Alice expected to discover Fractured Time at any moment, but instead they kept moving further and further into the bowels of the power plant.
Long tunnels stretched out before them, filled with ankle-high water, the constant and potent stink of burning metal in the air, and very little light except for what Crystal was providing. Were she the kind of person who could still feel common fears, then maybe she might have been creeped out by the sight.
It was the kind of place where monsters should have been lurking around every support pillar and where something might have been in the water, waiting to grab an unsuspecting ankle. But she knew better. The monster here wasn't physical, it was the magic of the place that scared her.
"This whole place is on the brink," Alice said.
"It's... it's getting tighter," Vasilisa said.
Alice glanced back. The girl was resting her face in the crook of Crystal's neck, her words muffled. If it wasn't so quiet it might have been nothing more than a lost mumble.
"You feel it too?" Crystal asked.
Alice didn't need to stretch her magical senses to know what Vasilisa was talking about. The magic in this place was so strong and potent that it didn't surprise her in the least that even a non-magical person could sense it.
It was a smothering blanket, a thick miasma that pushed in from nearly every direction, but most of all from ahead of them. The water below didn't move, and the air here was stagnant, but it still felt like she was walking into a strong gale.
"We're close to something big," Alice said. "Tell us if you start to feel strange."
She didn't know what the effects of powerful magic on a normal person might be. Not at this kind of level, at least. Her gaze met Crystal's, and her fellow magical girl gave her a subtle nod.
They'd need to speed things up, at least a little. In all honesty, she felt like Vasilisa shouldn't be here at all, but it was a little too late to turn back and... and something told her that the girl was a key to something.
She wasn't sure what.
Crystal's story about the place where she herself had been stuck resonated with her, however. If this place was where Fractured Time had crashed, then what was to say that Vasilisa wasn't the key to whatever tomb had been erected around her?
They continued. The tunnel had numbers on its sides. First a one near the entrance, then a two, three, and finally, up ahead, a large four, painted on a wall covered in a strange mossy growth in paint that was chipped and broken.
The tunnel ended, and Alice discovered that the pressure they were walking into suddenly came from the right.
It was bleeding through a door, as though the obstacle wasn't there at all and instead they were looking into the rear of an active jet engine. She felt like she was slowly being pushed back, but it was a false feeling. The air didn't so much as ruffle as she reached over and touched the wheel in the door's centre.
It was cold. Almost frozen in place, and rough with the pitted marks of rust. She tugged it to the side, and it did nothing. "Locked tight," she said.
"Oh no, whatever shall we do?" Crystal asked with a held back laugh.
Alice refrained from rolling her eyes as she firmed her grip on the wheel, then forced it to turn. There was a loud grinding of metal on metal and something snapped on the other side.
She pulled the door open, and discovered that whatever was on the other side, it was dryer there. The ankle-deep water rushed by, creating a small stream into the next room over.
Pulling the door open all the way revealed a small antechamber. Suits hung in long-unused lockers to one side, and there were a few tables with some old paperwork laid out. Maps and safety reminders hung on the walls, and more were being swept across the floor by the expanding puddle of water.
It didn't go too far. The little room ended at another door, this one a step higher.
Alice walked over to it, each step slowing her down ever so slightly. "This is getting frustrating," she muttered.
"Tell me about it," Crystal said. Atop her back, Vasilisa groaned slightly, and Alice imagined it was worse for the girl who had no resistance to this kind of thing.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
"Shield her, for a bit," Alice said before she pulled the door open. She was vaguely aware of Crystal projecting a shield behind her, one to protect herself and Vasilisa from the rampant magic in the air.
The next room was huge. A wide open space designed to hold a fully-functional reactor. It was also, at the moment, ripped apart.
The centre of the room was more of a crater than anything else, the floor caved in over a machine made of countless metal rods. The walls were blackened and the ceiling blown out and away.
Smoke rose from the still-burning edges of the ceiling, climbing up into the twisting centre of a storm far above, but Alice barely paid that any mind. Her focus, instead, was on the centre of the room.
There was a machine there. A colossal thing of hard-edges and rough, unpainted steel. It sat on a small platform, with arm-thick wires snaking out from beneath it. Next to it were several large computer banks, ancient ones, with spinning tapes and wobbling pens scratching onto scrolls of paper.
The machine, the catwalks around it, the computers, all of them were impossibly untouched by the devastation that marred the room. The metal was new and still factory-polished, the computers still ran as though nothing was amiss.
The machine had a glass front, and past it, warped by the thick panes of glass, was a familiar young woman.
Fractured Time was resting within, eyes closed, head locked in place by a vice around her temples, arms loose by her sides.
She was unclothed, but the sight wasn't so much obscene as it was disturbing. She was pale, even though the warped glass, with lips tinged blue and sallow cheeks as though she were slowly starving.
"What the heck," Crystal said as she came up next to Alice.
"Was I in something similar?" Alice asked.
"No. You were in a shadowy... cocoon thing, I guess. This looks like it was fabricated by someone." Crystal frowned, then sniffed at the air. "There's a lot of magic in here. Lots of radiation too, you can taste it."
"I suppose so," Alice replied. Her gaze fell down slightly. There was a woman on the ground by the machine, crumpled to the floor as if she'd just fallen down and gone to rest. The corpse didn't seem aged at all. "This is bizarre."
"Uh-huh," Crystal said. She stepped forwards, then stopped. "Uh... you feeling this?"
Alice frowned and extended a hand forwards. It almost felt like plunging her arm into ice water. The magic was so thick it was almost physical. Worse, it was a very particular kind of magic. Alice looked about and noticed a few scattered pieces of rebar on the ground. She picked one up with a shadow, then tossed it into the miasma.
It clunked onto the floor, then rusted away even as she watched it.
"A time acceleration field," Alice said. "It won't affect us, I don't think."
"Weird that it's not making the machine fall apart," Crystal said.
"That is strange, yes," Alice replied absently.
Carefully, she stepped forwards and pushed through the watery feeling. She was submerged in the magic, and it wanted to eat her time away. A strong push of her will and the magic backed off. This wasn't a conscious effort on Fractured Time's part, this was... reflexive? Reflexive, and yet it was very fine, very careful work.
Alice moved up towards the machine, finally noting that next to the clunky old computer was a far more modern laptop, one that seemed entirely out of place.
She frowned, but put off inspecting it to first look at the dead woman by Fractured Time's living sarcophagus.
A slight push with her foot made her slump back, and Alice felt her heart skip a beat as she saw the woman's face.
"Alice?" Crystal asked.
"It's nothing," Alice replied. The woman was clutching a notepad, and Alice dipped down to pick it up.
There was a message written on the front, in the thick writing of someone desperate to have their message read. I will free you no matter what.
Alice looked from the notepad to the elderly woman. Her face was uncannily similar. The spitting image of an older, more mature Vasilisa.
***
If you like this story, you should check out my newest fic! No Strings Attached! It's a bit darker than my usual fare, a story inspired by Bloodborne and Elden Ring, taking place in a fantasy world recently ruled by great dragons who have all fallen victim to a mysterious plague!
LINK!
The dragons are dead. Their colossal forms, once the lifeblood of an empire, now rot in the wastelands of a cursed continent. The people they empowered—humans made unnaturally strong by dragonkind's gifts—have been driven to madness by their absence. The land festers, shrouded in mystery, death, and a creeping decay that no living being dares approach.
Magus Montgomery Maldrak is no stranger to impossible odds. Driven by curiosity and a desperate need to save his daughter lost on the decaying continent of Draya Calyrex, he crafts a solution that skirts the very edge of life and death: puppet-automatons animated by necromantic sorcery. Through their lifeless eyes, Maldrak will walk the ruins of a dead empire, searching for the truth behind the plague, the madness, and the dragons' fall. Yet some truths are meant to stay buried—and some lands are better left forgotten.
What to expect:
A post-apocalyptic world
Magic going wild
Puppets
Transhumanism
Cute puppet girls?
A boatload of Elden Ring and Bloodborne inspired stuff.
Daily updates until chapter 40, after that... we'll see!