The Dreadnought plowed forward, through dot after dot, toward an unknown horizon, while thin lines of prismatic mana arced overhead, into the sky. Beyond the ship lay the tower, and its empty gate. Ahead lay… something.

  The scanners stopped about 400 meters ahead, at empty sky.

  The land ahead still looked like red sand wastes with blackened tree skeletons sticking up here and there. Whatever the architecture of this place might be, it was broken at least a little. The visuals were still there and the line of orbs in the sky continued forward, but everything else was revealed as a lie to proper scanners.

  Eliot had been picking apart the interior of the place ever since Mark suggested they were in a ‘space station’, and he saw a few things that hinted that while Mark was not correct, he wasn’t incorrect, either.

  Mark stood on the forecastle, thin lines of light overhead punching into the blue sky even further ahead.

  He waited for the hammer to drop.

  Everyone was prepared.

  Eliot had even finished editing their documentary about this place, including a 75-minute normal cut, a 5 minute highlight cut, and a much deeper 5 hour cut. All of them would be going out as soon as there was a connection to Earth, or Daihoon… assuming that such a connection was even possible. If Godking Dominant was there, waiting for them with spell and sword and giant branches, he probably had jammers up and running, too. Tartu had seemed to think so; he had spoken a bit about how Okuana’s main city of Verdant Citadel was open to most people, but it was also heavily secured, like all capital cities. You couldn’t go into the main valley without authorization, but it was just like Domal’Takela; there were tourists everywhere.

  Mark hadn’t really looked into the geography of the place until today.

  Verdant Citadel was located on Daihoon, in the same geographical locations as the former Earth nations of Switzerland and Germany and Austria. Mostly Switzerland; that was the heart of Okuana. Verdant Citadel was about 550 kilometers northeast and a world away from Citadel Freyala, while the Empire of Okuana covered the entire Mediterranean Sea, and much of Africa and Europe, though they called the continents Uzrune and Sheorune on Daihoon.

  The good news was that Okuana didn’t use walls, so if the team needed to escape they had a decent shot of it. The bad news was that they didn’t need to use walls at all, because there were necromantic trees everywhere that they called dryads that basically enslaved kaiju and other kinds of monsters as a general, all-purpose defense. Mostly, those defenses were invisible.

  All of those defenses could be turned on and pointed at targets, as the Godking, his Offshoots, or his governors willed—

  “I see it now,” Eliot said. “The hologram here fucked up.”

  Mark strained to see whatever Eliot was—

  “Where?” Isoko asked, flying overhead. “I can barely tell that there’s a difference at all!”

  “I’ll highlight it on the screens,” Eliot added.

  Quark picked up what Eliot was putting down almost instantly, and a section of the way forward highlighted in Mark’s vision. The highlight vanished, letting Mark see… blue sky? Just— Oh. It was a heat mirage, almost. Barely visible. Mark hadn’t been able to tell that it was anything at all until Quark highlighted it—

  A gear shifted out of sight.

  Something screamed like tearing metal, and then the illusion ahead thunk-ca-chunk’ed. The sky slipped away from itself and more metal screamed in protest before it died, too old to move further than it had.

  It was like an illusion had been taken half down, and the half that was gone was askew, like looking at the horizon through a tilted piece of glass. It was more than open enough for the Dreadnought to continue, based on some rapid calculations from Quark and pegging the opening as about 3 kilometers wide, but Mark was worried about the other side.

  It was dark on the other side, but then lightning flashed across a land of metal, revealing enormous towers like monoliths, stretching from floor to ceiling. The landscape was desolate and black, and the lightning vibrated up and down from one tower to the next in a coruscating dance of power. And then the lightning was gone, and Mark saw a single white-light dot hanging in the sky beyond. It was the trail that the Dreadnought was following, but there was no trail— Wait. There it went. One light became two, and then several hundred light orbs made a path forward, into the desolate dark.

  Lightning crackled beyond the land of dark towers, and lights came on near the path of lights, illuminating the dark.

  It was still dark as fuck and… forboding.

  “We are NOT going into that,” Mark said. “Drones, Eliot.”

  Eliot said, “Sending drones.”

  A cargo hold on the deck of the Dreadnought opened up and brightspeed drones zipped out into the next zone.

  A minute passed.

  The lights were coming on more and more on the other side, the dark towers turning almost silver-ish in the growing illumination.

  … Still looked like a bad time.

  Eliot said, “It looks… clear-ish. There’s another big tower about 300 kilometers forward. The lightning in there is prismatic lightning, and it’s settling down into lines connecting to the… Oh. Uh… Mmm.”

  Quark patched Mark into the scene.

  Eliot didn’t seem too worried by whatever he was seeing, but he didn’t say anything, either.

  Mark wasn’t too worried, either, as he watched the destination tower light up more and more, but something about the next zone…

  Worried him.

  The tower in the next zone looked pretty much exactly like the one behind the Dreadnought, but it stood mostly straight up-and-down instead of at a 17 degree angle. It was pitch-black, but becoming silver/grey, and the lines of light that connected to it were more like flowing lightning than prismatic powerlines. Those lightning crackles still had a sort of flow to them, too—

  Mark watched as a section of one tower in the background suddenly flickered and broke, like a shattering bomb going off, a shockwave of prismatic light bursting out in all directions. The thinner towers were still hundreds of kilometers tall, and tens of kilometers wide. That detonation struck every other nearby tower, and it was like watching sand blast against dirty surfaces.

  Black depths stripped away, revealing curling lightning below.

  The prismatic lightning was unfurling from containment, sputtering out prismatic mana everywhere—

  “Eliot!” Mark commanded.

  It had only been 3 seconds.

  “Hard to port!” Eliot yelled, “Speedburst—”

  Mark held on as David obviously moved in speed time and the ship did, too, the brightspeed hoverring at the back of the ship shimmering brightly for a single moment. The world lurched to the right, and the ship went left, and a whole lot of people got slammed around, but nothing serious happened, as the ship reoriented 10 kilometers to the left. Eliot said something about ‘not far enough!’ and David kept the ship moving.

  The ship was still moving as Mark looked up and to the right, at the mirage-hole in the blue sky, as prismatic mana blasted outward like a great geyser. Mark Unioned with Adamant and Ethereal, touching everyone and everything on the ship that he could, and just in time.

  The noise was incredible.

  The shockwave hit, indirectly.

  Isoko and Eliot had been prepared, but not nearly enough. Great ripples of platinum wind strained against the Castellan shield, holding on, but the platinum shockwave went right through. Mark turned adamantium black in the wave of power. The people inside the ship were better off, for Isoko had already done something to negate much of the volume, but she was tossed off of the top of the ship for her action. Mark went for her, already grabbing her with an adamantine grip before she could get blasted away too far.

  Isoko held onto Mark’s adamantium just as much as Mark held on to her, and onto the ship, as all of her astral body threatened to billow away from the Dreadnought.

  But then Eliot compensated, David pulled away, riding the wave, and the world calmed as much as it could.

  The hole in between realms was still spilling out an incredible amount of prismatic mana.

  Mark pulled Isoko back to the ship, yelling over the noise, “You good?”

  Isoko was mostly good. Her arm was dislocated, but she popped it back in, and winced, “I’m good!”

  The two of them gripped onto the top of the castle, the dome underneath cracked and broken but also healing. Eliot was working overtime. An ocean of prismatic mana continued to pour into the red wastelands, and Mark wasn’t sure if that had been an attack, or a failure of the elven lands.

  Mark yelled to be able to speak into the comms, “Probably a failure of the elven lands, right? Not an attack?!”

  “Think so,” Eliot said. “The prismatic mana is already healing the red wastes.”

  Mark looked away from the white ‘water’ rushing into the world, toward the red sands, and it was like watching someone cast a realm-wide Purity. The red sands turned to white. The blackened, bare trees stretched upward into windswept gnarled trees with flowing, green leaves. It was not a forest; it would never be a forest. But it was a whole bunch of singular trees in the desert, each of them suddenly finding themselves in a small lake of water. Other lakes formed quickly, but the desert sand was still dune-shaped, and the lakes were long green and blue lines in an otherwise white desert—

  The lines of prismatic mana gathering at the tower in the far distance all shuddered. They blinked on and off. And then they strengthened. Quark had counted 97 original lines of light. As moments passed, he counted more and more connecting all across the sky—

  Metal screamed, even louder than the sound of the ocean pouring out from the other realm.

  Mark felt fear from everyone on the ship, so he shoved that stuff away, into a sudden burst of black that ripped away from the Dreadnought like a liquid poison and billowed away in the endless shockwave of prismatic mana.

  Eliot yelled something about moving again. Mark had barely recognized that they had needed to move again, but now that he was focusing, too, he saw what Quark was trying to tell him. The structural integrity of the holographic wall was breaking. Fountains of prismatic mana were already opening up everywhere out there.

  David had never stopped flying away from the wall.

  The hole that they had been about to fly through suddenly widened, first at the bottom, and then in a massive crack that stretched far overhead. A wall of prismatic mana suddenly blasted at the Dreadnought, at the entire realm. It was like an illusion flowing out of another illusion—

  Suddenly the crack overhead sealed up.

  The shockwave of prismatic mana became a crawling, searching thing, like static flowing over a surface. It gripped the power lines overhead and it gripped the holographic wall, flowing down into the desert below. And then, suddenly, the prismatic mana became a gas, expanding, expanding, expanding, like another, lesser shockwave—

  Absolute fear.

  Mark saw the shockwave coming, and he knew that someone was going to die or expand into something wrong due to a sudden mana baptism. David, Derek, Lola. They were all in danger of a Second Awakening. So Mark moved into speed time to talk to David, but David was already moving. He knew what he needed to do.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  David grabbed Lola and a Derek, and then he was moving, fast, off the side of the ship, into the air and beyond. Mark could only watch, thankful, that David was getting Lola and Derek out of the worst of it… No. Just ‘a Derek’. All of the rest of him was going to get a prismatic mana bath. Ah… fuck.

  No.

  Mark was still moving fast, the expanding shockwave of prismatic mana was still 6.5 kilometers away. But it was approaching fast. Everyone else should be fine. They were already bathed in enough prismatic mana that a secondary bath would wash over them and do nothing. Or at least that’s what Addavein had told Mark, long ago. Everyone else knew that same ‘fact’. Hopefully that hadn’t been a lie.

  Mark appeared before a Derek. That Derek was standing in the hub and looking out at the incoming wave. His eyes were wide and all thousand of him in the ship were catching on fast to what was coming. He had already pulled back all of his clones from the land in anticipation of the crossing, so he wasn’t aware that he had anywhere to retreat. It had been too soon since David took one of him for Derek to catch on. The fear pouring out of the multiman was coloring all of his Unions black at all of his edges.

  Mark popped into normal time, grabbed Derek by the shoulders and made him focus, and with the 10 seconds they had before the shockwave got there, Mark spent 3 of them saying, “Disperse. David has a copy and Lola.”

  Derek jerked in Mark’s hands.

  And then Derek’s fear fled as he popped like a soap bubble. Every single Derek in the ship vanished.

  The major shockwave hit the Dreadnought like a kaiju roar; sudden and all-encompassing and barely mitigated at all by Mark’s Union of Adamant and Ethereal and Isoko’s platinum-wind grip and Eliot’s amber Castellan.

  Everywhere the shockwave touched blossomed into rippling branches and flowing leaves, the prismatic mana enlivening the deadwood of the ship in ways that should not be possible. The hoverring cracked and half of it went flying. The many engines in the ship sputtered and ripped themselves apart as giant white crystals grew out of places they should not grow. Eliot yelled about the ship going down, but then Isoko yelled back about keeping it afloat, even as trees sprouted from the entire thing. But then Tartu was there, and he locked in to the ship, somehow, and Mark felt him flow through the new roots of the place.

  Rapid undirected worry about sudden problems turned into a team working together to solve them all.

  Tartu spoke on the comms, “I think I got the worst of the growth contained. You got it from here, Eliot?”

  Eliot said, “Fucking hell… the entire Dreadnought is like… half broken.”

  “Better than full-broken,” Mark said, looking at the horizon down the way. Quark was able to see that Lola, David, and Derek (and suddenly a few thousand Dereks, spreading out) were fine. They checked in already, and the thickness of prismatic mana in the air out there was already a fraction of a fraction of what it had been this close to the eruption. Mark asked, “How come the ship couldn’t handle it?”

  “It shouldn’t have been able to break that easily,” Eliot said, “But I’ve never tried to absorb pure prismatic mana… I don’t think it was an attack—”

  “Can you hurry up with the repairs or tell me what I need to do?” Isoko asked, straining to hold the ship together, platinum wind gripping the hull with gelatinous flows. “Because I think we’re going down!”

  Eliot panicked—

  Mark commanded, “Sally. Land and catch. Isoko. Hand it off. Eliot. What do I need to do?”

  Everyone got moving, and soon Sally was on the newly-white sands and standing at a kilometer tall, catching the Dreadnought like she was catching a plant-festooned model ship. Isoko collapsed onto the deck, and Sally grinned as she talked about how she could hold the ship all day. This, of course, caused Isoko to bicker back with her, which was exactly what Sally was trying to get started. Bickering was better than breaking.

  Mark carved off the worst offenses to ship design that had sprouted from the hull, sending a practical forest to the floor of the realm.

  Soon, Derek was back, and doing a lot more to repair the ship than Mark, if only because there were thousands of him and only one Mark, and his hands touching things let Eliot touch those things in turn. Andria worked with Tartu in the engine rooms, fixing the major magical systems, as Eliot started fixing the ship in earnest as well as working on solutions to problems he never expected to have.

  “Could have been an attack,” Eliot said, in response to Mark’s open questions about what had just happened. “But it also could have been an oversight of mine. I’ve literally never experienced ‘full mana’ before. You know how much mana it takes to fill up a person? Take all the adamantium you have in the hull and try to put it back into your body, and that’d be a fraction of what you could still handle, if you were a normal mage.”

  Mark went, “Ehhhh… Really?”

  “Andria?” Eliot said.

  “Oh yes Eliot’s correct,” Andria said. “There are some mithrilkinetics in the main family of Bank Metallic who transport a million metric tons of mithril as basic storage for the bank. You got, what? 75,000 tons in the cargo? You could put that into yourself, easily, if you trained for it… and if you were mithril, actually. So I don’t know.”

  Tartu said, “Mana storage is a deep topic, but usually it’s safe to store a few months of mana at a time. More than that and you get crystallization problems, which is what happened here in the engine.”

  Mark glanced through Quark’s cameras again, toward the engines. He had seen images of the problem before, but now that most of the plants were cleared away by Derek, Mark saw giant white crystals poking out of turbines. Those turbines should be spinning, but crystal-like barnacles had erupted out of everything.

  Mark asked, “Is it still prismatic mana?”

  “Nope,” Tartu said, “It’s crystallized silica. Quartz, basically. Eliot already took care of the mana.”

  “I vented most of it,” Eliot said. “The Dreadnought is full, now. More than full. I’m working on a solution to prevent over-saturation from happening ever again, but the problem with being in the path of prismatic mana is that it tends to… to enliven everything! That was dead fucking wood. Why did it become alive again! I didn’t know that was possible.”

  “I didn’t know that either,” Tartu said.

  “ETA till fixed?” Mark asked.

  “2 more hours,” Eliot said.

  Mark nodded to himself, mostly, because he was kinda alone right now on the deck… except for Sally standing to the side, looking down at him and at the Dreadnought… Mark looked up at her, and asked, “Can you see better with those big eyes?”

  Sally grinned, showing off massive white teeth, her voice booming, “All the better to find you with, Little Red Riding Hood.”

  Mark snorted. “My oh my, grandma! What big teeth you have!”

  “Not into vore, thanks.”

  Mark laughed, and Sally grinned wider.

  Isoko spoke up, “I was in a play for Little Red Riding Hood when I was a kid. I got to play Akazukin-chan...”

  Mark smiled as they shot the shit for a few hours while Eliot got the ship back up and running.

  Soon, the emergency repairs were done, though crystals still stuck out of the hull here and there, and the hover ring was more of a shattered thing held together by adamantium wrapping than a real hoverring. It actually functioned better that way, according to Tartu and Eliot, but Mark thought it looked rather… bad. It was what it was, though. Eliot told Sally she could let go, and she slowly dropped her arms. The ship sank a bit more, but a few clanks and a shimmer of power later, and the ship hovered just fine.

  Sally stood to the side, looking at the whole thing, asking, “We gonna make it tiny, now? I think I can do it at this size.”

  Eliot said to everyone, “Realistically, if Kardi is here and Lucky, then there’s not much we can do to her, but if we make the ship smaller then our ability to react to her threat, and the threats of Okuana, is lesser. So I was thinking that we should not do that. Disassembling the ship is a bad idea, too.”

  Isoko asked, “We’re really not doing any preemptive measures against her?”

  “I mean… What’s the point?” Eliot asked. “She’s just going to pull some bullshit anyway.”

  Isoko grumbled.

  That conversation kinda just dropped.

  Sally looked to Mark.

  Mark felt Sally out with Union, dispersing her small injuries as they accumulated even now, just standing there at 1,100 meters tall. Mark said, “Come on back in, Sally. Let me heal you better.”

  Sally snorted, and promptly shrunk from the ground upward, ‘catching herself’ in a tumble of inertia that sent her tumbling onto the deck of the Dreadnought, to land on her feet, grinning. “I feel fine!”

  Mark was already healing her, though, saying, “Wherever you are, no matter what happens, I’ll always be here to heal you, Sally. So don’t front. I can already tell that you’re in a lot of minor pain.”

  Sally blinked, her eyes suddenly watering. And then she laughed it off. “It’s just a… a small pain in the right arm. Not even sure what it is… Do you know?”

  “It’s a problem of blood and the circulatory system. The heart gets really slow and pushes really hard when you get that big. You can handle it in short bursts because of Titan’s Strength, but when you push yourself even larger with Size Manipulation the heart and assorted blood systems can’t handle the strain on the body. It’s something I saw a lot with Titanfist, but he didn’t have Size Manipulation, so it took him a whole lot longer to get where you are right now, which I am healing with a Union of Cardiomyopathy and Vascular Integrity, specifically targeting the ‘natural’ degradation that has occurred and tossing it away…”

  Mark explained in detail what he was doing so that Sally would know exactly how to heal herself in the future. Sally didn’t think it was that serious at first, but she cottoned on to the severity of the situation right quick.

  Eventually, the Dreadnought was fixed.

  David hovered the ship into the open entrance to the next realm… which looked different. While this realm had turned from poisoned-red to white-desert-and-oases in the wake of all that prismatic mana, the realm beyond was even more changed.

  The circular entrance was fully open this time, instead of being halfway-open and broken. A line of light led from the top of the opening to the leaning tower back there, which was still leaning in the white desert sands, but now it looked to be leaning more ‘on purpose’ instead of for reasons of ‘this is obviously broken’.

  The dark, tower-filled lands beyond the opening were now full of light, and the centers of the dark towers were gone. It was a land of stalactites and stalagmites, each tens of kilometers wide, and with hundreds or tens of kilometers between each top and bottom. Thin lines of prismatic mana flowed between the tips of every paired stalactite and stalagmite—

  The path of white bubbles suddenly reappeared in front of the ship, guiding them to the tower far, far in the distance, right to another gate on that other tower, about 300 kilometers away. That 5-kilometer-wide gate was closed right now, but the tower itself was another 100-kilometer-wide tower with a thousand lines of light coming off of it and spreading into the distance.

  That tower leaned, too, but only at a 3 degree angle.

  It seemed that leaning towers were ‘normal’ around here.

  Isoko asked, “What happened to the towers? They were black, right?”

  Tartu postulated, “Could have been a contained zone, locked away and forgotten, with mana dense enough to be black… instead of prismatic white? No idea. Mana gets weird at high-densities. Opening the way obviously caused… whatever that was that happened, to happen.”

  “That bubble path is leading toward another gate,” Isoko said, “And that gate has to be the Daihoon gate, which means Okuana is on the other side.”

  No one had anything else to add.

  Mark said, “Forward fly.”

  David was at the controls, and soon, the ship sailed into the new zone, and the way behind them closed.

  The Dreadnought flew past thin pillars of prismatic mana caught between stalactites and stalagmites of white crystal, and nothing happened. 5 minutes, then 10 minutes passed. Half an hour came and went.

  Mark asked, “Nothing is happening, right?”

  “Scanners clear. Drones are picking up exactly what we see out there. The gate ahead is closed,” Eliot said.

  “Then do some final preps for gate approach. Everyone sleep if you need to sleep, and then food, and then we’re hurrying up to the gate.”

  David said, “Slowing ship.”

  The Dreadnought slowed.

  12 hours passed way too quickly.