Chapter 48: Glitch
The General Commander was strained. Despite her outwardly composed appearance, she knew she was grasping at straws. Whatever was happening in the real world was way more dire than she made anyone believe. For a gateway to be opened between two worlds, there had to be an exchange between them— a handshake between their anchors. These anchors must have been established well beforehand in both worlds for stable passage, otherwise it would be like shooting into the vast darkness of the void, hoping for a lucky hit. The odds of that happening was so small that you were better off not trying at all.
She had never expected herself to be in a situation where she would unhesitatingly come to the decision of doing just that. It wasn’t that she was ill prepared— there were coordinates to various Ryvelin owned anchor points with her, even a few publicly known anchor points belonging to other families, just as a precaution, but not a single one was reachable. It felt like there was a veil blocking her anchor from reaching any other on their world.
The idea itself was absurd. That would mean that whatever was happening went beyond just their family. It affected every other noble family... and even the Bravenheart Royal family, as their gateway was also unreachable.
If not for her years of experience in dealing with stressful situations, she might have lost herself to despair. No one wanted to die being devoured by the void. It was the most painful way to go. You slowly fade from people’s memories like the world itself forgets you. Only tier six and above powerhouses hold the power to keep you in their memories, while everyone else forgets.
Alyra had picked up that something was terribly wrong. She knew her sister very well and could tell when something was off. But she also had the sense to know that this was not the time to distract her. She was using every ounce of her focus to steer them forward while trying to use the consolidated origin as efficiently as possible, which was proving to be difficult.
The hall was pin drop silent as everyone watched with bated breaths. The view the giant window provided was useless to them at the moment, only filling them with a sense of dread and their utter insignificance in the grand scale of things. A few of them even turned their backs to the view to stop the feeling of paranoia starting to creep up.
Zephyr used the time to focus his mind on other things, like asking for more details about Virtual and 3D environments.
He was able to learn the basics, like the general idea behind them, how they work, and their applications. The ’how they work’ aspect where Aegis talked about Polygons, Textures, Modeling and whatnot, mostly flew right over his head. The terms were totally foreign and he could only glean a bit from their translation. What intrigued him was the application aspect.
Asides the possibility of experiencing worlds he’d never seen— the popularly known Holy rift world, Drasil, owned by the elven royalty being one of them. He’d always wanted to visit— the possibilities in regards to work applications appealed to him even more. He imagined himself setting up his own virtual runesmithing workshop, where he could test out crazy ideas he would never try out in the real world. Ideas that would have severe repercussions because of how dangerous they were.
The one thing he had an issue with was that from Aegis’ explanation, VR seemed to work on a different process than the spell the Grand Commander casted. In fact Aegis never mentioned anything about a spell, making him probe for further clarification, and apart from the general reminder that Aegis could not interact with mana, Zephyr got the familiar prompt he hadn’t heard for a while - Access Denied, User Privilege Insufficient.
He was just about to make a sarcastic remark when the hall shuddered, drawing gasps of exclamation from everyone.