Edge Cases - 158 - Book 3: Chapter 23: Roads to Nowhere

“We’re going to be at the Roads soon,” Belle said. “Are you sure you want to leave?”

“Sure?” Misa snorted. “No. But we have to.”

She didn’t look Belle in the eyes. They’d all been traveling together for the past few days — Clyde had taken time off specifically for this, though he didn’t elaborate on what the process of taking time off involved, exactly. The journey together had been the closest the seven of them had been, though of course they tended to split off into little groups. Clyde, it turned out, got along well with Sev; the man was fascinated by the idea of gods, for it turned out they were much less literal in this world than in the one with the system.

Belle spent the most time with Misa, the two sharing a similarly dark sense of humor. Elliot spent the most time with Derivan and Vex, curious about how their magic was different and how it interacted with the history of the world.

As time ticked by, though, and they got closer to their destination… the conversation fell gradually silent. Everyone was very much aware of what this meant.

There was a good chance that they’d never meet again. They would try to come back to say goodbye, of course, but this bonus room had given them no objectives; they didn’t know what they were supposed to do to get back. If they managed to complete it by accident, or if the energy required to keep the bonus room running ran out —

— this echo universe would pop like a bubble, and they wouldn’t meet again. Not in the same way, anyway.

“I guess this is goodbye, then,” Clyde said eventually, looking around awkwardly. “I know I should be a good host and all, but… I’m going to miss you guys a lot, actually.”

“We all will,” Belle said. She managed a small smile, though there was just a bit of sadness in the glow of her eyes.

“You better write,” Elliot said with just the barest hint of a forced grin. “I’m expecting letters.”

“Oh, come on,” Clyde said. “They’re not going to send us letters.”

“Will too!” Vex said. “I mean, if we figure out how to send letters… Wait, no, we have the Communication glyph we left with you guys. That should work. Why did you tell me to write letters?”

Elliot just smirked.

“Don’t be surprised if we leave you a few messages,” Belle said with a chuckle. She slowed to a stop as they finally came within a few feet of the entrance to the Roads.

This was very different from how it had been in Fendal and Teque, where the entrance had been hidden in the ground. An ancient stone archway towered over them, the edges crackling with dense magical energy; every so often a spark danced off between the cracks in the stone, almost sizzling with power.

And yet, were it not for those cracks, it wouldn’t have been clear that any magic was involved in this at all. The usual glow of densely-packed mana was nearly invisible, a product of sheer efficiency; every bit of that mana was being used to maintain the portal.

It was just a little anticlimactic that this feat of magical engineering was used to display nothing more than a dark tunnel, but that was just the nature of the Roads.

“Is this just a portal?” Vex asked, gawping up at the archway. He hopped a little to the left and then walked around the archway; the back of it was perfectly clear, and he could see his friends through it, though it was clear none of them could see him. “What happens if I try to go through it from the back?”

“Don’t go through it from the back,” Elliot called.

“…That just makes me want to go through it from the back even more.” Vex narrowed his eyes slightly at the archway, as if contemplating doing exactly that.

Then he picked up a rock, hefted it in his hand…

…and hesitated.

“It’s not going to break if I throw a rock through it, right?” he called out.

“Nope!” It was Clyde that responded this time. He sounded amused. “Go ahead.”

Vex tossed the rock, and watched with both his physical and magical senses as the rock left his hand, soaring through the air. He paid special attention as it crossed the horizon of the portal —

— and abruptly vanished.

Vex blinked. He hadn’t sensed anything. He walked carefully back around the portal, looking down the tunnel.

The rock he’d thrown sat inside, sheared into paper-thin slices. He stared at it and paled.

“Would that have happened to me?” he asked.

“No,” Elliot said with a laugh. “We wouldn’t leave something that dangerous around. There are wards in place to protect living creatures. And magical ones.” He gave Derivan a signficant look; Derivan just affected a shrug, like he didn’t know what Elliot was talking about. The shadow elemental shot him a bit of a knowing grin.

They all knew what they were doing here, though. They were delaying the inevitable.

“Time to go,” Misa said. She started walking towards the portal, then stopped, and sighed.

“Ah, fuck it,” she said. She spread her arms out wide. “Group hug?”

Seven people made for a rather awkward group hug, it turned out. But there was a certain sense of vulnerability that came about with that awkwardness, a certain sense of sincerity; sometimes there were no words that could really adequately summarize a situation.

It was even harder when none of it felt real yet. The reality that they could very well never meet again was a hard one to accept, and for the most part all seven of them were refusing to acknowledge the thought.

They’d become uncommonly close, really, for all that they’d only known each other for a little over two months.

Neither group left without carrying an armful of gifts left by the other.

“I can’t believe they made so many cookies,” Misa said. She was carrying what had to be an entire sack of them while they traipsed down the tunnel. “When did she even have time to make so many cookies?”

“Magic,” Vex reminded her. “Probably the glyph of Change, actually, since it accelerates time and all that.”

“That’s so much mana spent on cookies,” Misa said. She wasn’t complaining, though. They all saw the way one hand kept sneaking into the sack, pulling out a cookie to munch on.

Her seventh time doing this, she instead pulled out a note from Belle:

Cool it with the cookies. — B

“Oh, come on,” Misa grumbled. Sev snickered at her.

The tunnel they were traveling down was both oddly familiar and fundamentally different from the one in Fendal; the magic that thrummed in the air here was significant, to the point where it skittered about on Vex’s scales like an itch that wouldn’t go away. It affected all of them differently, even — it manifested in Misa’s hunger, in a fluctuating divine connection that left Sev with something of a headache, and a slight loss of control of Derivan’s Slime stat.

It was vaguely alarming the first time he started melting, actually.

Now they were just used to it.

Mostly.

It was still a little alarming.

“What do you think they meant?” Sev asked, just to break the silence. His words echoed strangely in the tunnel. There was still nothing to be seen in the distance, nothing to break the monotony of dirt and stone. “When they said that the Roads take you where you need to go.”

“No idea,” Vex said. “I spent some time in the library, and there are books about Fate-aspect magic; apparently the Roads are an extension of that kind of magic. They link the communities that need to be linked, so that food and water goes between them as needed, and guide people out into the surface when a location is stable enough for a new community to be built…”

Vex paused. “Though there have been mistakes,” he added with a slight grimace. “And that says very little about where we might end up.”

The tunnel stretched in front of them, long and still eerily empty. The lighting was strange, even; there was no real source of light, and when Derivan checked, he saw that the area behind them was pitch-black, too, fading into nothing after just a few dozen feet.

Yet the area around them was clear. It was strange, and when Derivan felt out with his senses, it was remarkably clear.

Even in Mundane, the system had been present. It was fueling the world they were in, and although it was a step removed in this bonus world, he could still feel its oppressive gaze. Here, the only source of the system was Misa’s reality anchor.

If he wanted to study it in detail, now would be the time to do it.

“Guys,” Misa said. “I think I see something.”

Sev, Vex, and Derivan all turned their attention to the tunnel ahead of them. Misa frowned at the path. “I thought the Roads were supposed to lead us somewhere,” she said. “Why’s it got a choice to make?”

“…You see a choice?” Vex asked. “The tunnel goes… uh, straight up, for me.”

“I see nothing,” Derivan said. He wandered forward a few steps and stopped, hovering at the edge of what was, to him, an empty nothingness. With some hesitation, he stuck his hand out into that inky darkness, then withdrew it a moment later, thanfully intact. “I am uncertain if it is safe for me to step into that nothing.”

Sev frowned. “The tunnel looks the same for me,” he said. “Nothing’s changed. Are we all just seeing something different?”

“Maybe the Roads want us to split up,” Vex suggested. He looked a little nervous about it, but not nearly as much as he normally would; if anything, there was a spark of curiosity in the way he kept glancing up towards his path.

“It’s… probably safe?” Sev hedged. “Based on everything that Clyde told us about the Roads. But it might be hard to coordinate anything to help anyone outside the bonus room for a while if we split up like this, so… we have to be ready.”

Misa walked a few steps forward, mostly out of curiosity. “What do you guys see when I do this?” she called.

“You’re kinda starting to fade away,” Vex said.

“There is a Shift as we progress deeper into the tunnel,” Derivan said. “A very powerful one, and not one from the system. Powered by reality shards, I suspect.”

“Okay.” Sev rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Let’s split up our remaining mana crystals and hand the reality shards off to Misa before we check out these paths, just in case this takes longer than we expect. We can keep in contact using the system, and… please be careful, guys.”

“It’s not the first time we’ve split up.” Misa gave Sev a reassuring grin. “We can take care of ourselves.”

“I know, I know,” Sev grumbled.

It wasn’t the first time they’d split up. It wasn’t the first time Sev had expressed worry, either. The first time it had happened, he’d fussed over them and made sure everyone was carrying healing potions.

Each one of them grabbed a mana crystal for themselves, and Derivan once again prepared himself to watch keenly. This was his opportunity — with the system mostly pulled back, this was the cleanest he’d ever be able to observe the process.

He’d made a few more observations the last few times they had done this, but had never been confident enough in his skills with Patch to remove their reliance on mana crystals with confidence.

This time, though…

He saw the way the mana crystals were funneled into the system, the way they were purified and stripped of something that went straight into the reality anchor Misa held.

He saw the way it responded. Something inside the anchor unfolded, absorbing whatever it was the mana crystals gave it.

Strange. It was different from what he’d seen the first time, when he’d observed it on their way to Elyra… But this was a better, truer representation of what the mana crystals and reality anchors were doing, he suspected.

It was almost like it was updating something.

Mana is memory.

Clyde had said that in the beginning, when they’d first arrived; that mana was a memory, a record. Dungeons were structures that kept reality anchors operating, but reality anchors needed something to anchor.

That was what a dungeon formation event was — the gathering of all that initial memory to push into an anchor, to give it the record it needed to anchor. And then the crystals continued recording events as they changed, updating that internal database.

Derivan felt, for the first time, like he understood. And if that was true…

The Patch would have to be subtle. He wouldn’t remove the prompt for them to offer the system a crystal — that was, apparently, necessary. But the killswitch that removed their access if they didn’t offer a crystal was almost insultingly easy to excise.

“I think I understand,” Derivan said, and everyone else glanced at him. He took a moment to find the words, and then continued, “I believe that when a dungeon is formed, a recording — a memory of everything the reality anchor has to stabilize is fed into it. But that memory is static and unchanging. Offering a mana crystals updates the reality anchor, keeping the memory in line with reality.

“I removed the part of the system that destroys our connection with the system if we do not offer a mana crystal,” he continued, “but in light of this, we should keep giving it crystals, if we can, so that we stay in sync.”

He didn’t say the other part of what he thought he might be able to do — that it might be possible to force the anchor to restore from its backup, the way Misa’s own family had been restored.

No unnecessary risks.

With that, they said their goodbyes, and each faded into their own separate Road.