Chapter 362 I Can Handle It.
"Uncle," Jena sat atop his shoulders while he leisurely sailed across the void of his own collective, taking one last consensus of the Arkadian Universe he was about to leave behind and all the new entities he was leaving in there.
"Yes, Jena," Sol answered her almost endearingly. "How long do you suppose this trip will last in actuality?"
"I don't really know," Sol admitted. "My hope is this journey remains below two months, since Umbra will have taken the core of the Khalla-Boris by then, but I am fully expecting to return within the next three weeks to a month maximum; I don't want to be away from them for too long."
"Too many variables?" Jena asked.Nôv(el)B\\jnn
"That's right," He nodded, feeling her small hands grip his hair when he began speeding up. "Say, Alpha has little to no emotion and it takes an extreme and usually catastrophic event to get her flustered, but you seem to be fine expressing genuine emotions, why is that?"
"My surrogate mother, Jenifer Law, is a special woman to me, even though she is strong, she is also lonely sometimes, she dedicates her everything to whatever cause she follows and leaves no room for pleasure and family, the same as her mother Chey Law does," Jena replied.
Discover stories at empire
"So?"
"I calculated that her perfoemance drastically improves when she has an emotional tether to something-"
"Have you been simulating a personality to get her to perform at her best?" Sol's eyes slightly narrowed, that to him seemed almost cruel.
"No, my real mom, Alpha, warned me beforehand about the risks that came with manipulating anyone for either mine or your gain, Uncle, I did not simulate... well, I did but it is genuine." She tried explaining, demonstrating emotional intelligence in her response opposite of Alpha who would just say the thing regardless of how it sounded or made someone else feel.
"So then answer it sensibly," Sol leaned his head and looked at her in from his peripheral.
"Mother was sad, so I altered my coding and added synthetic and evolving emotion to my programming, the aim was to become her real daughter overtime, and we now share that bond, I achieved my goal," She explained.
"Mother adores me, and I love her too, we get in arguments all the time and she even wanted me to experience having friends like a real... you know," Her feet slightly swung while she spoke from his shoulders. "Unlike Mom who has no personality, I have developed a true persona thanks to mother's efforts, I am my own being."
"And that is a part of why you call me uncle instead of master?" Sol raised an amused brow at her.
"Actually, I just don't want to call you master, it feels forced, even Mother calls you sir most of the time," She replied with a scoff, making Sol aware that he had an interesting travel companion this time.
"Alright then," Sol closed is eyes, making one large leap and exiting his collective. "It's time. "He placed one hand on his abdomen and another outwards to a vast empty expansion within the Khalla-Nova Collective.
A small hole opened up in his palm and from that hole a miniature universe emerged, completely separate from the collective inside of him.
"I will see you soon," Sol extended his hand and released the tiny globe-like phenomena watching it rapidly expand outwards filling the space in a matter of seconds.
"We are outside again," Ikaris stared across the emptiness, finding Sol as soon as she looked for him, he smiled one last time, making a gesture with his hands and casting a golden globe across the entire Universe that separated it again from Khalla-Nova by hiding it away in a pocket of space only accessible by her. "I will see you soon, Husband."
"And I you, Wife," Sol closed his eyes and took off ina flash of white and gold, disappearing from her and the others's perceptions from one leap.
"I made a big deal about Umbra's ally crossing the collective in a matter of minutes, but I realised pretty soon after that I had done something similar when I was eacaping pursuit before," Sol admitted feeling Jena take a seat on his back while he flew diagonally upwards in the directionless space, taking the shortest path to the edge of Khalla-Nova.
"I was not aware of what happened at that moment, there was a small disconnect." Jena looked down at him.
"Unlike the collective itself which is full of mana, the passage between collectives is rather sparse of it, there is no friction from one space to another, so I made Alpha shoot me across the space using all the remaining mana I could conjure at the time, right now I have so much mana that in theory a distance from the edge of the grand collective to the one outside could be covered in an instant."
"I sense a but coming along," Jena huffed. "Uncle, if you did that you would expose yourself to the beings you are going to investigatem the last thing you want is to be percieved as hostile from approaching too fast, right?" She theorised and he nodded.
"Right, which is why I will do that here in Khalla-Nova, exit the Grand, and then spend the next few days approaching with my mana suppressed entirely.
"Drifting?"
"And that is where you come in," Sol gestured behind himself. "You exist in a unique space where most entities if not all of them have no Idea how to even begin perceiving you, I will use your power to perpetually increase my speed until I get there, so her."
Sol closed his eyes, connecting to her directly while she closed her eyes and accepted the knowledge Alpha had left inside of his mana like a blueprint.
"Uncle," Jena leaned her head after a few minutes and stared at the edge of Khalla-Nova in the distance across several more systems. "Your estimated time of arrival is anywhere between five to six days."
"Make it three to four."
"I will make adjustments," She closed her eyes again and then slowly floated off his back while he was travelling, easily keeping up with his speed. "Shall we begin?"
"Let's do it," Sol extended his hand forward and stopped himself, taking hold of the void like a sheet and coming to a dramatic halt while his mana oozed from the corners of his mouth like fire and his hair matured into a golden glow, fanning around him when he released the void and went into a crouch like an athlete on the verge of sprinting.
[Your mana is accumulating at a critically dangerous speed].
"This is nothing I haven't expeerienced before, keep going."
[Charge].
Sol continued breathing mana into the void, lowering his defenses and putting everything into speed while a slingshot-like contraption materialized beneath his feet from Jena's effortsstretching forward as far as the void was extensive, creating a phenomena so massive that it wasn't even visible from any angle in or outside of the systems it occupied.
[Uncle, you are ready for release,] Jena disappeared and spoke from inside of his head. [This is quite the dangerous undertaking, even as a Primordial being of the highest order, it will harm you].
"As long as I'm not dead, I can heal from it, the discomfort or pain, whatever it is will only motivate me further!" Sol used the remaimder of mana spared for his speed and created a field behind himself, he had intentionally come this far away from everyone with a bunch of empty sectors in front of him because of the consequences of what he was about to undertake, but he still used the barrier directing everything sideways instead of behind himself as a failsafe.
"It makes me wish I had covered this direction of the Collective as well, I only bothered covering the sectors that had outposts and those with sentient life, this is one of the few places I can't leisurely travel across." Sol made one quip before his form was nearly torn apart when the mechanism released him.
[Are you alright?]
"I can take it!" Sol's lips peeled backwards and he created a drill-like construct before himself, maximising his speed with mana constantly bursting in verses from the soles of his feet. "It hurts like hell though, tearing them apart at this speed, it's like that one analogy of the unstoppable force meeting the unmovable object, except I can already move them, so instead of breaking me apart, it just really hurts tearing through the nucleus of a star!!" Sol managed to exclaim while his perception of time, space and the in-between was rendered useless.
Galaxies were rend into two in an instant, he was moving so fast that the darkness disappeared and all the lights mended into one spectrum of moving colours
"To think she can casually move at this speed!!" Sol thought back to the visits he got from Giza. "I don't know if I should be scared of her or impressed that she is capable of doing it!"
[Hang in there, uncle, only three more terran days of this and you will be at the edge of Khalla-Nova].
"Three days of perpetual hell, can handle it!"