He Who Fights With Monsters 7

1

OF COURSE HE DOESN’T HAVE PANTS

In outback Australia, there was an empty town left abandoned after the monster waves. No wave had come through, but the town was falling apart anyway, most of the buildings having been empty long before the evacuation. Upriver cotton farming had long ago depleted the town’s primary water source, and what was left had been diverted by a major battle between monsters and essence users that had devastated the land to the north. When the waves came to an end, the town hadn’t been worth reclaiming.

The old football oval had been nothing but patches of dry grass clinging to a field of dirt when Jason Asano and Farrah Hurin claimed it. The handful of buildings and the old grandstand couldn’t blame the recent troubles for their state; they had been little more than dried-out shanties long before magic came into the open. Only the bar had seen regular maintenance, even having a coat of paint younger than Jason, if only barely.

Something incongruous now occupied the dirt oval, standing stones set out in a ritual pattern of concentric circles. At a glance, it looked like someone was attempting to ostentatiously outdo Stonehenge in a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. Jason and Farrah sat in the sun-bleached grandstand, looking out at their work. They’d been sitting there for some time, talking.

“It’s time,” Jason said.

“You know they’re watching us, right?” Farrah asked.

“I do,” Jason said, his voice weary. “Every petty faction in this world. Dogs fighting over scraps. Once we’re gone, they’ll swoop down on this place, looking to plunder any knowledge or power we leave behind.”

“Leave them to their petty squabbles,” Farrah advised.

Jason nodded.

“I’m done,” he said and pushed himself to his feet, the old wood groaning underneath him.

“Did you end up talking to Amy?” Farrah asked as they left the grandstand and walked towards the standing stones. “I know you were in two minds about it.”

“I did,” Jason said. “Not that there was much to say. It was just sad, more than anything. Once upon a time, we knew each other better than we knew ourselves. Now we barely recognise one another.”

“She wasn’t angry?”

“She was tired. Kaito made his own choice to stand up for his world and she knows that. It doesn’t change the fact that her kids will grow up without their father because he followed me.”

They reached the standing stones that Farrah had hauled into place using her prodigious strength. They passed between the stones to the empty circle in the middle. It was one of the few patches of lingering grass, jutting from the hard dirt, yellow and brittle.

“You won’t be back for a long time,” Farrah said. “If you want a last look around Earth, this is it. If we wait another day or two before going, it won’t make a difference.”

Jason didn’t say anything. Instead, he opened a portal to his spirit vault, the extradimensional realm that existed within his soul. He stepped through without looking back.

Jason’s spirit vault was increasingly becoming less of a vault and more of a realm. His power was growing and the outworlder ability that created it had gone through a rare secondary evolution. It had also been shaped by introducing the dimensional door he had taken from the Builder’s control, and the dimensional bridge given freely by the World-Phoenix. Most of all, the realm inside his soul was shaped by the tribulations his soul had endured before recovering all the stronger.

The layout of his spirit realm reflected his spirit domains, the regions on Earth that existed in normal reality but were under his power. It centred on a towering pagoda tower of smoky crystal, each brick infused with sparkling motes of blue, gold and silver light that danced within the solid bricks as if they were liquid. From the tower, a vast estate of cloud buildings sprawled out into landscape that ranged from wild groves to carefully cultivated gardens to a cave system filled with luminescent fungus.

At the edge of his domain was a wall of darkness that seemed to devour the light around it. Even the starry void beyond was bright by comparison. The most prominent change brought about by the World-Phoenix's bridge was that the wall now had an arched gate. Beyond the gate, a rainbow bridge extended into the star-speckled dark. In the distance, a stream of multicolour light passed, coming from the depths’ void and disappearing into the distance.

Jason had vast power in his spirit realm, and with a blur, he and Farrah were standing at the gate. The arch was a solid construction of the same dark, sparkling crystal as the pagoda, while the gate itself seemed wrought from darkness itself, congealed into a metal that seemed to suck in the light. At a gesture from Jason, the gate sank into the ground, opening the dark wall that separated the physical space of his spirit realm from the astral void surrounding it. The rainbow bridge spanned out towards the distant stream of similarly polychromatic light.

“That’s the link between your world and mine?” Farrah asked.

“Yes,” Jason confirmed. “Beyond this wall is the deep astral. What we’re seeing is more metaphor than reality. My spirit realm trying to quantify that which cannot be quantified.”

“So, how does this work?”

“However I like.”

Jason flicked his hand, and with that gesture, his entire spirit realm started moving along the rainbow bridge. It accelerated more and more until Farrah realised that what she thought was a narrow stream of energy in the distance was planetary in scale, simply much further away than she realised. As they drew closer, the stream became a vast rainbow wall in front of them, blocking out the starry void behind it.

The spirit realm passed into the stream, the rainbow energy engulfing them but not crossing beyond the wall or an invisible dome above it. The gate rose back up and Jason turned away.

The people observing the stone formation from several kilometres away in a helicopter watched as the standing stones transmuted from ordinary desert rock into dark crystal, the inside of it speckled with shifting blue, silver and gold light. They reported that Jason Asano had left the Earth behind.

On Farrah’s homeworld, the companions Jason had left behind were gathered in a town recently fortified against increasing instances of monster attack. Jason’s team, plus Rufus, Gary and Jory, were all present. There were also two diamond-rankers, which was essentially unheard of for some unremarkable town in the middle of nowhere. One was Virid, the weaponsmith whom had become Gary’s mentor. He sat behind the group at a feasting table, cowed by the other diamond-ranker.

Dawn was not using an avatar projection the way she had on Earth. She stood in the fullness of her power, which was so vast that only the other diamond-ranker had an inkling of her might. In some parts of the world, such as the one they were in, diamond-rankers were barely more than legends themselves. Virid could sense that a similar gulf existed between himself and Dawn. They were both diamond-rankers, but she had clearly touched on something that lay beyond both his reach and his understanding.

Dawn stood in front of Jason’s assembled friends. They couldn’t even sense the power she possessed but were all watching her fiercely. The twisted remains of the sword Gary once gave Jason sat uneasily in Gary’s hands. A feast had been going on, but the townsfolk knew adventurer business when they saw it. They had already cleared out the area to give the group a wide berth.