We stopped in a so-called "bubble of silence"—a zone of temporal stabilization where the entropy level was low enough to let us catch our breath.
I sat on a gray boulder that pulsed slowly beneath my thighs. My left arm rested on my knees.
I used my right hand to massage the flesh of my left arm.
"You're going to crush it like that," came Kaelen's quiet voice.
He stood a few paces away, leaning against a hovering fragment of rock. His sphere glowed dimly, illuminating his face.
"Blood flow is reduced. I need to restore the conductivity of the nerve endings," I replied without looking at him. "Biological tissue is inefficient under high mana pressure. It's failing me."
"It's not 'failing' you. It's simply alive." Kaelen stepped closer and squatted beside me. "You treat yourself like a slave. Look at you: pale as a sheet, barely breathing."
I finally looked up at him.
"I have a goal. Dornheim. If I start babying my 'tissue' right now, we'll be stuck here forever."
Kaelen shook his head. He reached out as if to touch my shoulder, but pulled his hand back at the last second.
"Dornheim can wait if you die halfway there."
I finished the massage, feeling a tingling sensation return to my fingers.
"We're moving out." I stood up, leaning heavily on the Centurion. "We're in the thick of it now. From here on, space will start stretching."
We entered a sector I dubbed the "kinetic gradient." At first glance, it was a perfectly ordinary, fog-shrouded plain. But the moment you took a step, you could cover a kilometer in a minute, or spend three hours just trying to move a single meter.
Kaelen tried to use his sphere to generate an impulse for a jump, but I intercepted his arm.
"Don't even think about it."
"Why not? We'd save a ton of time!"
I picked up a stone and hurled it forward.
The stone flew a couple of meters and suddenly froze in mid-air, after which it began to slowly drift downward.
"See that?" I pointed at the rock. "The distortion coefficient here grows exponentially. If you use a magical dash, you'll simply be stretched out along the line of force."
Kaelen swallowed hard, staring types of the suspended stone.
"And how are we supposed to cross this?"
"We need to find the nodes where gravity and time intersect at a right angle."
I tossed small pebbles, timed their fall, and calculated the vectors. We moved in zigzags, in strange loops, sometimes backtracking to bypass invisible pits of kinetic vacuum.
Kaelen followed exactly in my footsteps. I could hear his heavy breathing.
"Iron, are you alright?" he whispered for the hundredth time.
"Focus on the route," I cut him off.
We stepped into a zone I hadn't had time to calculate. The air abruptly went dead still. All sounds vanished. Even the hum of Kaelen's sphere went silent.
I tried to raise my arm, but the movement stalled halfway. My muscles contracted, but the kinetic impulse was simply zeroed out. Kaelen froze beside me in an awkward pose—he had reached up to adjust his bag strap, but his fingers were locked in the air.
And then I looked up.
The massive rock fragments hovering above us were beginning to slowly descend. Deprived of the support of external forces, they were simply regaining their true weight.
The exit point was three meters ahead—I could spot it by the faint shimmering of the air.
"Will to Live."
I could see the boundary between the zones as a thin, vibrating film.
But I couldn't just step forward—the vacuum would swallow the impulse.
I used the Centurion. I thrust my right arm forward, overcoming the vacuum's resistance through the internal hydraulics of the prosthesis, redlining its RPMs. My fingers dug into a rocky outcropping lying just beyond the zone's border, in "working" reality.
"Hold on... to me..."
I grabbed Kaelen with my left hand.
One massive heave.
Crack!
We flew out of the vacuum a fraction of a second before the rocks behind us smashed into the ground, kicking up clouds of dust.
I collapsed to my knees and then rolled onto my side. I broke into a raspy wheeze from the sharp pain. Blood gushed from my nose, flooding my collar.
"Iron! Iron!" Kaelen was at my side in the blink of an eye.
He caught me, trying to sit me up.
"Look at me! Breathe, you hear me? Just breathe! Can you hear me?"
I tried to nod, but instead, I vomited blood.
"Set... my shoulder..." I squeezed through gritted teeth.
"What? No, I don't know how, I..."
"Do it. Now. Otherwise... tissue necrosis..." I grabbed his arm with the Centurion.
Kaelen squeezed his eyes shut and, muttering apologies, yanked hard on my left arm. There was a dull pop. I blacked out for a few seconds from the shock of the pain.
When I came to, Kaelen was sitting next to me, cradling my head. I slowly raised my right hand and wiped the blood from my lips.
"The calculation... was correct. We're alive."
"Alive... that's for sure," Kaelen gave a bitter chuckle.
I ignored him, staring straight ahead. Through the thinning mist of the Rift, the edge of the plateau was visible.
"We have... just a little further to the border."
"We aren't going anywhere until you sleep for at least three hours," Kaelen cut in sharply. "That's not a request. It's a condition. Either you rest, or I'll tie you up and drag you by force."
"...Fine, three hours," I agreed. "Exactly three."
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