Alma 141 Letting Go

Reed's role was to clean up the infection in the fissure until it was free of miasma by heading down into the built-in infrastructure of the planet that ran the Heavenly Barrier, the Michomitl.

Deep beneath the crust of the earth, laid a vast and expansive network of complex machinery that only a few people in the multiverse truly understood. It was an advanced, continent-sized machine of vast proportions. Not even Lu'um could say with complete certainty that she fully understood the means by which the Heavenly Barrier operated.

Thankfully, Reed would not have to perform any complicated repairs upon the Michomitl. That was, perhaps, the only silver lining about Reed's task. All he would have to do is descend through a literal hell-storm of miasma and an extreme-high density Anima storm the size of the North itself.

In layman's terms, he would have to survive an empire-sized marathon of pure, suicidal madness.

Lu'um, who was clearly far the stronger one of the two, had been left with an equally burdensome and daunting task. She was the one who would have to close the fissure shut.

It was a fissure a thousand kilometers in length by Lu'um guess, though she was certain that it was possibly even larger than that. Even for her, it would not be an easy task to accomplish. The amount of power and skill required to do something as ridiculous as what she was about to do could be counted a single hand.

Something like this would have been reserved for the likes of the greatest Ancient Mulians who belonged to the Builder-caste. In times past, they would have used their titanic engineer-fleets to shape planets as they wished, terraforming them on a scale unprecedented.

This was why Lu'um had expressed great unease when she learned about what they had been tasked to do.

She peered down at the fissure in search of his figure. It was nowhere to be found, already lost within the turbulent chaos within the enormous maw of death. He had really gone off and done it.

There was nothing she could do for him now. He would have to fend for himself down there and activate the reset node buried all the way at the bottom. Only then would she be allowed to start closing the fissure...

He better make it. He has to make it on time. He will. If he doesn't make in time, I'll...!

Her thoughts were in complete disarray as she gazed down at the chaos below. The wait was going to kill her before anything would have the chance...

Reed was out of his mind. His vision had already begun to fail. There was too much to keep track of in the hellstorm within the fissure.

A thousand sight-lines of potential futures, all of them dead-ends, filled his fading vision as he continued to descend at an ever-increasing rate of speed.

He was treading the fine line between life and death like never before in his life. A single incorrect move and he'd die instantly, for there was much to be feared in the hellstorm.

Huge flares of super-heated Anima condensate swirled in huge vortices the size of warships everywhere he looked... and those were the smaller ones. The bigger ones were, at the very least, larger than the entire combined fleet that participated in the Twilight War.

There were also massive pockets of space filled with miasma that limited the paths he could take on the way down. Reed couldn't pass through the miasma because unlike Lu'um, he could not control as much Anima as she did. Once it melted through the thin shield separating himself and the outside, he'd meet a terrible end.

If his body did not melt because of the miasma, he'd be torn to pieces by one of the Anima vortices instead. Or he'd be cooked to death in seconds because of the terrifying heat. Perhaps the incredible pressure bearing down on him would compress him to into a ball of flesh and bone...

Reed didn't know. All he knew was that if he died, Lu'um would probably end up wearing him on one of her fingers as a shiny diamond.

In comparison to everything around him, he was practically nonexistent. He was like a grain of sand in a churning ocean. Even so, Reed continued to descend without stopping like a shooting star that had fallen into a hellish world of fury and death.

The pain was starting to become too much to handle, even for him. His mind could not handle the strain of processing ten thousand different variables at once, let alone for the last...

...How long has it been since I've started? ...I don't remember when this started.

It had gotten that bad. A second for him had turned into a unit of measurement equivalent to that of a day. And it was not unsurprising, given he had to account for every single second within the hellstorm.

After all, it'd only take a single wrong move to spell his death and Reed was performing hundred of moves -- course adjustments and subtle manipulations -- every second.

But it was getting harder. At first, for every thousand future dead ends, there would be a single path of success where he'd survive, but now...

That path of success was only showing up after culling ten thousand paths that'd lead to a dead end. It wasn't that he was failing but rather, that he was running out of options.

The further he descended, the more miasma he found himself encountering, to the point that it'd become increasingly difficult to chart a course. And if that wasn't bad enough, the "smaller Anima storms" had disappeared.

A massive torrent of Anima, a hurricane of unimaginable size had impeded his way. It looked more like the sun though, because of how blindingly bright it was to the eye.

The second Reed laid eyes on it, his vision went dark. Waves of searing pain shot through his eyes as he let out a voiceless scream in the midst of the chaos.

In the middle of a literal hell, he had lost his vision. Still, Reed did not stop descending... because he couldn't. He was moving too fast to stop. The hurricane he was inside of wouldn't let him stop, thrashing him along with its unpredictable currents.

Reed was akin to a leaf caught in a storm, completely at the mercy of the storm.

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit...! Think, think, think, think, think...!

He could have healed his eyes, but it would have been pointless. The moment Reed opened them, he would have gone blind again, scarred once more by the blinding radiance of the superheated solar-storm of Anima.

I have my mind's eye, but it's too weak to use! I can barely see a hundred meters with it compared to using my eyes and the future-paths!

It was now that Reed fully understood what she meant by faith. She knew this would happen. That he would be thrust down this path.

He would have to rely on his own senses from now and make judgment calls on his own or die.

"Only through Faith will Mulia live to see another day, my Reed."

Faith. Either he had it, or he didn't. He lived or he died. He succeeded or failed.

In an astonishing act of courage, Reed... actually let go. He no longer struggled against his need to have an answer -- a definite path out of the storm.

Instead, he rode it. Although he knew not was ahead of him, he trusted in her. That she had not lied to him. He would place his life in her hands and let the storm carry him.

What more could he do in this situation? He had reached the end of what was possible for him.

The lone man was at the mercy of Nature or rather, the thread of Fate he had chosen for himself.

Reed opened his mind's eye and surveyed his surroundings without fear as he let things take its natural course. He sometimes whizzed by dangerous currents of Anima and toxic marshes of miasma with only a margin of a hair between them and himself.

For what seemed like an eternity, he flew in an unpredictable fashion in the storm without really knowing where he was at. Sometimes he brushed by death's doorstep and at other times, he was pushed around from one Anima current to another.

But, eventually, it happened. He was finally led out of the storm as he rode a powerful current of Anima out into the wide-open, the eye of the hurricane.

It was peaceful and silent within the eye, where the Anima was at its weakest. He survived.

Reed laughed his heart out in joy as he descended below, having passed through the final barrier with his life intact. He wanted to cry too, but his eyes had been welded shut.

It'd worked. For a good while, he thought that he'd been lost, but he found his way out...

With his faith to guide him. A feat most impressive, that not even he could have pulled off had he been in Reed's shoes.

...That was the biggest difference between them. Reed had faith in her, and he... did not.

Chapter end