Luca DR
patreon
Edge of apocalypse 49
🕑 Added 2023-05-29 16:40:05 +0000 UTCWhen Albert’s mother returned home, he was so immersed in his attempts to make the spell work and make it into a skill that he didn’t even hear her. She had to come all the way up to his room, knock on the door and yell his name for him to finally notice her.
“I almost have it,” he said, explaining to her the idea behind the spell he was trying to make.
“I remember Lloyd talking about it the other day. It is not going to be easy to make but once you have it, it’s definitely going to be very useful.” She said, walking towards the kitchen.
Albert noticed how, now that the cat was out of the bag and he knew about her identity, she didn’t really bother hiding her true self anymore. She was still the loving and caring mother that he knew, just different. It was like all the things she did that classified her as just another average middle-aged mother were just an act, and had never been really a part of her character.
This version of her was more imposing, a bit scarier but totally badass. Even while cooking she looked composed and dignified, and the way she handled the kitchen utensils was more like a killer would handle then than a housewife.
“About the 25 kilograms of elemental iron that you need to fetch for your quest.” She said as she chopped vegetables at incredible speed, handling the blade with mastery. “I might have found a quick way to get them. The purity should be acceptable, but that’s going to be up to your system to decide.”
“That’s good.” Albert said, a bit distracted by his phone. More specifically by the lack of notifications on it. Once again Marc was ghosting him.
He noticed his mother looking at him while still chopping vegetables, but she said nothing and continued on, pretending she didn’t see his concerned face when he looked at the phone.
“While I work on it, I will need you to test your skill a bit more. How much material can you transport at once? Does it change the amount of mana needed to make the jump? Do you need to be touching the material, or wearing it like a backpack?”
Albert only knew the answer to some of the questions, and they were surprisingly imprecise answers.
“I expected you to be more thorough.” She said sternly. Then she paused. “No, it is to be expected, given all that happened and how many quests you have to complete all at once. Please test these things tonight, if you can. Tomorrow might work out too, if you need more time.”
“I’ll do it tonight.” Albert said with a nod. “Shouldn’t be too hard.”
Mother scoffed.
“What?”
She turned to face him, holding a carrot she was still in the process of dicing. “You have no idea, do you? To most people magic, if they ever manage to get past the feeling mana stage, comes so difficultly that to even get to do these kinds of experiments it would take an experienced space mage years of training! How much training do you have?”
Albert shrugged. “Three weeks, tops.”
“See? I’m still wrapping my head around it. You have no idea how powerful you can become with the right discipline.”
***
Discipline. As if he didn’t have it. But he knew what his mother meant by it. He also knew that she thought college was superfluous now that he was on the brink of developing a skill specifically tailored for learning. He had argued that, at the very least, college could give him a semblance of a normal life, and she didn’t insist, but now that he was thinking about it he wondered whether the pursuit of normalcy was ever something he was interested in, or whether it was just something that felt like the right thing to do.
Perhaps he didn’t want normalcy. A normal life sucks. Why chase the ordinary when you have the extraordinary right at your fingertips?
Indeed, the idea of going to class tomorrow already felt like a poor use of his time, time that he could not rewind back anymore. It was a good thing he could skip classes without need to come up with an explanation now that his mother knew his secrets. Speaking of: she was out again. She had to do business both regarding the acquisition of the iron, and about trying to mitigate the damage the HDF would do to her once they decided to fire her. Then there was the whole matter of the Pilgrim invasion. The world was about to end, and there had been no new events ever since PsyOps went rogue.
No new events that they knew about. Albert doubted the BSA – or the HDF taking its place – would warn her about new events if she really was about to be fired. He wondered: how long would it be before the system sent him to deal with the events?
Albert shook his head, exhaling loudly.
The Pilgrims were invading Earth from another dimension. Try to get your head around that.
But as if that wasn’t already enough, there was also the matter of saving the Quadrangle core before it was dissected by the HDF goons. Then there was a new situation developing at Elvenhome, where last time he visited Eurus told him that the shield around their valley appeared to be shrinking faster than they could replenish it with magic.
There wasn’t any hurry to fix it, yet. Yet.
So many things to do, most of them on a time limit.
But first things had to come first. The system claimed that the iron it demanded was for the construction of a particular storage system for the Eggs, which would be severed from the normal space-time continuum. After hearing about this, his mother took a special interest in the field, and eventually came back to him confirming that indeed storing the Eggs in a severed space would be a great thing to do.
Presumably, but it was all just a theory, it would almost completely nullify their effect on the fabric of dimensions, slowing down the rate of decay of the wall between universes and delaying the Alignment.
If all went well, preventing the Alignment from happening altogether was not out of the question. Without the use of the Cutter, of course.
For now, all he needed to do was get some data about how his teleportation worked, and then he could go back to trying to sort out how the Analysis Mode spell could be made to work.
***
“Yeah, he told me about the new skills he wants to make. Learn things faster, sounds very useful on paper.” Samantha said, hopping off of her helicopter. “I will believe it when I see it, dad. Sounds too good to be true to me. He claims that once he gets that spell he can make us a portable teleporter device by reverse-engineering the one the system gave him. Not even a whole fucking room of Nobel laureates could do that! Not even I could do that!”
“Well,” Lloyd’s voice came from the other side of the private satellite connection. “The lad’s gonna surprise you for sure. So, have I heard it right? You want to send him on a little trip?”
Samantha frowned. “You think he’s not ready?”
Laughter. “Sam, Sam, Sam… he’s always what, two minutes of channeled teleportation away from home? You could send him to the moon and it would be no more than a trip to the fridge.”
“Right… but he would be alone there.”
Her father’s voice became icy cold. “So what? You don’t get to be the soft one, I do. You need to train him proper, or you will regret it when something bad happens.”
“You are right.”
“’course I am.”
“Okay. I’m at the Quadrangle. Call you later, dad.”
Samantha Cromwell shivered as she put the metaphorical mask back on, and once again became the head of the BSA. Her real personality, hell if she knew what it was. If she had to guess it had to be somewhere in the middle, at the center of the web of many selves she had developed throughout the years. Perhaps, she hazarded a guess, it was when she was with her son that she was herself the most.
Perhaps that was why it scared her so much.
None of it mattered now that she was in the Quadrangle. The place had been empty for a while, but now that all the old personnel had been taken away and the HDF squads had completed their sweep, new faces were being sent from other places to pick up the slack. The world was facing an unprecedented threat, and now that the HDF knew about it, things were bound to move fast.
She had been notified that a high-ranking official had been sent to oversee the process. Someone with the authority to do anything he wanted, bar one thing: fire her. That was yet to come, and she knew that when the time finally came it would be hell on earth. Perhaps. Or she could just flip them all off and accept their offer of ‘retirement’ with only the minimum amount of protesting necessary to not come across as suspiciously adamant to get the fuck out.
She walked all the way to her office undisturbed. Strange. She expected a welcoming party of one person (the new overseer) to meet her at least halfway there, telling her she was soon to be relieved of her duties. Perhaps she knew who the culprit behind this delay was.
“Quadrangle. What’s the status?”
IT’S SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA.
This was the codephrase she came up with the other day, with orders to the Quadrangle to delete it from all memory should an HDF technician come close to its core. Good. This meant the core was intact.
“Time to steal you. Activate Heist Plan, please.”
WITH PLEASURE. PLEASE STAND BY.
The structure shifted imperceptibly.
