met free Chapter 198: STARTING POINT
Chapter 198: STARTING POINT
[Circle Base — Main Room — 6:42 PM]
The room was too crowded for its size.
Alex in a chair. Grim on his shoulder. The three lights on his chest — crimson, violet, gold — low but present. 19,800 HP and the blood he had spat at the entrance already cleaned from the cobblestone but still in the memory of everyone who had seen it.
Emily to his right. Kira standing by the wall. Maya in the opposite chair with her notebook open and the map of Imperial City spread on the table even though no one needed it anymore.
Raven by the window looking at the street. Seraph at the end of the table. Jessica beside her with a new notebook.
Max in the center of the room with his arms crossed and the expression of someone who had spent four hours processing what had happened in the plaza and had reached a conclusion.
"You need to leave the continent."
No one answered.
"Not tomorrow." Max. "This week. The sooner the better."
Viktor from the back:
"Agustín will close the main ports in forty‑eight hours. They’ll already be working on it — the Temple has influence over the port authorities of the three large ports." A pause.
"But there’s one they don’t directly control."
"The south port," said Max.
"Registered as a minor fishing port. No permanent Temple presence. No Fragment verification system." Viktor. "And the Circle has had a boat there under a false name for two years."
Alex looked at him.
"What did you have it for?"
"For exactly this." Max didn’t change expression. "It’s not the first time someone has needed to leave quickly."
"Wow, you adapted fast in these weeks, Max." Alex praised him with a smile.
Max smiled.
"Thanks. It was the least I could do to help you in some way." He looked down. "I know I can’t reach the same level as you, but I’ll train to be more useful."
---
Seraph spoke from the end of the table.
"The Eastern Island."
The room looked at her.
"That’s where we need to go." She said it as data, not as a proposal. "I’ve had a map of Fragment locations for fifteen years. The Eastern Island has an X I haven’t been able to verify because no one crosses the ocean without a reason that justifies the crossing." A pause. "Now there’s a reason."
"What’s there?" asked Emily.
"I don’t know for sure." Seraph. "The map says there’s something. The records I found ten years ago point to ruins inland. Nothing more specific."
"How long does the crossing take?" Jessica with her notebook ready.
Seraph looked at Max.
Max looked at Viktor.
Viktor considered the question honestly.
"It depends on the wind. On the currents. On what we find on the way." A pause. "Two months if all goes well. Four if it doesn’t."
Jessica noted: *two to four months — variable depending on oceanic factors.*
"And if we find something worse than ’not well’?" asked Raven without turning from the window.
"The ocean has its own rules." Max. "You’ll learn them as you go."
Raven didn’t answer.
---
[Circle Base — Rooms — 9:15 PM]
The team prepared what they were taking.
There wasn’t much. Alex’s team were not people who accumulated possessions — weeks of dungeons and operations taught them to carry only what they could use. But there were things they needed to inventory before boarding something that would last two months at best.
Kira in her room with the bow disassembled on the bed.
Every piece checked. Every string verified. The arrows counted — eighty‑four standard, twelve enchanted, six unenchanted backups. The enchanted ones checked one by one with Predator’s Sense active, reading the state of each enchantment.
She put everything away.
She opened her backpack.
She packed everything again in the exact order she always packed it.
---
Maya in the common room with three maps spread out simultaneously.
The map of Imperial City.
The map of the territory between the city and the south port.
And one she had bought two weeks ago at a Circle geographical information stall — the only commercial map of the ocean that existed on the main continent, imprecise at the edges but useful as a reference.
Akari on the ocean map with her paws tucked and her golden eyes looking at the lines representing currents.
Maya moved her carefully.
Akari returned to the same spot.
"You’re not helping by being there."
Akari didn’t move.
Maya worked around her.
---
Emily in the base’s small interior garden — the only green space in the building, three meters by two, with the plants she had brought from Veltharr and kept alive throughout her time in Imperial City.
She looked at them.
Not with the expression of someone taking inventory. With the expression of someone making a decision.
The ocean. Two months minimum. No solid ground. No soil. Without the conditions the mountain plants needed to survive.
Emily knelt down.
She removed the roots carefully — those that could survive in a small pot, those with compact roots. Four out of twelve. The other eight she left in the interior garden.
The four in their smallest pots.
She put them in her backpack.
---
Raven in the corridor with Army of Bones completely dissolved — the skeletons in a latent state, F3 at rest, the spectral crow inactive.
She looked at her hands.
No weapon. No skeletons.
She thought of something she wasn’t going to tell anyone.
She went back to her room.
---
The question came in the hallway between the rooms.
Raven passing by the room where Alex was checking the status of the three Fragments with Seraph.
She stopped.
"Do skeletons float?"
Seraph looked at her.
Alex looked at her.
Raven waited for the answer with the same expression she used to ask anything.
"Bones are denser than water," said Seraph. "It depends on the size and the type of bone."
"F3 can compensate for density with active energy." Raven. "How much effort does it take to keep skeletons underwater while moving?"
"I don’t know." Seraph. "I don’t know if anyone has ever tried Army of Bones in the ocean."
Raven processed that.
"Good." She left.
Jessica in the doorway with her notebook.
She noted: *Army of Bones in ocean environment — first test pending.*
---
[Dock — 11:30 PM]
The Circle’s boat at the end of the south dock.
Designed for four people, adjusted for nine with the modifications Viktor had ordered in the last hours. The cabins small. The deck with enough space to move but not much more.
Max and Viktor supervising the loading.
Alex at the end of the dock.
Grim on his shoulder — the 80cm form, the crimson flames looking at the water.
The ocean started here, technically, though what was visible from the south port was still the inner bay.
The real ocean started ten kilometers south, where the bay opened up and the horizon disappeared.
**"Master."**
"What."
**"The ocean has its dead too."**
Alex looked at him.
The crimson flames were calm. Not threat‑evaluation mode. Just an observation.
**"Many."**
Alex looked at the bay water. The spiritual signature that Soul Sight was starting to read even from here — layers and layers of something ancient at the bottom, deeper than any dungeon he had entered, denser than any spiritual plane Emily had described on land.
"Is that a problem?"
**"No."** His flames. **"It’s an opportunity."**
---
[South Port — 5:20 AM]
Dawn arrived before the team had slept enough.
It didn’t matter.
The boat left with the first light — the bay calm, the north wind pushing the sails south, the main continent falling behind on the horizon with the slow speed of large things moving away.
Imperial City still visible from the stern — the towers of the Celestial Temple among the buildings, the plaza where the blood of the four Inquisitors still stained the cobblestone though the Temple’s cleaners had probably already washed it away.
The team on deck.
No one spoke for a while.
The main continent grew smaller.
Emily looked ahead — south, the open ocean, what was coming.
Kira with Predator’s Sense active reading the horizon.
Maya with the open‑ocean map, her finger following the route Viktor had marked.
Seraph with her eyes on the water. Jessica beside her with her notebook closed for the first time in days.
Alex with Grim on his shoulder.
Raven at the stern.
Looking back.
One second.
The main continent. The city. The towers.
Cael somewhere on that continent with Davan unconscious in his arms and Agustín without an answer for the young Inquisitor who was still waiting for instructions.
Raven turned around.
She faced south.
The boat continued.....
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Exxs’s Note: Thanks to everyone who’s been reading this book up to this Chapter. For those of you reading it when it first came out, or who might read it later, we’re already close to Chapter 200, and as you can see, we’ve practically finished the Celestial Academy arc and are about to begin a new arc that I actually came up with on the spot, but it’s inspired by an anime you might already know. Thanks for reading, and goodbye 🫂