Book 8 – Chapter 25 – End of the Journey

“First, get in position. I can cover the inside of the tower, you take the outside. And before you complain, it’s ‘cause you can fly around better than I can. And you have an armor in case something goes wrong.”

Drakonis explained the rundown on how to crack open the pillar.

“I wasn’t going to complain,” I lied. “Rude of you to assume that.” Although he had a point with the armor.

He gave me a flat stare, then went back into it. “We both hang around the top. That way you can look down and get a quick view of things. Moment you get the icon right, go right back to the top. All you have to do is fall downwards to your target. We get about thirty seconds to reset after each icon.”

He wasn’t quite aware of the inner turmoil I was going through, and I had no idea how to even begin to explain it.

‘Oh hey buddy, just letting you know there’s a world-shattering prophecy going on from the Mites, you know the little critters that shape every last section of the entire world, yeah those. I’m probably in it, Wrath and To’Orda too, and you’ll probably get roped into it somehow.’

So instead I just focused on the current easy to complete objective. Didn’t even require thinking, just agility and moving around. Something I really wanted as I sat with my thoughts. “How many rounds in total?”

“The fuck would I know that?” Drakonis asked. “Best I got was up to three. Could be ten, could be a hundred.”

We split up, and I took the outdoors, easily jumping my way from platform to platform before a lash got me to the very top. Flat circular part, nothing of note besides the marble white ground under me.

Abraxas left us his maps, and we have the coordinates to the division stone. Superior sent. We should be able to make it if we move fast. The world changes up over time, but not that fast. The map’s probably going to remain accurate for another week or two, and if it shifts, only one or two regions at most would change.

On comms, I heard Drakonis called out. “Starting.”

I pinged back green on my end.

Journey triggered a camera feed on my HUD, showing me the image that was generated at the base of the tower. A sort of double line connecting at one point, with a third line crossing both at a middlepoint.

All around and inside the tower, every single platform lit up and displayed a holographic image of its own. A lot of them looked similar, but only one was a one to one match.

Journey nailed it before I could even visually understand the main icon I was looking at. The pair had appeared inside the tower, and Cathida was already telling Drakonis where to jump.

“I see it now.” The Deathless called out over comms, and I could see from his little camera on top of the comms piece as he jumped into the void and fell straight down.

Last second, he deployed a shockwave and an occult grab backwards, which lowered enough speed so he could land into the platform with a heavy splash of water. Getting back on his feet, he marched through the ankle deep water to the center of that platform, and pressed down on a raised dais holding the matching icon.

The entire tower glowed white for a moment. The center icon vanished. “Thirty seconds until the next one. Probably on your end this time.” Drakonis said, launching a lash upwards so he could get back into position.

The mites might have had a sense of humor, because the next three were all his back to back. I’d been simply sitting on the side of the tower, dangling my legs out while I watched the biome as a whole.

I could tell I was having a slightly hard time processing the idea that Abraxas or Aztu could be gone, I thought it was more likely that they’d escaped in some way, or made a decoy. But that would mean they’d fooled even the mites.

Focus, Prime. Superior sent. Grab the goods from this tower and keep going. You are a knight retainer, you’re trained for this. Technically.

He was right, anytime we went out on expedition it was expected to come back with someone’s number called, or at least some injury. But now in armor, surrounded by people who were equally skilled at fighting off death in just about every way it came, it felt more surreal to think any of them could fall.

Windrunner. Superior sent. And Hexis.

I get it. I sent back, retreating to the soul fractal for sanctuary. I had to keep going, in their memory. If Abraxas and Aztu were gone, they’d probably given their life fighting off against Relinquished. The last thing they wanted was for me to falter just from their loss.

I had to keep going forward.

Maybe the Mites were watching, because as soon as I reached that conclusion and set my mind to to, my number got called up.

Cathida relayed which direction I needed to go, and I followed through, diving off the side of the tower, before landing with a heavy thud on the platform of my own. One press down on the dias, until it smoothly returned flush to the floor, and I was done.

All in all, it ended up fifteen rounds of this, which went by quickly and without trouble. Both of us were basically cheating in just about every way we could, so it was as easy as a snowball.

When the last image was correctly clicked, the chest at the very bottom stopped spinning around on itself and blew up.

Not in an explosion of any kind, but rather the shards that composed it expanded outwards, before halting in a large sphere formation around it all. At the center was our prize.

“Uh, know what this is?” I asked, landing at the bottom of the tower, where Drakonis was reaching a hand to grab the small cube.

It looked like a recall cube. I’d seen Lionheart use one right before he whisked away his entire team and their gear back. Only the colors were different. Blood red light was leaking out of it.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Drakonis said the same exact thing I was thinking of, and then added some more ideas. “Cubes like that can teleport an entire fireteam, so I’m thinking it’s related to teleportation. But the color makes me think it’ll work differently compared to the recall cubes.”

Superior, any idea? You’re the mite expert here.

Yeah. They admit they swapped your reward out for this one.

They… what? They swapped what was supposed to be here? Why?

They needed us to have this one instead. Not getting anything more from them besides that. Good news though, we apparently now have two favors owed from them, one for taking on Abraxas’s mission and the second for this bait and switch.

Did they tell you what it is, or do we need to burn a favor to get that info?

I can’t exactly be angry at not getting something, when I didn’t even know what had been swapped out. And if the cube was important enough for the mites to cheat the system a bit, then there was a reason behind that.