Chapter 242: Edge of the Fray
Blue emergency lights strobed in a desperate rhythm, as if the overwhelming smell of burnt ozone wasn’t enough for the hapless spacefarers to understand that their ship was on the verge of complete failure. Flashes of fire added a chaotic flare to the steady cadence of illumination. The buzzing of ungrounded energy reverberated off the insulated metal jackets of their housing, loud enough to be distracting. The temperature had risen, but that wouldn’t last long in the vacuum of space.
The scrap ship normally relied on momentum to maintain course, but it was languishing without sufficient power, threatening to permanently strand them in the empty vastness. They never anticipated this particular challenge as mana was what powered the vessel, and mana was unlimited. There would be no rescue for them if they couldn’t find a way to keep it moving.
Sparks danced around Lyriel’s nimble fingers as she braided wires in an effort to bypass yet another failing energy conduit as it starved. Energy surged as if the vessel valiantly fought alongside them. The old ship was a reflection of themselves, simultaneously dependent on mana while being susceptible to its exposure. Balance was necessary, but they had reached a physical point in space that had thrown off the required equilibrium.
Lyriel’s determined expression was marred by brows creased with worry. Slag stained her normally unblemished skin, leaving dark stains where she had pushed strands of hair away from her eyes with the back of her wrists. The inconsistent light was doing nothing to help accomplish her tasks.
Their situation was growing increasingly hopeless. The longer it took to complete the emergency repairs the less likely they would be successful as the problems cascaded. At this rate, she wasn’t sure if they would find a way to continue forward. She took some small comfort in the fact that the emergency lights were operating at all. Once they quit, she would know for sure that the ship was completely spent.
On the other side of the cramped bridge, her partner did his best to reactivate the dying mana core while continuing to track all of the other ship systems. Unlike the ship’s leader, he was able to split his attention and maintain his regular duties, monitoring the diagnostics with ancient sensors while manually reconfiguring their auxiliary plexuses. The primary mesh had fizzled decades prior, leaving them on imperfect power networks that had been scraped together with spare parts. Still, the problem wasn’t the ancient alien tech, though it was constantly being disabled by mana. The problem was the concentration of mana itself.
The once vibrant hum of the drive was now a ragged cough that was punctuated by thumps that threatened to shed the shell of the entire ship. The mana sails were hanging limp, metaphorically speaking, and the lack of power choked the propulsion systems.
They were experiencing the effects of what would have been considered doldrums in a nautical setting, but it made no sense when they rode the constant activation surge of mana. The emptiness of space was a natural doldrum, but there were as many celestial bodies ahead of them as there were behind. Mana should have been activating in those stars and planets in front of them just like the ones they had passed, providing a gradient for them to ride with the mana sails. But it wasn’t activating.
Normally, mana activated in a wave that originated from what they considered the center of the universe, somewhere deep within the galactic community. While mana already existed across the cosmos, it activated with a much slower pattern, forming a rolling swell that was hundreds of light years wide, distributed through the particles of the universe. They were able to harness the activation through mechanisms that weren’t entirely understood by them, but were passed down all the same. The main factor was that they relied on the gradient in mana densities to glide through relatively empty space.
The wave traveled at a ridiculous rate and the system spread along with it, assimilating planets as it went. Their ship was dragged forward by the surge, and in this way, the Avatars of the System were able to seek a way to free the exiles of the galactic community. If they couldn’t eventually accomplish their goals, they would never be able to live on a planet again, always being pushed by mana’s activation in the emptiness between solar systems.
Despite being branded for eradication, they were overlooked if they remained in the gaps between celestial objects in the periphery, but ceasing their forward movement would allow them to be rediscovered. Mana would coalesce, viewing them like an infection to be removed.
They were only able to continue to exist by staying where mana was the thinnest, lacking a full activation. It put them in a precarious situation where they needed active mana to survive, but couldn’t remain where it fully activated lest they invite the forces of mana to finish its job in annihilating them. They were a speck of contamination hidden in the transitional portion of the galaxy, between nodes in a network of omnipresent energy.