Light Bringer: New World[LitRPG, Fantasy, a very crazy idea]

The living room of the Acacias apartment had been impassable since eight in the morning.

Four heavy military-grade waterproof canvas rucksacks, internal-aluminum-framed hundred-liter beasts, lay unbuckled across the center of the rug. Beside them stood towers of cardboard cartons sealed with heavy duct tape, cases of bottled mineral water, vacuum-sealed packs of cured dried beef, and crates of high-calorie protein bars Dante had ordered wholesale from the docks distribution center.

Maria sat cross-legged on the floor, working a silicon carbide whetstone to draw a razor edge along her forty-pound greatsword.

The friction of coarse steel against the mineral stone honed in light oil ground out a steady, rhythmic rasp that filled the room.

Shhhk. Shhhk. Shhhk.

”Forty-five pounds of parboiled rice,” Dante announced, checking an item off an aluminum clipboard with a black pen. ”Twenty-two pounds of dry black beans, thirteen pounds of coarse sea salt, three packs of chlorine purification tablets, and forty tins of sardines packed in oil. That secures our rations for forty days without having to hunt metallic beasts on the plain.”

”Sardines every day gives you heartburn,” Maria remarked without missing a stroke on the stone.

”Sardines offer omega-three fatty acids, dense protein, and the oil can lubricate the iron of your sword if our grease runs dry,” Dante fired back without looking up from the manifest. ”Besides, we won’t have the luxury of leisurely campfires inside Piston Gorge. We’ll eat whatever we can choke down cold in ten minutes between patrol cycles.”

He set the clipboard on the coffee table and unrolled a world map of Earth, spreading the broad sheet of glossy paper over the dining table. Beside it, he unfolded the topographical chart of the Plain of Iron Souls.

Maria set the whetstone down, wiped the blade clean with an oily rag, and rose from the floor. She marched to the dining table with heavy strides, planting both palms flat on the wood to inspect the side-by-side charts.

”What are you cooking up now with this world map?” she asked, pointing down at the human continents.

Dante picked up a graphite pencil and tapped the eraser directly onto the coordinates of their city in southeastern Brazil.

”The fourth tab of my interface,” he began, his voice turning measured and analytical. ”Planar Transit. You’ve always assumed I could open a rift to any random corner of Hell whenever the mood struck, haven’t you?”

”You open the seam and we tumble through,” she shrugged. ”It’s worked that way for seven years.”

”Right, but that isn’t how the physics of that window actually function,” Dante traced an imaginary vertical line rising straight up from their location on the map. ”The rift isn’t an arbitrary teleport that conjures landing zones out of thin air. It’s a direct puncture through overlapping dimensional layers. A vertical anchor.”

Maria furrowed her brow, her brown eyes tracking the pencil tip.

”Translate that into plain human speak.”

”We only drop onto the rim of the Fourth Minor Continent and the entry gate to the Plain of Iron Souls because our penthouse here in the Acacias district sits directly over those exact spatial coordinates on the overlaid chart,” Dante tapped the infernal map. ”If we want to open a rift straight into the Capital of the First Great Continent, we can’t do it from this living room.”

Maria paused for two beats, digesting the mechanics.

”Because of that twenty-six-hundred-mile gap?”

”Precisely,” Dante drew his brass ruler and checked the offset across the world map. ”The Capital lies twenty-six hundred miles northwest of our current portal ingress. If I punch a rift here from inside this apartment, the emergency recall will always snap us back to this very rug. But if we’re in the heart of the Capital and need to flee for our lives through an emergency portal, the rift won’t engage.”

”Why not?”

”Because there’s no anchored soil on the corresponding plane,” he tapped the map of Earth. ”The geographic equivalent to Hell’s capital doesn’t align with this city. It maps to the northern tip of South America. Near the Colombian border where the continent meets the sea.”

Silence settled over the dining table.

Maria crossed her heavy arms over her black tank top, staring at the expanse between the two penciled dots.

”So we’re stuck taking that train.”

”To get there, yes,” Dante nodded. ”We’ll have to board the armored convoy at Depot Twelve and ride the Legion rails for three weeks. But once we arrive at the Capital and set up shop, we face a fatal tactical blind spot: if things go sideways, we have no rapid escape route to Earth. We’ll be thousands of miles away from our jump point.”

”Unless we relocate on this side too,” Maria said, her tone decisive as she connected the dots.

Dante offered a sharp, approving smirk.

”You’re sharp when you put your mind to it. That’s exactly it,” he stowed the ruler. ”We have enough liquidity in our Earth accounts to buy property anywhere in Latin America. Once we clear this hundred-and-eighty-day quest and establish our foothold inside the Capital, we book a commercial flight out of the international airport, fly directly to the matching coordinates on Earth, buy an isolated ranch house on that spot, and drive down a secondary dimensional anchor.”

Stolen story; please report.

”A base below and a base above,” she summarized with a nod of approval. ”Two safehouses linked through the same pipe.”

”With an instant emergency exit,” Dante confirmed. ”Until then, however, our survival relies entirely on our boots, that rust-bucket train, and whatever we can carry inside these four packs.”

He pointed to the stacks of supplies covering the rug.

”We head to the industrial supply outlet this afternoon for the steel cables and high-temperature tarps. Tomorrow morning, we step through the rift, and we don’t return to Earth until we both hit Level 20.”

The industrial wholesale outlet was situated in the warehouse district by the highway.

The two o’clock afternoon sun baked the corrugated zinc roof of the hangar, where yellow forklifts hauled pallets loaded with anchor chains and heavy steel wire spools.

The stockroom clerk, a squat man in blue coveralls with the name ’Valdir’ embroidered on his pocket, stared down at the order slip on his clipboard as though suspecting he was being filmed for a hidden-camera prank show.

”A hundred and sixty feet of half-inch steel cable?” the man asked, scratching his soot-smudged jaw. ”Two one-ton manual chain hoists, three vulcanized flatbed tarps, and six hundred forged-iron pipe clamps?”

”That’s the order,” Maria answered, planted squarely before the counter.

The girl wore heavy denim shorts and a black short-sleeved t-shirt that left her sculpted, vascular arms on full display. One hand rested in her pocket, the other clutching a half-gallon jug of chilled water.

”You folks got a flatbed truck to haul this?” The clerk glanced past her toward the barren parking lot outside. ”That’s nearly nine hundred pounds of dead iron and cured rubber. Our delivery crew can drop it off by next Tuesday.”

”No delivery needed,” she answered in an even tone. ”We’ve got a heavy-duty cart and a rental pickup parked just around the corner. Go ahead and sign off on the pallet.”

The clerk shrugged, scribbled his signature on the carbon receipt, and pointed toward the rear of loading bay four, where the wire spools and hardware sat plastic-wrapped atop a pine pallet.

Dante handed a counted stack of hundred-real bills to the cashier, pocketed the invoice, and walked back to the bay with Maria.

Dante grabbed an edge of the cable spool, hauled with both hands, and managed to lift the reel barely four inches off the ground. The tendons in his neck strained, his eight Strength exacting its toll with a sharp twinge along his lower back.

Maria nudged him aside with an easy bump of her hip.

”Step back, bighead. You’ll tear your new shirt for nothing.”

She dropped into a deep squat, wedged her calloused hands beneath the wooden runners, locked her core with [Unshakable Stance], and hoisted the nine-hundred-pound pallet of steel and hardware in one clean, fluid heave of her legs and spine.

The pine runners groaned under the bite of her grip, but held together.

Three dockworkers unloading a truck of corrugated roofing in the next aisle froze mid-reach, jaws slack as they watched a six-foot-three girl stride toward the exit carrying nearly half a ton of hardware in her arms as if it were a load of laundry.

Dante simply adjusted his sunglasses, tucked the clipboard under his arm, and trailed behind her with brisk steps, pretending the entire display was the most ordinary thing on earth.

The planar breach was initiated at eleven that night, dead center on the Acacias living room rug.

The apartment was triple-bolted with the deadbolts and the security system armed. Down at the front desk, Dante had filed a written notice stating they would be away on a month-long ecological field expedition inland.

The rift swallowed the crates, rucksacks, and the two youths with the dry crack of vacuum suction.

They touched down inside their subterranean hideout in the Ash Wastes, where volcanic dust rested cold against the basalt flagstones. They wasted no time unpacking there. Securing the four mountain rucksacks to their frames and lashing the steel cables and heavy rigging with leather harnesses, they set off on a northward march.

Crossing the frontier divide between the Fourth Minor Continent and the First Great Continent took twelve hours of unbroken trekking beneath a starless purple sky.

By noon on infernal time, they crested the southern rim of Piston Gorge.

The terrain ruptured into a colossal trench splitting the cast-iron crust of the plain. The gorge stretched over a mile wide and dropped twelve hundred feet into the gloom, driving in a straight line as far as the eye could see through the haze of venting steam.

The bottom of the canyon held neither soil nor rock.

It was a churning sea of titanic iron cogs, connecting rods the size of cargo freighters, and hundreds of hundred-foot steam pistons hammering in erratic, thundering strokes against blocks of compressed scrap that rattled the rim rock without pause.

THUM. CLANG. THUM.

The roar was deafening, drowning out all sound of footfalls or breathing.

Dante halted at the lip of the rusted iron bluff, pulling a cloth mask fitted with an activated charcoal cartridge over his nose. He peered down where dense eddies of vapor and scorched grease coiled between towering drive shafts.

His interface pulsed, logging dozens of active signatures scattered throughout the canyon’s mechanical labyrinth.

[Region Mapped: Piston Gorge (South Sector).]

[Average Entity Level: 18 - 22.]

[Terrain Hazard: Mechanical Crushing Risk and Superheated Steam Ruptures.]

”Plenty of prey down there,” Maria murmured, her voice muffled behind the black bandana over her mouth.

Her greatsword was strapped across her back, and she hefted one of the hundred-liter rucksacks in a single hand. Her brown eyes flickered with cold focus as she traced the iron girders descending to the first level of steam conduits.

”The plan is to pitch our base inside a hollow boiler hull,” Dante said, pointing to a cylindrical steel tank thirty feet in diameter wedged between two structural struts two hundred and fifty feet below the rim. ”That chamber has been decommissioned for centuries. The cast-iron hull is four inches thick. Nothing down there can punch through that plate without ringing out a racket we’ll hear a mile off.”

”And the roamers?”

”They prowl the drainage sluices below,” Dante opened the wooden kit at his belt, retrieving a stick of copper-conductive chalk. ”We drop down, barricade the boiler hatch with our steel rigging and tarps, and hunt in four-hour rotations. Both of us never sleep at the same time.”

Maria gave a single nod.

She dug the soles of her heavy boots into the iron rim, shifted the pack straps over her shoulders, and stared straight into the churning mechanical abyss.

”Three levels for me, five for you,” she reminded him, thumping the leather hilt of her sword with a gloved fist. ”We don’t step out of this grease pit until that number twenty lights up on our screens.”

”Three levels and five levels,” Dante confirmed, pulling the first climbing line to begin their rappel down the metal wall. ”Time to get to work.”