Book 6. Chapter 55: The Icon of Stars
It’s nice to know some games are so simple and universal even the Undersiders knew them just by the gesture.
I lost, but it was a close thing. Had him on the ropes for a few rounds where we both kept throwing out rock thinking the other was going to swap it up.
Climbing wasn’t difficult in armor. Even falling down wasn’t deadly, although certainly not something to test out in practice. Some mitigation like jumping off the wall sides, or trying to grapple anything on the way down would put that ‘maybe’ into ‘far safer.’
With my occult vision, even if I fell, I’d be able to see every wall within kicking distance and every handhold I could snap out to grab no matter what angle I was tumbling down at. Drakonis had his own suite of occult powers to call for that would help him if he fell down as well.
The issue was the armor’s weight. Rocks could hold us up. Wooden pallets with thin metal chairs under them as their backbone felt far more questionable.
Had the gravity been normal, those would have snapped under our feet like a thin sheet of ice. As is, I still wasn’t sure they would hold us completely up. And accidentally destroying parts of this tower would probably not get us invited anywhere fancy anymore.
So we took our time, making sure to stay as close as possible to the wall with each jump, using whatever handholds possible to keep our weight off the pallets. Our feet became more about keeping us steady rather than holding our weight. And kicking off was more done with our hands.
Foot by foot, we scaled the old human ship, going from the dead section of cracked screens and ripped up keyboards, further up into a more pristine section with lights still active.
And that’s when we realized we weren’t alone.