11 Fall

Lokus chided himself as he walked. How had he forgotten something like that? Had his encounter with the demon shocked him that much?

Maybe, but Lokus wasn't a fan of excuses. No amount of pushing the blame onto people or circumstances would change the fact that he had just wasted hours of his own time all because he had forgotten that he needed to unleash his Domain.

'That's a good spot,' he thought, eyeing a particular point on the side of the road that was far enough away from the city to be largely left alone, but not too far as to be unsafe. 'I'll sit here and-.'

BOOOOOM!

Lokus was thrown forward, earning himself a mouthful and eyeful of dirt as the earth quaked underneath him like a bucking dragon.

 Dust and dirt were kicked up into the air, obscuring everything in a haze of brown and preventing him from seeing more than a few feet in front of himself even after rubbing the dirt out of his eyes.

He struggled and failed to stand while the ground continued to rumble and rock him like a boat in a storm, feeling like a toddler trying to learn how to walk as he fell again and again. It was infuriating.

It was at least ten minutes before the earthquake passed, and another five minutes of feeling around in the brown before the dust settled and he could see again.

What he saw, or rather, what he didn't see, left him wide-eyed with shock.

The city, that towering monument of human ingenuity and adaptability even in hell itself, was nowhere to be seen. In its place, a gargantuan hole, kilometers long, stood. Even from so far away, Lokus could tell it extended down far deeper than it was wide, a bottomless chasm reminiscent of a hungry god's gaping mouth.

Another, similar hole was just barely visible over the horizon, but Lokus was much more concerned with the first.

'All those people…'

What a cruel trick of fate, to so callously snuff out so many lives. There had been families, livelihoods, and children in that city, but the universe had swept it all away with all the fanfare of a breeze blowing out an already dying candle.

But Lokus' shock would soon be renewed, as the ground shuddered once again and cracks raced across the grassy floor around him.

With a deafening sound, the ground opened up underneath him, and he began to fall.

...…

SPLASH!

Lokus' long, long fall was suddenly interrupted by a collision with some kind of liquid. He opened his eyes after having instinctively closed them during the impact, but his surroundings were pitch black.

'I must have fallen for at least four kilometers.'

But if that was the case, how did he survive? No liquid he knew of would be able to remove the lethality of such a fall, and he doubted his Endurance stat was great enough for such a feat.

He kicked his feet, intending to surface and find dry land, but he didn't move.

With a frown, he tried again, only to face the same result.

He was stuck.

Lokus forced his panic down as best he could, knowing that it wouldn't help him here. But despite his best efforts, his chest still constricted and his heartbeat became erratic a looming sense of dread took root in his mind.

'Think, think, think,' he thought. It had to have something to do with how he had survived the fall. This liquid, whatever it was, was robbing him of his ability to move.

So then, how did he leave its watery embrace when he couldn't move?

Thinking of a solution while simultaneously stifling one's panic was not an easy thing to do, and every idea he tossed aside only made his brain foggier, his lungs tighter, and his panic grow.

Lokus attempted to take a deep breath to calm himself, only to forget that he was in whatever this liquid was and gain a mouthful of it for his troubles. He choked and gagged, which only made it worse, and it took every ounce of his willpower to calm himself down.

'What am I supposed to do?' he thought. He couldn't move, he couldn't breathe, he could hardly think at this point. The deafening silence and infinite darkness that surrounded him left him fully aware of the drum-like pounding of his own heart.

What could he do? He had no tools at his disposal, except for…

His Frost.

But would it work? He didn't have any other choice. It HAD to work.

Lokus did his best to ignore his light-headedness and pulled from his Sovereign Gateway. Waves of cold began to radiate out from him as he activated Freezing Aura, and true to its name, it started to solidify the liquid around him.

Not by much at first, but the room-temperature liquid slowly dropped to something even he could feel with his Frost affinity, and this time when he kicked his feet and swung his arms, he moved.

Not because the drop in temperature made the liquid less viscous, but because with the constant cold Lokus was pumping out, the liquid was too busy trying to rob the momentum of the freezing waves to rob all of Lokus' momentum from him.

It was still only slighter easier than swimming through gelatin, and his limbs burned under the strain, but soon…

"Pwah!"

Lokus was overwhelmed with relief as he flopped onto the rocky ground with a wet slap. He looked up above at where he fell from, his chest bouncing up and down as he took one massive gulp of air after another.

His surroundings were so dark that he couldn't even see his hand in front of himself, but up there, miles above where he lay now, was the faintest pinprick of light. It was the only sign of the surface, and to Lokus, it felt so, so far away.

'No use in moping around,' he thought as he sat up and crossed his legs. 'Let's hope my Domain is enough to see in this place.'

Closing his eyes, he cast his senses inward.