“No,” Hector said. “No, it is not.”
For Jason, the process rivalled the star seed implantation for pain to both body and soul, his mouth wide open in a silent scream. It felt like his body and soul were being torn apart and then woven back together. He staggered and fell to his hands and knees, mind consumed with nothing but pain. He forced himself back to his feet, defiant.
The onlookers saw three globes of energy inside of Jason’s translucent body, circling each other behind his rib cage. One was a sphere of pure darkness while another was a glistening orb of blood. The third was a blue and orange eyeball that gave off a sense of depth and power, as if warning the onlookers against probing too close with their magical senses and risking annihilation on gaining the eyeball’s attention.
Jason’s body once more started to take on a fleshy opacity. The crest on his back, which had vanished with his flesh, manifested within him before moving out as his skin once more lost its translucency. The light coming from his body slowly dimmed to nothing. He was left standing naked, surrounded by people pointing guns at him. Most of the ichor had been forcefully ejected, but enough was left to mar much of his skin with the unpleasant residue. The hair from all over his body had once again fallen out.
He was unsteady on his feet, stumbling and almost falling as he took a step. He felt profoundly different both to himself and the people around him. For him, it was like being connected to the universe around him, his magical and aura senses both massively enhanced. He even felt something odd that he suspected to be the dimensional membrane separating physical reality from the astral. The aperture that had once only appeared to his magical senses was plain to see for him now.
For the Network personnel with aura senses, Jason was a transformed being. His aura had always been powerful, but now it felt like a solid object, as real as the ground beneath their feet.
He pulled one of his precious few vials of crystal wash and tipped it over his head, cleansing the ichor from his body. He ignored his nakedness and the gun-toting people all around him. Shade emerged from his shadow.
“Might I suggest some of Mr Tillman’s pilatory unguent,” Shade suggested. “Then, perhaps, some pants.”
“Sure,” Jason said, pulling out a tin of Jory’s hair growth ointment. “Could you?”
“Of course,” Shade said, taking the tin. He judiciously applied it to Jason’s head and eyebrows while Jason recovered, feeling completely spent. Shade, unlike Jason, could use the ointment without worrying about hair growing out of his fingers.
Dark mist surrounded Jason, and when it disappeared, he was wearing his battle robes and Shade was trimming his unruly hair and bushy, alchemically grown eyebrows. Hector strode over, Asya trailing behind.
“Mr Asano,” Hector said. “What exactly just happened?”
“I’ll explain later,” Jason said, then pulled out a recovery potion and swigged it. “After I deal with your rogue personnel.”
He marched over to the aperture and vanished into it.
“Your Operations Director wasn’t kidding when she warned me he was a handful,” Hector told Ketevan in the camp’s commend tent.
“In fairness,” Asya said, “his friend has been kidnapped and it’s clear that she’s very important to him. Not to mention that the people behind all this fall under our umbrella. You think he cares about which branch they’re from or if they’ve gone rogue? From his perspective, the Network kidnapped and tortured his friend, then kidnapped and tried to kill him. I’m not sure I’d be putting up with us if I were him.”
“He needs us,” Ketevan said.
“Does he?” Asya asked. “I don’t know what the World-Phoenix is, but from what I could tell, it offered him a power I certainly don’t understand. With backing like that, even if he’s reluctant to accept it, what can he get from us that compares?”
A Network functionary burst into the tent.
“Mr De Lange,” he said. “We’ve been interrogating the original aperture monitors, who are all Barbou’s people. They bolted after the dimensional space was sealed off, but we managed to snag a few and we’ve gotten one of them to talk.”
“Why didn’t they go through with the others?” Hector asked.
“Some did, from what we can tell,” the functionary said. “The rest had various tasks to perform. One of which was providing a car when Barbou left the dimensional space from a different aperture, just prior to it being sealed. He was alone. No EOA, no prisoner. His people gave him a car and that was the last they saw of him.”
53
FOILED PLANS
The pair monitoring the aperture from inside the astral space weren’t even iron rankers. Two of Shade’s bodies shot out from Jason’s shadow as he emerged from the aperture and used mana-draining attacks, which knocked the guards unconscious since they had no mana to drain. Jason barely paid them attention as he conjured his starlight cloak and looked around.
The astral space seemed to be an interconnected collection of dilapidated manors and crumbling castles, rising up through an impenetrable fog. They were strung together by a network of bridges like a spider’s web, none of which looked safe to walk on. Some were rotted wood, others stone arches, pockmarked by erosion. As for the buildings themselves, half or more of each structure had collapsed in sections, exposing the interiors.
The fog below completely shrouded the ground, if there even was one. Astral spaces obeyed their own rules and the fog might hide nothing but an endless drop into nothingness. The sky was dark and stormy, filling the air with drizzle. There was a wet chill in the air, the unpleasantness of which seemed to ignore Jason’s bronze-rank resistance to extremes of temperature.
The aperture emerged into a room in a wooden manor. The exterior wall had collapsed, giving him a panoramic view of the surrounds, although enough roof remained to keep the drizzle off him. On the floor was a magic circle, the seal put in place on the aperture.
“This astral space seems well-suited to your combat style,” Shade observed. “Complex environments full of dark corners.”
Jason nodded. According to the Network intelligence, there were an unknown number of iron-rankers and bronze-rankers, plus ten or more of the EOA’s elite converted.
“Are you going to unseal the aperture?” Shade asked.
Jason spent a moment considering it.
“No,” he decided. “A small army of Network jackboots doesn’t advantage me. We’re here for Farrah, not to bring in the EOA or the Network’s rogue personnel. The element of surprise is more valuable than numbers if we don’t share priorities.”
“We scout the area, then?”
“Yes,” Jason said. “Let’s go find her.”
Jason had reunited with the body Shade had sent to France some time ago, giving him access to six of Shade’s incarnations. Five of them went out to explore the astral space, while the last remained with Jason, who set out himself.