Chapter 132: Descent
The low, persistent hum of mana engines pulsed through the reinforced plating of the shuttle, vibrating deep in Frank's bones. He stood at the edge of the command deck, arms crossed, eyes locked on the growing blue-green sphere below UR.
Behind him, thirty seasoned fighters filled the vessel's main hold. They weren't here for glory. Each one, handpicked by Frank himself, was a survivor. Twenty Adept-rank Awakened and ten Commander-rank elites all battle-tested, all hardened by pain. Their loyalty wasn't to any banner, but to survival. And maybe, just maybe, to Frank.
The vessel's mana-core flared faintly as it engaged descent protocols, glowing in rhythm with the defensive runes etched across its hull. The view through the main viewport shifted as they broke through the planetary threshold. Twin suns framed the curve of the world, bathing the upper atmosphere in a golden-blue gradient.
UR's surface was a violent masterpiece chaotic cloud formations surged like warring oceans, and lightning danced across the sky in jagged, unnatural hues of indigo and jade. In the far distance, massive winged behemoths soared through the heavens, their bodies casting kilometers-long shadows across the roiling terrain below.
Frank's thoughts drifted, unbidden, to what he had glimpsed last time the eye. That impossibly vast, alien eye embedded deep within a canyon that had looked at him. Not just observed, but seen into him. It hadn't attacked. It didn't need to. Its gaze alone had fractured the will of a Commander-ranked scout. Frank had felt it, too a pressure that whispered one truth: You are prey here.
"Landing sequence engaged," the pilot's voice crackled over the comm, smooth but with the faint undertone of a mana-assist processor.
Before they could even begin atmospheric entry, the skies rebelled. The weather twisted violently, a storm birthing itself in seconds. Hail the size of human heads began hammering the shuttle, each strike resonating like cannonfire against the outer hull.
The ship lurched violently.
Mana shields surged, blossoming into golden layers across the vessel but the impact wasn't ordinary. One particularly massive shard of ice struck the underbelly, sending a shockwave through the craft. Alarms blared. The mana defense matrix rated to withstand a Legendary-level strike cracked.
"Brace for impact!" the pilot roared.
The ship plummeted. Steel groaned, mana conduits screeched, and the engines reversed thrust too late.
They crashed.
The sound was deafening metal tearing, earth fracturing, shields failing in bursts of incandescent light. Then, stillness. The storm continued outside, raging for long minutes before the ambient energy of the planet bled the fury away as suddenly as it had begun.
Inside, no lives were lost, but many were bruised. A few shields failed, and several passengers bore the results. Frank checked the pilot first. The man was conscious, groaning, running diagnostics with one hand and holding a bloodied forehead with the other.
"Status?" Frank asked, voice calm, but sharp.
"Ship's intact. Engines are drained. Damage minimal… hull's okay. Charging from ambient mana should take a few hours," the pilot responded.
Frank nodded. "Hold position. Lock the interior sections. I'll do recon."
Outside, the air was crisp, unnaturally so. The ground sparkled with thick, mana-rich hailstones iridescent cubes of ice humming faintly with power. UR's storms didn't just destroy they gave.
Frank stepped out onto the debris-strewn clearing. The hail had devastated the surrounding forest. Beasts some twice the size of rhinos lay broken and bloodied. The hail hadn't just driven them into hiding; it had slaughtered.
He turned to the waiting group behind him and split them into small squads. "Form perimeter defense. You five gather as much of the ice as you can, but stay in visual range. We don't know what the storm stirred up."
The men and women moved quickly, harvesting over forty tonnes of the rare elemental ice. Frank personally inspected the material dense with freezing-type mana, crystallized at a ratio he had only read about in Void-research logs.
He secured the collection inside a reinforced spatial ring a temporary asset given to him by the House for the mission. Then, turning toward the shredded remains of the beasts, Frank muttered, "Waste not."
He activated his vine.
From the edge of his palm, a deep crimson tendril slithered forth, dancing through the air with eerie intelligence. The Red Vine a strange power he'd awoken during his early time in UR snaked toward the beast corpses. As he extracted their mana cores with surgical efficiency, the vine absorbed the biomass, converting the bodies into rich mana nutrients and dissolving bones like sugar in fire.
Several cores glowed bright Commander-tier some at the master level , at least. A few showed signs of mutation, a unique trait of the UR wilds. He pocketed them carefully, marking them for analysis.
He paused.
In the distance, the land shivered.
He returned to the shuttle, letting the storm-stilled air settle behind him.
Thirty-one lives under his charge. Unknown threats ahead.