To Stand Between Sea and Sky (The Forerunner Initiative Book 5) by Draith

Author:Draith [Draith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Darryl Kirtzinger
Published: 2024-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

5.21, Bountiful Bounties

6:15 pm, local time. (September 4, 2023, 8:15 pm.) Drowning in disbelief.

97,000,000,000,000.

Ninety-Seven Trillion Gold-rank mana essence. That’s what the current bid for first rights to invade earth is worth. More than enough to protect earth from the incoming mana-storm. Far more.

Pushing Fethix to the side with a hip check, I start paging through to check what Akilo was worth. It takes me a while to figure out the search function, Fethix grousing the whole time about ‘stupid over-powered Earthers’.

Akilo’s first invasion commenced ten years after Integration. Their highest bid was Five-hundred thousand Gold-rank mana essence. Further checking reveals they were three waves ago.

By this point, the others have filtered over, so when I turn to ask Fethix another question, Beth beats me to it. “What does this mean for Earth?”

Fethix pulls at one of her droopy ears while staring at the ceiling. “It means… it means you’re pretty much right fucked in the pooper. The System’ll impose limits, but you’re gonna have the most powerful factions in the System bearing down on ya.”

As my papa once said, Beth’s response is about as elegant as a trucker who was just kicked in the nuts, with twice the volume.

When Papa said it, he’d been describing the homeless man I’d run into, to his friend Mr Edwards. The homeless man, who had told me his name was Roger, Chris, Frank and Charmin in the space of five minutes, and normally hung around the strip club I wasn’t supposed to know about.

When he saw me there, he’d waved me away before walking me home. Even as he knocked on our door, hollering for papa, he regaled me with a lot of profanity I’d never heard before. Come to think of it, that was a very educational day.

After Beth has calmed down, she commandeers the console from Fethix. Fethix doesn’t put up much of a fight, sauntering over to another display attached directly to the Ripple-drive.

“I shoulda known. That’s why we had to build it all from scratch. It’s so obvious now.”

“What’s obvious?”

Fethix jumps as though she didn’t expect company. “The whole design. It’s durable. Efficient. Powerful. This design would be envied on any of the Nine. I thought I’d had it figured out, but she co-opted the World Dungeon.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that earlier. Big deal?”

Fethix snorts. “Yeah, it’s a big deal. Damn kitten was smarter than I gave her credit for. Way smarter.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. See, she didn’t just co-opt the dungeon. She did it while not revealing to those of us building it what we were really doing. And look,” Fethix taps the screen. It shows what appears to be Fethix’s party status, but nothing else.

“So?”

“So? So, I’m the only one she locked in here. My sub-engineers? Her hundreds of workers. They’re all gone.” Fethix waves her arms around in excitement, her grin stretching so wide it makes my face ache in sympathy.

“Well, I’m glad Uthica didn’t enslave anyone else,” I nod. Honestly, I feel kind of bad for Fethix.

“What? Uthica didn’t enslave me.

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