Chapter 69: Looping Winds – Part 2

Chapter 69: Looping Winds – Part 2

"You know, this place isn't so bad," Hana comments.

"Yeah, there's no way you'd think that an entire town's worth of people died here and were cursed into being zombies," Roxanne says.

"It makes me uncomfortable just remembering that," Ciel says and scratches her cheek awkwardly.

"I imagine that after stabbing a fetus, nobody could 'comfortably' remember that," Roxanne adds with a smirk.

"Please..." Ciel pleads with a sigh.

"I see that you're back to your usual mean self," Alissa says and nods in understanding.

"I'm telling you, Wolf's cum has healing properties," Hana says.

"I'm not mean, it's just banter, banter!" Roxanne exclaims and pouts.

"You call that banter? I've seen maids with sharper tongues," Yunia says and points her chin up snobbishly.

"Oh? Is the elegant elven princess finally showing her true colors?" Roxanne asks and grins evilly. The two glare at each other, and I start to feel like they're competing, or something.

"What's gotten into them?" I whisper to Alissa.

"Banter. Their sadism compels them to put others down once in a while," she answers.

"Oh, please, I've always been myself: a refined and upstanding example of elven nobility," Yunia says.

"Yet you bowed down so quickly to Wolfy's cock," Roxanne says, her voice dripping with sensuality when she refers to my thunder spear.

"Hmph. It is not disgraceful to find pleasure in sex," Yunia responds and turns her head away.

Roxanne smiles with glee and slowly says, "A commoner's cock."

Yunia narrows her eyes and gives her a sidelong look. "You forget that he's a hero."

"Yes, but he, a human, bested you in battle, and then, he didn't just fuck you, he dominated you. Admit it, you're addicted to his cock." Her honeyed words slowly infiltrate my mind, then gently persuade my pleasure rod to stand at the ready.

Yunia turns her head to face her and takes a step forward. "If I'm addicted, then what does that make you? A loyal dog that licks up every drop of his cum that falls to the floor whenever he fucks a real woman."

Roxanne also takes a step forward, and the two stunningly beautiful women nearly butt heads as they glare at one another. "I'm his slut, not a delicate flower with an ego the size of a castle."

"Ooh...! Are they going to fuck?!" Hana asks, excitedly.

"Please, not now," Ciel asks and shakes her head.

Yunia's voice gains a cold and deliberate tone. "A slut is a toy, below his loyal slave, so you need to be shown your place."

Roxanne leans forward, her lips curled into a kiss, but Yunia has [Precognition] and easily avoids her attack. She trips Roxanne's leg, making her stumble, then slaps her ass hard.

Roxanne continues on for a few steps before regaining her balance, then she holds her hat against her head and turns around to glare at Yunia.

"Hmph, got what you deserved," Yunia snorts snobbishly and walks away.

Roxanne's lips curl into a faint smile, and her face slowly returns to normal.

"I'm rather happy about how this ended," Ciel says in a low tone.

"I guess that Hana and Yunia are going to be competing for the position of top slut soon," Lina says.

"Pff... not even she can win against me," Hana says and grins fearsomely.

I sigh and bring my thunder cock back under control. Their short bout made me a little excited.

We split up again and continue our exploration. The Control Room is already powered, so at least we don't have to go through that connection process all over again, which would be a massive pain in the ass.

I gather documents and start translating them. After a long hour, I finally notice something interesting: references to a "Remote Stability Scanner." It supposedly costs a lot of mana to operate, but we can just redirect all the power to this room again, and it should work fine.

"I think this is the Scanner that you mentioned," Lina says and grabs my attention.

She's standing in front of a large square wooden table with a glass panel on top. There are a bunch of knobs and levers at one side, a few glass panes beside the table, and underneath are some small colored crystals embedded in a metal plate full of gold and silver mana channels.

We quickly divert the power back to the Control Room and return to the Scanner.

Lina pulls a lever, and a red smoke starts to seep out of the glass panel, then gathers in a few spots above it. On the glass panel, a more colorful variety of smoke comes together.

"Okay, now what does this red smoke mean?" I question.

Lina fiddles with another knob, and a blue smoke forms a completely opaque cube on top of the table, covering the red smoke. She fiddles with the knob again, and the cube becomes transparent, allowing us to see the red smoke.

She fiddles with another knob, and a small cone of black smoke appears near the bottom. She turns one last knob, and hundreds of little purple balls of varying sizes appear.

I hum in thought and say, "Well, I think the blue smoke represents 'normal' air, so we can turn that off completely; black could be the tornado above us; and I have no idea what red or purple would represent, probably something bad."

"Agreed," Lina says and nods, then she moves to a set of knobs that turn endlessly. She slowly turns one, and the black, purple, and red smoke all move downwards. "Oh, I think this is moving the scanner's 'view.'"

"Seems so. Now, we just need to find our destination."

She continues moving the Scanner down and puts the whole tornado in view. At its bottom, we see a small red dot surrounded by black smoke. She fiddles a little more with the Scanner and discovers a way to zoom in and out.

"Heh, that's nice," she mutters.

Alissa finds a book of official coordinates. It has the name of a location, its coordinates, the anchors required to make a path to it, and the polynomial equations used to calculate the path that the Looping Wind would take. It's not really that complex, it just requires a lot of small calculations that could be done automatically by a computer.

Hana and Roxanne skim through a lot of documents and memos, and they start to notice a repeated name: "Ozymandias."

Well, that's ominous.

"Ozymandias was the name of a chimeric king. I don't know anything else about him, though," Lina says.

"It's the name of a location in the book," Alissa says.

"It really is the most commonly mentioned name that we've found," Roxanne says as she counts its occurrences. "Also, it's seemingly the capital of this 'fake' chimeric nation."

Assuming that this station is the center of the system of coordinates in Alissa's book, Lina puts Ozymandias' coordinates into the Scanner. The red smoke gathers into the shape of a vertical disk that's half the size of this station.

"Well, it looks like an interesting place, alright," Roxanne comments.

"I can zoom the Scanner out to show the distance between the station and Ozymandias," Lina says.

"Please do," I say.

The red disk of Ozymandias slowly becomes smaller and smaller until it's so minuscule that only Alissa can see it, then we see a small black dot representing the tornado.

"Well, that seems pretty far," Ciel says.

"A few hours, maybe half a day?" I question.

"Not sure. I don't know how to translate this zoom level into a real distance," Lina says.

"Let's see what obstacles are in the way," I say.

She increases the opacity of the purple and red smoke, but we can't really see anything since it's all so small.

I get an idea and grab one of the glass panes beside the Scanner. It has a support frame that allows it to stay upright, so I think that it has some kind of use.

When I put it on the table, the red and purple smoke starts to glow, making it much easier to see.

"Interesting..." I mumble.

"I guess that all that's left is figuring out how to control the Looping Winds?" Alissa asks and looks at Ciel and Aoi.

"Well, that thing's a mess. The tornado is not the right way to use it, apparently," Ciel says with a wry smile.

Aoi nods in agreement and says, "Tornado is not in the manual."

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?" I ask.

Ciel opens her mouth, then closes it, then bites her lip.

Aoi blinks blankly then turns to her, "What a waste!"

"Lots more ahead," Alissa warns.

"Barrage! Pick a target and fire, then switch! Don't try to destroy them!" Lina relays Ciel's orders.

Alissa's "radar" is filled with dots, so I use [Bind] to feed this information directly to the girls. They fire their spells into the dark clouds, then lightning is thrown back at us in response. Most of it is diverted by our electric elementals, but the sheer number of attacks overwhelms them, and a few get through. Some planks explode, but the damage is minimal.

Another wave arrives, and fewer bolts hit the ship this time. The girls are adapting to my information sharing.

A third wave comes, and the same thing happens.

"Curve!" Lina warns us.

We move the ship to the left side of the lane, then we roll it 45o and start pulling the nose up.

We leave the Looping Winds since we turned too early, and the ship slows down a lot. Then we sink back into it again, and our vision is clouded by smoke because we didn't turn hard enough.

We bring the ship vertical again, and the smoke pulls us up without our input, then we surface and cough. The smoke is magical, so it's not completely suffocating, but it's still not air, so it's not good for our lungs to breathe it in.

"Behind!" Alissa warns.

A salvo of lightning bolts hits the back of the ship before the girls can counter it. A hole is opened up in the stern, but the electric elementals are defending the wings and sail perfectly.

We quickly leave these storm elementals behind, but then they start appearing all around the tunnel. Their numbers are less concentrated than before, but they still force the girls to be constantly fighting.

Without them having the needed numbers to overwhelm the electric elementals, we don't receive any damage from their lightning bolts.

But the dungeon's aim might not be to destroy us, it could simply be trying to tire us out.

"Curve!" Lina warns us again.

I've learned my lesson, I won't come into a curve too fast like a noob again. We repeat the same preparations as before, but this time, I slow down the ship's forward speed, and we make the turn without a problem.

Then the sky river starts to wave again, and I get a bad feeling about this.

"Loop!" Lina warns.

"Ahead!" Alissa warns, too.

Fuck.

We flex our muscles to keep them from shaking, but the tension makes them hurt. The road starts turning upwards, and we gently follow it, keeping our speed at the limit that the ship can handle without leaving the Looping Winds.

The girls struggle to aim correctly, and when we go vertical, the belly of the ship gets hit repeatedly.

We turn upside down, and the girls all miss their spells, too busy trying to hold on to the ship to aim.

Then we finally start pointing downwards, and the bolts hitting the ship reduce in number until they stop completely.

The sky river straightens out, and we reach a new speed record. We go so fast that the wind hurts my eyes and makes it hard to see.

I need aviation goggles.

Soon after, the last of the storm elementals is left behind, and then we're clear of the clouds of death. The cold winds and rain hit us again, but they're nothing in comparison to what we just went through.

Up ahead, we start to see something shining in the sky, then a burst of lightning reveals it to us: a fucking-huge floating island.

"Our first landmark," Lina says.

The first anchor is nearby, so I think we could get some rest over there. Lunchtime is coming up soon, and I don't want to fly on an empty stomach.

We get closer and closer to the huge lump of rock and crystal. It must be larger than a mountain.

It arches over the Looping Winds, sheltering us from the rainstorm. Soon, the wind stops, and we reach the calm.

I pull the ship out of the sky river and park it right beside an exposed Wind crystal on the floating island.

"I want to try something," I say.

Alissa sighs and turns to me, looking slightly tired. "The last time you tried this, you hurt yourself. You certainly didn't go slow like you said you would," she says reproachfully.

I smile guiltily and reply, "I have to find a way to control small amounts of mana. Last time, I couldn't really focus on that because of how desperate we were."

She lifts up my visor and kisses my lips.

"Fine. Just be careful."

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