With the mission complete, everyone paused to rest. They were wounded, spent, and exhausted. But nobody had any crippling injuries and nobody died. The group steamrolled an outpost and left no survivors. The Endless Hive would take days to find out the camp had been wiped.
And then, if nothing else changed, the Hive's reaction would be to send double or triple the forces lost to secure the position and search for the attackers.
They needed to push the offensive, cause distractions, and wipe out other camps. Because if they retreated now, they would point the Endless Hive toward their secure valley passage.
But the rewards. Oh. The rewards. Everybody but Biscuit gained between a couple to several percentile points of advancement. Freddy and Veronica, the only two still at one star, grew so much they needed to gather essence to convert the Aura into advancement.
They moved to a nearby spot where a cliff blocked one of the sides.
*
*
Robert kept the first watch during their afternoon rest as he didn't need to sleep in the real world. Biscuit would stay away for the entirety of the next day, to keep anyone scrying on the attack group from detecting him. In a day and some, any peeping Toms would reveal themselves.
His Minotaurs were fine but their suits of armor took severe punishment. Between Noah and Robert, they could fix most of it and bring the units back to a semblance of working order but they were more valuable as they were.
When a Taulusian named Bosco came to take the second watch, Robert hopped back to the arcology and swapped the three damaged sets for brand-new ones. The material engineers at the HQ could study the broken suits of armor to improve the design.
While running simulations and having experienced people spar to do damage was good (and expensive), they could never compare to the chaotic and deadly environment of a real battle. How blows interacted, how they hit the weak points, and so on. Even without being an employee, Robert still had a contract to field test the suits of armor.
If Samson was one of those medieval kingdoms, he would be. what? Prince consort? No, that was for the Queen's lover.
In any case, he lost his job but kept his work but lost the wages.
And they didn't matter anymore because he made a billion dollars during his vacation. Even if half of his current net worth was stolen goods.
*
*
Taulusian nights were very, very weird. And ducking bright. First, the sun sets. The planetary ring remains bright as the planet's shadow slowly covers it. The ring was completely dark only at midnight and that depended on the month of the year. During the summer, the upper band remained lit. And during the winter, it was dimmer because the sun was in the other hemisphere. But the ring was not solid so some light filtered through.
Then the moons. The world had eight big tidally-locked moons and dozens of smaller ones. Even during the day, you could see a few of them in the sky but at night? It was like some kid went wild with the glitter. Though all that light pollution stole a lot of shine from the stars.
Biscuit had urged everyone to move. They couldn't afford to spend an idyllic night under the bright alien sky. Not when the Endless Hive could find the camp and let loose the hordes.
They went to the next camp, this one more entrenched than the previous one due to being older. The Hive never stopped working, adding, improving. And, most of all, expanding.
Despite that, the plan changed little. They knew about the tunnels and were ready for that. They also changed tunnel assignments. Amanda would stay near the Taulusian guerrillas to support them with her plants. Veronica, Noah, and Caroline moved closer to Amanda to reduce the distance people had to move to get healed.
Robert would not defend a tunnel mouth. Instead, he was to fly around and zap any entrance that was being overwhelmed with his void lance.
*
*
The second time around, the massacre felt less gruesome and more mechanical. More like a chore and less like slaughter. The human mind - perhaps all sentient minds - rapidly adapted to repulsive things. The garbagemen got used to the smell of garbage, and the surgeon became unphased by blood.
What they were doing was a bit of each. Until it wasn't. Some tunnels stopped pouring monsters. It remained like that for a few minutes, when Noah barked.
"Retreat! All units gather in the center and move toward the extraction point. Robert, let the Minotaurs take the front line!"
Seconds after Noah gave that warning, Robert's danger sense flared. He senses that the ground would open up and swallow some of his comrades. He burned his essence reserves and placed two-star horizontal walls of Force over where it was about to breach.
The four Minotaurs lined up as Amanda set her bean Gatlings to fire upon sensing movement. The humans ran and the Taulusians walked along paying attention to the battle.
The sound of glass scraping against glass rang, sharp, loud, and painful. Robert's walls of Force were attempting to resist an enemy Force effect.
Robert's spatial senses told him what it was. A couple of massive pill bugs the size of a large bus were trying to push their way through the invisible walls. And they were winning.
Keep moving!" Robert shouted.
Unchallenged, the monsters poured out of the tunnels and rushed at the invaders. The Minotaurs turned into a blender of blades, showering not-really-bug body parts and gore everywhere. But the four monsters could cover so much ground. Monster flanked them and swarmed around.
Robert dropped three shield voidlings on each side, not caring for the overlaps. A burst of black tentacles cleared the flanks, and then the tentacles moved to the front to stem the tide of chittering monsters. It was too bad he’d upgraded his drain essence spell with the concept of contagion. He couldn’t use it near his allies for fear of hitting them. And he couldn’t dismiss the secondary spells since he wasn’t the caster. The only way was to cut them off altogether.
He stayed behind and drew the British assassin's bow along with the infinite quiver. Casing his two-star haste on himself, he fired as fast as he could. That bought his allies time to retreat to a safe place. However, they couldn’t leave survivors if they wanted to keep the information about this attack a secret.
He used his main talent and took Caroline’s Minotaur back to her, using his time in the liminal void to refill his void heart. That was the only monster among the four bulls that couldn’t die. His Minotaurs were the basic Dungeon boss and he had their imprints. He could “revive” any of the three by capturing another Minotaur.
Then, he came back to the fray. The pill bugs would break free from his walls of force anytime now. He aimed at a spot underneath his magical walls and fired a concentrated void lance. It dove into the ground before the walls of Force and caused a reaction out of a shielded pill bug. It screamed and redoubled its attacks on the barrier keeping it from surfacing. Robert fired another three shots which only caused the monster to become even more desperate. Curious about what was going on, he kept the barrage.
The pill bug screeched and then the ground around it exploded, taking out his wall of force, the nearest shield voidling, and knocking the minotaurs to the ground. The monsters around the blast zone were either pulverized or launched into the air, depending on how close they were. Robert let the shockwave wash around his stage two mage armor. Of the monster that caused the explosion, no trace remained.
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The other pill bug decided to skirt around the wall and dig into the crater of the first one.
Wary of the suicidal monster, Robert took his three minotaurs away by grabbing their horns. Their suits of armor were, once more, ruined by no fault of the designers. The punishment the armor suffered was just too much. If anything, the fact his monsters were still alive was a testament to its efficiency.
He returned to the field, now without any allies around him. The pill bug was shielded and thus protected from his debuffs. But the remaining monsters of the hive weren’t. He stored his armor in his ring and changed shapes. Flying over the hive, Robert cursed as many creatures as he could sense with drain essence. The few that were getting away he killed with void lances.
Biscuit had warned him to not do that. They couldn’t tell if someone from the Endless Hive would use a long-range sensory ability on the camp and see him. In the corgi’s strategy, Robert going all-out should be kept as a trump card. Given the pill bug’s destructive potential, he felt it was justified.
Robert cleared the monsters on the surface and around the pill bug and lured it away from his allies and deeper into a tunnel. Once the monster was back underground, he used his main talent to move back to the surface and above the tunnel entrance. Then he fired void lance after void lance, as fast as he could.
The bus-sized pill bug’s shield was reactive. Every time an attack was about to contact the shield, it released a burst of energy to defend against the attack, neutralizing it before it could hit the shield. Robert conjectured that this active burst was more essence-efficient than just tanking the hit. The shield, then, was not a solid protection but a detection field and passive defense that triggered the active form. It must save a lot on upkeep costs.
The shield overloaded. The pill bug’s whole body converted into essence and exploded violently. Robert blinked out of the way and a jet of flames and superheated rocks spewed out of the tunnel, going in a diagonal but raising a hundred feet in the air. The tunnel caved in.
Sense life showed no bugs had escaped the camp. They could hit the next camp over, probably.
When he reunited with the group, he got a surprise. Both Veronica and Freddy had ascended to the second star. He checked his Ethercosm. He was at seventy-six percent to gain his third star back. But this was the objective of this incursion and another reason Biscuit remained away. They needed to train and strengthen the troops.
Freddy didn’t comment or share what his talent evolution was. The camouflaged hound just said it was a very good upgrade and he was very happy with it.
As for Veronica, her talent now gave her a passive haste bonus and a discount on her healing spells' essence cost the closer she was to danger. It didn’t say how much testing that would require exposing her to the enemy. It also didn’t say if the intensity of the danger mattered. But her talent was shaping her to become a Battlefield Medic. He thought it was too bland to name her talent after that but maybe with some tweaking, they could find a catchy name for it. Not that it mattered too much.
*
*
A week passed and they hit ten other camps. The number of invading monsters they’ve killed must be over a million. Everyone was tired and showing signs of battle stress. At one point, the Endless Hive monsters became just bugs to be smashed under one’s foot. But the gains were good. The goal was to make the members of this expeditionary force three stars, a process that back on Earth took years of constant delving.
But that was because people treated delving like a day job. Go in, play safe, secure the pay, go home, and have a relatively normal life. Eat, sleep, leisure, love. Nobody sane went to a passage and spent days on end doing wholesale slaughter. And that’s, perhaps, the reason so many Archs got stuck at two stars ninety-nine percent advancement. One needed to take risks get into tough battles, and really go the extra mile.
It all started with their Prime Vestiges. The rich hoarded the best and sold the crap. Robert was guilty of being part of the problem now. He held more than two hundred Prime Vestiges in his ring. The ones he got from the fairies and those he stole from the factions he raided during his summer vacation.
*
*
One night, Biscuit alerted the camp.
"Get ready to evacuate!" He barked with a lot of nervous energy.
Fairy-Robert's imprint cycled his Life tempering techniques to fully wake the body up. The metal projection didn't need to sleep and worked around the clock on several projects, most of it reading and strengthening the thought shield.
He grabbed Spidersilk by the waist and sent his doll house to the liminal void.
"Whoa! Robert, my heart is not ready yet!" She joked.
Spidersilk spent most of her time studying the behavior of the three female humans in their group. It was out of pure curiosity but he already predicted some trouble coming his way.
Holding the fairy's hand, they flew out of the cave the raiding expedition was using that night and surveyed the landscape around them.
He didn't need to even search. The horizon was covered in a carpet of carapaces, chitinous legs, and appendages, and antennae. Monsters marched in organized lines with giant… roaches with big howdahs on their back, also full of insect-looking humanoid-ish creatures wearing armor.
They were far and also in grayscale. Even with all the sensorial enhancements, Robert couldn't see much definition. It was like someone decided that participating in a tabletop wargame tournament without painting their models was a good idea. That's exactly why "army decoration" was worth ten victory points. Nobody likes an eyesore army. Don't be that guy. Paint your minis.
He didn't dare to approach. The odds of someone there noticing his attention were not zero. While he had no idea about the odds, he didn't want to risk.
So, he spent his time talking to Spidersilk while the doll house did its slow thingamajig to become a cube again, then returned to reality.
He should have told Yolania that the doll house would see military use and needed to be packed and stowed fast. Hindsight was 20/20.
*
*
Could they face that army? Probably. Could they win without fatalities on their side? Debatable. Should they take the risk? No. Could they send their strongest members, Noah, Biscuit, and Robert to strike and cause some damage? Yes. Would it have consequences? You could bet on them. The Endless Hive would send a bigger army.
Robert stared at the dust cloud billowing behind the army. It turned out that seeing them in the real world didn't change the color scheme much. Some browns, pastel colors, and accents like the military decorations and heraldry.
He exchanged a glance with the floating corgi. Biscuit shook his head.
"We should go and hide our tracks. We got what we came from. Engaging this army is an exercise in futility. They are led by a four-star General and have several specialized units for detection, intrusion countermeasures, and shielding. Even if your spells are strong, a single person can't hope to bombard that army and cause significant damage without triggering strong retaliation from them."
Robert had to heed Biscuit's advice. He had no idea what that army was capable of. They weren't barbaric and uncoordinated like the Gurglocks. This was a professional army from a multi-world organization with thousands of years to refine their tactics. For all he knew, they could have a crack commando unit specialized in fighting threats from the void.
They retreated back to the Taulusian Resistance's passage base. At least the army moved at a snail's pace.
*
*
Robert argued with Biscuit. He wanted to strike at the army alone, and Biscuit said it was suicide even though Robert has a Swiss knife of affinities and spells to work with.
"They have seers and Time specialists too. Let me show you one particularly nasty property of the Time affinity."
The corgi asked for Veronica's help. He had both humans sit in front of each other. The game was simple. They should hold the left arm in defense, and use the right arm to slap the adversary on the cheek. But to earn the right to slap, one needed first to lower the left hand and rest it on their thigh. Slapping the cheek earned the attacker two points, but slapping the left hand earned the defender one point. Slapping without the left hand on the thigh made the attacker lose two points. Whoever went a minute without slapping at least once lost the game. You could lower the left hand at any time but could only raise it if the right hand was in its resting position with the back of the fingers touching the right ear.
Physical abilities that increased damage and offensive magical or mental ones were forbidden. But for this practice game, they should use only internal Time abilities.
The game started. Its "Nash Equilibrium" was to have both players keep their left hands up at all times. One minute from the start, the game would end in a draw.
Robert fainted, using his two-star Haste to lower his left and send a slap toward Veronica's hand. He stopped an inch from her hand. Now his cheek was exposed but his hand was closer to her face and she needed to lower her hand to attack.
Veronica looked confused.
Robert then lightly tapped her left hand and returned to a resting position. Now the one-minute timer was against her. Since he tapped, she would lose even though she was ahead on points.
"Wait, I can't predict his moves!" Veronica protested. "Are you using Foresight?"
"Yes," Robert said, then realization dawned on his face. "Oh! I got it! When two Time Archs try to predict one another, they have their windows of prediction reduced until one of them loses any information on the future! Since my foresight is at a more advanced stage than yours, the interference forces you to see nothing. While my own range is also reduced."
"That's correct," Biscuit barked with excitement. "The problem is that you trained yourself to interpret an absence of feedback as an absence of danger. That's both incorrect, naive, and dangerous. The counter to the Time affinity is the same affinity. The stronger Time practitioner will negate the other's power."
"How can we circumvent this?" Veronica asked.
"You need to consider an absence of feedback as just that, no more, no less. To tell that there's no danger, you need to see a future with no danger and keep an eye on this future until it becomes the past. But people have a hard time seeing only one point in time: the present. How hard is it to see a band of time, both the present and the collapsing probable futures? Almost impossible, most Time Archs discover.
"If you went and attacked that army without this knowledge, Robert, you would be fooled by your own misunderstandings until a massive attack struck you. Then, you would no longer trust your prescience until you either died or learned this truth."
With those words weighing on his mind, Robert gave up on his suicidal plan. The army advanced over Taulusia unimpeded.