Rex kept going. He used the hand that wasn’t holding the gauntlets to make a wide lateral sweep, and the construct hit the wall hard enough to crack along its animate core and lose its glow before it could turn around.
Ten ters below the surface.
Two more structures, hanging from the ceiling, fell at the sa ti from opposite sides.
Rex split his attention across both in the practiced way of soone managing multiple telekinetic contacts simultaneously and deposited both on the floor ahead rather than the walls, because the walls at this point were beginning to lose structural cohesion and he needed them to stay intact for another seven seconds.
Five ters.
Rex could see the light from the fungi in the upper chamber ahead of him, and in his Foresight, he could see the last open sequence of movent that would take all three of them through before the biggest part of the ceiling ca down.
He went through it.
As they crossed the threshold, the ceiling section fell behind them, not right behind them but six ters back. The sound it made was like a huge mass of stone filling the space it fell into completely.
They were in the upper chamber.
The upper chamber’s ceiling was following the sa sequence as the lower chambers but with a delay, and the delay was enough.
Rex took both of them through the main passage and out through the cave entrance, then up the slope of volcanic rock above the shore. He moved at a speed that showed he knew exactly how much ti was left and was using it wisely.
They ca out of the cave and into the open air of the island’s afternoon. Rex put them down on solid ground that wasn’t falling.
Talyra let out a breath that had clearly been waiting so ti to be let out.
"Okay, phew..." she said. "We really need a huge break after this...!"
Aisella looked back at the cave entrance and then down at her paperwork kit, checking it over with the automatic focus of soone whose hands needed sothing to do.
"We’re clear," she said. "We’re actually clear."
There was a noise at the cave entrance. After that, it wasn’t a cave entrance anymore.
It was a part of the cliff face that had new cracks in it and rock dust coming off the top. It was also a space that had just changed its basic nature.
A big part of the cliff above the entrance started to fall.
Talyra was the first to notice it. She made a brief, involuntary sound—sothing that began as a word but trailed off—and Aisella turned at the sa mont.
"That’s—" Aisella said.
Both of them instinctively pulled back, like people who had just seen sothing big coming toward them and had no ti to do anything useful about it. Talyra grabbed Aisella’s arm without looking at her, which was the kind of thing you did when your body was making decisions faster than your thinking was.
Rex lifted one hand.
The part of the cliff face that had broken off from the main rock body, which was about the size of the Silver Rest’s ground floor and much heavier, stopped in the air above all three of them at a height of about two ters.
The sound it made when it stopped was a short, concussive silence, like the sound of a big mass coming to a stop. The mineral dust from its surface kept falling through the telekinetic field and covering all three of them in white-grey dust, while the stone itself stayed where Rex had put it.
He held it there for three seconds, moved it all two steps back from the cave entrance, and then put it in the space between the cliff and the shore at an angle that stopped it from bouncing or moving again.
The sound it made landing was significant.
The birds on the island, who had apparently co back to the trees at so point during the hour they had been underground, all left at once, flying away from the cliff.
Talyra and Aisella both stood in the rock dust that was still settling around them and didn’t say anything for a mont.
Talyra then turned to Rex and gave him a look he had never seen before. It was the look of soone whose ntal categories for what a person could be had just changed forever and who was still working on updating all the related categories.
She gazed up at the spot in the air where the rock section had just been, then back to where it currently was. Finally, she turned her attention to Rex.
"Y-you," she said.
Rex stared at her.
"You caught it," she said, her voice sounding like that of soone expressing a thought that had not yet beco real, belonging to the realm of things that didn’t happen.
"Yeah, I did," Rex said.
Aisella hadn’t turned around. She had been watching Rex the whole ti with a look that wasn’t the diagnostic one or the interested-researcher one.
When Rex looked at her, Aisella continued to gaze at him with the sa expression.
"Rex... are you hurt?" she asked.
"No," Rex said.
"You’re sure," she said.
"I’m sure," he said.
She let out a slow breath, like soone who had been holding sothing and was now choosing to put it down. Then she walked over to him without saying anything and checked his hands and forearms with the healer’s touch that was quick, efficient, and completely thorough.
Rex let her do it because telling her he was fine again would have been technically true but practically inadequate since she had seen him hold up a section of cliff with one hand.
"Nothing," she said after a while. "You’re fine."
Rex said, "I know."
She looked at him with the not-diagnostic look for a little while longer, and then she nodded once, like she did when she had confird sothing and was ready to move on.
Talyra had moved to stand next to both of them, and she was still looking at Rex with the new look.
"I had to be honest about this, but..."
"You’re far better than Apollo," she said in the simple way she spoke when she was sure of sothing. "I know it’s a big thing to say, but I said it anyway because it’s the truth!"
Talyra looked at Aisella. Then at Rex. She didn’t say anything, which was Aisella’s way of saying yes.
"Your way of praising is too much." Rex said while keeping up his cool because he wants to stay as humble as possible.
Rex held the gauntlets in their telekinetic field, which made them float at chest height. The Elder Script on the top surface caught the afternoon light, making it look like sothing that had been underground for a long ti and had just seen the sun.
He said, "Apollo is a nice guy."
"W-what...?" Talyra said, "That’s not what I said."
Rex looked at her, and the corner of his mouth moved slightly.
"No," he said. "It isn’t."
The system notifications arrived in the sequence he had been expecting since the mont the gauntlets ca free of the chest.
[DESIRE LEVELS UPDATED]
[TALYRA SKYDANCER: 88/100]
[AISELLA MOONBLOOM: 93/100]
[ARTIFACT ACQUISITION CONFIRD: GAUNTLETS OF THE EARTH SOVEREIGN’S VESSEL]
[INTEGRATION AVAILABLE: EARTHEN DIVINE AUTHORITY — SECONDARY LAYER]
[INTEGRATION REQUIRES: CONTACT ACTIVATION. BEARER PLACES THE GAUNTLETS ON THE HANDS AND HOLDS INTENT FOR A SUSTAINED PERIOD OF NOT LESS THAN THIRTY SECONDS.]
[WARNING: INTEGRATION IS IRREVERSIBLE. THE GAUNTLETS WILL BOND TO THE BEARER’S AUTHORITY STRUCTURE AND CANNOT BE SEPARATED AFTER ACTIVATION.]
[ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: THE EARTHEN APOSTLE’S ACCUMULATED DESIGNATION ABILITY SPANS APPROXIMATELY ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF ACTIVE SERVICE.]
[THE SECONDARY AUTHORITY LAYER, ONCE INTEGRATED, PROVIDES: EARTHEN AFFINITY — FULL RANGE OF MANIPULATION OF STONE, EARTH, AND MINERAL SUBSTRATES AT DIVINE SCALE.]
[CONSTRUCT CREATION — ABILITY TO BUILD AND ANIMATE EARTH CONSTRUCTS AT A SCALE CONSISTENT WITH THE ORIGINAL APOSTLE’S OUTPUT.]
[GEOLOGICAL FORESIGHT — PASSIVE READING OF SUBSTRATE CONDITIONS WITHIN OPERATIONAL RADIUS.]
[NOTE: THESE CAPABILITIES OPERATE INDEPENDENTLY OF THE MARK OF LUST AUTHORITY AND DO NOT DRAW FROM THE SA ENERGY RESERVE.]
Rex read through it twice.
It was independent of the Mark of Lust Authority, featuring a separate energy reserve and capability set. This secondary layer did not compete with his existing system; rather, it supplented it from an entirely different foundation.
An Apostle’s thousand years of experience, in a title without a patron, with no god watching over it right now, and waiting for the right hand to pull it out of the stone for eight hundred years.
He stared at the gauntlets that were floating in front of him. Then he looked at Talyra, who was still looking at him with the new look.
Then Aisella, who was watching him with the non-diagnostic one, and the ocean were behind both of them, doing what they had been doing all day. The cliff was closed behind them, and the island’s birds were coming back to the trees in the direction that was not the cliff.
Rex contemplated tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and how everything beyond this island would appear with an additional layer of divine authority and desire levels at eighty-eight and ninety-three.
Twelve points and seven points.
Only two days left.
He looked at the gauntlets, then at the two girls, whom he saw as tools, and then he held them all in the sa space without letting any one part get too close to the others.
Tomorrow was still a day.
He had two left, and both of them were going to matter.
User Comments
0 comments from readers