"A medium-sized airship, lost half a month ago, no one knows what happened on it, the last telegram sent back to the ground was a series of pleas for help saying that the flight attendants had gone crazy and were shooting at the passengers wildly with their firearms, the first half of the message was quite normal, the second half turned into a series of nonsensical characters, it looked like a very urgent situation, and then finally no word came back. "
In the cramped jet glider cockpit, a huddled Holy Gun spoke to Eleazar.
Witcher, who was also curled up on his knees, narrowed his eyes and looked ahead.
"Is that the one in front?"
In the overcast sky, under a thick layer of clouds, a narrow oval thing loomed up in the occasional flashes of electricity, floating like a ghost traveling slowly through the air, without any signal lights.
With increased horsepower, the jet glider, which had climbed several more knots in speed, quickly approached the airship, and then Eleazar, under the guidance of the Holy Guns, flicked up his flare to shine it down the side of the hull.
"The Croft, yes, that's the airship!"
The small airplane, blown up and down by the strong air currents, struggled to approach the blimp.
Through the transparent cabin door above his head, Eleazar saw a propeller spinning so hard that he couldn't see the shadow, spinning frantically just above their heads.
Retracting his gaze to the side again, Gahn maneuvered quickly around the sophisticated and intricate cockpit.
Within a moment, several probing claws catapulted out of the side, holding the two flying carriers firmly in place, and as the rotors twisted, they came closer and closer together.
Right before his eyes their wing was about to collide with the blimp, Garn said with a sigh of relief as he pressed stop on the retracting rope:
"Okay, we can go over."
The hatch then opens and a gust of wind rushes in, Witcher, finally able to stretch his body, stands up fearlessly at tens of thousands of meters in the air.
Without much in the way of tools, the two men, who were Transcendents, set out on the most thrilling of air dives with only a parachute on their backs.
This is the first time Eleazar has set foot on an airboat, by way of stowaway.
Shattering a window, the two men who had climbed like geckos on the hull of the boat quickly dug in, then copied what was at hand to plug the relief vent.
"Rumble--"
The hull of the boat all seemed to tilt at that instant.
It was only when Eleazar finally used his dragon's breath to burn the metal red that it was completely blocked.
"Whew!" Garn breathed a sigh of relief and stomped hard on the floor beneath his feet.
"Finally caught up, this airship has no idea how much fuel it has left and could crash at any time like a dropship."
Sensing the anomalies around him, Eleazar asked, "So you know how to fly an airship?"
"Slightly."
Sacred Gun, who was also examining the situation, let out an exclamation.
"This world is changing so fast..."
"Whereas the skies used to be dominated by only a few species, now even ordinary people with no abilities can dabble in them."
Eleazar narrowed his eyes, only to find the interior of the airship very similar to the architecture he had seen in the steam cellar.
There was nothing wrong with the cargo hold, and then they found the upward access opening.
"Did you sense anything?"
Garn looked up at the hatch that was dripping blood through the cracks.
A pair of empty pupils lifted, and in that colorless world, Eleazar watched as the ceiling had fine dust that continued to vibrate down with the footsteps above.
"Blood, corpses, empty shells, malignant spirits..."
Garn's eyes widened, "Are you saying that after those passengers died, their bodies were taken over by another consciousness?"
"Uh-huh!"
"When will these evil things die out!"
Cursing, Garn pushed open the hatch and quickly jumped up.
Eleazar then follows and then looks down a corridor that resembles a guest room level, at several bodies crawling on the floor.
It seemed to be the reason for not adapting to the human body structure, the limbs were bizarrely folded back in various ways, the dark veins on the surface of the body bulged out, and the eyes were completely pitch black.
"This is... Spirit of the Void!"
The well-informed Sacred Gun quickly recognized the disaster that had erupted here.
And Eleazar is still pondering what transcendent power caused this.
"It's someone contaminated by a star core!"
Gahn raised his gun and was just about to fire the beam when he saw Witcher rush up and kill the infected first.
[Magic potion residue: 1205→1201]
Shaking the black blood from his silver sword, Eleazar turned around.
"How many passengers does this airship have?"
Garn thought about it for a moment, and returned with a bit of uncertainty, "Medium-sized, usually no more than 500 people..."
"I'll get busy then."
The two then went their separate ways, with the Transcendent Event-experienced St. Guns going off to find the source, and Witcher going off to clean up the Starcore infected.
The airship carried only half its passenger load.
[Residual magic potion: 1201→980]
After a long time, Eleazar, carrying his silver sword, returned to the airboat meeting place that was littered with corpses.
It was a lavish venue with a red cloth floor, flowers and all sorts of fine ornaments, several white-clothed tables, wine and food, and a show to watch.
Garn said quietly, "There was a collection auction going on here ..."
A statue whose entire body was cast from gold tipped over on the stand, the huge golden body broken from it, cracks all over its body.
But this wasn't their goal, and bypassing the golden statue, the two walked in behind the stage curtain.
An unidentified sphere that hadn't had time to be pulled out and displayed, with an uneven surface that looked like a virus enlarged a million times over, was grayish-white in color.
This rather collectible-looking thing was the core of some large void creature, filled with polluting forces from the void.
Somehow activated, as they got closer, the star core kept releasing fluctuations that made the air shake, and the closer they got the stronger the shockwave became.
But that didn't stop the two Transcendents from advancing as they both used their respective abilities to resist the powerful knockback.
Arriving near the sphere with considerable difficulty, Garn intended to simply destroy the material, which was already in an unstable state.
Eleazar looked at it with a pang of regret, but he wouldn't be able to deal with this kind of material, and even more so, he didn't want to risk including it in a space crystal.
Taking the three sacred crystals handed to them by Garn, they intended to embed the sacred energy into the sphere.
But just then, Eleazar, who had endured the baptism of the Evil God, seemed to vaguely understand a bit of the Void language.
"Kill them ..."
In the whispers that were hidden in the shockwave, he heard the thought that Starcore wanted them to die together.
Eleazar quickly craned his head to give Holy Guns a dangerous look.
Garn's eyes widened slightly and he immediately snapped out of it, then flashed backward as a stream of light.
Eleazar was ready to pull back as well, but just then the strong repulsive force suddenly turned into a black hole-like attraction, and he was sucked through without standing still, only having time to raise his hands to brace himself against the sphere.
"Witcher!!!"
The Holy Guns in the background, struggling to stabilize their bodies, were horrified to see Eleazar's hands slowly sinking into the star core.