novelraw Chapter 464 - 464
Chapter 464 - 464
Only having to cast Fly on two people- for the price of one person- meant that Midnight and I could pretty easily get a good angle to see a large distance towards the edge of the horizon. Then we would Teleport. It didn't matter whether we made it precisely to our destination- whether we went fifty miles or forty-nine and a half miles, it was a pretty time efficient way to travel. Not mana efficient, though it was practically twice as efficient as it had been moments before. If we were stingy, we could probably reduce the cost even more, since we weren't going for maximum distance. Stability was better, though.
Between Midnight and myself we had about 120 mana… not counting going into the negatives. Fly cost a handful of mana for a good 20 minutes. Some of that was reserved for gaining altitude and making sure we had a proper descent at the end, but that still easily gave us 10 minutes to spend focusing on our destination and Teleporting.
We decided to conserve some mana in case there was danger on the ground wherever we rested, which meant we cast Teleport about 10 times instead of the potential 12 we could manage after accounting for Gate. Each one carried us a variable distance, but we covered the distance of several small countries during that time. Actual size of countries was wildly variable, though.
It was actually possible to go 10 or 20 times as far with Teleport, but we had to know the area. While we had maps and a general idea of what a volcano was, I didn't exactly trust their accuracy. No, I knew some of them were wrong. Partially from my time here in this world, and partially from Earth where they also intentionally made some old maps wrong. To mess up invaders, mostly.
Anyway, we had to go around Adrela because they might be the sort to have anti-teleportation stuff. I was still annoyed at my last time there. I'd lost a good staff. Yeah, now I knew how to enchant things but enchanting that staff would have been better. Though I might be getting a replacement for the Yggdrasil wood at some point, now that Ceira had more time to work on things like that instead of being taken around the world healing rich idiots. Those were her words, more or less.
Midnight and I paused our journey buried up to the neck in tall grass. Though that was only the case for Midnight because he was on my shoulder, or he would have been numerous Celmothians deep.
"So where is this place?" Midnight asked.
I took a look at some digitized maps. "Probably Durel. I've never been here, but it fits the maps." I hadn't really left Mossley, to be frank. Most of my first world was technically new to me. Now, I'd seen more of Earth- though I'd stood on the ground in fewer places, since I'd taken a plane over most of it. And actually, I'd only seen a few countries, and one of those was in Earth #2.
"How close are we to Mount… Agony?"
"Probably just one more round of doing this," I commented. "Unless we have to go around another large area."
We were staying away from cities, since people probably didn't like arbitrary teleportation into where they lived. Seriously, there was a very high chance of ending up inside someone's house with Teleport. Even if we were using Fly and intending to be above a city, it wasn't guaranteed to work.
"So…" Midnight looked around. "We just wait here? Maybe we should just go back to Earth."
"This place isn't distinct enough to easily Gate back to," I pointed out. "But we're just going to be hanging out anyway, so we can do that here. Though with a roof over our heads."
I pulled something out of Storage, a tiny model house. It was a great focus for Shelter, allowing for consistency. Leftover effort could be spent on durability. I doubted the spell would ever be sturdy, but a higher rank version of it might be. Though the traditional method was to just make a pocket dimension so that nobody could even try to hurt it.
I could do that with Master Spatial Magic, but I wouldn't be able to inhabit it with stuff. That would take knowledge I didn't have, even if it was technically within the same mana limits. I could spend points to learn Magnificent Mansion, but… I didn't feel like it. That was all. I had plenty of points. Maybe I could be considered as saving them up for an experiment, but I really just didn't feel like using them.
There wasn't quite as much to do with just our mobile devices, since we didn't have access to Earth networks, but sometimes it was better to disconnect. Or at least, Midnight said that about social media. I did miss access to a few things, but this was a good time to study physical books from the isekai world. It… might have a name. Though it wasn't likely that humans and the many-colored people agreed on it. Well, I only had one group I really wanted to talk to, so I just asked them.
"Midnight, split a Sending with me."
"... Aren't we resting to recover mana?" he asked.
"I need to know something."
He rolled his eyes. "Alright."
Yalith answered. I figured she was probably the least busy of the knowledgeable people I knew in that world, and she didn't seem likely to be annoyed by random questions.
"We call this world Home for All People. Aizilish."
Ah, that made sense. Like their country, Aidura, was Home for the Many-Colored. On the surface one might intuit the "Ai" sound to mean home and that wouldn't be wrong, but their language was more complex than that. Not that I was an expert- my lack of full understanding was how I could confirm it was more complex.
The quantity of mana in the grasslands where Midnight and I were taking a break was… pretty decent. It wasn't amazing, but it was better than Mossley. Slightly worse than New Bay's current state, but I was pretty sure there were still some places that had high-mana portals open. Maybe they were being cycled in and out. Either way, there was a slower but still noticeable growth compared to the early spikes.
Midnight and I spent about a quarter of our time actively meditating to cut off a couple hours from the total recovery time, but it wasn't something you could do all day. It was work, building up mental fatigue from the other direction of spellcasting. I noticed the long term fatigue more and more as my mana pool grew and I could use more total magic in a day. It wasn't as jarring as using too much mana all at once, but it could still throw off spellcasting if you pushed yourself too much.
It was a shame we couldn't just use mana crystals all the time, but even if I had unlimited quantities there was only so much the body could handle. It was better to use them for more time-sensitive matters. After all, we were probably only going to use maybe thirty of our theoretical seventy hours. We just left after a good night's rest to make sure we didn't cut things too close.
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At some point, we fell asleep on a couch. I didn't even remember lying down, but Midnight was resting on my chest. I only really noticed when I woke up. It was nice. Something about Familiar Bond helped negate the awkwardness that another full person was snuggling on top of me. No, it would be stranger if anyone that close couldn't accept physical contact. Though certainly, the world liked to push people towards exactly one sort of physical affection.
It wasn't exactly a proper rest, and I had to spend a good twenty minutes stretching to feel right. Honestly, though, I would barely have noticed the discomfort if not for Midnight. Sometimes, we just felt things better secondhand.
"I guess it's time to finish our journey," Midnight said.
"Sounds about right," I agreed.
There wasn't much else to say. It would be a pretty quick trip, as one might expect from teleportation. It would have been instantaneous if we had a good impression of where we were going to begin with. We could have tried Scrying, but we weren't in a rush and we didn't have a good anchor to the volcano. It would be embarrassing to end up on the wrong volcano, and we wouldn't exactly have GPS to tell us we were off. So this was easiest.
… I used to take longer to walk into town than we spent teleporting past countries.
Things sure had changed, huh? I still liked magic, though. In fact, I think I enjoyed it far more now that I was significantly better at it. It didn't lose its charm. Even Storage was more interesting with experience.
We passed over forests. We knew we were a bit off when we hit a big lake, but we skirted around the shores and passed a whole lot of other terrain that would have been a slog to walk through.
I hoped repeated teleportation wasn't bad for people, or the world somehow. If it was, Wrickle would probably tell me when I brought it up, but I didn't feel any ill effects. None of the books I had indicated anything like that, though, so it would have to be a secret.
There were probably a ton of secrets. Otherwise, we wouldn't be meeting up on a volcano named Mount Agony, but in a coffee shop. Or at least back in the gardens we had met in before to have tea.
"Oof, good thing we didn't stop in that swamp," I commented to Midnight. "Oh wow those are huge mosquitoes. They sure do keep getting bigger, huh?"
"I'm working on it!" Midnight grumbled. It was his turn to cast the spell. We could have split things evenly with Assistive Familiar Casting, but we weren't quite as proficient as we would want to save the necessary mana for this. There was just no comparing 6 upgrades to 15.
We got out of there well before we ran into any trouble with the mosquitoes. Which was good, because I was less concerned about them drinking our blood and more about them simply impaling us.
Not too long later, we spotted it. Mount Agony.
Midnight tilted his head. "There's no way that it has constant flows of lava. How does that even make any sense?"
"Magic," I said. "Besides," I gestured broadly. "Clearly, it does."
Midnight sighed. "Time to put on our equipment," he said. "Breathing is going to suck."
It wasn't that bad, really. Midnight's wasn't even restrictive as his suit molded a sort of helmet around his head to filter out the noxious gasses.
Power Brigade members didn't frequently have interactions with volcanos, but Extra did every once in a while. They were more likely to go through portals or work in different parts of the world. They'd known where to get some stuff not available on the open market. It was pretty specialty.
As for the heat issue… Energy Ward did just fine. As long as we didn't do something stupid like step on a lava flow. That also included sections that looked cool, but were simply below molten. There were lots of warnings about rubber melting, mostly photographers who really should have been using drones. Though volcanic activity wasn't great for drone propellers too.
"... We should have brought a drone," I said. "To take images of the top. Then we wouldn't have to go ourselves."
"You know," Midnight replied, "We can always just go back to Earth."
But we were already there, so it was easier to just go as we were. For shorter distances up the side of the mountain, we used Dimension Door. We continued to use Fly, though we kept our eyes open for anything territorial.
"Red scales," I said. "That's what we don't want to see. A dragon would be a real pain right now. Hopefully, Wrickle didn't send us into dragon infested territory without warning, though."
I wouldn't mind fighting dragons, but that was the sort of thing you needed to be emotionally prepared for. I recalled Great Girl throwing some really big ones through a portal. I just hoped they didn't live here. Then again, that group clearly hadn't enjoyed their current home or they wouldn't have come through the portal, right?
Eventually, we reached the top. It was really hard to appreciate the sights with choking ash floating everywhere. "I think this is the closest we can get until she's actually here," I said. "Time for pictures."
Pictures and three-dimensional scans. We wanted to make sure we could get back with precision. I wasn't planning to spend the next day or two on top of a volcano, or even in this world. Carefully taking pictures of course also helped us memorize things, but it was still useful to have reference. Once we'd been around multiple times it would be fine, but even with numerous upgrades we still needed to know where we were going to get there. Again, we didn't want to end up atop some other volcano.
"It sucks here," Midnight said. "I'm sweating and Celmothians don't really sweat. Energy Ward is barely going to last, and my eyes and lungs hurt."
Hopefully that wasn't quite true. If stuff was getting through our various defenses, it would be a problem.
I heard an aggressive crackling sound behind us. How did I know it was aggressive? Translation. I spun around, and Midnight did as well. A flaming figure stood there, vaguely around… six feet tall? Depending on how you counted fire hair and hovering just above the ground with poorly defined feet.
"Hey there," I said. "I don't really understand what you're saying, but uh… maybe you should meet Ignis? He can explain that we're cool. Or hot or whatever."
It was getting closer. I judged how much mana we had remaining. I might have to go into the negatives to bring us back later, but I could easily do that for one spell. Especially something familiar like going home.
The good news was that Ignis was part of Spatial Magic, and thus cheaper.
The little guy appeared at my call.
"Hey. I think this guy wants to fight us. Can you stop him?" I asked Ignis.
Come to think of it, I never fully understood Ignis, as Translate didn't quite work. I had to wonder if elemental languages were universal. Maybe they just didn't really form words.
The good news was Ignis seemed able to communicate. I got the general gist of the conversation. It was something like, "Leave these people alone." "No." "Yes." "No." "Fear my top hat and moustache." "Burn your last fuel and disappear!"
And then the local fire elemental charged Ignis who was, generously, half its size. Ignis counter charged, grabbing it around the waist and suplexing it.
Then they had a discussion about proper behavior around new people and respecting mages and hats. Ignis then assured Midnight and I that the fire elementals would leave us alone, though we were done with our scans anyway so we wouldn't be lingering for too long.
"Thanks," I said before he left. "You were a big help." Even as a little guy.
Now it was time to go back to Earth. Then we could return close to the promised time. No point in bothering the locals by hanging out on their front doorstep, even if Ignis convinced them not to be a problem. It was simply better not to provoke them, because we weren't in the area for experience. Not today.