Chapter 37 - The Pressure of the First Ring

The watch rotation inside the twenty-eighth car had been split into six-hour shifts ever since departing Depot Twelve.

When the plateau's weak sun slipped behind the expanse of black sand, Maria took the first watch, perched atop the folded tarp with her back propped against the iron plate and the hilt of the greatsword within arm's reach. At midnight, she would wake Dante with a light nudge of her boot against his heel, lie on her side across the crushed ore, and sleep until dawn, leaving the youth on guard until six in the morning.

On the sixth day of travel, the convoy crossed the arid threshold into the western reaches of the Slag Desert.

The air across this stretch of the continent carried a different density.

It wasn't merely the biting draft whistling through the tarp's upper seam. There was an invisible weight pressing down on the atmosphere, a dense saturation of free ether particles drifting from the violet vault above to pool in the ground furrows like a dry fog. Every time Dante drew air through his nose, his throat seized with a mineral burn that demanded regular sips of treated water to keep from turning into a racking cough.

It was two in the morning when the first spasm struck.

Dante sat in the iron corner of the car, his closed notebook resting across his lap and the dynamo lantern shut off to spare its battery.

Across the compartment, the two sisters slept huddled together beneath the wool shawl, and old Jabor's coughing had temporarily subsided, lulled by the rhythmic click-clack over the rail joints: clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack.

The stab of pain between Dante's shoulder blades came without warning.

It was a dry electric shock, igniting squarely at the seventh thoracic vertebra and tearing down his spinal cord as if someone had pressed a red-hot iron spike directly into his central Mana conduit.

Dante's breath fled his lungs instantly.

His body hitched forward in an involuntary reflex, forehead nearly striking the crushed iron ore on the floor.

[Critical Warning: High-Density Atmospheric Resonance.]

[Ambient Mana saturation has exceeded 300% relative to the Minor Continents.]

[Primordial Soul Matrix entering biological overexcitation.]

[Trait [Winged Vestige] forcing structural expansion!]

The two slender lines etched into the skin of his back flared with searing heat.

It wasn't the measured burn felt when he mentally willed the wings to deploy in the living room. The deep musculature beneath his shoulder blades seized in violent spasms, forcing the twin skeletal frames outward against his will.

The basilisk bone plate housing the Primordial Iron Core grew so scorching that the fabric of his shirt began to vent a thin wisp of gray smoke.

Dante clamped his teeth together until his jaw popped, his fingers clawing at the denim of his trousers in a desperate bid not to cry out inside the quiet car.

Retract.

Retract now, damn it!

He marshaled all the focus of his thirty-four Intelligence to force the flow of Mana back toward his core.

The energy refused to obey.

The dense ether of the First Great Continent's atmosphere flooded into his lungs with every ragged breath, stoking the dormant matrix of his soul like gasoline splashed over a coal fire.

The tips of the ivory feathers ruptured through the dermal layer with two sharp snaps of cartilage.

Two six-inch bone wedges thrust out beneath the reinforced fabric of his heat-resistant leather vest, straining the rear seam until the stitching began to groan under the tension.

A harsh, strangled wheeze slipped past Dante's lips.

Maria snapped her eyes open.

She needed no system prompt. With thirty-two Constitution and the Sentinel instincts honed over seven years of guarding the boy, the sound of Dante's erratic breathing pulled her awake in an instant.

Sitting upright on the gravel deck, she glanced into the corner and found Dante huddled on his knees, shivering violently from head to heel, his back arched as two jagged points strained through his jacket.

She rose in a smooth, silent spring, keeping the iron plates beneath from shuddering.

With a swift, practiced motion of her long arms, Maria seized the heavy section of vulcanized tarp they used as a floor mat and draped it over both Dante and herself, forming a sealed, opaque tent in the car's shadowed corner.

She planted her two-hundred-pound frame with her back to the compartment, creating a living rampart of broad shoulders that completely obstructed the line of sight from old Jabor and the two sisters.

Across the car, Cida stirred against her flour sack, disturbed by the muffled rustle of canvas.

"Everything alright over there, Maria?" the woman asked through the gloom, her voice thick with sleep.

"All good, Cida," Maria answered instantly, keeping her tone flat, steady, and unhurried. "Dante drank the water too fast at the stop and caught a bad stomach cramp. I'm fixing the tarp so he can lie down dry. Go back to sleep."

"Want me to warm up some herbal water?"

"No need. He's got tincture drops in his pack. Get some rest."

This tale has been pilfered from NovelPhoenix. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Cida gave a low murmur of assent and pulled the blanket back over her father.

Beneath the dark tarp, Maria dropped to her knees on the gravel beside Dante.

The heat radiating from the boy was suffocating. The air inside the makeshift tent smelled of scorched cotton and hot ash, the skin at the nape of his neck flushed crimson and glistening with sweat that tracked down his spine.

The twin skeletal protrusions along his back had already grown a foot in length, wrenching his shoulder blades outward with clicks of cartilage that made his entire torso shudder.

"Dante," she gripped his shoulders with gloved hands, keeping him angled forward so the expanding wing tips wouldn't strike the iron wall. "What is happening?"

"The... atmosphere..." Dante forced out between gritted teeth, saliva trailing down his chin. "The Mana here... is too dense. The core... is drinking the ambient current... forcing them out."

"Keep that shit locked down!"

"I can't!" His voice cracked into a sharp wheeze of unadulterated physical agony. "External pressure... outweighs my focus. The seal... the seal is boiling over!"

Maria looked at the basilisk bone plate strapped between his shoulder blades.

The twelve runes traced with primordial iron dust glowed incandescent, burning like hot coals beneath his shredded shirt. The plate was fulfilling its duty by smothering the etheric radiance, as no golden light bled into the dark, but the physical plumage no longer answered his neural commands.

If the wings deployed fully, their five-foot span would tear through the heavy tarp, clatter against the gondola's iron bulkheads, and expose the ash-gray pinions to everyone in the car.

Maria didn't bother with spells or runic theory.

Releasing his shoulders, she hooked her thick right arm behind the nape of Dante's neck and planted her left palm flat over the glowing bone plate in the center of his spine.

She leaned the full mass of her thirty-three Strength into him. She didn't strike. She shoved, driving the weight of her chest down against his spine with continuous, crushing leverage, forcing the skeletal frames trying to burst free back beneath the plane of the flesh.

CRACK.

Cartilage popped beneath the girl's brute pressure.

Dante let out a muffled groan into his sleeve, his entire frame arching in agony as Maria's raw force pinned his vertebrae against the bone plate.

"Stop trying to calculate this shit with math, Dante!" she barked directly into his ear, her voice rough, breath brushing his sweat-soaked skin. "You have thirty-four Intelligence and twenty-six Wisdom in that stubborn skull. The air is forcing its way in? Then use your conduits to dump the damn energy into the deck!"

Her words struck Dante's mind like a slap of ice water.

He had been trying to resist the torrent through pure containment, like a man trying to plug a ruptured high-pressure line with his thumb.

The logic was flawed.

With Maria's Strength physically pinning the bone deformation into his back, Dante stopped trying to bolt the Mana gates shut.

He threw the conduits wide open.

Instead of letting atmospheric energy pool at the root of his shoulder blades, he engaged [Instant Anchor Scribing] internally, projecting a dispersion circuit directly through the skeletal matrix of his ribs, down through his legs, and into the boot soles resting against the iron gravel.

The plain's dense Mana surged through his lungs, raced down his spine, and vented into the iron deck like a grounding wire dumping an electrical surge into bare bedrock.

The searing heat across his back began to recede.

The cherry-red incandescence of the basilisk bone plate cooled down, shifting from vibrant crimson back to the customary dark gray of concentrated ash.

The twin protrusions of pinion and cartilage ceased straining against his flesh. Slowly, with faint clicks of settling sinew, the structures retracted into his body, sealing flat once more beneath the two slender marks along his shoulder blades.

[Resonance Overload dissipated successfully.]

[Biological Adaptation to the First Great Continent: 100%.]

[[Ash Veil] Stability: 91%.]

[Mana Points: 510/510.]

Dante's arms gave out completely.

He pitched forward, forehead resting against Maria's shoulder. He drew long, shuddering breaths, cold sweat dripping from his nose onto her shirt, his entire frame trembling as though he had just cleared a twenty-mile forced march through snow.

Maria kept her heavy left hand planted on his back for a full minute longer, feeling his racing heart gradually steady into a regular beat.

She let out a slow breath, easing the pressure off the bone plate.

"Get the beast stowed?" she whispered in the dark of the tarp.

Dante nodded against her shoulder, lacking the strength to lift his neck just yet.

"I got it..." his voice was faint, raspy from the heat that had seared his throat. "The body... adapted. The system logged one hundred percent atmospheric compensation."

"This piece of shit never pulled that before," she muttered, brushing a strand of wet hair off his forehead with the back of her fingers. "We spent an entire week inside the gorge and you didn't sprout a single feather."

"The gorge... was set inside a deep fissure," Dante lifted his head slowly, resting his back against the cold iron plate of the gondola. "The ambient pressure down there was different. Up here on the open plateau, the Mana radiating from the Capital's core matrix hammers the surface at full strength. It's what Goran warned us about in the tavern regarding gravity and atmospheric density."

Maria inspected the four-inch tear through his jacket where the bone tips had sheared the fabric.

"And once we reach the Capital?" She crossed her arms, her expression darkening. "If this train rolls into a sector where ambient pressure is three times heavier than this, those wings of yours will rip through the entire car right in the middle of the depot."

Dante touched the basilisk bone plate through his torn vest. The relic sat cold and firm against his vertebrae.

"I already know how to manage it," he answered, his analytical mind snapping back into gear. "I learned how to shunt the excess into the deck plating through my skeletal frame. The plate preserved ninety-one percent integrity. Before we drop into the north classification yard, I'll carve two grounding runes directly into the soles of my boots. Any surge will discharge through my heels into the rail bed without reaching the pinions."

Maria studied the boy for several seconds, ensuring the natural pallor had returned to his skin and his chest no longer wheezed.

She peeled the vulcanized tarp back slowly, keeping the heavy fabric from scraping noisily against the ballast stones.

The dim violet gloom of the desert night washed over them once more.

Across the gondola, old Jabor remained asleep under his sheepskin coat, and Cida hadn't stirred from her flour sack. No one had caught wind of the silent struggle waged beneath that scrap of black canvas twelve feet away.

Maria settled back into her corner, crossed her long legs over the gravel, and pulled the greatsword snug against her thigh.

"Now lie down and sleep, Dante," she murmured firmly without looking over. "Your watch is done. I'm keeping watch until dawn."

Dante offered no argument.

The sheer strain of checking the biological mutation by force had bled his physical stamina nearly dry. He pulled the cotton blanket over his shoulders, rested the back of his head against the wooden partition, and closed his eyes.

The rumble of steel wheels over rail joints hammered on through the night of the First Great Continent: clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack.

Express 404 held its unbroken western course, swallowing miles of black sand while Dante's body finally learned to breathe the atmosphere of this higher tier without shattering its own vessel.