Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 89: To the Lake

Toren Daen

Each time my foot came down, pain lanced up my leg. I didn't let my discomfort show on my face, pushing away the sensation. I plodded along next to Sevren Denoir, using my emblem as an intermittent crutch to support myself.

The ever-cloudy sky cast everything in a grim haze. The world was eerily silent this far up, no wind rushing through the sky. This zone felt dead, and not just from the corpses trailing hundreds of feet below us.

The whole Unblooded Party, the Aensgar Exiles, and what remained of the Twinfrosts slowly edged along a rooftop, no sound coming from our movements. Darrin and Hraedel took the lead, while our many shields kept around the perimeter. There was a vibrant tension to every step we took, a collective fear lacing our thoughts.

Darrin peered over the ledge as we reached it, scrutinizing the ground far below. Wordlessly, he gestured toward Jared and Jameson, who stood on standby for this exact reason.

The two mages stepped forward in unison, ready to enact our plans.

We couldn't risk traveling over the ground, so instead we used scaffolding in the sky. The two shields raised their hands, and I felt the mana in the air react. Slowly, a bridge began to form in front of them, a strange mix of metal and ice. It slowly layered over itself, arcing from our building to the nearest skyscraper.

I was reminded uncomfortably of the last time I witnessed these two create a bridge and the desperate struggle that ensued as the entire group was pursued by a horde of undead. I'd stayed behind, engaging my Phoenix Will to save Sevren Denoir from being crushed.

I winced, noting the strange sensation of my basilisk blood. I didn't think I had truly manifested my Vritra heritage. No, what had happened was something a couple of steps to the side of that.

The sense of my basilisk blood was unnerving. There was this hatred in my blood that clashed with my own senses and values, driving my emotions higher than I wanted. But it was closer to a force than the bare sentience the Will displayed.

I had to keep a constant grasp on the Will in my core. It... sensed, for lack of a better word, the basilisk blood in my veins. But Lady Dawn's Will wasn't nearly as out of control as the Vritra blood was, yet these two were like alkali metals and water. Utterly incompatible on a fundamental level.

The bridge finally connected to the other skyscraper across from us, metal and ice spreading out in a grasping lattice as it anchored itself silently. Our group waited for one tense moment, fear and indecision pushing at our heels. Then, at Hraedel and Darrin's direction, we crossed over swiftly. I spared a glance downward at the streets below.

As I'd adapted to my telekinesis rune in this new world, one of the chief things I needed to conquer was my fear of heights. I didn't fear heights as some people did, but what I considered 'normal' was heavily recontextualized by my ability to strengthen my body and fall from a dozen feet in the air without consequences. As I trained in the Clarwood Forest, and indeed even in this zone, I gradually wore away the nervousness I'd instinctually feel around a great ledge.

Yet as I stared at the ground hundreds of feet beneath me, I realized there was another aspect of heights I hadn't desensitized myself to. Because when one was hundreds of feet in the air, it gave you a special perspective of the streets.

Hundreds of undead milled about like ants, moving in a disjointed swirl of rotting limbs and broken bodies. There was a turbulent flow to how those things shifted, a strange domino effect of corpses tripping each other one after the other. I remembered a time in my previous life when hundreds of football fans stood in a cascading wave, creating a unique effect from afar.