“Heavy lead, radioactive isotopes, mercury compounds… every toxic material possible. No way a living soul could even come close to this place.”
Arkadin drifted awkwardly as he examined the planet from a safe distance. It was a very small planet, probably closer in size to a moon. Even from here, the amount of radiation was enough to cause immediate cellular decay. A mortal being would already be bleeding from every orifice, and, frankly, Arkadin wasn’t feeling that great. Still, he needed to concentrate on the task at hand.
Inside this toxic hellhole was a network of tunnels that criss-crossed the underneath of the surface. The tunnels were not naturally made, they just seemed to be a random maze, with no real rhyme or reason to their creation. Not only that but the tunnels were rather small, most of them no more than three metres wide in diameter. And every single tunnel was flooded with a strange, incredibly runny liquid that Arkadin was pretty sure was made from decomposing radioactive isotopes, propane and maybe a hint of water. A single spark could easily cause the whole planet to light up.
Worse, Arkadin was completely alone here. He had zero communication with anyone. All he had was a single small device, that would signal to Epani once he was about to snuff out the centre of the moon, where a black dwarf supposedly lied. Supposedly, as Arkadin wasn’t completely sure what to expect. He trusted Epani’s information, but this was the Heart of Kinisis they were talking about, nothing was certain.
Still, Arkadin had a job to do. He needed to get to the planet’s core, and as soon as possible. The longer Arkadin took, the higher the chance that he or Epani could get caught. As far as Arkadin was aware, Yisini and Kairos had no idea about Epani’s plan, and all it took would be for Kairos to swing by and spot Arkadin’s presence, raise the alarm and ruin the whole plan. Arkadin wasn’t supposed to be there, he was supposed to be in his little apartment quadrillions of miles away.
With a sigh, Arkadin made his way down to the planet’s surface, scanning it for an opening. He didn’t make contact with the ground, doing his best to keep himself as discreet as possible, not to mention the fact that the ground was mostly made of flakes and shards of metal. The levels of radiation were even more intense, causing visible waves of greenish blue energy to ripple across the surface. The atmosphere was nonexistent. Luckily, there were plenty of openings. The question was, how many of them were dead ends?
Arkadin approached the first hole he saw, then delicately dipped his finger into the fluid. He inspected it, then sighed again. This was not going to be easy. The plan was to become phantasmic, ghost-like, and simply float through the liquid and tunnels, straight towards the planet’s core, the consistency of the liquids and the makeup of the planet meant Arkadin would have to do so completely blind. Which also meant he’d have to go incredibly slowly, using time as a way of measuring his journey rather than distance. He was tempted to blindly teleport himself inside at a set distance, but he had no real idea how large the core of the planet was, and didn’t want to simply teleport into something that was so dense, it would easily crush parts of Arkadin’s body.
“Alright… The plant is about a thousand kilometres in diameter, meaning about 500km to the planet’s core, but I’ll have to stop a bit outside that… Ugh, this is going to take a while…”