Chương 257: (252) 4.31. Group Tumble!

Vin did what any self-respecting person would do when they suddenly found themselves plummeting through a potentially infinite sky with no parachute. He screamed. Rather loudly. After a few seconds of screaming and tumbling head over heels as the wind whipped past his face, a sharp stinging across his cheek snapped him out of his panic, and he blinked as he spotted the source of the sudden pain.

Reginald was clinging to the lip of his pocket with his paws, the rest of his body dangling upwards and waving violently like a flag in the wind. The poor rat must have been woken up out of nowhere and was now holding on for dear life as they fell with one another. Reginald had slapped him across the face with his tail, breaking him out of his panic.

"Thanks, Reginald!" Vin shouted over the wind, noting the nod from the rat as he finally focused on his surroundings. Scule was only a couple of feet to his right, but a good few dozen higher than him. It would seem either through some strange, magical quirk of his race or physics Vin definitely didn't understand that the petian truly did fall slower than the rest of them, as the screaming Rogue was definitely getting farther away with every second.

Lumel had been leaning out to grab Shia right before the cloud shattered, so the two of them were falling right beside one another. Lumel's fabric-heavy outfit was fluttering loudly as she fell, and Shia's face was white as a ghost as she gripped her staff as if it would be able to save her somehow. In just a few seconds, the five of them had already fallen quite a good bit and were only gaining speed, so Vin tried to hurry.

"Lumel!" he shouted, thankful when the pulmon managed to stop screaming long enough to look at him. Her purple eyes were wide open with fear, but the moment they landed on him, she seemed to calm down ever so slightly. Seeing he had her attention, he thrust a finger back toward the distant village that was rapidly rising into the sky relative to them.

"The village! Can you make it?!" Following his finger, understanding dawned on her face, and she hurriedly nodded before shouting back at him, her words nearly lost over the screaming wind.

"I think so! But I'd have to go alone! I don't have the mana for anyone else!"

"Do it! We'll figure something out!" Lumel hesitated for only a moment before she nodded. With fire in her eyes, she turned to look at the floating village on the horizon before vanishing in a flash of purple. Vin was just able to make out a small, robe-covered figure appear a good distance away in the sky. She began falling again the moment she appeared, but after another second, she vanished once more. He lost track of her after that, but that was fine.

He had slightly more important things to worry about at the moment.

"Shia! Come-" He smashed through another icy cloud, sputtering at the sudden impact he hadn't seen coming as his fall was slowed ever so slightly for a moment. It had felt like belly flopping into a pool that was only a few inches deep, without any water beneath the surface to actually catch him. The slight resistance had actually helped him close some of the distance between him and Scule, so he switched targets before the petian could get even further away.

"Scule! You need to fall faster!" he tried shouting up, wincing as Scule showed no indication of hearing him. The poor petian who was terrified of birds and heights more than anything else was absolutely freaking out, screaming at the top of his lungs and tumbling head over heels as he fell.

"Scule! I need you-" A sharp squeak interrupted his attempts at getting Scule's attention, and Vin turned his head just in time to see a rather determined-looking Reginald, who was still dangling from his pocket, lean forward and sink his sharp teeth into his own tiny arm. The rat squeaked in pain, but he didn't let up, sinking his teeth even deeper into his own flesh. As blood began pouring out of the wound and trickling upwards as they continued to fall, Vin heard a desperate cry from up above.

"REGINALD!" As though he'd been splashed in the face with a bucket of cold water, Scule suddenly spun around, finally utilizing his remarkable dexterity to correct his out-of-control fall. Following the bond he had with his companion, Scule's eyes found them in a split second, and the petian angled his body straight down as though he were an experienced skydiver.

His speed nearly doubled in an instant, and he shot toward them like a missile, barely managing to snatch onto Vin's hair and stop himself from shooting by.

"Reginald, you deranged rat, what did you do?!" he shouted, his eyes going wide at the severity of the wound. Vin didn't know just how the strange connection between the two of them worked, but he could only assume the worse an injury was, the more it alerted the other one, because Reginald hadn't gone easy on himself. It looked like he'd nearly bitten through to the bone, and the poor rat was now dangling from the edge of his pocket with only one paw.

"I'll heal him once we're safe!" Vin shouted, startled out of his concern for Reginald as he felt something hard latch around his leg. The sudden sensation horrified him for a moment, as his mind leapt to imagining some sort of flying monster taking advantage of their confusion to try its luck at eating him. He looked down, preparing a Stone Shot and praying it was just going to be one monster all on its own.

Instead of a monster, he discovered Shia with her staff outstretched, a long, thin branch having been grown out of it and used to secure herself to him. She must have come to the same realization that he had, as she used the branch to pull the two of them together and grabbed his hand in her own. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

For a group of people with no skydiving experience and who certainly hadn't planned on changing that any time soon, they'd managed to conquer their initial fears and group up with one another in the sky shockingly fast. Even so, it had to have taken them nearly a minute to actually get together again, which meant they'd fallen quite a ways down. The village was nowhere in sight at this point, and more and more clouds continued to whip past them as they plummeted with no end in sight.

"If this fragment doesn't have a ground… are we just going to fall until we starve to death?!" Shia asked, looking all around them for some sort of way to halt their fall.

"I don't know, and I don't want to find out! Lumel went toward the village to get help, but we need to find a way to slow down! If we keep falling, even if there's no ground for us to hit, they'll never be able to catch up to us!"

"Well there's the obvious!" Scule shouted, still dangling to them by a few strands of Vin's hair.

"Use your gravity magic you idiot!"

"It's a tier 2 spell, and there's too many of us! I won't be able to maintain it for long!" he shouted back, already having thought of that. Redirect Gravity was the very first thing his mind had gone to after Reginald had helped him collect himself. Technically, now that they were all together, he could use it to 'fly' through the air by changing the direction they were falling.

The only problem with that was he'd only be able to keep up the spell for a short while at best, and at least a portion of that time would be wasted canceling out their current momentum. He wouldn't be able to hold the spell until Lumel came back with help, and even if he managed to get them to another stable cloud, it would just shatter underneath them and send them tumbling into the sky all over again.

"Come on, magic-boy, surely you have something that can stop us!" Scule snapped, sounding more than a little annoyed at the current situation.

"You don't have any spells that float?!"

"There is one!" he said, his mind whirling as a rough concept of a plan began forming in his mind.

"Though it's going to require precise timing, and it'll be a rough landing!"

"How rough?!" Shia called out."'Divine boon' rough!" he shouted, grinning despite himself as Shia began laughing.

"Let's do it!" Nodding, he turned to look beneath them, his stomach dropping even further at the sight of sheer empty space as far as his eyes could see. It seemed as though there were in fact different altitudes in this fragment, as they were about to break through the last of the clouds. He'd thought falling through endless sky was scary, but endless, darkened sky without so much as a single cloud was beyond horrifying.

"Hold on tight!" he commanded, throwing together two different runic formations within his mana. For this plan to work, he was going to need to cast two spells nearly simultaneously. It was a feat he was fairly confident he could do at this point with his high attributes, but not one he'd practiced much. Taking a deep breath, he activated the two spells that he needed to arrest their fall." Aqua Sphere! Dimensional Sheath!"

Using Runic Recalibration to adjust the size of the sphere and how far it was summoned from his body, Vin flooded the first spell with mana in order to make it larger than ever before, and place it far enough that it would be mostly formed by the time they hit it. Even with his efforts, however, they were plummeting fast enough that the spell was still only half finished by the time they caught up to it. Which was why he needed Dimensional Sheath.

Vin didn't know a whole lot about physics, but he knew enough to assume there was a strong chance they'd shoot straight through the half-formed Aqua Sphere, the water not nearly enough to arrest their fall. However, he'd belly flopped into a pool enough times as a child to know the more spread out something was, the harder it hit.

In the fraction of a second before they hit his spell, Vin summoned the large and flat petrified elderwood door he'd snatched from Alka's fragment on the way over here, placing it directly beneath them. He had just enough time to flip over and ensure Shia, Scule, and Reginald were above him before he and the door at his back slammed into the floating sphere of water at terminal velocity.

As expected, Vin gasped as golden light exploded out of him, his divine boon preventing his body from bursting like a grape at the sudden impact. Just like back when they'd fallen from the floating library, the boon erased not just his momentum, but that of his friends holding onto him for dear life as well. Though also just like when they'd fallen from the floating library, the golden light erupted outward, with enough force to send his friends flying off in all directions.

Having forgotten that one slight detail, Vin shouted, before realizing his friends were only thrown back a few inches before snapping back. Thick, strong branches had been preemptively grown out of Shia's staff and wrapped around each of their waists, preventing his boon from tossing them over the side of the Aqua Sphere and back into the empty sky.

Vin wanted nothing more than to lie back and catch his breath as he drifted on the wooden door, but his spell was a sphere of water, and he wasn't entirely certain if the door could float at the top without toppling off. Storing it once more with Dimensional Sheath, he let himself fall into the cold water, paddling to keep his head up at the top. Finally, he turned to stare at his friends.

Shia had withdrawn her branches connecting them all now that they were safe and treading water at the top of the sphere without risk of falling further. Each of them stared at one another for a few seconds, before they all burst out laughing simultaneously. Vin wasn't sure how much of their laughter was from nerves versus just simple exhilaration at the fact that they were still alive, and frankly, he didn't care.

Even after adventuring together all this time and narrowly surviving scrape after scrape, plummeting to their eventual deaths with one another had probably been the scariest, most adrenaline pumping scenario they'd ever been in. As it was, they were now stranded, isolated from one of their friends, and had no way of saving themselves from their current predicament. But they were alive.