Chapter 213: Heading Off
At the peak of 3rd Origin Mythic Class, Magnar matched Neil’s own tier in terms of raw class standing and was genuinely useful in combat at the level they had been operating at recently, the combination of their fighting styles having developed over enough shared encounters that coordination was automatic rather than directed.
But poison was Magnar’s weakness in a way it was not Neil’s.
A realm where the air itself was toxic to non-native organisms and the creatures were built around venom as their primary offensive and defensive tool was not an environment where Magnar would last long regardless of his strength, and bringing him in would mean spending most of his attention managing Magnar’s exposure rather than hunting, which defeated the purpose.
This one he would go alone.
He had gone into worse conditions alone and had come out the other side, sometimes requiring several attempts before the coming out happened cleanly but always eventually coming out, and the Analyzer skill was functional and clean now and the Building of Ghosts was accumulating a new ghost every day.
He had the resources for this.
He thought through the environmental hazards methodically as he walked, starting from what Randy had told him and building outward from there with what he already knew about hostile environment hunting and what he had learned from every previous realm.
No oxygen, manageable with the suit.
Toxic air, manageable with the helmet’s filtration and his passive resistance.
Contact venom on the creatures themselves, the real concern, requiring the clearance cycle to run regularly and the monitoring to be consistent rather than something he checked only when he noticed a problem.
The regeneration, the thing that required the most planning, because if he could not defeat a creature faster than it could regenerate the damage he was dealing then no amount of toughness or aggression would change the outcome.
He needed to get inside the regeneration, not fight it from the outside.
The Inferno chain’s internal damage model, the heat discharging inside the bound target’s biological systems rather than against the exterior, was the closest thing he had to a weapon that bypassed surface regeneration entirely.
He would build the approach around that.
By the time he walked through his domain gate he had a working architecture for how he was going to operate in there, not a complete plan because complete plans required information he did not yet have, but a framework that would hold until the actual environment gave him the real information.
He explained the situation at dinner.
The relevant parts of it.
The realm, the creatures, the general composition of what he was going to be hunting and why, and the practical implications for the domain’s operation while he was gone, which was the part that actually required their attention.
The evolution was running and would continue running for the next several days regardless of whether he was present, and the domain’s systems were stable and understood and did not need him standing nearby to function correctly.
He took out the two 3rd Order Mythic class domain cores he had been keeping and set them on the table in front of Ileana, and the quality of the silence that produced around the table was the kind that happened when people saw something significant enough to stop the usual movement of a meal.
Both cores were dense with energy at that class, and even people without extensive sensing ability could feel the weight of them when they were sitting on a table in a closed space.
"Once the current evolution completes, use these to start the next one. Give them to Nemo and let her handle the sequencing, she understands the domain’s architecture well enough to run it correctly."
Ileana looked at the cores for a moment and then looked at him with the expression she had when she was taking something in fully rather than responding immediately.
"And the upgrades. Once the current evolution clears, start on the buildings and the defenses. Prioritise the perimeter and the army capacity first, then the utilities. Use the shards and use your judgment on the order."
"I will handle it." Not a promise in the sense of something offered, just a statement of fact about what was going to happen.
Jane was looking at the cores on the table and then at Neil with the expression she had when she was tracking everything being said and running it against her own assessment of what it implied, the slight tightening at the corners of her eyes that she did not fully manage to keep neutral.
"How long." She asked.
"Not sure." Neil said honestly. "Long enough to fill the gene points. Could be weeks."
The table went quiet in a way that was different from the usual silences between conversation.
Bob looked at Rob with an expression that contained several things neither of them said.
Rob looked back at him with the same quality of contained things.
Leon’s expression did not change on the surface but the quality of his stillness shifted slightly, gaining a weight that had not been there a moment before.
Rin was watching Neil with those quick dark eyes moving between him and Ileana and Jane in the way she watched things she was mapping in the domain’s structure.
Mob said nothing, which was Mob’s response to most things, but there was a different quality to his stillness from the usual one.
"I will be fine." Neil said.
The meal continued after that, quieter than it had been, carrying the particular texture of a meal where something has been established that everyone at the table is going to be living with for a while.
The rest of the day moved quickly in the way that days moved when something significant was arriving at the end of them, the ordinary hours carrying a different weight than usual, more textured, more present.
Neil spent part of it going through his equipment carefully with Nemo running diagnostics on the suit’s systems, checking the oxygen supply capacity and the filtration quality and the storage reserves, making sure everything that needed to be ready was ready.
He spent another part of it walking the domain, not checking anything specific but taking in the current state of it, the familiar shapes of the buildings and the familiar positions of the people in them, the way the evolution pulse moved through the walls in its slow and steady rhythm.
He found Jane near the outer courtyard in the late afternoon.
She was standing near the section of wall where the evolution’s light was strongest, her back to the courtyard, looking at the pulse in the wood with the quality of someone whose attention was pointed inward rather than at the thing in front of them.
The afternoon light was low and warm and the domain was quiet in the way it was quiet in the hour before dinner, the particular settled quality of a place whose population had wound down from the day’s work and had not yet gathered for the evening.
She became aware of him without him saying anything, the way she had always been aware of his proximity before he announced it, and when she turned her expression had time to do one thing before she composed it, which was to be openly worried in the genuine way that had no performance in it.
Neil looked at the wall beside her.
"You will be alright here."
"I know we will." A pause that carried more in it than the pause itself. "I was thinking about you."
He said nothing to this for a moment.
"I know." He said.
She nodded once and turned back to the wall.
They stood there in the silence that existed between people who had something real between them that had not yet resolved into a clear shape, the kind of silence that was not uncomfortable exactly but was not easy either, carrying the weight of things on both sides that were real and acknowledged and not yet dealt with.
Then he walked on and she stayed by the wall with her arms folded and the low afternoon light catching the side of her face.
Night came with the domain settling into its late configuration, the perimeter rotation moving quietly, Magnar occupying his position near the campfire pit, the lights in the buildings going to their lower evening levels one by one.
Neil finished his preparations and went to find Ileana.
She was in the main building working through the domain’s resource log with the quiet focus of someone who had been planning to finish this particular task before he left and was determined to do so, a small light beside her and the records open in front of her.
She closed them when he came in.
She looked at him for a long moment, the thorough and direct attention she gave to things she wanted to have properly seen, taking in the full picture of him standing there with everything ready and the evening around them and the fact of what was coming in it.
Then she crossed the room and kissed him, not the brief conclusory kind but the kind that was its own complete thing, one hand against his chest and the other at the back of his neck, saying everything that would have taken much longer to say with words.
When she stepped back her expression was composed but the composure was doing considerably more work than usual, the thing it was containing visible in the slight tension around her eyes.
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