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[Skill-Eater] Chapter 41: Catastrophe (Three Days Earlier)
🕑 Added 2024-07-15 17:26:01 +0000 UTCThe sky turned black, then white, then both at once.
A clamorous roar filled his ears, like the world was breaking in half. Electricity buzzed in the air, the ground shook, and Edge was drenched in a tide of magic so thick that he could taste it even without a core.
Then, for just a second, he saw something inexplicable. A vision of the planet from far above the surface. He could sense that the world’s energy was being rerouted, as the immensely powerful spells that shielded Ord were unwoven and remade. Before any of the details became clear, the image dissolved into shrieking static, and he blacked out.
He woke up in a world that had descended into chaos. A way of life developed over centuries had been erased within a matter of hours, leaving Ord’s inhabitants scrambling to make sense of the changes that had occurred.
The first thing that Edge saw when he opened his eyes was a message from the System floating in front of his face. The words he read shocked him to his core. He sat down hard, shaking as their implications pierced his soul, revealing a truth that had been too overwhelming to absorb all at once.
The most pressing matter was the notice informing him that his original body had perished, along with every other puppet on the planet. Their connection to the simucast network had been severed from the wrong end, resulting in a terminal desync. Every stasis pod had been destroyed by a massive surge of mana that conducted across the entire relay at once, wreaking havoc upon hardware and wetware alike.
Something like that wasn’t supposed to be possible. Not with trillions of credits worth of failsafes and a dozen top tier AI’s monitoring the grid at all times. There hadn’t been a single fatality related to simucasting in decades, and now tens of thousands had happened at once.
The silver lining was that Edge hadn’t simply died without ever knowing what hit him. His consciousness was still intact. His mind was permanently bound to the puppet he’d been piloting, transforming what was supposed to have been a survival vacation into a genuine life and death ordeal.
He didn’t have time to ponder that dire proclamation at length. He just kept on reading before figuring out his next move.
The next detail Edge learned was that several vital components of the System had been destroyed when Ord’s magic went haywire. The AI had implemented a planet-wide lockdown while it assessed the damage and tried to recover.
On top of everything else, the planet’s link to the intergalactic transportation network had been unmoored. The red-shield wasn’t letting anyone in or out, even the wardens’ vessels. It meant that no one down here was going home the long way either. Everyone who was standing on the surface was stuck on Ord for the foreseeable future. The prison administration wasn’t responding, and they had begun fortifying their holdings, killing anyone who tried to approach.
If that wasn’t enough to deal with, all long-range transportation on the surface had been shut down too, including the airships and most other vehicles.
Most baffling of all, the geography of the planet had been reshuffled, mixing the frontier with bits and pieces of the colonized biomes. Since only a slim fraction of Ord had been tamed over the last few centuries, the foothold that mankind had established had been effectively erased.
Without the buffer biomes and magical shields protecting the settled regions, powerful beasts and monsters were already spreading into the starting zones. Last but not least, the feed was rife with rumors that that some of the planet’s SS criminals had escaped and their whereabouts were unknown.
It was a lot to take in at once.
In addition to being stuck on the planet for the foreseeable future, life on the surface was about to become even more dangerous than it already was. If he didn’t make it to a settlement, his odds of survival would dwindle from slim to none within a matter of days.
Edge’s feed stayed on for another half hour, letting him learn more about what was happening before it abruptly cut off. At that point, he got another message from the System, informing him that more of the planet’s infrastructure had been critically damaged. That the AI’s mana was being rerouted to protect its core.
Communication magic wasn’t working either, thanks to some manner of interference that had arisen in the wake of the anomaly. The Prison World broadcasts had ceased, and no information was coming in from the outside. One of the most profitable ventures in human history was no more, and an economy bigger than most solar systems had crumbled into dust.
Finally, due to the losses the System had taken during the surge, most of his Guide’s functions had been disabled. It left Edge completely on his own, stranded in an alien wilderness that was growing more deadly by the hour.
Standing on the surface of a hostile world, staring out over the Ivory Plains with no way home, there wasn’t any way to sugarcoat what had happened next. It was a dark, desperate moment, forcing him to face the truth that he was probably going to die in one horrible manner or another.
He wanted to freak the fuck out. Curl into a ball and cry or start screaming at the stars.
But he didn’t do any of those things. Because at that point a cold clarity had descended upon Edge, infusing him with the awareness that if he didn’t plan his next move carefully, he was going to die sooner rather than later.
Even in the aftermath of the calamity, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to endure the hardships ahead without some credits to his name. Since he was already in the region and didn’t have any other good options, he continued looking for the plants that he was supposed to find before making his way back to town.
But when he reached the closest hillock, he learned that the entire area had been remade in the wake of the disaster. The Emerald Grove was gone, and a mountain stood in its place, jutting up toward the sky like the beak of a gigantic bird.
Making a bad situation even worse, he soon discovered that it wasn’t just the grove that had changed locations. The patch of ground he’d been standing on had been moved when the surface was reconfigured.
While he was still on the Ivory Plains, Edge was far to the southwest of his original location. Puppet Town was now at least a three-day journey, if the settlement was still there at all.
The only thing that kept him from losing his shit at that point was the profile of the Guide’s Fingers on the horizon. Even if the fingers looked different than before, they let him know which way he needed to go.
He spent two desperate days heading toward the fingers, knowing that every hour could well be his last. In addition to being easy meat for the predators roaming the grasslands, he had little food, no money, and no easy way to make more. Even if he made it back to town, he couldn’t afford provisions or shelter. On Ord, relying on the charity of others was a sure road to a short life.
Edge had to do something that would change his situation within the next twenty-four hours, or he was going to die, either from magicyte depletion or between a monster’s jaws. That was when he came across a series of deep ravines. A feature that hadn’t been a part of the plains until the anomaly had occurred, likely brought here from the frontier.
The biomes near the capital and prison administration had been picked clean decades ago. Their quests completed and dungeons long-since delved. But beyond the frontier, there were still countless artifacts that had been seeded by the System in the early days of its inception. Chests hidden in dangerous locations and other secret rewards.
He knew in that moment, that he was facing the most important choice of his life.
Edge could either head back to town emptyhanded, or he could stop and search for something valuable enough to help him survive the dark days ahead. He was probably going to die either way, so he decided to go with the option that offered a slim possibility of a genuine solution. He started walking along the scars in the grasslands, looking for something interesting within their shadow-ridden depths.
Just when he was about to give up, he saw the ruins beckoning to him from below. They were unlike anything he’d seen before. A remnant from the planet’s past that had likely never been explored by prisoners or tourists, and thus a prime location to find something valuable.
At that point, Edge had decided to gamble his life on the chance that he would come across an opportunity that would change his fate, beginning the series of events that led him to his present situation. Hiding in the branches while peering into the darkness, praying that the reavers wouldn’t show up before dawn.
