Book 4 Chapter 29: Adventure
Book 4 Chapter 29: Adventure
++Trade in Asyran? The way I heard it they haven’t even invented coinage yet, what’s there to trade?++
- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.
Jungle travel proved more annoying than almost any other kind I had yet to do.
Asyran was a place of vast, sprawling trees. Trees larger even than most buildings of the modern age, with some reaching as high as two hundred feet. We moved in perpetual darkness, though the sun in this region was terribly bright and strong. The shadow cast by those towering growths was omnipresent and all-consuming. One did not feel light and warmth upon their face in this jungle, not without the permission of its ancient masters.
All of this was interesting on a purely intellectual level, and watching it, soaking it all in, was some sort of entertainment for me, but it was all overwritten by how painfully tedious moving actually was.
On flat land, I could have driven the sled as fast as I wanted. Even on uneven terrain, like the dunes of an Irucci desert, I could make adjustments and add a suspension to the vehicle to ensure that it did not capsize itself upon hitting the first slope. The oceans were easiest of all, with how yielding water was.
But this jungle was an endless, sprawling mass of obstacles. I could simply have blasted a path through them, but even I would have been exhausted by such a task. Most of the tree trunks barring my way were two or even three times wider than I was tall. A cannon would have struggled to fell them, and there were thousands ahead.
“I did not know that trees got this big,” I grumbled as we rode.
Johns snickered. “Never been to the east, then? These ones aren’t even the largest. There are growths that exceed two hundred and fifty feet.”
I pictured that, and had to appreciate the sheer scale. It was, however, difficult at the moment. Right now that scale was doing nothing but impeding my journey.
Steering a sled at speed was essentially impossible. I certainly had the raw power to slow and turn it around corners, even in the fraction of a second and pulling the many thousands of gravities that doing so at such velocity would require, but my limiting factor here was the ordinary human passenger Victoria. I did not know what her precise tolerance for G-forces was, but I knew that no unaugmented mortal would fare well with that sort of acceleration.
In fact, I did not even know how well myself, Blakely or even Johns would weather the strain. If I had a mere handful of times an ordinary person’s physical durability, thousands of Gs would still be more than enough to burst blood vessels and crush organs against my innards.
No, better to be careful and slow about it.
Granted, slow was relative. The sled was still moving at what would be roughly jogging speed for most humans, and it was sustaining this in perpetuity. In fact, I was powerful enough now that even while Qaigor rested his weight on it, keeping up the force needed for this speed actually consumed mana less quickly than my Vessel was recovering it just with the passage of time. I was resting while we moved.
I was also unoccupied enough that I could quite easily turn and move around on top of the sled, provided my hands remained aimed in the vague direction of the aether. I started by turning to Victoria, taking off my shielding amulet and handing it to the girl.
“Wear this,” I instructed her. She blinked at me without comprehending, but did as I said. A few moments later, with the enchantment so close to her skin, her eyes widened in shock.
“This is a shield!” she yelped.
“It is.”
“It’s your personal shield?”
“Correct.” I was already fashioning a new amulet from a stone snatched up off the forest floor and some twine from Johns’ bags. It would take many hundreds of hours to be nearly as powerful as the one I had given Victoria, however.
“I can’t take this,” she frowned. “You need it.”
“You need it more.”
“No I don’t, you’re still just as squishy as I am,” Victoria insisted, already taking it off. I seized her wrist with one hand to stop her.
“I am a seasoned battle-magician and was surviving arcane combat before I ever had this amulet. You are untested.”
Victoria glared at me. “You think I’m weak, that’s it?”
“I think you are more likely to be hit by a magic missile than me, and I think you will never learn how to fight if you get eviscerated before you can do so. When we stop I will…start instructing you in combat magic.”
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She practically screamed with joy.
Our first stop was to eat, and it gave me a good opportunity to begin Victoria’s instruction. I did not have the heavy training pads used in the Winzorth Institute to stop idiots from accidentally cutting each other in half, but I fortunately did not need them. I was able to simply rely on my shielding amulet to protect Victoria, and if my own body was less protected by comparison, I still made do with a few heavy planes of aether strapped around strategic places.
We started simple, exchanging magic missiles while circling around each other, getting Victoria used to casting while aiming and generally sharpening up her accuracy. An hour passed and her technique improved, which certainly pleased her. A bit too much, I thought.
“Your biggest barrier is the inability to cast under pressure,” I told her. “I assume you experienced that during your kidnapping.”
She flinched as I said the word. Everyone else had taken to dancing around it in conversation with her, using euphemism or oblique references. I did not believe in that. If she could not even bring herself to hear it called what it was, she would never stop being afraid of the memory.
“I did,” Victoria said, face falling.
“This is normal. You will need to work on holding your focus in moments of stress.”
“How do I do that?” she asked.
“The quickest way is to simply make you think you are going to die at random intervals until you become numb to the sensation, but that is difficult to arrange in our circumstances.”
“And also really traumatising,” Johns added.
“Hm?” I frowned. “Oh. Yes, probably that too.”
We set off again after our short rest, which I spent on getting more of a start on my new enchantment. Hundreds of hours to go, and I had managed to put only a handful into it. Perhaps I should have prepared a replacement enchantment before leaving.
Then again, I would not have to if my little rat siblings had not snuck aboard the—
Getting angry would not help anything, so I buried my irritation and continued driving the sled.
It was Professor Johns who guided us for the most part. On top of being the only one in our group to have actually set foot on the continent, he had also made a study of the area based on descriptions I provided of the object I was searching for, pleasantly surprising me by narrowing down its location even more than I had. The nature of our crash meant that I had gotten a bird’s eye view of the landmass before impact, which made navigation even easier. I knew precisely where we were.
On the other hand, where we were, was a good thousand miles from the ruins we needed to approach.
“It’s good to teach your sister a thing or two about combat,” Johns told me unexpectedly. I was snapped out of my thoughts to focus on his conversation as he continued. “This is an academic expedition, but that doesn’t mean it won’t get violent. A lot of the ones I’ve been on tend to…escalate.”
“How so?” I asked him, frowning. This was news to me, and not good news.
“They just do,” he shrugged. “You know how it is.”
“No, I do not know how it is when ‘it’ is, apparently, a tendency for scientific expeditions to become violent. Do you owe someone money or something?”
Johns just shrugged again, which made me give rather serious thought to removing one of his internal organs as a means of loosening up his lips.
Unfortunately, I still needed the man. Actually in light of the crash I needed him far more, if news of this first expedition’s fate got out, it would be all the harder to coax other experts into providing me with their aid for a second one. I needed to bring back results from this soon if I was to minimize the costs of the whole affair.
Besides, now that Elqarth was an enemy of mine. I did not want word to reach him that I was searching for something in Asyran before I had already obtained it.
“This had better not lead to any unexpected complications,” I warned him instead.
“Unexpected, like being attacked after I tell you we might be attacked?”
“Like the sorts of entities that might be behind such an attack,” I snapped. “I do not wish to be entangled in a grudge with the Vorets, or any other such families.”
I was still not powerful enough that I had a chance of winning an outright war against the Vorets alone if it came to that. They, the Worfey’s and Elqarth all had influence that far exceeded my own in one way or another. I was too significant for them to ignore, or take lightly, but I would still have to make sure I did not become enough of a problem for any of them that the resources needed to stamp me out would become worth the benefits of doing so.
“That sister of yours, by the way,” Johns added. “I was expecting her to look more like you. She’s still pretty though.” He said it in rather a friendly way, like he was expecting me to smile or agree.
“Okay,” I replied, not sure at all what he was getting at.
“I don’t suppose she’s…courting anyone?” he added.
“If I catch you around her alone, I will vaporize you,” I told him, understanding dawning at once. “I am being entirely literal when I say that. Vaporized. The constituent atoms of your body will all be separated, and there will be no trace at all that you ever existed. I will dispose of your remains by inhaling them. Understood?”
Johns swallowed, suddenly looking a good deal less jovial. “I understand.”
I turned back ahead and added a shade more speed to the sled, just to remind him how effortless it was for me to move all that weight around. The transport really was not that loud, even with the extra velocity. One thing about magical propulsion was that it did not generate any noise by itself.
Which meant that, despite our speed now being as close to a sprint as it was to a jog, I could clearly hear the noise ahead of us over the vehicle underneath me. My reaction was near-instant; a sudden stemming of my mana to slow the sled before we reached the source.
I did not, after all, know that it would be friendly.
The others heard it soon, and had the good sense to keep quiet as we disembarked and began slithering closer. It did not take long for the sound to become more clear.
“Those are people,” Qaigor whispered. “It’s people up ahead, they’re talking.”
They were not speaking the common tongue of Garamon, but there was no denying that what we were hearing was a human language.