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Chapter Text

“Did I just get summoned to another world!”

...

Subaru Natsuki, age 17, has just been summoned into another world.

He finds himself not in Lugunica, Not in Kararagi. Not in Gusteko and Not in Vollochia.

Where the hell is he?

This is where he is:

                                                    riggghht there    ↑

(that circle by the windmill is supposed to be the sun)

...

Subaru Natsuki finds himself perched precariously on a Stalactite at the very bottom of the Lugunican continent.

He is miles away from anybody else.

He is completely alone

He has no idea where he is.

All he has is a tracksuit, a, A phone, some Ramen, some chips, and that is it.

Subaru Natsuki is currently in a cave. The cave is very small and only has one way out.

“Typical laws state that I should get some of crazy isekai ability! But why was I summoned here? Wheres the cute heroine who summoned me?”

Subaru begins to run out of the cave excitedly. Running out to his Isekai dream.

When he exits the cave, He is greeted to the sunlight.

Just one problem. The sunlight beams from below Subaru’s field of vision.

“Whoa! I’m on a cliff.”

Subaru now takes a good gander at his position.  He is on an outcropping; he looks down and sees Nothing. Nothing is below him. The rock which he stands upon tapers down to a fine point and goes no further. It seems that the only thing keeping the Stalactite which Subaru currently finds himself on intact is a vast array of vines and creeping weeds.

Subaru is 48,000 Feet below the continental plane. 14630m.

He is deep shit.

Subaru explores the tiny rocky outcropping which he findself precariously perched upon. There is no grass, the constant threat of rocks dropping from the ledges above. Furthermore, it is disturbingly hot and humid in this area. The temperature is around 104~ F, 40~ C

The humidity is at 100%.

This is because Subaru finds himself at the layer where the plumes of water from the draining rivers, lakes, streams and eddies evaporate. Od Laguna heats up this region to a high temperature in order to ensure the evaporation of the rivers and waterfalls which flow into this area. This evaporated water then rises to return the continent in massive convection currents. In this way, Od laguna maintains a water cycle.

It gets hotter the farther down you go. Oxygen grows thinner as well. This lack of oxygen means that despite the high humidity, few plants grow in this region of -48000~ feet.

What boons will Subaru get in this hostile environment at the bottom of the world?

The ancient civilization’s last surviving outposts and mining installations endure in this abyss. When the great calamity of 400 years ago wiped out the surface creating the Kararagi wastes, the castour fields, and the many completely uninhabited areas of Lugunica, the calamity spared these ancient installations. The inhabitants of today’s Continental population might be descended from the cliffside survivors.

But why did these ancient people go to the cliffs of the great waterfall? Simple, these regions had good amounts of ore, Magic stones, and good ferrites. The closer proximity to Od Laguna’s center creates higher purity outcroppings. Ancient Vollochia and Ancient Lugunica with their Aerial Magic, used to exploit these rocky outcroppings in their arms race against each other. This aerial magic, still practiced by mages like Roswaal and the Vollochian Flying dragons, assisted in the exploitation of the Stalactites.

Magic stone mines predating Subarus arrival by 800 BA , 1000 BA , Even 1500 BA old can still be found on the cliffs. Even ancient towns with relics and artifacts are found on this land. Corinthian columns and marble temples remain haphazardly standing, completely untouched by the hands of the continentals.

The boy called Subaru Natsuki has never climbed a day in his life. He can do 12 Pull ups on the bar, and can do 20 on the lat raise and has a self-proclaimed “Grip strength of over 70 KG.”

Let’s hope that’s enough to climb 48,000 Feet.

The boy realizes quickly what he has been tasked to do in his new isekai world. He finds himself at on an outcropping at the tip of a Stalactite at the only way to go anywhere is up. Therefore, it can be interpreted that Subaru Must go up.

When Subaru first realizes this, instead of despairing and jumping off the cliff to end it quickly like a normal person, he views it as his “Adventure” to experience.

And so he immediately and without consulting his instincts begins to climb on those vines upwards towards the next outcropping. He is doing well and this has led to a false sense of security. At 47880 feet below the top, Subaru looks down back at his progress and when he looks back up, a rock from the 48,000 feet of pure earth above him flies into his face.

Down he goes tumbling down and down and down. He is going to fly past the outcropping which he previously was on.

“OH NO NO! NOOO! NO! OH NO! GOD NO!” Blood drops fall with him.

Subaru flies past the outcropping and continues falling.

The tip of the Stalactite grows farther away. This will be his first fall.

Oh no, don’t tell me this is how It ends! I just got here! No! Somebody! Help!

He continues to fall. Eventually, the Stalactite which he was on grows smaller and smaller.

The air is heating up. The humidity is higher. Updrafts and currents of violent air begin to blow Subaru around like a ragdoll. But in this cacophony of winds, Subaru sees something no Lugunican has ever seen before.

Looking up from below the continental ridge, Subaru can see the heart of the world itself. He is the first person to look Od Laguna directly in the eye. He can see clouds and snaking currents of Mana and moisture heading in towards and from the great center. It emits it’s own blue light.

Od laguna is found at the intersection between the River Tigracy and the River Tenril. Subaru does not know this of course. He is too busy trying to flail around and do anything.

Eventually, the panic of falling gives way to a numbness, a neutrality of mind knowing that you are now destined to fall forever.

“Bullshit fate, Bullshit!” Subaru has nobody to talk to. The temperature has reached 110 F 43 C.

Its getting hotter. Subaru closes his eyes, he wants to go to sleep as the winds flail him around. Looking below him, there is nothing. Looking above, there is a continent which, if Subaru were to extend his fist at arm’s length from his eyes, would see that it is now equivalent in size to the outstretched fist. That is how distant the continent is from Subaru.

As he goes farther and farther down, the air grows thinner and thinners. He soon comes to the realization that he is not falling anymore. The updrafts are strong enough to keep him aloft. The temperature has reached 130 F and 55 C. He is running out of water to perspirate. His body is overheating.

Looking downwards, he swears he can see small rocks and floating islands in the far distance. These are mirages, tricks of the brain to create false hope.

And so, Subaru spends the next 2 days flailing around like a ragdoll in the high winds 182,000 Ft below the Continental ridge.

Mercifully, he finally dies to dehydration and asphyxiation in his “”sleep””.

He awakes In that damned cave alone afraid and having spent 3 days suffering miserably in the great nothingness. Mercifully, a tiny amount of water trickles around it. This little trickle must’ve been what formed the Stalactite.

It seems that these powerful winds have a purpose. Rocks and sediment which fall from the sky are ground up against each other over thousands of years into fine powder in the sky, which is brought up back to the continental ridge, returning the sediment to the environment by rain or condensation.

The Energy which powers these erosive winds might be from Od laguna, or they might be completely natural, it is unknown.

Subaru has returned by death.

“Did I, did I just return back to the cave? I must’ve died. So it’s a save point. I guess I got isekaied into getting over it or jump knight?”

“I need to find a safe route up, and hopefully find some other people, my goal needs to be to find another person in this world.”

“First goal acquired! Go up. Second Goal, don’t die.”

Subaru begins his journey by scaling the same vines, this time he dodges the falling rocks and continues scurrying up. He is at -47542 Ft below and has made 338 feet of progress. He hasn’t screwed up yet. He is about to get up higher when he suddenly hears a strange sound coming from the vine. The vine spans it seems like the run is over, but he grabs onto the bottom end of the snapped vine.

The weight of Subaru causes the vine to deanchor from the rock, like a ladder breaking from it’s bolted fixtures, his inertia causes the vine to deanchor from more and more cracks and pores as he falls still clutching the vine.

When he comes to. He is 20 feet away from the Stalactite and is holding on precariously to the vine as it dangles. He now needs to climb 20 feet of vine to return to the rock face lest he spend another 3 days in the abyss before dying from dehydration.

You’re kidding me right, I have do climb 20 feet of this shit. Oh no. Oh no no. Fucking world. Fuck.

Subaru’s fantastic conceptions about the nature of his transmigration are dead. All he has is return by death and cliff face. He is truly alone.

Adrenaline rushes through and his adrenaline filled climbing rush gets him 10 feet up on the vine. He is exhausted and clutches the vine like a baby to the teat.

3 hours pass before he tries for another 5 feet up. He is 5 feet away from reuniting with the Stalactite when the sky suddenly and rapidly darkens to pitch black. This is because the sun has passed directly below him and has gone out of sight from Subaru. Therefore, the cliff face is darkened. In pitch black, with only a cell phone light in his mouth, Subaru wills himself up 2 more feet, 2 more, then a little bit more. Hes so close to that fucking rock face.

His hands touch the cool limestone of the Stalactite. It is ecstasy. His hands are burning from clutching vine for the last 7 hours. Its finally over. Finally, Finally!

CRUNCH.

In the pitch black environment, Subaru fails to see a large rock falling from the ceiling, it mercifully and instantly kills Subaru Natsuki.

Those 7 hours of fucking misery are undone and subaru finds himself back at the cave.

He cries for 3 hours and boxes ancient stalagmites like Chinese tourists to vent his anger.

“DAMN DAMN! FHHHUUUUU----ZZHHAHHAHEHHAHHAHEHA”

He is orating noises like a madman, its been like 3 days alone and Subaru Natsuki is acting like a macaque already.

Attempt 3, Subaru shimmies up the vine, dodges the rocks, and chooses a different vine for his ascent. He now finds himself much higher than he was before. He has climbed 820 ft via vine and is 47180 feet below the top. The exertion has tired the poor boy out.

“Goodness. Goodness, baru baru sususki, how did we get here? How did we get in this sitsitu since you situation? I think iiiiii was a climber in my past life? Don’t you think mr ramen? Mr Nokia? Come on cheer up!”

Subaru anthropomorphizes objects as he begins to grow lonely and unstable. Subaru’s climb continues and the Sky suddenly darkens, announcing the cliffside’s brutal version of night.

This time Subaru is lucky and rock which hit him last time flies past him without crunching the poor boy. To death. Subaru has made very good progress this time around.  

Finally, he finds a place to rest. It’s a rocky outcropping which he cannot see well in the darkness. He names it the “Vine Bridge” at 46200~ ft below the top.

He is truly tired; he collapses and is unconscious within a minute. The exhaustion of climbing 1800 feet straight up has taken it’s toll upon the poor boy.

The sun rises in the east so therefore, when it the sun appears into view from directly below the Stalactite, it is now day.

With daylight Subaru awakens and discovers the most horrifying thing he has ever learned in this world. The Stalactite which he had slept on, the one with the cave, the water, it Wasn’t connected to the rest of the to rest of the landmass. It was precariously held by those vines. Which meant that subaru’s save haven, his checkpoint, it wasn’t even connected.

This sent a shiver of utter terror into subaru’s spine. A different more ancient type of terror.

And how did Subaru find this fact out?

When he awoke, he found a very particular vine.

Now picture this in your mind, picture a rope of a 100 strands intertwined. Now imagine that rope’s strands are all plucked back bar one little strand keeping the two sides from snapping. A common trope in literature and movies. Now imagine the potential energy held within that little strand.

Now imagine how stupid you’d have to be, a stupid stupid man, to TOUCH the angry ball of potential energy.

When subaru in his neverending bullshit decided to touch the strand, the sheer tension energy held by the vine was released.

This is why you stay far away from Mooring lines in ports.

The vine ripped back like a whip in Mobile Alabama. 1855~

Subaru’s first fight in Lugunica was not with thugs or beasts, but with angry ball of potential energy. Subaru did not win this battle and the whiplash of the vine ripped off his arm at the shoulder cleanly.

“ahh-ahh AHHHHHHH!”

And then it got worse.

There was a reason why that particular vine had so much potential energy, so much degradation, there was a reason only one strand remained.

Like the Golden gate bridge in disaster movies, when one vine broke, the stress and weightload suddenly transferred to another vine. This vine breaks too, sending double the weight to the third vine.

Subaru is too busy in shock and agony from having his precious arm ripped from it’s socket and thrown off the great waterfall to notice the vines holding up his Stalactite are now snapping one by one.

And then, two by two,

And then all at once, the vines holding the thousands of tons of rock which keep Subaru aloft snap.

And down he goes.

Subaru, who was in the previous moment bleeding like madman, suddenly becomes cognizant of the fact that he is falling, he tries to get back onto the top of the Stalactite only to realize that it too is falling.

Oh shit.

Mercifully, unconsciousness is taking hold of him as a long streak of red follows the falling Subaru like a trail.

He dies to potential energy. His own foolish retardation.

Be careful around mooring lines and springs kids.

When he awakes, he mercifully finds himself not at the cave but at the intact Vine bridge.

Thank fuck.

He looks over and sees the angry strand of potential energy staring back at him. That fiber, it is sapient and is telling Subaru “I will do it again, try me.”

You see, the relative of mass on this Stalactite has not changed I thousands of years. Subaru’s sudden addition to the rock changes the mass. Like a penny on top of a piano causing it to tip, Subaru’s addition now threatens the suspended Stalactite itself.

Subaru is staring at that thread of fiber. The fiber stares back.

The fiber makes it move and, as if to say FUCK YOU SUBARU, snaps violently for no damned reason. Why did it do that? Ask murphy.

When Subaru realizes what just happened and hears the unpleasant sounds of the next vines beginning to snap, he springs into motion and starts climbing up some vines that don’t seem to have any potential energy on them as fast as humanly possible.

SNAP! SNAP! SNAP SNAP! Hes half-way up the vine to the next rock face, he knows that when the vines snap -the vine he is currently on- it will move suddenly and possibly shake him off. Therefore he must get onto solid rock fast.

He scurries

SNAP SNAP! SNAP!

They make appealing noises like lightsabers and sci-fi weaponry when they snap. This is not the time to be thinking that.

He’s finally on the rock face when the vine he was on suddenly stiffens with potential energy, like a mooring line suddenly getting pulled. It snaps and the energy causes the vine he was just on to shoot towards the sky for a bit.

Thank goodness he was off the vine.

He looks down to see his home, his safe haven, his oasis, falling down at terminal velocity into the misty abyss. Down it goes, say bye bye Subaru!

Subaru gingerly waves as the rock he called home falls out of view.

Now there is only one direction to go; Up.

He has a couple of close calls, he now is completely vigilant at all junctures, dodging falling rocks and being able to identify rotting vines with an utmost of efficiency. The boy’s skills slowly improve as he scurries upwards. At around 45000 ft below, he looks up and sees something very interesting.

“Are those. W-wind turbines?”

He can see the outline of dutch-style windmills of some sorts. They are perpendicular to the rock face. Subaru, now with a renewed energy now scurries up the rock face as fast as he can do. Safely of course, he has learned his lesson.

He can see two different windmills. One is covered in plant matter and is rotten and static. But, the other one, the one above the first, it’s blades still spin to the updrafts with permeate this elevation. It spins. Subaru has finally found evidence of human civilization and is jubilant like a fatass in a candy shop.

He finally gets to the lower Windmill. It is made of rotted wood and metal plates reinforced with iron. The iron is crusty enough to pierce with your thumb. This is disturbing as it appears the entire structure is reinforced by this iron.

Entering into the ancient building, there is dampness and humidity permeating the room.

Disgusting wafts of mold are everywhere; there is decay and plant rot on every wall.

Inside, the mechanism of the windmill is completely rusted through. But, there is the remains of a ginormous Bevel gear – a gear which would change the direction of the rotational energy from being parallel with the cliff to perpendicular- are visible.

The central shaft of the windmill complex is visible. Subaru begins to walk about in this structure. He heads right, in the direction of the turbine blades and to his surprise there is a door.

Above the downward facing blades, there is a small enclosure where gears and mechanisms are found.

And… A recreational room of sorts?

Subaru finds nothing left of civilian value, all is rotted. But, he does finally acquire his fist piece of equipment.

There is a piece of metal which seems to have been made out of a non-corroding metal. It has a hook presumably for rope to have once gone through it. He loots it.

And then, Subaru finds his second best find In the windturbine housing. It is a chain of 10 ft. Mildly corroded. Subaru decides not to rely on it, but to keep it as an emergency chain. If Subaru ties the chain and then climbs but falls, the chain will save him 3 days of dehydration misery.

Speaking of dehydration misery, Subaru turns and goes deeper into the complex, finding his first canteen for water.

Subaru has been sustaining himself on the fall of freshwater from the continental ridge, along with puddles from condensation.

It’s a very wet place to be.

Back to the wind-complex, he follows the shaft into a carved part of the rock deeper into the rock. A door of metal can be found. When Subaru opens it, air rushes in and out.

Subaru is about to make another retarded mistake

He enters to room with his NOKIA flashlight and marches in like an idiot.

And then promptly collapses and dies from stale air.

When he returns, he is thankfully at the entrance of the windmill and not back down at the Vine bridge.

Subaru now has to go get the chain and hook again and returns to the door. He opens it and looks in. There is Un-decayed things inside. Undecayed. He looks and sees a backpack, a poster of some mysterious language depicting one party killing a dragon and throwing it’s cadaver off a cliff face that looks suspiciously like the one he is currently on.

Another seems to be a poster of some palace being burned with angry text and an angry red eyed orange haired man striking down the same dragon. Propaganda at it’s finest.

Looking into the room, there is one bunk and goods that have not encountered the damning effects of moisture. How will Subaru get this objects?

He begins throwing his chain with the hook on it like a lasso. The weight of the chain on the desired object and it’s pulling motion gets the desired object a little bit closer.

Over hours of throwing the chain into the stale air room, Subaru is able to get a backpack halfway across the room. He decides to risk it and inhales as much as possible, running in and taking it then running out as fast as possible.

It works and Subaru abandons the chain and begins doing this. Running in and out as fast as possible to get things.

Subaru now has a backpack, a document written in an unknown language written in a font that conveyed anger or fear.

He also acquired a bunch of empty cans. Somehow, canning was a thing here?

Finally, he finds some weird device that looks like a carbide lamp and has some fuel left inside of it. He wont have to rely on his dwindling Nokia anymore.

The first windmill has been looted up, now its time to go up to the 2^nd.

Its dark outside, but with the lamp Subaru braves the darkness and manages to get to the 2^nd windmill.

Unlike the first, which is made of wood and stone, this windmill is built of Stone and metal. The metal appears to have corroded but has overall stood the test of time.

There is a giant symbol on it of a wolf with three swords in it’s back. How daunting.

When Subaru opens the door to this windmill, he finds a structure much better preserved than the first. The shaft and the Windblades are connected by the bevel gears, and rotational energy is being transferred into some cave opening into the mountain. Unlike in the other windmill, this one isn’t caved in.

He enters the gear house above the blades of the wind turbines, the wind is still causing the ancient mechanisms to move, so he must be very careful in this area. He finds another canteen and fills it. He then finds what looks like a gladius and a skeleton with a note.

There is a sword in his neck and it looks self-inflicted. Opened metal cans surround the skeleton.

The note looks to be a suicide note, but why?

“Poor guy, Rest in peace my brother.”

Subaru solemnly salutes the dead man.

He now goes in the direction of the spinning shaft.

A door similar to the room of the original structure can be found. In it is a disturbing sight.

There is preserved rope in the room. Somebody no longer has need of it anymore.

Subaru gets onto the stool and gingerly brings down the skeleton from its limp position.

He now has rope. Finally.

Looking to the walls, there is writing. Lots of it.

Subaru cannot read any of the writing; but.

There is pictograms written. It is written like a comic book on the walls of the room.

On the first picture, what appears to be a floating island is seen

On the second, a line points to the bottom of the floating island,

The third picture depicts the windmills.

The fourth depicts their true form.

The drawing is of a massive airship falling from the sky. The turbines of the airship are shown to have been caught by rocky outcroppings. The pictograms show how these turbines are secured to the rock, then they show little buildings coming to be around the wind turbines.

Then, the contents of the pictogram shift, the floating island is shown once again.

Then, from the right side of the floating island, a black void is shown expanding to cover the top of the entire island. The scene shifts to stickmen back in the turbine-towns, the pictograms depict as food runs out and out people begin to gain x’s on their eyes.

A final picture is rendered; it is rendered much more defined than the rest. An self portrait of a man in military gear is drawn into the wall. On his armband is that same wolf with 3 swords. To his left Is a woman who stands close to the man. On his right is a little girl holding a very large spear with that same insignia. She looks fierce but seems to have an expression of childlike innocence.

There is more writings, signatures are found.

Subaru pieces together that something has happened to the surface, and that the people on the cliffs starved because of it. This vexes Subaru, as he now believes there is a good chance the surface is destroyed. He will have to find this out himself.

In the room he finds no more goods. He leaves and heads deep into the mountain complex.

The gears are connected to a bunch of flywheel belt drives, their belts have long since withered. There is a factory here. The rotational energy of the wind must’ve been used in tandem with the pulleys and belts to manufacture goods en mass.

Subaru finds what they have been producing, Amputation Devices, Prosthetics with holes for hands, cannon hands, Prosthetics with swords and blade, this must’ve been a society of war. The destitute and crippled were likely sent to these farlands to work and be useful.

How interesting.

The factory finally gives Subaru something of value. It is the grapple to a grappling hook. He can now attach this to a rope and throw it across chasms to get across. Perfection.

Eventually, the structure is fully explored and it’s contents are looted. Subaru finds a shaft and ladder heading straight up and takes it. 100 feet later and it opens to a smaller bunker on the cliffside. Subaru will sleep here.

The day ends in a second and the world is suddenly pierced into darkness.

Chapter Text

He awakes to the sound of a bird cawing perched on the open slit of the bunker.

Looking out from the Bunker’s opening, the sky is a gradient of Orange-scarlet fire from the low point of view and purple-lavender from the upper part of the point of view. This is because Subaru finds himself on the eastern end of the world, the sun rises from below the continental ridge. Day in this land only occurs when the sun is in direct view.

For his first meal in the new world, Subaru returns to some of the formerly air-sealed rooms and uses his new gladius to chop up the furniture into dry-wood. He has gotten very lucky as this is the only non-waterlogged wood for miles.

He uses his carbide to light tinder and kindling and is about to expand the fire when his prefrontal cortex suddenly reactivates and he realizes the danger of burning fires in enclosed places. He moves his bundle of burning kindling outside to a ledge overlooking the great nothingness. He then gets the fire to a good degree of heat before using his canteen and ramen to make breakfast.

The meal is good and the sky now erupts with colors of scarlet and orange at eye level.

“Hey Nokia-taaannn, where do you think we should go tooodayyy?”

Subaru has taken a couple of photos of the sheer cliff face via his NOKIA. Memento Mori?

Now with the Ramen fully digested, Subaru regains his energy and begins his climb towards the next outcropping. The vines here grow bigger and this is a problem as medium sized vines the side of arm width are much easier to climb when compared to vines the diameter of a waist. Subaru increasingly relies on his gladius, stabbing it into fibers of the wood to gain a point of holding. In other places, he wraps his chain around the vine and uses it’s friction to reverse-repel upwards. He found a helmet that looked suspiciously like a pickelhaube at a skeleton in his bunker. He had looted it for the only reason being: it looked very cool.

It’s large spike and metal protective casing had saved Subaru once, for when a rock fell directly upon it’s spike, it was split into pieces and thrown into many directions before the force of the rock could directly hit Subaru’s cranium, therefore saving his life.

He now lay at 44560 feet below the continental ridge. He had made good progress but now had no food or consumables left.

Often Subaru would find a bushel of berries and tenderly try one, only for it’s bitter disposition and nasty flavor to award it’s chewed up remains a one way trip down the great waterfall. He finally found some semblance of acceptable snack in the form of sour Icker Umbers from a vine with wood-coloring like that of birch.

The sour flavor was acceptable and so Subaru ate as many fruits as possible on that vine.

As he ascended, Subaru had begun to see many birds nestlings in the cliffsides. It seemed that the migratory birds of the continent migrated yearly to these cliffs to mate and spawn. Subaru had stolen some eggs from a nest but now found himself hounded by a baest which looked like a cross between the Canadian Goose and a Shoebill.

Often times this violent bird -who had all the right to be violent- would peck and swoop at Subaru as he tried to climb. Subaru almost lost his footing many times and would’ve fallen into the great abyss had he not had a chain.

Eventually, another bird arrived and starting hounding Subaru too. Fuck.

When Subaru eventually found an outcropping for which he could sit, he saw something that gave him the idea for a dastardly plot.

The angry strand of potential energy had returned.

Subaru saw another vine with only a couple threads left. Subaru’s mind was good and so he decided he would eat meat on this night.

To create his trap, Subaru very carefully tied a small sharp metal piece to two ropes. The sharp metal piece from the windmill was very carefully oriented so that when Subaru pulled on the rope with rapidity, the sharp metal would dig into the fiber and cause a chain reaction leading to the vine’s splitting.

He placed the recently stolen eggs onto a ledge of limestone very near to that tensioned strand of plant fiber. When the birds came down to retrieve their eggs, Subaru pulled at the rope with all his might, startling one of the birds.

As that bird came up to scurry away, the vine broke in half and the tensioned vine snapped directly at the bird’s neck, ripping it off cleanly and throwing it’s head far into the abyss. The other bird cawed a screech of terror and went beside the first.

When Subaru came to the scene of the massacre, he found that the other bird was nestled into the warm corpse of its mate. The bird did not move when Subaru brought a rock above it’s head in wrath for the last day of pecking and Stuka-diving. Therefore, he brought the rock down and sent the other bird to rejoin his or her mate in Valhalla.

On that day, Subaru relit a fire using the last dry wood he had bundled in his backpack. The blood of the birds had long since drained when Subaru used his gladius to gingerly skin the birds. He boiled the eggs with canteens of waterfall-water and used his helmet as a pot for the eggs. The spike was deep into the fire but did not crack or bend to it’s heat as it was a spike of superior ancient vollachian engineering.

Eventually, the skinned remains of the bird were removed of anything that didn’t look like chicken and consumed gingerly. For salt, Subaru did something disgusting and scraped the salty sequestrations of salt which now covered his body and scraped them off into a little pile. He had been sweating for days on end, and had to drink water from a waterfall regularly.

Subaru’s justification for this bullshit was that “it’s like eating your own saliva.”

Disgusting.

This disgusting salt was spread upon the tender meat of the bird the juice of an Icker Umber was marinated into the meat. Subaru had been a very good cook in his previous world and used his satisfactory knowledge to prepare the meals.

He said thanks and devoured the meat like a gluttonous beast. Night had once again fell and Subaru went to sleep with pride in his catch.

Subaru no longer talked to Nokia-tan or anytime for that matter. Talking seemed a waste of air to the lungs and therefore Subaru began to be more silent.

He fell asleep within seconds to the sheer exhaustion of the climb and slept for a longer time than last time. When he awoke, he had found a scene of pure horror as he had now found himself precariously close to the ledge.

That feeling of falling down when you’re about to fall asleep permeated Subaru as he recoiled in horror at his close distance the abyss.

He was about to curse his luck when he looked at the previous position where Subaru had been resting. A stalactite dripstone had fallen from the infernal cliffs and pierced where Subaru had been sleeping. Subaru was now grateful for his restless sleep movements.

With newfound strength given to him by the sacrifice of an entire avian family’s worth of calories, Subaru set off to climb higher.

“Check for rocks, Check for Rot, check for bad-stone so you’ll die not.”

“Check for fiber, Check for biters, check for water like the river Tiber.”

“Check for loot, Check for man, so I might not die in this desolate land.”

“Watch the sky, watch the sun, so one day I might meet another one.”

“Climb the roots, climb to land, so one day I might return to Japan.”

And so, Subaru continued his ascent. The air had growth thicker and the oxygen deprivation was no longer an issue thankfully. Updrafts of intense strength permeatated this area and Subaru exploited these updrafts to throw his ropes at greater distance.

He had not died in many many-

FUCK! Subaru got unlucky and a powerful gust of wind had decoupled him from his climb. It had come when Subaru had fallen into vertigo from exhaustion. When he fell, the chain snapped violently and he continued to fall.

He now found himself falling at a very fast speed towards the abyss.

Subaru had a choice now. He was gingerly aware of Return By Death and it’s effects. Subaru would either spend the next 3 days aloft 180,000 feet below the continental ridge before dying from asphyxiation or Dehydration or he could get it over with quickly with the gladius at his side.

After a day of falling, Intense and utter boredom gave Subaru the strength needed to cut himself open and let blood pour from his appendages.

He went to sleep in the violent winds and woke up shortly after his successful hunt.

The furious Subaru took out his anger on thousand-year-old rock formations and once again set off. He had lost around 400~ feet of progress but continued his trek upwards nonetheless.

“Check for rocks, Check for Rot, check for bad-stone so you’ll die not.”

“Check for fiber, Check for biters, check for water like the river Tiber.”

“Check for loot, Check for man, so I might not die in this desolate land.”

“Watch the sky, watch the sun, so one day I might meet another one.”

“Climb the roots, climb to land, so one day I might return to Japan.”

The song in his head had become his marching rhythm. A metronome to his jumps and grappling.

He found a route that protected him from the worst of the updrafts and continued to climb until.

The Smooth Wall.

For some unknown reason, the smooth wall was a layer of rock that did not permit Vinal growth upon it’s figure. The rock was milky and white and a composition like that of granite but did not permit for stakes and hooks to be hammered in to its façade.

Therefore, Subaru had come across his first unscalable rock-face in his trek upwards. Subaru now had a couple of options. Rawdog it? Find another route? Or take rest at the outcropping which lay below the flat-marble like cliff face.

He was at 44002 feet below Tigracy-sea-level and now had a problem. He could not find a suitable route upwards other than to actually rock-climb without harness, vine or stake.

Furthermore, the winds in this area were unpredictable.

There was another option. On his way up, he had found a vine which spanned a huge length from one cliff face to the tip of a stalactite dripstone fall in the distance.

The vine had a shape of a parabola and seemed to be alive enough. There was only one problem in that it had the diameter of a human thigh. 80 feet of vine would have to be scurried across to get to the stalactite to continue his climb.

Subaru Natsuki decided to choose to climb that vine.

His first attempt he had gotten 10 across when the wind shifted and he lost his grip, he had a chain around his waist to catch him if he fell, but this chain had a 25% failure rate and, in this moment, the ancient chain snapped and released Subaru into the abyss.

He now had three days or the gladius to deal with. Subaru chose the gladius and once again found himself at the bottom of that smooth wind blasted granite wall.

His next attempt he had a very tight bounding to the vine via a rope around his waist and the chain in his hands, this would be more successful as Subaru would be able to make it 50 feet across the 80 foot chasm.

The attempt failed when the rope got caught on a part of the vine and subaru untied it to regain traction. This would prove a mistake as he’d suddenly lose grip on the dew-ridden slippery texture of the vine and once he found himself falling a distance. Gladius to neck saved him the pain of dehydration.

The third attempt failed because Subaru had gotten tired of the fuckass vine and now tried scaling the rock face. His greatest mistake was that he actually managed to get 50 feet up.

He lost his grip on an old little ledge and fell down 50 feet.

The gladius which had saved him from dehydration so many times now turned on the poor boy and when he fell, the unsheathed gladius pierced into his gut but did not permit him to die quickly. The boy bled out over 3 minutes in excruciating pain.

On the next loop, he threw the angrily gladius off the cliffside in rage before realizing the absolute stupidity of the previous action. He hanged himself via a vine to get the gladius back.

Finally, on the true loop, Subaru returned to that vine and used the rope method to scurry across. When he got to 50 feet, he was able to successfully retie the rope and now found himself 20 feet away from the end of the rope.

Fate was cruel and history likes to repeat itself.

At the far end of the vine, where Subaru had previously been, perhaps a rock or a dripstone fell downwards and ripped the vine in half. This meant that the vine had no support on one end and suddenly, Subaru’s vine was a vertical angle.

Subaru once again found himself needing to climb 20 feet of vine straight up.

With adrenaline pumping in his body, a sense of Deja Vu permeated him. As night fell, Subaru’s NOKIA once again found itself clutched between his molars as he continued his ascent. Subaru was but 5 feet away from the rock face.

Will.

He willed himself to move, absolute conscious control of ligaments and tendons which screamed in agony to stop or rest. Willful control of the muscles forced them into overwork to reach those 5 feet of vine.

He had now touched the rock of the stalactite dripstone and was jubilant. Thankfully no falling rock had destroyed his 7 hours of climbing progress.

He shimmied up the rock with the last of his strength and found a tiny burrow to sleep in.

He once again collapsed into it and fell into a deep [REM] sleep.

A curious bunch of baests which looked like a cross between meerkats and flying squirrels looked on in wonder at the sight of a weird boy with an appealing smell perched within their house.

Subaru finally made it to 42300 feet below the continental ridge.

He had awoken again and found those curious Meer-beasts watching his every move with vigilance. He tried to catch one they were too swift for his hands.

Once again he set out and found a stretch of rocks much easier to climb that the rocks which came before him.

The windmills were now too far away to be seen in the fog and Subaru Natsuki found himself incredibly bored. The thrill of the vistas and the beauty of the of the natural environment had become stale to Subaru.

He was at 41122 Feet below the continental ridge when something finally broke the monotony…

A cabin?

The cabin was made to be with stone to it’ height and with a roof of wood. One end of the cabin was directly connected to the shear of the rock face. The roof’s straw had long since faded off. This was the first sign of civilization Subaru had seen for days now.

It had been 7 days since Subaru had arrived on that stalactite. He had just a little bit of bird meat left and one egg as emergency rations. Therefore, this place looked like a godsend.

When Subaru arrived at the cabin he found the door was rotted to the point where one could push their fist into the center of it and pierce through with little effort.

Inside of the roofless cabin, Subaru looked around to his dismay to find very little of value.

The glass of a window had long since shattered and what seemed to be the remains of a bed could be found. There was but a bookshelf on the far end of the cabin on the wall adjuntant to the rock face. When Subaru tried to take one of the books, he found that it wasn’t a book anymore but rather a coalescence of molded-powder which loosely retained the shape of book. He put his finger on one and it collapsed into powdery mold spores.

There was nothing in this cabin to be found.

…

…

Is that a lever?

Subaru’s antics with the moldy rotten books had revealed in the bookshelf a lever. Subaru was very keen on the tropes and pulled that lever.

A click could be heard but no motion could be found.

Subaru decided to, out of anger for finding nothing, punch the moldy bookcase with a great intensity.

Only to find his hand having fully pierced the rotten wood of the bookshelf and the moldy mess of the books.

There was a hollow space on the other side.

After a long couple of minutes of work, the bookshelf was moved and a passage into the cliff was found.

Subaru entered gingerly and turned on his carbide lamp. The air was stale here but had enough oxygen to breathe.

He came across a bulkhead door bearing a very different symbol. There was not the symbol of the Wolf and swords but rather a symbol of a dragon.

Why were the vollochians so far north at the windmills you might ask? This was because the windmills were the most forward of the operating bases of the ancient Vollachian empire. The were made as a sacrificial lamb, whose radio silence would indicate brewing trouble for the Vollachians. That is why the vollachian Insignia was displayed so prominently.

In the great war between Ancient Vollachia and Ancient Lugunica, there were 3 main fronts.

The continental front at the land border. Armies and knights forces duked it out here.

The Aerial Front, in the skies above the land. Dragons and mages duked it out here.

And finally, the cliffside front. Jaeger infantry and draconic infantry duked it out on these cliffs. Ancient battles of terrifying proportions took place in these areas. Oftentimes, when the continental front was stalemated, expeditionary forces would try to snake around the defense lines of the enemy like Germany around Maginot. Their route would often be the cliffsides and walls of the great waterfall. If an expeditionary force -like the airship- successfully managed to cross the cliffs of the great waterfall, they’d find themselves behind enemy lines and free to wreak havoc on the civilian population of the enemy. To stop this, Both the Ancient Vollachians and the Lugunicans constructed massive defense networks. Vertical fortresses and scout bases like the one Subaru found at the windmills.

The bulkhead was opened by Subaru. Inside he found a dry but oxygenated complex.

The halls were perfectly circular as if excavated via beam of energy. There were doors of wood and metal at regular intervals. Opening them revealed bunks upon bunks. The mattresses were dirty but could still be used. There were no lightbulbs but strange apparati that appeared in the manner of lightbulbs.

“What is this place?”

Continuing deeper into the complex, Subaru opened every door for a while and found many bunkrooms, he explored each one thoroughly and found many skeletons.

In the hands of a skeleton, he found a very useful item In the form a rudimentary swiss army knife. It had but 3 functions and was the size of a hand, but the blade was sharp and the file and flintstone were still usable.

Subaru went a wardrobe and found it to be sealed via bulkhead. When he opened it, his instincts detected stale air, but inside he could see good uniforms and equipment. There was airflow in the structure. Therefore, Subaru elected to return to that wardrobe room later once it had oxygenated. Subaru had walked for a while exploring the complex.

On one wall a great mural could be seen written with an unknown Language. That dragon could be seen watching over a land of green and verdant. There was seen soldiers with interlocked arms protecting the border of the country. The cliffs were visible on this mural and the closer it got to the dragon, the lighter and more appealing the muralist had drawn the landscape.

In the area away from the dragon, demons and beasts could be seen, children being eaten and babies thrown off the great abyss. Angry fonted words could be seen.

He found another mural of propaganda depicting the wolf of the Vollochians being shredded and eaten by soldiers a dragon insignia. What a society to live in.

Subaru had moved on from these posters to the next rooms. One was caved in and held no value.

The other was an armory.

He found crossbows with bolts still inside of their structure. He took the one that looked the newest and finally had an adequate hunting tool. He took as many bolts as possible. He found In this room a variety of blades. Kanobos and Gladiuses, Katanas and maces, Flails and cutlasses, Warhammers and kunai. There could be seen daggers and tridents of good quality, Spiked clubs like the one held by rom. Good weaponry, but unfortunately Subaru had very little use for it. Except, for the phalanx.

But why did Subaru want a phalanx?

Simple, he wanted to recreate the “Salto De Pastor” from the Canary Islands using the phalanx. The Shepards leap could allow Subaru to jump down from higher places without dying brutally. He could now jump from 20 ft down and use the sharp end of the phalanx to dig very deeply into the earth, he’d use the friction from a newly acquired pair of gloves to slow his fall and ensure his survival. It was a very good find.

With crossbow and Phalanx now acquired, Subaru left the armory and headed towards the last remaining door. The door was of metal and was painted with the insignia of a two headed dragon with a halo around it’s head. The star of David with a skeleton skull inside of it could be seen, perhaps an ancient warning sign.

Subaru opened the Bulkhead door with great difficulty.

What stood before him could not readily be described.

Imagine a medieval king was handed an image of NORAD headquarters and told to recreate it dutifully within his domain. This is what it would’ve looked like.

There was a truly massive map on the far side of the wall. The map depicted a huge country spanning from one side of the continent to the other. There was another country on the map, the southern country appeared to have split the western area with the northern country. In the farthest of the far north, a smaller country could also be seen.

The northern country (Ancient luguinca) had the most detailed map of them all. Cities and towns were dutifully labeled in a language unknown to Subaru. There could be found many rows of desks with different segments of the border between the northern and southern countries. On these desks, little toy soldiers indicated units and grey squares indicated tasque forces.

Roman numerals could be found on these- HUH?

How did roman numerals get here? Is this roman? The language is completely foreign? How could this be? How how??? Somebody from my homeland must’ve come here like me and introduced them to this place.

The roman numerals had been introduced by somebody from Subaru’s homeland. A certain Flugel character.

After the initial shock of seeing Romanized Numerals in a an alien land, Subaru continued his dutiful investigation.

Documents looking like causality reports were everywhere, reports of battles and skirmishes seemed aloft. Right next to the big map, there was another smaller map.

This map was a map of the eastern cliffside front between The ancient Vollochians and Lugunicans. The war in heaven had truly consumed both lands.

The map was segmentalized, but the complex which Subaru found himself on could be seen.

A line of dots indicating forts and gunnery ports could be seen on this map. Lancer Artillery arrays like the ones used by Crusch against the white whale could be seen on these gunports. This was Lugunica’s line of defense against flanking maneuvers by Vollochian flying dragons, Airships, and Aeriel troops. Those two windmills were indicated as enemies on the map.

One more notable thing could be seen on the wall. A truly MASSIVE lancer artillery cannon was visible near the fortress subaru currently found himself on. If crusch’s cannons were babies, then this would be the great grandfather.

Subaru was a man and therefore felt unimaginable gravitation towards the artillery weapon. This would be his next destination.

Subaru’s unbridled curiosity at the war-room would bring him the desk closest to the map. There was a Metia there.

Subaru began jacking around with button for the next 5 minutes. He pressed and tried to-

[WARNING! LANCER-1 LOST][WARNING! CAPITOL SIGNAL NOT FOUND!]

[WARNING WARCODE 1]! …Subaru reactivated the ancient strategic war room.

The map lit up and red flashing outlines appeared around every city and installation on the map.

[WARNING! PRIESTELLA-1 SIGNAL NOT FOUND!][WARNING! FL-1 SIGNAL NOT FOUND!]

[WARNING! ANTI-VOLLOCHIAN DEFENSE LINE DESTROYED.]

[WARNING! MAJOR LANCER ARRAY DAMAGE.]

A variety of angry blasts and alarms screeched out in Japanese.

Why is it in Japanese? The language is scuffed up but I can understand it? Is it the same reason as the roman numerals? What the fuck is going on?

The alarms continued until they had listed every city, installation, and town on the map. The map was powered by a reserve mana-battery hidden deep into the complex. This complex was the forward command post for the defense lines, it was built to be as deep as possible to ensure it’s defensibility against enemy attacks. Why 41000~ feet down? Who knows.

Subaru was smart enough to understand something bad had happened here. Sometimes the map would switch it’s labels from all red to green. Then, starting from a place in the far east of the map, the light outlines of the labels would become red, like a wave of death. Subaru now knew his location was remarkably close to the origin of this wave of death.

Some calamity must’ve occurred to make everybody in these structures die. But what? I know I am close to where this calamity must’ve happened, I can see that wall map. Also, WHAT THE FUCK! Those -XL Roman numerals with lines above them mean I’m “40,000” in the negative. 40,000 WHAT? Feet? Meters? Miles? Oh god. I can see that stalactite I was summoned on in the map, and that place is indicated by the map’s scale factor to be VERY close to the complex I am currently at. This is very bad. It might be months till I get out of here. I will succeed! I must!

The sound of a click permeates the room as the mana-battery runs out of juice. The map returns to it’s dormant state and the room is in silence once again.

///

In the market of Lugunica, a truly ancient device was being inspected by Russel Fellow. It seemed to be ancient military weaponry with a METIA screen and some mysterious mechanisms. Crusch Karsten had discovered this device in her archives and was getting it appraised.

It suddenly lit up with a bright flash. Ancient Lugunican texted blared an intruder alert.

and suddenly the vision of a war room was seen. A black-haired boy with evil eyes and a tracksuit could be seen. He was looking around aimlessly and asking “Hello”?

Both Crusch and Russel looked at each other in shock. The device that Crusch had tried everything to turn on had just now activated, just like that.

Then the screen suddenly shut off.

“What was that?”

///

Subaru Natsuki continued his exploration. Many of the corridors leading deeper into the structure were irreversibly blocked by fallen rocks and rubble. One pathway was found and Subaru discovered what looked like a cross between a General Atomics fusion reactor and a biological living heart. It had a giant insignia of a black butterfly on it’s center.

Subaru had no clue what it did and decided to leave the dead end behind.

This device was actually the heart of the complex, decided by Ms. Pisstea, it was a similar mechanism to the device she used to power her (Canon) Levitating Mansion.

Subaru found an actual grappling gun this time. A real one. A good one. Grappling hooks seemed to be an important tool in these rugged farlands for the ancients. This was the only one that remained operational that Subaru could find. He’d have to use it sparingly to ensure it’s durability.

Subaru also found more fuel for the carbide lamp.

He found a tablet of thin clayish material and created a rough copy of the giant map along with the countries and towns shown it. He drew it in charcoal.

Subaru discovered a room filled with skeletons in the next antechamber, this chamber seemed to be a mess hall and the people had many bottles everywhere. Jim Jones would’ve looked upon this image with nostalgia and glee.

Subaru took a couple of bottles from the dead and gave respects.

He came next to a room filled with what looked to be - [BOOM]

Subaru had returned by death. He had entered a room with a crack in the wall. From that crack emanated natural gas. Subaru’s carbide lamp ignited the natural gas and caused his death. Because this natural gas was actually natural, it had no odor and no eggsmell. Subaru had been sent back to shortly after the map was activated.

“FUCK!”

Subaru was no idiot; he had seen the explosion and felt the heat. So therefore, he knew it must’ve been some sort of ignition. He connected the dots with the carbide and turned it off when he got to the room. He entered with his Nokia and did not ignite the Natural Gas.

He found in this room many shells and powder cylinders. These powder cylinders must’ve exploded violently when the natural gas ignited in the room. Subaru shuddered at the potential violence of the explosion. There was a shell loading apparatus powered by a shaft running deeper into a collapsed part of the complex, Subaru tried to climb up the shaft to see where it led and ended up inside of a Gunnery turret. The turret had no entrances or exits that could be opened. But it had a window out to the outside and Subaru could see that it was night. And then.

[BOOM!] That carbide had a little bit of ignited ash still inside of it. When Subaru opened the door to the magazine, he inadvertently let the natural gas begin to seep outwards. When this happened, it creeped to his carbide and found a source of ignition.

The mountainside Erupted the most violent explosion Subaru had ever seen. The turret which subaru was inside of protected him from most of the explosion itself. But that came at a cost.

The sheer energy behind the explosion caused the many ton turret to shoot up towards the sky at terrifying speeds, with Subaru in it, his legs completely broken. Now from that shaft he had entered in, there was now a full view of the mountain cliff where Subaru had come from. He could see a massive cloud of dust similar in size to the Beirut explosion. He was flying away from this explosive cloud with the same velocity as the 2-ton turret.

His motion made a parabola and he eventually began to fall back down to the abyss. He saw the sheer force of the eruption had sheered a humungous side of the cliff straight off, rockslides were occurring everywhere from the shockwave and brutal avalanches of earth were seen.

Subaru was now falling from the continent while inside an ancient rusted up mass driver turret. Also with broken legs.

While he was falling with the turret, his excruciating pain from having had his lower body crushed eventually caused him to fall into shock.

He died from shock while riding a battery turret like major king kong from dr Strangelove.

He returned to the previous checkpoint, looted what he could, and chose to never open that door again. He eventually found another path and looted more bunkrooms. He found a bathroom filled with propoganda of a lion raping the small dog (Lugunican Lion VS Vollochian Wolf).

He took a piss and went off to find the exit. he quickly took a detour to that stale-air wardrobe and found a good felt hat to wear.

He now wanted to get as far away from this fortress as possible, there was a very good chance the thing could erupt and Subaru wanted to get the hell out of dodge as soon as possible. He found an exit and opened up to a little valley of green between the cliffs. Subaru saw his first tree here.

The day was here but Subaru was tired. He found an alpine stream of clear water and drank tenderly from it. He then went over to a little burrow of grassy dirt and went into it.

He could see high up in the clouds the silhouette of that giant lancer artillery battery pointing high into the sky. He also saw that traumatic turret which he had ridden into the abyss with broken legs.

He shuddered at the thought of the mountain erupting.

His tired mind soon once again fell asleep. He was at 40991 Ft below

…

She was an ancient spirit. A spirit of water, she had once been named “The Guide of the Realm.”

Her name was Alexandria, cousin to Melakeura.

She spent her days exploring her realm, she was naturally playful and curious.

While she was a teal Corporeal spirit, capable of speech, she had forgotten human language. One day, she felt the Prescence of a young boy in her realm. And so, she decided to head off to meet him.

…

Chapter Text

“Hey little guy,”
“OW! Why’d ya pinch me?”

“I’ll try again, Hey there,”

“No pinch, are you a gal?”

Alexandria Purred happily.

“I guess that’s right, whats your name little lady?”
Alexandria remained silent, then nuzzled upon Subaru’s hair.

“Hey-Hey, My fine locks are not your mount! Oh the humanity I’ve been commandeered!” Subaru jested with a smile.

In the next moment, the image of an ancient lighthouse and library appeared within Subaru’s mind. Alexandria had used a peculiar Mental interference spell to transmit what she was thinking to Subaru. Essentially, when Alexandria thought of her own name, in Subaru’s head he imagined his own mental experience with the name.

“I think I’ll call you Alex, do you like that name?”
Alexandria purred quite happily. The boy which stood before her had quite the spiritual affinity.
“I’ll take that as a yes, so don’t mind me if I ask you but, what are you? You’re the first critter I’ve seen out here looking like something out of a stalker game, but you look cute nonetheless!”
Subaru smiled and began to once again pet the great spirit of the cliffs.

Alexandria pouted for a bit, before realizing the extent to Subaru’s true obliviousness.
In her curiosity, from upon Subaru’s head, she decided to take a glimpse into the boy’s memories.

This wasn‘t a full observation, but would rather be glimpses and flashbacks to previous events. By doing this, Alexandria would be able to determine the character of the boy.

From the visions, curious structures and strange devices permeated her mind, followed by visions of climbing alone and intense isolation.

Her heart ached at the emotions of loneliness emanating from the boy, for she too had suffered from those same emotions before.

As a kindred spirit of solitude, she had grown to desire companionship in the many years which followed the war in heaven and the great calamity.
She purred again. This time she decided to try something she hadn’t done in many centuries

{Hallo}

“Wah? You can talk? Awesome! I’ve been getting so lonely out here, Even with Nokia-tan and the birds!”

At the sight of Subaru’s wide eyed curiosity and genuine fascination, Alexandria dismounted the subaruian 7th Cavalry division and floated in front of Subaru once again.

“Oh I almost forgot, my name is Subaru! Nice to meet ya!”

{buruburu.}

“Huh?”

{buruburu friendship?}

“My name’s not Buruburu! And for the second query; absolutely!

{Alexandria pleased with choice of buruburu. Buruburu will be friends with Alexandria for uncountable centuries. In exchange, Alexandria will make Buruburu into being without fear and loneliness Buruburu confirms?}

“Uncontable centuries sounds like a Quebec alt-rock band, and yes, Buru confirms!”

And so, Subaru inadvertently formed his first contract, Subaru would promise to accompany Alexandria for “uncountable centuries.”
…
\\\ Interlude
The year was 812 AA. The ancient spirit Alexandria and Subaru could both be seen staring off into the distance on rocking chairs in a hut overlooking the great abyss.
Turns out, Alexandria was one to keep promises and therefore, with a combination of Soul transcription stolen from one of Roswaal’s ancestor’s books of the dead and a superior version Sacrament of the Immortal King, along with some cheeky manipulation of the envy witch factor, Subaru had been made to live uncountable centuries.
This was fine, as Alexandria had previously made Subaru the God emperor of Gusteko as a birthday gift for his 500th’
\\\ Interlude end
…
In exchange for Subaru’s companionship, Alexandria would do the same and would try to help the boy in his goal to get above the mountain.

And so Subaru once again began to happily caress Alexandria, inadvertently making his first spiritual contract.

Alex, who had now taken the form of what could only be described as a cross between a morning dove, a crow, and Otto von Bismarck. This was because Alexandria decided to copy her contractor's fit and recreated the vollachian pickelhaube.

And so they set off once again towards the high cliffs at 40991 Ft below the continental ridge. The high humidity and low oxygenation of the lower regions gave way to high humidity and high oxygenation, in other words, a vertical rainforest could be seen.

“So how long have you been around these parts?”

{Uncountable Centuries}

“That doesn’t answer anything!”

{Alexandria lacks the ability to count past four}

“Four hundred years! Don’t tell me you were all alone down here?”

{Alexandria fears Buruburu will grow sad over predicament, Alexandria will now change the subject. Look up}

Climbing through the intense brush of the vertical Buddheim Rainforest, one could see a vast outcropping of rock, which extended a huge distance away from the rest of the vertical rock face. This massive overhang extended very far out into the abyss and could be found about 4000 feet above Subaru’s current position. If one were to be placed in a high powered cannon at the edge of the rock, then there would be a parabola where a high enough firing power could get you flying above the edge of the continent and falling back down onto a field or forest within it.

On this rocky overhang, Subaru could see the massive outline of a huge and ancient piece of artillery. This shaft artillery piece was, from it’s great distance, about 3/4 the height of the lugunican royal palace. From it’s positioning to Subaru on the far horizon, vines and vegetation clung to the barrel. The barrel pointed southward.
This was Lugunica’s largest surviving Lancer Artillery battery left over from the war in heaven between Ancient Vollochia and Ancient Lugunica.
As it turns out, Ms Pisstea was an artillery fanatic to give even napoleon bonaparte a run for his francs.

In the time of the ancients, Echinda had created many different weapons of war in her never ending quest to defeat death. She sold this weapon-technology to both sides of the conflict to gain the funding and rescources needed for her experiments. In this way, Echidna’s Sanctuary became ancient Lugunica’s first taste of the Military industrial complex.

It is Quite ironic that echidna created such deadly devices in her quest to defeat death.

Such is the way of a witch.

When compared to the lancers of Crusch Karsten’s Magic artillery division, This great gun would be the greatest of great grandfathers in comparison. It held thousands of times more power and could lob a Firestone shell as far away as the city of Lupuguna.

It was as if a giant version of lancer artillery, the Vergeltungswaffen-3 also known as the V-3 Cannon, and the previously mentioned strange Echidnianic power core had a violent orgy - this cannon being the result.

Men love artillery cannons.

This is a universal constant, as unchanging as the mass of a proton. In every world and every universe, all men have a secret desire to load a shell and fire a barrage at their enemies.
Even if Subaru had been born a woman, this fundamental constant would still remain intact, as bitches also love cannons.

Therefore, when Subaru, who is a man but often acts like a bitch, saw the distant silhouette of the King-lancer as it shall now be called, He was ecstatic.

“Hey Alex, who built that big Bertha over in the distance?”

Alexandria seemed to wince at the mention of it.

[Ancestors of Men fought the war in heaven against one another, Alexandria does not wish to remember those days.]

“Ah, I’m sorry Alex, must’ve been a sore subject”

[Correct, BuruBuru is observant.]

The two lonely beings had now made it to 39999 feet below the continental ridge, their first milestone in climbing the wretched cliff.

From their vantage, the lancer appeared around 36500 feet below. It would be a long climb.
They begun the climb of the vertical rainforest. Unlike the lowermost regions of the Great cliff, this region had much more wood and canopies to climb upon.

As it turns out, those vines were not actually vines but rather the vast root system which anchored and hydrated this higher level of rainforest. This root system helped to prevent erosion from destroying the continent faster than Od Laguna could rebuild it.

The continent worked like this, in the very center of the world, Od Laguna could be found. The rock around hit would be incredibly molten, and as hot material does, would spread out to cool. This continental spreading would fight against the erosion of the elements and the loss of regolith to the great waterfall.

Here Subaru met his first Mabeasts, The lessermost of the Majira. These rabid macaques hounded Subaru with nuts. Subaru promptly ate the nuts, much to the infuriation of the Majira. They then switched to rocks. When this happened, Alexandria’s inner Yandere emerged.
[El Shiha], [El Huma], [El Huma]
“Hey Alexandria, I think they’re dead.”
{Foolish contractor, always remain vigilant of the dead opposum strategy, [El Huma]}

It was in this manner that Subaru learned of magic and spirits in this world. He had long suspected the world to have possessed magical things, as indicated by the floating island, but this was just further confirmation of Subaru’s preconception.
As it turns out, Alexandria’s pickelhaube wasn’t just there for show, as she showed a quite remarkable ability in navigation and strategy, albeit a bit of paranoia and overprotectiveness for her new friend.

Subaru ate smoked Majira that day, seasoned with the spice of ground Bokka casing and tenderized by the juices of the Lemon and Kafka fruit, a fruit which seemed to grow exclusively in this layer and had a flavor identical to that of a papaya. He gorged upon this platter and discovered that spirits had no need for corporeal foods, much to his shock.

The sun had once again gone out of view of Subaru, therefore plunging the cliffs into darkness. This was quite the experience, as the contrast between the still illuminated horizon and the dark cliffs made for a trippy environment. Every night, in the middle of night, there was a time when the sun parallel to the rock face but all the way on the western side. This meant that on the eastern side there would be pure darkness. Subaru once awoke in the middle of the night to the terror of total darkness, only the starlight illuminated the land.
When Subaru awoke this time, he found Alexandria at full alert.

{Greater Majira, get your Phalanx and Crossbow ready, have the grapple at your side BaruBaru, do not leave me behind.}

“On it!”

Subaru grabbed his Phalanx, which he had previously been using for canary island Shepards leaps, and prepared his stance with his back to a rock. While this position appeared precarious, Subaru put faith in his Ancient grappling gun. He had reserved it for emergencies not knowing if the durability of it was enough to be relied upon.
Subaru’s stance grounded the Phalanx’s nonfunctional edge into the ground. The first greater Majira burst forth at a high speed but upon realizing the existence of the Phalanx, tried to stop himself. This was too little to late and the Majira was pierced in the upper lungs by Subaru’s Phalanx, impaled too deeply for Subaru to extract the phalanx, he abandoned it and next went for his crossbow.

Alexandria had been diligently using Huma against another hoarde which threatened to flank the boy. She had put faith in his abilities despite knowing of his lack of combat skills.

Subaru released a crossbow into a second charging Majira, piercing the Adam’s apple. However the sheer momentum of the now dead creature tackled Subaru to the ground.

A third Majira pierced Alexandria’s lines of defense. Subaru, having recently been pummeled with the flying corpse of a Majira, used it’s body as a shield as the bloodthirsty macaque bashed downwards. Once the Macaque had thoroughly crushed it’s comrades cadaver, Subaru suddenly unsheathed his Gladius and stabbed it into the kidney of the beast. Alexandria had finished with the rest of the Hoard and when the final beast stumbled back. A quick blast of water threw the bleeding Macaque from the edge of the cliff, falling down into the abyss.

It was a nominal victory.

Subaru had suffered a few broken bones from the residual force of the 3rd bloodthirsty Majira bashing down upon the 2nd. This was when he discovered Alexandria’s water magic, as he was healed to mint condition by the little spirit.
10 Majira lay dead, 7 by Alexandria and 3 by Subaru. On that day, Subaru decided to make a belt of Monkey skulls.

{why does barubaru want to make a belt of monkey skulls? Alexandria is curious.}

“Come on, it’ll look cool as shit!”

And so, Subaru spent the next day fastening plant fibers into a belt and using the Majira’s skulls as aurafarming equipment.

Thanks to his skills honed on the 40,000 below layer, Subaru had not died once since meeting Alexandria, this was due to many factors, primarily the fact that the lower levels of the vertical forest were actually quite forgiving to failures. 5 times Subaru fell but was caught by the canopy of lower trees, had he have been on the level of the vines, he most likely would’ve died many more times by now.

It had been 2 weeks in true time. Subaru’s tracksuit had been Stowed away, as the temperature was much too high for such gear.
Subaru had begun to grow facial hair, when Alexandria offered to {Make Subaru look less like the Majira previously killed} Subaru declined saying he wanted to look like Tom Hanks on the island.

“Check for rocks, Check for Rot, check for bad-stone so you’ll die not.”
“Check for fiber, Check for biters, check for water like the river Tiber.”
“Check for loot, Check for man, so I might not die in this desolate land.”
“Watch the sky, watch the sun, so one day I might meet another one.”
“Climb the roots, climb to land, so one day I might return to Japan.”

{BaruBaru sings with the fluidity of the Tigracy, continue singing so that Alexandria may memorize the melody for uncountable centuries}

They now found themselves but 300 feet below the ridge which held the lancer. From this vantage, Subaru could see the true majesty of the artillery piece. It’s outer barrel was covered in magical circle after magical circle, Alexandria explained, each magic circle accelerated the projectile to higher speeds and energy-levels that before. There were hundreds of these magic circles going around the circumference of the gun barrel. Subaru could only shudder to imagine it’s power.

Subaru had finally made it to 36500 over the course of many days, in no part thanks to his new best friend.

{Contractor, must we truly go to this weapon of war?}

“I thought we already went through with this, we need to scavenge supplies and this is the only landmark we can see.”

{Contractor, I will not lie or tell half truths to you. I hate this location. In my wandering travels I have avoided this place. It is a place of bad memories for me.}

In her distant past, Alexandria had watched as the humans descended upon her realm, their eyes first held childlike curiosity and wonder and the lands, but after a few decades this childlike wonder was dead.

Replacing it was avarice, warmongering, and fear.
Alexandria could only watch as the gun fired it’s shells across the horizon, day after day, month after month. It was like Chinese water torture to the young water spirit, knowing full well those shells would land upon cities and armies.

When the great calamity occurred, Alexandria had every opportunity to walk the newly flattened continent but chose not to. She had been quite traumatized by the vast scales of the Great War in heaven, the continent spanning skirmishes and the sheer magnitude of suffering overwhelmed the young spirit of water.

In other words, she ran away, away from the war, away from the suffering she should have been healing, away from it all to the relatively untouched natural beauty of the cliffs.

To her, this cannon was a symbol of the world she tried to leave behind creeping back into her life.
This hatred of the world’s folly was another reason why Alexandria grew so fond of the boy, from his memories, Alexandria determined him to be from a world untainted by the folly of conflict. Had she known how badly our world truly had it, she likely would’ve cried tears for her contractor. Tears of empathy.

The complex was an ancient structure, made of concrete similar to that of the Romans. The insignia of the dragon was displayed proudly upon the magazine-bunker of the site.

There were many secondary and tertiary lancers which surrounded the main gun, likely intended as point defense against potential attacks.

Around the structure, huge metal devices that looked identical to the Chernobyl DUGA could be seen. Alex explained them to be atmospheric Mana sequestration arrays developed by the Witch of Greed to directly siphon magical energy from the environment to power the gun. Wires could be seen snaking from these metal structures towards the complex. These arrays had been made out of the remains of deceased spirits, their ability to sequester mana from the atmosphere was repurposed in a similar way to the crystal palace of Lupuguna.

Subaru and Alexandria went to the largest bulkhead of the complex. Ancient symbols could be found. Alexandria translated them.

[LUPUGUNA BATTERY - IN SERVICE OF THE LUGUNICAN ROYAL GAURD SINCE AOD 1024]

AOD meant after Od Laguna’s formation

This gun once held a firing rate of 3000 metres per second (9,800 ft/s) and had a range of around 1000 Kilometers when utilizing spells such as Murak upon the shell.

The barrel of the gun had a diameter similar to a VM Polo, the barrel was seated atop a massive rail system built to control the force of the recoil. The barrel itself was oriented at around a 75 degree angle compared to the ground. This angle was enough for the barrel of the gun to get a clear line of sight to the distant horizon.

The goal of this Cannon was simple, Shell the Vollachian capitol Lupuguna without getting hit yourself.

But why go to great lengths to build a Cannon so far below the cliff of the great waterfall? This was simple, The giant Magic artillery device atop the Vollachian Crystal palace fired it’s ray in a straight beam, not a parabola. If magic artillery was built on the frontlines, then it’s unmoving location would be retaliated against by the Crystal palace artillery.
Therefore, the King-Lancer was built in an area where hundreds of miles of pure rock prevented Vollochia from counterattacking the cannon. It was as simple as being out of view of the Lupuguna Lancer.

Parabola vs Straight-line.

Ancient Lupuguna once had a shielding system, this shielding system prevented the vast majority of artillery and shells from hitting the capitol. The sheer number of deflected shells would eventually excavate the Lupuguna Resevoir.

Entering a pressurized bulkhead, Alexandria used water magic to purify the stale air of the structure, thereby allowing Subaru to enter the complex without fear of asphyxiation.

Subaru now found himself in the ancient hallways of the battery. It was made of concrete and was remarkably well preserved.

Magi-craft wires snaked around the walls of the structure on conduits and pipelines could be seen above. Subaru entered a doorway with a large symbol of a lightning bolt which he assumed to mean electricity.

Subaru now found himself in a massive room about the height of an average airport terminal. In this room, massive machinery could be seen. The wires which snaked out to the DUGA looking arrays were attached to these machines.

Subaru had two goals in this place, one was to loot everything, and two was to see if the gun could be fired once more.

He wanted to do this for a variety of reasons, firstly it could alert people to his location and get him rescue, secondly he would be able to get a better understanding of ancient technology, and thirdly it would be fucking awesome to do so.

He jacked around the control room for awhile, Alexandria translated the specifics and Subaru began to jokingly pump the primers of one of the units of the ancient system.

To his sheer horror, the ancient lugunican engineering reactivated and the atmospheric Mana sequestration arrays reactivated. Mana-Power was restored to the 400 year old complex and the blasts of alarms and announcements could be heard.

[WARNING FACILITY POWER LOW, CONTACT LUGUNICAN HIGH COMMAND]
[ATTENTION, FIRING CHAMBER LOADED, FIRESTONE SHELL LOADED, FIRESTONE CARTIAGE IS LOADED]
[ATTENTION, BARREL-CAP REMAINS ATTACHED, REMOVE BARREL-CAP BEFORE FIRING]
[WARNING, BARREL INTEGRITY UNKNOWN]

Subaru felt like he was in an episode of Stargate and ran around giddy as a schoolboy. He entered one of the many different rooms to find a treasure trove of different things.

Subaru looted cans of 400 year old proto-MRE, he found and stole a better map of the cliff side, he also found a chest filled with a pouch of gold, and decided to keep it for good measure.

He looted a small ancient spyglass as well.

After this, he went into another room and found many mysterious half assembled devices.
It was in this room that Subaru also found a weird device which seemed to be a cross between a portal gun,the gravitational beam emitter from blame, and echidna’s star staff.
Subaru looted the Metia which he promptly named “The Incinerator.”

COUGH.

It was quite the versatile device, When fired, it would release a torrent of extreme ionization; a beam of absolutely blue light.

Firing the weapon at a beast would cause it to immediately have it’s skin fried, it would also begin to disintegrate over the course of a couple of hours. Firing the weapon at higher settings would cause the air to become completely blue, melting anything in it’s pass

This weapon had a couple of weaknesses,
Firing it at neutron reflective material meant instant death. Looking down the barrel of the operational device also meant death.

It also had a cool down of around a day between firings.

This weapon would inevitably save Subaru’s ass many times as he got closer to the horrifying Vertical Augrian canyon.

Subaru had sent Alexandria to explore another half of the facility for valuables as Subaru explored the upper levels, he found more bunk rooms but no corpses could be found. He found empty shell magazines that seemed to have once held many VM Polo sized shells.

Subaru also found the Control room of the structure. It was built deeply into the cliff face and overlooked the gun. From the tiny glass slit of the bunker, Subaru could see the entire gun in it’s total glory.

Subaru began to jack around with the controls, he put faith in his ability to cause bullshit.
The controls of the room had flickered to life,

[ATTENTION, LAST SAVED TARGETTING PARAMETERS, 78.23 ELEVATION, 273.32 ORIENTATION]

[BARREL-CAP MUST BE REMOVED BEFORE FIRING.]

“Woahahah, Awesome, Awesoomme! I get to fire this shit! My dreams are coming true!”

Subaru’s Spirit Alexandria returned and together, they were able to translate the controls of the weapon.

But why was Alexandria helping Subaru do this?

This was because she knew this would be the last time the weapon would be fired. The rusted out gun was oriented in a way so that when the gun was fired, it would be pushed out onto the tracks by recoil towards the cliff edge.

While in it’s operational days, giant springs the size of busses would bring the gun back into it’s original position, today those springs has rusted out. Therefore when the gun was fired, the barrel would roll back away from the cliff side and towards the end of the overhang via rail. It would not return to it’s original position. This would put intense strain on the overhang, eventually causing the gun to fall into the chasms.

Alexandria had calculated all this, she knew that firing the cannon today would also be it’s last.

The gun’s barrel cap was removed mechanically.
The barrel cap of the gun was a metal seal placed above the barrel which sealed the inside of the barrel when not in use. This was to protect the sensitive rifling of the barrel from corrosion. Even ancient Lugunicans knew not to underestimate humidity.

A mechanical device popped the metal cap, which looked exactly like a vault-tec door but with a black butterfly logo, off the barrel of the gun. Air rushed in for the first time in centuries.

[BARREL REPRESSURIZED, SHELL LOADED, CARTRIDGE LOADED, HYDRAULICS IS GO, PNEUMATICS IS GO, MECHANICAL IS GO, MANA-TECH IS GO, ELECTICAL IS GO]

Many of these systems weren’t actually go, their sensors were long since fried, Lugunican engineers had tried to engineer redundant systems into their gun. Unfortunately, some things were malfunctioning after 400 years of inoperation.

Subaru now had a big red button before him. The button called to him,

Press it Subaru.

It beckons for you.

You must.

You must press it.

“We’ll, no taksie backsies!”

Subaru said before pressing the button, switching two keys, and then screaming his hatred for Vollachia into a security metia, which then confirmed his Lugunican citizenship and gave him administrative permision to fire the cannon.
All the procedures Subaru had learned were found in a little operations manual translated by
Alexandria.

Subaru, over the last couple of hours had diligently followed the manual and brought the gun to working order.

[WEAPON PRIMED, FIRE?]

“Absolutely.”

Subaru was already under the impression that the world above him had been annihilated by war and calamity. He had seen no other person and believed the surface to be uninhabitable at the time of the gun’s firing.

Had he known he was pointing a gun at one of the largest cities on the continent, he might’ve puked.

[T-60 SECONDS]

In the first 30 seconds, Magic circles surrounding the shell activated. These were [MURAK] spells which made the shell have less mass, therefore giving it more range.

Lights on the gun activated and alarms were blaring. From Subaru’s vantage point in the gun-control bunker, he could see everything. His Nokia was recording the countdown.

[T-30 SECONDS]

The barrel of the gun began to glow a faint glow of grey around it’s barrel. Steam began to emanate from the gun, the vines and vegetation coating the gun seemed to boil off.

The magic circles on the barrel all activated at once. They glowed red like blood. In the far distance, the Atmospheric Mana-Sequestration Arrays began to glow in the same manner as the gun.

[T-15 SECONDS- WIND ADJUSTMENTS]

The gun’s orientation automatically began to adjust itself based off wind, as there was no wind at the time, there were no adjustments.
The magic circles upon the gun buzzed with energy.

[5]
Alarms were blaring loudly
[4]
Alexandria knew this would be the last time the gun would be fired.
[3]
Strange metal grunts could be heard, particles of mana became corporeal as they surrounded the gun.
[2]
Subaru watched on with eyes full of awe. The Nokia was recording.
[1]
It was a low rumble, followed by a noise sounding like a synthetic riser, then…

[SSCRRAAABOOMMMMMM!]

All at once, the gun’s color became orange. Steam surrounded it. The air boiled like a mirage in it’s region.

A shockwave emanated from the barrel, causing rockslides and landslides all around.

The shell exited the barrel at Mach fuck, it was cosplaying as that one manhole cover well.

The magic circles, to the naked eye, seemed to activate all at once.

However, the truth was different. As the shell passed, the acceleration spells would activate, propelling the massive shell to higher and higher speeds consecutively.

It had a design nearly identical in function to that of the V3 Supergun.

When the gun was fired, the recoil caused the gun to lurch back with a huge speed. Friction pads caused the barrel to lose momentum, but the rusted out springs failed to bring the gun back into it’s original position.

The steaming hot barrel now found itself precariously on the edge of the cliff.

In the ancient past, this wouldn’t have been a problem as the rock face was much more sturdy and stable. But in this moment, the gun’s massive mass suddenly shifting for the first time in centuries proved too much for the overhang.
The rocky overhang which held the barrel of the gun suddenly cracked, before collapsing at all once into the abyss. The bunkers which Subaru and Alexandria were on were unaffected.
From his vantage point, Subaru watched as the massive overhang of rock fell farther and farther into the abyss before finally falling out of sight.
Silence permeated the control room.
…
…
“Hey Alexandria,”
…
…
“That was fucking AWESOME!”

\\\
The citizens of Mirula heard the sound of a cannon shot that day from the distant east. But thought nothing of it until a new star appeared in night sky.
\\\
In the royal capitol, the Lugunican Astronomical society observed a brand new occurrence in the night sky, heading in from below the horizon of the eastern great waterfall, a star rose with a great speed and arced high towards the distant south. In the streets of the cities, children looked up in awe as a streak of light flew across the sky like a meteor.
\\\
“Emperor Vincent! This is urgent, A new star has been detected by the stargazers, it’s interpretation is unknown, but it appears to be moving above our territory.”
“Explain.”
“It was first sighted in the far east, rising above from below the great waterfall, it seems to have been moving in an arc, and our stargazers are unable to divinate the oracle presented by this star!”
Vincent was about to ignore the report when he looked out of a window of the crystal palace to see a bright star in the night sky.
“Is that it?”
“Yes your majesty, that is it.”
Vincent now went outside to the court of the palace, many stargazers looked on and bickered about the meaning of it’s appearance.
Vincent was the first to notice.
“Is it just me or is it getting brighter?”
“No your majesty, I think it to be gaining luminosity as well”

“Why the fuck do you talk like that?” Asked Vincent.

“Your majesty, The Imperial stargazer has gone missing! He left behind a piece of paper!”
“Excuse me? What did the note say?”
“The head imperial stargazer wrote down: “GET THE FUCK OUT” on a piece of paper before suddenly stealing a ground dragon and hightailing it west.”
It was at this moment that the court of the Vollachian empire realized that the bright star in the sky was not actually a bright star, but rather-
[KAAAAAAPOOWWWOOSHHHH]

The shell impacted the Crystal Palace with a terrifying force, Vincent was immediately shielded by his Divine Generals as the massive explosion ripped one of onion domes of the Crystal palace to smithereens. One fourth of the Crystal palace was turned into a crater and every glass window within it was shattered violently.

Vincent Vollochia now had around a week to find someone to blame for what had happened to ¼ of his palace, if he failed to do so, he’d be viewed as a weak leader and the 50th fuckass Vollachian Civil war would begin.
Such was life in Vollachia.
\\\

Chapter Text

Ch 3

In the area between the vertical Buddenheim jungle and the sandstone cliffs of Augria Canyon, there lay a zone of cliff known as the “Temperate Zone” 

Nestled in between the lower layer of high heat and high humidity. And the upper layers of high heat and no humidity. This layer can be found.

The temperature here is mild and in the night, Can reach chilling temperatures. This is because this region is unheated by Od Laguna and spends the majority of it’s time outside of the direct line of sight of the sun. Therefore, temperatures are lower.

With a climate like the black forests of northern Germany, Subaru loots the last of the mountain bunkers of goods, namely some linen and a few canteens. He now begins his ascent with Alexandria in tow.

He looks back at the ruins of the cannon-site one last time. He hopes that perhaps, somewhere, somebody has learned of his existence.

The tropical vertical forests give way to spruce trees. The lack of vines increases the difficulty greatly. Subaru jumps from rock to rock with Tact. Climbing progress slows greatly as he is forced to find alternative routes costantly.

He climbs up and up and up. He grips a cliff of limestone with all his strength. Alexandria is assisting by changing the moisture within and coating his hand, increasing grip and allowing for Subaru to make jumps across chasms with greater confidence. 

After a particularly long-

[CRUNCH]

Fuck.

It’s the abyss. One must always remain vigilant. 

A falling rock from the upper layers splatter’s his skull. Alexandria had tried to stop it but by a bad stroke of luck, the [MINYA] spells she casted missed by but the breadth of a hair.

“…”

Subaru was once again at the base of the vertical temperate forest.

“…fff…”

Easy Subaru. Calm yourself.

“…fffFFFFFFzzz…”

Breathe in and out chap. 

“FFFFUUUUUHHHHHCCKKKKKKK!!!”

He slams his arm on a 22 million year old rock formation. 

The sheer boom of his rage echoes across the chasms. On a far cliff above him, a tiny little pebble is dislodged from it’s outcropping.

It falls to hit a slightly larger rock.

Which then hits a much larger rock.

Which then falls onto a boulder.

Which rolls onto a cliff face.

Which causes the entire cliff face to destabilize.

…

[RUMBLE OF SUBARUIC PROGRESS]

…

Subaru looks up to find the entire mountain dislodging upon him. It was already weakened by his previous tomfoolery at the cannon, and now collapses towards the abyss.

He tries to shoot his one-use grappling gun to escape the cascade…

Alexandria tries to blast Subaru away from the cliff and towards the great waterfall, but it is too little too late…

[CRUNCH]

Subaru ends up like Caesar Zeppeli.

…

He’s once again back at the foothill.

We now see Subaru sitting upon a rock in the pose of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker.

He looks up at the cliff face. He now hates the cliff face.

“Fuck you cliff.”

Says Subaru out loud. Much more Quietly than previously, but still loud.

He has now died two times at the destabilized rocks that he himself destabilized by firing the cannon. He only now asks… why did i do that?

You’re a man Subaru. It is our duty to fire artillery at the far distance.

Anyways, Subaru’s ascent restarts with Subaru putting on his Pickelhaube and fastening it more tightly.

The ascent here now reaches angles of 80 and is nearly vertical. Back when he was in the zone with the vines, the cliff face was around 70. Only by the vines could Subaru ascend. Now, there are no vines. Only Granite outcroppings and andersite veins to grab on. All at an angle of ascent. Subaru has often needed Alexandria’s assistance in these parts. She helps by bringing up ropes using water magic. She has also been keeping her new contractor in tip top shape by micromanaging the fluids of the body. Because of Her, Subaru will be able to conserve and reuse his own body’s water for longer. Essentially becoming Subaru’s Stillsuit.

Subaru has been using his phalanx for Shepard’s leaping for too long. At 35980 feet below, he shattered the Phalanx’s head on a rock and the broken pole was rendered unusable.

He was now at 35900 feet, and had begun to use a new method to traverse higher faster.

His weapon, the incinerator.

He found a way to lower the energy released by the weapon. By doing this, the cooldown lowered to around two hours. The weapon would lose it’s lethality. All it would be capable of now would be heating a small area close to the barrel.

 Subaru decided to make use of this. 

He got Alexandria to form a little blob of highly pressurized water in the incinerator’s barrel.

When the weapon was activated, the water would become ultra-heated and the already pressurized water would become super-pressurized. 

When Alexandria released the pressurization spell, the sheer explosion pressure of the rapidly expanding gas would push the gun upwards with a horrific speed. If Subaru tied himself to the gun while it was careening upwards with a torrent of superheated steam careening out of it’s barrel, he could make it up past rocky outcroppings and to the next ledge.

No sane man could ever dream this up. Only a fool with Return By Death would even consider something so unimaginably stupid.

Subaru had essentially recreated the core from steamboy. Just much more dangerous and in a cliffside wasteland, not a British steampunk city.

This method had a couple of weaknesses.

If you happened to get caught in the rocket trail of irradiated steam, you’d have your DNA scrambled and end up dying like Hisashi Ouchi.

Also, the sheer force of the steam-gun’s recoil would cause horrific effects to the human body. Subaru learned this in the battery gun in chapter two.

To remedy this, Subaru added a pogo-stick style contraption to his incinerator-steam-cannon contraption.

He also made Alexandria modify the spell to make the explosive exceleration just a little less explosive.

To conclude what Subaru had just created. He made a possibly Nuclear powered Pogo-Stick that doubled as a weapon of war and was capable of giving any enemy he came upon the absolute worst death imaginable on earth. Becoming a living corspe, whose DNA was completely scrambled. And Subaru was using this device as a POGO-STICK. 

And the worst part was, it fucking worked. It had taken a few loops to perfect the method. The first time he tried it, his balls were annihilated by the sheer recoil of the gun.

And to make it worse. He fucking lived.

For a brilliant instant, Subaru experienced the worst pain in human history. His brainstem said fuck this and instantly killed itself via shock. Alexandria, who was exploring a cave at the time, would’ve returned to see a scene absolutely heartbreaking and ball-breaking too.

Somebody had mercy on Subaru, it seems the sheer insanity of that level of pain has been forgotten by Subaru’s soul.

…Thank you Satella?

By the way, envy fucked with the summoning to “Ashiteru Ashiteru Ashiteru Ashiteru” translation “to be closer to her beloved.” She had the correct X and Z coordinates but assumed the Y coordinate was set at 64, and accidentally sent Subaru to the bottom. Oops.

Subaru tried again with the pogo-stick gun on the next loop. This time, Subaru’s steam-rocket-pogo-stick-contraption flew off the cliff to never be seen again. 

Subaru - in the spirit of not trying to kill himself- tried to resume his climb. 

But the world, as if to say -go back right the fuck now and get it back- caused him to die by a fuckass reason. He was at a new cliff and found a plant that looked nearly identical to blueberries. 

Unfortunately. This weren’t blueberries but…

Evil berries.

Actually, they were an extremely rare plant known as the “Stargazer’s Berry” which allowed for an increase in their abilities. The plant was extremely rare and were once harvested by Vollochian Dragon-Riders in ancient times on their side of the great waterfall. 

For refrence. If one person were to take one berry, squeeze it’s juice, pour it into a water anaphora the size of a minifridge, then repeate the dilution process twice. Only then would it be “””safe””” to drink.

Imagine the entire US-Mexico drug trade squeezed into an innocent looking berry bush.

Subaru grabbed 6 of these berries and shoved them into his mouth.

For 6 seconds. Nothing happened.

And then. The world began to dilute. 

For 3 seconds more, Subaru was conscious. 

And then, Subaru’s vision went berserk.

Imagine an LSD visualizer, just 20 quintillion bajillion quillion zillion times worse.

He saw briefly saw tesseracts, Kladoscopes, klaxons, the golden ratios, then shapes that could not be described. He saw colors beyond comprehension and comprehension beyond comprehension.

He became everything in existence.

He became nothing at all.

He lived entire lives of pure madness

He lived entire bloodlines of pure insanity.

He observed a vast network of different mishmashes of possibilities, every possibility and path? Every what if, Every future. Every story. All loosely connected by strings of tussis coughing. Interuniversal Cough communication networks were clearly visible, courtesy of AT&T.

Subaru met every warp entity there was. Every LSD being in their full glory.

Subaru lived quintillions of years, Subaru lived picoseconds. He became paradoxes. He went insane; he regained sanity. He lost it and found it an uncountable number of times.

Imagine the “Behold an unthinkable present” but exponentially worse.

He learned everything and forgot everything.

He hallucinated unimaginable visions.

He even met the observers.

…The Observers (観覧者,  Kanransha ] are metaphysical beings who according to stride, manipulate fate itself from their higher planes of existence. These beings are the same beings who give stargazers the ability to see into the future.

But who are the observers?

He watched himself die over and over again. 

He watched himself fall in love with a half-elf

He watched himself fall in love with a goddess.

He watched himself fall in love with an Oni.

He watched himself be forgotten and tortured.

He watched himself fall in love with a merchant.

He watched himself become wrathful.

He watched himself fall into a gluttonous amnesiac insanity.

He watched himself pridefully kill millions.

He watched himself lustfully save millions.

He even met me. We talked about fishing for bass with a bit of coffee. A brief intermission in the maelstrom of absolute madness.

In the outside world, it was only 5 seconds before Subaru collapsed dead.

The loop’s memories were such an infohazard that Satella and Envy had to collectively scrub the last moments of Subaru’s life so that Subaru wouldn’t start his next loop a brain-dead potato doomed to infinetly loop forever, incrementally increasing the amount of the miasma released until, after a time passed similar in duration to the time it takes for a neutron star to evaporate, the entire continent would be consumed in miasma.

\\\

In the Taygeta library, a book is added to the collection.

This book is unimaginable.

It contains the insanity of the universe. The purest concretration of entropy.

Not even the warp gods of chaos would touch this book.

Anybody who happens upon this book will have their minds fried and will wake up as a mind-broken potato, completely non-sapient.

Anyone..

Now. Bear with me.

Reinhard can’t be killed. Never. It’s impossible.

But could be turned into a potato?

If Reinhard read this book, he definitely wouldn’t die. Nobody who reads this book dies.

But could this defeat Reinhard?

(Probably not, Od Laguna would give him the divine protection of sudden hand paralysis of some shit moments before he opened the book)

…

When he returned by death, he could not remember the last moments before his death, thankfully.

He also had a voice in his head to never eat berries.

He once again began tinkering with the steamgun-pogo-stick-apparatus of doom and death. 

On his 3rd attempt, he had finally managed to create a working prototype and had only broken his legs twice. Alex healed him back to health and he continued until he perfected the amount of water, thrust, steam, and acceleration to prevent the device from annihilating his balls.

He now went up again with a new haste. He climbed up to a high ledge using his new pogo stick when…

Subaru climbed atop it to see a small berry bush.

The berry bush of death, sadness, insanity, dalism, chaos, and broken dreams.

It was there.

The 6 berries, so plump, so juicy.

A serpant seemed to slither into Subarus head. Was it a hallucination? Or something else? We’ll never know.

“Eat them. You will not surely die,”

Subaru looked at the berries. 

“…then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

Subaru began to reach to touch the berries. 

Even touching them was enough to allow enough residual moisture to enter the pores to give you an experience similar to an ultra-strong LSD x Salvia Trip.

The theme of the Monolith from 2001 a space odyssey could be heard as Subaru reached out…

He was about to touch them when.

His instincts screamed! NO!

His body screamed! NO!

Od Laguna and Satella screamed! NO!

And Subaru remembered a clip from the Survivorman Tv show he had watched on cable a few years back, where the stroud brothers warned of eating unripe berries in the wild.

“I’ll come back to check these out later.”

Thank fuck.

He pogo-stick’d away with haste.

\\\

At 34720 ft below the continental ridge, Subaru finds a deep grotto into the side of the mountain. It is well protected from falling rocks and contains an oasis of room temperature air. Subaru sets up camp and lights a fire.

Today, he goes out to forage for mushrooms.

He had no clue which mushrooms were poisonous or not, so Subaru elected to try something else.

He could not afford to return by death, as he did not know whether or not the checkpoint had been updated.

Therefore, he first went out trapping.

He found the burrow of one of the small flying-squirrel creatures and captured it into his backpack. The process was pretty easy with Alexandria on his side.

He then looked him in a bag and cycled different types of mushrooms through It. Whichever mushrooms the creature nibbled were deemed edible and added to the pot. After a long time, Subaru managed to make a mushroom stew. 

How did Subaru repay the squirrel for it’s contribution? He killed it and put it into the stew.

Don’t worry, karma will get him back later.

Subaru ate well and talked with Alexandria for a while. He told his stories from earth and Alexandria listened in awe.

 The exhaustion of the day hit Subaru and soon, he fell asleep in that grotto at 34720 ft.

…

…

…

That night, he dreamed of berries.

Chapter Text

34720 FT 

Trees.

But many did not resemble trees.

And many more were rotten and Carcosian.

And many more were propped up only by vines.

But there were so many of them. 

And then.

There weren’t any more trees.

Rather a Sheer Cliff.

So flat. So High. So grey. So Foreboding it was.

And Subaru could only go up. So he did.

And up he did.

Alexandria And Subaru.

They didn’t Yap as they climbed. They Talked, Yet when silence reared its head, they mirrored silence and went to high alert. High alert, For a silent cliff meant that the scurrying critters and little Beasts had been alerted to danger and had fled. Silence in the Cliffs could only mean one thing. Predation.

Subaru Looked up from his perch to see the incomers.

Kassimovias, A predatory Mabeast appearing in the manner of Vulturous Flying Creatures, with mullets in the color of ice and a beak which could shatter bone in a piercing motion. These Terrible Beasts flew in flocks numbering in the hundreds, and stood as high as a man.

Their call was a “KASSI KASSI” and Kassi was heard in the cliffs, all atop them scurried into their burrows and caves.

A Flock of Kassis against a single boy and his spirit.

Something was going to be ripped apart.

The flock Descends.

A boy stands still. Perfectly Still.

And the Boy is ripped to shreds.

His corpse is tattered, shattered, revealing…

Not a corpse, but rather raw meat, no organs, the boy is not a boy, its a dummy made from Squirrel meat, attracting the Beasts. The Hunter becomes hunted.

As soon as the birds rip the Dummy from it’s rest, a tripwire is tripped and a medium blast of firestone rips a torrent of shrapnel into the flock. A bloodrest mist now lingers in the air and the birds are dead. Despite being Vultures, they are unimaginably delicious. And for some odd reason, They taste of fine lamb. A good feast for the boy is prepared. The Odor of the Carcasses is suppressed by Alexandria, Permitting their cadavers to be skinned and cooked without attracting the attention of the greater flocks.

And so. The boy gluttonizes the corpses of the vulturous beasts. Delicious they are, yet provide poor nutrients and cause indigestion to the lower intestines. 

Subaru finds this out the hard way, as the soil is fertilized in the land by torrents of waste from the ass of a climber who’s fallen down on that very ass thousands of times.

34300 and the cliffs continued. It became quite cold in this regions. The Heat of the sun was fleeting and the Energy from Od Lagna was weak.

\\\

Days of climbing.

“Check for rocks, Check for Rot, check for bad-stone so you’ll die not.”

“Check for fiber, Check for biters, check for water like the river Tiber.”

“Check for loot, Check for man, so I might not die in this desolate land.”

“Watch the sky, watch the sun, so one day I might meet another one.”

“Climb the roots, climb to land, so one day I might return to Japan.”

Weeks of Climbing.

“Check for rocks, Check for Rot, check for bad-stone so you’ll die not.”

“Check for fiber, Check for biters, check for water like the river Tiber.”

“Check for loot, Check for man, so I might not die in this desolate land.”

“Watch the sky, watch the sun, so one day I might meet another one.”

“Climb the roots, climb to land, so one day I might return to Japan.”

He has forgotten how many days he’s climbed.

“Check for rocks, Check for Rot, check for bad-stone so you’ll die not.”

“Check for fiber, Check for biters, check for water like the river Tiber.”

“Check for loot, Check for man, so I might not die in this desolate land.”

“Watch the sky, watch the sun, so one day I might meet another one.”

“Climb the roots, climb to land, so one day I might return to Japan.”

He now finds himself in a place called the Vertical Fjords.

The Vertical Fjords were beautiful. 

Unimaginably beautiful. The sunrays intermediated by floating rock and outcroppings, suspended in the air by updrafts of hot air from the lower levels. The trees here were like that of the temperate forests of Northern Europe, and the birds of the world migrated here to mate. Subaru had climbed to this layer at the time of the migration’s end, and watched as huge flocks of birds departed from the rocks and trees, headed to the continental lands above to live and feed. 

Subaru Natsuki had lost count of the days he had spent on the Great Waterfall’s edge. He was not alone, but longed desperately for the comfort of another human being.

In the crevices between rocks, where rain was funneled, huge piles of wet pine needles accumulated over hundreds of years presented dangerous pitfalls, as these piles presented themselves as crossable and stable, when in reality they were anything but. Burrowing animals called these piles of pine home. 

Subaru could be seen watching the entrance of a burrow carefully, for a small bæst was scheduled to emerge. When the poor creature, a strange mismash between a meercat and a lizard, emerged to lay upon rocks for Heat, Subaru unleashed a bet upon the squirming creature, before bringing a rock above his head in the manner of Cain and shattering the bæsts head, mercifully ending it’s life.

The night came instantly in these parts. With no transitionary period between day and night, Subaru had to rely on his increasingly unstable biological clock to predict the coming of night, for his Nokia had run out of battery and was now deadweight.

A small fire, a burrow, a boy, and a spirit.

A nice smell of gamey meat as well. Subaru ate relatively well in these parts. He began to name some of the creatures he came across, the flying-squirrel bæsts were dubbed the “SkySquirrels.”

The small bæst he had just killed was named the “Fluffy Monitor” and so on.

He was lonely. Alexandria was a good companion, but he still longed for others.

His face now had a stubble upon it, his hands were forever roughened. A few scars could be seen on his arms and body, trophies of victory against witchbæst and nature.

It had taken him three weeks to get up to 30002 FT below the continental ridge, and he finally crossed his first threshold, reaching 29999 FT. Of course, he had no idea he had reached this milestone. 

Looking up from his climb, Subaru could see nothing but more to climb. He wondered if the entire world was but a cliff, but decided to continue his climb. It was in this land that Subaru experienced his first thunderstorm, a violent and electrically superchargered storm had rolled in to his layer. He got very close to being stuck by lightning, the sheer amount of metal on his person likely being an atractive factor to the angry sky, but he had gotten lucky and escaped the storm Scott free.

At 29830 FT, he met his newest Archnemesis.

He called them the Hawkiers, and he grew to despise them like no man had ever despised something before.

The Hawkiers were witchbæsts with unusually long horns of sequestration. They appeared in the manner of bird-like beings and held features reminiscent of the fur of a buck. They were beaked creatures, beaks similar to that of an octopus and with extremely large feather like appendages above the ears. They held talons of incredible sharpness and held bile in their stomaches that could melt through bone, 

The Bæsts were also curse users.

Subaru found this out the hard way.

His first meeting with the birds occurred on an unnamed cliff near a waterfall of great size.

Subaru had engaged in conflict with a large group of the birds, and emerged victorious with the help of his Spirit, but during the battle, he was scratched by one of the birds and cursed.

He died in his sleep. Alexandria had been patrolling around the perimeter of the cave and had noticed her contractor’s predicament much too late

When he returned, he falsely believed the cause of his death to be his aforementioned consumption of the “Fluffy Monitor” and he despaired like a madman believing he had fallen into an infinite loop doomed to die of poison over and over again. 

Thankfully, When he lived on the second day, the day he was supposed to die upon, he realized it was not the food he had eaten which killed him. His despair was replaced with intense jubilation followed by utter displeasure as he now believed he had been killed in his sleep.

He once again wandered into the territory of the hawkiers and was hounded by them. Once again he was victorious. This time however, he asked Alexandria to check on him after the battle, and she was able to dispel the curses out of his body.

After a short conversation which revealed how curses worked to Subaru, he realized what had killed him in his other loop, and vowed to eat hawkiers from now on. He did not abide by this vow, as the hawkiers tasted of rubber boot and hydrocarbonic latex. Absolutely abysmal to the tongue.

The Bæsts were getting harder and harder to kill the farther up he went. He was no glory-seeker and often retreated from battle, he had no one to impress and everything to lose, therefore he often avoided conflict whenever possible. Of course, when confict sought him out, he’d defend himself with whatever he could.

A gladius and an incinerator. His new weapons of battle. Remember the way he used his incinerator to hop around the cliffs? He now gave it a new function. The blast of steam which flew out of the gun when it was used to scorch water could also be used to propel a projectile towards an enemy, an irradiated projectile at that.

The recoil was still a problem, but could be solved utilizing magic magic to push back against the recoil when it was fired.

He now had a weapon capable of accelerating rocks or shards into his enemies like a shotgun. 

His incinerator now had three functions, it could be used in its most powerful form, a beam of blue which melted away the enemies but took a day to recharge, a de facto pogo-stick which allowed for greater locomotion on the cliffs, and now a junk-cannon which could be used to pierce his enemies with impunity.

\\\

27590 FT.

Months of climbing have passed in the blink of an eye.

The Orthus appear.

Orthrus, two headed wolf-like beasts which stand at most 4 meters tall.

Orthrus of the waterfall however, were a bit smaller due to dietary and nutritional restrictions, standing at around 2.

But they were still Orthrus, the brutal two headed beasts covered by jet black fur and with a disposition to kill. Their eyes within its two heads are described to be devoid of sanity, sharp forefeet pointed-like claws that can easily slaughter human beings can also be seen.

20 Lesser-Orthrus. One Greater-Orthrus controlling the pack.

Vs.

The Climber.

Begin.

[KAPOW] The initial sounds of conflict can be heard. The blasts of the ancient ray, Alexandria releases a flurry of Minya into the charging formations of Orthrus. These Orthrus, the most ruthless of the wolf Witchbeasts, split up their formation of 20 into 4 packs of five and circle around the boy. The boy responds by ripping a powerful explosive strike directly into the 3rd group of five, ripping them apart in a beam of blue, ionized light. The ionization of the air creates a bright blue flash, which scares some off the more chickenshit of the Orthrus, yet most stand tall, and pounce towards the boy.

Alexandria reacts with a blast of water, coalesced directly from the humidity of the air, as not to consume high levels of mana. This blast of water is propelled directly at Suabru’s feet and lifts the boy up about a meter above the battlezone. Minya pierces the eyes of some of the Orthrus who come to far, causing them to scream in agony and rage, catching the attention of the region’s Orthrus. Another clan emerges from high above the cliffs, curious as to why their enemies are screeching. They see many dead and decide to charge in. The battle becomes a 3 way scuffle, A Clan of Orthrus controlled by an orange maned Baeste who loved to goon, Vs the original Clan which had decided to attack subaru, the clan who now fell under prey to the new clan of 25. The Battle between the two Orthrus clans allows Subaru the chance to escape.

The scuffle attracts the attention of a third clan of Orthrus, a smaller clan whose alpha is known for raping the small dog.

This Third clan waits for the second and first clans to tear each other apart, then attacking the remnants of the two and forcing them into an uneasy alliance.

Subaru then returns, having recuperated his strength and consumed a bocca fruit to feed Alexandria Mana. 

The battle between the remnants of the goon clan and the original clan now has a new combatant, or an old one.

The 3rd clan falters against Subaru, and now, all three are in an uneasy alliance as the angry japanese boy runs around killing as many Orthrus as possible with a combination of Minya and Incinerator-shot. The incinerator runs out of energy, and so, Subaru runs away like a bitch once more, allowing for the three clans of Orthrus to once again return to ripping each other apart.

Subaru climbs a tree and watches over his masterful instigation as more and more Orthrus are called to rip each other apart. A fourth clan appears, but this clan of Orthrus is ass at fighting, and is therefore ripped apart by the remnants of the original 3. 

Two hours passes, and subaru watches the battle like its a television show.

Two more hours pass, 3 Greater Orthrus remain. They rip each other apart in a grand battle, while the remnants of the lesser Orthrus look on, having culled each other's numbers by no less than 90%. 

One Greater Orthrus remains, standing at 4 meters, having bagged zero fine Orthrus Shyts, the leader of the orange goon-clan of Orthrus stands tall as the winner of the battle.

And then has his first head blown off by a well placed Incinerator shot, instantaneously ripping a massive hole into his neck. The still cognizant head falls to the ground and screechs a deathcry loud enough to rattle the rocks of the upper layer, causing a landslide to collapse upon the beast and covering it in rubble.

This rubble prevents it’s movement, and it’s now just a head popping out of a pile of rocks.

Subaru climbs down the tree, goes atop the rocks, gets right up to the head, blows a raspberry at it, then has alexandria minya-lobotomize him, before boiling the cranial fluid in his brain and quite literally roasting the brain of the beast directly inside the skull. 

100 Orthrus.

1 Climber

Total Subaru Victory.

Subaru now spends the next couple of hours ripping meat from the neck of the Orange Orthrus, roasting it atop the piles and piles of dead Orthrus, then consuming the meat and gaining 80 Grams of Protein per bite.

He sleeps out in the open, as the sheer masses of dead Orthrus are enough to scare away even the bravest of creatures. Except Kassis Vultures, who descend in unimaginable numbers and cover the land for many meters, a sea of feathers. Within a couple of hours, there are only bones in this place. 

Subaru leaves once more. 

It’s getting colder.

\\\

27002 FT.

The sun is weaker here.

The humidity grows weaker, and it condenses not into droplets of dew, but into frisky ice and sleet which covers everything and causes subaru great inconvenience in his climbs.

There are no more tropical trees, rather there can be seen many, many, many, trees of spruce.

The beasts are getting stronger.

The Hawkiers grow more annoying. And more dangerous.

Subaru finds himself fleeing more and more. 

The best resolution to conflict is to avoid it.

Alexandria and Subaru have become so close to one another that words have become irreverent, for they understand one another’s intentions and wills like their own. Of course, they still speak to one another when the time comes, but alexandria has already told every story she’s ever known, every history, every fact, she’s trained him on every magical subject she’s ever known about. Now, it’s her turn to learn. 

Subaru’s Yapp sessions can go on for days without ceasing.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah. And Alexandria soaks it all in like an eager Chunnibiyo acquiring new phrases to shout.

Alexandria now knows more about the other world than even Aldebaran. How ironic.

The region grows colder still. Od Lagna forsakes this place, and the sun does not shine here often, and like the regions of mercury which receive no sun, it grows cold and destitute. Subaru sees the first snow in the land. And as he looks up, he can see a layer of clouds, neverending, never clearing, always lingering around the central abyssal layers. 

The Layer of the Eternal Snowstorm.

This layer of clouds and ice, separates the zone of humidity at 26000-24000-22000. The layer is 4000 Ft in height, and the cloudline lays at around 26000. In these neverending white clouds, there will be the coldest of the cold layers. An eternal winter, an oasis of cold between two layers of heat. The beasts here are adapted to eternal cold, and are entirely unique to this 4000 ft layer of Cold Cliffside land. 

No trees grow in this layer.

Above this layer, there shall be no more humidity to be found. 

This layer forms the split between the lower and upper Cliffs.

The 24,000 Ft Halfway mark will also be in this desperate layer of despair and frigidity. 

Throughout the duration of Subaru’s journey up to 24,000 Ft, when he looked up to the sky, in the very distance, he could see only clouds. These are the clouds which have obstructed his view for all time. The answer to his question “Do these cliffs go on forever?” shall be solved when he crosses the threshold, rising above the cloudline.

The corpses and hides of the Orthrus have been transformed into a fluffy hide-coat.

And in it.

The boy had truly become a man.

His face was like that of a coal-miner from Victorian England, perpetually covered in dirt, with eyebags as grey as ash, a head covered in scars from the falling of small pebbles, and accidental injuries deemed minor enough not to necessitate return by death.

There is a stubble upon his face. A beard grows. Many Months of Pure Exercise and a diet based solely on meat have increased his testosterone levels to unimaginable highs. His arms have grown strong and his posture sturdy. His reflexes have become like that of Max Verstappen’s. Months of dodging rocks in the nick of time, jumping away from rabid dogs and beasts with reaction speeds forged by many deaths.

He has lost count of the days he has spent on these cliffs.

The boy sleeps on a pelt, atop a grassy outcropping which looks up at the churning, neverclearing wall of clouds which he is about to enter. Flashes of lightning can be seen, for it is an eternal storm which separates the lower and upper parts of the Great waterfall.

He sleeps.

Tomorrow is the day.

The day to get his answer.

“Are these cliffs neverending?”

He’ll get his answer soon enough.

\\\ OMAKE

[A REPORT THE ATTACK ON VOLLACHIA AND IT’S CONSEQUENCES]

[Conwood Melahau]: “It reads. In the name of the Imperial Emperor of Vollachian, Pontifex of the Vollachian People and Grandmaster of the Imperial army, The Vollachian Empire demands Tribute and Grievance for the attack upon their royal palace, from a weapon which appears to have originated in lands controlled by our nation. The Ultimatum requests the tribute in as little as 3 months, in the form of 20,000, Diinarianius, Holy Golden Coins, and a signed declaration of guilt and repentance for the attack on Lupuguna. If these demands are not fulfilled, a border-conflict shall be initiated between the two counties of the Barielle Estate and of North Lupuguna.”

[Bordeaux]: “You mean to say they blame us for the attack!?”

[Conwood Melahau]:“Their Grievances are this, the beam of light which hit their capitol came from the Northeast, Therefore, it appears it was a direct attack by the Lugunican Crown upon Vollachia.”

[Bordeaux]:“But doesn’t Vincent know we didn’t do it?”

[Miklotov]:“He has no choice, lest it seems the Vollachian Emperor has lost the Mandate of the Observers.”

[Rickert Hoffman]: “Damnable Country.”

[Rickert Hoffman]:“How bad was the attack on Lupuguna anyways?”

[Miklotov]:“One Quarter of the Crystal Palace razed, deaths in the hundreds.”

[Bordeaux]“Goodness. Council of the Sages, what impact will this have upon the Royal Selection?”

[Rickert Hoffman]“Perhaps it must be postponed.”

[Bordeaux]: “Indeed, if the Vollachians are truly postering for war at our southern frontier, We may be forced to take emergency powers once again.”

[Miklotov]:“The Candidates and the Nobility won't take lightly to a silent coup. Perhaps taking away the five candidate’s right to run will lead them to a five-way alliance against the council. We should instead, ease our influence further, lest we create instability with the nobility.”

[Bordeaux]: “So what shall we do?”

[Miklotov]:“We are to-”

[Sage Macduff] “NEWS! NEWS OF GREAT IMPORTANCE FOR THE COUNCIL! THE TABLET HAS SPOKEN!”

A general commotion and uproar occurs at this.

[Bordeaux]: “What is written!!?”

[Sage Macduff] “IT IS WRITTEN: THE TRUE SAGE HAS RETURNED IN THE FAR EAST. THAT IS ALL THAT HAS BEEN WRITTEN UPON IT.”

[Everyone]:“...”

[Miklotov]:“General Prerogative 1-11. Activate the Contingency. General Mobilization in the Mirulan east, contact the Mirulan Garrison via Metia and order them at high alert. Mobilize the Knights and have them patrol the Capitol and the East. I order a total Information Blackout. The royal selection’s first meeting is to be postponed until the Sage can be located.”

[Bordeaux]: “And of the Vollachians?”

[Miklotov]:“Get me Vincent on the Mirror-Metia. Give him what he wants.”

[Bordeaux]: “Verywell.”

\\\

There was a change in the atmosphere of the capitol. And in the City of Mirula, There was curfew.

The Infantry marched daily, the people of the city were ordered into their homes and given pension. Food. But the city grew silent.

The knights appeared paranoid, always looking, always observing.

Telescopes and Eyeglasses were often pointed at the watchtower by the Officers and Grandmasters of the Lugunican Kingdom. They Drunk tea while the curfew was in effect, and so they waited. Waited. Waited so more.

The Kingdom was in limbo.

And Roswaal, the court mage, has gone east. 

His reasoning is unknown.

May The Dragon bless us all.

ф- The Cave in which he first spawned into the world of Rezero. 48,000 FT.

I- The Vine Bridge that caused his death via Tensioned Ropes. 46,200 FT.

II-The first of the Windmills, having been constructed from the machine toolings extracted from a destroyed Echidnianic airship. This airship built from the same technology which created her Canon Floating Mansion. 45000 FT.

III-The Second of the Windmills, 44560 FT.

IV-The Cabin with the underground Bunker attached to the 41122 FT.

IV-The view of the Inside of the Bunker, Ancient Magi-screens online.

V-The Turret which lay above the gunpowder magazine, Subaru's Coffin. 45 Caliber Battery. Old Vollachian. 40991 FT.

VII-The Lugunican Gun. 40 Megawatt energy-based Shell Battery. 1.5x The size of the Paris Gun. Unknown Range capabilities. Built as a wonder weapon by the Ancient Lugunicans to win the war, was too expensive too use and fire. Instead, it was used for propaganda purposes and ceremonial attacks on symbolic structures in Old Vollachia. The shells from this gun were unable to adequately change the course of the war, which was stalemated until the Witch of Envy's Rampage. 36500 FT.

Vollachia-The Crystal Palace and the Star which fell upon it. 

Chapter Text

“DYAAHHH- Hah~ hah.”

The sensation of return by death inundated the boy once again.

“Route 36-  No go. On to Route 37.”

As his trembling shivers came to an end, he looked up.

Above him, a ceiling of crystalline fog shimmered and lapped against the cliffside as though it were an inverted sea in the sky, a sea of completely opaque clouds bearing the color of snow and frost. This was the layer which Subaru found himself under. The layer he would challenge.

The flapping of his fur coat could be heard. At all times in his ascent, the distinct sound of [Wind against eardrums] could be heard, that distinct sound of wind often picked up on by the recording devices of his old world, the intensity of the wind was sufficient so that subaru could hear such sounds in the new. 

Strong gales -the strongest on the cliffs- blasted the boy right from the start.

To understand the reason for these galeful conditions, one should analyze the environment of the cliffs itself. Near the top, the Augrian Dunes produced dry, temperate airs in day and frigid airs at night. These atmospheric conditions would cause the cold air to fall in great atmospheric rivers which followed the waterfalls of the great waterfall itself. Simultaneously, humid airs from the lowest reaches of the great waterfall would rise up in great swirling motion, fully damped and aqueous with the water vapors created by the boiling of the aforementioned waterfalls whose penultimates ended up in this region of evaporation. The rising of warm, humid air from the bottom of the cliffs interacted with the falling cold airs from the augrian dunes. Convection currents met here, vortexic motions reached their highest intensities, condensations formed and a layer of neverending storms could be found at the dryline between the two. 

On earth, there was only one place which paralleled these conditions and that was tornado alley, the place with the most violent storms on earth. 

A superstorm -was the only world that could describe it- an eternal supercell of galeful winds, tormentic storms, rain, hail, storms, and snow. And did I mention vortexic winds?

Now, when Subaru first faced up towards this layer from the lower cliffs, all he could see was a small overcast of stratus clouds which seemed calm and tranquil. This layer was only around 50 FT wide and proved to be a false flag, a lie, which concealed the true ferocity of the storms above.

To get through this layer, Subaru would need to march through an eternal supercell with an intensity equivalent to the storms which spawned tornadoes as strong as joplins and as destructive as the tristate. In other words, a challenge among challenges.

But nothing a positive person like Subaru couldn’t handle… Right?

The boy was now climbing a much different route, where before he went upon cliffs of sandstone, he now attempted to climb a steeper but more sheltered path of granite.

Visibility was completely shot. One could barely see their hands outstretched in the clouds.

This was a very. Very. very big problem. 

One always had to look up in the Great waterfall. Always.

“Hhk.”

Rocks. Icicles. Carcasses.

“Gotta keep going.”

All manner of things accelerating at 9.8 M/S A could strike without warning and prematurely end his runs. For this reason, one had to remain vigilant and always look up in the depths.

Unfortunantly. This was a problem too. To look up constantly meant to neglect the footwork, to neglect the observation of what one was attempting to step on. 

When rock climbing, stepping on a false ledge or a shoddy stone was an everpresent danger.

And without proper observation of the rocks below him, certain doom awaited him at every corner.

[FWWWOO~O~O~]

There was a third problem in this godforsaken layer too. 

The gales. Downwards winds, upwards winds, sidewinds, everchanging and everpresent they were. Worse still was the threats these winds brought with them, the ever present threat of eternally circulating debris, little rocks and bones caught up in convection currents, slamming into one’s sides by sidewinds was also present. 

Meaning subaru would have to remain vigilant of his feet, his sides, directly above him, and vigilant of the air around him as to ascertain the safety of the environment.

Complete and utter vigilance would be needed as well. Total attention would be required. A single second of distraction would reward subaru with an inspiring tour of all which he had already scaled before, as he would be able to see the cliffs he had previously scaled as he fell.

He had fallen 6 times in this layer. Each time he did, he used a gladius to escape days of humid torment. But not before watching the entirety of the cliffs as he fell. Often times he’d be able to retrace the steps he’d gone on as he fell, giving him  great motivation as he would be able to see how far he’d come.

[CRUMBLE] A sandstone outcropping which deceivingly presented itself as sturdy crumbled under Subaru’s weight, but his vigilance saved him from a fall and he recovered his position.

“Damn sandstone.”

A layer of hell. Subaru would name it a variety of names.

“Dantes 10th layer”

Its appropriate because I'm climbing a cliff.

“Tornado Alley 2.0”

So many tornadoes in this layer too.

Oh and did I mention this layer had tornados too? Vortexic winds, how dastardly you are.

And finally: The Jelawat Layer was what he settled on, named after Typhoon Jelawat which had impacted japan just a few months before he had been summoned.

Tornadoes. Gales. Hail. Falling rocks. Sidewinded rocks. Humidity. Frigidity. Vortexic winds. Snow. Sleet. Hail. 

Vs.

Subaru Natsuki.

“Arghh. DAMN IT! BRING IT ON OHH INEVITABLE FATE!”

That bundle of positivity, that positive boy both in mind and…

[ZAAPPPPPPP] “-YEAGGGGHHHHH”

Electrostatic charge.

The clouds which Subaru Natsuki was trying to get past were negatively charged.

Subaru was Positively charged, having spent larges amounts of time climbing electrically charged ferrite outcroppings shortly before his checkpoint.

That poor bundle of positivity both in mind, spirit, and electrostatic charge, had died the most to this. Lightning. As if said inevitable fate was mocking him. To make it worse, it came with warning. When Subaru’s hairs began to stand up, this would be an indication of an imminent strike. 

And to make matters worse, Subaru Natsuki possessed metal on his body.

Lots of it. 

A gladius, an incinerator, hooks, grapples, all made from conductive steel.

When lightning struck his body, not only would he be electrocuted, but the metal around him would become superheated, so if he survived the initial lightning strike without falling, he’d now have to deal with molten hot metal objects around him.

So what was he to do? These metal objects protected him, allowed for his ascension, yet also damned him into becoming a lightning rod.

The first loop, he tripped. The second, he got hit by a rock, the third loop he got struck by lightning and died. The fourth loop, he fell. The fifth loop, he fell. The sixth loop, he got struck by lightning. Seventh loop was lightning, as was the eighth and tenth but not the ninth. On the ninth loop, he died to rocks. The eleventh and  twelfth loop was lightning again. On the thirteenth loop, subaru found a spirit on the cliffs, and tried to pet it, but it wasn’t a spirit it was ball lightning and so he died. Did i mention this place was electrostatically charged?

Finally, he said fuck it and left behind all his metal objects, weapons included.

This would spare him the lightning but he was now unprotected.

He did manage to get higher up, but soon met the inhabitants of this layer.

They were strange. Very utterly strange beyond belief. One could describe them as the beasts form jordan peeles “Nope”. Atmospheric floaters which floated on updrafts, were completely electrically insulative, and had incredibly regenerative bodies to regenerate from the damages caused by existing on this layer. Also, they ate everything they could smell. Subaru had no way to conceal his own smell, and promptly got eaten. 

But why didn’t Alexandria stop him from getting eaten?

Get this: the mana of this region was Vortexic as well, meaning it took just as much effort to acquire mana from the environment as to cast it into spells. In other words, this layer was forsaken by god, buddha, and od lagna. 

Eventually, on one of Subaru’s loops, he had tried to create a lightning rod out of water magic, using ferrite dust and salt to turn a line of ever-floating water above his head, therefore diverting the lightning to the saltwater-watercable line instead of the boy. It worked, but it meant that Alexandria was out of commission to focus fully on maintaining the waterline of ferrous salt water.

With lightning no longer a threa-

[ZAP]. [ZAP]. “DYAAGHHHHH”

It worked perfectly. One time. Unfortunately, lightning often struck the same place twice, and when the watermagic-lightning-rod evaporated, the second lightning-bolt would naturally rebound to the next nearest conductive object, Subaru.

The point of all this exposition is simple.  

This layer was hell.

Loop 14.

“ZEUS. STOP SMITING ME. I DIDN’T DO SHIT!”

Loop 15.

“Now, if i go here… hmm. Not there. Thats where the Majira are… What about here?..”

“Should i go…”

[CRUNCH] 

He didn’t even care anymore. Fuck it. If a rock is gonna hit him let it hit him.

LOOP 17.

He tried to land atop one of those strange floating beasts to steer them up, and it worked.

Until the flying beast brought him to the flying beast lair, which was a plastic bag looking nest that was nestled in the snowy cliffs. He was then thrown in a giant vat of god knows what, and dissolved promptly.

Loop 18.

In retaliation for what just happened, he used his incinerator to kill as many of the beasts as he could see, but god said dont get carried away there and he got struck by lightning for committing the dastardly infraction of bringing metal out in a perpetual superstorm.

Loop 21.

“How do those plastic bag beasts even fucking fly?!”

He killed one and was dissecting their flotation organs. Self produced hydrogen it seemed, no wonder they exploded violently when shot at with the incinerator.

“I shall call them Hindenbergs from now on.”

Those little hindenbergs would become quite the nuisance as Subaru got higher and higher with each consecutive loop.

Loop 25.

“Berg-bags take me to victory!”

He had killed two of the “Berg” Mabeasts and had harvested their buoyant flotation organs, which were pouches of pressurized hydrogen and gastrointestinal gas. When the blubber of a berg was sufficiently cut, these organs would float upwards by their own buoyancy and would be connected only by some sort of umbilical cord. Subaru used these bizarre party balloons made of flesh to rise very high, high enough that he reached the midlayer of the “Jelawat Layer”

Unfortunately, it took only a few hours for these flesh balloons to lose their buoyancy as the hydrogen based gastrointestinal gasses within them escaped. 

He had floated a great ways up, but was now far far away from the cliff face he needed to get to. He had abandoned every object made of metal except his incinerator. The incinerator had a rope tied around it, which was also tied to Subaru’s foot. The distance of the rope between the incinerator and his foot was 50 FT, enough to protect him from a lightning strike.

Unfortunately, a stray splinter of wood would catch the boy off guard, having been blown in by a powerful gale, he was paled and killed by a shard of wood piercing his chest.

LOOP 27

A winged Mabeast, different to the bergs but appearing in the manner of Pterodactylus had appeared and attacked the boy at a high altitude.

LOOP 28.

The Rope Snapped

LOOP 29.

Lightning.

LOOP 30.

Lightning.

LOOP 31.

Was blown in to a extremely dense cloud of perspiration, promptly drowned in a cloud.

LOOP 32

Failure.

LOOP 33.

“WHY  THE FUCK AM I SO ATTRACTIVE TO LIGHTNING!? DOES ZEUS HAVE A CRUSH ON ME!? FUCK YOU!”

LOOP 34.

“DAMN THE TYRANNICAL RULE OF THE LIGHTNING GOD- ZEUS!”

LOOP 35.

Failure.

LOOP 36

High-winds prompted subaru’s attempt at a blimp flying contraption to careen into a cliff, was promptly impaled onto sharp sulfurous spikes and bled out.

LOOP 37

Fell into the abyss.

LOOP 38

Died to a Mabeast, probably the Pterodactylus again

Loop 39

Experienced being inside a horizontal tornado, which had spawned on the cliffs itself and was sideways when compared to a normal tornado. Spun round and round, died from whiplash

Loop 40

“DAMN IT ALL! IF I CAN'T GO UP, I’LL GO SIDEWAYS!”

Subaru had finally made his breakthrough. Instead of going up, he’d go sideways. A glorious and simple solution, he decided to begin to trek northways, towards a peninsula of cliffs which seemed to spread wester than even the most western of stalactites. 

A cliffside fault line, quite thin and of unstable disposition, became his path. 

As he went north, the Abyss of the Great Waterfall changed in it’s biosphere.

He remained at 27002 FT Below, but began to explore the sides.

Two days of northwards travel and he arrived at a new location.

Pink flowers. Ashen wood. Bushels of scarlet. A vertical sakura forest on the cliffs. However, this vertical cherry blossom forest was quite bizarre in the fact that it was anchored into pure angled sandstone, orange and mesa-like. Not only that, but between the vertical groves there were waterfalls. Waterfalls not of water, but of fine yellow-tan sand. This sand flowed like water down from the tormentic clouds above, and was often scattered to become like that of rain instead of waterfalls. It rained sand particles upon the Cherry blossom forest so that the blossoms of the trees were coated in the color of sand, making their verdant reds visible only to those directly below the trees itself. 

Subaru found a small grotto here and made camp. The sun went out of view of the cliffs, and night instantly fell. The eternal falling of sand granules, a phenomenon that only seemed to increase as Subaru went northwards, did not cease in the night. When Subaru asked Alexandria about it, she postulated that a desert may be the cause of the ever-falling clouds of sand.

The night passed uneventfully. When Subaru emerged from his cliffside grotto, he found that the never-changing cloudcover of the sky had remained unpierced, continually churning in a ceiling-sea of furious clouds that indicated rain. Rain fell. Rain, or rather droplets of sandy mud, fell down onto the dirty Cherry Blossom forest. 

In the morning, Subaru decided to descend downwards. He had given up on going up for the time being, and was eager to explore new regions that weren’t eternal maelstroms from hell.

Travelling down a stalactite, he came to find a forest at the same elevation to that of the Vertical Buddenheim upon the cliffs. The only difference being that the leaves of this forest had evolved to catch the sandy raindrops of mud from the Augrian Dunes high above. 

The Lilypad forest of mud, he would call it, had evolved to catch the falling sand from the Augrian Dunes directly above them, funneling them in to the center of their lilypads to be consumed of nutrients and water. The Roots were the leaves. These lilypad like vestiges of green attached perpendicularly to the sides of the craggy rock face outstretched themselves from the sides of the stalactites at great distances. If their radius was at the cliff itself, then the farthest edge of a lilypad-like plant would put the radius at around 100 ft. These plants held ponds within them. Ponds of mud, allowing for smaller plants and trees to grow within them. The mud and water which overflowed from the topmost lilypads then flowed to lilypads directly below the topmost ones, creating a terracing structure which ensured the largest lilypads remained at the top where the most fertile sand-mud was captured. 

Below these lilypads, roots went deep down towards the far ends of the tips of the stalactites which the lilypad forest was anchored to. Subaru explored the lilypad forest thoroughly.

In the Evening, night fell instantly and he slept under a lilypad to protect himself from the dangers of falling rocks. Interestingly, the lilypads had evolved strange structures at their attachment points to the cliffside edges reminiscent of springs, which allowed the lilypad to absorb the impact of falling rocks from the cliffs above.

The next day, Subaru travelled north again across these endless terraces of lilypads. The lilypads became larger and larger, reaching farther out into the abyss as the breadth of the stalactites increased. 

The Churning storm above was blackening, appearing darker and more turbulent as if energized by a foreign entity. 

Subaru decided to once again go up, back the elevation of the Cherry blossom forest which lay above the lilypad’s abodes, and found that the cherry blossoms here were massive in size, reaching sizes similar to that of ancient oaks and elm trees back in his old world. Some were larger, a few were as large as the California redwoods. The larger the Cherry blossom was, the scarlet their leaves seemed to be. 

The forest of pink was now a forest of blood. 

On a cliff by the largest tree, Subaru found his first sign of civilization here.

A cliffside ruin, appearing in the manner of the ruins of Petra in the jordanian Levant, could be seen. It was stunning.

From his position, it appeared in the manner of a massive and well decorated facade. Ionic columns supported a high and proud entablature, which itself supported two different sets of dorian columns with a space in between the two. In between the two quarter-temples above the main entrance, a dome. Around the dome, these two dorian columns supported two cornices of small size, adorned in marble and covered in a tympanum.

As Subaru approached the structure, however, a glaring problem emerged. 

“J’ Christ what is that smell!?”

A putrid smell.

An ungodly smell.

The worst smell in history.

But what could be creating this smell?

Subaru Natsuki would find out as he entered the main hall of the palace to find-

The most unkempt palace he had ever seen. There was ancient trash skewed everywhere, canvas bags, biological waste which had turned into soil, fallen pots, fallen anaphoras, all sorts of things which gave the impression of a dirtied place. 

As it turns out. This was a house. More specifically, a mansion. And as Subaru would find out, a very convenient mansion indeed. 

As soon as he entered the threshold of the archaic mansion, the lights attempted to flicker on and one of the doors attempted to open itself but to no avail, as it was already jarred open.

Entering inside, Subaru found the inside of the structure to be laid out in the manner of a basilica. And at the end of the basilica, shrouded in complete darkness, there was an object in the distance.

A sound began to whirr, and a strange thing began to move towards Subaru from the end of the hallway towards the entrance. It could only be described as a minecart crossed with a wheelchair crossed with a mobility scooter. And there was a figure on it, silhouetted by the darkness.

“...Hello?” Subaru asked as the archaic mobility scooter began to trek ever closer to him on a fixed railpath on the ground, a rail that looked like the stairassists found in nursing homes, but on the floor instead of the walls.

There was no response as the mobility scooter got closer and closer in an ominous manner.

The lights finally managed to get their shit together, and revealed who was sitting in the mobility scooter.

Purple hair. Extremely long purple hair. Eye covering bangs. Upon it there was a strange ornament appearing like a fleur de lys. 

Black dress. Gothic. Covered in wool and embroidered with fourpoint stars.

A woman. Ash skin, purple eyes, large breasts, and very, very big, slouching at around 6’6.

And she was the source of the odor.

Oh god did she stink to high fucking hell, having never even understood the concept of a shower in her entire life. She stunk to a level that would’ve automatically qualified her for an Indian visa without application.

“H-Hello?”

At the moment the mobility scooter stopped in front of the boy, a noise emanated from it.

[“...hkk If you are …hkkk… listening to this …hkk… then i’m dead.”]

“What the hell!?”

[“Feel… Free… to make yourself at… home…”]

“You’re dead?! But how? You look so…”

The body had no signs of decomposition, nor any signs of tampering. And she looked like the second coming of Misato Katsuragi herself. Bottles of alcohol were all around her, opened bags of what seemed to be chips could be seen. A truly lazy image, she looked as though she were the literal God Emperor of neets. Correction, Corpse Emperor of neets.

Could you fix her? Hell no. 

[“My… name is…. Sekh… Met… And… [SNORE]”]

The recording began to snore as the mobility scooter thing began to move once more, backtracking on it’s preordained railtrack to where it was before.

And what do you know? A giant Metia screen could be seen.

Sekhmet, the most utterly lazy existence on the planet, had been thrown into the depths of the great waterfall to die. But she did not die here, rather she was too utterly lazy to climb back up and so she remained here. She found the ruins from a previous era and made echidna fix it up in exchange for giving echidna data. Specifically, the data pertaining to what she would be watching on that large screen. Remember kids, nothing in life is free. Like a greedy smart tv, Sekhmet spent the next hundred years of her life engaging in utter sloth, watching hours upon hours of whatever the screen showed her. Within that screen was a preliminary version of both the sanctuary and the tome of wisdom, which gave Sekhmet what she wanted the most.

Lazy entertainment to satiate her immense boredom.

She sat and sat and watched and read and lived like a shut in for 100 years, gorging upon flugel’s collection of entertainment, along with whatever else the screen showed her.

Like one of those fatasses from the Wall-e movie, Sekhmet -whose posture became like that of the fibonacci sequence- slept, gooned, and rested, becoming so utterly lazy that she couldn’t be bothered to do anything.

One day, one unremarkable day, She forgot to breathe. 

That was the end of the fourth strongest existence on the continent.

“Goodness gracious. Is that a mobility scooter?!”

The sounds of snoring from the prerecorded message faded as the chair returned to it’s idle position before the large Metia screen. As subaru explored the mansion, he was horrified to find that there was no shower, no toilet, no soap, no hygienic apparatuses, nothing. Sekhmet never showered. That chair doubled as a moving toilet as well, therefore removing the need to get up.

It reeked to high hell.

As subaru methodically explored room after room after room, he found that entire crypts and mausoleums of the cliffside mansion had been unaltered from their ancient states, and were filled with relics from bygone eras. Gold and treasures that were remarkably useless to the boy could be found. This building must’ve been a treasury before the lazy gooner found it.

Entering a room that looked to be a foodstore, Subaru found a massive library, all the books remarkably preserved by a combination of dusty air, low humidity, and the fact that the room was hermetically sealed. Unlike the bad air of one of the other ruins Subaru had explored, this room had air which was good enough to breathe, as indicated by Alexandria.

Alexandria had not recognized Sekhmet. This was because Sekhmet never went outside. Ever. 

To Alexandria, Sekhmet emitted a dangerous odor, an odor separate from her already nasty natural odor, an odor of the witch.

Back in the library, Subaru began to meander about. 

“Are there any hidden passageways here?”

Nope. There weren’t.

Flipping through a few newer lookingbooks, he found that the language was bizarre and completely illegible, albeit familiar. He then went to the oldest manuscript he could find and began to flip through it. Bizarrely, the script of the language appeared much closer to what ancient Japanese had once been. Perhaps the language here had been an offshoot?

It was here that Subaru would look beside one of the grand shelves to find…

“Is that Manga!?”

Bizarrely out of place among the manuscripts and scrolls of the library, there it was.

Who was to blame for putting this manga upon that doric pedestal?

As it turns out, echidna. Somehow she had managed to get her hands on it, and had borrowed Sekhmet’s gooncave/mansion for some study and experiments. 

It was here that she would create the star staff based off the illustrations in that manga, BLAME! Echidna had been quite enthralled by the idea of white beams of fuckallinthatdirectionium, and had modelled her star staff after the gravitational beam emitter from said story. 

Why is there manga here? Could that person have been a japanese person like me? No. She’s too tall for that. Maybe American? Nah. But what about those roman numerals i saw back at the bunker looking place. Could those be connected to this?

Subaru, looking through the manga, found that in between the illustrations there were pieces of paper, written in that bizarre language, that appeared to be designs of a strange staff.

Designs. I remember BLAME! These designs look like the G.B.E. Is copyright not a thing here?

My Incinerator looks like the Gravitation Beam Emitter Too. 

As it turns out, Echidna did not design the Incinerator, rather in a feat of convergent evolution, the engineers who had built it had made it quite similar to the design of that rectangular behemoth from the story.

Subaru was now convinced that somebody had come before him, somebody from earth.

That lady, who smelled awful and spoke japanese? Subaru was almost certain that she wasn’t from earth, but perhaps she knew an earthling?

The possibilities were vexing.

For the next couple of hours, Subaru spent his time absorbing what he could from that library. 

Back in the main hall of the mansion, Subaru decided to more thoroughly investigate the body of the dead Sekhmet. 

The Metia in front of her was broken, yet sparks still flew from it as though it were trying to activate. Her body was punctured with many pipes and IV tubes which seemed to negate the need for drinking water and eating food. 

He was about to leave, when he found something in her dead hand. A key.

New mission, find the keyhole.

He spent many hours within that mansion but could not find it. Because of this, he became irritated and decided to do what shut-ins did best, return to the library and indulge himself in whatever he could find. As it turned out, the most ancient manuscripts were barely legible in Japanese, giving credence to the idea that the scripts of the new world had origins in the orient.

He was mostly looking at the pictures now, like reading untranslated the Voynich Manuscript, he tried to make sense of what the pictures could be saying.

There was a statuette of a butterfly on one of the shelves. Subaru accidently kicked it as he was climbing to reach some high up manuscripts that peaked his eye. A click sounded out.

Secret rooms? I was right?

Beneath the statuette, a keyhole. With a twist of the key, a wall began to open up and…

Stopped halfway. The mechanics were shoddy from lack of maintenance. 

Subaru, in his irritation, chose to blow up the wall with his Incinerator.

This would prove to be a stupid decision, as the beam of energy accidentally hit what was behind the wall.

As it turned out, Echidna was a fucking sociopath who had somehow, someway, by some way, recreate neutronium material in a yin-spell pocket dimension. By blowing up the metia which maintained that pocket  dimension, an ultrahot teaspoon of material with the mass of mount Everest suddenly appeared in the real world.

Instant death occurred. 

Subaru, thankfully, had had his checkpoint updated to a few minutes before he blew a hole directly through an archaic nuclear reactor made from the insane mind of a witch.

This time around, he used a sledgehammer to break through.

As it turns out, the mechanism that held the neutronium looked like an average boiler from a residential house. A generic metal cylinder containing a material that could cost quintillions. Goodness echidna, how did you do it? 

There was a ladder there. 

As subaru climbed, no less than 20 metals bars broke under the weight. Some were less of metal and more of rust solidified into metal.

Yet he persevered and scurried upwards towards his destination. A metal trapdoor leading upwards.

[CLINK]. Subaru began to crank that soulja boy.

It didn’t budge.

[KYAPPOOWW] Subaru decided to blow up that soulja boy.

It worked and blew the door clean off. Unfortunately, it also turned it into a scalding fountain of molten metal which went up, and then went down. Alexandria was able to shield Subaru from the falling half melted door.

Finally, he crested the top to see…