Chapter 410 – Dome of Light

Chapter 410 – Dome of Light

“Well, this was... a day,” John tried to put it into words as he made his way over to the line of chairs that had been put up by Aclysia in a neat row. They were all facing outwards so that whoever sat in them was looking over the railing and at the Atlantic Fuse.

They had passed through the other two leylines without any problems or further interesting details. More intensive than the the previous one, in particular the outgoing line, but it wasn’t like there was a huge difference between being surrounded by light on all sides and being surrounded by light on all sides for a minute longer.

“You know what I hate?” he continued on. “Everything remarkable, positive or negative, always happens in like an hour or two. Yet I will remember the 10 minutes we spent waiting for Salamander’s firestorm to go out forever with a bleak sense of dread for the next decades, while the pretty eventless, happy 22 hours surrounding it will be mostly forgotten.”

“Yeah, that’s how that goes,” Rave spoke from the chair to his right as she took her drink from him, leaving John with his own. For this occasion, he had allowed Aclysia to punch his drink with some alcohol. He took a sip, he barely tasted anything of the nerve-poison, but this orange juice tasted sweeter than usual. “Ya with your super brain can still remember pretty much everything, can’t ya?”

“Consciously? Totally,” John responded. “But that’s not my point, it would just be nice to have random flashbacks to that one time we kissed in the jacuzzi in the Neon Lights. Instead I sometimes just lay in bed and then remember that one time I had my chest cleaved open.”

“I am fucking sorry, okay?!” Eliza picked up on that ill-chosen example. “I was really fucking angry and you just refused to kill me!”

“I would like to say you should have just listened to me back then,” John said, “but in this one case, dying was actually the smart way out.”

“Wait a second, you DIED?” Maximillian suddenly darted into the conversation from the furthest removed chair.FOlloow newest stories at no(v)el/bi/n(.)com

Silently reprimanding himself for letting that slip, John exhaled a baited breath. ‘I got too relaxed,’ he thought, recounting the past few hours. After the tension that was Tilgun’s appearance and the even worse tension that was Salamander’s insistence on doing THAT then and there and then the worst tension of Izha and the following infection.

The resulting exhaustion and just general lazing around had probably put him in a less careful mode than was normal, for him to just mess up like that around Maximillian. ‘Alternatively, it could just be that you look at him as something like a friend and don’t think you need to keep everything a secret from him,’ John thought, half sarcastically, half self-scolding, which was confusing in its own rights.

In a totally platonic way, their relationship was advancing towards something resembling actual friendship. At least that’s what his subconscious was telling him there. He was not sure what he actively thought about that. Rave looked at John as he was thinking and just giggled knowingly.

“Yeah, I fucking died, twice if you want to know for real,” Eliza didn’t give a tosh about that part of her history, “and both times SUCKED, although way less than the time preceding them. First was being hunted by shit-eating Nazis and sleeping in overcrowded beds too small for one person alone. Second one was just lots and lots of a lot of fucking torment.”

“Yeah... but how are you still alive then?” Maximillian asked.

“Remember how there is a goddess living inside me, giving me overpowered as all shit powers by proxy?” Of course that was something the crippled king could hardly forget about. “There, now stop asking about this kind of shit; you should know about not wanting to remember certain stuff, you post-traumatic-stressed-dick.”

John wanted to intervene at that, because he felt that this was going a bit far beneath the waistline. However, he waited for the half-second it took Maximillian to react to that.

“Well, I can deal with my PTSD, but you will always be short,” the gravity king shot back.

“MOTHERFUCKER!” Eliza jumped out of her chair, onto her feet and almost made the extra step of leaping at the guy to shake him a bunch while throwing death threats at him. Feeling that the latter half of that plan would probably send Maximillian in a panic attack, she stopped herself at the last moment. “You are a lucky shit that I still have something like empathy, otherwise I would hang you off the mast by your intestines.”

“This ship doesn’t even have a mast,” Maximillian mocked.

“I would build it,” Eliza’s voice was dangerously quiet, “out of my blood and your spine, using the shards of your pulverized ribs as thorns to grind your smartass face against.”

Maximillian shut his mouth after that one. A moment later, Eliza began to laugh maniacally, the high-pitched, temporarily painfully shrill sounds echoing over the deck.

Aclysia leaned over to John and whispered, “I am thankful to you, Master, that you got her more stable so she doesn’t do that every day anymore.”

“I heard that, cocaine hair!” Eliza suddenly whirled around.

In anticipation, they all waited. They had been promised that something amazing was going to happen at the turn of day to night. Sylph spied it first.

“Look, look, there, at the edge, see that, see it? I see it!” she palavered, pointing at the rim of the barrier. Around the leyline, the point where sky, outside and inside ocean met, the aurora spread in a thin line, following perfectly the border of the Protected Space they were inside. The same thing happened at the other two leylines, the emerging auroras meeting and melding together.

Once the circle was complete, it began to rise. The upper edge remained that thin line, but it left behind a curtain of shifting rainbows, slowly creating a dome. The ring narrowed as it approached the top, eventually vanishing into itself.

For a solid minute, they were simply surrounded. In John’s opinion, this was way more impressive than the complete engulfment of driving through a leyline. The ocean beneath, the towering Atlantic Fuse, with its tip connecting to the very centre of the dome, the two spread out leylines they could currently see. It was a scenic picture, a complete whole, not just a drowning encapsulation of light.

Without any warning whatsoever, the curtain disintegrated from the top downwards. Wherever the aurora no longer covered the sky, all of the stars that would reach a lightless world shined through in all their radiance for just one second like an uncountable amount of diamonds in the sky. Most of them vanished again thereafter, only the strongest glowing ones staying behind. It happened rather slowly, especially with the amount of area it needed to cover; John had an idea and got up.

“Let’s take some photos,” he announced to everyone, using Craft to reform the backrest of his chair to be able to hold his phone and then having Jack land to push the button. The idea was met with enthusiasm.

First was just a group photo with everyone present. Even Maximillian, despite the king first denying the need to be on such a thing. After some talking to by Rave, Aclysia and Sylph, he was finally coerced into it though. They stood close by each other, all of them, even the king and the host of which he feared. Yet, Maximillian managed to look more concerned over looking good than afraid, for the most part.

Next was a series of pair photos. Rave how she enthusiastically kissed him on the cheek, arms around his neck, one leg raised, him smiling and half-hugging her. Him and Aclysia, just standing, heads resting against each other, his arm around her hips. The third photo was him with Eliza in his arms, the blood mage flipping the camera off with a giant grin on her face.

Next was Gnome, who peeked out underneath John’s arm from her cowered position behind him. Salamander struck a wide open pose, flames in hand as if she was in a photoshoot for a supervillain movie, John standing in the background shaking his head. Sylph landed on his shoulders, arms cheeringly raised to the sky, legs stretched out, as John had to panickedly grab her and keep them both in balance, a moment that turned into their photo. The photo with Undine was a weird display of the quiet water elemental becoming quite daring, her parting in two, surrounding him on both sides, touching him in lewd ways and whispering things into his ears that made even him blush. Afterwards Undine disappeared into the pool blushing herself. Siena acted all nice and compliant until the very last moment before the picture, upon which she turned into a flurry of shadow blades. With her commandment to not hurt John currently disabled as a sign of trust, John was genuinely afraid for a second, turning their photo into a display of a Gamer ready to dodge and a towering mass of bladed tentacles around a hot, domineering nightmare elemental with sulfuric yellow glowing eyes. Siena loved her picture.

He and Nia had three photos taken. One where she was in the process of walking out of it. A second where she was in the process of walking out of it with Copernicus in her arms. Finally a third where she stood still without any expression whatsoever, with Stirwin nesting in her voluminous hair and the suncat in her arms.

Metra put John into an armlock, he didn’t complain as he was pressed right against her chest, and she laughed through all of it.

Last was Maximillian, John and him getting talked into taking a photo by the present girls. They were even forced to take a shared pose, both of them crossing their arms and then, in attempt to out-cool each other in that pose, taking it seriously and doing their best. The popular vote was that Maximillian looked better on it; John had overdone it, looking more like a caricature of a cool guy.

All of the photos could be ordered quite easily by the falling curtain of light in the background.

So, what was that phenomenon in the first place? Different answer existed, but the two John subscribed to were that it was either an internal pressure thing or something there to keep the barrier working. Either way didn’t explain why it was coupled to the day-night cycle.



Well, there was the answer he had been wanting.

“That was nice,” Rave stretched, “do we have any more plans on this cruise?”

“Not really, no,” John said, “I think the next two and a half days will just be us lazing around.”

Salamander drifted over, radiating the golden glow of fire. “I am going to throw a barbeque from my allowance tomorrow. You know, to do at least some shit for all the trouble I put you all through.”

Eliza giggled, her fingers drumming on the rests of her chair in nothing that even resembled a rhythm. “Make that a regular fucking occurrence for the rest of my whoring life and then we may be able to say you did enough by the total end of it.”

“I guess I can afford a monthly one, if we go grinding again,” the endflame elemental wasn’t opposed to the idea.

John liked the idea, “Anyway, let’s go back into the jacuzzi, no reason to keep sitting here.”