The world is unfair.
It was something that Ester intuitively understood when he became older and older, and it was something that could be proven by just looking around.
Void below, Ester couldn't help but be forced to understand if he sifted through the surroundings that fell from the sky thanks to the donations made by the line of black boxy Dumpers that continued to visit their planet.
From the wreckages of discontinued industrial grade starships all the way to vehicles of all shapes and sizes, Ester was forced to realize the difference in lifestyles the Exiled previously had before they were sent here.
Especially when it rained down onto him every single day.
Day and night was vague in this place, but since the Dumpers followed a 24 hour cycle with an average deviance of an hour, every time trash rained from the sky, it proved that time passed.
It was hard to miss as well as common household waste items such as plastic bags, toys and broken electronics burnt up in the atmosphere, oftentimes melting together into large chunks of metal and plastic rocks that were liable to break someone's bones if not burn the flesh off of their bones.
'Ahhh I want to kill something.'
Feeling a newfound hatred bloom in his already scorched heart as he stared at the line of dumpers belching out all of their stomach contents onto the already ruined planet, Ester couldn't help but shake his head and refocused back on the task at hand.
Hands on the wheel, Ester's eyes roamed across the rough landscape as he shifted the gears and made the car climb a sharp slope, the rough terrain causing the car that they were in to jolt every so often.
He thought he had gotten used to jolts thanks to the Driller boring through several kilometers of rock and plastic, but that was underground where the only change in elevation came from them purposefully controlling it and the poor quality wheels.
Here, above ground every jolt came from the uneven lumps of plastic rock that had hardened unevenly after splatting onto the ground and giving it a greyish white sheen.
The fact that the quality of the car that they were in was of worse quality than the Driller didn't help and made the journey all the more annoying.
And it seemed that his partner in the backseat agreed with his words as she let an annoyed hiss of air escape from her neck.
Pale skin as white as the skin of a Grunger greeted him when he glanced backwards, a sweaty sheen clinging to her forehead as she absentmindedly wiped it with the hem of her sleeve.
Thin limbs on the verge from suffering from not so mild malnutrition were outlined through the several layers of clothes that she donned on her beautiful self.
Eyebags rested underneath her closed eyes as she irritably clutched the sides of the Runic interface covering her head, the hiss coming out doubly strong now.
With coarse grey hair that ran down to her rather modest chest, metal clung to her face and replaced her jaw and throat, substituting her mouth for a speaker, a food tube and an airway.
That very same material clung to her thighs and legs, substituting for the pair of legs lost by an explosion of insane proportions, the scars from the explosion still clinging to the pale flesh around her thighs in the form of burn marks.
Letting out a hiss of air through her throat for the third time, Ester glanced backwards and couldn't help but open his mouth to speak towards his back seat partner.
"Are you good?"
That backseat partner who went by the name Eva leaned back against the door of the car, her monotone voice somehow coming out strained as she closed her eyes.
[Nope, Runes are a fucking pain.] Eva rubbed her forehead where a headache continued to silently brew. [Remind me why we had to leave behind the computers again? I want to have a reason to hit you.]
Ester rolled his eyes and briefly consulted the map set in between the both of them, turning wheel of the car and bringing it over the crest of a trash hill formed out of what seemed to be a broken semi truck now covered in trash.
"Well it would be because-"
[To slow. Get hit.]
"-they were all broken." Ester finished with an exasperated shake of his head. "Who knew that microelectronics doesn't do well when kinetic forces coming from a Driller flipping upside down being applied to them was bad?"
He rolled his shoulder where the sting from being slapped lingered. "Anyways, do you want a break or something?"
[Oh architects Yes.] Eva let out an annoyed hiss, ripping off the interface covering her head as if it was coated with acid. [My head feels like someone's trying to split it with a jackhammer.]
"No idea how you can stand channeling all those runes for so long." Ester commented, his eyes glancing at the map before driving to an area that was a bit off the road.
[Bitch, even I have no idea how I can stand channeling all these runes for so long.] Eva wet a ragged piece of cloth and folded it, placing the wet cloth over her overheated forehead. [Now if you'll excuse me, my miserable ass is going to sleep off this killer headache.]
"Did you at least locate any rifts we can run through?"
[No, now shut up and drive.]
Shaking his head at Eva's spikiness, Ester nevertheless understood why she was so prickly and irritable.
If Ester was a Warder that dealt with Wards and Glyphs, then Eva was a Channeler that dealt with Ciphers and Runes.
And just as how warding required dedicated tools such as a Glyph Scribe to bring out their full potential, channeling required a dedicated Medium to filter their thoughts through to the machine.
It was still possible to do the both warding and channeling without these two tools, but without a Glyph Scribe or a Medium, the difficulty of doing such things spiked significantly, the risks rising proportionally.
In his case, without a Glyph scribe, Ester would be forced to use to scribe glyphs onto a ward, placing an extraordinary burden on both the tool and the body as his Inner Aether was drawn out to fuel the Glyphs.
He was used to being forced to bleed out his guts every so often when forced to use his Inner Aether, but it wasn't a pleasant sensation.
Channeling was similar if not exactly the same.
Dealing with the areas centered around the mental world instead of the material one, Channeling placed burdens on the mind instead of the body.
In the case that Eva was without a Medium like the broken computers they once had, the interface currently lying on the ground soaked in sweat directed all the data it received from the corresponding device straight into Eva's mind.
Hellishly irritating as she had to mentally parse through all the Runic data the Gravitator sent regarding areas of high Aetheric concentrations, including areas that didn't have high Aetheric concentrations for the rifts that the both of them were looking for.
It certainly didn't help that the Gravitator continually updated the data as they moved, sending entire chunks of the new data and the old data through the interface straight into Eva's mind.
And since the data which floated about in her mind previously sent by the Gravitator didn't just disappear on its own, in addition to receiving new information which bloated her already bloated mind, Eva needed to mentally remove chunks of the info before it mixed with the new data and corrupted it with false positives.
It was all very mentally taxing and wasn't easy on the hardware either, leaving a headache with a side of possible brain damage for the Channeler and a melted heat sink for the hardware.
'And now that I look at it, the Heat sink in the Interface is all melted.'
Glancing back at interface which suddenly began to start smoking slightly, Ester adjusted the intensity of the Respirator resting on his frame and let the thin wisps of smoke escape through the cracked ceiling of the car.
Hearing the white noise of the Respirator fill his ears as it sped up the rate of which it filtered the air, Ester reached to the back and adjusted the knobs on Eva's respirator so that it was filtering out the air at the same rate as his.
As much as he verbalized his hatred for Eva, he still cared enough for Eva to not want her to die from being unable to breath properly.
Feeling the ground shake underneath them as he looked around, Ester eventually spotted a place large enough to accommodate their vehicle from the corner of his eye.
Pulling into the hull of the broken remains of the Starship, Ester let out a long sigh as the car's engine idled in the darkness.
It would be some time before Eva woke up, so in the meantime, he should properly find out why the supposed leader of Ash town gave them this car alongside a map oh so willingly.
It was naive to think that there were no hidden intentions when they gave them a whole damn car for killing a guy that they were more than capable of killing with their guns.
Ester stretched his limbs as his eyes briefly glanced over at Eva before moving to the smoking Interface.
'I should probably replace that before it strains her respirator though.'
+++
TWO CHAPTERS AT THE COST OF MY SANITY
TREEEEEEEEEE