From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 80: Sense

While the others slept I decided to train.

There was no point in lying down when my body had already rested, and the conversation with whatever lived inside my head kept replaying. Polish your actual weapon... easy to say when you weren’t the one aiming it. Easy to say when you were a mysterious voice with no arms.

The problem wasn’t Switch, the problem was precision.

During the serpent fight, I’d split two of them at once by creating dual mental boxes simultaneously. It had worked. Recreating it reliably was another matter entirely.

Every time I tried it on the rocks scattered around the outpost, one cut landed clean while the other drifted. Still, I kept going.

Switch. Wrong angle.

Switch. Better, but still off.

Switch. Closer...?

The moon crossed most of the sky before the rhythm started settling into place. By the time the morning lightshone over the canyon walls, the ground around the bunker looked like a mess.

Boulders sat in places that made no geological sense. Flat rocks bumped from the earth.

But there was one upside from all this rock cutting. The holes the serpents had blasted through the ground existed no more.

I’d used the displaced rocks to fill them. Every opening I could find was now packed tight with stone. It wasn’t elegant, but at least now I didn’t need to worry about falling down to a serpent nest. One less way to die.

"Did you rearrange the entire landscape?" Kira asked, squinting at the field of misplaced rocks.

She stood at the bunker entrance with her hair flattened on one side, still half asleep.

"I was training." I replied.

She stepped closer and nudged one of the packed holes with her boot, testing the stone. "You also blocked the holes. Thank god."

"I decided to use all those rocks for something useful."

Finn appeared behind her, yawning hard enough that his jaw cracked. His eyes moved from the boulders to me, then back to the boulders again.

"I’m glad I wasn’t born a rock." he said after a moment.

Phinyx walked out next on his own two feet, which still felt like something worth noticing. He stretched his arms wide and tilted his head toward the sky.

"Good morning vibes." he murmured peacefully.

"Good morning, Phinyx." I said, my eyes drifting to the foot that had been misplaced yesterday. "Glad to see you’re walking again."

He flexed the ankle once more, testing the motion with a small bounce on his toes.

"As good as new." he said with a satisfied nod.

Coco stumbled out last and nearly tripped on the bunker step. He caught himself, blinked at the rearranged terrain, then simply accepted it with the calm of someone who had stopped being surprised by anything I did.

"When are we going to the next outpost?" he asked.

"The sixth one..." Finn said as if remembering something, pulling the folded map from his jacket.

He spread it across a flat rock and traced the route with his finger, his brows lifting slightly as he studied it.

"It’s the longest stretch we’ve done. Two days, probably, if the terrain stays consistent." Finn scratched his head. "Maybe a little more."

He tapped the map again, a little higher up from the location of the sixth outpost.

"This one’s the closest outpost to the exile point. Just above those mountains." Finn said, his expression was briefly nostalgic, but quickly faded.

A brief silence followed.

My eyes drifted to the mountains shown in the map, to the memory of gliding down from them. But right now was not the time for that.

We moved out once Coco distributed the canteens of dark water, passing them around without ceremony.

The Corruptors we spotted at a distance moved with their usual heavy, deliberate weight, scanning the terrain with senses we didn’t fully understand. But they swept past us without pausing.

The dark water held.

We walked most of the first day without incident, which in this wasteland felt almost suspicious.

On the second day something felt off as we walked through the wasteland.

The sense of unfinished work.

I’d been rotating the sense spell spheres in the background of my thoughts for a while now, but I hadn’t reached twenty yet.

The voice in my sleep had said to focus on Switch.

And it wasn’t wrong...

But twelve spheres in harmony felt like an open door I hadn’t finished walking through.

Phinyx walked beside me, humming some random, weird tune. Coco was ahead, trying to balance a pebble on the back of his hand while walking. Finn led at the front, pausing every so often to check his internal compass.

I split my focus.

One part tracked the terrain, watching for anything out of place in the ground or the canyon walls.

The other turned inward, gathering the familiar shape of the spheres and beginning the rotation.

One through ten came easily now.

Eleven, twelve.

They slid into the pattern without interrupting my stride.

Thirteen, fourteen.

Fifteen. A faint mental friction, like the structure might wobble apart if I pushed too hard.I breathed slowly and let the rotation slow for a moment, stabilize.

Then I continued after fifteen held.

Sixteen, seventeen.

My focus narrowed until the rhythm of my footsteps barely registered.

Eighteen, nineteen.

The final sphere resisted, not dramatically. Just the natural pushback of the last piece within a puzzle.

I didn’t force it.

I found the empty space in the rotation where it belonged and I let it settle there like a key sliding into a lock.

Twenty.

The world felt as if it cracked open.

It transformed all of my senses.

The air became a medium around me. Every disturbance rippled through it like movement across still water. Finn’s footsteps ahead had a distinct rhythm. Phinyx’s breathing carried a faint hitch where his ribs had taken a knock during the bunker fall.

The canyon walls had depth in a way they hadn’t before. I could feel where the stone turned hollow.

Everyone around me existed inside that awareness as clearly as if my eyes were closed.

"Are you alright?" Kira asked from my right.

I hadn’t realized I’d slowed.

"Yes, sorry. I was practicing a spell" I replied as the mental image broke.

’I was able to finally hold the sense spell, why?’ I thought for a moment. Yesterday I wasn’t able to hold thirteen, what happened?

"Stats." I murmured, the words only audible to myself.

The window confirmed what I’d suspected.

Intelligence: 15.

It must have crossed the threshold during the last fight. The pulse calculations. The mend spell. The dual box switches. All of it quietly feeding the stat while I wasn’t paying attention.

I closed the window and looked out across the canyon ahead.

The sixth outpost was still hours away, maybe more.

But the world felt much larger and defined now.

We reached the sixth outpost as the ambient light of the second day began to fade. The structure appeared through a narrow canyon pass, a low silver shape half buried in the canyon wall.

Finn exhaled slowly when it came into view.

"I found it." he said to himself, sounding relieved more than proud.

Coco walked up to the outer wall.

"What a big building." he said as he ran his hand across the surface. "What a very big, very intact, very not collapsed building... I don’t trust it."

He was right.

Better preserved than the other outposts too. The building showed no erosion, and the entrance remained intact.

Before getting any closer, I focused, and set the twenty spheres of the sense spell into motion. The pattern locked together inside my mind.

I stopped a few steps from the door.

Something was already inside, and whatever it was, it wasn’t small.

I really hoped it was friendly. Or sleeping. Or both. Preferably both.