An Unbound Soul

I stood, silently seething. I wasn't the only one, either. I'd never been great at reading dragon expressions, as inhuman as they were, but I knew Serlv's anger when I saw it. When I felt it. The ambient air temperature dropped like a stone for reasons that had nothing to do with the prison of ice she'd erected to ensure the dying didn't spread the plague further. Even the herd of centaur, mourning as they were, backed away from her.

"We will reach the next one in time," she stated, and it really was a statement. Not a question or a goal, but a declaration of how the universe would be. "I shall not let Erryn's children perish under my watch."

We stood watching as a group of healers on the outside of Serlv's barrier fired healing magic at those within. It helped, and the adults were certainly doing better than the children. I saw a few physical classers with high endurance shrug off the infection completely unaided. Combined with the way [Eye of Judgement] or equivalent diagnosis spells could screen the infected, we had the tools to protect ourselves. The plague wouldn't succeed in its goal.

Just because it wouldn't turn into a world-ending epidemic didn't mean it was toothless, though, and I watched on as the low-endurance young and weakened elderly fell and died. I couldn't use the excuses I'd made for the effect of our abnormal germs on earthlings; these weren't pathogens evolved to live alongside mana and System enhanced endurance. Nor could lack of exposure explain the speed with which it acted. This wasn't natural; it was a deliberately engineered plague.

The death toll reached half a dozen by the time Serlv stirred. "South-west coast. As close as you can get us," was all she said, and Horail complied wordlessly. "This will do," she added, grabbing the pair of us and taking off south at speeds that would leave even sound in the rear-view mirror, looking embarrassed. In less than a minute we hit the coast, and in two the rift came into the range of [Mana Sight], rats stampeding out and drowning in the sea.

"End this," she demanded.

It was my turn to wordlessly act. I ripped the decay bomb from [Inventory] and inserted a level thirty monster core, tossing it through the portal. I plucked out an eye with [Detach], sending it in after, and tearing the portal apart with spatial affinity the moment it was inside. I needn't have bothered; the moment my eye entered, the pulses ceased as they shut down their own equipment. They must have detected my intrusion, somehow, and acted to keep me out.

The decay of the rift wasn't fast enough to prevent my delivery from reaching the other side, though.

It activated, flooding the room with temporal mana and whatever else made up the decay effect. There were hints of water and lightning in there, with a touch of death and, for some reason, body. The manaless environment of Earth sucked it away, the mana seeming to simply vanish into nothing, but it was being produced faster than it was being erased. A number of rats became clouds of bloody mist, the metallic floor cracked and eroded, then the mana reached my eye and I saw no more.

The rift flashed angrily; the equipment producing it had been shut off, while raw spatial affinity attacked it from our side and from within, and the decay field assaulted it from the Earth side. The cracks in the universe healed, leaving no sign of what had happened here beyond the swimming rats and a slight lack of mana. It also left me with no idea how many people I'd just killed.

"Rats can swim, and whatever disease they're carrying can probably survive for some time even if they die," I pointed out. "It can likely survive being frozen, too. It's not likely any will reach shore, alive or dead, but we should destroy everything that came through, just in case."

Serlv answered by turning the local region of ocean into an iceberg. I had some concerns about what her repeated castings of that spell would do to the global climate, but I wasn't going to voice them while she was still very obviously angry.

"You are certain that device worked?" she asked.

"Yes. I saw it detonate before it consumed my eye."

Speaking of which, my face was bleeding quite heavily. It just didn't seem important compared to other events.

"Please give us transport to Synklisi, then," she asked Horail. "We will take Jason to the centaur herd and save who we can."

"My teleport location is indoors. Please shrink yourself," he answered, despite the fact Serlv was carrying us both. She complied regardless, leaving her unable to support our weight.

Teleportation must have been mana intensive, given the amount of mana I saw Horail expending, but he'd also learnt my recharge trick. The gaps between teleports were more than enough for him to recharge, so he shifted us to Synklisi as we fell, coming out in the guild's teleportation room, thankfully without the downwards momentum.

"I'll run ahead," I offered, given how time-sensitive our mission was.

"Run ahead? You are not..." started Serlv before I activated [Timeless World], rushing from the guild to the hospital in mere seconds. By the time Serlv and Horail turned up, Jason had healed my eye and was ready to go, thankfully having been available at the hospital.

"I'll follow with my own teleportation," I offered, given that my bracelet only allowed Horail to take two passengers.

This time it was my turn for everything to be over by the time I arrived; in the time it took me to activate [Redistribute], Jason had cleansed the entire cage of ice.

Another four had died while we'd been away...

"Damn them," swore Serlv.

I was in complete agreement. This was not how I wanted my first meeting with the centaur race to go. "At least it's over," I commented.

"For now. How much damage did you do this time? When can we expect a return? You should prepare more of those devices, while we focus on an ability to reach any point on the planet in minimal time. I shall work with Horail to set additional teleport points, including islands of ice out in the ocean. You will also need a point within my lair, and a means of long distance communication."

Horail looked less than enthused about the prospect.

"There are other rank four spatial mages," he pointed out. "In fact, don't you require only rank three for these purposes?"

"That is true," admitted Serlv.

"While there's no hard limit to the teleport points I can maintain, the increasing quantity makes it harder to move between them. We would be better off dividing the world into areas of responsibility."

I let the pair debate logistics while I pondered the answer to Serlv's rhetorical question. The truth was that I had no idea how much damage I'd done; the closed rift had left me unable to view the results of the detonation.

Assuming the most likely case—that I'd destroyed the entire facility, but little more—they would have suffered a significant setback. They likely had off-site backups of any data, but if they had to rebuild the equipment from scratch, Harry had decreed a minimum of two years.

That had been his logic the first time, though, and it had failed rather miserably. Who was to say they didn't have multiple portal generators set up? For all we knew, part of the reason they'd been able to open multiple portals in such quick succession was that they were already running from multiple independent facilities. There hadn't been any more since I tossed the bomb through, but that may just be to give them time to think of countermeasures for further bombs.

... I needed to ask Grover to make further bombs.

I left Serlv and Horail to their discussion, teleporting back to Dawnhold. As interested as I was in a proper exploration of the Ruby Plains, for now the area had been rather thoroughly spoiled.

Cluma bounded upstairs immediately.

"You were gone for ages! Is everything okay?" she asked.

"No," I answered truthfully. "Remember those monsters on Earth I was telling you about? They launched an attack. Ten people died."

Cluma gasped in horror. "Did you kill the monsters?!"

And she could ask it so casually, too. "Yes, I think."

"Good!"

On a logical level, perhaps. On a personal level, I wasn't so sure. I was glad I hadn't seen how much damage the device did. I hadn't had to watch anyone die by my hand. I could pretend nothing had happened. An attack had been launched against us, I'd foiled it, and that was that.

A delusion that would last until the next portal, whether we opened it or they did.

"I need to sleep. If any dragons turn up looking for me... As much as I'd like to say I'm not in, it'll probably be important."

"Okay," said Cluma, demonstrating that she'd picked up on my mood by trying to hug it away. And then tucking me into bed, which did elicit a small smile.

I really should have spoken to Grover first, but I was far too shell-shocked to do anything constructive. Thankfully, nothing else tried breaking into our universe in the middle of the night, and I visited the institute the next day. This time, Cluma tagged along. I still wasn't sure if she actually had anything against the place, but if so, my condition obviously trumped it.

"You used it already?" asked Grover, aghast.

"They opened up portals and poured small creatures through that were infected with a terrible disease. We had to stop them. People were dying."

The frown was obvious despite the beard, but he didn't question it.

"Fine, I'll build you a few more. But I can assure you that whatever was on the other side of that portal no longer exists, and you don't need to fear it coming back."

With Grover building more weaponry, my next visit was to Harry, forcing me to once again explain myself.

"Biological warfare?" he asked, confused, as he glanced at Cluma, who was being uncharacteristically quiet and standing slightly behind me. "Why? They must have known about healing magic, and that it wouldn't be effective."

"That's the thing. It was effective. Not against people with super-high endurance, admittedly, but even regular adults fell deathly ill. Children died in ten to twenty minutes."

"That's ridiculous," said Cara. "A normal bacterium would divide once in that time."

"It wasn't normal. You could watch boils growing, exploding and filling the air with whatever it was. No way was it anything natural."

"But you can't just engineer microbes of any kind to grow that fast. That's not how biology works!" complained Harry.

"You can't engineer a human to live to a hundred and eighty either," I pointed out.

"I suppose. We do know he was involved with epidemiology studies. Did you keep any samples? And how did you get them to stop?"

"No, there aren't any samples. Every region they dumped the infected rats into has been thoroughly cleansed by means of dragon. And I tossed a bomb through the portal."

"... A bomb? No, I don't want to know. Assuming you destroyed their equipment, it will take a couple of years to rebuild... is what I'd like to say, but that didn't work out too well last time."

Harry paused.

"Not that I've seen any actual evidence of these ahead-of-schedule portals," he added. "Nor did anyone find evidence on the Earth side, despite the enormous power requirements of producing portals in quick succession like you described."

"What? Why would I be making that up?"

"I don't know. As an excuse to impose the Law on Earth, perhaps?"

"Don't you dare. People died from that attack! And if you don't believe me, ask Serlv or Horail. Or the herd of centaurs that are mourning their dead children! They can't lie about it."

"I'm not saying I don't believe you. I'm just pointing out I only have your word that anything happened, and the only other witnesses aren't exactly people we have access to."

As much as I would have loved to call Serlv down, she had more important things to deal with than convincing our bitter scientist that yes, people from his world really had just murdered multiple people from ours, and had intended to commit a full genocide.

Instead, I left him to whatever he was doing, storming off back home.