Chương 30: Chapter 29: Along the Road

The road stretched ahead of me in a straight line. I'd been walking for four hours since this morning and it still looked exactly the same. Dark stone. Faint steam. Snow melting on the edges. The bag bit into my shoulder. I'd packed as little as I could — tent materials, dried meat, the warmth core, the lightning core, the knife, the other cores — but that didn't mean it was light nor did it mean it was painless.

The straps had been digging into the same spot since the first kilometer and it wasn't going to get better. I stopped. No birds. No wind. Just the faint hiss of the thermal stones doing what they'd done for centuries. I set the bag down and sat on it. The road was warm through my pants. My legs were going to hurt tomorrow. My back already hurt today. After all, I'd been pushing it for hours already. I looked ahead. The car was still nowhere to be seen.

"How am I going to do this?" The road didn't answer. I sat there for a few more seconds. Then I stood up. Picked up the bag. Kept walking. It was mid-afternoon when I finally reached it. I guessed the good news was that I'd overestimated the distance. For once I was happy to be wrong. The car was covered in snow. The weather had not been gentle — the battery indicator on the dash was dark. The screen didn't wake when I opened the door. It had run out completely. I set the bag in the trunk and got to work.

I'd known this was going to be hard. And I'd planned for hard. Warmth core. Tent. Food. A hundred kilometers of road. What I hadn't planned for was the weight. It weighed more than I cared to calculate. Dead battery. No motor assistance. Dead metal. I put both hands on the hood and pushed. The car first had to be turned around. It moved. Not much — a few centimeters — but it moved. I pushed again. Another thirty centimeters, maybe forty. I did the math. At this rate, with this terrain, I'd be doing this for a week.

Maybe more. I pushed again. The hours blurred. Push. Breathe. Push. The car rolled forward one agonizing meter at a time. My arms went from sore to numb and back to sore in cycles I'd stopped counting. The road passed beneath me. I stopped twice. Drank water. Ate dried meat. Got back to work. Push. After a while the car caught on something — a hidden bump in the stone — and I had to put my whole weight into it until it broke free. Then I stopped. Not because I was done. Not because I was resting.

Because I'd heard nothing and seen nothing, and yet every piece of the world had changed. The air bent. It looked like heat twisting the air in summer, except the air was freezing and the road was barely warm enough to melt snow. A distortion maybe ten meters ahead of me — a faint shimmer, oval-shaped, the way the world looked through a lens of water. It grew. The shimmer deepened. The light twisted.

The air pressure in my ears dropped and then came back with a pop, and I felt something I'd never felt before — I went rigid for a single second, this wasn't normal. Is that how it looked from the outside when my house moved to this world? I had no idea about that but my instinct told me that something was about to come out. Another house, a book written by the devil or a robot from portal? In an instant so many options came to my mind. The distortion quickly stabilized. And now someone stood in the road. A woman.

She raised her eyes to the world like someone waking up, then lowered them — to the road, to the snow, to the silent plain, to me. I was still in pushing stance. Hands on the hood. I hadn't moved because my brain was still catching up to the fact that a person was here and standing in the middle of the road. A real person. Flesh and blood. Someone who wasn't me. She was beautiful. Not in the way people in novels were beautiful.

In the way the portrait in the book I'd found in the study had been beautiful — the same calm expression layered over the same features that didn't seem quite real. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. The same face. I knew that face. This is her. I'd spent hours looking at her portrait while I'd decoded her records — the queen who'd founded the nation that built this island, the woman who'd vanished during a magical experiment without explanation.

No heir. No remains. Just three pages about her inside someone else's history book. And now she was standing in the middle of the road. She took a step. Her boots — simple, dark — touched the warm stone. Then her attention shifted. Not to me. To the mountain. Her expression didn't change at first. She recognized it. I could see that much. The recognition was the kind of thing that sat in the chest rather than the face — a stillness, a held breath, a sudden comprehension that needed a moment to settle.

Then her gaze dropped. The road. The village somewhere behind the ridge. The empty land. She was scanning. I could feel it with my mana sense — a ripple passing through the ambient energy, like a stone dropped into a pond. Looking for people. For mana signatures. For anything. But she found nothing. She found the dragon of course, and her head snapped slightly toward the mountain, and her right hand flexed at her side. No surprise. Just confirmation. Then she found me. Her head came around. Her eyes met mine.

She didn't speak. She just studied me — the strange clothes, the bag in the trunk, the metal carriage, my hands on the vehicle. My posture. My exhaustion. The faint mana traces of the two circles working hard inside my chest. She tilted her head to the side. In the portrait she'd been calm. Painted. Still. The woman in front of me was not still.

"Do you speak Hadran?" The question caught me off guard. Not where am I. Not who are you. She'd already worked that part out.

"Yes." She processed that. Then: "Where is this?"

"About a hundred kilometers from the village beside the stream."

"The village —""Beside the stream," I said.

"I know." Something shifted in her eyes. Not surprise. Attention. She was reassessing.

"Say it again."

"The village beside the stream." I repeated it, quieter, clearer.

"Much better." She looked at me. Then back at the mountain. Then she raised her hand in the light — a mark at its side, a stylized dragon, dark against her palm. The same mark the book had mentioned but never shown. She held it there for a moment, then let it fall.

"Where are the people?" It wasn't an urgent question. It was a quiet one.

"I don't know." She looked back at me. Waiting.

"My house arrived here months ago. You're the first person I've met."

"Person," she said, the word catching.

"The dragon."

"Oh. I see. Makes sense." Her gaze dropped to my hands, still pressed against the hood.

"Why are you pushing this object?"

"The battery is dead."

"What is a battery."

"A thing that stores the force that makes it move."

"And why did the battery lose this force?"

"It ran out of charge."

"Then restore it."

"I can't. Not out here."

"You don't know how."

"No." She looked at me. Then at the car. Then at the road behind me.

"You have been pushing it for how long?"

"A few hours."

"And you planned to keep pushing."

"Until I got somewhere I could charge it."

"How far?"

"A hundred kilometers." She blinked.

"That is a lot of kilometers."

"Yes."

"You're weird." I didn't say anything. She wasn't wrong. She walked toward me but not to speak — she walked right past me, and for a moment I thought she was just looking at the car for the first time. Then her hand dipped into my front pocket.

"What are you —" I flinched. My face went hot. She pulled out one of the small pebble cores — not the ones I'd set aside for grenade experiments, but a good intact one. She turned it over in her fingers and turned around.

"Haha. You're cute." I stared at her. She walked to the passenger door, and sat down.

"What are you doing?" She folded her hands in her lap.

"Continue."

"You're inside the thing I'm pushing."

"Yes." She looked at me through the glass.

"Keep pushing." She smiled, clearly amused. I stood there for a long moment with my hands on the hood. Then I lowered my head. Breathed out. And pushed. The car moved. She sat in the passenger seat with her hands folded and watched the road inch past the window. After a while she started paying attention to the interior — not the dashboard, not the switches, just the shape of the thing. Tracing the line of the door with her eyes. The steering wheel. The dead screen. Then she started drawing.

I couldn't see exactly what she was doing from the corner of my eye, but I could feel it — the faint amount of mana, circles forming and dissolving in the air above her palms. She wasn't casting. She was composing. The way I'd spread paper across the floor and rearranged components, except she was doing it in the air with circles so fine I could barely trace them. Push. Breathe. Push. The car rolled another meter. Another. She drew and dissolved and drew again. At some point I stopped to drink and she looked up.

"You stopped."

"I'm human."

"That is inconvenient." I drank. She watched me. Then she went back to drawing. Soon after I had resumed pushing, she produced a circle I had never seen before. It appeared above both her hands — not Heat Transfer, not Air Current, not any of the components I'd fumbled with on the floor. This was something else. A simple shape with a singular direction. A push. A single vector, tuned and shaped and compacted into a form that didn't need to exist as air or heat or anything physical. Just force.

She tilted her hand, and the circle brightened. The car lunged forward. I was still pushing. My hands were on the hood. One second I was leaning into dead weight and the next second the weight was gone — the car rolling away from me, picking up speed faster than I'd ever managed on my own, and I stumbled forward into empty space. My boots slipped on the stone and I nearly went down. I caught myself with one hand on the ground and the other reaching for a bumper that was no longer there. The car was still moving.

She was sitting in the passenger seat, one hand extended, the circle glowing in her palm. She was not pushing. She was sitting. The car was rolling on its own and I was chasing it. I ran. Three steps to catch up. My hand found the open driver's door and I threw myself inside with the car still coasting forward, my legs swinging in after me like I'd barely made a train departure. I sat there breathing hard. She was looking at me with an expression that was trying very hard not to laugh.

"Haha. Still cute." I stared at the dash. Then at her. Then at the core — my pebble, the one she'd stolen from my pocket, now glowing a pale silver in her palm. She'd carved the circle straight into it without hesitating.

"You — I almost —""It's just pushing. You were pushing with your body. I pushed with something better."

"You almost made me fall."

"I made the carriage go. My job is done." The wheel was turning slightly with the gentle correction of the road, steering against the subtle crown of the pavement. The wheels were spinning. The car was moving. A few kilometers per hour. Barely walking speed. But nobody pushed and nobody was tired.

"Did you seriously just carve a circle into my stone."

"Your stone."

"In my pocket."

"Yes."

"That's theft."

"It's a practical use of an idle resource." She folded her hands back into her lap and smiled. I looked at her. Then at the core. The pale silver glow was steady. The push was gentle but constant — exactly the amount of force it took to keep the car pressing down the road. I pressed the start button and the engine came to life. The dash flickered. The battery indicator showed a single charged cell. The motors were online.

Between her push-circle and the trickle of regeneration from the spinning wheels, the car was moving. Not fast. Not far. But it was moving. I put my hands on the wheel. The car kept rolling.

"You've done this before."

"I understand forces. You were providing the pushing with your body. I simply moved the job to something else." I didn't know what to say to that. So I drove. The road unwound beneath us. She didn't speak much. She sat with her cheek against the glass and watched the mountain, the empty plain, the place where her kingdom had been. Then she closed her eyes. I saw it once — the first tear, the small one that dropped from her lid to the door frame — before I looked away. She didn't want to talk about it. She didn't.