SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100 Chapter 641: Eleven Days North

Chapter 641: Eleven Days North

"Tomorrow morning," said Ji Liansu.

She was already rolling the map. "You have tonight to prepare, which is less than you want and more than the survey team has. One thing before you go, and I am not going to repeat the rest of the briefing."

She looked at each of them in turn.

"If you confirm an immortal-level danger, you leave. If you reach a point where you cannot reliably judge what you are facing, you also leave. Either condition is enough." Her eyes settled on Leon last. "You do not remain to verify your conclusion, and you do not stay because retreat would look poor in a report. Pride has killed more capable people in that basin than lightning has."

"Understood."

Han Suwen laid the equipment out on the table.

Five talismans first, each a folded strip of stiff paper with a jade thread through it, sealed and heavier than paper had any business being. "Single use. Anchored to a receiving array under the eastern terrace. Tear it and you arrive there, wherever you are and whatever is holding you, unless something is actively suppressing space in a way I have never personally seen."

Leon took all five, and then handed them out himself.

He passed one to each woman and watched until all four had secured theirs in separate places.

Vyra raised an eyebrow. "I could carry them."

"No."

"They’d be organized."

"They’d be in one place," Leon said, "and if that place is separated from the rest of us, four people have no way home." He tucked the last into his own collar. "Everyone carries their own. Every day. Even in camp."

Vyra accepted that without argument and made a note.

The rest followed: the communication plaques, keyed to windows every second day at the third and eleventh marks. The survey team’s route records and the frequencies their formations had been running. A map that was excellent for forty kilometers and then showed a blank oval with a hand-inked line around it and the words written twice. Sample containers, sealed cases, field supplies.

"Miss a window," Han Suwen said, "and a response leaves within the hour. That is automatic. Nobody has to decide it."

They spent the evening preparing, and Leon watched his household turn into a field unit without giving a single instruction.

Vyra had the provisions counted twice and the equipment distributed by weight before the second mark, and then went through the contingencies aloud — what happened if the plaques failed, what happened if they were separated, which of them carried the spare sample seals, and where the reserve stones sat.

Seraphine took the route records and the map to the far end of the table and stayed there for two hours. When she came back she had a watch order, three rest points chosen for sight lines rather than comfort, and an opinion about how they should move if the storms came in.

"Poor visibility, we go in a stretched diamond," she said. "Ira forward and left, me forward and right, Leon center, Loriel behind Leon, Vyra rear. Nobody more than eight paces from two other people. If we lose sight of each other, everybody stops. No searching."

"Agreed," said Leon.

Loriel had commandeered a side table and was choosing containers, which turned out to be a considerably longer job than choosing medicines.

"Sealed jade for anything with an active vitality signature," she said, mostly to herself. "Wood for the dry material. Nothing in the copper cases — copper leeches. And I want three empty containers that have never held anything at all, because if there’s something in that basin nobody’s catalogued, I’m not putting it in a jar that spent four years holding blood-lotus."

Ira had been ready in twenty minutes and had spent the two hours since being visibly ready.

"We’re going to a wasteland to look for nine people," she said, on the third pass through Vyra’s contingency list. "How many ways are there to carry rope."

"Four," said Vyra, without looking up. "One of which you have chosen, and it is the wrong one, because you have coiled it so it will snag."

"It won’t snag."

"It will snag, and it will snag at the exact moment somebody is hanging from it." Vyra held out a hand. "Give it here."

Ira gave it over, made a noise of protest that lasted approximately one second, and then leaned over to watch how Vyra recoiled it, because she was impatient rather than stupid.

They left at first light with a Palace-arranged transport crew, a river passage north, and then a hired mountain caravan for the last six days.

The women called him in front of every one of them.

It came out naturally by the second morning. Seraphine used it flatly, as a title. Vyra used it while handing him a report. Ira managed it with a straight face and a slight delay that only Leon noticed. Loriel used it and then apologized to a boatman for stepping past him, which nobody found strange at all.

The country changed as they went.

The eastern islands gave way to a mainland coast, and the coast gave way to farmland, and the farmland thinned into upland grazing, and by the seventh day the villages had stopped and the road had become a track that a caravan used four times a year. On the ninth day they passed a boundary marker with the Palace’s mark on it and nothing beyond it but grey hills.

The communication windows went through cleanly every second day. Vyra sent them, Han Suwen acknowledged them, and the reports were short and dull and exactly what they should have been.

On the eighth night, they sheltered in a stone waystation while rain drove sideways across the roof. The caravan crew slept beyond a wooden partition, and Seraphine had sealed the household’s half of the room behind a privacy ward before Ira lay on her back and said, "This is the first time."

"First time what," said Vyra.

"That we’ve done this." Ira gestured at the ceiling. "All five of us. Out in the open, going somewhere, and nobody’s hidden in the dimensional world waiting for everyone else to report back."

Nobody answered for a moment.

"Velaria," Seraphine said. "The northern expedition. We travelled with Young Master then."

"That was different and you know it. That was four of us with Young Master somewhere ahead and unreachable." Ira turned her head. "This is the first time I’ve packed a bag for a mission and known I was actually going on it."

Loriel, half asleep against a rolled blanket, said, "I like it."

"That’s because you haven’t had to sleep on stone yet."

"I’ve slept on stone. I planted things in the stone afterward."

Leon lay in the dark and listened to the four of them argue about bedding for another ten minutes, and did not contribute anything, and was as content as he had been since the crossing.

Ashen Rain Basin came up over a ridge on the eleventh day and did not look like a wasteland.

It looked like something that had been hit.

The rim ran in a long shallow curve for as far as Leon could follow it, and inside that curve the ground had been shocked into shapes that ordinary geology did not produce. Shelves of black stone lay across each other in glassy slabs, tilted, fused at the seams. Inside the darker rock, pale branching mineral ran through the stone in forks and forks-of-forks, like something had been frozen mid-strike and then buried.

Steam came up through narrow cracks in eleven places Leon could count from the ridge. There were pools, ringed in mineral crust, some of them faintly steaming and one of them a color he did not have a word for. Hard-leaved plants grew in the lee of the shelves, low and dark and clearly serious about surviving.

Thunder rolled somewhere to the north and kept rolling for eight seconds.

"Stormglass," said Seraphine, quietly. She had crouched at the ridge edge with her hand a few inches above a fused shelf, and had not touched it. "It’s holding a charge. Right now, in the rain, with no lightning nearby."

"Ore under those vents," Vyra said, pointing east. "Look at the color of the crust."

Loriel had already found something growing out of a crack and was refusing to pick it.

"Later," Leon said. "Camp first."

The survey team’s camp sat two hours down the slope, and it was intact.