PHANTASIA (17 page)

Impossible
thought Red.
 

He had burned away most of the mushrooms, but thousands still remained. They began converging towards Red and the bladed man at the center of the impact, swimming through the mounds of cauterized flazb and fungus as fast as they could. But their movement stopped abruptly as the floor of the cavern began to quake, and they turned around to swim in the opposite direction just as fast as they had converged. From above, Red could see his team racing towards him in vertical strides.

 
“Go back, go back!” he screamed towards Butz who was almost at the bottom of the spire. A cleft began to emerge at the pit of the crater, quickly developing into a fissure that sliced the floor of the cavern from one end to the other. The hint of a tremor followed, but instead of the roar of a seism, an invasive slithering began crawling up from deep below the surface — an unhinging noise mixed with the sound of slime skidding across a rocky surface. The toadstool creatures had by now, vanished into the walls of their city, squeezing themselves through the cracks of various rocks to disappear behind a bed of flazb.
Wish we could do that
Red though sullenly.
 

“Hurry up! The floor is breaking!” Butz screamed back at him. The fissure had now grown from a single crack to a web of broken terrain. Steaming umbriel poured in through the gaps of the fault to pad the air with a brown mist, heating the bottom of the cavern with a searing humidity. When Red finally got to the spire, he had to leap over a growing gap to grab on to its base. He looked to see if the bladed man was chasing him, but saw that he was still at the center of the crater, recovering from the collision.
At least I did enough damage to slow him down
thought Red. He began climbing as fast as he could, skipping every other step by throwing himself upwards with only his left hand. He looked back down — the bladed man was running towards the spire. But something else caught his attention; a thin, sickly green ooze began seeping in through the gaps on the floor.

Now what
Red thought unwelcomingly.
 

“Don’t stop climbing!” Butz screamed as Red became too distracted by the ooze. The amount of the substance was increasing rapidly and soon it flooded the entire crater, beginning to leak across the floor of the cavern. The bladed man ran from its touch and grabbed onto the spire they were on, climbing behind Red in staggering leaps by using his sword to anchor his momentum. Both Red and Butz gave a short yelp as they doubled their paces. The goo continued to rise, quicker and quicker every second. Its capacity soon filled the entire bottom of the cavern.
 

Then, from the corner of his eyes, Red saw the sea of muck beginning to take form like a liquid filling an invisible container. “It’s alive!” he heard Magnus scream from far above them. “It’s alive!” The ooze splattered against the spire as it climbed the cavern with a hideous speed, spreading bits of itself all over the air.
 

“Go! Go! Go!” He could hear Magnus scream.
I’m already climbing as fast as I can
he thought, but somehow managed to speed up his pace anyways. Once all five of them had gotten to the top, they began taking turns jumping to latch onto the ceiling.
 

“Do you have energy?” Raven asked. She seemed delirious, not her usual self. Something about her was off, like she had been deeply disturbed. It reminded Red of what he looked like after a nightmare. For a second he felt like there was something he needed to ask her, but couldn’t remember what it was. “A regular jump won’t cut it, we’ll need to combine it with a propulsion cast.”
 

“Yah, I feel fine,” Red answered, surprised that he actually
did
feel fine, and not exhausted. Somehow he still had a good amount of energy leftover after his cast. She returned a curious look before pointing upwards.
What is it that I need to ask you?
The thought wouldn’t leave Red’s mind despite the blitz of the moment.
 

“Okay, I’m jumping last,” she replied.
 

Butz, Magnus, and S went ahead of Red, each spacing their jump only a second apart from one another. Butz carried Linx on his back and went first. Red followed behind S, but nearly missed reaching the ceiling. Butz extended a hand that he grabbed onto, saving him from having to jump a second time. Raven had no problem closing the gap with her leap, and they began climbing towards the hole they entered through as soon as she came up.
 

“No, follow me,” Raven replied, as she went towards a different direction. When they reached an alternate gap in the ceiling, they rushed through it as fast as they could. A moment before Red went in, he glanced back down at the caverns and saw the ooze spiraling around the bladed man like a tornado and then collapsing onto him in a violent splash of slime.
Finally
thought Red.
Please let that be the end of him.
 

The chute they climbed through led to a horizontal tunnel where mini toadstools scuttled back and forth as the five of them crawled across. Despite being far and away from the chambers down below, no one seemed inclined to take any chances by slowing down. Eventually they reached a tiny room where Red saw several fast moving currents at the center, twisting the air around them like channels of energy.
Geysers.

“
This is near where I first landed,” Raven began. “I had to climb back down through that other chamber to get through to you guys — that’s when I got caught staring at the crystal. How far up do you think this goes?” She asked, turning to Magnus.
 

“I don’t know, but the wider the geyser, the further towards the surface it’ll take us,” Magnus replied. They spent a few minutes comparing the width of each of the geysers until a soft rumbling interrupted their calm.
 

“It can’t be…” Butz whispered.
 

The floor exploded in green as the ooze popped up from underneath them, gushing into the tiny chamber as though it were being pumped from below. Raven used a cast that eviscerated the floor with plasma while Red poured as much of his energy as he could into a cast of flames. He had never seen Raven use plasma before, at least not in a fight, and suspected it had something to do with watching Wren use it in her dreamscape. Magnus and Butz, who relied primarily on physical combat, were useless against the slime. They helplessly skittered across the floor with S, attempting to dodge the goo whenever it seeped to their feet. The two of them shoveled the ground around her to keep the goo from getting to her, and for a second, Red thought they were simply being kindly protective until he realized they were trying to fix their positioning. At Crest, it was drilled into their heads over and over again that positioning in a fight was always the key to victory — where your healers, warriors, casters, and everyone else was in relation to each other and the enemy. Because the slime was flooding the floor in a haphazard manner, S had no where to remain calm and focused. If your healer was neutralized in a fight, the position was called curative-atrophy — the kiss of death for any squadron.

“GO!” Raven shouted furiously at the four of them. “ What are you doing? Don’t bother fighting it. Just go through one of the geysers, any of them. Before the slime takes shape.” Just as she had finished her sentence, the goo began stacking on top of itself in loud plopping noises to create a totem-like creature that continued to burgeon as it collected more slime.
 

Without hesitating, Magnus jumped into a geyser and Red saw him cannon upwards with the draft. Butz and Linx followed behind him, then S, and then Red. The sensation was almost the same as falling, except he could feel two forces sandwiching his body — the air propelling him upwards and gravity pushing him downwards. In a few seconds he traveled to a higher level of the caverns, where the geyser threw him on top of his team. Butz, Magnus, and Red were all piled on top of S, who somehow ended up at the bottom.

“You’re crushing me,” she squealed as they rushed to get off.
 

“Just makin’ sure the healer’s safe,” Butz replied.

Somehow when Raven came through she was able to maintain her tact and landed gently next to them on her feet. The chamber they landed in was large, but nothing like the one with the ainmosni crystal. A single geyser protruded from the floor of this one, and hundreds of rocks, perfectly weathered into elliptical shapes, were collected among large pools of umbriel. They took their time catching their breath while Magnus and Butz hopped over to study the rocks. Red was about to join them when a rumbling noise interrupted them just like before.
 

“No…no…no…” Red whispered. “I thought we
left
the nightmare.”
 

“How? It’s impossible. We must be a tezra or two higher than the first chamber,” Magnus replied. “It can’t be chasing us this far.”
 

But just as it had done twice already, the floor began to crack and a green ooze leaked into the room. S swore at the thing before jumping into the geyser. They all followed right behind her, jumping in pairs of two this time.
 

“We can’t stop,” Raven said, as soon as they had landed in the next chamber. “Don’t stop going until you’re at the surface. Following her directions, they climbed through 4 consecutive chambers without stopping, always on the look out for the slightest hint of a rumble. The last room they ascended led to a vast chamber with waterfalls — not made of umbriel — and from the holes on the ceiling in this one, Red could see the faint trace of starlight.
 

“We made it…” S breathed. “And there’s daylight… solstice is over?”
 

“There’s a geyser there,” Magnus pointed. “We don’t even have to climb the walls.”
 

They ran for the channel of air and took it straight up to the surface, where the sudden surge of light made Red feel like he had cleansed himself of a deeper evil from down below in the caverns. They landed atop a shallow dune, and Red noticed that behind him, the sliver of space they had popped up from disappeared underneath the sand.
Odd,
thought Red; it looked as though the space was timed to close right after they had exited through it. The five of them panted breathlessly while stretching their combat suits over their mouths to protect themselves from the wind. Solstice had given way to torid, and already, the season’s notorious sandstorms had begun tearing across the desert.

“We must have been asleep for longer than we thought,” Magnus finally shouted, breaking the silence between them. The howling of the sandstorm made his voice barely audible.
 

“Time distortion in the dreamscape,” S shouted back. Butz let himself fall and rolled down the hill of sand they were sitting atop, either laughing or crying as he went; Red couldn’t tell. Linx jumped along behind Butz, letting the slope of the dune carry him to the bottom.

“I can’t believe we made it,” Red beamed as he finally caught his breath.
 

“Let’s save that for when we’re back in our beds,” S said. “I’m sending a message to the control room right now for an exfil. We can’t walk back to Echidna from where we are.”
 

“At least we’ll have an interesting debrief after all this is over,” Magnus laughed.
 

Red looked at Raven to ask her if she was okay but saw that she had walked over to the same spot they had emerged from, seemingly dumfounded by the disappearance of the hole just as he had been. “Is everything okay?” He shouted.

“Fine. We should head over to the extraction plant, we’ll be safer around there until we get picked up,” she replied, pointing over to the purple beam of light in the distance. Cron extraction plants looked like gated microcities, and were indistinguishable from normal settlements except for their ‘Cron Prisms,’ beams of purple light that extended from their centers. The beams were a result of the excess energy given off from hyperproxification. While it was unknown exactly how much energy was wasted in this way, MegaCORP made a point to make sure that none of it was redirected towards a free pool of energy.
 

All five of their microAIs lit up simultaneously to confirm their exfil in twelve hours — which Red noted was an abnormally long time. The notification suddenly reminded him that he hadn’t checked his progress for the field test since their first night on the desert. “Our scores!” Red yelled. The pace of everything that had happened nearly made him forget why he was here in the first place. Taking out his microAI, he quickly opened up his field test progress to see how he had done.
 

“No way…560!” he exclaimed.
 

“What!” Magnus choked as he ran over to see it for himself. Not believing that it could be accurate, he checked his own score, which ended up being only 10 points lower. Butz and S scored 530 each, and Raven had a 600, which they suspected was a result of initially landing at a much lower level through the whirlpool.

“What does this mean?” Butz asked.
 

“It means we’re going to Areopa,” Red sighed as he collapsed once more on top of the sand, suddenly feeling like everything had been worth it. He could see the backdrop of the Cron extraction plant as he lay down, the silhouette of a tiny city, and imagined how pleasant it would be to finally return to his own bed at Echidna. After resting for a few more minutes, they took to finding a spot near the extraction plant to make camp until their exfil.

“Do you think he’s gone?” S asked, looking back towards the direction they had come from.
 

“It looked like it,” Magnus replied. “I’m surprised your cast didn’t kill him. I’ve never seen you do that,” he added, turning to Red. “Didn’t know you could.”
 

“
I’ve
never seen myself do that, and I didn’t know I could either,” Red laughed.
 

He caught Raven’s eyes glaring at him from their peripherals, but pretended not to notice. There was something about everyone that had changed now, although he couldn’t put his finger on it. Not on the surface, but something inside had changed in Butz, Magnus, S, and Raven. In everyone except for Raven, it seemed to be a change for the better. In Raven, he sensed something more complicated. Even her energy flow felt different — more powerful, but more raw.
I’ll ask her about it later,
he thought,
in private.
He had wanted to ask her about The Evil Eye as well, the term used by the shaman, and something else that had slipped his mind but he hoped would come back to him.