Chương 33: The Road to Ascension

Team Zero woke to grey morning light filtering faintly through Yukito's dome. The shadow construct held steady, though it was considerably thinner than it had been the night before.

"Still here," Yukito said, voice rough with sleep, releasing the dome with visible relief once Miho confirmed the surrounding forest was clear.

"I wasn't entirely sure I could hold it the whole night."

"You did, though," Miho said groggily. Zero sat up slowly, cataloguing his own state with the particular attention he gave anything new. the 'sleep' had done something measurable: a clarity in his thinking that had not been present the previous evening, and an ease in his limbs that exhaustion had stripped away and sleep had, apparently, restored. He did not mention what the others had clearly already noticed.

Viria looked at him for a long moment, something careful in her expression, the kind she reserved for things she wanted to acknowledge without making a big deal out of simply mentioning it.

"You slept," she said finally.

"Yes."

"How was it?" Zero considered the question seriously.

"I don't have a comparison point. I assume it was successful, given that I feel different than I did before it."

"Different how?" He thought about this.

"Quieter," he said.

"Inside." Viria's expression did something complicated, settling somewhere between pleased and visibly moved, and she did not push for more than that, which Zero understood as its own kind of gift.

They broke camp within the hour, moving carefully back toward the valley's edge to retrieve the few supplies they'd left at their original riverbank camp, watching for any sign of Carrion's continued presence before deciding the immediate threat had passed. The journal, exhausted of its usefulness now that the Obelisk and its offering had been claimed, offered nothing further about the Gate of Ascension's location.

The system's original task window, when Zero pulled it up to check, was equally unhelpful in specifics. World 1: The Shattered Peaks Primary Objective: Reach the Gate of Ascension and complete the trial Status: Trial requirement waived (Nephrite Key) Remaining Objective: Locate and reach the Gate of Ascension"No coordinates," Miho said, reading over his shoulder.

"Just the objective."

"Typical system behavior," grumbled Viria. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Could we just ask someone?" Inquired Yukito.

"Carefully," Miho said.

"Asking the wrong team where the Gate is tells them we don't already know, which also tells them we might be vulnerable in exactly the way Carrion already tried to exploit."

They found their answer eventually, two days into a cautious eastward route, from an elderly cultivator tending a roadside shrine who seemed to have no particular stake in the competition at all and answered Zero's careful question without hesitation.

"The Gate," the old man said, not looking up from the incense he was arranging.

"Past the eastern ridges, where the mountains finally give way to the lowlands. You'll know it when you see it. Most people do."

"Thank you," Zero said. The four of them hurried on their way.

The road east climbed before it descended, a final pass through thinning mountain forest before the land began, gradually, to open into the broader lowland terrain the old man had described. They traveled with more caution than the journey to Seol-Ainu had required, Miho insisting on cold camps and careful route selection, the lesson of Team Carrion's ambush sitting close enough to recent memory that no one argued the extra effort.

"Do you think Carrion will try again?" Viria asked, on the third evening, watching the fire Miho had permitted now that they were further from the valley's traffic.

"Possibly," Miho said.

"Ross struck me as… unstable, to say the least. From what we heard from Solace, he seemed to have good judgement, but from what I've seen, he seems to let his personal feelings take precedence, seeing how he picked a fight with Axiom. I don't know whether his animosity is more towards Axiom or us, though."

"And if they do come after us again?"

"Then we'll be ready," Miho said.

"We weren't, last time, because we were depleted past anything reasonable. We won't make that mistake again." Zero, listening, thought about the necklace at Ross's throat, the warmth in the dark red stone that had not matched anything else about the man wearing it. He had filed the observation away back in the valley, and not yet found occasion to raise it.

"Miho," he said.

"About the necklace Ross wore."

"I noticed it," she said.

"Do you know what it does?"

"No," she admitted.

"But I also didn't like the way it sat against his skin. Artifacts like that usually carry an active effect, something drawing on the wearer continuously rather than activating on command. That's not inherently dangerous. But it's worth remembering." Zero nodded, filing the information away.

They crested the final ridge on the morning of the fifth day since the valley, and the lowlands spread out below them in a wide, pale expanse, rivers threading silver through green country that stretched toward a horizon none of them could fully see.

At its center, distant but unmistakable even from this height, rose a structure unlike anything Zero had yet encountered in this world: not a building nor a natural formation, but something that seemed to exist in the deliberate space between both, towering and ornate, catching the morning light in ways that suggested it had been built by hands that no longer understood architecture the way any sect or city in this world currently did: The Gate of Ascension.

"There," Miho said quietly, though something in her voice that carried more weight than the single word should have held. Around its base, even from this distance, they could make out the scattered shapes of other teams, dozens of them, converging from every direction across the lowland approach, all of them drawn toward the same final threshold this leg of the competition had been building toward since the moment they'd first arrived in this world.

"That's… a lot of competition," Viria said.

"We have the Key," Yukito said.

"We don't need to fight any of them for it."

"We still need to reach it," Zero said.

"Through however many of them have decided the approach itself is worth contesting." Miho looked at the distant Gate for a long moment, then at the three of them, weighing something Zero could not fully read in her expression.

"Then we go carefully," she said.

"Like how we've done since the valley. One step at a time, watching everything, trusting nothing we haven't verified ourselves." She started down the ridge. The others followed behind her, with the Gate of Ascension rising slowly larger with every step.

And somewhere among the scattered, converging shapes of every team that had survived this far, Team Zero began the last approach of a leg that had started, months ago, with a ceremony that none of them had been invited to, and a god's voice promising that some parts of this world would be bright.