Chapter 65: The Other Place

  Erik went into his own mindplace, searching for a connection to Jessie’s. He sensed her all around, and it wasn’t clear to him whether that was because they were so physically close in the real world, because their mindplaces were connected, or because she had been in here to heal him. If either of the two latter options were the case, he’d have to get used to it—though in case of the latter, the traces of magic left behind might go away on their own after a while.

  A pointed, more compressed sense of Jessie rang from beside him, yet all he could see or otherwise sense was the empty void. Still, he felt it. Describing the feeling to himself, it was more…adjacent, rather than next to, though it made little sense to him. Instead of searching for something physical, he focused on Jessie’s presence.

  The space he was in flashed, and he found himself somewhere very different. Jessie’s mindplace. The jarring and disorienting change overwhelmed him; the sudden change sending his manifested body to its knees.

  He floated on a cloud of dense, multi-coloured dust. Either the entire landscape swirled around him like cream being whipped, or Erik was the one doing the whirling. Below him—on the other side of the psychedelic dust forming the ground he’d fallen to—was Grace, looking at him with calm and kind eyes.

  Like an anchor, the sight of something tangible like Grace was enough to stop Erik’s senses from going haywire. The world seemed to settle, though nothing had changed around him. He focused on Grace’s large, blinking eyes.

  “Hey, girl,” he said when he felt comfortable enough to speak without throwing up.

  Grace smiled with a wide, open mouth in response, her thick facial hide not having lips. She seemed to call out to him, but he couldn’t hear her. She stomped around with her forelegs in a happy dance.

  “Good to see you too. Thank you for saving my life,” he said, thinking back to when Grace had sacrificed herself for him. He waved at her and got up on his feet, looking around without discomfort. This new world was quite something.

  The Titan could see the various shapes and patterns the free-floating dust formed. To the north, or maybe just forward, was a small pavilion. Behind it stood an extensive set of stairs, the wispy steps extending from a tall hill. To his left were several cloudy trees, a pink current of dust blowing around each of them. The leaves were part branch as the individual movement of each grain caused them to overlap and trade places. The effect was a blurring and dizzying experience to watch.

  Erik started walking around, finding it difficult to even take simple steps. His difficulty was two-fold: he wasn’t confident he wouldn’t fall through the floor of dust, and he still felt the world swirl around him, causing a slight disparity between his intended direction and where his feet fell.

  He explored the place for well over an hour, finding the dust forming city streets, parks, mountains and even cars. He didn’t recognise any landmarks but got the feeling that the place was randomly configured anyway; he could walk through an alley and end up on top of a mountain without a single vertical step.

  “Damn it,” said a familiar voice, and Erik turned to see Jessie clad in a beautiful pink-and-green dusted dress. The dress ended above her knees—the rest of her legs bare. It had a low-cut bust, revealing most of her Crest. Also uncovered were her arms and neck, her hazel hair braided in a long tail with hairbands of a similar style to the dress keeping everything tidy.

  “Woah…” he reacted.

  “Hm? Oh,” she asked, then looked down at her body. “Yeah, it’s not like the usual me, but…I kind of like it.”

  “You look beautiful,” he said, walking over to her. “What should be damned?”

  “I hoped my spirits would show up with you here, but I guess it requires something more than just this connection-thing we have. I even tried hiding until now.”

  “You’ve been following me?”

  “Only in the sense that you’re inside my soul, so I know everything you do.”

  “You know I would’ve gone to a toilet if I could find one, right? That bush was right there, and I really needed to go.”

  “Mmhm,” she answered in a distrusting tone.

  “Why were you hoping anyone would be here?” Erik asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I? You can talk to them, train with them, learn from them. Levvie and Gloom are such cuties, too. Besides, you’ve already grown so skilled. I was kind of hoping to get some training on my own.”

  “Please—” Erik chuckled. “—you’d beat me in a fair fight any day. I’m pretty sure you took down more of those beasts earlier.”

  “I didn’t argue that,” she grinned. “No, I mean that I just stand there throwing spells, while you’re actually doing something that requires skills.”

  “Oh, stuff it. You flew around more than me earlier, and besides, you’re a natural at this! I’ve been training most nights for hours on end with my spirits—close combat fighting, aura control, and movement techniques—and still you’re just as good as I am. That’s a lie, your aura control is better than mine despite you getting your aura power long after me! If you’re feeling inadequate, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Jessie looked at Erik’s surly face with a confused expression on her face. Was he…serious?

  “I…” she tried, but her throat locked itself up. Was she being impudent? Was the reason he kept training so much inside his mindplace to keep up with her? She hadn’t considered how her aura control came almost naturally to her while she’d seen Erik struggle with it.

  “I’m not mad,” he said. “It’s great that you’re a natural at this. But when you doubt yourself, you make me think what I’m doing to keep up isn’t enough. All I’m trying to do is to keep you safe. All of you. I’ve killed for you and I’ve bled for you. A lot,” he chuckled. “So don’t start going dispirited on me, or we will have words. Knowing your stubbornness, those words will escalate into a fight, which you’ll win.”

  Jessie looked down and smiled. “Your face grows a little chubbier when you’re upset, did you know?”

  “It does not!”

  Their ORAD-RID, SEMP and UBAF camp mates assisted the group getting back on the road the next morning. When Angela realised she had forgotten to retrieve her gun from Sophie, she couldn’t do anything but apologise to Jessie, who, to her credit, didn’t seem that bothered by it. She knew her sister had been training with it, after all.

  They borrowed a new vehicle, intent on not destroying another military asset so soon after the previous one. They kept the functioning car from earlier; it only having a few dents in it. Someone had washed it, though no one quite knew when or who had done so. Its exterior had still been full of blood when he and Sophie sat inside it that night.

  Sophie got to keep the gun as Angela received the general’s own as a gift. Angela cleaned it right away and promised she would keep it safe as long as she breathed. Melodrama aside, the general approved the promise, so long as they got together for a drink or ten when this was all over. Angela drove away from camp, beaming.

  “How long until we reach your town?” Sophie asked, sitting in the back seat of the new car.

  “We should arrive by nightfall, but it depends on traffic…how much of it we need to move, I mean,” Erik answered.

  Erik sat in front alongside Angela, whereas Emma, Jessie, and Dunham sat in the other car. Dunham had seemed to struggle the night before, so the team had given him an out. He snorted in response to Erik and Angela as they told him there would be no hard feelings if he stayed behind. He both promised he would finish this and scolded them for believing otherwise. Much to Emma’s chagrin, they repaid him by giving him exclusive control of the music in their car—something they could be sure she’d pay them back for, considering neither of them shared cars with him and his raucous head-banging. Jessie was ecstatic to find Dunham also being a metalhead, much to Emma’s further chagrin.

  “Do you want to go back there?” Sophie asked.

  “No,” Erik answered honestly. “When I left it, there wasn’t anything left I’d want to go back to.”

  Sophie refrained from asking more, leaving the car silent for the next several minutes. Angela broke the silence when the somewhat tense atmosphere in the car wouldn’t subside.

  “Would you want to see where he grew up, Sophie?”

  Erik looked at Angela, who met his eyes for only a moment before turning back toward the road. He then turned to look at Sophie in the back seat. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. If you want, we can stop by my old house,” he smiled.

  “No, I shouldn’t have asked. We’ll get to see your town though, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s close to the location we expect the Hellbeasts are gathering and coming from. There wasn’t much to look at last time I saw it, though.”

  “I can imagine…” Sophie said, turning her head to the side to look out the window of the car.

  They weren’t close to any town right now, but they were on a main road with plenty of signs of destruction. This far south the signs of battle—and bodies—were few, with only the occasional roadblock being contested. Despite their usual instincts, or orders, the beasts had torn apart plenty of deserted cars along the road.

  “Hey, Angela? I wasn’t around, so why are there so many cars left abandoned in the middle of the road in the middle of nowhere?” Erik asked.

  “At that point, I wasn’t yet on-mission and things were happening fast. There were arrangements made to keep the roads safe during the evac. Buses and trains, mostly, though anything that could take plenty of people was used, like trucks. As the enemy pushed further south, so did the evacuation stations. That’s the main reason you see some places with plenty of personal vehicles abandoned,” she explained.

  “I guess that’s logical. Keep the roads as clear as possible, I mean.”

  “That was the gist of it. It might not look systematic right now, but keep in mind that the various improvised stations were moved south over time. The stretch we’ve driven by already was later in the evacuation. By that point there were planes being volunteered, buses from all over the European continent driving in and out all hours of the day. The world’s never seen an exodus of this scale before. It’s a miracle so many got out…though that doesn’t mean it’s been easy for the evacuees since then.”

  “I never got a number on how many got evacuated. There was so much news coverage, all day, every day, but I wasn’t paying much attention,” Sophie said, her eyes carrying a shame she might never shed.

  “You were mourning your sister and taking care of your father. This was what, a month after she died?” Angela said. “It’s estimated that six million people from Norway got away. Almost double that from Sweden, and most of Denmark and Finland have evacuated as well. Over twenty million people from the Empire needed somewhere to go. As you know, most live in refugee camps all over the world. You could say it’s only a third of the UBs population, but that’s still a severe strain on the infrastructure already in place.”

  “A lot of coastal areas have been evacuated as well, though, right?” Erik asked. “The two Hellbeasts I fought that got through the defences when we stayed in Cambridge, that residential area was mostly abandoned.”

  “Yes, and no. Directly along the coastline, that’s true, but not that far inland. The area was mainly evacuated because of the early warning from the troops defending the coast. Clear communication and intel on how the beasts move have saved plenty of people from attacks like that. Luckily, the hounds are either stupid or have a very basic set of instincts; it’s easy to calculate where they’re going simply based on the immediate direction they’re running. That has saved more lives than anything, I’d guess. It allows precision evacuation rather than of an entire region.”

  “Why haven’t I heard of this before now?” Erik asked, thinking back on the past few weeks.

  “You haven’t asked, I guess. From what I’ve seen, you have a knack for deflecting…I assumed you didn’t want to know the death toll,” she explained, slowing down the car to drive around a tank and between several other military vehicles. “Don’t look outside, Sophie,” she then warned.

  Erik considered Angela’s reasoning. She’d guessed right. He would rather deflect than talk about something serious, especially if it was uncomfortable to talk about.

  “It’s starting to rain?” Sophie asked, spotting the drops slowly covering the window next to her as she looked out regardless of Angela’s warning.

  “Typical,” Erik groaned. “If it isn’t snowing, it’s raining.”

  “Well, those are really the same thing, so…” Angela said, smirking to her side. “What timing! Erik, would you please move that car out of the way?”

  “You call that a car?” he asked, raising his voice a little. “That’s a truck!”