Chapter 1055: Chapter 1055 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike
Ren knew it.
He knew it because he was exactly the same way in those situations, and because he had spent enough time around Luna to recognize the pattern in someone else, even when recognizing it didn’t stop him from feeling guilty about it.
Selphira looked at him with the deep attention she had when she wanted what she was about to say to land with all the clarity she intended to give it.
"The only reason you’re the one going," she said, "and the one giving orders out there, is because you’re the only one who can do something about the crystallization when you find what they’re looking for." She paused. "But you’re carrying nine lives that matter a great deal. Don’t focus only on Sirius’s."
The silence that followed had the weight of things that were said once.
"That’s also something you have to grow into handling," Selphira added, and the quality of it wasn’t hardness but the kind of honesty she applied to things she cared about enough not to soften. "Remember that among those nine, you’re also carrying my granddaughter and your future wife."
Mayo raised her hand.
"Can I ask whether Ren’s orders are absolute for the non-future-wives when we’re about to die? Because if we’re going to be underground surrounded by mutants I’d prefer the kind you can ignore to run away screaming."
The air in the room changed the way it changed when Mayo did exactly that: not removing the weight, but reminding the mood in the room that the weight couldn’t exist alongside other things. So now both were allowed to be present at the same time.
Lin gave her a karate chop on the head, ’gentle one’ because Maria wasn’t there to do it properly, and Mayo made the sound of exaggerated pain that she made when she did something that didn’t deserve a big reaction and produced one anyway.
The guards had the varied expressions of a group that had spent enough time with Mayo to have calibrated the different registers of her interventions, and had arrived at the collective conclusion that this particular one was the one she reserved for moments she felt needed ventilation.
So Ren looked at Selphira.
Selphira looked back with the patience of someone who could wait for the Mayo moment to finish before continuing.
Ren nodded.
"I promise... Everyone comes back safe," he said. Not with the inflection of a dramatic declaration; with the calm of someone stating something they have decided will be true.
Selphira held his gaze for the second it took to evaluate whether what she had heard was what she needed to hear... Or the truth.
She nodded once.
Julius moved toward the table where the maps were already spread out.
"Then we begin," he said.
"I... Kinda already know the place." Said Ren, scratching his nape.
♢♢♢♢
Ren flew on the now bigger Mantis...
He had been able to do that before the advancement at Silver, but now that she was Gold, the size increase had finally made it less uncomfortable; the distribution of wind currents across the beast’s back was different at this scale, and though the Mantis was not the most aerodynamic beast by design, her new physicality and power let the rules of aerodynamics settle into a secondary plane where they could be overridden by brute force rather than worked around by geometry.
The Mantis at Gold 1 was indeed considerably larger than the Mantis at Silver 3.
It was the kind of difference Ren knew intellectually was going to happen and that still caught him off guard each time, because the scale of a beast in a new category always turned out to be more than the number of the previous rank allowed him to calculate precisely.
Getting used to seeing her at one size also did nothing good to prepare you for the next... So he had learned to stop trying.
It had enough space on her back now to make the long aerial journey what it was rather than an exercise in ’jumping endurance’, which was the relevant threshold.
Liora was to his right in silence..
Shizu and Umi, two of the guards who had operated together long enough that their coordination was automatic in most situations, occupied the space behind them with the discretion of people who understood when their presence was functional and when it was better to melt and just act like inanimate baggage.
Mayo carried another contingent on her Celestial Cloud Bird, and from that direction came laughter with the energy of someone who considered the journey the entertaining part and the destination the work, and who therefore believed in making the most of the transit.
Lin and Hikari flew separately on their own beasts, holding their positions in the formation without needing to be directed.
The formation stayed loose for the first few hours because the Silver, Bronze, and Iron rings offered no real resistance to a group at this level. The beasts that detected the combined mana signatures processed it with the same logic they used for any superior threat: move away before the threat had reason to come toward them. The group passed through each ring like a change in weather rather than moving through a different level of territory.
It was a quiet journey.
Ren used it.
The cold at the altitude of the outer rings arrived with the height and with the ambient mana density, which made temperature behave slightly more aggressively than it did near the city. Not impossible cold at this elevation, but the persistent kind that after enough time produced the particular sharp chill that became difficult to ignore.
Ren noticed it.
"Do you need help?"
"N-no," Liora said, in the tone of someone saying "no" in a way that did not close the conversation.
Ren was in what she privately thought of as ’chivalrous’ mode and interpreted it correctly.
He moved closer and put his arm around her.
Liora went slightly red and began activating the spirit fire with the economy of someone who had learned to calibrate exactly how much she needed for the specific result she wanted; not enough to be obvious, enough to be effective, the practiced control of someone who had been working with that power long enough to treat it like a dial rather than a switch.
The baggage tried hard not to giggle.
They were close enough that the warmth Liora generated reached both of them instead of only her, which was more efficient and the fact that they could support each other was the correct reason if a correct reason was what was needed to be a bit less shy.
Liora looked ahead.
Ren looked ahead too.
The formation continued through the cold, and the outer rings fell behind them one by one, and neither of them said anything else for a while, which was its own kind of answer to the question that hadn’t quite been asked.
