Chapter 148: Hyperspace

Never tempt fate. 

Honestly, that was something that I definitely should have already known, but for some reason, I had seemingly forgotten that tempting fate was a bad idea. 

I had settled into the chair of the spacecraft and the door to the hanger bay had opened up, revealing the inky blackness of space with the small twinkling dots of starlight far off in the distance. 

It was a breathtaking sight, the wide expanse of space without any atmosphere to hide the glittering gems that were other stars, and surrounding those stars other planets. 

I'd been darting about from crisis to crisis and adventure to adventure ever since I'd woken up on Prespian city, I didn't think I'd taken even a few moments to just sort of enjoy the fact that I was now living in a hyper futuristic galaxy where I could actually go out there and explore the universe. 

It made me giddy with excitement. 

Unfortunately, that giddiness bled over to the already minimal control over my power that I had. 

Yr'Arl took the craft out into the inky void of space, propelling it through his own magical means rather than relying on me for the short trip out of the hanger. 

"All you need to do is place your hands on the control panels and channel your manna through them," Yr'Arl said, "I have already placed the coordinates for the temple into the drive system, so it should just be a simple matter of powering up the drives and then engaging into Hyper." 

I took a deep breath and placed the palms of my hands on the two joysticks, one on either side of the chair. 

As my hands connected with the sticks it was as if a jolt of electricity had thrummed through my body, connecting me to them like my hands had been magnetized. 

"Well that tingled," I muttered under my breath, though by the twitching of Yr'Arl's ears I knew that he had heard me. 

I decided to take Yr'Arl's advice, I'd just push manna straight into the ship and then engage into Hyperdrive. 

To do that I pushed BB down into our synchro mode, I was still beholden on that to access any of my manna, even if my physical stats had been greatly increased by my power up. 

With that done I let my manna loose, slowly at first, just a trickle to warm the engines up. 

But before I knew it, both BB and I had lost control of the rampant flow of power that was boiling under the surface of my skin. 

It was like sticking your hand into the roaring fires of a volcano and hoping not to get burned, that was never going to happen. 

The ship drank in my manna greedily, sucking as much as it could from the inferno that raged inside my body. It didn't take long for me to max out the ship's manna storage capacity, though, and that was where things started to go wrong. 

The sloop shot into action, catapulting itself straight into Hyperspace. 

I had expected hyperspace to be something similar to Star Trek or Star Wars. In those shows and movies, light would stretch and it would seem like you were zooming past stars as you travelled through the universe at incredible speeds. 

The reality of the situation was incredibly different. 

It was as if we had moved out of the universe entirely and into some kind of sub-universe, a different plane of existence that ships used to travel great distances in just a few moments. 

It looked as if we were moving through some sort of tunnel, with lightning sparking from one side to the next and thick clouds of gaseous matter clouding the viewscreens. 

In a way, it was honestly absolutely beautiful. In another, it was honestly absolutely terrifying. This twisting tunnel of power and energy felt like it could destroy us at any moment. 

The housings of the ships rattled and shook worse and worse every moment, it was like listening to an old barn coming apart in the middle of a hurricane. 

As the ship devoured more and more of my energy and moved faster and faster through the vortex outside its walls a strange metallic screeching noise started to rip through the air toward the back of the ship. As if something were shearing off of something else. 

"Stop pushing power into the matrix, Squadron Leader Jacob Lyre," Yr'Arl just about managed to scream out over the din. "You're going to destroy the ship and us both!"

But I couldn't stop. 

Something else had taken control of the system, and it was trying to drain me dry. The only problem was the fact my energy was a limitless well, I was never going to be drained. 

Was it another of the Remnants? Trying to take me out before I could gain mastery of my heightened power levels, before I became any more of a threat?

No, it didn't feel like it. It didn't feel malicious at all. It felt… automatic. Like some kind of feedback loop the ship had fallen into. 

The metallic shrieking increased in higher and higher in pitch until, with a sudden jolt and a colossal series of crashes and cracks, something behind us exploded. 

The sloop was flung out of Hyperspace and, at last, I felt the drain on my power subside. 

"What the bloody hell was that," I wheezed, "I feel like I've been squeezed like an orange, someone tried to scoop all the juicy inside bits out." 

"I'm… uncertain… Squadron Leader Jacob Lyre," Yr'Arl said with a heavy cough, "But right now we have much bigger problems to be concerned with. We appear to be crashing into an unknown planet." 

I glanced up and was met by the sight of a large sphere getting closer and closer every moment. 

There was no way that we would be able to avoid a collision. 

We… were probably going to die. 

<Well, I guess that's what could go wrong,> BB snarked as we plunged into the atmosphere.