It took the group a while, but eventually they were ready to progress with their journey. Laurence finally accepted that they needed to move on and continue their journey if they wanted to become stronger, but he still spent every single waking moment by the arena he had built and worked on his combat skills. The only time he stopped was when he followed the others out of Yun’s world to see the damage they had caused by bringing it into existence.
He was unsure of whether he wanted to have done it sooner, but he could not bear to see it in case it had been a failure. It was frustrating for both Laurence and Yun, but finally they bit the bullet and looked. The result was what neither of them expected. They had hoped the golems would be damaged beyond repair and dreaded the amount of damage done by the severing of space, but when they stepped back onto the eleventh floor they finally saw their handiwork. Below the group was a giant hole that stretched as far as the eye could see. There were dark, ominous cracks and clefts wherever they looked, some even shaped like the silhouettes of men being torn apart by an explosion. What was once a mountain range had inverted, simply becoming a hole that tore at the world for hundreds of miles.
There was a sinking feeling in the chests of most of the group, but Laurence felt elated. He saw the damage and was concerned, but when he looked at the ground and felt the rich mana that suffused the air he could not help but smile. There were no golems. The golems would have travelled from anywhere to be at the nexus of this rich birth of mana, but they were nowhere to be seen. While the monstrosities could have hidden in the ground it would not have made sense for them to do so, they would not have been able to resist being at the heart of all that rich food for them. It was incomprehensible, like telling a baby not to eat when it was hungry.
Laurence fell down and relaxed on the platform of air that Yun had constructed as their exit point. “It worked...” he whispered. His heart was in his throat and the voices were pounding into the back of his skull, but he was relieved. Everything that he had done over the last half a year had not been for naught. He had resolved the issue that the hundreds of new users of the Book of Creation had with their situation, leaving them free to explore the intricacies of cultivation for the rest of their lives and set the groundwork for Laurence’s passion project; the revival of the Hephaistia clan.
He was not feeling the most common emotion in the situation, however. Most commonly the group felt shock and abhorrence at what they saw, at what they had even tangentially been a part of. The world had been ripped asunder by them and they had no real capability to understand what they had done. The power and scope involved simply escaped them. He could see that Cleo felt horror, whether it was at the sheer amount of power expressed in Yun's ascent or simply at the amount of damage seen in the now irrevocably scarred landscape. Laurence could tell that the world would recover in time, that the sheer amount of mana infused into the soil would promote and attract life in droves, but the others were in no state to even assume that.
They were simply too shaken by the result of Yun’s ascension to be able to deal with the minutiae of the situation, and soon enough everyone except Yun was joining Laurence on the floor, but for the opposite reason. Laurence slowly relaxed and calmed down before getting up and standing next to Yun.
“It’s a pretty big blast radius huh?” He said, looking out towards the direction that the ring on his hand pointed him in. “I wonder how far it goes in the direction of the stele”.
“I can still see a small ring of the marsh,” Yun replied, smiling at the calm Laurence showed.
“So it didn’t even reach the range of the actual living areas within Biqiril? That’s amazing! Guys, even through all this desolation we managed to avoid harming the people of the kingdom!” Laurence said, looking at his friends to make sure they were hearing him.
“We... You mean no one died?” Cleo stammered, looking at the young man she relied on with wide eyes.
“Doesn’t look like it. I mean we completely changed the shape of this part of the kingdom, and hopefully wiped out all the golems, but no one actually died with this”.
“That’s amazing,” Jim said. “I thought we were going to have one hell of a time explaining it to the rest of the kingdom if we had managed to wipe out half of the people living here”.
“We may still have a hell of a time explaining how we made a hole the size of a mountain range and also stole the greatest minds of a generation at the same time,” Laurence replied. “It might be more prudent to actually just avoid towns or basically anywhere with people and just head for the stele”.
“Are you sure we will be able to? Remember it is considered a killing tool by an enemy kingdom,” Winoa interjected. She still had a skittish look in her eyes, but she was recovering quickly.
“Oh... Yeah... Well We have Yun, so things shouldn’t be too much of a difficulty. If all else fails he can just run us there under the cover of darkness and we can all hop in”.
“They must know of the hole by now anyway, so they will be looking into it, and with the advent of the stone soldiers being wiped off the face of the earth, the soldiers of Biqiril should be on low guard anywhere but the borders of the kingdom. They just had a knife looming over them for Babel knows how long and it’s just been removed, so they should be relaxing thoroughly to recuperate right now,” Winoa continued. “Just hop back inside Yun’s world and I’ll fly us as far as I can. We can still take turns travelling out here, but I think it’s time for our priority to go back to being moving through this kingdom at high speeds. We’ve wasted far too much time within Biqiril, and it’s time for us to go to the next floor”.
“Hear hear!” The group said in unison, before following Yun back into the safety of their new home.
No comments:
Post a Comment