CoESC Book 18-8.2: Truthseeking (Patreon)

A journey of a thousand longstrides meant that Yuriko needed supplies. She needed a lot of things, really, including spare condenser canteens, a portable stove, pots and pans, and toiletries. The Cleanse spell was the most convenient thing she’d ever learned, but the Mending spell was a close second. Not that it could fix everything, but as long as the damage was minor, it was more than enough. 

She got the mountain bike she wanted, though it needed a couple of touch-ups that she’d do once she was on her way. She traded the golden ring for it and sold the necklace for eight hundred Weyrmarks. Then she turned around and purchased a small one-person tent, a bedroll, as well as her other needs from a different shop a couple of blocks away inside a strip mall. All told, she spent most of her gains on gear and food, but she still came out of her shopping spree a couple of hundred Weyrmarks richer. She also had a new gym bag for the bike and a rucksack for everything else. She needed to enchant both with spatial expansion, however. 

 She couldn’t actually bring the mountain bike up on the rooftops openly, so she sought a public park where she commandeered a picnic table and started sewing runescript lines into the gym bag and the rucksack. The latter allowed her to create a three-cubic-pace space within it, which fit everything she purchased as well as her older backpack. She wasn’t able to grab another canteen bottle, and the gym bag barely had enough room for the bike. It took her until dinnertime to do all of that; then she bought street food for dinner, spending a dozen Weyrmarks in the process. 

Once she found a place to spend the night, she completed the second Satellite Sword and was able to fit its orbital path easily enough. She didn’t foresee having any problems with that until there were dozens of swords. The night passed without trouble, though she slept fitfully until dawn. 

The next day, the 2nd of Julius of the year nineteen hundred ninety-five, Yuriko headed north with the intent to explore the northern exclusion zone, but she had to pass most of Rakkisgrad to do so. Her backpack and rucksack were secured behind the saddle, but she pedalled at a roughly sedate pace of twenty longstrides an hour. It would take more than six hours to cross the city limits, though, according to the route she plotted. 

She didn’t want to enter the Central District, considering that it was where the heaviest security measures lay, but she couldn’t just take the nearest circumferential roads either. That would have her go through the most distance. Instead, she took one of the radial routes that would take her as close to Central without going inside, then she’d take the first circumferential road to circle it. Afterwards, it would be to another radial road that would take her to the outskirts. 

The book of maps then gave her a couple of options if she wanted to head to the nearest pass. She could take the coastal road or the highway. The latter was restricted to motorised vehicles, though, while the coastal route was longer and more scenic. 

Nothing much happened during her ride towards Central. The radial route wasn’t really a single highway stretching all the way to the middle, but rather a series of roads trending northwards. It told her that it wasn’t a planned route and had evolved organically throughout the city’s history. The circumferential road, on the other hand, was a deliberate choice considering that many residences and establishments a century ago had been demolished to make way for the highway. Cycling wasn’t actually allowed on that route, so she had to take the service roads that extended her travel time by half an hour. All the while, she was within sight of the Central District, which had been built on a series of hills that had their tops flattened and connected, resulting in a space that was notably at least fifty paces higher than the surrounding districts. The eastern half of Central was dominated by skyscrapers that were at least a hundred storeys tall, and ran the gamut from having dark stone facades to mirror-finished glass. The latter reflected light at odd spots along Districts two, three, and four, where the properties had been abandoned or neglected. 

It was midday by the time she completed the half circuit, and she entered District 1 proper. The northern part of Rakkisgrad was distinctly cleaner and looked richer than District 4, but didn’t look as snooty as Central. The residences were separated into gated communities that had large, sprawling mansions, and the apartment buildings weren’t as tall as the tenement buildings in Four. It also looked like there were only two to four apartments per floor, from what she could observe through the windows. The streets were wider and well-maintained, and the people who walked the pavement didn’t look as shifty or downtrodden. It almost felt like an entirely different city compared to what Amalia knew. Unsurprising, perhaps, considering that Rakkisgrad seemed more an amalgam of different cities that grew into each other than anything else. 

Ah, Amalia even knew that the districts had different names once upon a time, but Yuriko couldn’t pull up the memories for it. Just a bit of trivia from before. Her thought lingered on what Elaine Nimdahl said, about how the plane looked purposefully made. Well, Rakkisgrad showed what happened after people lived and wore away at the boundaries. 

There were more cyclists on the road as she headed northeast. The coastal road seemed the better bet than heading straight north along the military route, even if it would probably take her a day longer to get to the exclusion zone. She stopped for lunch at a diner along the dedicated bike path, which only highlighted how different District 1 was from District 4. The price was commensurately higher, and she spent about twenty Weyrmarks for a meal that would have cost her five marks in Four. 

The rest of her trip across the city took half the afternoon. She expected…something…to happen. The bloodsuckers to intercept her, the police, even the military, honestly, but nothing happened. 

By three in the afternoon, District 1’s dense residential and commercial blocks had petered out into suburbs, then open fields. Farmlands, from the look of things, only it was after harvest, and the fields were bare. Of crops, anyway. Instead, herds of goats and cattle dotted the landscape, and there were only a couple of homesteads visible at a time twixt the rolling hills and valleys. By five o’clock, she’d reached the coastal road, which, ironically enough, wasn’t actually next to the ocean. Probably a couple of longstrides back, while the land between the road and the beaches was filled with resorts, beachfront private properties, and natural preserves. By seven, even that had given way to desolation. 

Yuriko had pedalled nearly three hundred longstrides from District 4, and she was another three hundred from the supposed exclusion zone. Another five hundred longstrides and change to reach the foothills of the mountain range, which was roughly twenty or so longstrides from the actual mountain. Nurev Mountains was another hundred longstrides wide, and she wondered which route she’d need to take, or if she was better off crossing it directly. Most of it was impassable to wheeled vehicles, but she was strong enough to climb cliffs and jump across canyons. The only issue would be getting lost, actually.

Then again, as long as it was daytime, she could track direction from the position of the false sun. At least that was consistent. She didn’t know the path of the false moon, just that it didn’t follow the Luminous or even the false sun’s crossing. That limited her travel time to during the day, and with the sun currently setting, it was time to find a campsite. 

She tested Elaine’s pager some time back and found that the signal strength waned as she travelled farther from Rakkisgrad. Oh well. 

Thankfully, it didn’t look like it would rain anytime soon. She settled into a copse of trees fifty paces from the road, set up a campfire and heated water for tea. She spread her perception aura, then scanned the area using a focused cone, mostly to see if she could find prey animals. She lucked out and found a warren of rabbits twenty paces away, in their burrows. 

“Helping Hand.”

She cast the spell behind an adult bunny, caught it by the scruff of its neck, and pulled it out of the burrow. It struggled mightily for the few seconds it took to retrieve it, then Yuriko snapped its neck. She cast a couple more Helping Hands to set up a stew pot and a roasting spit while she butchered the rabbit using Animus constructs to avoid the need to clean, though she made sure that it wasn’t infused with Radiance. 

An hour later, she had a bubbling pot of stew for tomorrow morning, while she nibbled on roasted chunks. 

She had to forgo sleep and settled into meditation instead, though she only paid a bit of attention to her surroundings. The way she set up camp, she wouldn’t be visible from the road, and her fire was well concealed. She couldn’t do much about the scent of cooking food, however, but any wild animals that dared approach would be turned into supplementary rations. 

Which made her sudden visitor quite a surprise indeed. 

At the edge of her normal perception range, twenty-two paces from her body, something skidded to a halt right after barely crossing the boundary. Her snap shift to conical perception revealed the stranger, which turned out to be a huge bipedal monster, roughly two and a half paces tall at the shoulder, covered in coarse grey fur, and had green eyes that caught and reflected what light the false moon gave out. 

The touch of her perception aura startled them into fleeing, which Yuriko supposed was for the best. She also didn’t catch more details than that, since they moved faster than she expected, and their features were fuzzy. 

She enhanced her sense of hearing, then her other senses, to compensate for the darkness. She heard nothing other than the breeze rustling the bushes and smelled nothing other than the remnants of her cooking. It was only when she moved towards where the creature stopped that she was able to detect the musky scent. 

The footprints were light and distorted, but they reminded her more of dogs or wolves than anything else. Hmmm. The Howlers that Elaine mentioned? Were they literal wolfmen? Beastkin? It wasn’t as if she’d never seen such people, though the scent was more bestial than anything else. Well, since they retreated, they weren’t her problem, though it did mean she really couldn’t sleep.

She spent the rest of the night forging the fourth layer of her Sword Seal core, though it would likely take another couple of days before she finished. She didn’t try to make another Satellite Sword since she felt the core wasn’t solid enough to hold its orbit. 

She ate the stew come dawn, cleaned up her campsite, then departed. The ten hours of cycling were uneventful, though not uninteresting. The coastal road followed the curve of the land rather than cut across it. She rode through a couple of fishing towns during the morning, each barely more than a dozen domiciles. The residents paid her little mind, though she did turn on the pager once she was in town. 

“All normal,” was the only message, so she supposed Lucian and the Bellemer magi were doing alright. 

The transition between normal Westenland and the exclusion zone wasn’t abrupt. Yuriko estimated that she had travelled another hundred longstrides into the zone before she actually noticed anything, and that was because the town she rode into was abandoned. 

Abandoned…but not empty.