Chapter 8 – First Flight

CREEEEAAACK!

The sound of the gates opening echoed through the night.

Mark stepped forward with steady strides, the worn cloak swaying lightly. Behind him, Pippin followed, holding the brim of his top hat with one hand while trying to keep up with his short legs.

The commanders were lined up near the exit, waiting for the moment of his departure.

Even after Mark told them they didn’t need to escort him to the gates, they still insisted on seeing him off.

“Sovereign…” Carmilla stepped forward, her red eyes engraving Mark’s new appearance into her mind. “I will be counting every second until your return.”

Karkinos clacked one pincer against the other in a rough salute, while Malphas only lowered his head in silence. Elizabeth, still hugging her cloth doll, took a timid step and whispered to Pippin, “Bring him back… it’s dark out there.”

“Y-Yes!” Pippin nodded quickly.

Hermos placed a hand over his chest. “Administration and security are in my hands, my Lord. There will be no failures.”

Mark nodded.

“Wait for my return.” With that, he turned and began walking out through the gates, hearing Pippin’s steps right behind him.

The orders he had left were simple.

No one was to leave Ziggurat.

The commanders were to keep a low profile, hidden within the fortress until he returned.

If any desert tribe tried to make contact or even invade, they had permission to repel them without massacres or pursuits that might signal their existence to the world.

His intention was clear: the Ziggurat would remain silent until he came back from Luminaris with a real idea of how the world worked now.

BOOM!

The heavy gates slammed shut behind him. Mark stopped for a moment, looking up. The night sky, dominated by three large, pale moons, was still there, hanging over his head.

If not for the constant wind stinging his face and the dry scent of sand flooding his nostrils, he might have closed his eyes to draw in a breath of fresh air.

‘Finally…’

He was outside.

Only a few hours ago, Mark had been sprawled on his couch, drowning in the boredom of his routine, and so much had already happened. He had been reborn in the powerful body of his character, reunited with his game servants, and now he was already setting out to cross an unknown desert.

It filled him with motivation.

“Let’s go, Pippin.” Mark called, adjusting the cloak on his shoulders. “We don’t have all night.”

“Y-Yes, Sovereign!” Pippin answered quickly, holding the top hat that tried to escape his bald head under the desert wind.

The ash desert at night was an empty expanse, with silver dunes stretching as far as the world’s curve allowed.

Mark had to admit it—the Cindralisk scouts who had visited him hours earlier possessed admirable courage for crossing that terrain.

Even with three moons lighting the world, it was still hard to see whenever clouds drifted across the sky and blocked their glow.

Still, for Mark, that wasn’t an obstacle.

As an Ancient Vampire, his vision was enhanced by his race. The world didn’t look dark, but bathed in ultra-detailed shades of sepia and gray.

Even so, seeing the path didn’t mean the journey would be easy.

Walking to Luminaris, a city Mark only knew lay to the south, could take days. Fortunately, before crossing the gates, Mark had plunged into his skill list.

It was an ocean of icons—more than two thousand techniques accumulated over four years of grinding. Browsing through the “Mobility” tabs, he found the classic options of his race.

One of them glowed with the icon of a stylized bat.

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Transformation.

In the game, it was a standard ability for fast travel or infiltration.

Mark stared at the mental command and felt a twinge of hesitation.

He refused to use it.

At least for now.

Despite inhabiting that powerful body, he still felt like a human wearing a luxury shell. Changing his biology so drastically to turn into a flying animal was a psychological leap he wasn’t ready to take.

It was too much for his salaryman mind.

With that, his attention shifted to the Large-Scale Teleport Scroll.

He still had a few in his inventory, the same ones he had used to bring the commanders from the throne hall to the walls in the blink of an eye.

Mark considered using one to jump straight to the gates of Luminaris.

The problem was that he didn’t know where it was.

He needed to visualize the destination, and the system returned a silent error. The scroll had a “Mana Network” lock.

Inside the Ziggurat, teleportation was absolute because the fortress acted like a colossal antenna, a closed energy network he himself had built and mapped.

So when he used the scroll, it worked as a shortcut within that network.

To jump to a place outside his domain, like Luminaris, the item required two conditions Mark couldn’t meet: first, the destination needed an active and compatible “Mana Network”; second, Mark had to have personally visited the place to “register” its coordinates in memory.

Without an established teleport network in the outside world and without ever stepping into Luminaris, the scroll was just useless paper for long-distance travel.

Mark was limited to internal use within his fortress.

That left the option he had always neglected in the game.

Flying.