179 The Greatest Hail Mary In History (1/2)

In that same vein of thought, Lu'um believed that Reed carried a remnant of that infantile, yet astounding genius. That was the conclusion she had come to after listening to Reed's proposal.

It was nothing short of spectacular insanity, as far as she was concerned. To some extent, she even doubted the sanity of her beloved. There was pure stupidity and then there was what Reed had suggested, Lu'um thought to herself.

But the worst part of it all was that... she couldn't really find any justifiable reasons to refute his plan, even after triple-checking the hypothetical factors involved with the whole scheme.

Though Lu'um hated it, she had to admit that Reed had indeed presented a solution that covered every single base she was worried about and then some. If it all went to plan, they'd even take care of the Itroch syndrome cases along with their little problem floating above the city.

”You do know that this plan hinges on whether or not we'll actually be able to perform an administrative reboot or not, right? I don't have the credentials for that, so I won't be able to help you with that. And the amount of Anima that'd you need to realistically affect the entire continent is absolutely out of—”

”Then do you have any better ideas? If all you're going to do is complain, then go find me a city-sized wench so we can haul this back to Citlai,” said Reed.

He was starting to get a little bit irritated with Lu'um incessant worrying, which he felt was not helping anyone. Not one to miss an ironic situation, he suddenly realized how strange it was for her to voice such concerns and wondered if this was a recurring problem on her end whenever she proposed her own ideas to him.

Reed was no stranger when it came to himself — he was well aware of his troublesome idiosyncrasies, particularly whenever they got into dangerous situations. He was a professional worrywart himself. Thus, it came with a heavy blow to Reed when he figured out that he must've always sounded like that to Lu'um in the past.

There was nothing productive about someone who always doubted, criticized, and complained.

...Is that how I'm usually like in these situations? Good lord, if I've been like that since the very beginning, then what sort of inhumane patience must she possess to have handled me nonsense for years?

This all but confirms that she's a real saint. I would've blown my brains out if I had to deal with someone like me every time a difficult or risky dilemma arose.

...I should probably do something for her after this.

Lu'um, who had been preparing to give Reed a tongue-lashing, choked on her spit in moderate disbelief when she heard his apology. It'd been such a level-headed, polite follow-up that she scarcely believed it had come out his mouth.

What the hell was going on today? Was it the city, the peculiar Anima, or some other unknown factor that was affecting his mental state? Or was she the one who was being affected in some strange way she couldn't discern?

He was not like himself at all. She preferred the coarse, free-spirited, and charmingly inconsiderate fellow that she had come to understand as ”Reed”. To her, Reed's raw, immature edges were proof that he was naturally himself and not a simulacrum.

Rather than deal with something artificially whetted and constructed for a specific purpose, Reed was wholly himself, even if it came at the expense of himself or others around him.

Reed had not forsaken his own personal identity to become something else, something unnatural and fabricated... like Him.

Was it a sign of personal growth or had it been the rumbling of His footsteps beginning to affect him?

There was no way to whether it was one or the other. Not without intruding into his mind and finding out for herself, but that was something they had expressly forbidden each other from doing.

”...Is something wrong, Sweetcheeks? Look you, well, like you caught a bug.”

”No, I'm fine,” said Lu'um, quickly covering up her slip up with a calm smile. ”I just found it a little odd that you'd come up such an absurd plan from nothing. Even I wouldn't have imagined it, to be honest.”

And it was true. Not even she would have had the audacity to propose what Reed had envisioned.

He sought to defy the order of imposed upon the continent in one fell swoop by... hijacking the Will of the World itself, if only for a brief moment.

His plan stemmed from his newly discovered connection to the titan beneath the earth and his ability to control it.

Reed had only tasted it for a short while, but that had been more than enough for him to imagine doing the unthinkable.

It was an established fact that all Anima that flowed across the continent came to the titan itself as if it were its own blood. Without it, the Heavenly Barrier would shut down and all life would perish.

In essence, all Chosen were merely microbes feeding on an insignificant sliver of the Anima that went to sustaining the Heavenly Barrier. Even the many cities modern Mulia had built amounted to nothing in the face of the outrageous amount of Anima that was constantly fed to maintain the continent's strongest and most important defense.

The world would continue to live another day so long as the titan's heart continued to beat, even if it was unconscious and injured.

So Reed, the oddity he was, proposed the idea of using the brief period after they activated the reset node to commandeer the titan itself power something he had not used for a long time.

What he had sealed within himself in a layer of subspace two-hundredths of a millimeter in an unreachable direction to beings that existed in three spatial dimensions.

The Divine Furnace had not left his side, even after all that had occurred since the Twilight War. It had bonded itself unto Reed's very existence, such that it had become an ever-present vestige of not so readily cherished.

For all practical purposes, the construct was divine in composition despite being made by mortal hands. As far as Reed comprehended, it was capable of far, far more than he or even Lu'um presumed to know.

And it was the only thing he knew that could possibly handle the immense flood of Anima that they would redirect in order to realistically do what Reed wanted to do.

He wanted to perform a one-way slingshot from Mulia all the way to Citlai by means of simulating the same method that Guiding Nails operated upon. That is, to create a non-euclidean bridge across the hostile vacuum of unbound existence that was the Outside.