Chapter 79: Return
If one flew against the explosive shockwave in the sky, heading away from the capital city, they would have noticed a figure flying toward the epicenter with incredible speed. To normal folks below, it would have been a blur, a fleeting shadow against the twilight, if it was perceived at all.
Back in the capital, Professor Dio Basara stood on the high balcony of an old clock tower, his knuckles white where they gripped the stone rail. He had rushed out, chasing the cloud that had stolen from him.
He had witnessed the culmination of his life's work, a harmonious, city-cleaving resonance swallowed whole and then... dissipated.
"A firework it became... sigh."
His initial disappointment was a cold, hollow pit. Years of planning, recruiting, forging, and sacrificing had been rendered null by a wandering cloud entity? With a conscience.
The meticulous architecture of his rage, meant to be the kingdom's grand finale, had been canceled during intermission.
He looked down at the peaceful, ignorant city. Lanterns were being lit for evening markets. Laughter drifted up from a tavern.
The kingdom's rot, its beautiful, festering sickness, continued to breathe below him. He gritted his teeth, the pressure making his jaw ache. A killing intent so potent it felt like a physical aura thickened the air around him.
What a truly pathetic sight.
Then, almost as an afterthought, he looked up.
He expected nothing. Empty sky, stained with the last of the explosion's benign, colorful haze.
But there was something.
Not the enormous, powerful presence from before. Compared to its former, this was merely a wisp. A shred of grayish mist, no larger than a cloak, twisting weakly as if caught in a dying breeze. It pulsed faintly, a faltering heartbeat of light. It was clearly struggling and perhaps even dying.
Dio's despair evaporated, replaced by a galvanizing, icy hope. His mind, brilliant and twisted, began to spin new calculations. This entity had contained the detonation.
It had survived, albeit barely. What if it could be captured? Contained? Studied? If its nature allowed it to absorb and neutralize catastrophic mana.
He imagined not just a bomb, but a vector. A living cloud, force-fed successive waves of concentrated, blight mana from multiple sites, then unleashed. It wouldn't just destroy a capital. It could drift, could be guided, could scour the landscape of the entire kingdom, leaving only purified, silent ash in its wake.
"A national sanitizer," he murmured to himself, a smile touching his lips for the first time in years. It was a beautiful, terrible thought.
There was one problem, he couldn't fly. He was a preparer, a solver. He was also far stronger than his scholarly guise suggested but he couldn't fly.
He moved. In a blur of motion that belied his age and profession, he descended the tower's inner stairs three at a time, burst into a hidden sub-basement, and went to a sealed locker.
Inside, resting on a felt lining, was a device of his own design, a rounded crystal lens the size of a dinner plate, set in a brass frame, with a small, box-like machine affixed to the back.
A directional mana siphon. It was meant for harvesting volatile energies from unstable artifacts. Today, it would harvest a patient.
He snatched it and was back on the tower balcony in under three minutes, his heart pounding with anticipation.
He looked up, raised the device, and scanned the sky.
It was empty.
The wisp was gone.
"Tsk." The sound was pure frustration. He lowered the siphon, his new, glorious plan evaporating as quickly as the cloud had. Had it finally dissipated? Had some unseen current carried it away? He slammed a fist against the stone parapet, the impact cracking the weathered surface. Nothing was going his way. Absolutely nothing.
---
A few kilometers away, moving with a speed that was now tempered by extreme caution, Raiz flew. His expression was grim, his usual relaxed posture tense. Cradled carefully before him, held in a stable, bubble-like field of his own mana, was Moon.
Or what was left of him.
The cloud was a pitiful fragment, a smear of dull gray that occasionally sparked with a sickly, unstable color. It had no form, no consciousness Raiz could detect, just a fading, pained ember of what had been his friend and leader.
Carrying him like this was agonizing. Raiz didn't know if a cloud could feel pain from wind resistance, from pressure, from anything. So he flew as smoothly as physics allowed, the mana bubble acting as a shock absorber, an incubator, a desperate attempt at a life support system.
The flight back to the forest's edge felt eternal.
When he finally crossed into Cloustar's airspace and descended toward the central grounds, the sight immediately drew a crowd. The clan was still on edge from the sudden recall order and the distant, thunderous boom that had shaken the world.
They saw Raiz first, his red wings beating with uncharacteristic heaviness. Then they saw what he carried.
A collective gasp rippled through them. Murmurs turned to worried silence. This... this wasn't Moon. This was a ghost of him, a wounded, fading echo. The being who was their foundation, their strangely cheerful and powerful core, looked like a piece of storm debris. If a cloud could be sick, this was it. A pallid, thin, and trembling.
Skele, who had been nervously pacing, took one look and felt his knees go weak. His dramatic soul, which usually thrived on grand narratives, was suddenly confronted with a narrative too grand to bear.
If the walking calamity who laughs at lightning ends up looking like a used dishrag, he thought, a hysterical edge to his panic.
WHAT IN THE NAME WAS HE FIGHTING?
He had to lean against a wall, the urge to cry and with the urge to hide somewhere was growing.
Raiz ignored them all. His focus was a laser. He didn't head for his own nest or the communal hall. He banked sharply toward the structure at the clan's heart where Moon was dwelling.
It was a unique building, constructed when Moon had first expressed a desire for "a place to put things." The clan had taken it as a project. The result was a magnificent, organic-looking structure that seemed grown rather than built, blending elven elegance with a fluid, almost futuristic design.
It was round, open, beautiful, and radiated a serene, natural calm. Moon had protested at first.
"I don't get cold! I don't sleep!" But Raiz had insisted. "So it's basically an accessory. But I'd suggest you take it anyway. Something about having your own place... it brings a comfort."
Now, Raiz was viciously, desperately glad he had won that argument. The cloud needed shelter. He needed somewhere to call a home.
He passed through the wide, arching entrance, there were no doors, and into the main living space. The interior was airy and simple, with curved walls and large openings that looked out over the clan's territory.
Gently, with more care than he had ever used in his life, Raiz lowered the mana bubble to the center of the room and dissolved it. The small, gray wisp settled onto the smooth floor, pulsing faintly.
Almost immediately, footsteps sounded at the entrance. Zion entered first, his young face etched with deep worry. Val was right behind him, his usual sturdy composure shaken. followed, her bee senses attuned to the discordant, feeble energy in the room.
They all stared at the remnant on the floor.
"What happened?" Aurora asked, her voice hushed, as if loud noise might scatter the wisp into nothing.
Raiz didn't look away from Moon. His voice, when it came, was flat, stripped of its usual easygoing tone and laced with a bitterness as sharp as a stinger.
"He saw a bomb meant for a city. He swallowed it. He held it inside until he couldn't anymore. Then he blew himself up to save a bunch of strangers." It didn't take Raiz speculation to know what happened. The words were simple, brutal facts.
Aurora watched Raiz's face, the tension in his wings, the barely contained frustration in his posture. "And you," she said softly, not accusingly, "would have acted differently?"
Raiz opened his mouth. Yes. I would have. I would have prioritized the clan. I would have found another way. The words lined up in his throat, logical and cold. But they stuck there, refusing to be spoken. Because the truth, the infuriating, admirable truth, was that he wasn't sure.
Faced with that same moment, that same scale of innocent life on one side and personal annihilation on the other... he didn't know.
His silence was answer enough.
Aurora nodded, a sad, knowing look in her eyes. "Two buds in a pod, it seems."
"More like two fools sharing a shell," rumbled a new, calm voice from the doorway.
Elder Green stepped inside, his presence immediately bringing a measure of grounded calm to the tense room. He approached slowly, his newly advanced Myr realm senses extending gently toward the wisp on the floor. He didn't touch it, just observed.
"He is not gone," Green stated after a moment, his voice firm with certainty. "The core is there. Dormant. Shattered, perhaps. But it is there. That's enough at the moment."
Raiz finally tore his gaze from Moon to look at the elder. He didn't know why but felt like Elder Green knew something.
"How? What does he need?"
Green sighed, stroking his beard. "What does a cloud need? Time. Quiet. Clean, stable energy. No disturbances." He looked around at them all. "And perhaps... a reason to come back. To remember what it's like to be here, and not... everywhere."