Alan, feeling the token slip and the deadly energy surging behind him, gritted his teeth. "Not... letting... you... fall!" With a final, desperate surge of will, he tightened his grip and made the throw. The token sailed through the air, landing squarely on the teleportation platform. The moment the effort left his fingers, his consciousness collapsed, and he fell into a dead sleep.
Ethan's forward momentum was instantly shattered by Alan's full dead weight crashing into him. He staggered, the immense pressure making it almost impossible to move. The rolling wave of blue energy was already like a physical presence at his back.
And there it was. The first time he felt it was during his fight with Darrel, but he didn't have the time to think about that as his perception heightened in these final seconds, giving him the time he needed to assess their doom. Without even turning his head, he knew the blue energy wave was almost on them.
"Five seconds away and He just had to fall asleep now."
His eyes darted to the platform. The portal was unraveling, spinning to life. There! At least he made the throw. He calculated the distance. Three steps, maybe five if I'm being safe. He immediately dismissed the thought. He was getting dizzier by the second, his vision blurring at the edges. Walking was not an option.
In the next heartbeat, he made his choice. Everything depended on the next action.
"Here it goes!!"
Taking a deep breath and steadying his feet on the rocky floor, he hauled Alan into a tight bear hug. With Alan secured, he took the two widest, most unbalanced steps forward he could muster and launched himself into a desperate, stumbling leap for the shimmering portal.
Ethan squeezed his eyes shut, counting the moments until either the blue energy washed over them or they tumbled into safety. "I swear I'm killing Alan when we get to the spirit worl... Arghh!"
BANG!
His body impacted a hard surface, with the unconscious Alan using him as a cushion. Cough... cough... Gasping for air, Ethan shoved Alan off his chest and lay there for a moment, his body heavy and wrecked from the energy exposure. He slowly opened his eyes.
"Ha ..... We're not dead..... We're not dead!" he repeated, a light, disbelieving chuckle escaping his lips.
Pushing through the pain, he stood up and trudged over to the "Princess of the Mountains," who was sleeping as if he hadn't just almost gotten them both killed. Ethan smiled 'gently' down at his friend.
Then, he put all his remaining strength into one, accurate kick to Alan's shin.
BANG!
"OW! You BITCH!" Alan yelled, jolting awake.
He turned to face Ethan, only to see the limping young man already walking away. Alan was left in the middle of the scene they had created: the center of the Rank 1 Teleportation room, with guards and several other ascendants staring down at him.
"H-he... Excuse me," he stammered, trying to stand up quickly, especially after noticing a couple of ladies watching him with confused looks. Forgetting that his body had not recovered from the prolonged exposure to the blue energy, he immediately lost his balance, smashing face-first back onto the floor.
"Why me?" he groaned into the cold stone.
---------------------------------------------
"I swear, one moment you're risking your life to throw the token, and the next you're getting kicked in the leg," Alan grumbled as he reached Ethan's door. He knocked and waited for a response that came almost immediately.
"Alan Get in here quick. You need to see this."
Hearing the urgency, Alan rushed in. "I'm here, what's happening?"
Ethan was sitting at his desk, surrounded by a small stack of old, leather-bound books. "Make sure the door is locked."
"Now, look at these." He pointed with so much glee at the tomes placed neatly on the table.
"Uhhh... yeah. First, yes, the door is locked. Secondly, what am I looking at?" Alan's face was a mask of total confusion.
Ethan looked at him, speechless. "Are you crazy? This... is... it!"
"I mean, it's a couple of old books. Big deal. My leg hurts; let's talk about that instead," Alan spoke angrily, limping towards the bed to sit down.
"You know," Ethan began, exasperated, "I start to think you're wise, and I don't understand how easily you prove me wrong each time. Forget about your leg for a second and look at these books. This is information. Remember the information we were going to save up points for?"
Alan, still not bothered, replied, "Big deal. I never liked books anyway; they're always so boring." He fell back-first onto Ethan's bed, continuing to grumble about his injured shin.
"Was he always this stupid?..." Ethan sat silently for a moment before focusing on the tomes before him again.
"Tsk. Anyway, what do we have here?" Ethan muttered to himself, picking up the largest book from the ring. "Hmnnnn... Among other things, I didn't think it'd be a journal. In pretty good condition, too. I guess these space rings really do maintain whatever is stored in it."
Flipping through the pages, he saw intricate drawings and dense research notes he couldn't decipher at a glance. Ignoring them for now, he remembered something and turned, throwing the spatial ring they had found on the skeleton toward the relaxed Alan.
"Here..... keep yourself busy with this. I don't know exactly how many are in there, but I added my blue stones to what I found in the ring. I'm keeping the mid-rank blue stones and ten low-rank ones for my compression. You can make a calculation of what's in there. Sell them if you can; I'm sure you can handle it."
Alan's eyes lit up. He immediately picked up the ring, put it on, and pricked his finger to bind with it, effortlessly canceling Ethan's prior bond. He peered into the ring's contents and his jaw dropped.
"Ethan... is this..? Why didn't you start with this?!"
"This is a whole mountain of blue stones! We won't be lacking points if I successfully sell all of it!"
Ethan immediately fixed the stone-crazed Alan with a dead stare. "Yeah, go ahead. Sell every single one. I just hope you're ready to go back into the mountain to get the stones you need for yourself, because there's no way I'm facing what we did in that mountain ever again. At least, not until I can protect myself."
He looked back at Alan, who didn't bother to reply. Alan was already tapping away furiously on his soulband, probably trying to haggle with Henry for a fair price.
Shaking his head, Ethan ignored him and focused on what he felt was truly important. He put the other two books into his own ring without even glancing at their covers. He focused on the journal first, a thrill of anticipation running through him.
"Finally," he whispered, flipping open the first page. "Some first-hand information." He leaned forward and began to read slowly.