They didn't leave to much fanfare. Neither she nor Oliver got much rest due to a combination of it not being quite the end of the day and the lack of their normal sleeping arrangements. But, it was better than nothing, and once Alyssa had assembled basic provisions for a couple of days and Oliver had gotten his tablet back from Henrietta, Alyssa scooped the Artificer up in her arms and ?Springlaunch?ed them off the top of the Spire.
At level 23, [Leafstep] was right on the cusp of allowing her to fully run across treetops, even the lightest branches sufficient to hold her weight. But with the burden of an Archmage in her arms, she not only weighed substantially more - which did influence things, though not in the way pure mass would suggest - but also lost much of her maneuverability. So... not worth the risk. They had a job to do.
She hit the ground, barely even needing to bend her knees to absorb the impact, redirected herself to the side to avoid a dragon, and started running again. In her arms, Oliver gave out a small yelp and clutched his staff tighter. Another dragon interposed itself in her way, and she jumped above it, then drove it into the ground with ?Blowback?.
They carried on for some time like that, following the most direct route Alyssa knew towards the area that Shelter had resided in. Though she wasn't strong enough to jump over the entire First River in one go - and by the time ?Springlaunch? could carry her over it, she would probably be able to just run on top of the water - her earlier explorations had helped her find an area where, thanks to some protruding rocks that often had logs caught on them, she could make the crossing even when laden. As she crossed, she saw some dragons flapping their way over the river, but less than she would have expected considering how many were attacking First Tower, and how the non flying dragons crossed the river was a mystery.
Hopefully, it would all make sense soon. They had a mission to complete.
The woods blurred by at such a speed that Alyssa almost marveled at the fact she hadn't gotten any kind of direct speed-boosting skill or subskill yet, and fast enough that when she skidded to a stop, Oliver nearly flew out of her arms.
She kept hold of him. Of course.
"Stand up," she told him warily. Oliver untucked his head from between their shoulders and started.
"What happened here?" He asked, his tone of confusion mirroring a bit of what Alyssa felt.
"Same thing as Shelter, maybe?" Alyssa released Oliver's legs, and he unsteadily took to his feet while she drew her axes to be on-guard. "This is about where that cloud was, right?"
"How am I supposed to know that?" Oliver grumbled, brandishing his staff.
The Jungle in this particular area was just gone. Instead of the thick and vivacious ground cover, or even the sparsely vegetated and weather-worn rock of the Spire, this place was barren sand interspersed with jagged, dead rocks. No hardy vines, mosses, or even scraggly bushes grew here, and as they stepped hesitantly into the sandy area - it extended in either direction beyond what she could see, so there was no going around it - the sounds of The Jungle fell away, leaving a kind of eerie, wind-battered keening as the only thing they could hear.
The air here felt... wrong. It carried a kind of sticky, caustic sensation to her arcanoception, sliding off her skin as either it rejected her, or she rejected it unconsciously. It didn't feel good, and Alyssa suddenly realized just how comfortable she had been finding the steady influx of mana from their surroundings since the Jump itself.
"Lots of Dragon..." Oliver was holding his tablet in one hand, glancing at it while also flicking through his personal System. "Then there's some Ash, Sand, something that might be Plague? No, the readings aren't quite right for that one. Or is it, just with some kind of interference? I'm not seeing any Peace, but that might be a sign that things haven't fully settled, or just a calibration issue. It's not super close to any of our elements..."
"Just stay close," Alyssa indicated, "I don't want to have to keep an eye on you as well."
Oliver didn't say anything, hopefully in agreement. He kept muttering to himself, eyes darting every which way.
There was a bit of a haze to the air, which made it difficult to determine at a glance features of this... desert-y wasteland, but Alyssa did still know the way to go, and crept forward, hands on both axes and a mental trigger ready to use one of her skills. A quick [Rustlewind], Find me a hostile creature, returned a faint breeze coming from every direction, which she... didn't know how to interpret.
"Hey, that tablet thing," Alyssa whispered, "Did you say that it's compatible with [Rustlewind]?"
She wasn't entirely certain why she was whispering, but it felt appropriate. The sound here wasn't being supernaturally muffled, like the crystal-rocks of Shelter had been, but it still felt eerie and wrong to make too much nose.
"Yeah," he passed it off, and Alyssa grabbed it with no fumbling at all. She tore her eyes away from the surroundings to see the screen twist into familiar words -
Oh neat, she had another level to assign. That was... oddly fast. Not that she was complaining, but... fast levels usually meant something bad was happening, whether or not it was visible. Nothing she could do about that right now, though, so...
[Rustlewind], she activated into the tablet.
The magic shifted underneath her fingers, the screen clearing itself and aspects of the enchantment twisted and presented themselves to her, ready for her input. The sensation wasn't exactly like 'buttons' appearing on the artifact, but as Alyssa twitched her fingers in certain proto-casting ways, she got a sense for the kind of response the tablet would provide her. It took a moment to realize what she was looking at, but once she did...
Is that a map?
The patterning and discolorations were starting to settle into place, spreading out from the center to create varying textures. Different patterns were represented in varying places, and as she looked behind them, the treeline behind them did look like it might correspond to the shape on her tablet where one pattern began.
That was very neat.
Find me a hostile creature.
Normally, she needed to outright whisper to trigger her skill, but the tablet only required her to focus on the command akin to activating a skill. The tablet shifted slightly, the featureless section of the map corresponding to the desert took on a slightly whiter tone, but otherwise not much happened.
Alright... find me Oliver Smith.
A white dot appeared, very nearly at the dead center of the tablet, and Alyssa frowned. So the interface worked like she would have expected it to... did that mean the entire desert was considered a 'hostile creature'?
[Leafstep] kept the sand from shifting underneath her feet, but Oliver needed to constantly readjust to avoid falling off.
Solid ground, then. A moment later, she realized she'd been musing, not commanding her skill. She readjusted the desire into an actual command, and noticed as the textured, non-desert areas all grew slightly whiter... and a few patches within the desert also gained some amount of outlining.
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This thing is awesome, she grinned.
There was one decently close by, which they could use to get their bearings slightly. The sun... not sun. The daylight was muffled by the clouds overhead, so it wasn't unbearably hot, but the atmosphere was undeniably stifling in some way she couldn't quite put her finger on. It affected both her magic and her body, something she felt like she should recognize but just... couldn't. It wasn't going to be a good idea to spend any more time here than they had to.
Alyssa kept her eyes peeled, looking every direction but still forced to flick her eyes downward as she tried to prod the tablet into giving her a new display.
What's the best route to get through this area towards Shelter? What places lie along the safest and fastest path to Shelter? Which direction ought I go in to avoid danger on my way to Shelter?
Unfortunately, no matter how she structured her ask, or translated her thoughts into asks, she couldn't get an answer from the tablet. Either what she was asking for didn't exist, or the tablet simply wasn't equipped to answer it.
A dust-laden gust of wind swept over the pair of them, forcing Oliver to shelter his face with his arm but still getting a fair amount of sand wedged in around his elbow for the trouble.
That proved to be the push Alyssa needed to swap back into 'proper Ranger' mode, and she handed the tablet back to Oliver. "Get on my back," she commanded. "I want my hands free. But hold on tight, I'm going to go fast."
Situating themselves took a minute or two, with Oliver expressing a few dismissable concerns, but they eventually got into a configuration with Oliver hanging on her back that helped him keep a solid grip on his bag, staff, and tablet alike. Alyssa also kept her arms mostly free, though with slightly limited range of movement, and the added weight didn't feel that bad. Oliver was tiny. It was still inferior to her just carrying him as far as convenience went, but she could deal with it.
[Leafstep] was pushed a fair amount to keep Alyssa on top of the sand and with steady footing. A desolate, lifeless desert was the terrain that was furthest from the Skill's preference, but she was a high enough level it still worked. She was slower than usual, though that didn't matter too much.
Her mana did get worryingly wrung out, but-
The sand shifted a few feet to her right.
"Off!" she commanded, shrugging her Oliver-backpack off and settling into a combat-ready stance with her axes. Shortly afterwards, a dragon emerged from the ground, shaking off the sand it had been buried in.
Or created in, Alyssa narrowed her eyes. The dragon didn't look like it had been sleeping underneath the surface, or preparing for an ambush. It looked like it was just figuring out what was going on, adjusting to suddenly existing.
She didn't give it the chance to figure itself out, instead electing to axe its head, then motioning for Oliver to get back on her.
"You saw that too, right?" she confirmed as he adjusted himself.
"Y-ye-yeaaahhh," Oliver played up how much she was bumping him around because he was like that, but got tired of the gag a moment later and started speaking normally, "I think I felt it, too. I've never seen a full creature just... conjured, though. Never mind it being a dragon, how does that even..."
"Do you really want to find out though?" she asked.
"Obviously," he immediately replied. "Full-creature conjuring, proper spontaneous generation, is incredibly rare. I want to figure out how to reproduce that so much."
"Just ask the Commander?"
"She makes constructs, not - eep - " Oliver slipped, but readjusted himself before he could truly fall off. "Not true creatures."
That probably meant more to him than it did to her. Alyssa's mind raced as she thought about what their latest discovery meant. Was the Calamity some kind of... she didn't even know what. Some kind of dragon which laid spell-eggs in the land it devastated, its offspring hatching and venturing off to spread more destruction? An invasive, pseudo-infectious infestation of dragons? That almost sounded kind of fun, honestly.
Now that she knew what to look for, she could spot a couple of other dragons being birthed from the sands, and while they tried to pursue Alyssa and Oliver, she was far faster than any of the creatures that tried to pursue them, whether on unsteady legs or on pitifully small wings. They all were far enough away that she lost them within minutes.
The looming wall of greenery that was The Jungle's return was absolutely wonderful, and Alyssa practically dove into it. Her legs and mana burned from dealing with the sand, and going from the uncertainty about if a dragon would pop up under her feet to the simple uncertainty of whether a jaguar was about to jump down on her head was simply wonderful.
[Rustlewind]
"Are there any predators on the hunt nearby?" She whispered to her skill. Fortunately, there was no response. She didn't bother asking whether there were any dangerous animals in general, the answer to that was always yes, but so long as they weren't being hunted, she could deal with it.
She let herself relax. Oliver slid off her back, and she let herself slump against a tree. She'd been going at maximum speed, and needed a few minutes to recover now that they were in relative safety.
Not that they had really been in danger, but...
The mana of her surroundings lapped at her like the ripples of a soothing pond, rejuvenating her physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Being without them after so long was... weird. She wasn't looking forward to returning this way, but it still beat going the long way to the ocean and back up First River. Also, the desert might well extend to the ocean, so that might not even get her out of it.
Oliver was standing at the border between the two areas, nudging some sand back and forth between the areas. Like she'd noticed with the area around Shelter, there was practically no fading from one ecosystem to the other. There was a line in the ground, and on one side was sand, the other sub-tropical jungle.
"Oliver, o Oliver, what do your wizard eyes see?" she poked Oliver, trying to get him moving again.
"I'm not sure," he absently replied, "There's some kind of transmutation effect going on, anything in the desert is being drained. It might be coming back when it's out of the desert? But it's definitely slower. I also can't find the magic actually responsible for it."
"It's nonmagically transforming things?" Alyssa didn't even think that was possible. Well, chemistry. But magical transmutation was kind of separate from the base 'chemical rearrangement' that natural sciences produced.
"That's not what I said. There's a lot of magic here. A lot a lot. But I don't recognize anything that might normally be responsible for transmutation. I do see a couple of structures that look a bit like siphons, but I can't quite tell what's being siphoned or to where. It could be the transmutation effect, but... I can't tell."
"Fascinating," Alyssa flatly poked the Artificer, "Now, you ready to keep moving? We do have a job to do."
"Yeah... yeah," Oliver slowly decided. "Let's go."
They didn't depart quite then, as there was a bit of shuffling to be done and it was all painfully slow, but eventually she had Oliver back in her arms, racing through the trees along a thin game trail. Oliver made some noises of curiosity when they got to where Shelter had been, but she'd already given him his chance to study the sudden terrain-change at the desert, so she instead circled around the side.
"That's a lot of rock," he still insisted on saying as Alyssa made their way around the edge. The rocky wasteland was now quite definitively a cliff, at least twenty, thirty feet tall and with mosses and vines growing along it. "Like, actual terraforming levels. I'm surprised, there's not many native magics that could do something like this."
That was just so wrong, Alyssa couldn't help herself. "Oh come on, there's lots of Expedition magics that can make or break mountains, what's a bit of stone?"
"You know those are exaggerations, right?" Oliver asked with the tone of someone talking to a child. "Basically nothing can move something the actual size of a mountain in one go."
"I've literally seen a mountain being moved, so some people could talk to a Tyrant."
"Basically. Industrial scale magic is ludicrously rare, and even with industry, a mountain is just... so massive. You need actual technology to accomplish something like that. And that's not even what I was talking about!" he harrumphed, "Moving a bunch of stone is entirely doable, but this stone... if I didn't know better, I'd say it had been there the whole time."
"So get a druid, big whoop."
"No, but..." Oliver sighed. "You do know where we're going, right? Because I thought you hadn't actually found Shelter itself in any of your exploration yet, and that was why you wanted me to teach you light spells."
"I totally do," Alyssa automatically responded. She'd been inside the area's caves, and... didn't actually have the potency needed to navigate the tunnels with her [Rustlewind] alone...
"But there might be a quicker way, lemme see that tablet." She put Oliver down and motioned for him to hand her the focus again.
Oliver's smirk was rife with superiority, and she glared back at him, then looked back down at the tablet's display. The [Rustlewind] map very clearly demarcated The Jungle and the Shelter rocklands, even marking what Alyssa realized were tunnel entrances. A spare thought made her wonder whether she was going to try and nudge her skill's growth in a way that would replicate the tablet's mapping function... or if she could grow it in some other way that she couldn't think of right now because this was distracting her. On the one hand, having a Skill GPS would be pretty great... or she could just either use this tablet or have Oliver make her one of her own, and then she'd have the functionality that way...
I want to go to the Shelter we called home, she nudged the map. 'Going home' was one of those things that magic was quite good at, a principle that ought to apply with [Rustlewind]. It hadn't worked before, but... Yes! This time, one of the cave entrances shifted slightly, and some of the underlying distortions in the glass clearly outlined a route she should take there.
"Oh hey, there was. This way!" She felt Oliver's judgement on her, but she did her best to ignore it as she scooped him up and jumped up the side of the rock wall. The vines and mosses made it far easier for her to climb, as [Leafstep] practically turned it into a ladder.
The top was still... odd, subdued in volume and with various creatures visible in the distance. She thought she might have seen some dragons in the distance, but was disinclined to investigate at the moment. Instead, she brought the two of them to the edge of a pit. She looked inside, but the weak light that emanated from the clouds above didn't do much to dispel the gloom hanging inside.
"Really? This way?" Oliver asked incredulously, "You want us to go here?"
"Yeah. Yeah I do," Alyssa sniffed. A part of her wanted to grab Oliver and step off the edge right then and there to make a point, but she restrained herself.
Barely.
Oliver took a deep breath and looked over the edge. "You're not nervous about jumping somewhere you can't see?"
"Ollie," she returned the patronizing tone he liked to use sometimes, "I can walk off terminal velocity so long as I bend my knees slightly."
He sighed again, then closed his eyes and nodded. "Once more unto the breach?"
Alyssa smiled, scooped Oliver up, and jumped into the awaiting darkness.
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