Chapter 20: A Giant Gaping Hole in Reality

Scarlet was close to the tree line now. She’d finished up with the harvesting, and in a bid to avoid a third ambush the moment she left her bunker, she’d decided it would be prudent to take a gander around the perimeter of the yard considering just how useless the CCTV had been at spotting the murderous bat.

In defence of her tech, the thing was literally built for stealth. Unfortunately, that meant she couldn’t bank solely on the very numerous, very expensive detection measures she had in place.

That didn’t mean her tech was completely useless. The only reason they hadn’t alerted her of the roidcoons was because raccoons hadn’t counted as ‘threats’ pre-integration. Pests? Certainly, but outside of maybe giving her rabies if she got too close, they were generally not something she would have specific danger or detection for. An oversight she’d changed once she was in her control centre.

Figuring she’d take a hybrid approach to security, after she’d cleaned up the mess in the yard, she’d gone to the garage and pulled out one of the aerial drones she’d purchased. With one eye on the drone footage, and the rest of her mind paying attention to her surroundings, the drone acted as an extra set of eyes that roamed past the range her senses could reach. And they could reach pretty far.

In fact, in the time she’d been outside she’d taken to spreading her senses out as far and wide as she could in a bid to ‘feel’ the world around her.

It was a mental exercise she was quite enjoying, trying to make sense of what she was observing with these new senses, it was the only part of this perimeter sweep she was enjoying, in fact. The truth was she was exhausted. She could feel the gnawing ache in her stomach reminding her she hadn’t eaten since before she had established a digital knowledge hub, murdered a magical bat, and gained a quest. Maus had more than once wandered off to munch on an edible root, or Blink into the bunker to find a snack. Scarlet, on the other hand had been carefully dissecting mutated creatures. Then carefully cleaning her tools and yard. Now she was carefully doing a sweep of the yard.

She was truly fascinated by the different energy signatures and mana types she was observing. She didn’t necessarily know what those signatures represented, but trying to work it out based on how they felt and where they appeared was distracting her from the fact that her hands were basically one big cramp, her legs were wooden, and she was pretty sure her body was starting to eat itself for fuel.

At first everything had felt like a very loud indistinct mass of clashing, harmonizing, and coexisting energy. She was unable to make out anything specific due to the sheer volume she was processing. As she focused, that began to change. The noise did not dim, or settle, but it did resolve itself into distinct sounds, or flavours of energy. She was beginning to recognize variations in the fluctuations. There were large consistent undercurrents. Energies that flowed like molasses where they didn’t just pool. Other signatures were smaller. Faint, uneven disruptions that hinted at movement and intent.

As she walked, she tested the limits of what she could observe. The more she focused, the clearer the distinctions became. She couldn’t yet isolate them or identify every unique signature. However, recognition would come with time and familiarity. For now, this was enough.

She was halfway around the tree line when she brushed against something completely foreign. This energy wasn’t new to her senses the way an animal or a plant she didn’t recognize would be, but entirely alien, and it was loud. It was the sensory equivalent of gliding along a frozen lake only for the ice to crack and drop her into freezing water.

The assault on her senses threw her into a bout of vertigo, causing her to stumble. Her lungs seized, and she choked on air, clutching her cane like a lifeline as she doubled over, gasped for breath, and fought to stay on her feet. Instinctively, she tried to pull her senses back, to shrink away from this wrongness in the middle of the forest, however she was only barely able to dampen her passive skills, not entirely withdraw them. She remembered musing earlier about people being able to turn off their senses, and promised herself in future, she’d be one of those people. For now, there was nothing to it, but to get through it.

Thankfully, the sensation passed quickly as her mind acclimatized to what it was feeling. Yay super brain, she supposed. It took her a moment to come back to herself and realize that Maus had climbed back onto her shoulder and was in full puffball alert mode, ready to target whatever was threatening her, which, considering his abilities, was a genuinely scary prospect.

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Once she’d gathered enough wherewithal to make sure the drone hadn’t crashed in the few seconds she’d been out of it – it hadn’t – she realised that there was a System notification waiting for her. She opened it, figuring it would have some answers, and she almost regretted being correct.

[Spatial Anomaly Detected: Portal – Tier 1]

She had to re-read the words, because the first time around her mind refused to register the words in front of her. She looked again, hoping beyond hope that she had not seen what she thought she had.

[Spatial Anomaly Detected: Portal – Tier 1]

Nope, same words.

“For the love of–” Would this day never end? She checked the time and let out an incredulous laugh.

[00:13]

The fatigue of the past several hours was catching up to her, and she took a moment to center herself before she asked the obvious question. Just what did the System mean by ‘portal’?

[A portal is a stabilized spatial aperture leading to a contained dimensional pocket. The aperture functions as the primary access point to the pocket world.]