The Martial Unity

Once they had gotten the information that they sought from the macrobes, Ria’s team immediately pushed forward, moving rapidly towards the firestorm. The sky had rapidly darkened the closer they got, making for a dark blue dusk while the blue star in the solar system dipped below the horizon.

The winds were powerful and resistive, driven by not just the gale of the massive firestorm and the colossal Coriolis forces from a quasi-gas giant, but also the great heat of the firestorms.

RUMBLE

The infernos generated by the storms produced such great heat that it melted the ground underneath their feet that it passed over.

”Once we enter, we need to be quick,” Ria told her teammates with a serious expression. ”I want to minimize the amount of time we subject our exosuits to stress. Let’s go.”

They soon arrived at the firestorm, entering the boundary of the powerful wind and fire phenomenon. The sheer force that they experienced from the spiraling, hurtling gale was so great that it could have effortlessly vaporized mountains as it skirted past them. The winds weren’t furious gases, but it was composed of a lot of dust and dirt, making them comparable to a grinding force that could finely pulverize anything it touched.

Even Martial Seniors would have struggled to deal with the power of the storm, but the four rank-four pathwalkers managed to withstand the storm rather firmly as they pushed forward, led by Ria. Because she was wearing an armor fashioned from an invintium alloy, she only had to deal with the raw force rather than have any concern that the disintegrating aspects of the storm had yet to break her armor down.

RUMBLE!!!

She led the charge as they pushed forth at a steady walking pace. Each step they took was firm, planted into the land. They couldn’t afford to simply jog through because it was very easy for any of them to lose leverage and simply be carted away by the storm regardless of their strength.

More than anything, Ria led the charge, sharpening her eyes as she poured all of her senses into her environment, doing her best to guide them towards the center of it. Her Martial Body was a sensory beacon, allowing her to sense every minor detail of the storm. She could feel the complex ocean of vectors that curled about the firestorm, using them to gauge exactly where her next step needed to be.

The other four quickly lost track of where they were going. Even though their senses were excellent, they simply had no way of being able to maintain their grounding. Their bodies weren’t engineered just to sense things but to be able to do so with great accuracy and precision.

RUMBLE!!!

The deeper they got into the firestorm, the harder each step became, but eventually, they managed to reach the center of the storm.

Immediately, the pressure let off even though the heat was at its most intense. She could feel an extreme heat being generated by a stream of high-intensity entropy that seemed to emerge out of nowhere. Entropy was disordered heat, in a purely physical and thermodynamic sense.

When enough of it was concentrated, particularly in an environment where the barrier of entry to sparking a flame was so low due to the exceptionally high presence of hydrogen in the atmosphere.

Her eyes widened with realization. ’That’s why there’s a firestorm around each of the entropy vents. There’s too much entropy for a fire not to be generated.’

And eventually, each of the fires generated could easily escalate to be something much worse, especially if the storm snowballed with generations. She had no idea how old the storm was, of course, it could be millennia old, perhaps even older.

Over the eons, it had grown larger and more intense, making it harder and harder for anybody to cross them and enter the manifold.

Now, her eyes searched for the causality anomaly.

The distinctive marking feature that separated an ordinary entropy anomaly from a genuine manifold was that it could be used to enter and exit the manifold.

It wasn’t long before she found it.

Unlike with the Kandrian Manifold in the Kandrian Empire, this one’s entrance wasn’t in the ground.

No, much to her surprise, it was in the air.

”There!” Ria pointed up at a specific spot high in the sky. ”That’s where the vent is. We need to skywalk towards it and aim properly!”

”That’s kinda crazy under these circumstances!” Runark shouted, although his voice barely reached even their enhanced senses due to the tremendous turbulence of the storm. ”We’ll need to skywalk very precisely!”

RUMBLE!!!

”We can do it!” Ria yelled back. ”Let’s go!”

They jumped for the heights, launching them straight towards the went at the very point that Ria had pointed to. Losing a firm anchor to the ground left them vulnerable to the winds, but Ria pushed hard, canceling them as she tried to ensure that they moved straight towards the vent entrance.

Before they finally entered it.

WHOOSH

In the blink of an eye, the world around them changed entirely.

They found themselves in an entirely new world. The sky, previously darkened with dusk, was now a bright blue filled with vivid clouds. The winds, previously ferocious gales that sought to grind them down to molten dust, were now gentle breezes that swept them.

The land, previously a stark red because of the high presence of iron, was now lush with the kind of greenery that could only be associated with vegetation.

It was an entirely different world, one that was wholly separate from the outside world.

They had entered the manifold.

”Yes!” Ria’s expression lit up with amazement.

Up until that moment, she couldn’t be certain of her ability to detect the vents from a manifold across a massive planet like Planet Pinky. There was no way to perfectly train such an ability either. After all, there was no major manifold on hand for her to train. She could only hope that her experiments with the Kandrian Manifold would be enough to replicate on a larger scale when the time came.