Chapter 4: The Great Desert

“Seriously?” The girl said for what had to be the hundredth time so far, staring up at the dark night sky above. “I know you're watching, so why in Aurar’s name did you put me down here???” She cried to an unlistening audience.

Everything had started well, or as well as it could with four dark beasts coming into existence above a green, living world. Romeo had led the way to high orbit above the planet, swimming easily into the gravity well, with Shaitan going slightly lower to observe the distant planet with his massive black eyes. Juliet and Nemesis had entered the system further out, emerging in the asteroid belt beyond the first six planets and starting to feed on the resources available there. The two females were hungry and made no secret of it, and Romeo would soon join them. In the spatial storm the group of dark beasts had decided to leave the girl there for two months of the planets time, according to Juliet’s observations of its size and cycle. They would spend the time resting and feeding in the outer system, before coming down to retrieve the girl who would theoretically be fed and rested after spending time among her own kind (other mortals). Despite her protests that they had no idea what they were doing and that there were a thousand better ways, Shaitan had ignored her completely and set her down in the middle of a vast desert where he claimed mortals would not see her appear.

“Ira’s wrath, of course they won't bloody see me, morons.” The girl complained as she climbed another sand dune. “There aren't any mortals within a thousand miles of this place.”

Muttering to herself and screaming at the sky every few minutes the girl climbed over the endless dunes and stared at the distant horizon. She was considering playing one of her cards and just blowing the planet up to make the dark beasts stop treating her like a fragile doll they needed to fawn over all the time, but restrained herself with effort.

“Jeez, I wanted to last a bit longer.” She muttered as she prepared magic to travel. She reached deep inside herself and felt for a space that existed outside this universe, created by a myriad of other dimensions as a storage for things she kept. Storage magic, far vaster than even she could search through easily, displayed a diverse array of weapons and treasures for her use.

Not that any were. “No use, no use, too powerful, I don't like it, too valuable, no use, no use, pointlessly elegant, also useless, and I'm bored.” The girl muttered as she sat firmly down on top of a dune, staring at the unending desert before her. “Couldn't that swimmer have put me a bit closer to these ‘mortals’?”

Her symmetrical face turned this way and that, observing the desert and the night sky with her closed eyes. Sighing, she took a handful of sand and tossed it into the air, observing how it slanted to the right in the minimal wind of the night desert.

“Deserts are often created between two geological features, a mountainous region, and an oceanic or flat region. The prevailing winds at the cloud layer are from the mountainous region to the flat region, the air losing most of its water while cresting the high mountains and cooling rapidly before heating up over the dry and hot daytime desert. But surface winds vary depending on where you are and what the time is. In general, the night desert is the coolest feature around, with no heat retention, so winds flow out from the center and towards the surroundings. During the day, the reverse occurs. The winds are stronger on the flat or ocean side, and weaker on the mountain side.” The girl says, as if reciting a geography textbook. Then she switches to thinking aloud. “People congregate near easily accessible locations. The ocean is the most easily traversed for early civilizations, water travel outrunning land travel throughout long periods of civilization. Spacefaring civilization change to orbit-accessible locations primarily, ignoring terrestrial geography, but this is definitely a planetary civilization from those swimmer’s conversation. Thus, I need to head towards the ocean.”

The girl then tosses sand again, this time forming a column reaching up to the lower clouds. The stream twists and turns as it falls, mapping the various air currents of the different levels of air.

“At the peak we have the Coriolis trade winds, which should run east-west according to the hemisphere and the planet’s rotation. I can't tell which way is called north, but it doesn't matter right now. Rivers typically run towards the equator, with a few exceptions, which implies that if I'm between mountains and ocean the River should run from mountains to ocean, i.e. North-south if it goes that way. Luckily for me, the prevailing weather winds below the Coriolis are almost perpendicular to them. Based on the lower winds running slightly angled from those winds, I can conclude that the ocean is closest this way. I'll just follow the coast till I find civilization, then.” The girl concludes, standing up and dusting off her hands. “Adventuring is fun sometimes, isn't it?”

She started walking down the dune, happily whistling a tune as she set a blistering pace and traveled several kilometers in an hour. That was when she was suddenly attacked, a completely unprovoked assault in her opinion.

“Hm… I think they want to eat me or something.” She said, watching the five sand lizards crawling towards her without a trace of caution or concern. The first got close enough and accelerated rapidly, it's opening maw swinging towards her as its legs kicked up sand.

“Whoops, you missed.” The girl said, hovering above where the lizard had struck and created a cloud of sand and dust. Growling, it swung its head to clear it and leaped to snap its jaws just below her hanging feet. Clapping, she watched get others circle around as it continued to leap upwards towards her dangling legs, missing slightly each time.

“Almost there! You can do it!” She encouraged, taunting the lizard snarling below her. Sighing, she watched as it gave up and started circling along with its fellows before descending back to stand lightly on the dunes.

“Aren't you going to attack?” She asked kindly, and the first lizard jumped towards her again, this time keeping a close eye on its target and swinging its legs to trap her before biting. Yet the girl merely held up a hand and stopped it mid leap.

Held in the air by a single leg lightly grasped by the tiny girl, the lizard let its mouth fall open and stared at the impossible phenomenon. It was used to beings being stronger than they appeared, as this was a cultivation world, but there was no aura of power nor the slightest hint of cultivation in this little girl. As if understanding its shock, the girl shook her head and threw it into the sand.

“Gotta do better than that~” she sang, taunting the rest with a beckoning hand.

The other four lizards watched warily as the first got to its feet and started taking this girl seriously. A slash of its tail sent a blade of sand flying towards the girl, but she cartwheeled over it then back flipped over the successive slashes. Twisting her body easily, the girl avoided every attack the lizard sent without breaking a sweat, singing all the while.

“Missed me, missed me~, now you've got to kiss me~, dancing all around me~

Sand that tries to ground me~ pointlessly, pointlessly, we all~, fall~, down.” She stopped suddenly and blocked the lizards spiked tail with her bare hands, her song cut off and her face turning serious in an instant.

The lizard strained its back muscles and cultivation to extract its tail from her hand. All was in vain, because the girl didn't even bother to move as it hissed and threatened her, her hand as steady as a mountain.

“I find it surprising, honestly.” The girl said, showing once again a habit of talking to herself. “It's been, what, thousands of generations since you differentiated from those tiny lizards that hid in the sand dunes. And yet as soon as you run into something you don't understand, something stronger than you, you call right back into the same instincts. Threaten the predator, try to run away, struggle futilely to detach a tail that no longer separates cleanly… Same old, same old.” The girl shrugged and dropped the lizard’s tail, which it swung behind it as it backed away from this far too dangerous prey. Growling and hissing, all five lizards circled her, looking for an opening in which to strike. The girl didn't even bother to ignore them.

“It's been some time, hasn't it? And it's so cliche, so typical… I really shouldn't.” The girl said, shaking her head and addressing no one but herself. “Even so… I want to.”

She smiled and plunged her hand into the sand, which began to glow red hot around her arm. The lizards howled in alarm and charged. They thrashed their tails against the sand for a burst of speed and used their cultivated energy to strengthen their limbs and fangs, snapping angrily at the interloper that had finally been recognized as a threat instead of prey.

The same first lizard reached her first, it's jaws closing down on her upper body, believing it would be a sure kill strike and almost tasting the warm blood. That was the last thing it ever thought, as its head was suddenly cut into six pieces by three instantaneous cuts. As blood spattered across the desert floor, the remaining four lizards slowed their charge and watched the body of their leader collapse to the ground, the legs giving out first before the body crashed heavily to the ground, sending dust in every direction. As it cleared, they saw the girl walking up the headless corpse, unstained by either blood or dust and holding a crystalline length of glass in her right hand.

The wind rose as they watched her, blowing her bright cyan dress around her legs as she stood tall and proud atop the corpse of their kin. Her similarly brilliant hair streamed out from her head, flashing in the dawn light, and her doll like face impassively looked down on them with closed eyelids. She took a breath and brought her sword in front of her, holding the blade perpendicular to her body.

“How do you want to die?” She asked, tilting her head at the four lizards below her.

They glanced at each other and seemed to reach a decision. Two charged at her from the sides while another started hurling blades of sand from just in front of her and the last hung back, watching and waiting.

The girl didn't need to move her head to see all of them, not that she was using her eyes to see anyway, so she just waited for the blades of sand to reach her. They never did. The glass blade flashed in the air, the whistling sound of temporary vacuum collapsing singing in its wake, and dispersed the sand with the mere wind of its passing. The next to reach her were the pair of lizards coming from the sides. The one on her left reached first, charging in while she should have been distracted by the sand blades. It was met by an outstretched leg, a roundhouse kick knifing into the side of its head and hurling it into the path of the next sand blade as the girl whirled on her other leg. The spin gave her sword momentum, momentum she used to sever the tail the lizard on the other side used to attack her from a distance and throw the twitching appendage into the distance.

Screaming pain, the lizard without a tail spun and charged again. It's claws scrabbling against the hide of its kin, it opened and closed its jaws repeatedly while howling rage and anger at the interloper who had so badly wounded it.

It's jaws were slammed closed by a kick to the bottom of its head, the girl back flipping to add force to the blow, and it's entire body arched upwards with the force of impact. The soft neck was too tempting a target for the glass sword, which whistled again to sever the throat of the lizard, silencing its howls. It collapsed to bleed out on the sand, struggling to breath as its life drained away.

The kicked lizard had weathered the sand blades and was struggling to its feet, the other two moving beside it to attack the girl up close. The first, the one that had been hanging back, scooped up large rocks with its tail and hurled them at the girl, sending a wave of sand next to cover its own charge. She didn't flinch, the rocks parried away by her sword and the wave of sand useless in blinding her senses. The lizard was met with with a jumping heel drop, the blow slamming it into the ground and cracking its skull, dazing the lizard so it's limp form impeded the assault of its fellows. The girl raced along its back, sword parrying swung class and tails before plunging deep into the heart of another lizard.

The girl next cartwheeled around her grip on the sword, avoiding the attacks of the last moving lizard before drawing the sword out and allowing the spurt of blood to blind it. The lizard howled, rousing the dazed one into motion, and swung blindly at where she had last been. Unfortunately it only scarred its fellow, who bellowed in return and whirled to attack the pest carving into its back. The lizards snapped at each other before realizing the girl wasn't there and turning every which way to search for her. They didn't even notice her falling through the air behind them before a pair of glass shards penetrated their brains and killed them instantly.

“Too easy.” The girl said, landing softly and sheathing the glass sword in a lizard-skin sheath that formed itself out of the nearest corpse.

Under her sharp, eyeless glare that same corpse suddenly started taking itself apart. The blood formed a pool, gathering in a spontaneously created basin of glassed sand which also drained that from the other four. The skin peeled into strips that hardened into leather and stacked themselves conveniently, and the flesh tore itself from the bones to make similar piles which differed depending on whether it was from the legs or the rest of the body. The bones, scoured clean, powdered into dust and stacked into a great pile near the other stacks, before all that was left was a floating crystal containing cultivation energy. The girl walked over and grabbed it, seeming to examine it despite her still closed eyes.

Sighing, she pulled four more crystals out of the remaining beasts, all of them about the same level of quality.

The girl frowned, tossing the crystals up and down in her hand. “Beast cores, for things this weak?” She muttered, studying the crystals and ignoring the other materials. “This little mana should have remained distributed without solidifying into a core yet… What is the significance of this change? Inverse something… No, direct. The minimum core energy level was directly related to the… The what?” Rolling the five cores around in her hand the girl made an expression of serious thought. “Tch. I shouldn’t have bothered with this. Measuring energy density levels in cores never sat right with me anyway.” She said, clenching her fist around the crystals but not breaking them yet. “It's always so much easier just to do it directly.”

With that dangerous mutter she tossed the cores into her mouth and swallowed them with a drink of water she had extracted from the blood. Within her stomach she felt them burst and send their energy into her body, the remnant souls of the lizards furiously attacking her body and trying to corrupt her own energies. Yet they found nothing to attack or corrupt, the energy being trapped inside her stomach where it was overwhelmed by her own power that surged for a heartbeat to quell the vicious cores.

“Yare yare.” The girl muttered, destroying the last trace of will and rage in the cores and leaving only pure energy. She focused inwards on that energy and compared it to that which she had known before.

“... Interesting. The true energy density is down, but the proportional energy levels are way up. Thus the apparent density is higher, leading to cores forming at lower absolute densities.” The girl muttered to herself, noting the changes. “But this analysis is limited to just this planet, because apparently each system has its own balance and densities, none of which are connected. What did you do, my children?” She asked someone not present, her tone dismaying. “What were you trying to do?”

Shaking her head, the girl walked over to the pool of blood and reached down to touch it lightly with a finger. At that touch the numerous iron rich cells and other solutes that made up the blood made a fine trail of mist as they were extracted, flowing over the pool of rapidly clearing water and towards the pile of flesh and other meats, which caught fire and started merrily burning. When the pool was clean, the crystalline clear waters reflecting the sun far above, the girl stripped off her dress and dropped her sword next to it. She waded out into the pool, waist deep at its deepest, and fell backwards to float on the surface. Stretching out her arms and legs, she floated naked as the desert sun rose and bathed her in its fierce rays.