The Fusionist Book 4 -- Chapter 40

Chapter 40

It was nearly 5 hours into his trip over the desert, as the sun began to approach the horizon toward night, that Larek realized something that made him slowly bring the Air Skimmer to a stop, though he kept it floating above the sand. It wasn’t something that he had forgotten, nor did he visually notice something that made him want to pause, and there wasn’t a pressing need to stop and eat from his supplies, though he was getting a little thirsty. It wasn’t any of those things, but was something that was completely lacking in the land he skimmed over.

Not once in the miles and miles of desert he passed through did he sense a single instance of an Aperture.

At first, he considered that there simply hadn’t been any that were near his route through Lowenthal, but that seemed awfully unlikely. When he had been passing through the Empire, he could barely go a mile or two before detecting one, though in the more populated areas it was more difficult because they began to get closed more often, which reduced his sense of them to less than a half-mile. While they were still open, though, he could detect them up to nearly 2 miles away, though at that distance it was relatively faint, and he had to be paying attention to really pinpoint where it was located.

But not once in his current trip over the desert did he sense any Apertures, closed or otherwise. According to the notification that he – along with everyone else – had received back in Enderflow, Scissions and Apertures were supposedly being opened everywhere, so it seemed strange that there weren’t any in Lowenthal.

Looking at the sand dunes nearby, which didn’t appear to have seen any form of life in years, if ever, he had a sudden thought. Nothing is living on the surface; the Drekkin apparently live underground. Or at least the lived underground, as no one back in Day’s End seemed to know what happened to them once the tunnels collapsed. What if there are Apertures, but they’re far enough underground that I can’t sense them?

He had heard that the tunnels under the sand were deep, near bedrock, at least according to what he’d learned from Serena and a few other people while he stayed there, though the former source was a bit suspect with her being possessed by a monster and all that. Still, he didn’t think anyone he got his information from had lied or stretched the truth that far, so it was entirely possible that they actually lived miles under the surface. If the Apertures had opened down there, then that would explain why he didn’t sense them at all.

Slightly disappointed, as he had wanted to continue accumulating Aetheric Force on his trip over the desert, but that didn’t seem likely at this point. Even if he had wanted to find a way to dig down to where the Apertures might be, he didn’t have any way to do that.

Though, I think I could probably figure out a Fusion that would help with that. Perhaps by utilizing the effect created by the Furrow spell I learned from Nedira—

*SLAM*

Larek was nearly knocked over as something impacted his Air Skimmer hard enough to shift it both upwards and to the left far enough that it nearly flipped over. He managed to keep his feet as he instinctively gripped the handlebars he had momentarily let go of while he was investigating why he hadn’t sensed any Apertures. Once the Skimmer stabilized a few seconds later, he cautiously looked over the right side where he thought he felt the impact come from.

Thankfully, he saw no damage to his vessel, but as for what had slammed into it, there was no sign.

There seemed to be a disturbance in the sand below, but he couldn’t say for sure because the air cushion was moving a lot of it around as it cycled through the system it had created, so it could’ve been a result of that. He peered over the side and even peeked all around the vessel to see if there was any other sign of what had hit it, but he saw absolutely nothing.

Now wary of there actually being something in the desert, he resolved to keep a better eye out for whatever it might be, because if it had been able to attack him 10 feet above the surface with such a blow and then disappear as if it had never existed, then it was something that might actually be able to harm him. Still, he had no desire to set the Air Skimmer down and investigate at the moment, so he simply reactivated the forward gusts to get him moving again.

Over the next hour, he didn’t see anything at all moving along the desert, and if he hadn’t felt the blow that occurred to the Skimmer, he would’ve considered that he had imagined it. As the sun began to set, sending the creeping darkness to cover the land, Larek began to look for someplace to set down for the night so he could eat, drink, and sleep so that he would be refreshed in the morning. Theoretically, he could always keep going and cover more ground, but it was a little harder to navigate in the darkness to ensure he maintained the correct heading and not get turned around. Guiding his way ahead by the stars above wasn’t something that he’d ever learned how to do before, so it wasn’t something he could rely on to see him pointing the correct way.

Larek finally found a large dune with a relatively level top to it, which he immediately maneuvered his way over and practiced his precise application of the air gusts from his Multi-Thruster Fusion. It was as difficult as he thought it would be, and while he hadn’t perfected it by the time he set the Air Skimmer down on top of the dune, he had made some progress toward getting there. It sunk a few inches but fortunately had enough surface area to keep it from sinking too far, and Larek immediately set up his Secure Hideaway before getting himself something to eat. Ideally, he would’ve preferred to stay in the air while he slept, but the constant use of ambient Mana for prolonged periods of time would deplete the Mana density even at some of the lower Magnitudes, so it wasn’t something he could maintain for the entire night – especially when he had Secure Hideaway active as well.

And he wasn’t going to sacrifice being safe and secure behind his protective Fusion just so that he could stay hovering over the sand the entire night.

After breaking into the food supplies and hydrating himself with the help of a Water Stream at Magnitude 1 from the tip of his staff and a simple stone cup, he was ready for sleep. After rearranging some of the supplies in his Air Skimmer so that he would fit, he laid himself down inside the vessel on his side, curving around the handlebar pole in the center. With the help of one of his softer bags as a pillow, he closed his eyes and drifted off to a night of glorious slumber.

Larek woke up as the rising sun was just barely beginning to lighten the world around him, surprised that nothing had disturbed his sleep. Half-expecting to be attacked by something, given his encounter with a mysterious entity earlier in the day, he was pleased to find that his protective Fusion had obviously worked just as intended and kept everything away from him.

That was until he stood up and looked outside the Air Skimmer, discovering that he wasn’t in the same place he had set the vessel down the night before.

“How did I get down here?” he asked aloud, confused at what had happened.

Instead of being on top of a sand dune, he was now at the bottom of one, as if he and the Skimmer had been moved; whether it was the same one he had landed on, he couldn’t tell, as they all looked very similar and there was no sign of disturbance on it. There was no indication that he had simply slid down the side of the dune during the night, which he thought was entirely possible since he knew from personal experience that the sand was more viscous than solid. However, that didn’t explain why he hadn’t even felt the vessel tilt over as it moved down the slope of the dune, which he was sure he would’ve sensed even while asleep.

A quick look around his vessel’s new resting place revealed no signs that anything had approached his location during the night. With no evidence to go on, he shifted his supplies back to where they would be balanced for the upcoming flight, and then lifted off the sand as he initiated his Multi-Thruster Fusion. Lifting the vessel in stages, he was nearly at his normal cruising altitude of 10 feet when he caught a flash of something black out of the corner of his eye right before another *SLAM* reverberated off the left side of the Air Skimmer. It hit the vessel even harder than before, and the result was worse than before since the cushion of air underneath hadn’t fully stabilized the Skimmer, causing it to turn nearly sideways and shoot off to the right – and directly at the sand dune nearby.

One of the food crates slid out along with one of the bags before Larek managed to mentally order a reduction in the speed of the upward-thrusting gust of air, which greatly stopped his forward progress before he and the Skimmer impacted the dune at full speed. In fact, it had barely righted itself before slamming into the dune with a *thud* and an explosion of sand, knocking him off his feet and into the interior side of the vessel. Quickly recovering, he got up and took stock of the situation, before being pleased to see that the vessel hadn’t seemed to take any physical damage from the hit or the impact, and the rest of his supplies where jumped yet still intact.

As for the crate and bag that had fallen overboard, he almost missed them as he saw the corner of the thin wooden box descend under the sand at a rapid pace, as if something were pulling down. He was tempted to go after it, since those were some of his supplies, but he wasn’t foolhardy enough to jump into danger when something clearly was down there. Soon, even the last hint of the crate was completely gone, and the sand settled where it was as if nothing had happened – just like every other time he had been attacked or his vessel had moved from where it was at the night before.

Something is going on here, but I’m not sure I want to find out.

It wasn’t anything he’d ever thought about before, but he imagined that being pulled under the sand and suffocating as he was buried under dozens of feet of small granules had to be a bad way to go.

The sooner I’m out of here, the better.

Larek decided to begin moving forward as he rose into the air again, hopefully bypassing any risk of being hit again, and it seemed to work. Or at least nothing came out of the sand to attack him.

As continued on his way through the desert, he contemplated what it was that was underneath the endless sand in all directions, but he eventually had to stop because he didn’t have nearly enough information to go on. All he knew was that the barren environment wasn’t as devoid of life as he had previously thought, though was exactly it was continued to be a mystery. Larek traveled many miles over the next day without anything interrupting his journey, even after he stopped around midday to eat and drink something. At that point, he used a higher Magnitude lifting gust of air to raise him up higher from the ground, though he could tell that it wasn’t quite as stable as he previously was; what that told him was that trying to move forward while at that height would be a bad idea. Regardless, it afforded him a sense of security for the few minutes he spent gaining nourishment and hydration, which was all he really needed.

When night fell, he again stopped and found a place to set down, which was in between two large dunes this time in a relatively flat space that had no chance of drifting down somewhere. After setting Secure Hideaway up once again, he fell asleep despite being slightly paranoid that something would happen in the darkness.

He was right to worry, he discovered after he woke in the pre-dawn light. Contrary to what happened the night before, he and the Air Skimmer were now on top of a dune with no signs of how it happened. Somehow worse than that, the entire landscape seemed to have changed, as Larek had paid attention the night before to how large the local dunes were and where they were in relation to his vessel, but none of them were even remotely familiar. The only explanation was that he had been transported somewhere else in the desert, but where exactly that was, he had no way of knowing.

Using his technique from the previous morning, he elevated the Air Skimmer from the sand while moving forward, and once again he avoided being hit by something. Whether it was actually effective or if whatever was underneath the sand was now far away because of the distance he’d traveled the day before, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever know.

The next evening, Larek set the Air Skimmer down again, but this time he decided to stay awake through the night. He thought it might be difficult to keep himself active while it was dark and nothing was happening, but it proved to be easy enough because his mind was racing with hyper-focused paranoia to the point where he doubted he would sleep even if he laid down and closed his eyes.

At a point that he judged to be around midnight, something finally happened that dispelled any feelings of tiredness that he might have felt. It was subtle at first, and even though Larek was paying attention to everything around the area, he nearly missed it. It was only the very soft sound of sand gently rubbing against the shell of his Air Skimmer that alerted him that something was wrong. Standing up from where he had been resting his legs after the day, he looked out at the nearby desert to see something that boggled his mind.

The sand was moving. Not just a little bit, either, but the entirety of what he could see with his eyes was slowly but surely shifting in gentle, undulating waves that he was told that the ocean was like; it delicately pushed his vessel along with it, sometimes with a “wave” of sand pushing him up from below, while other times it rode at the bottom of a valley nearby massive dunes.  The speed of the movement wasn’t very fast, less than a slow walk for someone like him, but it didn’t stop, either.

While there was no sun to easily navigate by, he was fairly certain that it was pulling him to the east – which was where he wanted to go. If it had been pushing him back toward the west, meaning that it was reversing some of the progress he’d made in his travels, he probably would’ve lifted off the sand to prevent it from working against him. As it was at least somewhat helpful, he let it continue as he stood wide-eyed staring at the sea of sand that was bringing him… somewhere.

Approximately an hour before the pre-dawn light would eventually start illuminating the sky, the movement through the sand began to slow and eventually stopped altogether, leaving him in an area that didn’t resemble the place he had set down at the beginning of the night.

Mystery somewhat solved, but what should I make of all this? Is this harmful or just a unique quality of the desert I’ve never heard of before?

He wasn’t sure, but what he became sure of as he sat in the darkness of the pre-dawn night was that something had changed that he hadn’t really noticed until he had some time on his hands. In short, as he looked around himself with his Magical Detection Skill, it was clear that the Mana density had improved somewhat. It wasn’t a huge increase, but it certainly caught his attention since everywhere in the Empire had been relatively similar as far as Mana density went. The only places he found that had slightly higher density were around Apertures, especially ones that hadn’t been closed at all and were growing large enough to start affecting the density directly.

Therefore, the fact that the density around Larek was increasing was due to a couple of potential reasons – or even both. The first was that he was slowly approaching the location of the Kingdom, and the incredible Mana density there was already spreading to nearby lands, at least in part. The second was that there were a bunch of open Apertures nearby that he couldn’t detect, but he could at least detect the higher Mana density that they created just by existing.

To do something like that and have Larek detect the change in Mana density at such a distance – since he couldn’t yet sense any Apertures – they would likely have to be quite large. Or, it was entirely possible that this was the result of one giant Aperture that was pumping out all the Mana into the world…

…but that wasn’t likely, was it?