[Voidknight Ascension] Chapter 170 – The Giving Pyramid

Kale took the first watch as he huddled closer to the fire. The sleeping forms of his friends and allies were dark shapes in the night. So much had happened in such a short time that he didn’t know what to make of it.

The night air was cold, and the group had once again lost what homes they had managed to erect. Small sad huts and lean-tos that were easily destroyed by the swarm of creatures that came during the night.

Thankfully, ever since they were attacked by those strange red-armored zealots, Kale’s group had begun camping in a more defensible location and keeping watch.

It sucked, especially on long cold nights like this, but it was important and had saved their lives multiple times already.

Kale often found himself looking at the new people who joined them. They had more than enough armor, weapons, and even food from the people that had been so hellbent on killing them.

Still not sure what that was all about, Kale thought to himself.

One of the forms shifted and Kylie propped herself up on her elbows, looking at him.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked her in a low voice.

She shook her head.

Kale patted the ground beside him. Kylie shrugged out of the tattered sleeping bag to come sit beside him. She looked up at him. “We should get rid of it,” she said without preamble.

Kale had been expecting this. After they had turned the tables on those crimson-armored bastards, the group had found something on their Skyshard.

There were no survivors. All the men and women who Kale had hoped came in peace were fighters to the last. The few that they found on their Skyshard were foaming at the mouth to wet their blades with their blood and had to be put down.

It saddened Kale, even though they had found a great deal of useful items on their Skyshard. No doubt it was taken from other people, but among the treasures was a stone that gave an unsettling sensation the closer you came to it.

Shaped like a pyramid with carvings covering every inch of its purple surface, the thing had simply moved from the aggressor’s Skyshard to Kale’s one night.

Nobody had moved it, that much was sure. Even Kale with the highest Strength among the group at nearly 150 was not able to budge it.

The damn thing just appeared one day, and nobody liked to go near it. Some people complained about bad dreams when they slept near it, so they had moved farther away.

Kylie believed it attracted monsters. She wasn’t alone in that thought.

“If we could get rid of it, we would,” Kale told her. “We’ve already tried, you know this.”

“Maybe we could move onto the attached Skyshard and leave then?” she offered.

That had been discussed too.

“And what if it appears on that Skyshard now that we’ve claimed it as our base?” Kale asked. “It’s half the size of our Skyshard, we’d be within range of it at all times.”

Kylie wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

Nobody liked being near it.

While there was no sound coming out of it, there was nevertheless the unsettling sensation that somebody was talking just out of earshot. Sometimes Kale thought he could hear strange whispers and muttering just beyond his ability to hear.

Kylie, with her high Awareness, had said she couldn’t hear anything more than he could.

Chris, however, could. Kale didn’t like the implications that Insight allowed him to hear what Awareness couldn’t. Chris had heard what he called “scratching sounds like when your dog is on the other side of the door and trying to get in,” but far fainter.

He heard it anywhere within 10 yards of the tiny pyramid.

And that wasn’t all.

People had begun arriving at their Skyshard as it drifted on whatever amounted for currents in this crazy shattered world.

In ones and twos, sometimes as many as four, tiny Skyshards that were little more than a chunk of floating rock brought bedraggled people to their shores.

Simon had wanted to turn them away, but their home was effectively a democracy, and the vote was to let them stay.

The taciturn young man hadn’t liked it, but he was the one who had set it up like that.

Kale chalked it up to buyer’s remorse.

Speaking of Simon, he had become more reserved the more people there were around. Kale had a hard time trusting him, despite the fact that he clearly saved his life.

The only oddity was Simon’s obsession with “testing” every person that arrived. It was harmless enough, and Kale was able to disguise it as a sort of initiation once the people who came were fed and watered.

Most of them were half-dead when they arrived and one of the items the crimson armored people had was a clay pot that seemed to have a never-ending supply of food and another for water.

The items were clearly magical and, much like the pyramid, had simply transferred to their island one night.

Nobody could move them, and though there wasn’t a soul that dared to try, Kale strongly suspected that they couldn’t be destroyed either.

In fact, he was beginning to think that they were tied to the pyramid somehow.

If that had been all the strangeness, perhaps he could have left it at that, but the Skyshard seemed to… move on its own.

Sure, they all did that at times, but this seemed deliberate.

Day by day, the strange dark shape on the horizon loomed closer and closer. It looked like a pillar for the heavens themselves. It was larger than any skyscraper Kale had ever seen or heard about. It made the mountains back on Earth look like anthills.

And they were clearly making their way to it.

“It’s calling to people,” Kylie said in a hushed tone. “You know it’s true. There’s absolutely no way all these people have managed to just ‘stumble’ upon us. I’m not buying it.”

Kale nodded and looked at the nearly twenty people spread out in huddled shapes around the low-burning campfire. “And is that so bad? We have food, water, and with more numbers, we’re safer than before. I only need to take an hour or two a night of watching. Would you prefer to go back to four hours?”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Kylie hissed. She pulled up her legs until she could rest her chin on her knees. “It’s… odd. And you can’t tell me that you aren’t bothered by that storm.”

Kale forced himself to turn to the side. Through the trees, even at night, he could see the strange storm off the portside of the Skyshard.

Green lightning lanced through black, swirling clouds that blotted out the light of the stars on the distant horizon. It looked like a terrible place, like the center of a blender on a cosmic scale.

“We’ve been slowing down ever since it came into view,” Kylie told him.

With her insanely high Awareness, Kale didn’t doubt her. She spent more time scouting and making sure their Skyshard was free of opportunistic monsters than anybody else.

It was almost ironic that her accuracy was so bad considering how good her Awareness was. But she refused to change her stats. She preferred quantity over quality, and who was Kale to tell her otherwise?

Her [Storm of Arrows] had saved his ass more times than he could count by now. It was an excellent area denial attack that was on par with anything Chris’ magic could put out.

“What can we do about it, though?” Kale brought up yet again.

If they were, as Kylie thought, circling the drain, what were their options? A small Skyshard would just get sucked in twice as fast and even then, they had no way to direct themselves.

Instead of answering, she said, “Have you heard from that ghost woman?”

Kale shook his head. He almost regretted telling her about Raiko and her telling him that Sam was alive and well.

It had given hope to his friends—and indeed, to himself—but it was now a constant question on Kylie’s mind. Was Sam abandoning them? Were they ever going to see him again?

They had grown up together. Had been through more shared trauma than four people ought to, but now that everything was different, maybe Sam had decided he was in his element and didn’t need to be dragged down.

Not that Kale thought his best friend would do that.

Never.

But he could see the insidious thoughts worming their way into Kylie’s and Chris’ minds. After so long without hearing anything about him, there seemed to be only two options.

Either Sam was dead, or he wasn’t able to come get them.

The latter seemed most obvious to Kale. If falling hundreds of feet with probably less than 100 HP and fighting a golem couldn’t put Sam in the ground, nothing could.

Besides, they couldn’t steer their own Skyshard. Who could say that Sam could?

“No,” Kale told her. “I haven’t heard anything. But you know that doesn’t mean anything. If we can’t control where we’re going, neither can he.”

“But we’re all traveling on the same currents,” Kylie argued. “Eventually, we’ll end up at the same place, right?” She leaned in closer. “How many billions of people did Earth have, Kale? How come we’ve hardly seen a hundred people? And that was including the starting island!”

“Keep your voice down,” Kale said, watching some of the forms shift and move from the sound of her voice. “I don’t know, Kylie. Neither do you, and the same goes for anybody else.”

The number one question everybody asked when they arrived was if they had seen this or that friend, family, or acquaintance. Then it became questions about if they had any information about where they were, what had happened to Earth, and if there was any food or water.

It seemed every other day a group of people arrived. They didn’t say how they knew to come, or even that they did. They simply saw another Skyshard, and theirs seemed to be drawn to it.

Kale strongly suspected the pyramid.

“It calls itself a ‘Key’ Kale. What if it’s like that Marker thing from that one game with all the dead bodies?”

“Nobody seems to be going crazy,” Kale said, trying to mentally block the images that played across his mind’s eye. That was just what they needed. Some artifact that turned people into killer zombies.

He had examined the thing as well and saw the same as everybody else. It mentioned that it was stolen, not won, and that it was a [First Layer Key]. Very little information besides that.

Like everybody else, Kale only visited it long enough to get food and water for the others. Most people couldn’t even get that close.

Kale watched the storm rage off the portside of the Skyshard, unable to tear his eyes away. He wanted to tell himself that his eyes were playing tricks on him, but he swore that the storm was getting closer.

That was what he hoped it was, at least. Because he wondered if the damnable pyramid was calling it like it called the new arrivals. He wasn’t alone in that thought, but as he had told Kylie, what could they do?

There weren’t any airships or planes that they could take to leave, they were stuck on this Skyshard and had to defend it to the death. But what could you do against a malevolent storm that pulled your home them into its grasp like a black hole?

And so Kale kept his mouth shut about his suspicions because they weren’t productive. Everything he did needed to serve a purpose. They didn’t even have homes. Every time they built anything remotely improved, monsters came and wrecked up the joint.