Nicholas stepped forward onto the glassy surface of the poten sea. The black, almost spiraling sky above the realm he stood in seemed to tremble just as the soul did. This realm didn't tremble, didn't shake, but cracked. The transparent surface cracked and popped as he took another step forward.
Pressure began to fall on his shoulders. As if gravity suddenly increased its influence, the world grew heavier. The cracks on the surface spread further, spiderwebbing across the rainbow surface.
The pressure escalated as he took another step forward. His foot fell, and the ground beneath him cracked again. But unlike thin ice, he knew this would never break. He could feel it in the core of his being. This realm between Azotreh's aspects wouldn't break so easily.
The cracks weren't literal, as nothing in this space was. But they still happened. The increasing pressure wasn't real in any sense, but that didn't matter when he wasn't real either.
It pressed in on all sides, trying to crush his form into utter absence. Into something so small it would never be visible to the eyes of anything in any world. Not his own, and not this arcane one.
But he kept walking. He knew it wasn't truly trying to hurt him. Just as it hadn't hurt Azotreh and him as the duo tried to enter and fix their core. This was still within them, after all.
So, no matter how difficult the next step would be, he took it. There were six aspects, and he wanted to know what they were and why they were.
On the tenth step, the air itself seemed to crack in response to his footfall. The same glowing white spiderweb fractures spread through the dark, spiraling sky.
But the cracks also spread through the pressure. The endless gravity didn't lighten, but it seemed the force behind it weakened by the slightest margin.
He took another step forward, and the pressure intensified again. It intensified exponentially with each step, and even his unreal form ached and rippled in pain. White cracks slowly broke their way up his legs from his feet. Pain echoed through his metaphysical form, but he didn't stop. It hadn't killed Azotreh and him when they found the core, so it wouldn't kill him this time either.
But his steps did falter soon after. He collapsed to his knees at the fifteenth step, breathing heavily and eyes unfocused. It was as if his false body were becoming more real simply to echo with more pain. As if the very laws of reality, or perhaps the laws of Azotreh, didn't want him to take another step. But if he couldn't walk, he'd crawl. His curiosity was simply too strong.
The white cracks spread from his hands now as he began to crawl. But when they reached his shoulders, they exploded into crimson flame.
[Your familiar has broken the containment field created by the Tri-Layer Border.]
[The Tri-Layer Border has trapped Ruby within your containment field.]
Ruby was irritated. Again, their bond vanished. She was fine with it when they slept, but this was different. She'd been forcefully ejected from the warm realm she occupied within their sleeping frame. The dungeon hadn't cared as it began its work, but she still curled up on top of the mass of slime. She'd pawed at it, trying to wake it up. The moments had brought back bad memories over and over.
Over the first day, she'd done nothing but practice her fire manipulation in the mana-dense dungeon and paw at Azotreh. But the mass of slime hadn't responded. It glimmered with raw mana, but didn't move.
She couldn't feel their aura. While her mother had been dissected by that goblin, she knew what the utter lack of aura meant. Even when they'd slept, their aura was slightly projected. But she couldn't feel it at all now. She had tried everything she could think of to make them wake up, to stop the voice in the back of her mind telling her that Azotreh was dead.
She'd felt them die once. Truly die. Under that divine radiance, the raw power of that event had surpassed anything she'd ever encountered, including the raw power projected by Mukurric that first time she'd "trained" Azotreh with her aura. But the power of that lightning…
She knew they only survived because of the creation of their dungeon nexus, and even now, her rational mind told her that they were still alive. The nexus still moved and thought, sent monsters through thin tunnels and ants marching in platoons. But that didn't help those memories. It didn't help her scattered thoughts or the nightmares when she fell asleep.
She didn't want to be alone again.
She'd spent plenty of time looking within herself. The warm space within Azotreh that she spent time in while absorbed was gold and natural. Bright plants of burning flames, and a sky of dim purple lit with gold stars. But most importantly, she felt the bond she shared with Azotreh much more vividly in that place.
She couldn't enter that place now, but she could feel the connection. It went dim somewhere, seeming to fade out of existence, but remained present. She could touch it, use it. So that's what she did.
She pushed at the bond. At what she felt. She pushed, and it gave. Just a little, but enough for her to notice. So she pushed again. She pushed at the connection to elsewhere she felt within herself. She pushed and pushed.
Nothing happened at first, until she felt a cool sensation at her feet. It seeped into the pads of her feet and made her fur stand on end. But she didn't stop pushing the bond.
Her body got colder, so she lit a fire to warm it. She felt like she got heavier, so she sat. It was uncomfortable, irritating, and difficult, but something would happen. She knew it.
It took her an hour to notice that the slime mass on the ground had lowered substantially, or that her fur had taken on a blue sheen. She didn't care about the changes to herself, but did care about what she was sure about. She was absorbing her bond, protecting them.
It took three hours for the pool of slime to be completely absorbed into her tiny body. Her twin tails swayed lightly as she moved into a corner to curl up. She desperately ignored the voice echoing in her head. The voice somewhere between her bond and her mother's.
She had more important things to do. She pushed on their bond again. She didn't know what it would do, but it was still giving to her pressure. It gave further with each push. She didn't know where the other side was, but knew it was her bond. So she pushed to reach them, until at last, her consciousness slipped into absentia.
[Your Dungeon Nexus has been forcefully returned to your aspects.]
[The physical manifestation of your nexus has been obliterated.]
[ERROR]
[System error: Unknown process…]
Nicholas ignored the messages as his body collapsed. They were the first messages he'd received since he'd gotten Errazorrus to watch over the others.
He put one hand forward and felt it explode. But not in pain, in simple warmth. The explosion was a real one, of mixed blue and crimson fire.
The white cracks across the poten sea and his body burned with crimson flames.
[Your manifestation has been reinforced by Ruby.]
He thanked the small fox in his head. He'd pushed himself too far and had apparently needed reinforcement. So he pushed another hand forward and continued his crawl.
But that wasn't enough. On the 25th step, the ephemeral form finally and completely collapsed. It shattered into golden shards of glass before returning to the soul.
Nicholas' body still ached all over; the fracturing process hurt in a way nothing else could. It exceeded any kind of bodily torment. It didn't have a facet; it just hurt. Didn't burn, didn't rip, and didn't stab. Just hurt like nothing. Like nothing except the tribulation of power…
He didn't spend time considering that as his form collapsed into the soft grass of the soul realm. He'd have to try again. His curiosity had killed the cat, but he knew a cat had nine lives. He'd have another chance to be curious once his body stopped aching.
One moment he was lying in the soft grass, looking up at the abyssal sky, and the next he was back in his apartment. Rain pattered against the windows and thunder echoed in the distance.
His mattress was a lot more comfortable than it had been in life, and the fluorescent lighting was less painful to his eyes. Yet this space didn't feel the same. He knew neither his sister nor her husband were here.
He'd woken up in this strange facsimile of his room once before, and fled from it immediately. It felt lonely here, echoes of a world he didn't know if he could ever return to. To a family that was dead, killed by a freak accident.
He was glad he didn't have to work in a back-breaking nine-to-five again. There were many things about his old world that he didn't like, but it was still a slap in the face to know there was likely no way to ever go back. If he did somehow manage to, on his logic that if there was a way here, there must be a way back, would the world that raised him so poorly even recognize him?
His dark musings were interrupted by a weight settling on top of him. He moved his head just a bit and saw the mess of dark hair that meant Azotreh was here. How they'd known where he was, he didn't know. He didn't even know how he'd returned here, but for now, that didn't matter.
He rested one hand on Azotreh's back as a second form entered the small room; a twin-tailed fox leapt up to wrap itself around his neck. Ruby murred slightly against Nicholas' throat, just as a cat would purr.
The new world, and the remnant of his old one trapped eternally within Azotreh's soul suddenly didn't feel so lonely.
The massive eye of the dungeon nexus opened in a new space. Above, a grand absence seemed to spin, pulling in thin tendrils of blue, pink, red, and golden light. They spun around its edge before passing through its edge and entering its depths, where they vanished.
It turned its grand eye in every direction to see four colored horizons. The same colors as those lights being pulled into the center of that grand nothing.
It sat at the foot of a grand mountain, two stars sitting at its top. Beneath it was a multicolored sea of rainbow light that shifted and warped without rhyme or reason. It stretched the long veins from its heart mass onto the glassy surface of the light, and felt the surface crack.
But it knew on instinct that the surface wouldn't crack. Wherever it was, it was safe.
The computational power of its mind went to work. It didn't know where it was, but it was within Azotreh, its bond. It could feel the dim connections to its champions, and it was made of matter. It began its experiments in the only way it knew, by spawning a monster.
A small black salamander emerged from its… mouth.
The eye didn't retract into the absence behind it as it had within the dungeon; instead, a mouth on the side of the great heart opened. A mouth it didn't know it had.
It began to investigate its new body more carefully and found three mouths across its body. One on the left of its eye, one on the right, and one underneath.
It opened each in turn, and then spent a moment to dedicate the idea of spawning a salamander to each. Then it spawned a salamander from each simultaneously.
It didn't know how having three mouths would benefit it, since the original eye mouth could spawn multiple monsters at the same time, but perhaps it had benefits the nexus simply hadn't realized yet.
So instead, it returned its gaze to the salamanders, now numbering six.
[Aspect Denizen: Lesser Black Salamander]
It didn't know what that meant, but more importantly, it wanted to see if these little creatures were limited to this strange realm, or if it could send them elsewhere.
[Leave confinement by the Tri-Layer Border to move denizens between the Void Between Aspects and Prime Materium.]
Irritating, but not unforeseen. If Azotreh had lost their connection to the nexus, then it made sense that in this place, the nexus lost its connection to its dungeon.
It only needed to figure out how to escape this so-called confinement, and then it could return to its own duties.
But perhaps it would keep the proper nexus here. This realm was likely safer than the material realm anyway. While the prime avatar could be reconstituted due to its strange makeup, the nexus, if destroyed, was destroyed for good.
No. That went against its purpose. It would not do such a thing. It would return to its dungeon and continue to create monsters and combat the rabbit-kin. It would serve its purpose.