Zeroth Moment: My Cheat Skill Is Stupid, So I'll Just Ignore It

Topher suspended the Augurus above his left hand, so easily and smoothly that he was barely conscious he was doing it. His right hand, as though moving on its own, reached out for nothingness and grasped his Ledger as he summoned it; with his will, he snapped it open and pulled at the mass of pages until the book lay open to something he hadn't looked at in months.

His crappy, childish drawing of the world, as described to him by Tok on the road to Wanbourne, was all he had for a focus; but it would be enough. He couldn't ask Quint for a map or a projection; keenly, he felt his threats and losses of control like an acid eating away at his self-respect. I have no right to ask them for anything. Suspending both the book and the Augurus in the air was tricky, but he managed it; an octuplet of invisible rotating anchors produced a paired coupling of Lagrange points, a miniature celestial spiral between his hands that only he could see or sense. As he contemplated its relationships to the runes, he felt another shiver of epiphany -- the runes could be thought of as a system, in motion -- and akasha obediently began to flow into the Augurus. "It begins," Rudo murmured, almost silently; Zashe steadied him, but his eyes were similarly fixed on the artifact.

As before, it expanded cleverly as magic poured into it, like a little clockwork balloon filling with water; for a moment, he feared it would fail, would encounter some impossible block or shroud. When it first began to stir, his heart leapt into his throat, in fear that it would simply drift about aimlessly as it had when Suzume had gone to her portal-realm.

But, despite all his trepidations, it worked as smoothly and as reliably as it had every time before; it swung right, forward, and downwards, then dipped under itself before curving back up and to his right. As it had when he'd found Takano, it was pointing up, away from the map; but as he began to fret and try to calculate how he might look among the darkness between the stars, it paused, then swung back around again. Unerringly, it tilted and canted downwards and to his right -- leveling dead-center at the drawing in the upper-left corner of the page, where a tiny blue dot labeled "Zanasha Jones" was pulsing with fierce stillness.

Topher blinked. The double-leafed illustration in the center of the pages described the main landmasses of the world, with only vague little wave-shapes and stick figures of dragons surrounding it; a sprinkling of notes, mostly crude snippets of disbelief at the ridiculousness of everything, dotted the margins and edges of the pages. But in the upper right corner was something he'd scribbled and forgotten about.

I've never been able to figure out where it gets its light from.

The drawing was simple; a round circle, always unchanging.

I'm just thankful it doesn't occasionally shoot at us or something.

"Of course." Quint's eyes were huge, almost bugging out of his face. "Of course!"

What difference to I, who have seen the rise and fall of the moon and the stars?!

Topher felt his defiance draining out of him; the import of what he had just done filled him with dread. He couldn't keep his trance going; his Ledger fell to the floor and vanished, and he would have dropped the Augurus if his hand hadn't been directly underneath it. "I'm so stupid," he cursed himself.

Hana cocked her head. "What do you mean? It's not like you could have known. I mean, none of us considered it either."

Topher sat down heavily; he put the Augurus down on the stone floor and gripped his own face in despair. "That's not it." He forced himself to look at Quint, ignoring everyone else. "Sure, it's a smart base of operations. There's maybe one guy who could even come get you, and you'd see him coming a mile away. But that's not the problem."

Quint, he could see, had already figured it out; his once-strong hands, now seeming so fragile, gripped his staff as though it was all that kept him from drowning. "He can no longer ignore us," the older man agreed bleakly.

"Yeah." Topher nodded, his face feeling bloodless. "Now that we know, he can't let any of us live. And that means we only have one chance, right now."

He clambered to his feet, feeling as though his bones were full of solid lead; Quint shied away slightly, then mastered himself, his hangdog face firming up into an expression of weary resolution. "As you say. If time's of the essence, I shall open a portal --"

"You can't," Topher objected heavily. "He's counting on that. Kalphegor had Arcane Nullification -- he's probably got something worse, something that'll warn him if anyone tries to teleport near him at best. At worst, it might turn anyone teleporting there without the secret password inside-out -- and no Mage Shield would save you from that, however many MP you have."

"Nevertheless," Quint admitted. "It is all I can offer you. You have no other way to reach your destination."

"No good way." Topher clenched his fist; this was going to be extremely unpleasant. "But I can do what I did in the Lava Mountains."

Everyone else was confused, but Hana understood; she nodded, then frowned. "But you have no way to transport companions. How will the rest of us join you?"

"You won't," Topher grated, shaking his head. He gestured towards Rudo. "He's not going anywhere, not after I busted his brittle old man hip. And none of the Archmages or other adventurers are even Level 100; you guys are great and all, but there's probably Level Nine Hundred Kazillion monsters all around this guy. I could take Kholoth and Suzume with me, but they're too far away, and he's probably watching them a lot more closely; that's why he had Vius there in the first place." He sighed. "I'm the only one who has any kind of a shot. And I have to go alone."

Zashe and Quint protested, but he ignored them; grimly, he turned away and began to make his way towards the front gate. I'll probably never be able to come back here, he realized dully; the sight of everyone's stunned horror when they'd realized they couldn't stop or even oppose him was seared into the backs of his eyelids. Can't ever undo what I just did.

Guards occasionally stumbled across his path, but he simply stalked past them; in less than five minutes, he was standing out in front of the castle. He thought about starting right away, but something in it felt incomplete; instead, he turned, following his oldest memories, and hurried down the twists and alleyways he knew best out of the city -- out of any place in this insane world. The sun had just set; fitting, he felt. Probably seen my last dawn, now. Shoulda paid more attention.

The stiff, ill-nourished grass of the empty lot crunched under his feet like bones; with grim approval, he noted that the broken board he'd hit Makoto with still lay where it had fallen. And when something goes wrong, and it will -- because something always goes wrong, eventually -- you'll get hurt. He sighed.

"You're wrong, you know."

The unexpected voice behind him made him jump; he whirled, expecting anything from the Infinite King himself to Makoto's ghost. But what he saw instead was Hana, alone and defiant. "You can't take everyone. I get that." She stepped closer, raising her chin to look him in the eye. "But you can take me."

"You gotta be crazy," Topher spluttered; he gestured furiously, feeling a profound sense of déjà vu. "It's suicide, Hana. I can survive being stabbed in the face, and it's suicide even for me at Level two hundred and frickin' seventy-nine. You're what, Level 40? You'll be a grease stain."

"Fifty-three," the young woman returned fiercely. "Did you think Muchenje-san and I just sat on our hands the entire time we were gone? We cleared whole dungeons trying to find something, anything to help, while you were..." Her fists clenched, and she bit down on her vitriol, but Topher knew what she'd left unsaid.

While you were fucking my best friend.

"You know I'm right," she spat instead, crossing her arms. "I took down Vashyarl at Level 23, remember? I might not be Level 100, but I'm the closest you've got. But even that's not why you're gonna take me." In an instant, she sprang nimbly across the distance and poked him hard in the chest with one finger; Topher didn't feel it at all through his Arch Shielding, but he couldn't help but feel intimidated anyway. "Zee is all I have, and you're taking her away from me, just like you always said you wouldn't do. You don't get to refuse, understand?" Her voice rose almost to a shriek on the last word.

Topher flinched, rubbing the spot where she'd touched him as though it pained him, and gritted his teeth. "It's stupid. We're probably all gonna die."

Hana nodded fiercely, her luxurious hair tumbling over her shoulders like a tenebrous cataract. "Maybe so, Bailey-sama. But I'm done being afraid. I'm gonna rescue Zee or die trying, and you're my only chance to do it. So the sooner we go, the better."

Topher groaned, like a man disintegrating; he wanted to scream, wanted to batter her away with force. But, as always, his foolish traitor heart dragged him down and back, like chains; right from the beginning, I've been a sucker. Guess it's how I'll die, too. "Alright," he muttered, helpless and hopeless. He crouched down. "Climb on my back. This is going to hurt really, really badly."

Wordlessly, she leapt against him like a gazelle; her soft, supple arms settled around his neck like an iron collar, and her legs wrapped around his waist as snugly as a harness. Grimly, he reached down and gathered her knees up in the crooks of his elbows, then clasped his hands tightly to trap her legs against his body; I'm not sure what'll happen if she falls off halfway, but it probably wouldn't be good. "Don't let go," he said, stupidly; she squeezed him back, mute for some reason he didn't understand. He winced, inhaled; held it for one second. Then he let it out, slowly, over a span of perhaps five seconds.

Then he jumped.

It was not, as one might expect, a mighty leap; in the absence of any other factors, it would have been a sad, wobbly hop, because doing a lot of squats does not necessarily impart grace or elegance. But it didn't have to be pretty.

It just had to get him off the ground.

"Bwin Ish," Topher gasped out; he felt the magic take hold, lightening Hana's body along with his own in preparation to drift softly back to earth. But he didn't give it that chance; he reached up, angling for the roof of the nearest tall building, and pulled.

They jerked, bobbled in the air; wavered, indecisively, between floating upwards and downwards. But then Topher found more anchor points -- taller buildings, distant mountains -- and they began to pick up speed. He somehow felt Hana squeeze her eyes shut behind him, and he wished he could do the same; tears were already streaming from his eyes, and he knew it would get much, much worse. But he needed more velocity, needed to time this just right; he spun them, with greater and greater speed, through loops and troughs and spirals until he thought he was going to vomit.

Always faster. Always higher.

With grim care, he timed the final turn -- a long, heart-stopping drop into an agonizing inverse parabola -- to begin just as the Feather Fall spell expired; he'd need every ounce of weight for mass and force. Hana's grip around his throat was nearly strangling him; the strain of keeping all the forces under his control threatened to crack his bones. But his strength and his will held through the hideous strain; and, when the final twist and heave of momentum took hold, he reached out, further than he ever had before, and pulled with all his might.

Straight towards the moon.