Eva's voice came on again. "Alright, passengers. Look ahead. There is our stop!"
In front of the ship, there was a giant ring. It was huge, bigger than a house, made of spinning, white stones. The hole in the middle of the ring was not empty. It was filled with a swirling, wobbly light, like blue and gold jelly sinking inside a funnel.
It was the mana teleportation circle.
"Hold on to your seats!" Eva shouted. "We're going in!"
The ship pointed its nose right at the center of the wobbly, spinning light and flew straight into it.
The moment the ship crossed the threshold, the universe vanished.
There was no sense of speed, only of pressure. The wobbly, blue-and-gold light of the mana circle was no longer a "jelly" in a ring; it was everything. It was a tunnel, a river, a dense, swirling fog that pressed against the hull from every direction.
In the cockpit, Eva's hands were steady on the controls, but her eyes were fixed on a single, old-fashioned analogue dial to her left. It wasn't a fancy digital readout, but a simple brass gauge with a needle. Its label, etched into the metal, read 'Mana Cohesion Field'. The needle, which should have been locked solid at 100%, was vibrating.
It ticked down. 99%.
"Stay with me, old girl," she muttered, her knuckles white. She knew this ship. She knew its groans and shudders. This was new. This was wrong.
The needle ticked again. 98%.
A high-pitched hmmmm filled the cabin, a sound so thin you felt it in your teeth.
In the passenger bay, the glowing pink lady gasped. Her gentle, warm light flickered, like a candle in a strong draft. Across from her, the tall, tree-bark man's leafy hair began to curl at the edges, browning and crisping as if touched by an invisible frost. The fuzzy, blue rabbit-children whimpered, their long ears drooping lifelessly. The very air grew cold and thin, a vacuum-like pull that stole their breath and leeched the vitality from them.
The ship gave a violent lurch, not a shake, but a skid, as if it had hit a patch of ice.
"Mana flux differential!" Eva yelled to no one, fighting the yoke. "Stray current detected!"
On her main console, the blue-and-gold tunnel was no longer a clean, perfect tube. It looked frayed. And for just a second, she saw it—a clue. A thin, parasitic thread of coppery-red light had pierced their tunnel, latching on like a leech. It was a pathway within the pathway, a secret current no one was supposed to see.
The needle on the cohesion dial plunged. 85%.
The hmmmm became a shriek.
In the back of the passenger cabin, a single, worn-out rivet on a wall panel, one that had held strong for two hundred years, suddenly glowed a dull, sick red. It didn't pop. It simply... dissolved. The metal turned to a fine, silvery dust and vanished.
The panel it was holding, a four-by-four sheet of bulkhead, detached from the wall with a soft sigh.
It didn't fall to the floor.
The stray red current was inside the ship now. The panel, caught in its invisible grip, began to slide towards the outer hull. The passengers watched in silent horror. The panel reached the wall, and instead of stopping, it passed through it as if the hull were made of smoke. There was no hole, no explosion. and the panel was simply... gone. Sucked out into the non-space of the tunnel.
"Hull integrity breach! Section 7!" Eva's console blared.
"I see it!" she snarled, yanking the yoke hard aport. The ship groaned in protest, but its trajectory barely shifted. The current was dragging them sideways, pulling them inexorably in.
The ship's engine, the "grumpy bear," gave a sputtering cough. The red thread was siphoning its mana, drinking the ship's power.
"No, you don't!" Eva slammed her fist on a covered panel, flipping the switch beneath. "Shunting all power to mechanical thrust! Eat this!"
She was trying to fly the ship like her old RR200—on pure, physical propulsion. The engines roared in protest, a mechanical sound now, not a magical one.
Her maneuver bought them nothing. The ship was fully in the grip of the hidden, parasitic pathway. The "teleportation circle" was a lie. It wasn't a tunnel; it was a shredder.
A cargo crate near the back, stamped with the logo of a long-dead shipping company, dissolved at the corners and was pulled, piece by piece, through the floor.
Then, a larger section of the outer hull—a piece ten meters long—peeled away like the skin of an orange.
But it didn't just vanish. As it was pulled into the red stream, the stream itself forked. Like a river delta, the main tunnel suddenly split into a thousand tiny, chaotic pathways. The piece of hull, caught in the diverging currents, was atomized.
Eva saw it on her navigation scope. The debris from her ship wasn't in one place. It was being scattered. A fragment of the landing strut was flung into a pathway labeled G-44-Delta—a galaxy on the other side of the known universe. The cargo crate, now just a cloud of metallic dust, was routed to Unknown_Void_9. The rivet that had started it all was on a trajectory to a place so far away it had no designation, just a string of coordinates.
The ship was disintegrating, and its debris was being cast wide, sown like seeds across the stars.
The main cabin cracked. A spiderweb of energy ran down the center aisle. But as the red current tore at the metal, the original blue-and-gold light of the tunnel surged in. It was no longer a passive fog; it was a rescue.
The fuzzy blue rabbit-family whimpered as the floor vanished beneath them. Instead of falling, the golden light swirled around them, hardening into a shimmering, amber-like cocoon. It was warm and safe. WHOOSH. The cocoon was pulled from the wreckage, a glowing meteor ball shooting into one of the forking pathways.
Across the aisle, the tree-bark man and the glowing pink lady were caught in the same, sudden embrace. The blue light wrapped them together, forming a protective, teardrop-shaped pod. It, too, was flung into a different stream, destined for a different galaxy.
One by one, every passenger was encased in these life-preserving shells, seeds scattered by a cosmic wind, each one a fiery, protected comet streaking towards an unknown, distant world.
Eva was alone in the cockpit, which was now just a metal can tumbling through the dark, red-tinged void. Her console was dead. The engines were silent. The ship was gone.
She gripped the useless controls, her heart pounding not with fear, but with a soldier's cold fury. "Who?" she whispered.
As if in answer, the red-tinged void in front of her viewport cleared. For a single, impossible second, the tunnel was gone. She was in a place.
She saw it.
It was a colossal construct of black, crystalline material, impossibly vast, studded with glowing red receivers. It looked like a nightmarish, mechanical spiderweb, and it was latched onto the main mana routes, puncturing them, siphoning their energy. She saw thousands of red threads, just like the one that had caught her, all pulsing with stolen power.
And in the center of the web, she saw a shape. A silhouette. Something... or someone... was watching her. A pair of cold, immense lights, like the eyes of a god she never wanted to meet.
The eyes flared.
A final, overwhelming wave of red energy struck her cockpit. Her viewport went black. And Eva Gartez, like her passengers, was flung into a stream of her own, her tiny capsule a tumbling piece of debris, her final, terrible discovery locked behind her silent eyes.
The "minute clues" were now scattered across a hundred billion light-years. But the pilot who had seen the truth was lost with them.