Chapter 70: Vandals Maybe

  The silence of the Sunken Gate is absolute.

  It is final, the settling dust of a tomb that has been sealed for a thousand years.

  We move through the aquatic ruins, our pace slow and deliberate. My new Kinetic Flow makes movement easier, but it isn't flight. I can't just superman my way through the water. Instead, I use it to launch myself. I push against the water behind me with a kinetic burst, the recoil sending me shooting over piles of rubble or darting around toppled pillars. It is efficient, but it strictly requires momentum and physical effort. I am a stone skipping across the surface. Sometimes I fall with splash, sometimes even trying to walk makes me go splat. If I stop pushing, I drop like a rock.

  I would need to experiment on this more.

  Massive, fluted columns of white marble lie toppled in the silt, covered in phosphorescent barnacles that glow with a ghostly, pale green light. Fish with transparent skin dart through the empty windows of palaces that have melted like candle wax.

  I sink down to rest on a balcony railing, my boots gripping the slime-covered stone. "It's peaceful," I murmur, the sound vibrating strangely through the water. "Creepy, but peaceful."

  "It is dead," Vrex corrects from below. He is heavy enough that even the buoyancy of the deep ocean can't lift him. He trudges through the silt, his new stone hand adjusting the strap of his hammer with absentminded precision. "There is a difference. Peace is a choice. Death is a conclusion."

  He stops, looking up at a massive mural carved into a cliff face. It depicts figures holding fire, looking up at a sky that is raining meteors. The stone is slagged and vitrified, the history erased by the very heat it tries to depict.

  "This world did not die of natural causes," Vrex rumbles, his voice carried by the stone beneath us. "This is the result of a Cascade. Someone pulled too much power, too fast, and the atmosphere ignited."

  I push off the railing, using a burst of kinetic force to propel myself down through the water, landing heavy on a piece of slag near him. The Gill-Mesh at my throat pulses rhythmically, tasting the stale, metallic water.

  "Like I almost did to the Oubliette," I say quietly.

  "Similar," Vrex agrees, turning his massive head to look at me. "But you had an outlet. You had the Titan. Here... I suspect they tried to become the Titan themselves."

  We sit there for a long time. The only movement is the slow drift of silt and the bioluminescent jellyfish pulsating in the darkness above like drifting stars.

  "Vrex," I say, breaking the silence. "We need to talk."

  The gargoyle turns slowly. "We are talking. I am cataloging the structural failure of this civilization, and your feet is wandering."

  "About Arcanorum," I say, planting my feet to stop the current from pushing me away. "About what we did. Back in the village. Grey-Water. And then in the prison with Jarek. I stepped in. I interfered."

  Vrex crosses his arms. The movement is slow, deliberate in the thick water. "We survived. We extracted resources. We gained power. By the metrics of the Astrolabe, it was a successful run."

  "And by the metrics of being decent people?" I ask, the bitter taste of the prison air still haunting my memory. "I treated Jarek and those prisoners like assets, Vrex. I moved them around the board like fucking pieces. 'Go to the vents.' 'Take the fruit.' I optimized their escape route, but I didn't verify the exit."

  "You are assuming responsibility for variables outside your control," Vrex says. "That is arrogance, Kaelen. It is the same arrogance the Magisters had. You think because you touched their lives, you owned their fates."

  "I gave them hope," I argue, the water around me swirling with my agitation. "Hope is dangerous. If I hadn't interfered, they would have stayed in their cells. They would be drained, yeah, but they'd be alive."

  Vrex sits down on a fallen pillar. The impact sends a slow-motion shockwave through the sand.

  "Sit"

  I hesitate, then sit on a chunk of masonry opposite him.

  "You are looking at this like a human," Vrex rumbles. "Humans view life as a binary state. Alive or Dead. Safe or Unsafe. But to the Unchained—to those of us who have lived in the dirt and the dark—there is a third state. It is called Stagnation."

  He points a massive finger at me.

  "Those prisoners were not alive. They were components in a machine. They were batteries. You did not kill them, Kaelen. You woke them up. You gave Jarek a moment where he was not a number, but a man with a mission. He died running. Do you not understand the value of that?"

  "It feels like a rationalization," I admit, looking at my hands. The restored fingers flex perfectly, but the memory of the pain is still there. "It feels like something I tell myself so I can sleep."

  "Perhaps," Vrex concedes. "But consider the alternative. We do not interfere. We walk past the village. We let the Magister harvest the child. We let the Titan sleep in its torture chamber. We take our loot and we leave."

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  He leans forward, his golden eyes piercing the gloom.

  "Would you have slept better then? Knowing you had the power to break the lock, but chose to save your own skin?"

  I think about the way the village had looked when the Wards hit 200%. I think about the Nascency, that face of pure light pressing against the glass.

  "No," I whisper. "I wouldn't have slept at all."

  "Then you have your answer," Vrex says. "We are Wayfarers. We are interlopers in every reality we visit. If we touch nothing, we are ghosts. If we touch something, we leave fingerprints. Sometimes those fingerprints look like bruises. Sometimes they look like freedom. You cannot choose to have no impact."

  "But the scale of it..." I shake my head. "We didn't just save a village. We destabilized a planetary superpower. We started a war, Vrex. The Spire isn't going to just shrug this off. They're going to purge everything that looks like us."

  "They were already doing that," Vrex points out. "The system was stable only for those on top. For the rest, it was a slow apocalypse. You simply accelerated the timeline."

  He picks up a piece of the melted statue—a fist-sized chunk of slag. He crushes it into powder, watching the dust drift in the current.

  "However," Vrex says, his tone shifting. "There is another consequence you have not considered. One that concerns me more than the ethics of revolution."

  "What's that?"

  "The Community," Vrex says. "The other Wayfarers."

  I frown. "What about them? We stick to the code. We didn't kill another Wayfarer. We didn't steal a claim."

  "There is an unspoken rule," he explains, his tone serious. "They call it the 'Glass Wall.' The idea is that we are observers. We trade, we scavenge, we traverse. But we do not touch the structural integrity of the worlds we visit. We are ghosts. If a world is burning, we sell water, or we sell matches, but we do not put out the fire."

  "Because caring makes you heavy?"

  "Because of the economy, Arcanorum was a Tier 3 hub. It was a farm. It produced high-grade mana, enchanted items, and knowledge."

  "A farm run on torture,"

  "Yes. But a farm that supplied the multiverse," Vrex says. "Do you think the Magisters only used that power for themselves? They exported it. They traded. They sold those wands, those scrolls, those crystals to Wayfarers in the Gilded Gyre. We burned down the factory that supplies half the sector with batteries."

  The realization hits me.

  "The other Wayfarers... They're going to be pissed."

  "They will be annoyed," Vrex confirms. "Not because they are evil. Most Wayfarers are simply... indifferent. They focus on their own ascent. They view worlds as resources, not homes. The Owl? He likely had trade agreements with the Spire. The Watcher? He probably used Arcanorum as a training ground for his teams. By shattering the status quo, we have inconvenienced powerful people. we have cost them money. we have cost them stability."

  "So we are not just a fugitive from the Spire," I say, a dry laugh escaping my lips. "we are liability?"

  "No, maybe vandals," Vrex says, not unkindly. "we walked into a balanced ecosystem and threw a rock through the windshield. We have marked ourself. When we return to the Gyre... you will not be the anonymous rookie anymore."

  I kick off the seabed, treading water as I pace in slow circles, turning over the implications.

  "I don't regret it," I say finally. "The system was rotten. If the economy of the multiverse relies on torturing gods, then the economy deserves to crash."

  "A noble sentiment," Vrex says. "But noble sentiments do not deflect arrows. If we continue this path—if we continue to intervene—we must be ready for the backlash. We cannot be half-hearted heroes, Kaelen. If you save the sheep, you must be prepared to kill the wolves. And the wolves out here are very, very large."

  "I know," I say. "I saw the Ascendant. I saw what real power looks like."

  "That was a glimpse," Vrex warns. "That Ascendant... he was not merely powerful. He was an author of reality. He did not cast spells; he issued commands to the universe. If we want to survive playing this game, we need to stop scraping by. We need to get strong. Not just 'clever.' Strong."

  He stands up. The sediment swirls around his legs.

  "We cannot stay here. This world is dead. There is no mana to scavenge, no loot to find. It is a tomb."

  "Back to the Gyre?" I ask.

  "Back to the Gyre," Vrex nods. "We need to assess the fallout. We need to sell what we have, buy what we need, and see if there is a bounty on our heads. And..."

  He pauses, looking down at his hand.

  "And I believe we need a drink. Real drink. Not this watery soup."

  "You don't drink," I remind him.

  "I will pour it on my head," Vrex grumbles. "It is the principle of the thing."

  We begin to move again, following the faint, tugging current that indicates a Wayline exit.

  "So," I say, swimming along beside him, constantly pumping my legs and pushing the water away to keep pace. "If we're going to be the bad boys of the multiverse... the ones who break the rules... we need a better ship. The Paperweight is a fucking bathtub."

  "Agreed," Vrex says. "We need a vessel with shielding. With weapons. Something that says, 'We are here to help, but we brought artillery just in case.'"

  "I was thinking something faster," I counter. "Something that says, 'You can't catch us, so don't bother.'"

  "Speed is good," Vrex concedes. "But armor is better."

  "Why not both?"

  "Because we are poor, Kaelen. We have 5 Starlight Points and a pocket full of stolen batteries. We are not buying a warship."

  "Not yet," I grin, feeling a spark of the old confidence returning. "But give me a few days in the Gyre. I'll figure something out."

  Vrex stops walking. He looks down at his hand again. The ring of woven grass that Elara had given him is gone—lost in the battle, incinerated by the erasure beam or shredded by the fall.

  He looks at the empty finger.

  "I liked being the wall," he admits softly, his voice barely audible over the hum of the nearby Wayline. "It was... structurally satisfying. It gave my mass a purpose beyond simple existence."

  He clenches his fist.

  "I do not regret Grey-Water. I do not regret the Oubliette. But if we are to continue this... 'interventionist' strategy, we must be smarter. We cannot simply smash every system we do not like. We will run out of hit points before the multiverse runs out of tyranny."

  "We need resources," I say, nodding. "We need gear that doesn't disintegrate. We need spells that aren't just 'push' and 'shock'. And we need to know who is hunting us."

  "Then we agree," Vrex says, resuming his trudge toward the exit. "We leave this graveyard. We return to the Gyre. We sell what we have, we buy what we need, and we listen to the chatter."

  We find the Wayline a mile down the road. It isn't an archway this time; it is a fissure in the ground, glowing with that familiar, inviting indigo light. The water rushes into it, spiraling down into the void.

  I tread water right over the edge.

  "Next stop, the cosmic truck stop," I say. "Ready to face the music?"

  Vrex hefts his hammer. He looks like a statue of retribution, scarred but unbowed.

  "Let them play their music," he rumbles. "We will bring the noise."

  "Let's go. We can come back if we want to, Astrolabe has probably marked it for us."

  We dive into the fissure. The dead world of the Sunken Gate vanishes behind us, replaced by the rushing, endless stream of the space-between.