Humans were master craftsmen. They had built a blimp the size of a village. I wished I had ever seen that blimp. It must have been glorious.
All this to say there was no shame in dying to human craftsmanship.
Even though I was one of their creations myself.
Shrapnels! The massive golem before me, its massive deer head still exhuding mist, had finished casting it. The rubbles I was stuck under would not stop those spiked metal pieces thrown at the speed of a beam.
I had tried to cast my own attack but of course, way too late. It would never finish.
Everything got ravaged by that shower of iron projectiles. The wall itself blasted by the impacts! And I was still there to feel it. It had missed?
No, there was a shield before me.
A chitin shell that had received the hits for me. Tiny legs at its end that wriggled under the pain. The insect fell on the ground, its chitinous body shredded. It squirmed there without a sound but the ruffle of its legs.
Holy spears! With that respite, my own spell had finished. The magic circle formed a halo behind my cracked head. One after the other the ray of pure light went crashing on the steel centaur, blasting the armor pieces, shattering the small plates underneath.
White mist exhuded from those wounds.
I pushed back the rubbles, got up, I was not finished! Paralysis! That was the spell I was looking for, not the equivalent of belching mana upon my enemy. Even weakened, the centaur could not be frozen fully, but all I needed was to hold its arms.
The caparace on the side had stopped struggling. The wounds were too great. It had succumbed. I myself was trying not to falter while walking toward the restrained golem.
No, not a golem. The mist had betrayed it.
And if anything, a golem would not have been resignated.
Here it faced me, not struggling, not moving, just looking at me while waiting for the final blow. I had not the luxury to wait, lest my spell faded and the fight kept on.
So I struck. My fist hit its girth, created a rock spear inside from its own metal that thrust deep. I felt it reach the magic crystal.
Except that magic crystal had depleted long, long ago. When my master had come here, it had been replaced by a monster's heart. A newborn in a bulwark, stuck in that ruin, that mistook a golem's instructions for instinct.
It had stopped beating now. It was broken.
I took out my necklace and, even though there was almost nothing to collect, still placed one of the two amber beads against that mass of metal. Let it vanish until only the deer head remained, that fell in the collapsing room.
It had expanded for the fight; it was now back to normal, except for the path ahead now open, where the monster had emerged before.
And there they were, surrounding the altar on which the golem had probably rested the whole time. Stelae. What my master had wanted me to find.
We said: You have a solution to the calamity. The city answered: We will share it if it works.
The city of Rajlin, like all others, had sought to combat the mana drain. Confusion, panic and distrust summed up the rest.
We said: You will share your solution with us. The city answered: We cannot gather magic fast enough.
We said: You are lying, share the process! The city answered: The calamity is killing us. The basin may barely sustain a hundred for a few years.
We said: Use curses, use sacrifices, you must succeed! The city answered: Gathering more only heightens the calamity.
The city had not been destroyed by warfare. Nor by draining mana. They had tried absorption at the scale of a kingdom. Retrieving it faster than it trickled away from them. In the end, magic was relentless. Their kingdom whole could not protect even one dome.
We said: We found a solution. It is called Earth. You can die now. The city answered: You too will pay for Wekel. When we survive, we will find you. All must share the same fate.
We will be relentless.
An entire city. No, an entire kingdom. Humans had found refuge and left behind untold numbers of their own. And Rajlin had eaten itself, over the months, to only achieve three things in the end.
One, a faster and grislyer fall. Two, a slightly bigger puddle of mana for the monsters afterward.
Three, a way to find that Earth.
The summoning circles. It wasn't this kingdom that came up with them; that work eventually ended up in the city if Shiranu. But the principles were spelled out and with them, and my experience, a dreadful possibility.
I went and picked up my arm. Waited for it to get fixed back while watching the dead insect. Caparaces did the weirdest things.
Then up, all the way up, past the arena and amphitheater of this dead academy. Past their prototypes and experiments. Back to the surface where the boat still waited in the wrecked and dry court.
My master was waiting against the cabin wall. Waved for me. Coughed violently.
He watched me unmoor and bring the sails.
"So? What do you think?"
I only had one thought. Turned back and looked at him. He had put back the tunic. His skin was slowly getting sick again.
My master had suffered from magic illness. Too much and too little magic, unable to stabilize. The answer to stabilize it had been a race to the bottom. He was thoroughly exhausted and now that the illness was gone, the drain had caught up.
Relentless.
"Makoto..." I muttered.
"I mean those messages! The whole thing!" He had to stop to cough once more. "Eh, listen, there is a lot more I need to tell you about."
I fell on my knees to hold his shoulders. He was too weak to even push me back.
"I will draw the summoning circles again! I will help you get back, you will see..."
"Cut it!" He got angry.
Then he started to sob and gave me a meek smile.
"Can't you see I'm trying to be brave here?! I don't want to think about it! I don't want to pretend, I don't want to... just let me be useful until the end!"
What he meant was, even if I drew those circles, all it would do is siphon his mana again. He knew it. I knew it.
I had to get up and steer the ship away from the city rubbles. Back up the slope. Back into the emptiness.
"There is another thing I didn't tell you." My master was talking, hand covering half his face. "Remember the first time we met? You asked me about my system."
The human helper that helped no one.
"Well the first quest it gave me was to kill you."
I looked at him. He looked at my badger mask.
"I don't know why, but the reward has only kept increasing since." He coughed. "Even finding Hashal gives less points, it's crazy!" A small chuckle. "Whoever comes next..."
"Stop it."
"... he might try offing you the moment he sees his screen!"
He got nauseous, waved for me to get off his back. I returned to my rigging. Still not out of the crater yet, but the slope kept declining under us.
"Ah!" The teenager tried to get up, fell back against the wooden wall. "Shoot! I forgot! The system, you said it's useless!"
"Yes."
"Well it's not!"
He wanted to continue, had to cough, then to crawl to the side and get it out overboard. I helped him get back in the cabin, onto the berth where he lay down. Almost out of the crater, I still had to steer outside.
He held me back.
"Eh. Don't go anywhere. Okay?"
Back out, I got us on the vast empty plains, barely any landscape, soon the dry land swallowed us whole. Back in to my master's side.
He had turned delirious. I could remove the seals, but could not even tell if his state was the same as before. His skin wasn't getting rocky, just... losing colors. Just a general weakness.
His tousled hair were starting to fall.
Instead of coughing, the human just lay there, delirious, holding against an imperceptible cold that seemed to bite every part of his body.
Water. There were water tanks at the ship's bow. I went and picked them, carried them to the cabin and lit the water. Burning water. Mana. Anything to try and alleviate my master's state.
I would empty every single artifact on this boat to give him more time.
But he seemed to recover, if only briefly.
"Eh, Makoto..." I whispered.
"Where am I..." He asked. His memories entangled. "I want to go home..."
"I know."
"Kaele?" The teenager touched my arm. "I was... I was..."
"You need to rest. Don't strain yourself."
"The system... Did I tell you about the system?"
"It can wait."
He still told me about the system. And in short, yes, it was utterly useless.
It was made of skills, and when you put points in those skills, and then used them, as long as you stayed under the threshold that skill had reached, you used no mana.
And that would have been great if not for how low the thresholds were, and that there was no skill for staying alive. It was an extremely powerful system, for the very weak. Not for humans. Not for humans.
Did such a thing really exist? Back in the human days? I had no knowledge of it.
Had the humans from Earth developed that system? Had they planned to come back? Or for the calamity to reach them all the way there?
Yeah. I could not care less.
"I wanted to be a fisherman." He finally talked after a long silence. "As a kid. I thought fishing was the best thing ever."
I had my mask against his head. Feeling the water burn from one tank. I would have listened to my master talk until the end of times.
The boat was still sailing free in the emptiness. Dry rock as far as the eye could see. Lost in a dying realm. Its hulls slid on the stone, not producing anything. No more sand. Nothing.
Featherweight failed first. I had miscalculated. It had been busy the entire time, keeping the ship stable, absorbing the shocks. Now only the scales under the hulls were doing that and struggled.
The sails faded next. The sandy tissue started to fray, large gaps forming until it faded into dust. And still the boat kept going, if only by inertia, because there was still mana left to carry it.
I had removed my master's seals. They were as good as useless now. He was feverish, but conscious. We could still keep talking.
The protection runes broke one by one. Even though they were inactive, they still faded on the outer hulls.
The boat was slowing down.
Around it the realm had fallen to dusk.
And then, the shaking stopped. The rumble caused by all the cracks and rocks on which the scales banged, themselves inert. All of that was gone.
But the ship was still moving.
It was floating on a pool of water in the middle of the desolation.
An impossible, absurd miracle, a tiny spot where the small current made it gently drift. And all around it, fishes, just fishes, were swimming and leaping here or there.
The most peaceful of places.
I came out of the cabin. I walked to the side. I touched the water. Fresh, real water.
"Come see this, Makoto... There is a pond..."
I could barely talk. I could barely move. With one hand touching the water, bringing it back and close to my bare, clay golem face. My other hand clutching the necklace.
There were three beads now, instead of two.