Cleo watched as Yun’s crown slowly completed its transformation. The golden crown slowly became more and more solid as the mana within the world quickly fell under Yun’s control. It was beautiful, but she could not help but worry about Law, who was miles below her guarding one of the several funnels that were the route for the golems to pass through into. His was the furthest point forwards, but there was a very real worry for Cleo that Law would be overwhelmed and swarmed by the demonic creatures that were quickly approaching. As the rings sped up and became thicker her fear lessened, but it was still quite obviously dangerous. Until Law had come back, she would not feel happy about the situation. She had become too close to him. Losing him now would leave her completely lost, right when she had finally found someone to trust, someone to put her faith in.
Sticking her thumb in her mouth, she began to bite it as she watched Yun’s crown grow and stretch over his body, consuming him in radiance. The dome slowly fused into parts and soon there was only four thick bars rotating furiously, dipping down towards the golden cocoon that held Yun’s body. Motes of bright light spread out and began to fuse into the ground, the sky, even Cleo and her companions, enriching them and letting them feel some semblance of the power that was coursing through Yun’s veins. The ground shook and the world rumbled as the dome finally sealed itself off from the outside plane, sealing them away from the terror just behind the thin membrane of mana.
Mist descended, bulking up the cocoon until Yun took up almost half of the small plateau that they were standing on. The cocoon seemed to have a life of its own, rippling and rotating in place, writhing as if there was some great battle going on inside. With each rotation of the great dome above them, the cocoon expanded accordingly. With each fusion of the bars the cocoon shrank by half, until finally all the bars had fused together. The dome stopped spinning and the cocoon stopped expanding, leaving Cleo and her friends with barely any standing room left. On one side there was a precipice that would be uncomfortable to fall down, on the other a wall of white gold with shifting orange patterns on the surface.
It was a beautiful cocoon, and it seemed to call to Cleo in a way she did not understand, but she was not the one that was most enthralled by it. Louisa stood with her mouth open, transfixed by the swirling patterns, seemingly looking at a story that no one else could see. There was a softness in her eyes as she followed the waves of orange around her field of view, before finally letting her mouth shut.
It seemed like whatever story she had seen in the swirling mass of orange and yellow-white had ended, so Cleo began to move towards her and find out what she had seen. As she took her first step, however, the orange patterns became a deep red, and the white-gold began to go grey. Winoa gasped while looking at the bizarre change, and a look of fear spread across Louisa’s face. Louisa immediately tried to break open the cocoon, smashing her fists into the shell, but to no avail. It was as hard as diamond.
Louisa smashed her fists against the cocoon until they bled, desperately trying to prevent anything awful happening to her idol. Again and again her hands crunched against the hard surface that separated her from Yun, until Cleo could take her anguish no more. She grabbed Louisa and pulled her away from the cocoon, holding her arms back while the gamine woman cried desperately for her love. It tore at Cleo’s heartstrings to see Louisa like that bot there was nothing they could do. Each of them knew that there was a chance of the ascension failing, as without risk the reward was worthless, but they still strove onwards.
Louisa wept, and after five minutes of them staring at the awful cocoon of death they finally felt something new. There was a shift in the world. It was not something physical, but rather a sensation of disjointedness, like everything they were experiencing had somehow rotated ninety degrees to the right. It made Cleo feel ill, but she battled through it. She needed to know what was going on, especially as the cocoon seemed to suggest that not everything had gone to plan. Without Law here, she had to have a strong spine and work out what needed to be done.
She helped Louisa up onto her feet, and the small woman desperately clung to her. Saline was staining her dress but she did not mind it. It was a small price to pay in comparison to Yun inside the cocoon. She glanced back at the cocoon once more and stopped. All over the red lines that patterned the eggshell covering her friend were extremely fine cracks. They were hairline fractures at the moment but they seemed to be getting bigger and bigger.
“Guys...” She began, “Is that... Is the cocoon cracking open?”
Everyone turned and began watching as the cracks spread over the grey shelling and began to become wider. A soft red light began to seep out of the fissures and for some reason put Cleo at ease, as if the issues and worries she had would be fixed soon enough. She just had to wait.
Finally there was a sharp crack and the cocoon split into a thousands of tiny chunks of grey matter, leaving behind a mess, a tree, and a young man with white hair and a rich, red aura. He smiled slightly at the people looking at him with shocked expressions before swaggering over to Louisa, lifting her up like she was his bride and kissing her soundly on the lips. She gasped and sniffed loudly, slowly reaching out a hand to touch the man before her as if he was some kind of hallucination, but as her fingers reached his face it was obvious that he was actually there.
Cleo smiled and watched the pair of lovebirds, reuniting from a short, albeit terrifying, separation. It made her think of her own lovebird who was still at the bottom of the mountain. She knew that Law might have been having a tough time down on the edge, but with the successful breakthrough by Yun there was no reason for her to worry. She was sure that if he was in any real danger, then Yun would quickly go to his brother’s rescue, no matter how distraught Louisa was at the time.
“Sorry about worrying everyone,” Yun said. “I could see you all the entire time. In fact I’ve been able to see the entire realm since it got cordoned off by Law’s markers. The grey matter was all the waste material in my body, so it was nothing for you to really worry about. I think the only way for you to fail in ascension is if there’s not enough mana in your system or in the air for your body to be able to restructure itself”.
“I think that might have been the longest sentence I’ve ever heard you say, Yun,” Jim said, laughing and hugging the stoic man. “I really hope my ascension to Heaven is at least as smooth as yours, even if you were first”.
“It’s just the way things are,” Yun replied. He let Louisa stand up on her own, but she would not let go of him. Her knees shook slightly, but she held strong against his arm and kept standing. “I am going to have to pick up my brother now though. He was rather injured by a pair of golems, but he managed to stave them off. They are both dead now”.
Letting Louisa stand up on her own, he immediately put his hands together and disappeared from their sight, only to return a few moments later with a bloody and bruised body. Placing the person carefully on the ground he seemed to stop for a while before pulling some sort of fine gauze out of the very ground to wrap the injured body up, focussing especially on the shattered and warped arm. As the blood and dirt was wiped off it quickly became clear that the body was Law, and that he had been extremely injured by the combat but had managed to survive nonetheless.
As soon as she recognised who the body was, Cleo ran towards Law and began to look after him. It was by far the most injured she had ever seen him, and she was worried. Normally Law was the one who took care of people's injuries, with a combination of tools he had made and knowledge he had gleaned from his father’s Book of Life. The information was far from complete, but it was more than anyone else had in comparison, and so when he got injured the only person the entire group could really rely on to heal was completely out of commission. In some ways it was awkward that Law was such a jack of all trades, because he was involved in every facet of the group’s survival.
In comparison, the only thing that Cleo could really do was sit by and wait for him to get better. Yun had the capability to make anything he needed to speed up Law’s recuperation, so she could not help but feel useless when the man she cared about was so heavily injured. Internally she made a note to learn how to heal in future, so that she could heal Law if he ever got injured again.
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