Draith
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Chapter 74 - I Blame Gravity
🕑 Added 2025-04-13 14:00:27 +0000 UTCMinor edit to Chapter 73, adding a bit of Perry's thoughts about why he accepted the deal as is.
That was a little expensive, but a better deal than the Captain had offered Nexxa. Considering he intended to stay for a while, I figured it was worth endearing him to me a little, even if it cost me a bit of extra dust in the short term. Nothing said I had to keep going through him if a better offer came along.
...Mage Lord Isekai...
It turned out that keeping a glider in the air with only a single rope and no way to steer it was next to impossible, even while dragging them along behind the dune buggy at sixty miles an hour. At least with the designs I'd come up with.
So I hoped out of the buggy, creating an extra rope with a flex of the space. Much easier if I used two ropes tied to either side of the bumper, I figured.
I nodded in satisfaction as the ugly winged beast rose in the air behind me. Right up until it came crashing straight down again when I attempted to turn. It took several attempts with an assortment of ropes to get the first glider to stay up when I turned. Least I could resummon the gliders once I’d built them once.
The whole tangle of cables defeated the purpose somewhat. Sure, the glider followed along well enough, but I could hardly test its steering.
Supposed it was enough to let me know if they could glide though.
I cursed as yet another glider came crashing to the ground.
Gravity did not play nice.
One design completely failed to lift off, no matter what I tried. It seemed I'd made the front too heavy.
Thankfully, even with dozens of crashes, all it took to clear them away was a few seconds of focus. Which I only did after poking at the debris to see what broke, and where.
It was only after running dozens of successful test flights with the other glider designs that it occurred to me that I wasn't accounting for the weight of a person being strapped to the bottom.
Summoning a mannequin for the tests wasn't hard, but it was creepy. I immediately changed it to a wooden test dummy instead. Then I set about modeling it to match my weight. Which prompted the space to simply change it to an exact duplicate of myself.
Way creepier than the original mannequin. I could even see it breathing, though its gaze was empty. Was a bit like looking into a funhouse mirror, if that mirror simply froze your reflection in place and let you walk around it.
Thankfully, it didn't take much to summon a motorcycle helmet, which I slid onto the copy's head with some relief.
With a far too realistic crash test dummy, I attempted my tests again.
Which required an entirely new set of rigging to keep from getting tangled in its limbs. A lot of the designs tended to have even more lift with the dummy strapped to the back, which prompted me to test out the design that had initially failed. And… of course, it worked fine with the proper weight strapped to the bottom. Annoying, but made me feel better about my math.
The first time I crashed one of the gliders with the new test dummy’s attached, I almost threw up. Finding my own mangled body in the wreckage, one arm torn clean off and my face crushed by the impact… yeah, not pleasant.
Much like with the broken gliders, I had to concentrate on my mangled body for several seconds to make it disappear. Which I did.
Then I sat there, staring at the empty patch of ground. Flight was dangerous, even in a controlled environment. Did I really want to attempt to use a glider in the same skies that had wyverns, giant eagles and even dragons flying around?
Despite the risk, the answer was yes. But when I flew, it wouldn't really be the same, since I'd cheat. A well aimed Gust could give me all sorts of lift.
Still staring at the empty spot, I considered the other half of that. A poorly aimed gust could splatter me against the rocks.
I needed a way to test gliding in Memory Palace.
Then I realized I had all the tools I needed for it already.
If I could use my spells to affect the materials, then obviously I could cast Gust to give myself lift.
First, I started by firing test Gusts at the glider behind the dune buggy. The force was strong enough to pick the buggy up and haul it backwards towards me by several feet.
I’d known it had a lot of oomph, to be able to affect something the size of a wyvern, but I was still impressed by how much Gust had tugged on the buggy. It also made me realize how useful testing combat spells would be. There wasn’t a mana limit inside Memory Palace.
Which lead to me testing a great deal of my spells, including Dimension Step, Lightning Bolt and Create Ice. Dimension Step, when not restrained by my lacking slots and mana, was transformative.
I spent nearly fifteen minutes simply teleporting around the shop, up to the tin roofing, then past the old fence, down to the dusty yard and back again. I doubted it would help my affinity much, but the extra practice had already made the spell less troublesome to use. Whether it would translate perfectly to the real world was yet to be seen.
Either way… it’d been fun.
I spent another few minutes testing the other spells, and discovered that I couldn’t replicate a spell or ability I hadn’t cast in the real world.
Finally, my attention returned to the gliders. During my experiments, I’d figured out how to use Gust to keep the glider in the air. I’d also figured out I could unsummon them without having to get close, which spared me from having to subject myself to seeing my own grisly fate over and over.
Now, I just needed to figure out how to do so while being strapped in myself.
Strapping myself in was even easier than having Calbern do it. I simply wished glider number one into place. Taking a deep breath, I prepared to cast Gust on the glider.
I’d prepared for it, all I had to do was use a well aimed Gust, directed at the glider, and I’d be pulled up and into the air. I’d done it successfully a dozen times without any harm to my test dummy.
My first attempt in the driver’s seat… was not well aimed.
For several seconds, the false horizon flashed in and out of my sight before finally, the glider came down with a horrendous crash.
When I opened my eyes, I was back in the room where Calbern had been giving Bevel lessons. Neither of them were there, though it took me a minute to notice.
Not only had I being forcefully ejected from Memory Palace, leaving me with a splitting migraine, my thoughts were slow and unfocused, like trying to think through thick jelly. It was bad enough, I didn't even manage to slink to the bed in the back room before passing out. I simply leaned to the side, falling out of my chair and onto the floor while slipping into unconsciousness.
When I woke, I found a pillow had been slipped under my head and a blanked draped over me. The migraine had died down to a moderate headache, and the fuzziness blanketing my thoughts was mostly gone.
Didn't feel like I was firing on all cylinders, but at least the engine was running again. Worst part was that I hadn't died immediately when I crashed. Memory Palace had done an uncomfortably realistic job of letting me know exactly what being involved in a glider crash felt like. Exactly what I’d been putting those poor dummies through.
Still better than actually dying.
Pushing to my feet and heading outside, only the glowing vines of Tetherfall shed light. Even the sky above was clouded over. As I stood there, I watched a fat flake of snow drift past.
It took me a few moments to realize snow wasn't a good sign. Tetherfall was supposed to be warm enough that the snow melted before it even touched the nets. It wasn't likely to cool either. There was warmth radiating from beneath the rock walls. Whether that was a buried enchantment or something else, I hadn’t had time to figure out. Either way, the refugee village wouldn't have either. Nor were the buildings we'd thrown up particularly well insulated.
At least they'd have plenty of firewood to burn, even if most of it was green.
From what I understood, the seasons in the Frigid Peaks boiled down to two. Storm season which lasted for a third of the year and not-quite summer or definitely winter, depending on the elevation for the rest. Unfortunately, Storm season didn't produce just one kind of storm.
The Storm Coast, which my domain technically sat on the tip of, was wracked by Storms of all sorts. The most common tended to be the kind I'd seen the other day, the lightning cracking and wind howling sorta storm Nexxa had rode in on.
Still, all sorts of mana could be at the heart of a storm. And that meant all sorts of effects. Snow was one of the milder ones. At least we hadn’t gotten a fire-storm. That said, I'd thought it was too early in the year for storm season to be on us. Should've had another month, at least.
Weather rarely cared about what folk wanted, even an ensouled. Not until we got to Djinn, anyway. That was true even before you added magic to the mix.
Scaling the nets, I moved up to the surface to take in the extent of the storm. It blacked out the sky for as far as I could see. There wasn't much snow, at least not yet, but the flakes were there.
Swearing softly to myself, I descended the nets once more, heading to the peak of Mount Aeternia.
When I stepped out into the open air, the clear night sky above stood in stark contrast against the turbulent clouds below. It felt as though the peak was an island, isolated in the sky. In the east I could see the peaks where the wyverns nested, though there was no sign of the massive beasts. Didn't mean they wouldn't be out. The wyverns had struck us during the night once already.
As I swept my gaze around, I stopped as I realized the storm wasn't moving in from the coast. The edge of the storm was visible in the west, wrapping around the chain of mountains that lay at the edge of my domain, slowly moving east. That wasn't normal storm behavior for the region. The storms came in from the Storm coast. They never moved the other way.
And they certainly didn’t slither around mountains tall enough to pierce them only to reform fully intact on the other side.
Not unless magic was involved. And not just any magic. Controlling a storm hundreds of miles across was something even Nexxa would struggle to do for any length of time.
Someone or something was controlling the storm.
And I had a horrible feeling I knew who.
