Chapter 66 - The Return Thread

The draft whistling through the upper gap of car thirty-four's tarp had lost the acidic bite of the central plain.

As the freight eased down the final rail inclines toward the east, the crushing Mana pressure that had weighed on their crossing for over two weeks steadily dissipated, leaving behind only the dry scent of coal dust and the mineral brine rising from the sludge river bed.

The three travelers sat in a loose circle atop the folded tarp, sharing the tail end of a parcel of grain flour biscuits and the last of the thermos water.

Inside the gondola, Nicole no longer kept her hood pulled down to her brow.

The huntress's dark hair fell loose around her pale face, her chitin mandibles moving in an unhurried rhythm as she listened to Maria recount stories of high school on Earth.

"The teacher wore the exact same brown sweater every single day," Maria was saying, waving an open hand as she chewed on a biscuit. "Ancient rag smelling like mothballs straight out of a grandmother's cedar chest. He'd spend half an hour filling the board with chemistry formulas nobody understood, and when Dante handed in his completed exam in ten minutes flat, the old man nearly had a stroke right behind his desk."

Nicole let out an easy laugh, resting the back of her head against the car's steel wall.

"And what were you doing in class?" Nicole asked, eyeing the broad muscular expanse of Maria's shoulders.

"Sleeping," Maria answered on the spot, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "The wooden desk was too cramped for my frame, so I'd stretch my legs into the center aisle and drop my forehead onto my closed notebook. If the teacher squawked, I'd claim my back was thrown out from hauling iron scrap, and he'd shut his mouth so he wouldn't catch heat from the principal."

Nicole shook her head slowly, all four amber eyes glinting with genuine amusement.

"There was no school like that inside the Citadel," Nicole said, her voice dropping into the quiet cadence of remembrance. "Pureblood demon kids were drilled on flintlock sidearms by age seven in garrison courtyards. My mother taught me how to read ancient intake files using a sharpened bone stylus to scratch characters into the copper dust falling from her workbench. She always said anyone who knows how to read a freight manifest will never starve, because they always know exactly where the rations are stowed."

Dante was tallying the final inventory of their travel rations across the last leaf of his notebook.

He raised his gray eyes from the page, studying Nicole with the clinical attention of someone auditing the party's development.

"Your mother was practically minded," Dante noted, capping his black pen. "Information is the sole asset that claims zero volume in a rucksack and costs zero stamina to carry. If we hadn't reviewed those forty leaves from the brass box, we'd still be wandering blind in the mire without knowing Sector Zero sits right under the military palace."

Nicole looked at him, her right knuckles brushing the harness strap where Elen's brass lockbox remained secured.

"And if I hadn't crossed paths with you two at that conduit hatch..." Nicole murmured, looking straight into Dante's eyes. "...I'd be dead in the aqueduct muck, my neck broken by that serpent's tail."

Maria tapped the toe of her iron boot lightly against Nicole's knee.

"Forget the snake, girl," Maria instructed with a faint smirk. "The snake turned into clean coin in our pockets, and my new greatsword has forty-eight pounds of black boiler steel strapped to my back. What's done is done."

The lead locomotive gave two short, muffled blasts of its whistle.

FONN. FONN.

The screech of brake shoes biting into steel wheels rang through the gondola's frame with that shrill, telltale whine of deceleration.

Dante pocketed his notebook into his canvas duster, pulled on his leather gloves, and rose from the metal floor on solid legs.

He peeked through the upper seam of the iron plate.

The freight was banking into the sweeping curve of the masonry viaduct leading to the switching yard of Coal Depot Twelve. The speed of the fifty-car manifest had dropped to under ten miles an hour, and the black mounds of mineral coal at the depot already loomed less than a mile out.

"The old line curve is coming up," Dante announced, turning toward the two girls.

Maria stood up in one fluid motion, unbuckling the safety catch on her six-and-a-half-foot greatsword, tightening the straps of her mountain pack over her broad shoulders with a sharp tug.

Nicole pulled her black-scaled hood over her crown, shading her horns and brow with the swift reflex of someone stepping back into hunt mode, and locked both straight daggers firm in their belt sheaths.

They climbed the interior rungs of the gondola ladder.

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The cold mountain wind struck their faces the second their heads cleared the seven-foot steel rim.

Below, the embankment of dark earth and loose gravel sloped gently toward an abandoned spur of rotten ties half-swallowed by scrub brush of desiccated wiregrass.

"I'm out first!" Maria called over her shoulder.

She planted both hands on the rim, heaved her two-hundred-pound frame up, and leaped into the drop.

She struck the gravel slope with a heavy impact that kicked up a dark plume of dust, bending her knees with the effortless resilience of thirty-two Constitution, rolling sideways over the stones, and coming to a clean stand on the ballast path without stumbling.

Nicole dropped right behind her.

The huntress came down like a falling leaf, touching the gravel with the toes of her flexible boots, sliding three paces through the dirt before checking her momentum in a flawless landing.

Dante jumped last.

He deployed an instant [Runic Barrier] two feet off the deck to absorb his vertical velocity, stepping off the force plane onto the gravel with a clean, light touch that placed zero shock on his leg bones.

Train 405 rolled onward along the viaduct tracks, steel flanges clicking over rail joints in a monotonous beat until car fifty's trailing plate rounded the station bend and vanished.

No alarms blared across the coal yard.

Not a single Legion sentry looked toward the embankment.

To the garrison of Depot Twelve, the return manifest had arrived empty right on military schedule.

......

The march across the frontier border of the Fourth Minor Continent spanned twelve hours of unbroken walking beneath the purple sky of the Ash Wastes.

With Level 21 and 22 fully consolidated and their physical attributes at the absolute ceiling of Tier Two, the strain of that hike no longer felt like the grueling ordeal of their first descent across the plain.

Maria took point with her forty-eight-pound greatsword across her back, maintaining a broad, unwavering stride that chewed through miles of volcanic gravel without her breathing quickening by a fraction.

Nicole held the center, matching the pace with silent, agile strides, her amber eyes scanning the jagged basalt formations along the trail.

Dante trailed behind, his thoughts clear of Mana calculations, feeling the air of this minor continent weigh less than half of the Capital's suffocating blanket.

Twice that afternoon, packs of cog hounds and lesser ash crawlers shadowed the rock outcroppings two hundred yards out.

Yet the predators never even attempted an ambush.

Catching scent of the heavy Mana current rolling off Dante and the raw authority of thirty-three Strength vibrating from Maria's black boiler steel blade, the beasts slunk back into deep fissures with tails tucked, vanishing into the sulfur mist without loosing a growl.

No stray scavenger dared cross three high-tier operators on these frontier waste grounds.

At seven in the evening, the silhouette of the dark volcanic ravine materialized ahead.

The subterranean redoubt sat untouched, exactly where Dante and Maria had left it weeks before.

Dante stepped up to the mouth of the rock fissure, held his open right hand before the basalt face, and touched the focal rune he had etched into the stone.

The three-tiered array of [Runic Containment Barrier] flared in muted blue, releasing its ether locks with three crisp snaps that echoed off the rock.

They filed down the dirt ramp into the subterranean vault.

The interior of the cavern was chill, dry, lit only by the pale beam of the dynamo lantern Maria hung from a bracket on the stone wall.

In the corner, the two old inflatable mattresses lay spread across the floor, resting beside the rusted iron chest where they had stashed their first bundles of gray scrip seven years ago.

Nicole stopped dead in the center of the basalt chamber, taking in the bare stone walls.

"This is it?" she asked, her voice echoing softly under the low ceiling.

Dante stepped to the exact center of the stone slab forming the cavern floor, stopping over a square of smooth rock that held a steady sixty-eight degrees.

"This is it," Dante answered, slipping the pack straps off his shoulders and setting his rucksack down. "The primary anchor coordinate for Planar Transit. Directly beneath these stones sits the dead center of our living room rug back in Brazil."

Maria dropped her forty-eight-pound greatsword and supply sack with a crash of relief that kicked up a faint cloud of basalt dust.

She flashed an ear-to-ear grin, cracking the heavy knuckles of both hands as she regarded the black-scaled huntress.

"Get ready, Nicole," Maria said, her deep voice brimming with honest excitement. "In five seconds, you're finding out what it feels like to stand under a shower that doesn't smell like rusty iron, sleep on cotton sheets with real fabric softener, and stretch those long legs out on a four-seat couch without kicking a stone wall."

Nicole adjusted the collar of her black-scaled coat, drawing her hood forward to shield her pointed ears, though her four amber slit-pupils burned with an electric curiosity she no longer bothered to hide.

Taking two steps forward, she reached out her gloved right hand and took a firm grip on Dante's right shoulder.

Maria locked her heavy palm around his left forearm, closing the biological circuit of their soul matrices.

Dante drew a deep, unhurried breath through his nose, feeling the flawless equilibrium of his five-hundred-and-ten Mana pool humming at the core of his chest.

He raised his open right palm in the center of the dark cavern in the Ash Wastes.

The fourth tab of his mental interface illuminated his retina in crisp, clean silver runes.

[Tab 04: Planar Transit.]

[Return Destination: Primary Anchor - Acacias Residence (Human World).]

[Active Transport Link: 3 passengers.]

[Anchoring time: Immediate.]

Planar Transit: Jump.

The snap of the dimensional vacuum swallowed the basalt cavern in the Ash Wastes, wrenching all three from the darkness of Hell in a fraction of a second, throwing open the floodgates of light into the world of living men.