As the group drew closer to the great wall of System mana, the boat started to slow down. As the boat continued to slow, Alice started to frown. She rushed to the deck of the ship and looked for one of the Immortals. It didn’t take her long to find Ethan’s mother, Myra.

“What’s wrong?” asked Alice. “Why are we suddenly slowing down?”

“We’re saying goodbyes. We’ll be separating from most of the [Sailors] here.”

“Separate from the [Sailors]?” asked Alice. She felt bewildered. Why were they separating from the [Sailors]? Alice had thought the [Sailors] would be coming with them all the way to the System mainframe.

“The mana here is much thicker than anticipated. We had some countermeasures for mana density ready, but there is no way they can hold up under this much mana,” said Myra, before she gestured at the massive wall of mana and System mana in front of them.

Alice squinted at the wall for several seconds, before she managed to single out some of the ‘raw’ mana in the area from the storm of System mana. She quickly realized what Myra meant.

Even without factoring in the System mana, the wall of mana in front of them was so dense that it probably rivalled even the conditions of the western continent. In other words, anyone who wasn’t a Mage and entered this area would undergo a mana baptism. Even enchantments built to ward off mana or isolate the wearer from mana would probably fail here - the mana was so ludicrously dense that it was practically congealing into the air, instead of a thin mist. There were about 150 remaining Illvarian [Sailors], and if the entire ship charged into the cloud of mana, according to the survival statistics for mana baptisms, six would live. Since the System wasn’t assisting people in mana baptisms anymore, the survival rate might even be lower - perhaps not a single [Sailor] would survive entry into the region.

Those that weren’t already Mages and didn’t have some other way to survive mana baptisms, such as a Perk that protected them, needed to stop here.

“How will the [Sailors] get back home?” asked Alice.

Myra glanced at the [Sailors], and Alice saw a mixture of emotions in her face. Sympathy. Pity. Respect.

“They won’t,” said Myra. “Those that came with us on this journey were those who were resolved to die.”

Alice felt her heart thud in her chest as she looked at the [Sailors] on the ship again. She wasn’t a very emotionally perceptive person, so she hadn’t picked up on the subtle, strange atmosphere of the [Sailors] before, but… 

Now that she thought about it, the [Sailors] hadn’t grieved when their comrades fell during the last battle. Nearly a fifth of their friends had died, and they had continued on, as if it were normal. Alice had thought that perhaps this was some sort of manifestation of military discipline, but most of the [Sailors] in Illvaria weren’t members of the military. Illvaria didn’t have a real navy - just [Guards] for [Merchants] and people who had immigrated to Illvaria later in life. Despite that fact, they had soldiered on even better than most militaries from Earth.

She felt a surge of emotions at the thought.

These people weren’t men and women who were resolved to die for Illvaria as a country. They didn’t have years of training and determination to serve their homeland. They had come anyway, with only fragmented knowledge of the truth, in order to give her the best possible chance at succeeding. They had come knowing they would die, and had still done it to give her the best chance of saving the world.

For a moment, Alice wondered if they really had enough information to make this decision. Did they know what she was trying to do? How much had they figured out. Then, Alice realized that the Sigmusi were after her for a reason. Most people had realized she knew more about the situation than she was letting on. Alice simply wasn’t good enough at subterfuge to hide all of the information she was trying to hide.

She looked at the [Sailors] one last time, and committed their faces to her memory. She would remember them.

She turned back towards Myra. “How are we getting to the mainframe if they’re leaving?”

Myra pointed wordlessly at the back of the ship. There, Alice noticed that the seventeen remaining Mages were lowering a small boat off the side of the larger boat. The boat was made entirely of metal, and it was somewhere between the size of a speedboat and a medium-sized apartment. It shimmered with rainbow mana, and Doll was overseeing it.

“What will the [Sailors] on the ship do?” asked Alice, trying to dispel the heaviness in her voice.

“They will divert the Sigmusi for as long as possible,” said Myra. “The Sigmusi don’t have accurate tracking Perks anymore, so there is a chance they might be thrown off our tail if things go well. I don’t really think that will happen, sadly. But they should still be delayed for a time. Hopefully, our destination will have some proper defenses we can activate to deal with them. The more time they can buy, the more time we’ll have to reroute and manipulate the defenses.”

Alice felt her chest tighten a bit, as she took one final look at those who were about to die, and then gave them a respectful nod. She couldn’t do anything else for them… at least for now. If they returned to Illvaria, Alice swore she would do what she could to pay them back - along with the other [Sailors] who had died during this journey. She couldn’t pay the actual people in question back - but if they had families left behind, she would do something for them. If she lived through the journey back to Illvaria after all of this was over, she wouldn’t let their sacrifice be forgotten.

“Thank you,” she said to the [Sailors]. They gave her one final nod, and then the Mages and Doll finished lowered the smaller boat into the water with a plop. Myra went to fetch Ethan, Cecilia, and Allira, before the Illvarian Immortals and the remaining Mages climbed onto the smaller boat via a rope. After the humans got on board, two of Doll’s golems followed them.  They weighed the ship down a bit with their heavy metal bodies - but the boat was clearly built to hold them, if barely. The golems took out several pairs of oars, all enhanced with System mana, and then began rowing, while the [Kinetic Mages] assisted the golems in propelling the boat forward. Without Myra’s Perks to boost its movement speed, the ship’s sailing seemed almost sluggish. It was far from matching its regular speeds - but at the very least, it was still moving forward. Even though Alice knew it was highly unlikely, she hoped that somehow the [Sailors] on the ship could still escape the pursuit of the Sigmusi.

The two ships continued to sail in different directions. Soon, the much larger boat began moving again. It sailed into the distance, quickly leaving Alice’s sight. Five minutes later, the smaller boat also started to slow down. Alice blinked in surprise, only to see that Doll was handing something out to every single [Sailor] of the new ship. To Alice’s surprise one of the [Kinetic Mages] put the cloak on, and instantly disappeared. She tried checking for the [Kinetic Mage] with her regular eyesight, then with her mana sight and her hearing, and found… nothing.

Doll winked at her. “In theory, people wearing this cloak should be invisible even to you. Of course, the Perk making them invisible is pretty limited. If you use too much mana, move too fast, or touch any object that doesn’t have a similar material composition to this boat, the Perk will fizzle out. So be careful.

“On the bright side, the ridiculous limitations also mean the Perk is pretty strong. Wearing the cloak turns the Perk on automatically. The Sigmusi shouldn’t be able to track us, but I want an extra layer of protection or two.”

“Won’t they still notice the boat?”

“Normally they would. However, in this case, the boat itself is also made by me. I designed this one with stealth in mind,” said Doll, before giving the metal boat an affectional knock. “It should be invisible to anyone not sitting on it, once we activate it. It also has a few other protections built it. Hopefully that throws the Sigmusi off of our trail. We’ll use this to creep closer to the mainframe, and to avoid the gaze of both the monsters and the Sigmusi. With any luck, we won’t need to engage directly with the monsters,” said Doll.

Alice nodded, before she grabbed a cloak of her own and put it on. Doll continued distributing her magic cloaks, until all of the humans and golems on the boat were invisible. Then, the boat turned in another direction, and kept moving. Every couple minutes of travel, the boat would change directions again, seemingly at random. Alice realized that the group was still approaching the heart of the wall of mana - but slowly. However, the constant direction changes would probably throw off several different kinds of tracking Perks.

Alice started to feel more and more nervous as the group drew closer to the heart of the mana storm. If the monsters noticed Doll’s boat, the group would be surrounded by enough monsters to outright bury a small town in sheer body mass. The types of monsters in her surroundings were also well beyond Alice’s recognition. None of the monsters she had covered in her monster biology class had interacted much with the stronger monsters of this world, since it wasn’t realistic for a normal student to encounter those monsters in the first place. They only lived in mana-dense regions, and sane people didn’t venture into those unless they were strong.

Alice saw a massive, twelve-headed serpent monster fight and eat a hive-mind school of fish-spiders in one region, while another was dominated by a great fish that was large enough to swallow buildings whole. Another region of the ocean was filled with what seemed to be piranhas, and another had some kind of aquatic ants weaving clouds of poison and flames as they ate each other. Those were the monsters she could still process the existence of - plenty of monsters had physiques that defied description. None of Alice’s expectations and knowledge about biology seemed relevant here. It was as if the world itself had gone utterly and completely mad, with horrors beyond comprehension wrestling with each other for dominance in every drop of water the group moved by. The scene wouldn’t have been out of place in a movie about Eldritch horrors.

The waves cast off by the stronger monster fights alone was nearly enough to capsize the boat. Fortunately, Doll’s boat had some kind of multi-step seatbelt installed, which prevented the group from being tossed around too much. The jolting and bumping was still highly unpleasant, but due to Alice’s [Endurance] stat, she was far more resilient than the average human on Earth. Doll’s value as a [Blacksmith] also proved itself once again, as the boat somehow failed to flip over despite several instances of time where Alice felt it should have flipped over. There was one terrifying moment where a wave nearly as tall as a two-story building loomed over the little boat, but Ethan used a jet of kinetic mana to move the boat out of the way, and most other smaller waves were handled by the boat itself.

The constant, imminent threat of death just from the aftereffects of the monster fights left Alice certain of one thing. If she had come here alone, there was no way she would have survived long enough to reach the System’s mainframe. The monsters here were overwhelmingly powerful monsters that she had no way to contend with, and even the aftershocks of their fights were dangerous to her. On the bright side, Alice knew that the Sigmusi would have just as many problems when they tried to follow them. While it was unlikely to be intentional, the System had a ‘security System’ already installed around it - the monsters in this region would make it very hard for most people to venture this far. Doll’s craftsmanship negated this problem.

About two hours after they began their journey, Alice finally spotted something unusual. In the distance, about thirty or forty meters below the surface of the water, there was a great, shimmering array of rainbow mana. As Alice looked at it, she realized that there were multiple other sides to the great array of rainbow mana. Some parts extended just belowground, on one of the nearby islands. Other parts were situated well below the ocean floor. Most of it still dwelled beneath the surface of the earth, in a place where no light could reach.

Even more importantly, it was familiar. It was just like the ‘snapshot’ of the System Alice had seen long ago.

They had finally located a physical part of the System.

She looked more closely, and realized that her Perk-induced vision of the System had been mostly accurate, but had left some important information out. For one thing, some parts of the System looked surprisingly accessible - they poked out of the ocean floor or nearby islands, almost as if they were designed to be entrances. Alice wondered whether they had always been accessible, or whether water erosion, monster battles, or some other factor had opened these ‘entrances’ up by accident.

Alice also felt a sliver of doubt appear in her mind as she observed the giant array of mana.

Was the System underwater? A big part of the System was situated right beneath the ocean, and it looked like some parts of the System were exposed to the air. If that was the case, logically, the entire System should have been flooded with water. Had the creators of the System accounted for that, or was the group about to enter a giant underwater maze? Or perhaps the System was designed to operate underwater? That was also possible. Proper machinery would have been fried by this much water coursing through their circuitry, but the System was far closer to magic than technology. Perhaps it was fine?

Or perhaps the reason the System was glitching out these days was because it had been flooded?

Alice had no clue what to think. She glanced at where she last remembered Doll sitting, and hoped that Doll could make some kind of knockoff scuba-diving suit if it was needed. She wasn’t sure what kind of time frame Doll needed to make more complex objects, but she hoped it wouldn’t take too long.

She sighed, and pushed that thought aside. She realized that the others on the boat couldn’t see the System with the same level of richness and clarity that she could. They could make more plans once they confirmed the state of the System. Right now, she needed to guide them.

“Aim at that small island - the one with seven trees on the western side,” said Alice. She kept her voice to a whisper, to avoid alerting any nearby monsters, and wished she had access to a proper anti-eavesdropping Perk. Luckily, none of the leviathans in their surroundings noticed the small boat as it passed through their territory. “I think I see a System entrance there.”

The boat made a sharp turn, and began approaching the island in question. Alice kept a wary eye on their surroundings, but nothing disrupted their movement.

Ten minutes later, the group reached the island Alice had indicated, before the group disembarked. Ethan stuffed the boat into his storage Perk, before the group walked closer to the entrance of the System.

Alice swallowed as the group reached the access point she had discovered.

Contrary to Alice’s imagination, it looked like something out of a sci-fi novel. The entrance was a thick metal door, laced with all kinds of mana. Alice suspected that the door might be able to withstand a nuclear explosion - it looked ridiculously sturdy and difficult to enter.

“How do we get in?” asked Ethan. “This metal looks pretty hard to cut through, and it doesn’t respond to electromagnetic mana. I tried to disassemble part of it, and -”

Before Ethan could finish speaking, a new System message appeared. One that Alice had never expected to see.

{Outworlder} Achievement detect@d. Access granted.

The metal doors slid open as Alice blinked in shock.