Dimensional Descent

Leonel truly waited for those days. He didn’t move, he didn’t check on his mother, he simply meditated in the depths of space, without thought for water or food, or even entertainment. His entire mind was focused on comprehending the path of the Vital Star Force, the very path that he had maybe neglected the most until this point.

He didn’t rely entirely on Anastasia. In fact, he smartly made the assumption that she would fail. If this was the case, then he would have to do whatever he could to speed up the process as much as he could. He could not, would not, leave Aina to be in that state for even a second longer than he had to.

El’Rion didn’t move either. He might have been 14 years old, but time seemed irrelevant to him. He had the patience of a monk that had lived for an impossible number of years. He didn’t say anything, and he even only seemed to breathe a few times a day. Slowly, though, his injuries were becoming far better. By the end of the fourth day, he had actually recovered a great deal.

If others saw how long it was taking to be fully recovered, especially those that understood the true majesty of the Pluto Race, they would be stunned speechless. This was a man who had healed his arm and leg being severed in an instant of time as though nothing at all had happened. It could only be said that those that had harmed him were truly monsters.

”... I’m sorry Leonel, there’s no such Innate Node here.”

Leonel’s eyes opened and he nodded lightly. He had already expected this.

He rose to his feet, or rather let his feet fall from their meditating position, and stepped forward, crossing the distance to El’Rion in an instant. He raised his foot again, to take another step, but El’Rion’s large hand had landed on his shoulder. Or, rather, half of his palm had. He was so much larger than Leonel that the other half of his hand hung off.

”I know you won’t listen to me, but I feel like I should say this anyway. Absorbing the Innate Nodes of others will never be perfect, there will always be some hidden flaw, even if you use the best methods available to you, or even me for that matter. When it comes time for you to become a... to enter the Ninth Dimension, it will only hold you back.

”If you want new nodes, the best course of action is to form them on your own.”

Leonel’s turned a smoldering gaze toward El’Rion. Streams of black smoke, hot to the touch, were still coming out of the corners of his eyes and the soles of his feet. Though, they were much weaker than they had been before, El’Rion still felt that seering pain when he met Leonel’s gaze, and it was even more exaggerated now than it had been in the past.

”And...” El’Rion hesitated again. ”... killing is already a heavy enough burden on one’s path forward. If you snatch things of importance from those that you kill on top of that, it will make things even more difficult. If even on top of that, what you snatch is of enough importance that you rely on it heavily to progress, the burden will be even heavier.

”And that’s not just for you. If you use this method to help your loved one, she will suffer as well.”

Leonel didn’t say anything. El’Rion was talking about a concept so abstract that it was for anyone to wrap their heads around it, but he... had already known it existed the moment that Anastasia had told him it was impossible to revive Aina’s mother because Aina was too powerful.

Those lines of time, of fate, of karma, whatever you wanted to call them, could bind anyone. And the more powerful you became, the heavier the burden became.

”There’s no burden I can’t carry,” Leonel said before vanishing.

El’Rion’s lip twitched. He didn’t even ask about how to forge his own Innate Nodes. But in the end, El’Rion sighed. What would be the point if he had?

One could only do such a thing when given an extremely special opportunity, and even that wasn’t necessarily without risks. Leonel was learning first hand just how dangerous it was to have powerful Innate Nodes, if he took one from others, as he already had, or if he forged new ones, it would be even more dangerous.

This was such an important rule that even El’Rion himself only had a single Innate Node. His father refused to allow him to forge more, although he definitely could. He could even replace all ten of his Nodes with Innate Nodes if he so wanted to.[Author’s Note: Not a typo]

Leonel returned to the location of his mother. She sat in a meeting with the remainder of the Luxnix, or maybe what the Luxnix would become. They seemed to be in the middle of a war against an existence they couldn’t even quite name. But Leonel appeared out of nowhere, causing the Luxnix to suddenly stand violently, ready to fight.

”Stop! This is the man who defeated the creature, you should be thanking him!” Alienor said with a powerful voice.

The Luxnix were astonished and then froze in place.

Leonel looked around, still not quite understanding what was going on.

”It’s time to return home, mom.”

Alienor’s gaze flickered, and the expressions of the Luxnix changed. When had their Matriarch had a child? And when had he grown so large? And so powerful at that?

In the end, Alienor nodded slowly. She had only continued this farce because she thought it would still be important to the Zone. But since it wasn’t, that would be fine.

”Come with me,” Alienor said to Leonel.

Though they would be leaving, there were still certain things she wanted to show Leonel first.

”HALT!”

A man stood with a furious gaze, he was practically spewing hot fire. This was his wife they were talking about, how dare-

BANG!

Leonel’s fist was like a tide of smoldering heat.