141 Letting Go (1/2)

It would not be enough to close the fissure, as that would only be delaying the inevitable. They would have to purge the infection first before they closed the fissure shut, as unbelievable as it sounded.

Reed's role was to clean up the infection in the fissure until it was free of miasma by heading down into the built-in infrastructure of the planet that ran the Heavenly Barrier, the Michomitl.

Deep beneath the crust of the earth, laid a vast and expansive network of complex machinery that only a few people in the multiverse truly understood. It was an advanced, continent-sized machine of vast proportions. Not even Lu'um could say with complete certainty that she fully understood the means by which the Heavenly Barrier operated.

Thankfully, Reed would not have to perform any complicated repairs upon the Michomitl. That was, perhaps, the only silver lining about Reed's task. All he would have to do is descend through a literal hell-storm of miasma and an extreme-high density Anima storm the size of the North itself.

In layman's terms, he would have to survive an empire-sized marathon of pure, suicidal madness.

Lu'um, who was clearly far the stronger one of the two, had been left with an equally burdensome and daunting task. She was the one who would have to close the fissure shut.

It was a fissure a thousand kilometers in length by Lu'um guess, though she was certain that it was possibly even larger than that. Even for her, it would not be an easy task to accomplish. The amount of power and skill required to do something as ridiculous as what she was about to do could be counted a single hand.

Something like this would have been reserved for the likes of the greatest Ancient Mulians who belonged to the Builder-caste. In times past, they would have used their titanic engineer-fleets to shape planets as they wished, terraforming them on a scale unprecedented.

This was why Lu'um had expressed great unease when she learned about what they had been tasked to do.

She peered down at the fissure in search of his figure. It was nowhere to be found, already lost within the turbulent chaos within the enormous maw of death. He had really gone off and done it.

There was nothing she could do for him now. He would have to fend for himself down there and activate the reset node buried all the way at the bottom. Only then would she be allowed to start closing the fissure...

He better make it. He has to make it on time. He will. If he doesn't make in time, I'll...!

Her thoughts were in complete disarray as she gazed down at the chaos below. The wait was going to kill her before anything would have the chance...

Reed was out of his mind. His vision had already begun to fail. There was too much to keep track of in the hellstorm within the fissure.

He was treading the fine line between life and death like never before in his life. A single incorrect move and he'd die instantly, for there was much to be feared in the hellstorm.

Huge flares of super-heated Anima condensate swirled in huge vortices the size of warships everywhere he looked... and those were the smaller ones. The bigger ones were, at the very least, larger than the entire combined fleet that participated in the Twilight War.

There were also massive pockets of space filled with miasma that limited the paths he could take on the way down. Reed couldn't pass through the miasma because unlike Lu'um, he could not control as much Anima as she did. Once it melted through the thin shield separating himself and the outside, he'd meet a terrible end.

If his body did not melt because of the miasma, he'd be torn to pieces by one of the Anima vortices instead. Or he'd be cooked to death in seconds because of the terrifying heat. Perhaps the incredible pressure bearing down on him would compress him to into a ball of flesh and bone...

Reed didn't know. All he knew was that if he died, Lu'um would probably end up wearing him on one of her fingers as a shiny diamond.

In comparison to everything around him, he was practically nonexistent. He was like a grain of sand in a churning ocean. Even so, Reed continued to descend without stopping like a shooting star that had fallen into a hellish world of fury and death.

The pain was starting to become too much to handle, even for him. His mind could not handle the strain of processing ten thousand different variables at once, let alone for the last...

...How long has it been since I've started? ...I don't remember when this started.

It had gotten that bad. A second for him had turned into a unit of measurement equivalent to that of a day. And it was not unsurprising, given he had to account for every single second within the hellstorm.

After all, it'd only take a single wrong move to spell his death and Reed was performing hundred of moves -- course adjustments and subtle manipulations -- every second.

But it was getting harder. At first, for every thousand future dead ends, there would be a single path of success where he'd survive, but now...