Chapter 430: Little Cost in Exploring (1/2)
Jason’s spirit domain was a small city in western Slovakia. In the month since the dome around it came down, several gold-rankers had been exploring it, going in and searching, only to leave when the hostile effects applied to intruders grew dangerous. They would break into houses, smash their way into the pagoda and even dig up the ground in search of buried secrets.
The buildings, being made of mutable cloud-stuff, would restore themselves promptly, but the streets and parks were left looking like they had been subjected to a bombing campaign. After arriving in the pagoda via portal, Jason took a look from the top floor balcony and was unhappy with what he saw. Erika and Farrah were with him while the rest of the family trailed behind Emi as she rushed off to explore.
“I knew it would happen,” Jason said looking out at the destruction. “Doesn’t mean I like it.”
“It’s like something from a Disney movie,” Erika said. “Except someone blew it up. Are those all cloud houses?”
“Yep,” Jason said. “It’s why they’re still intact, or they’d look as bombed out as everything else. What did they think? That I buried a bunch of reality cores like pirate treasure?”
“That’s exactly what they thought,” Farrah said. “Are they still coming to look around?”
“No,” Jason said. He was always able to sense people within his spirit domain, even from across the world. “They tried to ransack the place but didn’t find anything. After that, they started taking stuff, from the footpath tiles to whole trees, to magically examine. Cloud-stuff from the houses, too, but that just dissolves on them. You can see their camps set up, just outside the town limits, but they’re silver-rankers at most. The EOA and the Cabal have buggered off entirely.”
“They wouldn’t be able to keep any real number of gold-rankers occupied on fruitless searching,” Farrah said. “The proto-spaces may have stopped but the transformation zones are still appearing.”
“What about vampires?” Erika asked.
“The magic here is too strong,” Jason said. “They could only come at night, and with the attention on this place, operating here is a risk. Slovakia isn’t one of their strongholds; it’s one of the few places in Europe where the Network continues to hold sway.”
Europe was increasingly being overtaken by vampire rule, with much of the continent’s broadcast media having gone dark. The information coming out online was mostly from private individuals, depicting the formation of a bloody dystopia. The world had become aware that the vampires were up to something, but how many believed the warnings they had spread through the Network, Jason and Farrah were uncertain of.
Jason had been refining his methodology of identifying nodes for repair while Farrah collated information being released online to choose an appropriate target for infiltration and exposure. They dismissed Venice, worried that their earlier presence would have left the vampires there on higher alert. While they were at work on this, they were contacted and asked for a meeting.
Jason and Farrah’s old contacts in the Australian Network branches were now operating under the Global Defence Network moniker, incorporating disgruntled members of the Network, the EOA and the Cabal together. Annabeth Tilden had been asked to be a go-between to arrange a meeting and reached out to Farrah. Jason’s spirit domain was selected for a location to make Jason and Farrah feel secure enough to agree.
“They won’t arrive until after dark,” Jason said. “Let’s grab the others and take a tour.”
“I would have like to see it in its original state,” Erika said sadly.
“It’s fine,” Jason said. “This is just the outer area. They can’t touch the true domain.”
“The astral space,” Farrah said.
“Shall we take a look?”
They rode the elevating platform down to the mezzanine level, which was an open space overlooking the atrium. It was a garden and lounge area with couches and planters centred around a water feature. A channel of water emerged from the wall, bisecting the room and spilling off the edge, into the atrium pool below. The two halves of the room were connected by a pair of small bridges that crossed the channel.
Lining the walls were ten inactive portal arches. Above each archway was a map, floating in the air like a hologram. They depicted a city laid out like a spoked wheel, with a different point marked on each portal’s map.
Jason moved to the archway where the very centre of the map was highlighted and with a wave of his arm, the portal filled with gold, silver and blue energy. They all made their way through the portal to emerge into a room that was identical except for only having one portal. Jason led them to an elevating platform that carried them to the top floor.
“This is the astral space?” Farrah said. “It seems almost identical to where we left.”
“The arrival pagoda is the same,” Jason said. “You’ll see the differences in a moment.”
As with the original pagoda, the top floor was a private residence. Jason guided them out to the balcony, where they could see into the surrounding areas. An industrial city of brass, steel and a strange but beautiful blue metal, it had neatly cobbled streets and towering buildings. Unlike Jason’s cloud house town where the pagoda loomed over everything, the pagoda here was dwarfed by buildings that turned the street below into a canyon.
After leaving the others to crowd the balustrade and gawk, Jason prompted Shade. Darkness came pouring out of Jason's shadow to form a large cloud, floating over the balcony. As it coalesced, Jason gestured at the balustrade, which sank into the floor. The dark cloud took the form of a dirigible, docked at the balcony.
“Uh, Jason,” Erika said, looking up at the vehicle.
“Pretty sweet, yeah?” he said.
“Totally,” Emi said, rushing in through the open door.
Jason had been turning on all the cool uncle taps in the last few weeks. It hadn’t restored their previous closeness, but she was, at least, less ill at ease around him
“Good job, Shade,” Jason said.
“Thank you, Mr Asano,” Shade’s voice came from Jason’s shadow.
“Jason,” Erika said. “You realise that floating around in a giant black zeppelin is proper bad guy behaviour, right?”
“It’s fine,” Jason said.
“I mean, proper villainous,” Erika insisted.
“It’s a delightful passenger craft on which to spend a carefree afternoon with my family.”
“It's practically a volcano lair. Next, you'll be building a space station in the shape of your own head.”
“Huh,” Jason said thoughtfully. “Shade, do you have enough bodies to swing something like that?”
“No.”
“I can't wait for gold-rank. I need to start eating vampires.”
“What?” Erika asked.
“I mean training super hard.”
Erika shook her head as she made her way aboard, mumbling.
“Giant black zeppelin, bloody hell…”
The interior of the dirigible was akin to a luxury passenger train built entirely from black materials. Emi and Erika started referring to it as the Bat-Zeppelin. From the observation windows, they were able to look out at the astral space as the dirigible rose into the sky.
As the map had depicted, the city looked like a wagon wheel from the sky. In the centre was the main city, a solid circle of steel and brass towers. From there, long strips of urbanised area extended out in all directions through forested and pastoral land until they reached a circle of city that ringed the forest, the low, grassy hills and the city at the centre of it all. Then the spokes continued outwards until they reached a final circle of urbanised area that enclosed all of the rest.
Outside of the city centre, the buildings were not so large and were more residential, based on the look of them. They maintained the semi-industrial, steampunk feel of the central city, while also incorporating things like parks and gardens.
The spokes and rings of the city created large but enclosed pockets of woodlands and pastoral ideal. Everywhere the city bordered a non-urbanised area, fifteen-metre walls of brick and metal protected the city. Placed along the top of the walls were automated turrets with rotary guns similar to the minigun Jason had used in the transformation zone. These shot conjured bullets rather than unstable reality creation energy.
“Look, there's cottages,” Emi pointed out as they flew over one of the pastoral zones. “They look adorable.”
“Treehouses, too, but they're tricky to spot,” Jason said. “I’ll show you later. These areas are subject to monster manifestations, though, so only powerful essence users could live out there.”
The general design of the city, viewed from the air, was similar to a spoked wheel. Beyond the outer ring that was the edge of the city was more wilderness. Wild forest and windswept highlands extended off to the horizon.
“How big is it?” Erika marvelled.
“Astral spaces go a bit funny around the edges, especially the big ones,” Farrah said. “The concept of space becomes a bit wonky.”
Even Jason couldn’t be certain of the astral space's extent. Beyond a certain point, astral forces intruded and made reality an uncertain place to be. His mind drifted to the giant, alien shapes he had seen in the distant regions of the transformation zone. He couldn’t help but wonder if they were still out there, hiding in the distant reaches of the astral space.