Chapter 40 - The first tournament (1)

I finally stopped moving. Although I didn't know exactly for how long, I knew we had been stuck in the same position for quite some time. I had been paying close attention to my surroundings ever since this predicament had started, but for the first time I felt something different. I couldn't grasp exactly what it was, but I could feel it lingering in the air.

It was not visible to the eyes, but I could feel it in my bones and resonating with my blood. The way it moved and flowed made it at first appear similar to mana, which was still mixed within, but the "consistency" of the mixture set it remarkably apart from it. It didn't prickle my skin, nor was it antagonised by my aura. It flowed freely through my body and it felt "soft" and "reassuring" to the touch.

The more I paid attention to it, the less sensitive I became to it. The more I defocused and freed my mind from any thought, the more I felt it through the vibration of my spine. I closed my eyes, trying to let it manifest itself into my mind. The moment its image started to appear inside my head… I violently grabbed the "nothing" flowing through my hands.

My fingers twisted and every single muscle fibre of my body writhed. My vision flickered and space itself seemed to crack in front of my eyes. Sounds resembling breaking glass filled my ears, covering Faye's cries of surprise.

I didn't know what I was doing. I was acting on pure impulse, guided by the sole conviction of freeing myself from whatever prison I had been in for all this time. I moved my hands, trying to break apart whatever had been keeping me ensnared. Day and night started to succeed one another at rising speed, accelerating rapidly until they reached an absurd pace. Cracks multiplied and the noise would have been unbearable had I not been capable of completely ignoring my pain.

Light began to behave strangely and the world around me mutated in front of my eyes. It was like I was looking at it through a broken lens. Concepts I had always taken for granted like duration and distance became unreliable and some sort of cracked-vitreous-fractal-bubble enveloped me.

In the midst of it all, almost inaudible, I heard something different. It was Faye's voice. It seemed like she was screaming my name, still what reached me was not so much the words themselves, but the panic and pain it carried within itself. Once again guided by my gut instincts, I moved my body in strange ways and managed to extend the strange bubble and include inside of it both Faye and the wagon, although they appeared somewhat distorted.

I struggled for what felt like both mere instants and whole years. Finally, I saw the last crack appear and heard the sound of broken glass. The web that had been covering my eyes disappeared, the bubble of broken space mended itself and the world returned to normal.

I fell prone to the ground. I felt incredibly tired. Every single ounce of my being had been spent in the endeavour and my aura had completely dissipated. It didn't take long for it to start to replenish itself, but the sense of void I was feeling lingered. I sprawled on the ground, turned around and remained still, looking at the sky.

For two entire days, I didn't move. Faye helped me feed myself. Her expression showed signs of extreme worry and confusion. She tried to speak to me, asking me what had happened, berating me for not taking care of myself, begging me to come to my senses, but I didn't have the strength to utter a word. It was clear that, just like me, Faye had no idea of what had just taken place.

It was completely inexplicable and it got automatically archived in the depths of my mind. I was almost certain I had seen and learned something in the midst of it all, but my brain had been unable to retain any memory of those particular visions. They seemed to have deleted themselves the moment they had been captured by my eyes.

On the afternoon of the second day, incapable of finding an answer or even a vague explanation to what had gone down, I got up. After having rapidly reassured Faye of my wellbeing and having explained that whatever I had done had merely tired me down, I resumed the march.

It didn't take long to reach the end of the Obsidian Path and we continued on through the open fields. When the sun set, we set camp, with Faye closing herself inside of the wagon for safety reasons and me circling around the wagon to spend the time and act as a lookout.

When the sun peeped from behind the horizon, I took the chains in my hands once again and resumed pulling. The Perimeter now completely filled my field of view and in a couple of hours we would reach its edge.

The first thing I noticed about it was its contained geographical extension. The Gamma Perimeter was comparatively huge, as it contained within itself a portion of mountain range, while regarding this one I could even see the pillars on the opposite side rising beyond the horizon. I estimated I could probably run its diameter back and forth in less than a day.

The second thing was the peculiarity of its construction style. The small buildings were few and far in between and seemed to have been put together in a hurry, based on the heterogeneity of materials used for their construction. Some had wooden walls reinforced by metallic inserts and stone roofs or vice versa, others were completely made of metal, others still seemed to have been carved out from a single block of solid marble, and so on.

In the centre of the Perimeter rose a flattened metallic dome, which was in all likelihood the point of access to the Perimeter underground, where the regular humans carried out their lives.

Suddenly, the figure of a person appeared in my field of vision.

<<Halt!>>, a male voice resounded once we had reached a point less than a hundred metres away from the edge.