Chapter 1386 (1/2)
Sydney released a powerful and frigid pressure toward Thea Glasshammer’s face. Her gaze didn’t waver in the slightest. “...what did you say?”
Thea’s barred her teeth. “Do I need to spell it out for you? Your subordinate’s elemental isn’t here. It was taken by Ace several months ago in order to study the composition of elementals. Honestly, at this point…heh.”
If anything, Sydney’s gaze turned colder. But she didn’t follow the impulse of her temper. Instead, she tilted her head to the side and examined Thea. This was… wrong somehow.
It had taken Sydney months in order to locate the small island that the Nemesai called home. When she had seen the state of their living conditions, even Sydney felt a brief flash of pity for these individuals. They were truly living out of caves in order to survive. Apparently, Phirun was using the time where the other Zones were preparing to search for the Runic Tablet to hunt the Nemesai down to the ends of the Earth.
King Phirun held a deep grudge against the Nemesai for nearly causing Ifrenne to crash into the sea, after all. And he was not the sort of man to forget small slights.
Yet it wasn’t just exhaustion and fear that Sydney found in Thea’s expression. Her eyes were narrowed and it was fury that seemed to burn with a tangible heat in her person. Sydney’s skin tingled as she continued to channel her new image through her body in the face of that heat, extinguishing its influence around her. Cold and a numbness that was not quite related to the cold spread across her body. Yet Sydney didn’t even blink.
Her anger was completely extinguished. What she needed was to understand whether Thea Glasshammer was lying to her right now.
The tension of the moment seemed the vibrate the air between the two women. Then Sydney saw it. Thea wasn’t lying, but she was posturing. In order to push Sydney to challenge her to a fight. Right now, Thea Glasshammer was raw and itching for a target for all the aggression she didn’t want to turn toward herself.
Coward. Very purposefully, Sydney blinked. The chill surrounding her faded.
Some part of Sydney wanted to try and say something to Thea, guide her toward some self-reflection that would rid her of this burden she carried. Yet Sydney already had her hands full trying to finally put Drake back together. The man had been insensible from pain for almost a year at this point.
In the past, Sydney would have felt more sympathy for Thea. Now she just felt pity. She couldn’t muster up any desire to assist this young woman.
So Sydney turned away. “Thanks for the information.”
Ace… what happened to us…? Behind her, Thea’s image flared to life, furious but unwilling to be the aggressor in the situation. Yet Sydney just looked down toward her numb hands. A white bolt of lightning skittered across her knuckles. Would you truly continue to prolong Drake’s torture in order to accomplish your twisted wish…? Why couldn’t you have let go of your obsession.
Sydney’s hands dropped to her sides. She spoke out loud as she left the caves, one small favor for the girl too afraid of the truth standing behind her. “We aren’t gods. We are all just shitty people… even Randidly Ghosthound.”
*****
In the end, Randidly had to pull out some spare lumber that he had laying around in his interspatial ring in order to support the rapid proliferation of sketches he made as he designed the Kharon Academy’s underground Labyrinth. After much deliberation, Randidly had set the goal to create nine levels to the labyrinth to mirror the nine worlds held by Yggdrasil. But since even his first level meant he was standing in the middle of a wide circle of hastily made sketches...
So Randidly had constructed his typical one-room shack, with a writing desk and heavy wooden table in the middle of the shack. The walls had since been covered in pages of initial designs, from play mechanisms to traps to puzzles and finally to the initial idea for a living engraving that Randidly would carve into the place to give it its own spirit.
All the hung sketches had the strange effect of making the house seem like a normal woodcutter’s shack from the outside, but once one was inside, it looked like the entirety of the structure was made with the fluttering pieces of paper that had been pinned to the walls. It was a rustling house of cards, ready to fall. Not a single spot of wood, aside from the table, desk, and the roof, was showing.
When Randidly had gone down for his second batch of paper, Tatiana gave him an extremely strange look. Perhaps her insight into Randidly’s actions had triggered, because she reminded Randidly that his main focus should be on solving the problems they already had, not creating more complicated jobs for her.
Randidly grinned at her and winked, to which Tatiana rolled her eyes. But he did spend some more time thinking about the problems plaguing Kharon before he returned to the time sink that Randidly’s shack had become.
Most of the struggles between the various economic interest on Kharon were for two reasons: space and funding. The former Randidly could address pretty easily, but the latter was a much more thorny bundle of problems. Because it wasn’t just that the companies wanted money from the government, but they wanted reassurance their investments weren’t soon going to become worthless.
Currently, Kharon charged a flat tax on both the importation of raw materials from the various areas they visited and on finished goods. All of the expenditures that Tatiana and her administration made had come from these taxes.
The companies essentially paid to bring in the raw materials and then the consumers paid to obtain their final products. But the tax itself was relatively small. Which meant most of the money was in fact in the hands of the various companies in Kharon, but they didn’t feel comfortable spending money on improving their own infrastructure because of the lack of predictability of Kharon’s movements.
Should they improve their work area? Should they invest in more warehouses? Would it be more intelligent to just watch as the price of land continued to rise and then sell their land to a competitor for double what they paid for it?