Chapter 254
The Sky Beyond
Alexander carried the wizard down the corridor at a pace that split the difference between urgency and caution.
She weighed almost nothing. Tier 2 or not, the blood loss had taken most of whatever fight her body still had in it. His Electrokinesis tracked her bioelectrical signature in real ti, a pulse that flickered at the edges but held its shape. Fading, the way a circuit under sustained load faltered before it gave out. Steady enough for now. An ordinary person with that wound would have been dead before he’d reached her.
Droney hung beside him, held aloft by tallokinesis. The drone’s hovertech whined every few seconds, as it cycled through calibrations, reaching for lift that the fortress wouldn’t give them. Alexander had stopped trying to fly after the second attempt. Whatever was going on, it treated any attempt to fly or levitate the way a grounding wire treated current. Let it build, then bled it away to nothing.
He considered unleashing his presence fully, but the shock might cause the wizard’s heart to fail.
So that remained a last resort.
His first ntal thread managed the carry, the route, and the woman’s declining vitals. The second swept every room they passed.
The corridor was wide enough for four people abreast and built from the sa dense steel-adjacent alloy as the courtyard walls. Doors lined both sides at regular intervals, most standing open. Quarters. Personal spaces. Communal areas.
Beds with carved headboards, the carvings glowing faintly where symbols followed the grain of the wood. Low tables beside them. Shelves holding personal effects. Leather boots paired neatly beside doorfras. Folded clothing on chairs. A cup on a nightstand, still half full.
People had lived here. Until recently. He’d stepped around a few more bodies already.
Each room held the sa fixture above the bed. Two concentric brass rings around a crystal sphere seated in a shallow dish. Every one he passed was identical, down to the tiny symbols etched along the rings’ inner surfaces. The glow from each sphere was steady and warm.
Lamps. Just magical.
Further down, the corridor opened into a common area. A long table occupied the center, surrounded by heavy chairs. Plates and cups sat where als had been interrupted. At the far end, a wide counter separated the dining space from a preparation area where shelving held containers of dried goods and hanging racks carried utensils made from materials tallokinesis read as iron and copper.
Against the common area’s side wall, a row of identical cylindrical devices sat on a low bench. Each one was eight inches tall, tapered at the top, with a flat circular base marked by concentric rings of tiny glyphs. The construction was uniform. Sa height. Sa taper. Sa symbol placent. Whatever they did, soone had standardized the design the sa way Earth standardized any appliance that needed to be mass-produced.
His engineering brain itched to pick one up and figure out what it did, but his arms were full of dying wizard.
The woman lifted one bloodied hand from her stomach and pointed weakly toward a junction ahead.
Alexander turned left. The new corridor was narrower, the ceiling lower. More doors. A mirror on the wall caught his reflection as he passed, the OACS armor sared with blood from the courtyard, the opaque visor dark and featureless. He looked like sothing from a sci-fi nightmare. No wonder she’d attacked him.
“I have two important questions,” he said.
The wizard’s eyes shifted behind heavy lids. Blood had gathered at the corner of her mouth, a thin line running down her chin and pooling against the seal of his gauntlet where it pressed beneath her shoulder.
“Why can’t I fly? And why can we understand each other?”
She tried to laugh. The sound ca out wet and broken, and blood sprayed in a fine mist across the lower half of his visor.
He really should have installed windshield wipers.
“Anti-flight wards,” she managed. Each word ca separately, purchased with effort. “Carved into... the foundations. Translation matrix too.” A rattling breath. “Protection... against invaders.”
Alexander adjusted his grip as they passed through the junction. Made sense. A fortress built to guard a gateway between realities would need both. Suppress flight so nobody could bypass the defenses by escaping above. Translate automatically so the defenders could communicate with anything that ca through. It was well designed. Practical.
He’d built similar precautions around his own gateway. Using machines and the earth itself, given his lack of magic.
“So why were there so few of you?” he asked.
The wizard groaned. Her pointing hand dropped against her chest.
“Sorry. I should stop interrogating you while you’re busy dying.”
The laugh that followed was worse than the first. Weaker. The blood at her lips had thickened, and the cough that chased the laugh left a red sar across the collar of her blue and gold uniform. Her bioelectrical signature dipped, the pulse thinning at the edges before stabilizing at a lower baseline.
“Sorry,” he said again.
She closed her eyes. For a few seconds he thought she’d lost consciousness. Then her lips moved.
“Gate was abandoned.” A long pause. Breath whistling through damaged airways. “Invasion plans elsewhere... the blood hero... too strong.”
Red Haze.
The hero who’d spread the Lost Prophet’s infection across Baton Rouge in minutes, whose death had taken a quarter million people with him. Strong enough that the wizards had decided this entrance into Earth 1 wasn’t worth the cost. Not through him and his guild.
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Which ant they’d pulled their forces back, left a skeleton garrison, and two of their own had used the opportunity to slaughter everyone who remained.
But why? And what deal had they made with Flashpoint?
The wizard’s trembling hand rose again. She pointed at a door ahead, wider than the others, with a symbol carved above the fra that pulsed with a soft green light.
Alexander reached the door. It didn’t open on its own.
He looked at it. Looked at the tracks set into the fra. Reached with tallokinesis and found the chanism, a simple sliding assembly, counterweighted and designed to be activated by sothing his power could move but couldn’t understand.
He flicked his fingers and shoved it open with brute force instead. The door ground sideways on its track, protesting.
The room beyond slled like herbs and clean linen.
The Restorium was small. The flooring and walls were different from the rest of the fortress. His tallokinesis read silver threaded through the alloy, fine veins of it running through every surface. Crystal drawers lined the walls in neat grids, each one square and uniform, holding bundles of dried leaves, strips of bark, colored powders.
His second ntal thread had already locked onto the pod at the far end. Jade, carved from a single massive piece, shaped to hold a human body. A crystal canopy covered the top. The craftsmanship stopped him cold for half a step. tal inlays traced the edges in lines so precise they could have been machine-cut. Each one humd with layered energy that pressed against his Electrokinesis the sa way every other device in this place did.
Alexander crossed the room in three strides. “What do I do?”
Silence.
He glanced down. Her eyes were closed. Her head had fallen against his chest plate, and the hand that had been pressing her wound hung limp at her side. The bioelectrical signature was still there, thin and threadbare, but she wasn’t hearing him anymore.
He clicked his tongue and approached the pod. “Terrible timing.”
The canopy hissed and split where it t the jade, rising on hidden hinges until it was fully open.
Alexander laid her inside and waited. Two heartbeats later, nothing had happened.
He waved a hand. “Abracadabra?”
The canopy lowered, then sealed with a soft click.
Droney beeped.
Alexander glanced at Droney. “Don’t judge .”
The magic circles carved into the jade brightened. Green light blood from the carved lines, then climbed through the smaller channels until every line on the pod’s surface was lit. The energy density doubled, then tripled, the hum building.
Liquid began rising from the base of the pod. Green, translucent, sohow welling up from the jade itself with no visible inlet or pump chanism. It climbed past her boots. Past her waist. The wizard’s body shifted as the liquid reached her chest, buoyancy lifting her slightly off the pod’s surface. It reached the wound, and red mixed with the green of what he hoped was magical healing liquid.
It kept filling, reaching her chin.
Alexander leaned forward. “Uh. That’s enough, I think?” He tapped the canopy with a finger, the tal of his suit ringing against the crystal. “We don’t want to drown the wizard.”
Alexander paced to the other side, boots thudding in the enclosed space. Magical pods were not his skill set. But he waited. Surely even wizards wouldn’t design a healing device that killed its patients.
The liquid swallowed her. Alexander’s fist clenched at his side.
Then he saw her chest rise. Fall. Rise again. Slow, steady breaths that drew the green liquid in through parted lips and expelled it without resistance.
Alexander unclenched his fist and leaned against the wall, watching the pod do its work.
Seconds ticked by. The green liquid pulsed in slow, rhythmic cycles, brightening and dimming in ti with the wizard’s breathing. Her bioelectrical signature had stopped declining. Stable, if weak. The wound beneath her uniform was hidden by the liquid, but the blood had stopped spreading.
He gave it a minute. Then another.
By the third, he was pacing. Four steps to one wall. Four steps back. Droney tracked him from beside the pod, visor slit following his movent.
His second ntal thread kept circling back to the gateway. To Augustus, Talia, and Annie, facing two wizards who had slaughtered dozens of their own without taking a scratch.
He forced a breath through his teeth.
Augustus had taken Alexander’s lightning full force during the sparring match. Shield stripped, jacket smoking, exposed in the air with nothing between him and the next attack. He’d been casting again before Alexander could react. Decades of combat compressed into a reflex so deep it didn’t need conscious thought to fire. The man had fought in wars Alexander had only read about.
Talia had thrown herself off a moving hoverbike in freefall, fired a blade wave at point-blank range, and landed back on the bike through a portal she’d trusted Augustus to place without being asked. She’d calculated the trajectory, the timing, and her own fall rate in the space of a heartbeat.
And Annie had been thrown by Alexander hard enough to crash through half a dozen trees, with a lightning bolt chasing her down for good asure. She’d climbed out of the wreckage and flown straight back up, grinning.
They didn’t need him. They needed him to trust them. The sa way he expected them to trust him.
Alexander stopped pacing. He checked the wizard one more ti. The signature was holding. The liquid continued its steady rhythm. Whatever the pod did, it was doing it.
She’d either wake up on her own, or the pod would release her when it was done. He had to believe a healing device worked the sa way regardless of whether it ran on technology or magic.
He turned and left the room.
He took the corridor in long strides, faster now without a body in his arms to worry about. Droney trailed behind him, still held aloft by tallokinesis. He passed the common areas, the quarters, the bodies he’d stepped around before.
The courtyard opened before him.
Alexander stopped. The massacre was still there. Blue and gold uniforms. Scattered wands. The gateway humming at the far end, its surface showing the scorched streets of Baton Rouge on the other side.
He looked left. The gateway. Ho. His team. His family.
He looked right. The open doorway where Flashpoint’s bloody footprints led deeper into the fortress and beyond.
Alexander turned right.
Then stopped.
Flashpoint had a head start. Alexander had no intention of giving him a longer one by running through corridors he didn’t know.
He let his presence unfurl.
Will followed by power. He allowed it, rather than making it. That was the core lesson he’d taken from Radiant, though it had taken ti to understand.
Forcing it was wrong. A Domain wasn’t sothing he commanded into being. It happened when Will and Power aligned around the simple fact of his existence.
The Machine God stood here.
The fortress pushed back. He could feel it now. The magic layered beneath his feet, carved into foundations and pillars deep in the earth. Careful work, enchantnts etched and powered by dozens of wizards. Strong enough to hold him with little effort.
Honestly impressive.
And annoying.
He growled.
The floor trembled. The walls shuddered. Sparks snapped through the air, first in brief blue-white flickers, then in crawling lines that licked across the floor, climbed the walls, and arced over the ceiling as the tal structure around him bowed outward.
The ward held. Until it didn’t.
Alexander launched.
The ceiling tore open before he reached it, tal peeling away in jagged strips as he punched through the fortress into the sky beyond.
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