The Celestial Way

Chapter 26 - The Celestial Way

"Countdown initiated!"

Airo's heads-up display filled with giant oversaturated digits, adding another obvious mark for his hyperalert psyche to follow.

10...

9...

8...

He stared at the numbers, each second taking an eternity to pass.

7...

6...

5...

In that eternity, he cleared his mind of all distractions, leaving only tranquil emptiness.

3...

2...

1...

The lights again turned green.

"Deploying Spark Two!"

Airo rushed three steps forward, passing through the cyan forcefield, and left Ouroboros.

The warpstorm megafront hit him with brutal tenacity and deafening thunder drowned out his hearing even through the armor's insulation. He felt a powerful thrust when the armor's own propulsion system kicked in, carrying him forward. The superstorm buffeted him, its gusts jarring beyond physicality, dislocating all levels of his being in different microfractal directions. High-pitched whine pierced his skull, the heads-up display lighting up in amber frenzy.

Reality elevation 5%!

Reality elevation -90%!

Reality elevation -285%!

Airo pushed his will, summoning his starblade, and the overwhelming entropy subsided. He looked around, taking a read on the situation. The horizon was nowhere to be seen and neither land nor sky nor perspective were discernible, all devoured by sheer non-existence. Somewhere above, Ouroboros and the Radiant Knights clashed against the Revenant, their fate reduced to an ocean of fuzzy telemetric AR data. Deeper in the superstorm, Veralla did battle with Mentoria, her mind an incandescent beacon in the primeval chaos.

And far underneath was the monolithic, immovable presence of the Shard.

Airo peered at his destination. Down below, the Shard was shrouded in darkness, barely recognizable from when he had last seen it. The superstorm had all but buried the Shard and its cobalt surface was no longer enveloped in the protective golden haze of the Shield. The Reality Vortex had grown to staggering proportions, its raging singularity a mountain of its own, the secondary nucleus of plasma and lightning now a monstrous chimera of viridian tentacles, lashing in hyper-forked fractal arcs, forming a lattice of instant disintegration. Blasting outward from this nightmare was the planetary-scale energy beam, its lurid light casting the only illumination in this decaying locality.

Airo rushed parallel to the titanic energy beam at full throttle and headed toward the Shard's summit, knowing Ferrtau was somewhere down there, in the heart of the storm.

***

Veralla had never felt more scared in her brief life. Ever since she returned Airo to life by her will alone something happened, and now her senses were drowned with constant, near-infinite input. She was seeing myriad waves of complex images and was hearing whole symphonies of discordant resonances. Her scales were tingling from the ceaseless touch of pure reality and she could smell a legion of exotic substances, not all of them material. She felt completely overwhelmed by these new experiences and only Airo's presence gave her any semblance of stability, preventing her from going mad from the exposure. She clung dearly to the calming stream of his mindlinked thoughts, anchored against this vast, frightening tide by the light of his love.