Ba-dum.
I felt my breathing getting heavier the longer I stared down.
Ba-dum.
It was suddenly harder to breathe than it should have been.
Ba-dum.
Hah, shit. I am not a fan of heights.
Not even a little bit. And it was not some irrational fear either. There had been an accident in my past life that had left its mark on me, and that mark had clearly followed me here into this new body, this new world, like unwanted baggage I never agreed to carry.
The fact that I was now floating somewhere above everything with nothing beneath my feet did absolutely nothing to help.
So yeah. I was having a panic attack.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, get me down—!"
Before I could keep going, I felt Virgil's hand rest on my shoulder. I flinched hard.
⌈Are you okay? You do not look so good.⌋
"Yes, I am fine." I lied with a straight smile on my face.
Of course I am not fine! I am currently floating to gods-know-where with no floor to stand on and the nearest solid thing is probably light years away!
⌈Is that so?⌋ By his tone alone it was obvious he did not believe a single word of it.
⌈Regardless, the reason I brought you out here is because I want you to be exposed to the space element and gravity as well, and no place is better for that than space itself. And do not worry, you will not choke or anything like that.⌋
I took a slow, deliberate breath and held it.
That last part was at least somewhat reassuring. At least I was not going to suffocate. Small mercies.
I told myself over and over not to look down.
"Okay, but how exactly am I supposed to do that?" I asked, still very much aware of just how high up we were and just how little was between me and an infinite drop into nothing.
⌈Simple,⌋ Virgil smiled. ⌈you just have to experience gravity.⌋
The moment he said those words, whatever force had been holding me in place disappeared completely. My body went weightless and I started to drift.
"Huh, what is happening?" I asked, the fear creeping back in fast.
⌈Try calling upon your gravity element or your space element to stop yourself.⌋
Then Virgil pushed me.
Not gently either.
I floated away, body slowly spinning in the open void with absolutely nothing to grab onto.
"Wait, Virgil?! What kind of nonsense is this?! How am I supposed to call upon something I have never used before?! I do not even know what it feels like!"
I watched him shrug as the distance between us grew wider and wider. The further I drifted, the paler I could feel my face getting.
⌈I do not know, that is for you to figure out.⌋
"HUHHHH?! VIRGIL, YOU BASTAAAARRRD?!" I screamed as I spun away into the dark.
My stomach dropped again and kept dropping. That horrible helpless feeling, the same one you get when a plane dips suddenly right before landing, washed over me and just sat there. Heavy and suffocating.
I hated that feeling more than almost anything. And now I was not just experiencing it once. I was going to keep experiencing it, endlessly, with no ground in sight and no way to stop myself, spinning like a complete idiot through open space until that man decided he had enjoyed the show long enough.
This deity, I swear.
My vision kept circling around me and I was already starting to feel dizzy on top of everything else. I tried moving my arms to slow the spinning, waving them like that would somehow help. It did absolutely nothing. If anything I think it made it worse.
"Huff, huff." My breathing was ragged and uneven and my heart would not slow down no matter how much I told it to.
This went on for what felt like an eternity. At some point I realized a full hour had probably passed because Virgil's figure was no longer visible in any direction no matter how hard I looked.
I was completely alone out here.
I kept cursing him out under my breath for a while, every name I could think of in every language I knew, until I finally ran out of steam and accepted that it was not helping even slightly.
I needed to calm down. That was the first thing. Then I needed to figure out how to stop myself.
Easier said than done when my heart was still hammering hard against my ribs like it was trying to escape. But I forced myself to slow my breathing first, then my thoughts, working through it one piece at a time.
Okay. Think. From what Virgil said, I probably need to manipulate the gravity acting on my body. Right now I am drifting because of the force from being pushed, and out here the gravity is far weaker than anything on earth. In normal physics terms, I would need an external force acting directly against my current direction of motion to cancel out my velocity. I thought.
I genuinely never expected anything I half-remembered from school to be useful in this lifetime. Or the last one honestly.
But there was nothing around me I could use as an external force. Nothing to push off, nothing to grab. So that approach was out entirely. The only tools I had were the ones inside me. Gravity and space.
I closed my eyes and turned inward. Away from the spinning dark and toward something more familiar.
To the cosmos.
Then I let it go.
The cosmos energy wrapped around my body and the moment it spilled outward and came into contact with open space, it reacted like a flame catching a sudden gust of air. Something shifted inside it. I felt two threads pull at me from somewhere deep within the energy. Two distinct sensations trying to separate themselves from everything else.
Space, which felt solid and immediate, like pressing your hand against a wall and feeling the resistance push back.
And gravity, which was faint. Almost like a whisper from somewhere far away. Which made sense. Out here there was almost nothing generating it in any meaningful way.
I focused on both threads carefully and then, instead of pushing cosmos energy outward any further, I pulled back on it and tried drawing on space energy specifically. A dark purple bled out from my cores and spread slowly across my skin. Something else followed it, a second energy with no color to it at all. Invisible, but I could feel it. Pressing gently against me from every direction at once.
Gravity.
Good. First step done. I can manifest both. Now I need to actually use them. Using gravity, I could create a pull somewhere in front of me so my body starts accelerating toward it. Or I could flip it and push from behind with reverse gravity instead of pulling from the front. Or...
I looked around as I kept spinning and caught sight of a cluster of asteroids sitting off to my left. Big, grey, and most importantly, solid.
Or I could just increase the gravitational pull between me and one of those.
That was it. Simple enough in theory. Getting back to Virgil could wait. Stopping the spinning was the priority right now before I actually threw up out here.
I stretched one hand toward the nearest asteroid and tried to feel out the pull between us, to push on it, to amplify it.
And failed immediately.
"Damn it." I muttered as I spun another full rotation.
It was nearly impossible to hold any kind of focus when my body would not stop rotating in every direction at once. Every time I almost had the feeling, it slipped away.
I gritted my teeth, stretched both arms out this time to try and balance myself even slightly, and poured mana into it.
Slowly, something started to happen. I felt the spinning begin to lose speed, just a little at first, then more noticeably as the pull between me and the rock grew stronger and more stable.
"It is working! Come on, just a little more." I said out loud to absolutely no one.
I pushed more mana into it, steady and controlled, until the spinning stopped completely and my body finally held still in the void. Just floating, no longer tumbling.
I let out a breath that felt like it had been stuck in my chest for an hour.
"Thank god. A few more seconds of that and I genuinely would have thrown up. Though I am not even sure if that is physically possible out here and honestly I do not want to find out."
My trajectory shifted as the pull kept working. The asteroid was drawing me in now at a steady pace, picking up gradually. I could have made it faster but that would have ended with me hitting solid rock at speed and I had already come too far to die on an asteroid, so I kept it slow and controlled.
After a few minutes my feet finally touched the surface and the moment they did I let myself drop straight down and hugged the ground like it was the most precious thing in the entire universe.
Which, right now, it genuinely was.
"I never thought I would be this happy to feel something flat beneath me."