Return of the Fallen Volume 11 Chapter 22
“Hopefully those don’t happen too often.”
Kazuki was just speaking casually, but after he mentioned this, both Marty and Stez went quiet.
“What’s wrong?”
The two looked at one another before Stez spoke.
“Those frenzies are not exactly rare, but thinking on it now, the location is not right.”
“Location?”
Stez went quiet again before turning back to the displays.
“Marticia you and Jentson go ahead and take your leave, inform him of the frenzy. I need to speak with the other Oasis. Somethings off?”
After tapping one of these holograph displays somehow, Stez went quiet in thought, and Marty and Kazuki left.
“Marty, what was that about, did I say something or…”
“No, something unusual is happening. I didn’t notice before because the situation had just gone down but thinking on it something really is off. Those frenzies are almost always predictable. One of the usual patterns those sand worms follow is a certain location. They tend to follow not just our islands but the other oasis as well. They follow a few miles behind us before erupting from the surface. For some reason, those sandworms erupted directly beneath us this time and not only that they usually only attack like that once a month. The last attack we encountered was a week ago.”
“They changed their pattern?”
Marty nodded.
“Yes, and from my many years on this world, they’ve never done this. They always stuck to their routine so why did they try so close to us?”
“Why do they attack in the first place?”
“That should be obvious, well, I guess not since you are new. This whole place stays in the sky due to our divine energy. Those things eat souls, and since our souls are tied to our divine energy and there are quite a few of us together, we must look like a tasty buffet to them.”
“They have no eyes, but they sense or see with those fins on the top of their heads, right?”
Marty gave a nod.
“Correct. Even if they can’t see because they have no eyes, they don’t exactly need them. They have two main ways of sensing your presence. One way is from you releasing your aura outside of your body and some extra sensitive ones can even tell when you use it inside as well. They use those fins to detect your soul. As for the second way, if you noticed on their bodies there are thin spike-like hairs all over them. With those hairs, they can feel nearly any and all vibrations within a certain range. This isn’t as accurate as their fins. When they pick up vibrations, they can only get a general direction and area it came from so if you remain still afterward, they’ll have trouble pinpointing your exact location.”
Kazuki now understood something.
“Is this why Mack was so angry when I spoke? He felt I would give our location away with the vibrations, the sound waves from my voice.”
Marty rolled her eyes.
“That asshole is always going too far. Yes, they can get your general location with sound and other vibrations, but as I said those fins of theirs can sense our divine energy. We must look like a flame to a moth in the darkness. They already knew where we were. You making any noise would have been like a tiny spark burning within said flame. I as well was annoyed at first, but I was not thinking rationally. It’s a hard thing to accomplish when life and death is on the line. I know that may sound odd when It was said earlier that we Demigods wouldn’t lose focus from a 5th stage like you but those sand worms are not 5th stage beings.”
“I couldn’t sense any power coming from them when I fought one. What stage are those things at?”
“Technically, they are not at any stage. Sandworms don’t cultivate in the ways of magic nor in divine energy or lesser energies, for that matter. They have no cores, they barely have minds.”
“But the strength and toughness.”
Marty shook her head.
“Since you are new to the Higher Realms, you are unaware. Throughout the cosmos, there are many weird and strange creatures and powerful beings who do not follow the traditional path and make no sense in relation to our understanding. These Sandworms are one of many such beings. In terms of toughness, they are no doubt tougher than us Demigods. They outmatch us in strength and in the sand we are no match in terms of speed, but that is only because this decaying world reduces our speed to a fraction of what it normally is. With my glider, for example, not a single worm has ever caught up to me, hehe. In the end, this world, this eye seemed to have been made for them, though they are not comparable to Gods.”
Kazuki found that the last part didn’t match something Marty had said before.
“Wait, the worms aren’t comparable to Gods but then how did the God from Oasis Five die then. Was it actually the crash. Is it even possible for a God to die like that?”
Marty thought for a moment before she shook her head.
“Truthfully, no one knows how that particular God died. What I said was true, the God caused the disaster and brought the entire island, the whole of Oasis five crashing to the ground but we never found a body. It’s just assumed that he died, seeing as everyone else definitely did.”
“You know the others died for certain?”
“Of course, I arrived at the crash site before anyone else. I identified all 13 bodies of Oasis five, the God was the only one missing. I didn’t get to search any more than a few minutes because the worms had already sensed all the fallen prey and rushed over. I was forced to flee before things got too dangerous. Of course, I managed to get a few exceptional pieces for my collection, hehe.”
Marty was talking and bragging about her piles upon piles of junk she had but Kazuki was more interested in this supposed missing or dead God.
(A God wouldn’t just die, not like that. Since she didn’t find the body, that God must be roaming the world down below. With his strength, there’s no way those things should be able to kill him…right?)
Kazuki half expected Arc to respond to this question but still, there was no response from it.
After a while, things moved on to talismans. Just like Ki energy, Marty now had the knowledge from Stez but she was a hands-on type of person. There wasn’t a lot of material to use for these talismans so Kazuki used the rest of the cloth that was covering the Arch earlier. Kazuki used his ki to cut the cloth into tiny individual pieces allowing them to get about 10,000 talismans out of the lot.
Talismans were based on the ancient language of magic and were simply activated using ki energy. Kazuki himself didn’t know why this worked. In a desperate time, he had substituted his blood to write the inscriptions and used his ki to activate it. At that time he did this to escape from King David’s sky prison. His simple theory and reason for trying was that both contained energy and that was it. The fact that it actually worked in Kazuki’s mind was no more than dumb luck. As time went on though, Kazuki began to notice a pattern.
(The rules of the universe seem to allow all of these energies to exist within it. Some energies conflict with one another like magic combined with ki as well as aura. Using it that way I can make a powerful weapon that destroys other energies. At the same time, energies that should not be able to come together can be fused into something miraculous like Glacious’s black flames. It’s thanks to his black flames that I got the idea to make my combined death energy. His two became one and my three became something else. Then there is divine energy. A combination of a transformed soul along with a mastered element. Breaking that down, to its routes you have a regular soul and regular magic. Things that logically shouldn’t be able to come together do and some things that come together never should. The reason for this, is it because all energy is connected to one another.)
These were Kazuki’s thoughts. Energy of every kind seemed to have some type of unidentifiable connection.
(If every energy is connected in some way, then naturally if one figures out the rules then one can take advantage of this game.)
While Kazuki was deep in thought, Marty was tossing talismans here and there to test them out. One would create a flame while another sturk out with lightning. One produced a glob of water and another a gust of wind. She looked more like a kid in a candy store rather than a researcher who’s studied for thousands of years if not more.
While the two seemed to be in their own worlds, the door to Marty’s room opened and Stez walked in with a grim look on his face.
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