Gods of Myth and Midnight: A LitRPG Novel (Seeds of Chaos Book 3)

by Azalea Ellis

  At one point, Sam got his section of the rope caught on a jagged rock, and we had to carefully untangle it before continuing.

  One of the tunnels we needed to travel through was narrow enough that the supply pallets barely fit through, and it took a lot of gentle maneuvering and tugging before we made it to the next cavern.

  From there, we moved onto a larger tunnel, but, as if something had realized we were there and wanted to expel us, the water started moving against us, pulling us in the opposite direction of the anomaly. The extra drag of the supplies and Birch’s bubble made it impossible to win against the current, and we lost a few hundred meters of progress before Adam used one of the ink cartridges he’d strapped to the outside of his wetsuit.

  He created a pair of huge dolphins, and they grabbed the plastine rope with their mouths and pulled us forward, dragging our helpless forms after them until we burst out into the cavern with the anomaly. Adam dismissed them, while the rest of the group looked around curiously.

  The current had disappeared, leaving us in a dark hole of still water. There weren’t even any little pieces of biological sediment floating through the water, so it was crystal-clear. We hung back at the entrance while I felt around with Wraith and Adam scanned the area with the waterproof monitoring devices he'd brought.

  I shivered from the cold, despite the thermal wetsuit and the hours of exertion. No wonder no other human had ever found this spot.

  When Adam found nothing out of the ordinary, Zed opened up a rip into the Other Place, big enough for us to see the undulating globule of the anomaly hanging in the center. It looked like some huge amoeba, or maybe a distant mirage.

  Adam and I examined the alternate version of the cavern.

  I didn’t find anything except the same warmth and a buzzing sensation from the anomaly.

  Adam took a bit longer to poke at the instruments and frown, then sent out a Window.

  —I am getting some strange readings, but it is possible they are being thrown off by whatever Zed’s Skill just did to the fabric of reality, or the Other Place itself.—

  -Adam-

  He swam through the rip without another word, scanning the distortion again on the other side. He returned after only a couple minutes, when his devices started to fail. He shook them in irritation, and, after a little while back in the normal world, they recovered.

  —Looks like the EMP shielding didn’t work. I wasn’t able to get detailed readings, but there don’t seem to be any dangerous emissions. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything, though.—

  -Adam-

  I nodded.

  —Now for the rest of the tests.—

  -Eve-

  To be honest, I wasn't optimistic that tests beyond what had already been done would discover anything useful. But it was better to be as safe as possible, just in case.

  Adam sent out an ink fish, which he had ingrained with instructions to swim out one hundred feet toward the distortion and then return. As soon as it entered the spot of warmth, it visibly disintegrated.

  Adam shook his head silently, all the answer I needed.

  Kris went next, bringing out a fish she'd brought with her. I knew from its lack of vital signs that it was dead, but it swam around her like an affectionate pet before following her pointing finger out into the cavern. It hesitated, first at the edge of the rip in the Veil, and then again at the edge of the distortion in the Other Place. It swam around a few times and even turned around, as if to return to Kris, before she jabbed her finger at it again in a commanding motion. It moved nearer the distortion and, after a few seconds, disappeared.

  A shock-wave spread out from the distortion, rolling through the water and over us a few seconds later.

  —I lost the connection. It's probably just a dead fish on the other side, without my Skill to bind the spirit to the flesh.—

  -Kris-

  —That’s okay. I think what we just got fairly good evidence that we’re looking at a portal to somewhere else. Adam’s ink fish was apparently unable to withstand the vibration, though, so we’d better brace ourselves.—

  -Eve-

  Adam released a couple small devices into the water, small propellers pushing them forward.

  —These are programmed to turn around, and if the portal is the same on the other side, may be able to return to us with more information.—

  -Adam-

  The shockwave rolled out again, but the devices didn't return. It was no surprise, taking into account the electronic-killing properties of both the Other Place and the damage an uncalibrated Shortcut could do.

  I looked around at the others, who were, by now, starting to shiver noticeably.

  —Any more tests?—

  -Eve-

  Torliam, the only one of us besides Birch without a VR chip, pointed silently to the distortion, walked his fingers forward in the water, and then nodded emphatically. I took it to mean that he felt we needed to enter the distortion.

  I nodded decisively.

  —Then it's time.—

  -Eve-

  We all swam forward, bracing ourselves against the unknown. Zed allowed the rip behind us to close. We gathered around the distortion, and then closed in on it together, grabbing onto each other and our supplies for extra security.

  The vibration built up in a familiar manner, running through me till it felt like my bones were shivering. Then things snapped, but, unlike the Shortcut or one of the arrays, I did not find myself suddenly somewhere else. My senses abandoned me at first as my existence snapped, again and again, but then I saw flashes of color and light in the darkness, as if a god had been playing with sprinkles of light to fill the void, though I felt only emptiness beyond my teammates, and I wasn't sure if my eyes were in fact open or closed.

  Then it was over. I fell, collapsing forward onto hard, jagged stone. The world spun, my stomach heaved. I scrabbled at the front of my helmet, barely removing it before spewing up vomit onto the stone in front of me.

  I heard the others doing the same, and hoped that the nausea was the worst of whatever the teleportation had done to us.

  After my stomach was empty and the world had stopped doing ballerina-twirls around my pitiful, prostrated form, I stood. "This is not what I expected," I said, wrinkling my nose at the sulfuric, acrid smell on the air.

  For some reason, I'd imagined that whatever was beyond the portal would be like Estreyer. Probably dangerous and maybe deadly. But heartbreakingly beautiful.

  Instead, barren land stretched out before us, where we stood atop a hill made of dirt and jagged shale. A red sun shone in the mottled sky, pouring down heat that made me dizzy from system-shock as my body attempted to acclimate from the harsh cold of the Other Place. There were no animals or vegetation in sight, and the clouds in the distance were a sickly, poisonous mixture of grey and purple. It was a barren wasteland, a hellscape from a nightmare.

  Gregor threw up inside his mask, and then used his Shadow Skill to turn incorporeal, excluding the mask from his transition, thus slipping it off his face without ever actually opening it. Some of the vomit had still gotten in his nose and eyes, and he screamed, wiping desperately at his face. “I’m blinded! I’m blinded!” Then he threw himself to the ground in panic, flailing about.

  Torliam held him down and used his Skill to remove the vomit while Sam healed the minor damage that had occurred to the boy’s sensitive tissue.

  When it was done, Sam just blinked rapidly for the few seconds it took his eyes to heal, and Gregor climbed back to his feet, simultaneously scowling and blushing while he refused to meet anyone’s eyes.

  I was prepared for something to attack, or some sort of Trial to immediately start, but instead, things were somewhat anticlimactic.

  Sam checked the rest of us for decompression sickness, since we'd transition from diving with the pressure of millions of pounds of water to suddenly arriving somewhere…else without any time for our bodies to adjust. He found a few bubbles, and instructed Torl
iam on how to remove them, since his own Skill wasn’t the best at dealing with such things. Torliam found it relatively simple to fix the issue with Sam’s aid.

  My eyes soon began to sting and water from the toxic air, and I started to cough as my lungs and throat grew irritated.

  Torliam waved a hand through the air, blue mist trailing behind it. "The air in this place is acrid and low on oxygen. It will slowly degrade your mucous membranes if you are not strong enough to resist it. Perhaps, for the weaker members of our group, this will be dangerous."

  Sam raised a hand, one finger pointed upward like an exclamation mark. "I prepared for this," he said, hurrying over to one of the pallets holding our sealed supplies. "Well, not this specifically, but an environment where the air would be hazardous." He rummaged around for a while, then pulled out a set of gas masks. His eyes flickered over them and the oxygen tanks as he muttered silently to himself. "If we hook the oxygen up to the gas masks to combat the lack of sufficient oxygen in the air, we have enough to support a low feed for a couple weeks. The only problem is, we won’t have any left to swim back the same way we entered, which we may need to do."

  I turned to look at the spot on the ground that had spat us out—a circular mound that reminded me of a burst pustule, and which was sporadically spitting up a spray of salt water behind us. A dead fish lay on the ground beside it, but Pinocchio, who had come through with us, was very much still animated and was actually poking the fish with a stick.

  Birch shouldered the little wooden puppet out of the way, grabbed the fish, and ran away to eat it while giving Pinocchio nasty looks.

  Torliam frowned and turned to me. "Perhaps Zed, Chanelle, and the children would make best use of the oxygen.”

  "Let's try it, at least," I said. "I don't want to run out of oxygen if there's any other way."

  "I don't need any," Zed said, releasing the wheels built into the bottom of the supply pallets so that they would travel easier. "The nanites are augmenting my body, just like your Seeds do for you, remember? I can hike just fine with a gasmask alone."

  Sam had even ordered a gas mask sized to fit a bomb squad dog, for Birch. The muzzle was much too long, but it sealed just fine to his face, and Birch ruffled his wings with a pleased chortle, breathing deeply to exacerbate the eerie sound of air passing through the filter.

  Adam scowled at the barren landscape stretching out in front of the range of hills where we stood, then turned to Torliam. "Do you have any idea where we are? Does this place look like anywhere you've been before?"

  "No," Torliam said. "I do not recognize this place. It is not one of the layers of my world. A god powerful enough would not be restricted by such things, however. Estreyer was made by and of the gods, after all."

  "Do you at least know where we're supposed to go from here to find him? I don't see any gigantic humanoids—except yourself and Eve—ambling around."

  Torliam stretched out an arm and pointed forward.

  "The compass isn't working," Adam muttered. "So I hope your Skill can handle the navigation all on its own."

  Torliam threw him a derisive look. “It has been accurate thus far.”

  “Yet you didn’t manage to find this place,” Adam muttered back, looking away and pretending he wasn’t talking to Torliam, even though it was obvious and we could all hear him.

  “Let’s just get going,” I said, hoping to forestall yet another argument between the two.

  As we removed our thermal wetsuits, so we didn't sweat to death in the heat, I sent out my awareness. There was power all around, infused into this place, similar to the lands I'd felt on Estreyer when drawing near a god. It lifted my spirits a little, despite that fact that I sensed no single brighter spot of power to indicate our search was at an end.

  Kris frowned, turning in a circle atop the hillside. “There’s nothing alive here. No spirits or any dead bodies, either.” She shuddered. “It’s creepy. And it means none of my mannequins are going to be useful.” We’d ordered a couple and put them in the supply pallets. They were just high-quality clothing mannequins, but we’d thought they were better than nothing, and had no way to get weaponized bodies like she’d had on Estreyer. She hadn’t put spirits into them yet, because the ones on Ellesmere Island were quite weak and she’d hoped to find something stronger on the other side. Now, however, it looked like that had been a mistake.

  We made our way down the side of the large hill gingerly, slipping and sliding often when the shale beneath our feet crumbled away. Once, after one of the supply packets took a particularly nasty tumble, a few larger rocks broke off and pelted down toward us.

  Torliam batted them away with a casual display of his Skill's strength, swatting them to the side like one might shoo a fly.

  After we'd been walking across the rocky, barren plain for a couple hours, the clouds in the distance rolled in thickly, bulbous and threatening as they blocked out the mottled sky and angry sun.

  Lightning struck down, coming more and more frequently as the wind picked up. There was no shelter for us to run to, nowhere for us to hide. I was considering taking one of the plastine blowup tents from the supplies for us to huddle inside when the hair on my arms suddenly rose up as if trying to escape my skin.

  My eyes widened in alarm.

  Adam raised his arms and screamed, "Get down!"

  I let my knees buckle under me, and then the world exploded.

  The light seemed to rise up from the ground and strike down from the heavens at the same time, meeting where Adam stood. It coursed through him, branching off and reaching for us with arms of electricity.

  The blast knocked me off my feet. I blinked, eyes wide open but seeing only the dark shifting almost-colors that came when something too bright burns its memory into your retinas. My ears rang tinnily.

  With some effort, as little sparks of tingling electricity jumped along my skin and my muscles twitched, I rolled over and threw up for the second time that day, this time only expelling the small amount of bile still remaining in my stomach.

  After taking a moment to collect myself, I accessed Wraith to take the place of my useless sight and hearing for a moment.

  Jacky rose from her fetal position, grinning widely and saying something that I thought was, "I didn't get caught this time!" until she caught sight of Adam's prone form. She turned to look for Sam, but Torliam was already there, dragging our healer over to Adam's body.

  Adam was literally steaming like a roast turkey, still twitching sporadically.

  As Sam set to work, little bits of blackened flesh fell off Adam, leaving healed skin behind, and Sam's mouth set into a grim line as his own body assumed the wounds. His Resilience was over level ninety by now from all the Seeds and training that had gone into that Attribute and the Harbinger of Death Skill.

  I almost heaved again, but managed to regain control of myself. I remembered, with a sort of frantic delirium, that lightning actually did often strike the same spot twice. And as the only standing things in this barren stretch of desert, we were basically walking lightning rods. When one person was struck by lightning, the current would often jump to someone nearby. Adam had protected us from all being electrocuted, at a cost to himself.

  I stumbled a few feet away and let out a wave of Chaos, crumbling the earth beneath me in a long sweep. I looked for Torliam, but he was busy, so I motioned to Birch to clear the dirt with his Skill.

  The monster-cat bounded over, slamming a gust of wind borrowed from the storm into the ground in front of us. It easily swept away the mass of pebbles that had once been hard ground.

  I judged the trench we'd created, and shook my head. "Not deep enough,” I muttered, barely able to hear my own voice past the ringing in my ears and the howl of the wind.

  I reached for Chaos again, but Birch distracted me. He crouched down and the familiar dark tendrils of my power spilled out from his mouth, breaking up more earth for him to blow away. He turned to look at me expectantly, like a child showing off f
or their parent.

  "Good job," I told him, ruffling his fur while sending a Window to call the others into the protection of the trench.

  Sam moved Adam, who was still breathing, thank goodness, into my makeshift shelter.

  —Crouch down with your feet together. Nobody too close to each other.—

  -Adam-

  We followed his instruction and huddled down. The storm went on for hours, till we were all half-deaf from the booming of thunder. Though the lightning often struck uncomfortably close, it didn't hit any of us or do more than lift our hair with the residual charge in the air. Slowly, the lightning petered off, and, though we stayed in the trench just in case, I allowed myself to hope the worst was over.

  Then, it started to rain. After a few minutes, the dirt grew muddy, and we all began to shift around uncomfortably. The rain burned my skin.

  I closed my eyes to keep the liquid out, which seemed to be concentrated with whatever made the air so acrid. A few strands of my hair broke off and slipped away from my head, leaving me with a mental image of what I might look like bald, if the rain continued to fall. I was about to dig out a scoop from the side of the trench to create a barrier of dirt above us when the clouds seemed to crack like an egg, sending torrential sheets of water to smash down on us. The trench would be flooded within minutes.

  I wondered if we might use some plastine sheeting to shelter from the rain. With Wraith active, my awareness focused on the pallets instinctively.

  To my horror, I discovered the fibers in the reinforced plastine sheet covering our supplies weren’t immune to the corrosion of whatever the rain was filled with. Which meant that we couldn't use it as a protection, but also that our supplies were in danger.