Chapter 14: Proper priorities

Rylan was abruptly cut off by the wall of flesh that slammed into him mid-sentence. Once again it stretched and stretched, then tore. A white light flashed in front of his eyes as his head smashed into something, and then he was spinning through the fog.

Dazed as he was, he barely registered when he landed bonelessly on a sandy incline, tumbling head over heels a few times before he slid to a stop.

His head was pounding, his ears were ringing, and for a few seconds he just lay there, facedown. Finally, he managed to gather some semblance of thought and, despite hurting all over, spat out some sand and rolled himself over onto his back.

His eyes creaked open, but everything remained dark.

For a brief moment, he entertained the horrifying idea that he might’ve hit his head hard enough to go blind. Then he noticed a faint glow, originating from somewhere down his body.

With a supreme effort—and shoulders that felt like they were on fire—he managed to crane his head up, and spotted the source: his hip pocket.

Trembling fingers reached down, and after two failed attempts, fished out the glowband Zahra had given him. The piece of glowmetal on it was significantly smaller than the one Soren had been using, but its faint reddish-purple glow had never looked more beautiful.

With slow, careful motions, Rylan wrapped the strap around his right hand, situating the tiny hexagon over his knuckles. Then, with a pained groan, he rolled onto his knees, waited for the world to stop spinning, and slowly stood up.

His left ankle buckled when he tried to put weight on it, and he almost fell, but the floaty fog gave him enough time to catch himself on his hands and stay upright.

The ringing in his ears was getting fainter, but to his growing concern, he still didn’t hear anything other than the gentle susurrus of the fog around him.

“Soren?” he called out. “Tamina?”

There was no response.

Fog. How far was I launched?

Rylan turned slowly, pointing the glowmetal on his fist at the sand around him.

Thankfully, his landing had resulted in some pretty clear tracks down the sandy incline he was at the bottom of, so he at least had a clear indication of what direction he’d come from.

For lack of a better idea, he started hopping up the slope, occasionally testing out his left foot, and calling out with increasing volume.

He had to stop occasionally from spells of dizziness, but after a while, he still reached the place he’d evidently landed. Apparently, he hit the slope right next to a rather sizable rock, and despite it being covered in soft blue moss, he was very glad he hadn’t it.

Fog, I hope the others landed okay...

He kept hopping, and a little while later, reached the top of the incline, startling a nearby crab that quickly scurried away. Then he took a deep breath, lifted his glowing fist up high and shouted harder than he had thus far. “Is anybody there?!”

His voice echoed off something in the distance. Then, finally, he got a response.

Reddish-purple light bloomed up in the distance, followed by a  voice. “Rylan?!”

“Soren! I’m over here!” Rylan called, a relieved smile splitting his face despite himself.

“Are you hurt?” came the reply.

Rylan thought that over for a moment. “I’ve been better!”

“Stay there! I’m coming over!”

Rylan faintly detected the sound of footsteps approaching at a decent pace as the reddish-purple glow increased in intensity to an unprecedented level. He must be channelling mana into his glowband!

“Is Thar Tamina with you?” he called out when Soren came into view.

“No!” Soren replied, lowering his hand from his forehead, after which his glowband slowly dimmed to a regular level. “I lost track of her when I got flung out, ended up landing in the middle of this huge anemone.”

“Lucky bastard,” Rylan grumbled. “I had to skid like thirty feet through the sand.”

“Not that lucky, actually,” Soren replied dryly. “The bastard stung me.”

Rylan barked out a laugh, which resulted in another spell of dizziness sweeping through him, and he ended up losing his footing and falling forward onto his hands and knees.

“Fog!” Soren cursed, running the last few steps and kneeling down before Rylan. “Are you all right? That’s a nasty bump on your forehead... Did you hit your head?”

Rylan blinked up at his former friend’s worried face, then sat back on his haunches with a frown. “I... yeah, I think I did, actually. On one of its ribs, probably...”

Thinking back, the Mana Shell Soren had insisted he get may have just saved his life. However, he wasn’t quite ready to admit that to his former friend’s face.

“I also maybe sprained my ankle at some point,” he said instead.

“Ethereon,” Soren called out suddenly. “Please transfer 30 Credits to Thar Rylan.”

Within half a second, a familiar voice spoke in Rylan’s head.

《Incoming local transfer of 30 Quintessence Credits. Do you accept?》

“Ehm, sure,” Rylan replied after a moment, with mixed feelings.

Thirty Cubes was a lot of money; it was more than Rylan had made in a month.

“Okay,” Soren said. “Now ask Ethereon for an hour of accelerated recovery.”

“Are you sure this is necessary?” Rylan couldn’t help but ask. “I mean, I feel pretty okay, and—”

“Rylan,” Soren interrupted earnestly, holding up a hand. “We’re in the depths of the cloudsea, with no idea what’s out here. We need you better than ‘pretty okay,’ and fast.”

Rylan swallowed, glancing around. Something darted through the dark at the edge of his vision, which suddenly seemed far more oppressive. “Right,” he replied. “Ehm... Blessed Ethereon, would you please accelerate my recovery for an hour?”

《One hour of recovery acceleration requested. Accelerated recovery costs 10 Quintessence Credits per hour. Do you accept?》

“Yes,” Rylan said even as he felt the sting of the lost funds.

That sting, like many others, was quickly soothed by the warm breeze of energy that surged into his chest and from there, spread outward with every beat of his heart.

He groaned in relief as he rolled his stiff shoulders.

“Better, right?” Soren asked knowingly. “I’ve only had to use it once, when Helen hit my knee a little too hard during a spar. If it still hurts in an hour, you can get another one, though I’d suggest you save the remainder in case of emergency. I have more still, but...”

Rylan nodded, absentmindedly unwrapping the glowband from his fist and strapping it around his head. “We shouldn’t waste our resources.”

“Okay, priorities,” Soren said, standing up and holding out a hand to help Rylan to his feet. “First we need to find Tamina, see what condition she’s in.”

Rylan hesitated only for a brief moment before he accepted Soren’s hand and let his former friend help him to his feet. The throbbing in his ankle had gone down to a dull ache, so he carefully tested how much weight he could put on it.

“After that,” Soren continued, “I guess our biggest need is a source of water, then finding some shelter.”

“Well water shouldn’t be an issue,” Rylan said, “I’ve got a fog condenser in my—”

Rylan froze mid-sentence, his eyes widening.

Soren looked at him questioningly. “What? What is it?”

“My backpack! I lost my backpack!”

Soren blinked. “Fog! Okay, think: at what point did you lose it?”

“I—I’m not sure,” Rylan stammered. “After I hit my head, probably, but I don’t know...”

He trailed off, bringing a hand up to pull aside the neck hole of his tunic. Soren leaned in closer with a frown, his glowband lighting the angry red welt on Rylan’s shoulder, and cursed. “Looks like it got torn right off...”

“Yeah,” Rylan agreed. “I think... it might still be inside the whale.”

“Well,” Soren replied after a moment. “I guess that direction is as good a place to start looking for Tamina as any.”

Finding the carcass of the crashed whale proved trickier than expected. Thanks to the tracks left by his landing, Rylan had a rough idea of the direction they had to head in, but it was hard to be sure they were still going straight with the way the terrain curved up and down, and forced them to move around or over rocky outcrops covered in soft blue moss.

As they had no idea how far they’d been thrown, it was hard to know if they were still heading towards the carcass or had already passed it by.

But then Rylan picked up a rather rank scent, and stopped in his tracks as a big lump of tissue came floating by. Rylan had trouble identifying it, until it rotated far enough, and then Rylan wished it had remained unidentifiable.

It was one of the whale’s eyes.

He and Soren shared a glance, and kept moving. They were clearly heading in the right direction.

Soon enough, they came across a greasy splatter of tissue that seemed to have landed right next to a rather large anemone, its tentacles lazily drifting through the fog, looking for unsuspecting fogfish and whatever else it ate.

“Is this brain?” Rylan muttered, scrunching up his face at the smell. “I think it might be... It was heavy enough to splat down, anyway.”

Soren shrugged. “Then we must be getting close, right?”

Close turned out to be a relative term.

As they continued walking—occasionally calling out to Tamina—the rank odour only became stronger, and they came across more and more drifting blobs and grounded splotches of whale tissue. However, they weren’t the only ones attracted by the smell. Chittering sounds increased in frequency and volume as they approached the crash-site, and it quickly became more and more common for them to see things darting around the edge of what the glowbands could illuminate.

Just fogfish, feeding on the floating buffet, Rylan hoped.

The upside of all the activity was that the noise it produced seemed to be helping them pinpoint the epicentre of the impact, but there were downsides too.

Soon, they had to pick their way around a pair of giant crimson crabs fighting over a clump of meat with an unfamiliar creature that looked not unlike a cross between a hound and a suit of bulky, brown leather armour.

“What the hell is that?” Rylan hissed at Soren as they skirted around the conflict.

“An armadon,” Soren replied curtly. “One of the many things our farmers lose sheep to down in the cloudsea. Don’t get too close; they’re vicious.”

Thankfully, both the crabs and the armadon were preoccupied with the piece of whale, allowing them to easily slip by.

Next, Rylan’s heart practically jumped into his throat when he spotted the silhouette of a six-foot-long buoyhead shark floating by overhead soundlessly.

“It’s fine,” Soren whispered. “They’re all scavengers, and there’s plenty of food; let’s just hurry. Oh, but don’t forget to refill your Mana Shell, if you haven’t yet.”

Cursing himself for not thinking to do so earlier, Rylan tried to concentrate on the ball of warmth beneath his sternum while they kept moving.

Even under the circumstances, finding it was a lot easier the second time around. This time, it only took Rylan half a minute to get it to budge and release some mana, and soon he had another glimmering shell around his body. It quickly faded from view, but he could still feel its power hum around him as he moved.

Just as he finished, they finally came across the first recognizable bit of whale.

One of the whale’s massive fins lay propped up on some rocky outcrops in the sand, and they ducked underneath to continue. It sloped down towards the other end, and they ended up needing to crawl the last bit before making it out on the other side.

There, they found it to still be attached to the whale’s massive torso. Or the front half of it, at least. Through the dense fog, Rylan could vaguely see some light from his glowband reflected by what he suspected was its spine sticking out of the back.

“Tamina?!” Soren called once more, with his hands around his mouth. “Are you here?”

To Rylan’s utter surprise, there actually was a response this time. A kind of muffled shouting, seeming to come from nearby.

“What was that?” Soren called back excitedly. “We can’t understand you!”

More muffled shouts followed, sounding suspiciously like swear words.

Rylan rushed forward, following the noise, until he ended up standing right next to a part of the whale’s torso.

Oh. Oh!

Author's note:

I have far too much fun imagining the mess created by the crashed fogwhale. I'll try not to go into too much detail! ^^