Chapter 17 #2
Nili gave him a pointed look. “You are beyond lucky that my daughter sensed something was happening just as she left, and that we were intending to meet up with you anyway, Alex. What were you doing?”
Alex shook his head. “No time. We have to head to the warehouse right now.”
Her glare became a look of concern when she saw the intensity of his gaze. “Alex?”
His lips pressed tight with concern. “I just… please, trust me. I have to go there. I have a promise to keep, and maybe it will help.”
Nili cursed softly under his breath. “If you hadn’t saved both me and my daughter…
” She sighed. “If only you knew the headaches you were causing, hero.” Her exasperation turned into a soft chuckle.
“I have always wondered what it would be like to live a life of excitement and peril, like in the stories my sisters and I used to read, late into the night. Now I realize what a foolish kit I truly was. Come, Alex. This way.”
When a crack could be seen in the side of the passageway that should have been repaired long ago, a crack he somehow knew would lead right under the shadows of a large date palm that should never have been allowed to grow quite so close to the quartz tower’s foundations yet somehow was, he didn’t complain or question it.
He simply allowed himself to slip through shadow before taking a deep, relieved breath of fresh morning air alight with the scents of the hot desert sands and the lush fecund valley in the caldera basin, filled with a life-giving bounty of crops upon which the well-being of the entire city depended upon.
He flashed a serene smile, the growing pressure of angry, confused Silvers quickly abating as he and Nili casually stepped out of the shelter of the date palm’s unusually long fronds and began a leisurely walk toward the center of the city.
A walk that soon turned into an all-out sprint as they left the domain of cultivators and the elite in their wake, Nili now cloaking them so well that all most mortals sensed was a powerful breeze passing them by.
Soon, the fine marble-faced buildings gave way to sturdy and practical plain-faced brownstone as they went from central boulevard to one of a handful of parallel streets where the shadows effortlessly hid so many secrets, before at last arriving at the warehouse that had transformed so utterly that even Nili stopped to gaze up at the stout structure for long moments, muttering softly under her breath.
“There’s something very strange about this building, Alex.”
Alex just smiled. With a single press of his hand, the door that absolutely refused to budge for Nili gently eased open, and the pair were struck with the lush, fecund air of primal woodland, smelling of citrus blossoms, wildflowers, forest loam, and rich arboreal life.
Nili’s eyes widened with awe as she gazed straight up toward the heavens, her face caressed by shafts of emerald-tinted light piercing the thick forest canopy.
“Angels’ mercy, there’s no roof.” She turned to look back the way she’d come, cursing softly as she noted both door and wooden paneling from this angle. “It’s all alive… Alex, all the planks have sprouted branches, roots, and… the walls are alive. The entire building truly is alive!”
Alex instantly raised his fist, silencing his friend as his ears cocked, his smile of joyful wonder turning into anxious concern as he listened to odd rustles that writhed with a desperate growing thirst, his heart immediately going out to the miniature grove that had blossomed to his desperate plea, saved his life…
and now desperately needed him to hold up his end of the bargain.
And so he revealed just one of the prizes he had kept out of the hands of a certain hungry headmistress.
Nili gasped. “That’s the life of a city you hold in your hands, Alex!”
Alex smirked. “Not really. Unlike the prize you hold so close yourself, this is just a fragment, one that we know from bitter experience that the caldera will not accept. But just because it can’t be used to empower rifts and waterfalls doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its uses,” he quietly said as he hesitated from placing the ice chip willy-nilly and tried to really listen to the excited rustles of the branches.
To not rely simply on insights gleaned as an apothecary with Biochemical Mastery but rather to what the forest itself was trying to tell him.
Before his heart lurched in his chest and he realized that what he had prayed was just him jolting out of nightmare was anything but.
Such that when he gently placed a single icy sliver six inches under a cluster of happily writhing copperthorn vines that he knew would distribute the water to a good-sized portion of the grove, he sensed by the excited rustle of countless other branches exactly where he needed to place the next fragment he held.
So he did all he could to focus on the gentle susurrations of tree limb, twig, and branch and distract himself from the desperate sobs of a pair of girls he sensed rapidly running out of time.
Because a certain pair of lost companions weren’t alone as they wound about countless woodland trails.
And they weren’t meandering along.
They were racing for all they were worth and rapidly running out of steam.
And time.
“Hold on, Linnea. Guard her well, Ya Ling. I’m coming!” Alex dared to whisper aloud as he gently patted a second Ice sliver exactly ninety degrees to the north of the first.
“Alex, intact core or not, those things are precious! Surely you don’t need more than one… Wait, what’s this about your friends in Liushi?”
But Alex paid her no mind.
His gentle meandering steps of moments ago had become a race against time, effortlessly springing from branch to branch as he forged his third anchor between tree bough and eager vine, Nili looking on in helpless exasperation as he sprang through the air before placing a fourth ice-blue sliver several feet from true west.
Then he stiffened, frozen with anxious worry, realizing he wasn’t quite sure where he needed to be.
“Alex?”
“Sorry.” Anxious eyes gazed past his worried-looking friend. “I just have to find the fifth locus point.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
Alex shook his head. “The point where all four cardinal directions meet up to…”
“To what?”
He shrugged. “I’m not entirely certain.”
“Then why do you look like you’re about to explode with anxiety?”
“Because a shadow cat is about to eat my—wait, there it is!”
“Where is what?”
But Alex had already sprung through the trees, placing a final Ice chip at a point equidistant from all others.
And that was when he felt it, as the sapphire chip sank into the roots of a tiny sapling and the air itself seemed to grow thick with night’s gloom and the distant cries of his friends.
Nili’s ears perked, slipping free of her carefully pinned curls, such was her alarm. “Alex! What did you do?”
Alex swallowed even as his heart began to pound, equal parts awe, wonder, and trepidation. “I’m not sure, but you might want to hide.”
“Alex!”
But there was no more time to do anything but brace himself as the entire grove seemed to rustle and bend in directions at right angles to any Alex had known before, and the entire world seemed to snap into a new configuration.
Alex felt a massive wave of something slamming into them, without a single hair on either of their heads being sent askew.
And then he saw it as Nili lurched back in shocked surprise.
The tiny cluster of knotted samplings that Alex could have sworn hadn’t been there, just seconds ago.
Saplings that seemed to twist together to form a tunnel through the wood.
A tunnel that stayed the same, no matter what angle he approached.
As if all directions were the same.
Somehow, he knew that should he dare to enter that strange portal, everything would change.
“Alex!” Nili spoke in hushed tones that conveyed a sense of awed disbelief. “How? How did you actually manage… just, how?”
His heart began to pound with exhilaration and dread in equal measure.
“Alex!”
Nili blinked, as startled as he was by the utterance.
He recognized that voice. Just as he did the distant cries he heard as little more than rustles in the leaves.
A panicked cry. A throaty growl. And a brilliant flash of flame.
Then, so fast that Nili stumbled back with a soft curse, Linnea and Ya Ling dove through the portal of vines before stumbling to their feet, looking wildly around.
“Linnea! Do you sense it? Is it still—” Ya Ling’s eyes widened in wonder when she caught sight of a grim-faced Alex holding his fangtian ji high.
“Alex, it’s me! Please don’t—”
At that very moment, a panicked Linnea, hands white-hot with arcane energies, spun around to catch sight of Alex as well, face lightening with joy before seeing the expression on his face. “Alex, it’s us! How did we—”
Her eyes widened in a desperate plea, having just enough time to see the razor-sharp steel in his hand before it flashed through the air.
And before she could offer a single panicked protest, it was done, Nili’s cry resonating with the spray of blood covering all three women as a massive skull was cleaved free of feline flesh, Ya Ling desperately tumbling through the air she had mastered so well as a massive shadow puma slammed to the ground right where she had been standing, minus the head rolling into the thick undergrowth.
You have successfully decapitated Rank 1 Silver-tier Shadow Puma.
Experience earned!
Ya Ling stumbled back in horror that quickly transformed into exhausted sobs of relief.
“It was hounding us through the rift. A rift we thought finally clean, finally tamed! Then it separated us from the rest of the party and…” Her cheeks flushed as she flashed Alex an enormous heartfelt smile.
“You’re actually here. You’re actually alive! ”
“And he did it!” Linnea squealed happily, caring nothing for the bloodied weapon he held as she happily dove into Alex’s arms. “We thought we were done for, and our hero killed the monster that was hounding us with a single swipe!”