Chương 435: Chapter 422 - Into Open Waters

Several figures tore across the landscape at several times the speed of sound, the forest and plains below them bleeding into a smear of green and brown. Ayu moved at the front, Chiara cradled against her chest, both arms locked tight around her. Each leap carried her two hundred metres at a time, bare feet barely grazing treetops before she launched again. Imani stayed just behind her, matching her pace stride for stride, his massive frame cutting through the air in silence.

Alonso, Leonie, Pablo, and Lukas flew low to the ground, the wind tearing past them in a continuous roar.

"I suppose you had a plan for after getting on the Church's bad side," Alonso sent through a pulse.

"What's the follow up?"

"Leave the country," Leonie answered.

"Not much of a choice left. We have to get out of Brithelm and move where the Church's influence doesn't touch."

"And that is…?"

"The Far North. The Covenant holds ground there. The Church has almost no reach past the Greywood border." She paused briefly.

"It would be quite the journey, but it's the only option we have right now, unless we want to live in constant hiding." Alonso frowned, not familiar with the term.

"The Covenant?"

"Pablo," Leonie sent simply.

"Full name is The Covenant of the Forgotten Gods," Pablo said.

"Coalition of religious groups that got pushed out by the Church. Different faiths, different practices, but the Church wanted global reach and didn't leave much room for anyone who wouldn't fall in line. Most of them retreated to the cold north and eventually joined hands."

"What kind of religions?" Alonso asked, curious.

"Polytheistic mostly. Multiple gods, different pantheons depending on the group. Pretty much the opposite of the Church's single-god doctrine, which is part of why they spent so long trying to stamp them out. Most books in Brithelm paint them as dangerous, backwards, even tied to daemons. The Church has had a long time to shape the narrative."

"But?" Alonso sent.

"I found older records in some of The Scholars' branches. They tell a different story. Real cities up there, old ones. Trade routes that used to run south before the Church cut them off. Powerful figures too, some matching descriptions that would put them well above anything we've seen so far." He paused.

"Whatever The Covenant is now, it isn't a band of exiles hiding in snowdrifts. There's something real up there." The fields blurred past below them.

"So basically, we'd be walking into unknown territory with unknown powers and no introduction," Lukas said.

"Sounds fun. So… how do we get there?"

"We built an aircraft before we moved on Westmarch. We fly out into the Aldric Sea, stay well clear of the coast, and loop around Brithelm entirely. The Church controls the roads and the inland routes. Out on open water we are a lot harder to track."

"You built an airship?"

"How else are we supposed to cover over ten million kilometres?" Lukas said.

"I won't ask how you crossed one million in three days, but some of us are mere mortals who need a vehicle." Alonso just chuckled. A short silence followed, filled only by the rush of wind. Then Pablo's pulse came through.

"Alonso… what happened back there? Why was the Holy Knight afraid of you?" Everyone shifted slightly. Pablo had asked the question they had all been holding. Alonso didn't answer straight away. The fields below had given way to darker, denser forest.

"We'll talk later," he sent.

"Let's get to the airship first." Pablo didn't push it.

Twenty minutes later the forest broke and the land dropped sharply toward a rocky stretch of coastline, grey cliffs above dark water, the sea stretching flat and wide to the horizon. Alonso swept his waves across the exposed field. Empty. Was it underground? Lukas smiled and stepped forward. He sent a single targeted pulse and a door slid open out of thin air, spilling soft light into the open air. Alonso stared at the gap. His waves were still reading clean space.

Whatever coating they had used swallowed EM completely, giving back nothing. Full EM cloaking? Lukas turned to him with a grin.

"Cool, isn't it?"

"Well… yeah," Alonso said, grinning as he studied it, fingers brushing the invisible surface. One by one, they stepped inside. The main space was wide and softly lit, the glow coming from the walls themselves rather than any fixtures. Smooth surfaces throughout, capsule beds recessed into the hull along the sides, and a short corridor leading to a handful of private rooms. Ayu moved straight to the nearest capsule bed and lowered Chiara into it with care, adjusting her position until she was settled.

Lukas crossed the room and knelt beside it. For a moment he just looked at her. Then he reached out and passed his hand slowly through her hair, his expression quieter than anyone in the group was used to seeing on him. He had already healed her fully. The bruises, the punctures from the iron nails, all of it gone. What remained was just the mental state, and that needed time. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He stayed like that for a moment, then straightened and glanced back at Leonie.

"You want to explain the rest?" Leonie gave a single nod. The others filed back toward the main space and the door to the room slid shut behind them. Leonie gestured toward the nearest wall and a screen came to life, pulling up a quiet display of the ship's systems.

"So, we have a Miridium core at the centre of mass. Push EM through it and the ship moves. Smaller nodes along the sides handle direction and angle. The screens, the doors, everything reads EM input directly." She paused.

"Lukas wanted to add a small rolling robot unit inside. Luckily we were short on time."

"And he will still make his appearance. I've already started with the sketches," came Lukas' voice through the closed door. Ayu snorted. Pablo pressed his lips together, clearly fighting it.

"We finished it pretty quickly after reaching Fourth State," Leonie continued, completely unbothered.

"Just myself, Lukas, and Imani on the project." Alonso looked around the interior. The surface had clearly been heat-bent and shaped, though he couldn't tell exactly which material it was. What stood out more was everything beneath it—the internal layout, the reactive system, the way every surface seemed to know what it was supposed to do. He could tell Imani had a hand in those patterns, maybe taking inspiration from Ajnal designs. Overall, it was really impressive.

"What about the others?" Alonso asked after a while.

"Leonhard, Stephen, the rest?" Leonie's expression shifted slightly.

"Leonhard and his men decided to stay in Brithelm. They were against joining the attack on the Church, so..." she let it sit for a moment.

"We split for good." Alonso nodded. He never had a good impression of Leonhard to begin with, so he let it go without much thought.

"Stephen and Madelaine are staying too," she continued.

"Inside the Church, they could prove an incredible asset as they climb the ranks."

"That… could go wrong in so many ways," Alonso remarked, not very amused by the decision.

"They know that. They chose it," Leonie replied calmly.

"As for Wang… well, you heard him." Alonso nodded slowly. After Westmarch, Wang had made his choice without much fanfare. He was an official knight now, and the noble path was his to walk. Alonso had mixed feelings about it. Wang had been one of Gen-1's seven for as long as 'the seven' had been a thing. But he had fallen behind, and Alonso suspected Wang knew it better than anyone.

The noble path was probably his way of carving something real out of this world on his own terms, without standing in the shadow of people moving at a pace he could no longer match. Alonso couldn't fault him for it. Such was the way of The Tower.

"Alright then," Leonie said, channeling waves toward the core.

"Let's get this thing moving." She sent instructions to Pablo, Lukas, and Alonso through a shared pulse, then fed the first push into the Miridium core. The aircraft lifted without a sound. A clean upward shift as the core answered the input and the vessel cleared the cliff shelf and moved out over the water. The screens updated on their own, the exterior feeds pulling up across the walls.

From outside, the coastline of Brithelm was already shrinking behind them, grey cliffs above dark water, the land pulling back as the airship climbed and angled south. From the outside it would have looked like nothing at all due to the EM cloaking. The fuselage offered almost zero surface resistance, the curve of it designed to split air at the nose and let it close cleanly at the tail with barely a whisper of drag. The acceleration was gradual at first. The sea below began to blur. The horizon widened.

Brithelm's coastline became a thin grey line and then disappeared entirely into the distance. Mach 10 The air around the nose began to compress and heat, a faint shimmer visible on the forward feed. Mach 20"Pablo, Lukas," Leonie called out.

"Take over. Steady push, keep the angle." Both of them fed their waves into the secondary nodes, maintaining the acceleration in a smooth relay while Leonie pulled back and let them carry it. Mach 25 The exterior feeds showed almost nothing useful anymore, just a faint blur of sky and sea at the edges of the frame as the fuselage coating bent what little light reached it. From outside they were invisible and nearly silent, the shockwave trailing far behind them.

Mach 30 The acceleration eased off and the speed held steady. At this altitude and angle the fuselage temperature had plateaued just inside the outer tolerance of the coating, the heat dispersing evenly across the surface rather than concentrating at any single point. The design had clearly accounted for it.

"Damn, it's fast," Alonso muttered, more to himself than anyone. He knew exactly what Mach 30 would do to an unprotected body outside. The fact that the fuselage sat comfortably within tolerance at that speed said more about the aerodynamic design and coating layers than any explanation Leonie could give. He watched the screens. The exterior feeds were still pulling clean visuals somehow, the EM cloaking apparently working only one-way. Polarized?

The Aldric Sea stretched across every display, vast and grey and empty, Brithelm already swallowed by the distance behind them.

"So this is the route we will be taking," Leonie said, stepping forward as a holographic map bloomed into the air ahead of them. It showed Brithelm first, a landmass so vast that calling it an island felt almost wrong. Over a million kilometres from its western coast to its eastern edge, it dominated the centre of the display. To its west, the Velmoric Ocean, open and deep.

To its east, the Aldric Sea, where they currently were, a wide stretch of water separating Brithelm from the massive continental mass of Orvandis beyond. Leonie traced the route with a finger and the map followed her gesture, a clean line drawing itself across the display.

"We follow the southern coast of Brithelm at distance, staying well into open water. Once we clear the Ashveil Cape at the eastern tip we turn north." Her finger moved up along the Aldric Sea.

"Orvandis runs parallel to Brithelm's east coast for most of the journey. Once we pass the Durnfell Straits the landmass narrows and pushes north-east into a long peninsula called the Greyreach. That's where The Covenant holds ground. The Far North starts where the treeline of the Greywood border ends and the frost begins."

The route line curved up the eastern edge of the display and terminated at the tip of the Greyreach peninsula, deep into the upper reaches of the map where the landmass thinned to a jagged point above a frozen body of water marked as the Halvorn Sea.

"All together, roughly twelve days at current speed," she said.

"Possibly less if we push harder on the open stretches." She let the map hang in the air and turned to face them.

"So get comfortable. We will rotate the drive feed between us, no need to burn anyone out holding it solo. There are rooms at the back, capsule beds along the sides, and the screens respond to any of our signatures." She paused.

"Treat it like a very long flight." Alonso nodded slowly. Twelve days was quite some time, indeed. He noticed some gazes on him. Leonie mostly, but not only her. He could guess why. He exhaled.

"About what happened back there… let's wait for Chiara to wake up first. But I'll say this much." He glanced around at them.

"Whatever you think it is… it's not."