Saintess Summons Skeletons

Eventually, the third moon rose. The night was actually quite bright with three moons up, they were almost three ‘full moons’.

If they always move with the sun they’ll always look exactly the same, right? The question would be whether they actually do, or if this is just a coincidence today. One thing is for sure, they are not behaving like the moon I crashed into.

Spending more time observing the moons, Sofia noted a few interesting things. First of all, the moons seemed to be at three different distances from the planet, but due to the smallest being close, and the largest being further away, they looked the same size in the sky. Secondly, they were perfectly aligned, and lastly, they seemed to move through the sky at the exact same speed.

So the furthest one actually moves much faster, but they somehow all end up looking like they go at the same speed in the sky.

I can’t help but wonder if this is natural or if there’s some system tempering in action.

Honestly if the mana currents above the atmosphere didn’t look so dangerous I’d just fly there.

Sofia turned around, lying on the air on her belly, looking down at the dark jungle below.

It’s actually a big crater.

I wonder what could make a hole like this. A meteor strike?

Should I go down and hunt amalgams?

Hmm. Maybe not. I need to find another dungeon. We’ll need at least one more heart catalyser to get the hearts to B rank. I can get imprints in the dungeons. If the dungeons are all hidden like the first one it’s going to be a pain, though. And I haven’t found an IPS yet either.

I could also go back to the forest and hunt more Firebirds, just get mana imprints for now.

Again, Sofia rolled around and watched the sky. She closed her eyes and let her mana senses fully take over. With all the divine essences she had, [Quintessential] was giving her a much better mana vision than anyone else at her level.

It’s like looking at a roiling sea.

Hey… Can’t I… Use that?

The IPS towers have to go through, no? It’ll absolutely cause huge disturbances if not a straight up hole in the mana currents depending on how they made the towers.

I need to go a bit lower.

Sofia stood up and walked down a few dozen steps, then closed her eyes again and scoured the mana currents with her mana senses.

It looks random but…

The more she stared, the more she realized the mana above her mostly traveled in three distinct directions when the currents weren’t busy spiraling out of control and crashing into each other.

Is that how?! Follow the currents?

Sofia followed her hypothesis, and started walking in one of the three directions, eventually leaving the jungle crater behind.

She followed the current in a straight line until morning.

The good news was that she could now fly again, and thus travel hundreds of times faster.

But with the ambient mana returning it’s almost impossible to follow the outer currents properly…

“It should be fine if I fly in a straight line, probably?”

She did just that.

Approximately eight hours of straight flight later, in the early afternoon, with a loud bang, Sofia’s vision suddenly went dark.

Oh.

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Just the time for her eyes to adjust, and she could see that her head was currently stuck between two steel walls. Using her hands and feet to push herself away from the wall, she managed to extract her head.

Looking at the head-shaped hole in the steel wall, Sofia laughed out loud.

“Ahahah! Guess I found the tower! Good thing I was wearing my armor, uh? No damage. Didn't even hurt. But wow, I really did not see that one coming. Turns out following the mana currents was a good call.”

The hole she had left in the side of the tower was already closing back up. Sofia let herself fall down to the surface.

The tower was in the middle of nowhere, at the top of the highest of the many nearby grassy hills.

Maybe another way to find them is to check every high altitude point you can find? The one we came through was just in a flat forest, though.

Just like the other IPS, there was no clear entrance, and Sofia had to walk around the base of the tower touching the wall until she found the disguised passage in the steel wall she could walk through.

The inside of the tower was quite a bit narrower than the first one, and instead of a hole in the ground and an opening to the sky, all Sofia found was an empty ground level with a steel ceiling and some stairs going up following the curvature of the tower.

Is it not an IPS tower?

Pareth came out and took the lead, climbing the stairs by himself.

The result was: more stairs. The ‘second floor’ was an open space, with stairs spiraling against the tower’s side for about five hundred meters straight until they reached another steel ceiling.

Sofia followed after Pareth now that she knew it was safe, and flew all the way up to the top of the stairs. Pareth teleported to her and again was the one to step on the higher floor first. There was not much in there aside from the rotting corpse of a big bear-like monster. Sofia followed after him again.

Finally the top of the tower opened up to the sky. Aside from the monster corpse, there was a small staircase leading to nothing in the middle of the floor, which Sofia recognised as the way to climb inside of the Shuttle, which wasn’t there.

Well shit.

Sofia walked up to the monster’s corpse, which was in bad shape, rotting against the bloodied steel walls of the tower.

It’s probably been there for about a month…

The corpse was in very bad shape, riddled with holes and deep lacerations, the creature had been tough to take down, it seems, but it had lost in the end.

Besides the long-dried blood and guts of the creature, there was a bunch of random crap littering the floor. Leaves, stone, sand, dirt, glass shards, rope strings and small animal fangs.

“Looks like Ihuarah got there before us,” Sofia told Pareth, who nodded back.

She then turned her attention to the center of the room, with the steps leading to nothing, there was actually a small rectangular display there, embedded on the ground inside of the highest step.

‘Destination : Fenrir - Shuttle returns in 6 days 8 hours’

“Fenrir must be one of the moons. The shuttle is gone but it will come back by itself in six days… We could wait and explore the area, I guess. What do you say?”

Pareth looked at Sofia, then looked up. He seemed to hesitate for a second, then just pointed up. That was his answer.

Aight, get inside, we’re flying to the moon!

Maybe.

If the protection comes from the shuttle itself and not the tower, we’ll have to wait. But only one way to find out.

Pareth returned to the storage and Sofia deployed her wings.

She flew up and up until she was out of the tower, in space.

The top of the tower was like a boundary, out of it, all ambient mana was gone. Sofia was almost immediately flung back down inside, like sucked by a giant straw that was the tower. It seemed the tower had some magic in place to grab things from outside.

By the time Sofia stabilized her flight again, she was already halfway back down the tower.

“Well. We learned a few things. This allowed me to cross the currents, but the tower will try to grab me back… I feel like if I go fast enough I can probably get away from the grabbing magic’s range, but that means flinging myself into outer space like a cannonball.”

Sofia slowly drifted back to the ground, and sat there. Bookie came out to eat Ihuarah’s spoils of war, and eventually Sofia’s evening was spent playing cards with Pareth and Bookie while frequently checking the time of day outside through Crowie with a vision token.

With the sun finally starting to set, Sofia recalled all her skeletons and stretched at the bottom of the tower. She wanted to wait for night to be able to aim at the moons, but she also had to leave before the ambient mana fell and prevented her from flying, so now was the time.

Standing where the shuttle was supposed to depart from, she crouched, and jumped.

She flew up as fast as she could, pushing her wings to their absolute limit, and finally, she shot out of the tower and into what she thought was the black void of space. The magic failed to pull her back, she was already too far. She looked back, the planet was still very close, and just as she thought she was out, she started to fall back down.

What?!

Using a long bone hook, she managed to grab the top of the tower as she fell back into it, and used it to hoist herself up on the rim of the giant steel tower.

She sat there and tried to understand what was going on.

I’m still in the atmosphere, just above the mana currents? That’s what, twenty kilometers up, maybe?

There’s no mana left but still a bit of air… And still a lot of gravity, it seems…

I don’t really get it… I could fly away from the sun but I can’t fly away from a planet?

Would it work with [Runeforged Overlord]’s flight?

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