50 – Time to go

The night was troubled. Pretending that life was the same as always was not a lie that either of the party members could bear tell themselves without the truth seeping back through the cracks at every turn. Every fight they did the anxiety of the unknown, that look over the shoulder into the wilderness, that stray thought meant that they were not as efficient, nor as effective, and the risks they took multiplied. Ishrin cast his usual rituals, absorption on the slain monsters, and other enhancing things for his body, but he was silent as he did them, his witty self nowhere to be found. The energies he controlled were not as smooth and clean as they usually were, symptom of his mind being somewhere else.

They encountered adventurers, search parties made of Tier 10s that roamed the whole region incessantly. They always avoided them when the could, but at times they had to resort to the threat of violence to get out of unpleasant standoff situations. Handling five or even ten tier 10 adventurers wouldn’t usually be a problem for them, but having to do so without casualties while the enemies didn’t have any sort of inhibition was quite harder. They had to, though, because if they even so much as injured one of the adventurers then Syrma would be justified in coming after them himself.

Liù did her best to cheer the party up. She floated around, watching, cheering, nuzzling now Melina, now Lisette, now Ishrin. When she went to play with him, Ishrin was happy and carefree. But it didn’t last long, and soon Liù herself felt tired and weary from all the emotional support she was been giving. She went back to her favorite place in the world, Ishrin’s hair, and just dangled her legs on his forehead trying to be as obnoxious as possible, much to everyone’s amusement.

The tension kept bubbling up. Every few hours Ishrin checked with his telescope, pointing at the sky, and every time the bubble of warped space-time grew bigger, and more ominous. Every time after slowly disassembling the telescope, putting it away piece by piece in his inventory, Ishrin sighed and just shook his head at the inquisitive girls that looked at him to try and gleam something from what he had seen.

It was during a fight with a very familiar monster, a Sycoraptor they found roaming the forest next to a particularly dense spot of magic, that he decided he had enough. The fight had been going on for a good few minutes, with the girls dancing around the monster and attacking it as usual, Lisette also tying new attack patterns with her blades, and Ishrin doing his thing from the back. He provided support and cover, while also helping the girls move around space with his telekinesis whenever they needed a little push here and there. Even Liù was participating in the fight, distracting the creature with her holograms and sometimes deflecting attacks with her invulnerable body.

But the beast wasn’t going down. It was a Tier 14 monster, among the only ones the team could realistically fight thanks to its predictable attack patterns. More than being a hunting expedition, or even a pretext to train and gain more power, the fight had been a way for the team to vent some steam. Yells of rage and exertion filled the air as everyone let loose their most basic instincts, exploding in bouts of rage and pent-up anger.

Ishrin was no different, however the uninteresting nature of the fight soon meant that his mind was left to wander freely, and it wandered into some unpleasant territories. Syrma, he postulated during the fight, was probably one of the hero hunters. He didn’t know much about them, but they sure sounded like a group of people interested in taking down heroes, either because the guild required them to, or perhaps because they were after something else. Heroes, by definition given to him by Melina, all had exceptional qualities and skills. Be it because they had been summoned, or transported to another world different than their original one against their will like Ishrin was, all of them had special skills that gave them an unfair edge that set them above and beyond everyone else.

Hero hunters were probably after those skills.

The Sycoraptor roared, and Ishrin’s ears hurt a bit. He saw the creature take a wild slash at Lisette while she was in the middle of recovering from an attack, breaking its patterns and threatening to hit her while she was wide open. He lazily directed some force to deflect the attack, grunting when he found out that there was much more momentum behind those claws than he thought. But his telekinesis had grown by leaps and bounds lately, giving him power enough to defend his teammate.

Back into his mindscape, his thoughts converged on the Dynasty issue. He, or it, was getting dangerously close. A few days at maximum. In truth, this was a very slow response on the side of the guild: to send a spaceship at warp through space instead of teleporting a powerful agent directly. But there were many possible explanations for this, ranging from the absurd cost both in terms of magic and surely of money needed to transport powerful beings using teleportation, to the fact that perhaps the guild didn’t deem the issue urgent enough to justify the costs, only sending a response that was appropriate for the level of threat they were notified about.

“Fuck it,” Ishrin said all of a sudden.

He pulled out a scroll from his inventory and unfurled it, puncturing it with his sword. The blade began to glow with a powerful orange hue and when he swiped the air next, instead of the usual magic pebble coming off of it, an orange beam erupted from its tip, bisecting and cutting everything it came in contact with. For a millisecond or two, silence was supreme. Then, before anyone could gasp or ask him what had happened, the top half of the monster began to move, sliding off the bottom section that was still firmly rooted on the ground. It fell in a heap to the side of its legs before tumbling on its side, soon followed by the rest of its body. The fight was over.

“Ishrin?” He heard Melina call to him. “Why did you do that?”

“I’m tired of just waiting here, doing nothing while everyone else plots and schemes around us. We need to get a move.” He said.

“But we are gaining power to go to Mekano like you said.” She replied. She knew very well what he meant, obviously, but lately she had found that the more she got him to talk about what was bothering him, the better he was mentally. Not to mention how much better it made her feel, to know in words what she could feel through the emotional link she had with him.

“Not fast enough. We have been avoiding search parties made of Tier 10 adventurers for three days now, and they are only getting more aggressive. The Dynasty is coming, and we have nothing to show. But you know what? This is not even the problem. I want to go to Mekano because I want to know what the hell is that AI chip that Liù is inhabiting about, what it’s doing, what the hell was the deal with the mountain, and what its connection with Willow was. And I’m tired of waiting.”

“Okay,” Melina said, showing her palms. “I understand that you are upset. All of us are quite tense but, you said it yourself. We need to get to Tier 15.”

“There is another way. I’m sensing a lot of magic nearby, is there a ley-line or something?”

There was one. Ishrin told them that he could use the magic in the ley-line to power a transportation ritual, effectively removing their need to get to Tier 15 in order to reach Terrigenesis, Mekano’s world. After some deliberation the party decided that it was a decent plan, because they needed to do something and fast and couldn’t afford to wait until they reached Tier 15 anymore. It had always been quite a lofty goal, but until now it was the only possible option they knew about. The only one who had known about it all this time was Ishrin.

“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Melina asked, while Ishrin took some measurements of the magical density.

“I didn’t think it was relevant information.” He said distractedly. He realized that lately he’s been sounding more and more like a dick, so he quickly added a correction. “I just have too much stuff floating around my head. I know at least 7 different methods of dimensional hopping, all of which have countless little variations I can add to them to make them viable in this or that situation. This ritual here I’m about to do has fifteen major ways it can be done, and then at least five or six tweaks for each of those major changes. Using the ambient magic to power it came to my mind only after I realized we were on a ley-line.”

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After the measurements were all done, and a map of the magic density of the place was drawn, he began to triangulate the center of the confluence. He had Lisette help too, together with Liù, to trace the outer edge of the mana-collecting ring.

“That’s the issue with me, and rituals.” Ishrin said. “I need to know all the variables and all the data on a specific situation, then I need my mind to somehow connect the dots and fish out the perfect ritual to use. It’s hard.”

He didn’t mention why it was so hard, which was that his mind was very limited compared to how it was in the past. It was not a problem in normal times, but these were not normal times.

“We are done.” Lisette said, coming back with Liù in tow.

Done! Done! We drew preeeetty circles :3

“Good job!” Ishrin said, giving them a thumbs us. “My end is almost done. Melina, can you please give me the Tier 14 core from earlier?”

“Sure!” Melina said in a sing-song voice.

“You sound happy.” He said, smiling.

“I am! We are doing stuff, and we are not all depressed anymore!”

Ishrin chuckled. “Oh, right. You must have been so frustrated that you couldn’t lift our moods yourself.”

“It’s not true!” she protested.

“It is.” Lisette said, from the side. Liù thought so too, giving her a thumbs-us and a fist bump. Cute, the other two thought in unison.

“Okay fine…” Melina conceded.

“Do not worry. I was very moved by your efforts to cheer me up.” Lisette added, then she looked at Liù and the two nodded at each other while giggling.

“These two…” Melina muttered. “They are getting dangerously close.”

Ishrin agreed with her. He was very happy that Lisette was bonding with the pixie, and was also happy for Liù. He didn’t want to be only person she ever bonded with, even though he was her summoner. Her being inside an AI made things very different than they were before, both in the sense that Liù was more free than ever but also in the sense that she didn’t have the limitation she used to have as a summoned creature. She could do whatever she wanted, and he really hoped she could feel at home with his team. That she bonded with Lisette so much so quickly was something that really surprised him in a positive way.

“Are you sure this ritual is safe?” Melina asked, looking at the growing set of lines and piles of materials on the ground.

“Of course,” Ishrin replied. “Nothing like last time, don’t worry.”

***

“Okay!” Ishrin said after a few minutes. “The ritual is ready. Take positions.”

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