From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 91: The Reason

The sense spell spread out, covered the ruins, and found nothing.

No heartbeat, no warm presence tucked behind a wall, no crushing weight of something that wanted to kill us. Not even a polite skeleton with a lab coat. Just empty buildings and wind moving through broken walls.

I dismissed the spell and turned to the group.

"It’s empty."

A beat of silence.

Then I said it again, louder, because it deserved to be said louder.

"It’s actually empty. No snakes, no Corruptors, no anything, just ruins."

Coco made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. Finn’s shoulders dropped. Kira closed her eyes for a second, the expression of someone who felt relief running through her body. Phinyx let out a long, slow breath like he’d been holding it in expectation since the seventh outpost.

"Wip." Wip said from my head.

Then she said it again, differently. "Wip, wip wip wip. Wip wip." She had invented a song. She had no idea what was happening, but the energy was good and she had decided to contribute musically.

We walked in.

The eighth outpost was more ruins than structure, silver buildings collapsed, some half buried, others standing just well enough to be useful. Enough material to build a decent bunker.

"I think I can build something better here than the last ones." He paused. "If that’s okay."

"Build whatever you want." I told him. "Take your time."

Finn looked happy, he was slowly turning into an artist... that used bunkers and walls as his medium to express himself.

Kira was already on her knees at the edge of the ruins, pressing her palms against the ground with her eyes closed. She’d already put a couple of seeds inside the dirt, and growth started the way it always did.

Coco walked the perimeter with his canteens, laying them down without needing instruction. His small legs moved with the careless confidence of someone who’d done something enough times that it no longer felt dangerous.

Phinyx sat down on a flat piece of rubble and seemed to immediately become part of the landscape.

"What are you doing?" I asked him.

"The vibes here are really tired." he said simply. "I’m going to fix that."

I wasn’t sure if that meant he was going to use his vibes to increase our energy, or if he was going to rest himself, but I left him to it.

I spent the next hour bringing large silver pieces to Finn, carrying them across the ruins as if they weighed nothing.

Wip found a pebble.

She played with it, pushing it across the ground, chasing it. Entirely unconcerned. The pebble was the correct size and it was moving, that was enough for her.

When I’d gathered enough silver, I moved to the widest open section and started training.

Wip’s head came up immediately. She assessed the situation, confirmed that rocks were about to move, and abandoned the pebble without hesitation.

The improvement since the first outpost was not subtle anymore. I could take the middle section of a large rock, the top, the bottom, and a corner. I could switch while walking, timing the lock mid step. Small targets, moving targets, targets at angles I wouldn’t have attempted a month ago.

But I knew it was far from perfect.

The pack had fallen and I’d missed because I’d been operating at the edge of my visual range. I’d gotten lucky... Wip had gotten lucky. And luck was not a resource we could plan around.

I stopped mid sequence and held a rock without switching.

The sense spell. The pressure I used to scan outposts, to feel heartbeats through walls, to map a space before walking into it. I used it for information, there was no reason it couldn’t work as a targeting mechanism.

I grabbed a pebble and the twenty spheres started rotating inside my mind.

Sense.

I felt a rock that sat beyond my eyesight, and let sense map its shape, the exact edges of it. Then I tried to hold that spatial information inside the mental box the same way I held visual data.

The lock felt unstable, but I had to start somewhere.

Switch.

I was aiming for the top section of the rock, but instead I was now holding one of the bottom edges. My aim was really off

Wip ran after it without noticing or caring about my aim.

By the time the sun was almost down, I had pushed my range far enough that I would have sensed the pack when it fell. I still might have missed it, but at least I wouldn’t have been blind to it.

That night we sat around the bunker Finn had built, the best one yet, and ate the last supplies of meat that we had taken from Argent. Now we only had canned food for the rest of the journey.

Wip had fallen asleep on my boot.

"Eight outposts." Coco said eventually, staring at the ceiling. "We actually did it."

"Eight massive vines." Kira added quietly. "I never thought my ability would be useful for something like this."

I looked around at all of them. Eight outposts. We were taking the first steps toward a bigger Argent, where people wouldn’t die at 21. A city where hope wouldn’t be a weird emotion to find.

We had built the starting road.

For a few minutes I let myself sit with that thought. Then I remembered why we’d built it. Why I’d suggested it.

The outposts weren’t the goal, they were just the way back to Argent.

My chest tightened.

I reached into my pocket and found the yo-yo. I started spinning it slowly in the dark. Its green glow making small circles in the air.

Wip was already asleep, and the movement of the yo-yo didn’t seem to wake her.

I had been so focused on the outposts, on the training, on the next problem in front of me, that I had stopped thinking about the thing that had started all of this.

My vow.

It had been months without it triggering... and I could just hope that when it did, I’d be able to find the way back.