NOVEL WEB Chapter 413: Settled in the trap
//Sorry for this, guys, I somehow failed to upload this chapter, hence the slight continuity mishap and lack of certain depth for the location. In a few days tops, the chapters should go back to their right place, sorry for this mistake!//
When I first saw the person standing on the other side of the barrier, I figured out they wouldn't be the only one. And mere moments after lifting up and riding the magnetic field along the barrier's edge, this belief of mine quickly proved to be true.
"There's so many…"
If there was one thing that I learned about supremes thus far, it was how rare they were in this world.
Excluding my own, special circumstances and thus, by extension, Fay's, the entirety of Celestial forest only Madam, a single supreme.
Sure, one could claim that with how each of her kind had to overcome certain trials and gain specific achievements to grow past each rank, the population of this forest might not be a valid example…
But even within the vastness of the empire, there were maybe a few hundred supremes in total, with that already being an extremely generous guess.
Within the ranks of the expeditionary force of the empire, there was Etaria, that swordsman servant of hers whose circumstances were different but who still boasted the ability of a supreme, Claudy who opted to hide his rank and then the hidden ace, the supreme that I've only heard about but have yet to know the identity off.
In a force that neared headcount reaching into six digits, there was a total of five supremes, with yet another generous assumption that Etaria kept at least one supreme hidden the presence of which there weren't even any rumors about.
And again, just like the forest, the likely concentration of supremes within a military and then a special circumstance army was likely to be greater than the general statistics would imply, only further reinforcing my belief on just how rare people of this rank were.
But…
"Maybe this place…" Fay spoke out while allowing a single, long wrinkle to appear on her forehead as she looked out through the maglev's long, bulletproof window. "Just like it alters space, it is possible it alters time as well. Or maybe how it alters our perception of space is just a result of messing with time?"
For but a moment, I allowed myself to look over, genuinely impressed by Fay's deduction.
Even for me, someone who grew into the theory of space and time being just different sides of the same, formerly united dimension, the concept of those two seemingly separate qualities of the world merging together to make up the very foundation of the world as a spacetime…
It was a concept so vague, distant, and pretty much mystic that I would struggle to incorporate it into my everyday thought process.
And here Fay was, casually using this principle that she had only a few weeks to get familiar with since first learning about it to deduce a possible explanation of the phenomena below our ship.
It wasn't a hermitage where chosen few who reached sufficiently high rank would dedicate the rest of their lives to studying the barrier, even if that's the exact feeling the settlement below gave me.
It wasn't even a small camp or a settlement, despite the lack of any amenities that would normally appear the moment people decided to settle in any given place.
There were no inns, brothels, or even houses, with the entire area packed with nothing but tents and makeshift sheds of all kinds.
The only real sign of civilization was a nearly perfectly maintained set of roads, all running perfectly along the curvature of the barrier yet, strangely enough, all lacking any sort of path connecting each of the paths made by repeatedly stomping the plain's grass into the ground.
All in all, this whole area had the qualities of merely a temporary camp while being the size of a respectable town in this world. And, according to all that I've learned, all of its inhabitants had to be supremes… Or, in the edge case, promoted ascenders with abilities perfectly suited to crossing the plain.
"What makes you think the time itself turns weird here?" Claudy asked, lacking the necessary scientific information to know of the correlation between time and space.
"It's the only possible way for there to be so many supremes gathered in one place," Fay replied without even a second of hesitation, eager to explain her point of view. "Even assuming there were five hundred supremes in the entirety of the continent at the peak and half of that during normal times…"
Fay rose up as far off her chair as the straps allowed, all so she could get a better angle to peek down through the bulletproof windows.
"Yeah, I can think of no other way for there to be five hundred if not a damn thousand of supremes here."
Five hundred.
I gulped down my saliva even though, just like Claudy when it came to matters of science, I wasn't born into this world to feel the magnitude of such a statement as opposed to just understanding it.
'Even if there's only half of them here, they could form a force that everyone in the world would have to be wary of,' I thought, not even daring to imagine the magnitude of a disaster it would be if such a group suddenly appeared within the new camp.
"Just in case, we get attacked, we rush to the center of the ship and bail out through my portal," I announced, just for the sake of avoiding confusion if someone down below would fancy to test their luck against the bottom of the maglev.
My hand moved over to the power level before I used my thumb to switch off the safety cover at the side of the leaver, revealing a small button of a safety lock of the power output.
During my lessons, I only heard about the existence of safety and all about the reasons why ever pressing it would be risky if not a damn stupid idea.
But with potential hostiles of great skill and power gathered in masse right below as we passed by the area, the downsides of bringing the hypermangets to a level actively harmful to the maglev's passengers suddenly stopped being that bad of a plan.
After all, with the power of the hypermangets aimed downwards, whatever effect their force would have on us, it would be multiplied many times over to all those unlucky enough to find themselves below the ship!
In the end, though, no attack came our way even as we reached the central point of the settlement, nor when we passed by or, moments later, reached the outer end of this strange, camping ground.
As if not to let us rest even for a moment, though, the geography of this place soon proved its desire to keep things interesting. For mere minutes worth of travel by maglev, which could translate to roughly half a day to a day of travel by foot, we've reached the foot of the massive chain of mountains that we noticed quite some time ago.
And mere hour later, we finally reached the place where the call of the barrier sneakily forced us into the hilly terrain at the foot of the quickly growing mountains, leaving us with mere meters of space from where the hills turned into sharp, steep cliffs of the mountainside.
"Get ready for a bumpy ride," I called out, once again opening up the safety of the power-supply leaver as I positioned the front of the hovercraft to face the mountain before flipping two switches that I've left alone thus far, turning from travel mode to the height climb mode.
It was all a system implemented for the pilots that lacked the skills of the actual pilots. A crutch designed for times when the production of the maglevs was deemed to shoot straight past the country's ability to provide well-trained pilots.
And so, rather than forcing me, a damned amateur, to make the climb by manipulating the angles of the hypermagnets with the second control stick, I simply left the job of calculating the right angles to the onboard AI, simply informing it what to focus on from now on.
"Ready," Fay called out from the side, soon followed by Claudy's mirroring her call.
"Now or never," I muttered to myself before pushing the stick forth and sending the maglev straight into the stone face of the mountain. 'Hopefully now,' I thought as the wall of slid rock grew closer and closer. 'Because if I end up crashing this bad boy, Makary's sure to never provide me with another.'