The next day was spent poking at the manaborn monsters more, as Alice tried to figure out what made them tick. Since ‘manaborn’ creatures were so new to this world, Alice still had a lot of head-scratching to do when it came to these odd organisms. After her test with Cecilia, she explained what she had actually been testing, and then enlisted the help of a Jonathan’s children to test out other things.

The next thing she tried to figure out was how much, exactly, one person’s beliefs could change the physical shape and behavior of a manaborn monster. If someone believed that a manaborn monster was supposed to have forty legs, would it sprout extra legs the moment it came into contact with their beliefs? Or was its form fixed the moment it was born?

She quickly confirmed was that the forms of manaborn were not malleable. Even when Alice told Mimi, Jonathan’s youngest daughter, all about the interesting one-eyed manaborn monster she had been experimenting with, and how the monster did funny hops when there was a carrot placed in front of it, the monster’s form remained unchanged. It still looked like a monstrous patch of fog with dozens of eyes and eight legs.

This spurred Alice’s curiosity even further. After all, Alice had always thought of fog as being… well… malleable. It would have made perfect sense, in her mind, for the monster to shapeshift into a one-eyed patch of fetid swamp gas after Mimi’s beliefs were led in a certain direction. But the monster’s form remained the same.

It seemed likely that manaborn monsters would not change shape after they were born, regardless of what beliefs were fed into them. Once they were born, their forms were final, unless something physically amputated their limbs. While this contradicted Alice’s expectations, it was nice to confirm.

The second thing she confirmed was that, no matter what, none of the strings of mana that Alice suspected represented ‘belief’ ever penetrated through a fully enclosed layer of space with no mana in it. However, even if she totally blocked these strings of mana from directly touching a test subject, somehow, some amount of belief was still leaking through. This was very subtle, and hard to notice – but when Alice was feeding Jonathan’s children information about her ‘interesting test subjects,’ she noticed that some of the manaborn monsters had small behavioral changes, even when they were ‘isolated.’ Since they looked like they were half-dead after a certain period of time either way, it was barely noticeable.

Interestingly enough, this was not true if Alice removed all mana from the area. In this case, nobody’s beliefs about the manaborn monsters mattered in any way, shape, or form. This implied that mana itself was somehow connected in a subtle, hard to notice way, regardless of whether Alice isolated a bubble of mana from the rest of the world. This was interesting, but it was also a major pain in the neck for her.

Afterwards, Alice started focusing on a few other experiments she wanted to run.

The monster Alice had used to test Cecilia’s beliefs still had a body that was trying to do different things at the same time. Six of its legs were trying to lunge at Alice’s face and eat her, and the other two legs were trying to dance like a ballerina. Based on this, Alice had a new question. It was obvious that beliefs, aided by mana, could distort reality. But what happened if these ‘beliefs’ were removed from an area? Would the area revert back to its ‘natural’ form, or would the influence of other beliefs remain in place? This was a question she hadn’t considered before, but it could be very relevant. Thus, Alice decided to test how ‘sticky’ beliefs were in the face of anti-mana.

To test this, Alice got all of Jonathan’s children to believe that one of the manaborn monsters was jumping up and down for no reason, and also got Ethan and Jonathan into the mixture as well. Then, she set up a bubble of isolated mana that extended just outside of the testing room – that way, people’s beliefs would influence the monster before they saw it. When they entered the room, Alice was more than slightly relived to find that the monster she had set on display was jumping up and down.

After that, Alice shooed everyone out of the room, and tried throwing a bunch of anti-mana into the area, to see if the monster kept doing jumping jacks after all of the mana in its area was purged. Even after Alice removed any traces of the mana-strings of belief from the area, the monster returned to doing jumping jacks once it had enough mana to start functioning again.

In other words, beliefs permanently altered things. They would not return to normal once the presence of mana was removed from the area – anything that was changed by mana would remain changed. This presented a bit of a headache for Alice, since she had been kind of hoping that the warped swamps and forests of the continent, messed up monsters, and manaborn would return to normal if she fixed the System. Sadly, it looked like that wasn’t likely to happen, unless she was missing something.

Alice spent a while trying to figure out how to scrub people’s beliefs out of an area of reality, just to see if there was still an easy way to fix everything. Unfortunately, her attempts proved fruitless. She might find a solution later, but Alice suspected that what she was hoping for just didn’t exist.

The only thing Alice found herself thankful for after finishing up those tests was the fact that they had brought Jonathan’s family along. Mimi, being rather young, was quite easy to trick for the purposes of Alice’s ‘belief-testing’ experiments… although for most of those experiments, Alice had to get Jonathan’s permission to lie to Mimi yet again.

On the bright side, it seemed like Mimi got some sort of Achievement for helping out, although she clammed up when Alice asked her about it. Alice assumed it was probably some sort of benefit for assisting in her research, and decided not to ask any more about it. After all, it might have some sort of edge-case use in combat, and Alice didn’t want to be rude.

Eventually, Alice was pulled out of the quagmire of fruitless experiments when Ethan flew the ship into a town. This one was quite a bit larger than the village of Frostriver, and had a population of about ten thousand people, according to Alice’s rough estimate. After the group touched down, it split into a few smaller groups. Ethan and Jonathan went to assess any horses that were available for purchase, to finally cut down on the frivolous use of Ethan’s mana and attention. Allira started singing and chatting at the most popular tavern in town, in order to spread word about the ‘Heart of the Swamp,’ and how a few Illvarian Immortals had killed it and quelled the advance of the swamp.

Cecilia decided to stick around and help maintain order while Alice did another healing session. There were far, far too many people in this town for Alice to heal everyone – that was just an impossibility. However, she managed to fix up the people who were the most influenced by their mana before she bottomed out her mana reserves. It was nowhere near enough, and this time she didn’t get quite enough done to get new System rewards – however, it still felt good to help out. Alice suspected that she was close to her next level in [Legendary Organic Mage], at least.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

After that, Ethan finished getting the group new horses, as well as a few spare horses with saddlebags that could carry the manaborn monsters along. The group didn’t even stop to sleep this time, since there was still plenty of daylight left. Instead, they just got back to moving.

The next few days were mostly a blur of movement. Alice got very reacquainted with the smell of horses (unfortunately), and also had less time than before for her practical experiments. That wasn’t too big of a problem – after all, Ethan was more than willing to help Alice avoid falling off of her horse if she used the time ‘for a good cause.’ Alice spent that time working on filling in the gaps for her second mana-gem image that she had formed via {Magic Modelling}.

By the time they reached Fendrallia’s capital, Alice was almost done. She was looking forward to finally being able to run a good cross-comparison between a working and broken mana-gem. So, of course, that’s where everything went horribly wrong.

The moment the capital of Fendrallia came into view, the group stopped and stared.

Because even in the distance, Alice could see a thick plume of smoke rising in the sky in the distance.

“Is that… Fendrallia’s capital?” asked Alice.

“It… seems to be,” said Allira, frowning. “We’re in the right spot. Unless something has drastically changed about the geography of the area. Which wouldn’t normally be a consideration, but seeing how much the marshes of Fendrallia have changed… who knows?”

“Is it on fire?” asked Cecilia, sounding considerably more unnerved than before.

“I hope not, but I’m pretty sure it is…” said Ethan.

“Let me scout a bit,” said Allira, before she started humming. The shadows in the group’s surroundings started to ripple and elongate, like the leaves and limbs of trees in the midst of a dark forest. A few moments later, a few shadows detached themselves from the group, and started making their way forward…

Several seconds later, Allira frowned.

“The capital is under attack,” she said. “A swarm of monsters is storming the area.”

“How are the defenders doing?” asked Ethan. Alice could see a glimmer of cold calculation start to enter the man’s eyes.

“Not great, but not terrible,” said Allira. “The walls are reasonably intact, and they aren’t being overrun yet … but at the same time, they certainly aren’t doing well. The monster swarm is larger than the defenders, and they have a much greater number of magic users. It looks more like they’re holding on by the skin of their teeth.” Allira’s frown deepened. “Wait. It’s not one monster swarm. One swarm would never become this big. It looks like… several swarms of monsters are attacking together?” She shook her head. “There are over ten thousand monsters attacking the capital in some kind of coordinated assault.”

“Damn.” Ethan clenched his hands. “How many defenders?”

“Maybe eight thousand. A lot of them don’t look like they’re very experienced, though. Maybe half of them are proper troops, and the other half are civilians that the city probably recruited a week ago. Or less.”

“I say that we still try to help out,” said Jonathan, as he looked at the plume of smoke in the distance. “At the end of the day, we’re still Immortals. We have a duty to help those who are less powerful … but at the same time, I’m barely a combatant, at least as far as Immortals go. So I’ll leave the decision up to you two. After all, you would be the ones in the most danger. I’d like to help if we can, though.”

Ethan nodded solemnly, and Alice saw some of the cold calculation in his gaze disappear. Ethan sighed.

“Fine then. Let’s go help the damn Fendrallians manage their monster crisis. Unless you object?” he asked, as he turned towards Allira.

“No, I’m fine with helping out. I don’t think we should wade directly into the thick of things, but as long as we sit near the edges of the battlefield I don’t mind wiping out some monsters. Could build some goodwill with Fendrallia, and it does seem like that might be needed, with how Lady Alice’s plans are shaping up,” she said.

“Entirely acceptable,” said Ethan. “Let’s lend a hand near the edge of the battlefield, and see how things go.”

With that, the group sped up their gallop as they moved towards the capital. As they drew closer and closer, Alice started to see what Ethan and Allira had been talking about. The capital was a mess.

It looked like the capital city had originally been divided into two sections – the inner city and the outer city. Alice could barely see into the inner city, since it was blocked off by the wall surrounding the city. However, the outer city, oddly enough, had grown outside of the wall. Many portions of the outer city looked like they were made from poor materials, such as straw and bricks, and the construction was nearly as shoddy. Some of the houses didn’t even have Perks to support them, which was an unusual sight in this world.

The houses made of straw and mud bricks were, almost without exception, ruined. It looked like monsters had broken into them and eaten the inhabitants – there were bloodstains and messy corpses strewn about everywhere in the outer city region, and the entire area was unusually low on mana. Monsters had eaten their fill there.

However, while the outer city seemed nearly deserted, Alice still saw evidence of a few scattered groups of people managing to stay afloat in the area outside of the city walls. There weren’t any signs of mana there – but Alice could see doors that looked like they had been lock picked open, and windows that had been carefully propped open instead of broken into. If Alice had to guess, they had either been left behind before everyone died, or there were survivors with unusual classes that let them hide from monsters better.

The inner city was still intact… for now. However, it was under siege. Some ant-based monsters were trying to climb over the walls, while simultaneously manipulating nearby stone to throw chunks of the wall at the defenders. Meanwhile, a swarm of vinebears was helping them out by causing moss and flowers to bloom in between the stones of the wall, weakening the mortar that had originally held the whole thing together.

Defenders at the top of the wall were desperately trying to keep the situation under control by shooting down the ant monsters and the vinebears with bows and kinetic projectiles, but some type of winged monster was harassing them with volleys of icy shrapnel. Meanwhile, Mages from inside of the city were trying to take out the flying monsters, with mixed success.

To round out the picture, there were groups of people pouring cauldrons of hot substances onto the monsters at the base of the wall. At first, Alice thought that they were pouring boiling oil onto the monsters, but quickly realized that they weren’t using oil. Of course, on further reflection, Alice also realized that people pouring boiling oil onto an invading monster or army was so utterly ridiculous that it made no sense at all. Oil was expensive. Who would be dumb enough to pour boiling oil onto invaders? That was almost as logical as pouring boiling gold onto them – there were many, many better substances to use.

Instead, the defenders were pouring what seemed to be hot sand and boiling water onto the invading monsters.

The pourers were wearing considerably less sturdy armor than the [Archers] and the Mages, and Alice could see some of them using Perks to heat up water and keep the wall from collapsing under its own weight. They were clearly civilians, such as [Cooks] and [Masons], who had been dragged to the walls once things got bad.

The Mages were wearing solid steel armor, and the [Archers] looked to be wearing iron or steel as well. Meanwhile, the pourers were usually wearing armor that was half-put together and half regular clothing, or wearing thick, padded cloth. It looked more like the kind of clothing that could help someone avoid being burned while carrying something hot, rather than proper armor to protect them from dying on the battlefield. For the drafted civilians to be wearing this into battle made Alice realize just how bad things really were.

Alice grimaced as the group crept closer to the city under siege.

It wasn’t long before the monsters spotted them. When some of the vinebears near the edge of the battlefield spotted them, the greedy eyes of the bears lit up. The creatures seemed to grow in size, as Alice felt the barest trace of fear start to settle in her bones – before she immediately flooded the area with a little bit of anti-magic mana, totally shutting off the magical component of the anxiety and fear that had just started to slither its way into her mind.

Ethan snorted, and before Allira could do anything, he sent a spray of wooden debris into the clump of Vinebears. They went down in a swathe of gurgling, dying monsters, and Ethan stepped over their corpses and into the edge of the battlefield.

Alice swallowed nervously, before she followed suit.