Chương 324: Chapter 323 - The Oblivion's Matter

Lucid watched her go. Then he leaned back on his hands and looked up at the void above them, purple and enormous and, now, one A-rank Unfaithful lighter than it had been. His head still throbbed. His nose had mostly stopped. The chain had settled back to its passive draw and the ringing in his left ear was faint. Then the warmth arrived. Not from the void, not from the ambient temperature of the carriage roof. From inside.

Something familiar pressing through the space behind his sternum, green and careful and already reading the damage before he had named any of it.

"Are you alright, Lucid?" Her voice. Back in the shared space where it belonged, formal and unhurried, carrying underneath the formality something that was neither formal nor unhurried. He exhaled.

"You have bad timing," he said.

"I have perfect timing," Alice replied.

"You simply have a tendency to create situations that make any timing appear insufficient." A pause.

"You are bleeding. Your chain ran unmanaged. You have destroyed an A-rank Unfaithful with no conscious account of doing so." Another pause, shorter.

"I was not gone long."

"Long enough."

"Yes," she said, and did not follow it with anything else. The green warmth moved through him steadily, finding the damage and addressing it in the sequence she always used, most critical first, cosmetic last. The throbbing behind his eyes eased. The ringing faded entirely. Across the roof, Ayame crouched over the rear section of the void snake with her red dagger, working with precision that suggested she had done this before, or something close enough.

Arthur stood a few feet back, watching her with the expression of a man who had not yet committed to whether he was going to eat void snake. Lucid sat on the carriage roof in the purple void and let Alice work.

"Well, I can cook," Lucid said, looking up briefly. Ayame looked uncomfortable with the silence that followed his statement. Arthur surfaced from the control panel and moved imm ediately toward Lucid, his expression shifting into something between concern and assessment.

"No, I can do it. You worked hard out here, you must be tired," Arthur said, moving past Lucid toward where the snake remains lay cooling. Lucid glanced sideways at Valen, who was standing entirely too close, his expression carrying something that Lucid couldn't immediately categorize. Valen caught the look and, as if responding to some unspoken accusation, slithered around behind Lucid with the smooth efficiency of someone trying to appear entirely casual.

Then both of his hands landed on Lucid's shoulders and began working.

"Wait, what," Lucid said.

"That feels—" he started, and surprised himself by actually meaning it. Whatever Valen was doing with his hands against the muscles along Lucid's upper back was genuinely, irritatingly effective. Arthur carried the cut meat toward the kitchen without comment, already cataloging what was available. Lucid was almost fully surrendered to the massage until Valen explored further regions entirely uninvited.

"What the hell!" Lucid lurched forward.

"Where exactly are you touching?" He turned with a swing, which Valen ducked at the last possible second. The dodge was clean, precise, infuriating. The follow-through of Lucid's momentum carried into something solid and heavy, a coin pouch swinging from Valen's belt catching him square against the knuckles.

"That's a heavy coin pouch," Lucid muttered, shaking his hand out.

"Hey, rules!" Valen said, spreading his hands with theatrical innocence. Alice's voice returned within his mind, dry as parchment. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"I leave for one extended period and you are receiving massages from your corporate creditor on the roof of a void train."

'Don't start,' Lucid replied internally.

"I merely observe," she said.

"Observe quietly."

"As you wish," she replied, and he could feel the smile attached to those words without needing to see her face. Valen had already retreated a comfortable distance, leaning against the edge of the roof with his arms crossed, the coin pouch swaying gently at his hip.

"You're wound incredibly tight," Valen remarked, as though Lucid's reaction had been the strange part.

"For someone who allegedly rested last night."

"I allegedly did a lot of things last night," Lucid said. Valen studied him for a second, yellow eyes moving across his face with something that looked briefly like genuine curiosity before the usual performance reasserted itself.

"Right," Valen said.

"Well. Your back says otherwise." Lucid didn't have a clean response to that, so he didn't offer one. From below, through the carriage walls, the smell of something cooking reached the roof, something savory, fat rendering in heat. Arthur worked fast when he had ingredients worth working with. Ayame finished with the carcass and rose, cleaning her dagger against the outer edge of her dark sleeve in a motion so practiced it looked almost meditative.

She crossed the roof toward Lucid and sat beside him without asking whether there was space. There was. She took it anyway. She didn't say anything. Neither did he. After a moment, her shoulder settled against his, not leaning exactly, but close enough that the contact registered. Valen observed this from his position at the edge, tilted his head approximately three degrees, and chose to say nothing for once in his life.

'She does that often?' Alice asked within his mind, her voice carrying careful neutrality.

'She's cold,' Lucid thought back.

'Body temperature. Void hunting takes it out of her.'

'That is not what I asked,' Alice replied. Lucid didn't respond. The void spread around them in every direction, purple and depthless, enormous in the way of things that don't have a far edge. Distant rock formations drifted through it at their own patient pace, unhurried by anything. The debris from the A-rank creature had already spread far enough that he couldn't distinguish it from the background scatter.

'You fought well,' Alice offered after a moment, her tone shifting to something quieter.

'Without me managing the chain. You held.'

'I didn't really know what I was doing,' Lucid admitted.

'Most people who hold,' she replied, 'don't.' Valen pushed off the edge of the roof and moved toward the lounge without being asked. Lucid noticed he hadn't worn his coat. Ayame stayed at the window. She looked down at the void the way she looked at most things, steady, faintly curious. It moved at a slow, constant pace, debris and broken rock drifting through the endless purple expanse.

Lucid remembered swinging through that same void once, with Ayame beside him, and looking at her now by the window brought the memory back whole. It had been a calculated risk at the time, but the villagers had driven them out over accusations of cult ties. He hadn't understood then how reckless the decision was. It wasn't until he started attending the academy, sitting through lecture after lecture, that he came to understand the world and its stranger workings.

What scared him wasn't losing his grip on Ayame, or failing to reach the sky dock. It was the oblivion, something centered so far below the scattered realms that it tore at the very fabric holding those realms together. Normally he would have brushed a thought like that aside, telling himself it wouldn't matter since he'd leave the world eventually anyway. But this fact presented itself as a problem. He could die.

Lucid, for all his cunning and every ability he'd trained into himself, was just as exposed as anyone else. The oblivion didn't discriminate. It consumed people, carriages, void creatures, and landmasses without preference. Rumor held that even the great Monoliths of humanity kept their distance from it. If something like Neptune or Mercyros avoided whatever sat centered below the scattered realms, there was no mistaking the danger. Lucid could die. Certain factions used it outright as a death sentence.

Citizens, criminals, slaves, kings, magistrates, merchants, it made no difference who had been thrown down there for execution. He'd read the records, grim accounts of how Matrena carried out frequent executions, with Ateris and Vex following not long after. One method stayed with him: pushing the condemned off the edge of their own territory and into the void.

Because the fall was a slow gravitational descent, the body would drift there helplessly, edging closer to the bottom until the flesh was finally pulled into the swirling vortex.

'Into vide, huh,' he thought.

'Do they even know something like that exists.' It struck him as ironic. People claimed to seek peace with mother fate, yet their methods of execution said otherwise, as if they were offering people to the devil instead.

'Wait. Isn't that the whole point of hell.' Alice, the voice inside him, stayed quiet, seemingly enjoying the thoughts running through Lucid's mind.

"Who is vide?" Alice asked. Lucid froze. He hadn't realized he'd let his thoughts wander that openly. It didn't matter now. He'd studied the subject long before she'd asked, and she must have already had her own suspicions. There wasn't much he could do about it. He was just a voice trapped inside himself, and she had access to all of it.

"Some kind of divine, sacred being," he said, "opposed to mother fate. Centered below the landmass, endlessly pulling at land and life."

"Is that so."

"That little scripture of yours."

"Who gave it to you?" Alice asked. Lucid answered honestly.

"Just found it lying on the ground."

"So you just believe some random, suspicious book."

"Yup."

"Have you seen the thing write on its own?" He took it out carefully and opened it. Fresh ink stained the page, forming new diagrams and lines of text beside them, sketches of plants and herbs that hadn't been there before.

"That is," Alice started, sounding thrown.

"The pages are close to infinite," Lucid said. He closed it.

"This was what I was studying before we went into the domain of Mercyros."

"Hm," Alice said. Lucid looked up and stretched.

"Why don't we go check on Arthur, see if he's whipping up something good."