Chapter 78 - Manastorm

Notes : Chapter 80 has been written and added to the queue, kicking off book 3 !

Ah.

Ahahahahah.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH.

Okay. Short bit of context for my hysterical laughter :

The construction company for my place has just said that they're soooo sorry for delaying again, but they're now aiming to complete their things by mid december. They were supposed to be done in OCTOBER and their final 'DO NOT CROSS' deadline was TODAY. Now they're swearing pinky promise that it won't go into next year while also refusing to set it as a hard deadline (not that they give a shit about those anyway).

So I'm ending payments. At the very least until they make my place habitable again. I'm done being nickel and dimed to get fucked over. If they can't be bothered to at least make sure my BEDROOM ISN'T OPEN TO A FUCKING SCAFFOLDING, then I can't be bothered to pay the dipshits.

Sorry for the venting. But I'm at the absolute end of my patience. I've been de facto kicked out of my home for over two months and I am DONE hearing bullshit excuse after bullshit excuse while their price keeps skyrocketing. At this point I'm willing to consider legal action and drag this whole shitshow into a tribunal, even though it'll probably take half a decade due to the pathetic ruins of what the government happily pretends is still a functional administrative legal system here in France.

In any case, I was planning on going on and getting stuck in book 3 in earnest, but this will probably eat my attention and time for a bit, so there'll probably a bit of a break in chapter uploads once the current batch is out, sorry.

I hope you'll enjoy the end of the novel at least ! It has occurred to me, given the reaction some of you had to the previous chapter, that it, well...

Might, MIGHT, be three cliffhangers back to back. So, uh...you got chapter 80, which doesn't have one ! Hurray !

Chapter 78

Icerend Borderlands

Great Pine Forest

Sapphiria's sensors went mad, sending conflicting reports, and she simply shut them down as she got back up, shaking off the shock of...whatever the hell just happened, punching the emergency override button on the inner airlock door, and throwing Paul inside, following closely behind and slamming it shut.

She found herself in a compartment full of cowering squishies, looking at her with wide eyes. She realized suddenly that just jumping into the cockpit wasn't going to work, as these were on the edge of panic, the vehicle groaning around them as the storm of unreality and madness raged around it.

"Sorry I'm late." She said, hoping they couldn't hear how forced the levity was in her town. "Ran into an oversized cat."

There were a few chuckles as they stared at her, and she realized they were gazing at the damage on her armor. She smiled, retracting her helmet as her armor returned to...well, as full functionality as she was going to get with about fifteen percent of it obliterated.

One good thing about force recon armor is that it adapted fast to battle damage.

"Took a few scratches, but nothing a bit of tinkering won't solve. Though, I'd advise you all buckle up, it's going to be a rough ride."

Everyone nodded, brought back to at least some semblance of the mundane by her quip, the gestures she'd drilled into them taking over as they began fastening their seat restraints.

Paul had gotten up in the meantime, and opened the door to the cockpit for her, allowing her in. Which was when she realized he was still holding his carbine and its barrel was smoking.

She gazed at it, then back up at him, and then simply gave him a slight nod.

Obviously, he'd added his fire to the junkbots'. Foolish but...

At this point, it might have made the difference in having the panther whirl around and distracting it long enough for her to bring it down. So she'd take it.

"Status report." She asked as she came into the cockpit, the door closing behind her a second later, making sure that if it was 'we're all going to die horribly', at least the rest of the crew wouldn't have to hear it.

"Had I not gone to the bathroom before this I would be voiding my bowels in terror and this vehicle is a miracle of engineering." Replied Ramina, still at the control station. "I'm slowing down and trying to bring us to a halt where the maelstrom is the calmest."

"Why?"

"Because that way we won't find out there's an aberration forming as it triggers in the middle of the cargo hold."

"Fair enough." Sapphiria took Ramina's usual seat and buckled down, her armor's automatic systems already starting to repair the damage, her android's doing the same to her arm. The diagnostics were puzzled as hell by what had happened to her chestplate, but thankfully it simply decided on a full rebuild. Since force recon got into a lot of crap, and were invariably at the tip of the spear, their self repair systems were the most robust in the entire Federation's arsenal, save for the unholy combat androids of the kill-teams the Federation deployed to nuke critical targets behind enemy lines. But then again these androids were a one way trip and they achieved that level of performance by having a service life of around one month. Their nukes didn't even have timers, they just blew as soon as you pressed the button.

Impressively enough, you could actually see outside. The snowpiercer's dashboard was a gibbering mess of alarms and errors, and to be fair the vision out the slits wasn't much better. Ramina was basically moving at a crawling pace as everything warped around them. They were going in the wrong direction, unfortunately, the vehicle still angled to come back for her, but given the circumstances Sapphiria wasn't about to argue to try and turn around.

"So, your eyes allow you to see how dense this thing is?" Asked Sapphiria, and Ramina nodded.

"Sort of. Aberrations are really just concentrated magic. So are these."

"Right." Sapphiria shook her head as she looked outside. Was that....was it hailing meat? "These things are unbelievably violent."

"And we're on the outer edge of the Convergence." Said Paul. "Imagine what it's like once you get further in."

The AI shivered.

"I don't want to." She looked as what looked like a solid wall of snowflakes battered the raining meat chunks aside, and shook her head. The feeling of wrongness was overwhelming, and from her companions' faces, she wasn't the only one having it. "How long does this last?"

"No idea. Icerend's storms were never studied." Paul leaned forward, and winced as a few goblets of flash frozen meat were thrown onto the windows, shattering on impact. "A few minutes usually. Maybe an hour. Tempests can last a lot longer than that, but this isn't one."

"How can you tell?"

"The stomwall would have knocked us all out."

"Oh." Sapphiria remembered the...whatever the hell had passed over her when the storm had hit the vehicle, momentarily stunning her. That was...concerning. VERY concerning. Because it clearly affected her as well as the squishies, despite the fact that her actual 'consciousness' was hundreds of kilometers away, under stars knew how many billion tons of rock. "Are we likely to encounter one?"

"Only if we're supremely unlucky."

Sapphiria's next question died in her throat as the vehicle came to a halt.

"There." Ramina leaned back into her seat. "That's about as good as it's gonna get."

"Is it going to remain low density here?" Asked the AI, and Ramina grimaced.

"I...think so? They taught me in class that mana condensation begins during the storm and the patterns within it are somewhat stable. It's how the observatories can pinpoint some of the mana crystal fields." She looked at Paul, who shrugged.

"I was interested in how to survive out there and hunt someone down, not the resources you could glean or how they worked. But I've heard that about the observatories."

"Yeah." Ramina regained in confidence, looking at the AI. "We'll be alright."

Sapphiria cringed internally, but clearly fate did not care to be tempted today, and the AI nodded, slowly.

"Well...nothing to do but wait out the storm now."

*****

Thankfully, it lasted only a few minutes, though those were hands down the most uncomfortable ones of Sapphiria's life.

For a few minutes they sat there, the storm of unreality battering the snowpiercer, before it just...stopped. Almost as suddenly as it had begun.

Turning the vehicle around after that was fairly easy, if somewhat nerve wracking. Sapphiria had regained the wheel, and moved at a snail's pace as Ramina gazed around for aberrations. There were apparently always more after a storm, that then died out over time as their supply of energy ran out. They could definitely hear and see a few in the distance, one of them being some kind of giant sphere of lightning, somehow not setting the whole forest alight as they caught glimpses of it through the gaps in the thick trunks. But then again, after she'd seen lightning strikes arc out of the atmosphere and into hard vaccuum, she wasn't going to assume arcane lightning was even going to pretend behaving according to the laws of physics. Upper atmosphere lightning strikes were a known phenomena, but you couldn't just create a plasma channel without a material to turn into plasma!

Not that there was plenty else the storm had changed. Some bits of frozen, unknown meat still littered some parts of the landscape, and the snow blanketing the area was gone, replaced by hail. The trees were relatively unharmed, but all of them had their northern facing bark covered in a tiny layer of what seemed to be pyrite, according to her sensors. Not much of it, enough that it was already abrading from the wind, but it was startling to have witnessed material transmutation.

Hopefully the sensors had seen it happen and she could get some lessons from that, but it was unlikely. And she wasn't about to try and get out to record the aberration or take samples of the trees. For one, the squishies were spooked to hell and back, and for another, the possibility of freshly created monsters crawling out of the forest meant that she wasn't keen on tempting fate.

Plus...as little as she'd like to admit it, she was thoroughly spooked as well. She'd hidden it from the others behind her command facade, but right now she wanted nothing more than to return in her nice, big mountain with ancient ruins and unknowable terrors lurking below.

But they needed to keep going. They'd come this far, they weren't about to give up now!

Before long however, they arrived near their battle site...and stopped.

Because as they turned the bend, the screen automatically polarized from a dazzle of light.

"What...the hell is that?" Asked Sapphiria, as she saw the wide 'arena' she'd fought in covered in a thin layer of multicolored light, bringing the snowpiercer to a dead stop as she scanned it. It wasn't even refraction from the slowly setting sun over the horizon, it seemed like it was glowing on its own.

The place was pretty much rippling with exotic radiation as well. She'd seen hyperdrive explosions emit less than this!

Ramina opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again, and finally managed to force some words out.

"Those...those are mana crystals. That's an entire crystal field."

"Oh." She looked at the vista beyond, and a tension she didn't even know she had released, causing her to slump in her seat. "Mission accomplished, then."

*****

Of course, it wasn't that simple. Now they had to harvest the crystals.

The stevedores and miner got their gear out, with a great deal of profanity, and began to collect them.

They probably didn't know the best practices, but erred on the side of caution, and Sapphiria couldn't begrudge them that. She'd proposed sending the bots first, but they declined, on the fairly reasonable grounds that those things were made to rip entire mountains apart, and that a softer touch may be needed here.

The crystals were tiny, at least. According to Paul, they could grow to the height of trees closer to the Origin of the Convergence, but here they were barely the length of fingers, sprouting out of the ground like crystalline flowers, glowing with an iridiscent, ever shifting hue.

The three workers started picking them like they were the most delicate, poisonous of roses, and setting them in padded crates.

Sapphiria for her part, kept an eye out with the gendarmes and her junkbots. She hadn't had the time to replace the slapguns on the hull, that hadn't been so much torn off as obliterated by the stormfront hitting the snowpiercer, and honestly right now she wasn't trusting any of the hull attachment points until she'd been over them herself.

The body of the panther...thing she'd killed was no longer there. Actually, no, that wasn't quite right.

There were traces of it. Some blood and bits of fur stuck on the floor. But the body itself had more or less been annihilated by the storm. Ripped apart or abraded into nothingness. At least it didn't seem to have gotten back up again, which would have been terrifying since that was apparently the hallmark of a Bane tainted Convergence. At least she had the tendril sample, safely hidden in one of her armor's compartments.

Overall, she was weirded the hell out by what she'd seen. The dry riverbed had barely changed. Whatever the storms did, it clearly affected living material far, far more than normal stuff. Though she was told that changed deeper in, it was disconcerting, to say the least.

The first set of crates went into the cargo hold, and after being satisfied that the forest wasn't about to get up and eat her squishies the second her back was turned, Sapphiria took out some of the tools, and grabbed Ramina to give the snowpiercer a once over.

They noticed almost immediately that, in fact, the trees hadn't been the only one to have some transmutation happen. The back of the hull had its uppermost layer turned into iridium, according to her sensors.

This time she did take a sample. Not only because she wanted that stuff off her vehicle in case it was dangerous in some way, but also because everything in the platinum group was rare as hell and a critical component in room temperature supraconductors, also known as the foundational block of the entirety of her hypertech and power distribution systems.

Which reminded her of her armor. It was repairing itself nicely, though it would be a day at least before the torso was back to normal operations again. The arm, thankfully, had sealed itself, preventing the squishies from noticing the fact that this time the armor had been pierced...and that their savior didn't bleed.

She would have to tell them eventually. But not yet. First get them out of immediate danger by pushing the Bane back. Then...

Then Kalia. First and foremost. She was in a relationship with her, she owed her the truth. Even if only a part to start off of. After that, the rest of the town council.

Once she had the figures of authority in the know, they could consider whether or not to tell the general populace or keep things ambiguous. If nothing else, announcing who and what she was...

If she was the Kingdom, she'd immediately dispatch a team to capture her. Even if they had to do it through the Bane. An actual alien with access to godly tech? She was an asset and potential threat of ridiculous magnitude. They'd have to secure or eliminate her ASAP, through any means necessary. She knew that if she'd been on Earth during the late twentieth or early twenty first centuries, she almost certainly would have precipitated a full scale nuclear exchange and kicked off the festival of horrors of the Terran Hegemony War decades early.

Then she got a ping. From Cia.

"Ma'am." Said the simulacrum, as soon as the AI accepted the ping. "We have a problem."

"What kind?"

"There's been a battle at the pass. I...whatever the Bane were expecting, it's arrived at last."

Oh shit.