abcnovels
Chapter 410 It isn't as easy as it might seem!
Chapter 410 It isn't as easy as it might seem!
When the time came for us to depart again, there was absolutely no fanfare. Contrary to how it happened when we first left with the buggy, people were simply too busy to bother seeing us off.
Even Makary, after making sure I knew what I was doing behind the steering sticks of the Maglev, only stuck around for long enough to confirm we successfully lifted off before rushing back to the hundreds if not thousands of tasks he had to complete in the camp.
And in all honesty, I preferred things to be that way. Especially when taking into account just how insanely draining it was for me to steer this vehicle, despite how easy it would be for me to flip one switch and let the onboard autopilot do all of the work for me.
"Here we go," I muttered to myself once the full process of diagnostics went through without flagging any, even the most remote problems.
I flipped a sum total of four different switches, all conveniently placed one by the other. Then, after just a momentary wait, the first diode lit up above the first of the switches. Then the second, the third, and finally the fourth one, all within mere seconds of me turning the parts of the vehicle on.
I looked up at the hovercraft's displays, ignoring all the visual data of the outside and focusing on just the four strings of numbers in the upper left corner of the main display. As the onboard power generators ramped up their production to the point of crossing the minimum threshold of necessary power, I started to slowly push the power supply lever up.
The formerly throttled hypermangets started the song of its people, producing a constant humming noise that grew louder, the higher I pushed the lever.
It was roughly around the time I brought the power lever halfway through its shift when I felt the upward tug, forcing me to bring the power increase to a stall and even go as far as to decrease it a bit.
Upon crossing the barrier-level of the lift necessary to bring the craft up in the air, I took my time to stabilize the ship on the void gear, before flipping the fifth and the last of the switches that I needed to flip and setting it in the movement mode.
"Brace," I called out, even though I knew neither Fay nor Claudy were comfortable enough to relax even for a second.
And the moment I flipped the switch, rerouting some of the power from the lifting vector to the vertical movement gradient, the ship plummeted down… Only for everyone's guts to revolt when the ship cushioned out along with the spiking effectiveness of the lifting vector.
After all, the closer the hypermangets were to the ground, the greater the multiplier of their effectiveness was.
"Damn, I'm good," I muttered to myself while pretending not to feel the annoyed stares of my two passengers that followed.
In all honesty, I couldn't blame them.
What I considered a great lift-off felt like a pretty rocky start for them, all because of the weird nature of this vehicle's propulsion.
But now that the ship cushioned out and reached a state of stable hover, I finally restarted the process of raising the power, finally feeding some juice to the horizontal propulsion.
Following the extremely complex processes happening within its guts, the ship jerked up ahead before its movement smoothened out as all the onboard AI balanced out all the vectors.
"That was you being good?" Claudy asked, no longer able to hold back his opinion on the topic.
Discover more stories at empire
"It's nothing like the choppers," I countered, well aware of just what kind of past-time activity Claudy amused himself with during the time we were all waiting for my portal's cooldown to reset.
"With this vehicle, lift-off and landing might be rocky, but the travel itself should be smooth," I explained, with my eyes still glued to the data on the displays and my left hand finally moving back to the other stick once I finally pushed the power lever to its optimal maximum.
From there on, the travel itself turned pretty damn smooth… as opposed to my experience of it.
Not only was I unable to have Fay anywhere near me, given how her mere presence in the secondary pilot seat could mess up with the software lock on the secondary plane of the maglev's movements. Yet, while that alone wasn't an obstacle big enough to tire me down…
Steering the ship down while still feeling its modus operandi to be quite magical made it impossible for me to relax, even by the time when the entirety of my job reduced to fading away most of the vehicle's data from the display, turning the camera feeds off and then just using a single control stick to steer the maglev away from any zone of direct starlight.
'Our rate of progress doesn't help either,' I thought moments later when the ship continued to pick up speed.
Sure, exactly as I explained just now, the degree of my responsibility for the ship operation reached pretty abysmal levels… But as our speed increased, so did the rate at which the pressure of the starlight grew.
"How are you feeling guys?" I asked out loud a few moments later while turning the ship slightly to the side to avoid a massive zone of starlight that I'd noticed in the distance.
This was the one and main problem that came with moving as fast as we could now that the terrain no longer served as an obstacle to our rate of progress. All the unevenness of the ground that stopped our buggy from reaching its optimal speed was now safely a few meters below the bottom of our ship, no longer posing even the remotest issue.
But, with that problem gone, I now had to change my perception of distance.
With the ship moving faster, I had to pay attention not only to the potential dangers up close but also to the zones of direct starlight that were much further out in the distance. If I wanted to avoid a distant threat, I had to adjust our path much earlier, taking into account the maglev's unwieldiness in its current, limited maneuverability.
And that, in several cases within just the first hour of travel, forced me to often reduce our speed, just to make it possible to avoid a distant zone of starlight without going straight through one that was near.
"It feels weird, but I will manage," Fay was quick to respond, knowing full well how sensitive I was to the state of her health, even after all the check-ups of both modern and magical nature.
As if sensing my doubts, Fay relaxed her hold over our bond, allowing me to sense how her hand moved over to caress her stomach.
"The little guy seems okay too."
"Excuse me?!" Hearing those words, Claudy flared up… for as long as it took him to turn his head over and realize Fay wasn't talking about him. "Ah, sorry," he then apologized when confronted by Fay's weirded-out stare. "I'm okay too."
This question I repeated exactly ten minutes later… and then, every ten minutes passing. After all, this time the challenge wasn't about learning how to adapt to the influence of the thin presence of the light of the stairs within the air, but how to adapt to the rapid rate at which this presence thickened!
Thankfully, for how draining of a process it was for me to steer this ship and keep it clear of any dangerous zones, contrary to how it took us nearly two full days of constant travel by a buggy, we managed to reach the barrier and the site where we left the vehicles we used during our last attempt at crossing the plain, in just a quarter of that time.
In fact, we could shed an hour or two more of the time it took us to reach the area where we parked our vehicles if not for the fact it took us two whole, damn hours to figure out where exactly did we park the buggy and the logistic bots!
'I guess that's the problem you need to deal with when you don't need to follow the lay of the land,' I thought when I finally noticed the slight outline of our vehicles painted over the outline of the extensive and relatively empty grassland of the starlight plain.
Yet, right as I focused on reducing the speed and slowly bringing the hovercraft to a halt, I felt Fay's hand tap me on the shoulder before she reached out and pointed out to the right, straight past the glass of the cockpit's display-slash-windows and in the direction of the massive barrier of the starlight zone.
"Do you see what I see?" Fay asked in a cryptic way right as I reduced the maglev's speed to a mere crawl while readying myself to land a short stroll away from where we parked our vehicles.
"Just a moment…" I requested, putting all my focus on bringing the hovercraft to a safe stop before finally allowing myself to glance over in the direction Fay was pointing at.
And the moment I did, my body froze while my jaw inherently moved down, putting my mouth agape.
Somehow, despite how vast this impassable barrier was…
I could see a lone human standing frozen right on the other side of it! And right as the ship came to a complete stop, the stranger in the distance thawed out, only to start wildly shaking their hands at us!