Felicia wondered why she had fired the main battle cannon of her mode of transportation. She'd been somewhat nervous at first, the sheer magnitude of steering a large tank upsetting her mettle. The gutwrenching terror projected by the wall that had kept her a prisoner for months had been a problem, but she had simply put the tank into gear and closed her eyes. The jagged collection of spikes and metal bars mounted on the front of her vehicle had done a good job of digging into the high wall. She had then spent an eternity cowering inside the small yet lavish compartment, refusing to run away. The dreadful feeling instilled upon her by the barrier walling her in had diminished bit by bit. Her tank had smashed through the wall the moment the fake fear had vanished. She had peered out of the hatch as the tank rumbled across the stone rubble, tears streaking her face as she saw new land for the first time in months. The fact that she found herself inside yet another hexagonal prison did little to diminish the sheer relief and joy she felt at that moment. She tried turning some of the rubble into mana - as the constant maintenance and refuelling she had to do was starting to sap the power from her chest - but the dull stone had resisted her will. She grabbed a stone fragment stuck between metal plates and poured mana into the bit of rock until it stopped fighting her command. The amount of mana she got from dematerialising the shard was a couple of dozen times less than what was needed to crack the enchantment protecting it.

The next wall had been a lot easier to smash through. She then continued directly south, aiming for the place where the sun was highest. She had no desire to meet more people before she built up her forces and mana machine significantly, and she had little reason to doubt Camprisse’s geographical information. A desert seemed like the perfect obstacle between herself and everyone that wanted her dead and couldn’t materialise as much water as they wanted. Her vehicle of destruction broke through the third wall with even less delay and effort. She only had to duck each time she smashed through the following barriers, closing the hatch briefly to prevent rubble from entering her cockpit. She wasn’t willing to ruin the lovely interior she designed, after all.

So when she had breached through another wall without any indication that something was amiss, she was slightly startled the moment she saw a courtyard. She had not expected to see an old tower built right next to a modern art piece made from fine silver wires and dull crystals. Nor had she expected to see an ancient fossil of a pervert staring holes into her chest as he stood upon the tower's balcony. She had turned the turret and hit both firing controls in pure reflex, flinching hard when the shockwave of the blast nearly scorched her eyebrows off. She didn't even notice the small group of guards turning into paste under her tracks, so enraptured was she by the sight of the tower partially crumbling. She barely had time to reset the turret to its forwards breaching position before the entire courtyard flew by, and she plunged into a dense hedge.

A branch slapping her face reminded her that she still felt hungry, in an energetic sense of the word. Eating the plants from the hexagonal cells she had crashed through kept her from being mana starved, but it hadn’t been enough to top her off. So she had turned around and willed everything in the courtyard to vanish just before it got out of sight. Her nose started bleeding the moment she understood how to parry. Making a shield wall was a skill that she had practised for years by the time she lost sight of the courtyard entirely. Its sunlit cobblestone and rising dust cloud shrank behind her, left in the dust generated by the dual tank threads as she rushed away from the complex that imprisoned her for months. Felicia felt like someone was mixing up her brain with an industrial strength blender as she tried to keep her bearings. She made a valiant effort, but her feeble resistance to keep conscious was smashed the moment over a hundred years of magical expertise and understanding smothered her mind, courtesy of the freshly dematerialised archwizard.

She woke later, a combination of a penetrating drone and a horrible itch forcing her awake. Her head smashed against something hard and enhanced the already cataclysmic headache she was suffering from to truly world ending levels. Sitting up, she wiped drool and crust from her face as she tried to get her bearing. She was inside her tank still, she noticed. And from the rumbling around her, she was still moving. She blearily thought back to the reason why she woke and looked around, trying to find the source of the itch now that the droning noise was explained. Felicia froze when her foggy mind registered the masses of spiders, bugs, frogs, and other insects hopping inside around her small cabin. She looked at her sleeve and saw the smeared remains of some slimy grub dangling from a gross bit of innards. The following application of willful disintegration was so impressive; it put Agren’s most potent examples of the art to shame.

Breathing a bit easier now that all those creepy crawlies were safely turned into mana, she moved towards the half-open hatch to get a look outside. Morsels of information trickled into her mind, the composition of each and every animal she just now made disappear becoming clear to her. She idly noted that this trickle would have been overwhelming when she started this prison break, but the composition of every single cell in a bug was nothing compared to the fragments of human experience she had gotten smashed into her consciousness.

Reigning in her rambling thoughts, she held herself steady as she peered through the cracked hatch. She saw a flash of brown bark and green leaves before the hinged slab of metal smashed against the top of her head. Cursing silently, she waited for the scraping and cracking noises to diminish before peering outside again. She saw another tree approach and immediately hit the tank controls, making the massive vehicle come to an earth-churning stop. She slowly stuck her head out of the opening, observing the forest surrounding her with a wary eye. She ordered a tree to vanish and noticed that the data she received was similar to a tree she already knew. There must have been some sort of nesting bird inside the large plant, as the information on how a black type of sparrow was built accompanied the tree’s data. Once again ignoring the ease with which she now processed this information, she looked behind and froze.

A small collection of animals was staring up at her. Why was there a colourful horde of badgers following? Her tank had forced its way through the forest in the most direct way possible, Felicia noted. A straight line of crushed trees and pulped greenery marked her trail as it ran into the distance, straight as an arrow. She must be in quite the forest, as there wasn’t a single sign of light at the end of the forcefully made tunnel. Looking up, she saw multiple layers of forest overlapping and stealing sunlight from the ground far below. She remembered very little specifics about the anatomy and ecosystems of forests, but she did recall that Earthern woods usually had four layers. The undergrowth was made up of bushes, grasses and ferns, along with everything else that grows on the ground and didn’t try reaching into the sky very hard. The understory was made up of everything above the undergrowth and below the main canopy, which was the dense layer or intersecting treetops that made up the forests’ roof. Above that was the emergent layer, made up from outlying trees that somehow managed to gather enough resources to punch through the mediocrity of the canopy and become true sun-stealing giants.

This setup and classification did not apply to the forest Felicia was trouncing through at all. An oddly round conifer was just to the side of her tanks’ path, a tree that was entirely green from its smooth bottom to where she lost sight of it high above. She counted at least four distinct layers of intersecting plant life with just a cursory glance upwards. She saw that a single tree with a trunk at least ten meters in diameter housed an entire ecosystem, parts of it covered in shelved and layered fungus, others crawling with large ants that tended to flowering vines. A green spiked cactus spread across the ground, thin tendrils reaching digits into a dangerous network that she couldn’t see an end to. And then there was the small crowd of variegated badgers that was staring up at her with suspiciously hungry eyes. She swore she could recognise the shade of green fur that one of the bigger ones was sporting, but she resolutely refused to acknowledge that possibility.

Instead, she turned forwards again and hit the pedal to the metal. The tank roared to life as she tried to get a feel for the engine’s status. The way to induce torque was a problem she had ended up spending a large portion of the previous three months on. She tried to materialise a standard four-tact engine at first but had quickly concluded that her skills and precision had not been up to the task. The first prototype had made a single revolution before failing spectacularly, its crankshaft punching through the rough engine block at lethal speeds. She had wasted weeks trying to get that design to function, finally deciding to give up on the mechanical complexity that are two-tact or four-tact engines. Instead, she had tried making a relatively more straightforward way to turn fuel into movement. The first turbine she created - little more than a rotating cylinder of metal adorned with a fine set of fins - was spooling up in the back of her tank as she started steering the tank southwards again. An idle part of her mind did the needed maintenance on the relatively simple engine, and Felicia was surprised at how little the thing had fouled up during her stint of unconsciousness.

Felicia learned a lot as she drove through the dense greenery. The variety of wildlife was astounding compared to the small selection of plants that had been available to her. Her mana sight also showed her plenty of beautiful things. Streams of darkly glowing power churned through the earth far below, tendrils of mana emerging only to be sucked up by plants and turned into lighter energies. She had learned a great deal of control over her supernatural sight over the last three months, and she had largely forgotten about the extra layer of reality she could now observe. The bright lights overlaying the real world had been a blinding annoyance at the best of times, so she had switched it off the moment she managed to control her magical sight. She now let the extra layer of reality she could observe come back to her in slight bursts and thin layers. The trick to not being blinded all the time had been relatively simple in the end. The stone that was still preventing her from speaking in any audible manner had been sending thin tendrils of mana through her body the moment it got lodged in her neck. Halting the flow of these - in hindsight blindingly obvious - branching lines before they reached her eyes let her observe blessed true darkness again.

Felicia sat there, her head sticking out of the hatch of a magically constructed main battle tank as she made a path through the forest in a rather violent manner, and wondered why it was that she felt less unhinged that she ought to. The only company she had had over the past three months had been herself and the endless streams of fornicating animals she had fed to the pitfalls. There had also been that green badger that had kept trying to gnaw on her ankles, but she refused to give the annoying little shit any more of her attention. She really should have gone absolutely insane. The badger had kept accusing her of being crazy, but she surely knew better than some animal.

Felicia steered her tank through a particularly dense thicket of brush and fern and was blinded. Slapping a hand across her eyes, she tried peeking through her fingers. The sky was blue, she noticed. Her other hand had reflexively disengaged the gearbox, letting her rumbling tank slow to a halt as she slowly took in her surroundings. Yellow grasslands were divided by low walls, forming the rolling landscape into a patchwork of brown earth, drying weeds and low yet ordered bushes.

She had emerged from the dense forest just as the terrain was sloping downwards, allowing her a view that stretched many leagues into the horizon. Then Felicia did a double take, as she failed to take in what she had been staring at. A yellow mountain was towering above her, a rippling wave of gigantic proportions that didn’t make any sense to the woman. She had seen Mount Everest up close on some business trip, and the sheer absurd size of that mountain was the only comparison she could make. Below her, ordinary - if a bit dry - grasslands and partially cultivated field rolled down the slope. Low walls and dirt paths separated the different earth tones, and she even saw a few signs of habitation like barns and clusters of houses here and there. Further ahead, this pattern stopped. The fog of atmospheric perspective made it hard to see clearly, but Felicia felt like there was a significant drop between the soil and the mountains of sand beyond. Beyond the contrasting change in landscape was a desert. Yellow and orange toned waves of sand rose up and up, creating a desertic mountain of flowing dunes that must have towered nearly a dozen kilometres above her current position. It was like some god had emptied their moon-sized bucket of sand right in front of her. The sheer contrast between ordinary cultivated fields and the mind-bending sand mountain was a lot to take in.

Felicia had set out to look for the desert, but she did not expect to find the desert in such impressive and overwhelming volume and presence. Felicia closed her mouth after she noticed that she had been gaping at the otherworldly sight for the past ten minutes. She felt immensely small all of a sudden. Rather timidly, she put her tank into gear and steered it downwards on an angle. Felicia felt like meeting other people even less now. She ignored the silent bickering and chittering a certain troop of badgers made as they followed in the rough tracks produced by her tank as she cut across field and road.