*Thwap!*
"I swear," Aya mumbled darkly, "if I have to kill one more of these miniature mundane vampires, I'm going inside and not coming out until dark."
"What if we actually are in a polar circle? It could take days for that to happen."
"Did I stutter?"
The disgruntled expression on her face made me chuckle quietly. Surprising as it may seem, I rarely got to see this side of her. Normally when I went through this phase of adapting and integrating myself into a new world, she would just sit comfortably inside of my Soulsphere, heckling me telepathically.
"For an Aspect you sure are weak to the woes of us mortals," I jabbed playfully.
She just shot me a baleful glare while fending off another mosquito. "And just who's fault is it that I have to deal with these 'mortal woes' of yours?"
I actually had to think about that one for a second, since it didn't actually have an answer to begin with, and I didn't want to repeat anything that I'd responded with in the past.
"Was it Niya?"
Aya let out an unladylike snort of amusement, clearly caught off guard by my unexpected reply. "Oh I hope she heard that. She'd never let you hear the end of it if you gave her credit for that."
I blanched. "Nevermind, I clearly did not think that one through," I hastily said, which elicited another laugh from her, albeit much much more dignified than her last.
"Speaking of which," Aya spoke up again, "I wonder if either of those two will show up at any point."
I shrugged. "If we see one of my brother's parallel selves here, then I guarantee we'll see him eventually, but I don't think there will be enough Chaos here for Niya or any of her kind to even start watching."
And if she can, that means we're in the endgame already. Or at least close to it, I added silently, but I knew the girl beside me was thinking along the same lines.
I caught a glimpse of something white through the trees, and a moment later we were both stopped in our tracks.
"Holy…" I muttered in amazement.
"Well, that answers that question." Aya on the other hand was much more inured to sights like these than I was.
Saying that the forest ended abruptly would be like saying space is just a little big, or Aya is only slightly cute.
"Do you seriously say those kinds of things even in your monologues? I sorta regret listening in, now."
The sight reminded me of, in some video games back on earth, when you had a looping texture or prefab model that was supposed to run off-screen, so the artist didn't bother to make it end smoothly. This felt like seeing that, only in real life.
Trees were cleanly sliced vertically. Not like someone had cut them, but just if by some miracle a tree had grown with only half, or a quarter, or three-quarters, and so on of the tree.
But the thing I found most bizarre was that they seemed perfectly healthy. Of course it was possible that the planar splice happened recently, but a quick glance at Aya confirmed that wasn't the case here. Whereas my experience lay in souls, the area that Aya truly shone in was that of dimensions. After all, in her original world, she was vaunted as one of the twin Gatekeepers of Night.
In this case, the reason I could tell it hadn't happened recently just by glancing at Aya's face said more about her expression itself than my ability to read it. Being in the vicinity while a planar splice is taking place is the dimensional equivalent of standing on the side of a volcano while it's in the process of erupting.
And what made the border of the forest all the more jarring was the landscape that it butted up to. The glimpse of white that I had seen earlier was revealed to be a field of snow, stretching as far as the eye could see.
"Soooo… how about we make camp here? I'm not going out into the flipping tundra in nothing but Adaptive Gear if I have anything to say about it." I motioned at the clothing I wore. At first glance it just appeared to be a simple dark blue long-sleeved T-shirt and a matching pair of pants, but in reality it was made personally by Gaia, the Aspect of Earth.
These clothes were actually a classification of artifact officially known as Bloodbound—which is just a fancy way of saying it went through an attunement to be treated as a part of your body—but people never actually used that name. They were pretty much exclusively used by Outworlders and Offworlders for one very simple, but absolutely critical reason.
No one wants to get isekaied naked.
Now with that said, they were literally just normal clothes. Definitely not something I'd wear on an expedition to Antarctica, which is why I stopped Aya before she could transform her own clothes and walk out there. Because naturally, there was no way I'd leave her to walk through the snow alone, and she was well aware of that fact.
*Sigh* "I guess we'll have to. I was hoping to find a nice little cave or something to hide in while we were testing out my powers, but naturally there's no way something that convenient would happen."
I looked at her dubiously. "You do realize that regardless of how hard you try to raise a flag here, it doesn't work like that."
She entirely ignored my comment and started walking back into the forest, at roughly a 45 degree angle from where we had come. I smirked at her tacit admission of defeat and began walking into the forest at an angle that mirrored her path.
"Damn, trying to find a good spot here is like looking for a tree in a forest."
Aya rolled her eyes so hard that I actually felt it from a hundred or so meters away.
"Oh, this should work. I think I found a good one, Neb."
"Did you actually? Or are you just trying to stop me from making any more bad jokes?"
"Yes."
I snorted at her all-encompassing answer. "On my way."
It didn't take me long to reach her, and when I did, I saw that she clearly wasn't just trying to prevent me from committing any war crimes in the name of comedy.
It was an unfamiliar tree—not that that wasn't to be expected—with a massive trunk and oddly ridged bark. Counting the bark, the trunk was nearly two meters in diameter. It's important to count the bark in that measurement, because it had extremely deep ridges, around 10 cm deep, which ran in a shallow spiral all the way up as high as I could see. The limbs were no exception to this, the only difference being that the shallower the grooves on the bark were, the flatter the spiral was.
Overall it was quite an odd tree, although not one of the strangest I'd seen. Not by a long shot. However, Aya was correct that it was perfect for our needs.
I tossed my chain over one of the thickest limbs I could see, one that was about 8 meters off the ground and 40 cm thick. As if it had a mind of its own, the chain wrapped around the limb, biting into the grooves to stop from slipping. I wrapped my free arm around Aya before the chain began to rapidly shorten, and moments after we found ourselves standing on the limb.
Then, using that limb as the foundation, I used the chain to spiral outward, sometimes making a slight detour to wrap it around a limb that was slightly higher or lower, in the end forming a plane roughly level with the ground. From there I started to work my way back inward, weaving the chain through the spiral.
About half an hour later I was finished. A metallic grey platform ran the whole way around the tree, extending slightly over two meters from the trunk at any given point. Although it was a mesh woven from a single chain, it felt as solid as standing on the ground.
"No matter how many times I see this, it's impressive as hell," Aya said happily from where she sat with her back against the trunk. "I wonder why so few of the others go for a versatile Soulbound like that."
I shrugged. "You know why. Not many actually need it, and those that do always end up getting some sort of utility Soulbound linked to a Lesser Gate. But even then, you can't expect this much versatility from a half-step Projection Sorcerer, let alone one who's started forming their Gates."
Sorcerer's Soulbounds were firmly restricted by three rules. One, only a non-living, non-sapient object could be Soulbound. Two, only one Soulbound may be made per Gate. Three, a Soulbound may only draw power from a single Gate.
Well, I say that they're restricted by those rules, but somehow I managed to break literally every single one of them. Hell, it even made some of the Dragons lose their minds trying to figure out what happened.
I shook my head a bit to clear it. “But enough about my Soulbound. You should start testing what powers you have access to. Not only will that show us our path forward, but it’ll also tell us more about the situation of this plane, planet, or whatever the hell we’re on.”
Aya nodded and closed her eyes. Instantly I could feel the air around her change.
Gone was the calm warmth I felt from her, replaced by a bone-chilling numbness. The only physical changes were that her silver hair now seemed to glow with an inner light, flecks of violet occasionally flickering through it like shooting stars across a night sky.
When she opened her eyes I caught a glimpse of brilliant gold irises, but as soon as her eyes were fully opened they reverted to their normal serene blue-grey. She blinked a few times, pushing aside the traces of tears that had formed in her eyes. “Kisaths, I hate doing that.”
I leaned against the tree beside her and stroked her head. “I’m sorry you had to. Did you find anything useful out?”
She nodded. “It seems you were right about the dimensional splicing.”
“Well, it’s not like that one needed any confirmation after seeing that,” I pointed out.
“True, but I meant you were right about this being a planet that merged with a plane. The celestial objects were identical to those described in the codex, so the chances of your original theory being right are very high.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good. If that’s the case, you should have access to most of your powers, right?”
“To an extent. I won’t be able to use my Guardian authority during the day, naturally, and for some reason my only source of Mana is the moon. I can’t sense the planet at all,” she said with mild concern.
“It could be the overlapping dimensions that are interfering with your senses, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”
She nodded in response, but obviously wasn’t entirely convinced. “Oh yeah, and the length of the day here is actually nearly 40 earth hours. It was already long to begin with, but getting merged into a plane made it even longer. And as is characteristic of a plane, day and night are split perfectly in half.
"But there's no problem with the Mana link?" I asked, just to be sure.
"Actually white the opposite," she brightened up a bit at my question. "I'm not sure why, but it feels… static, I suppose. Nothing short of a fully powered Distortion matrix built by a high Mega-core magus can break it."
"Hoh, fascinating." Maybe the celestials being untouched has something to do with it? Normally planes don't have anything like that, so is it possible their location in spacetime was unaffected by the planar splice? That could be a possible explanation to this situation if they were fixed relati—
"Hehe." Aya mumbled as she pulled me from my thoughts, down onto the mesh floor. And, before I could react, she promptly laid down on her side, plopping her head down on my thighs.
I smiled and adjusted myself slightly, knowing that I wasn't going to be able to move for a while. She always turned into a bit of a cat after activating that. Her gold-eyed self was just as much a part of her as everything else was, but there isn't a person out there who loves everything about who they are.
Being able to isolate the memories and feelings from that time… I always wondered if that made Aya the lucky one or the unluckiest.
I sat there stroking her hair for a minute before she rolled over onto her back, looking up at me. "By the way, guess what the Mana link being stable means~" she gave a smug smirk.
I just raised my eyebrows in a questioning manner, while brushing aside the few stray hairs that got into her face from rolling over.
"I can keep Reinforcement active 24/7—or I guess 36/6 if they kept the same time scheme?" She trailed off curiously. I shook my head with a sigh and flicked the hair that I had just brushed out of her face right back into it. She had started out bragging smugly, but somehow almost instantly got sidetracked into wondering about something entirely unrelated.
*Ptew* "Hey!" She spat several strands of hair out of her mouth. "Rude!"
I laughed at her antics, but as we settled down for a short rest in the growing twilight, I felt a small twinge of sadness at seeing her act the age that she appeared.
