Chương 30: Ever Caught a Fish

Gotham's night hadn't fully burned off yet when Kaelvorn set out for Boston with Rachel in tow. He lifted off, one hand hooked around her arm, cutting past the city's towering Gothic spires, night wind dragging across both their faces. Factoring in that Rachel's body wasn't built anywhere near as tough as his, Kaelvorn didn't push the speed. The two of them took in Gotham's night skyline in silence for a while. Not that there was much to actually see.

Mostly just dark, with the occasional burst of rough shouting drifting up out of it.

"Slower than your magic, sure. But steady, right?" Kaelvorn glanced sideways at her, grinning a little. Rachel pulled her hood in tighter, purple eyes catching an unsettling brightness against the night, something impatient in her voice.

"Childish. Also, it's freezing up here."

"Want me to slow down more?"

"No." She murmured a string of half-audible words, and a thin, near-transparent purple shield wrapped itself around her body. After that, she let Kaelvorn carry her the rest of the nearly hour-long flight without complaint.

"My turn. My way." Rachel spoke up suddenly, signaling him to stop. Once they landed, she walked briskly out to the center of an open stretch of wasteland, purple light gathering at her fingertips, and a magic circle considerably more complex than anything she'd used before started spreading slowly across the ground.

"Long-range teleport needs about a minute to prep. Don't move." Kaelvorn did as told, standing at the center of the circle. Rachel's gestures sped up, the circle's glow growing brighter and brighter, right on the edge of completing, when the whole thing suddenly convulsed hard and shattered like broken glass. The pale purple magical smoke dissolved into the air instantly, leaving nothing behind but a few faint traces of residual energy scorched into the ground.

"Failed." Rachel pulled her hands back, expression unbothered.

"Failed? Are you hurt? No backlash from the magic?" Something in Kaelvorn's face went apologetic, a suspicion forming that this was probably his fault, given how his body worked. Rachel shook her head.

"I'm not built like a regular magician. Just burned through some mana, that's all." Kaelvorn stepped closer, looking at the runes still scorched into the ground, brow furrowed.

"Was it me?" Rachel nodded, something resigned in her tone.

"Teleport magic locks onto a soul to work. A normal person's soul sits fixed inside their body, position constant. You're different now." She paused, adding on.

"The second your body moves, the locator spell just gets torn straight open by whatever's happening in there. You're going to need to hold genuinely still for this." Something clicked for Kaelvorn, and he pulled his strength inward on reflex. Every muscle contraction, every pulse of blood through his veins that used to require deliberate control, slowed down now like an extension of his own will, effortless. The evolution triggered by the emotional spectrum hadn't just fused his soul back into his body.

It had handed him total command over his own power. It went well past the goal Diana had originally been training him toward, that unity of mind and body held in check.

"Let me try holding still properly this time." This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it He set his stance again, every muscle locked tight without going rigid, his breathing dropped to the slowest, steadiest rhythm he could manage, his whole body still as a statue. Rachel's dead-fish stare gave away nothing. She waved her hands through a few simple motions, and the circle unfolded again.

This time the runes flowed steady, no tremor anywhere in them, pale purple light wrapping around both of them and the space around them. The light shifted once in front of Kaelvorn's eyes, and the air around him swapped instantly from the wasteland's cold bite to something warm, carrying a faint salt-sea humidity. The long-range teleport had crossed two states in one jump.

Kaelvorn lifted into the air, pulled out the comm Batman had given him, and fiddled with it for a moment, pulling up its location function to confirm where they'd landed. The thing looked like an old MP3 player, but it packed a surprising amount of function into it. They alternated methods once more and landed directly at their actual destination in Boston.

"Held together better than I expected." Rachel leaned against a rooftop chimney, hood covering most of her face, watching the street below with mild disinterest, a faint trace of magic still lingering around her out of habit, a barely-there shield already in place. Kaelvorn pulled back the tan waterproof tarp, crouched down, and ran a finger over the thin frost coating the pod's hull. The Lo-Xing alloy shell caught the morning light with a hard, matte gleam.

"Just grab whatever's essential. This thing's got limited space, won't fit much more." He hit the release, and hydraulics let out a soft hum as the hatch rose slowly open, revealing the simple control panel and storage area underneath. Digging through it, his fingers caught on a few cylindrical containers. He pulled one out and found, unexpectedly, several cans of Lo-Xing nutrient supplement. Only now did it hit him.

Back when he'd been badly hurt and only half conscious, he'd apparently grabbed some supplies on reflex and shoved them into the pod, and between one disaster and the next since landing on Earth, he'd completely forgotten they existed. Something like curiosity took hold, and his eyes swept the interior more carefully. Bruce Wayne had repaired this pod, but hadn't touched anything inside it. Maybe he'd checked it over and put everything back exactly where he found it.

Is there anything else in here I don't know about? Curiosity got the better of him, and he ran his hands over every surface of the hull, tapping as he went, until his fingers caught a faint hollow resonance somewhere. Following the sound, he found a hidden button. A metal panel slid open slowly, revealing a concealed storage compartment underneath. Sitting quietly inside was a set of black-and-gray emergency space suits, lightweight, the texture strangely familiar under his fingers.

Kaelvorn picked one up and studied it, and the memory came back to him all at once. Back on Lo-Xing, after he'd killed the first Viltrumite, the surviving Lo-Xing people had dragged the body away, and he'd been too caught up in his own head at the time to pay it any attention. Looking at it now, the Lo-Xing survivors had clearly planned ahead for everything. This suit had been jury-rigged out of a captured Viltrumite's white battlesuit.

They'd added a sealed neck fitting and a life-support helmet, and repainted the whole thing black and gray, the exact inverse of Viltrum's own colors. A deliberate, defiant break from the enemy who'd wiped out their civilization. Something complicated rose in Kaelvorn's chest. He packed the suit back away carefully and closed the hidden compartment.

"I'm going to say goodbye to Ms. Prince. Won't take long." He said it toward the general direction where Rachel had gone invisible. Her voice came back out of thin air, flat.

"Remember dinner. Don't make me chew on cold bread again." Footsteps followed the voice down into the pod, her invisibility still holding. Kaelvorn waited a while, until pedestrian traffic picked up on the street below, then quietly opened the rooftop stairwell door and headed down. Right at the second-floor landing, he ran into Vanessa, freshly out of bed in a loose cotton pajama set, something bright and surprised crossing her eyes the second she saw him.

"Kael? You're finally back! Where've you been the past few days?" Kaelvorn's steps caught for a second. He returned a small smile and used the moment to ask.

"Is Diana around? I wanted to say hi to her too." Vanessa's smile dimmed a little, something wistful in her voice.

"The night you didn't come back, she got home really late. Been down ever since. Said the next morning she needed to clear her head back on Themyscira. It's been a few days now. Haven't heard anything since." Something in Vanessa's tone read as a little frustrated, a little worried underneath it.

"Honestly thought you two left together." Kaelvorn nodded, understanding, and stayed quiet for a moment.

"I'm just here to grab a few things. I'm heading out of Boston." He gave Vanessa a small nod, his voice genuine.

"Thanks for keeping an eye on the pod this whole time." Vanessa clearly wasn't thrilled about it.

"Come back and visit whenever, though. Once I get through this stretch of coursework, I'll show you around the city properly. Sunrise over the water here is genuinely something else." After saying goodbye to Vanessa, Kaelvorn headed back up to the roof and powered the pod up right away. Rachel raised a hand and wrapped the whole pod in an invisibility spell. Next stop, the little wooden cottage outside Metropolis.

Kaelvorn wanted to check in on Tom again, and the open land out there was quiet enough to make it a decent spot to park the pod long-term. After a silent ten-minute flight, the pod touched down precisely on the beach beside the cottage. Kaelvorn stepped out first and walked toward the house. The wooden door sat unlatched. He pushed it open gently. Inside, everything sat as neat as ever, but the whole place carried the cold, hollow air of somewhere nobody actually lived anymore.

No dust on the table or chairs, clearly cleaned carefully before whoever left. But no warmth coming off the stove, the cupboards emptied of food, the farm tools in the corner still lined up neatly, all of it wrapped in a silence like a sheet of gauze. Kaelvorn stood frozen for a few seconds, then walked to the window, looking out at the churning water, running a finger along the cold sill. Not out fishing. The door hadn't even been locked, and every piece of fishing gear sat put away inside.

Tom had clearly left on his own, and clearly hadn't planned on coming back. Rachel walked up beside him, looked at the empty cottage, and didn't say anything. She just stood there quietly with him for a while.

"What are you thinking about?"

"Nothing much... you ever been fishing?"