That had been close. Iona hadn’t been kidding when she said the speedster had a good skill - I hadn’t been able to track how fast they were moving or where they were for most of the fight. She’d even dodged a Radiance beam, which was absurd.
Her sword had been coated with apple juice, among other things, and [Luminary Mind] was split into the full 20 parallel thought processes, and one of them inhaled slightly, sampling the scents in the air.
It was so overwhelming I had to shut down the entire thought process, only getting a glimpse at thousands upon thousands of subtle scents all blended together on the edge of the sword. What was that!?
Another thought process took up the mantle of research, quickly coming back with a number of different possibilities. One floated to the top - a potion known as Bane, designed to target curses like the one I had. Because there had to be that one [Alchemist] asshole who was like ‘how do I kill as many people as possible and get a medal for it?’
Well, shit. Good to know my secret wasn’t out, that they hadn’t come prepared with apples specifically to harm me. That would imply a huge information leak, up to the point of Arachne possibly betraying me. That wasn’t the case - it was more that they’d thrown the entire kitchen sink at me, and apples happened to be in it.
Thank the twin goddesses of the moons that Iona hadn’t hesitated. We’d practiced with my curse back in the School and had discovered a number of things. The most important one - if Iona re-did an injury done by apples, my healing could handle it. For example, if my finger was cut off by an apple blade, and Iona cut off my hand, my entire hand would regrow.
It was good Fenrir and her were around. With my biomancy improvements and vitality, I didn’t think I could slice myself up anymore - my strength to vitality ratio was waaaaay off. My immunity to fire was great, except Auri couldn’t burn over an apple injury to make it ‘fresh’ - I was immune. I could possibly fry myself with Radiance, given that I’d dropped [Radiance Resistance], but that was chancy and dicey. My Radiance was a precision tool, but what was most needed with apple injuries was large brute force.
And Iona, without hesitation, without a moment of doubt, with complete faith and love in me, chopped off the injury on my neck, then put a hand through my heart to re-traumatize and let my healing take over.
To be fair - with how I’d modified my blood, I could go quite a bit longer without one than a normal human.
I needed to look into getting a knife sharp enough or enchanted enough that even a child wielding it could slice through me. It would help prevent the issue if I got hit with a Bane potion again.
While parts of me were musing on how close I’d come, yet again, to dying, and analyzing ways I could help prevent it again in the future, the rest of me was on the fight.
Katerina had been up to something. Get all the elves clustered together, get the Sixth very close to them, unleash the explosive alchemicals into them at point-blank range. It was a solid plan, if utterly treacherous, but all was fair in love and war. Artemis would heartily approve, and I hoped I’d be able to tell her all about it. It had naturally devolved at this point to utter mayhem.
The men and women of the Sixth Legion, as brave, trained, drilled, and well-equipped as they were, couldn’t match the might of the elves. The raw tyranny of stats and the initial arrangement of the soldiers meant the laughing horned Immortals were dancing around clumsy spear strikes, darting in with lethal strikes that did nothing.
I was keeping an eye on my mana, and apart from the pair of Radiance beams I’d shot out, it was staying strong. The Sixth was standing tall as elves slowly fell. This was the fight the Legions had drilled for, this was the battle they’d been shaped to fight.
A whistle pierced through the battle, just one more sound in the cacophony, and the two Rangers fell back to the command post, joining the rest of their team.
‘Shield it or tank it’ had been drilled into me from a young age, and I had a dozen thought processes and a powerful skill to back it up. Tiny tenebrous shields briefly popped into existence in the way of an arrow, rock, or spell, swallowing up the devastating projectile before vanishing, my attention snapping to another attack that I needed to handle.
It was honestly overwhelming. I didn’t have ‘track every strike in two small armies fighting’ level awareness, nor was I able to multitask that well. [Persistent Casting] was doing the heavy lifting on my healing, the skill so much better than I ever anticipated when I picked it up.
Sentinel Invincible was as good as his title, brutally crushing through the ranks of the elves, swinging his axes in devastating strokes. Trolls plus sunlight was generally a terrible combination, and all of his capes had been ripped off by the speedster. A skill cut through the haze and gloom, letting sunlight reflect off Invincible's adamantium armor. It didn’t slow him down at all, and the tusked menace continued to tear through the elves, living up to his title of Invincible.
Fenrir was continuing to cast devastating swaths of Lightning and Ice through the ranks of the elves, and Auri continued her flaming bombardment. Iona was staying back though, probably to protect the vulnerable Fenrir while he was stuck on the ground. The Primus Pilus charged forward, meeting the octopus in a flurry of blows and getting pushed back.
I cast an approving eye over him. He was properly fighting like I was in support, going into a purely offensive mode while ignoring defense entirely. The octopus was shredding him - fighting style couldn’t overcome the huge stat differential, plus it wasn’t like we drilled fighting octopi, the slippery bastards - but he was being pinned down.
I debated pushing forwards and physically engaging with one of the weaker elves to tie them down, but hesitated. My role was here, in the back, keeping everyone alive. The mental effort needed to properly fight would be better used with [Event Horizon] eating projectiles, and kept more people safe. Not only that - putting myself right in the danger line was a poor decision - there were a thousand ways someone could-
A large swing caught my eye. One elf was using a wooden warhammer, bringing it down on a soldier’s head. A sliced brain I could heal, but a crushed one was far more difficult to handle. [Event Horizon] wouldn’t help too much, there was no way it wasn’t vitality-reinforced. I fired off a beam of Radiance, choosing to aim for the handle of the hammer and burning through it instead. Cheaper on the mana than going directly for the kill, and the moment I ran out of mana this entire fight was going to get ugly.
The Decay Classer that had ruined Massa blurred in front of me, his hand reaching for my head. I threw myself backwards - while the vitality defense did a lot, hand contact could do more - and Iona tackled him a moment later, the two blurring as they fought.
Auri didn’t need me to say anything, she filled the entire area where the two of them were fighting with a roar of white and black flames, cursed fire mingling with the hottest flames she could conjure.
A devastating strike from the skies shattered in the middle of Katerina’s command circle. I took what should’ve been a decapitating blow against our entire command structure and utterly negated it. The octopus Iced our entire half of the field, causing us to slip and slide, and everything not skill reinforced by the Legions suddenly shot upwards, dragging quite a few soldiers with them.
The elves weren’t completely dumb. A pair of elves abducted a soldier and sprinted him several hundred meters away before trying to kill him. Joke was on them - my healing range was far longer than that, but they outstatted him so hard there wasn’t anything he could do about it. The only thing I had for extensive mental trauma by being repeatedly ‘killed’ was ‘That sucks, I know a few good [Mind Healers]. Want directions?’
“Sixth, second line of potions, rolled.” Katerina ordered.
In good order, with years of trained discipline, the members of the Sixth unclipped and rolled a second set of potions towards the elf lines. Harder to see, and the octopus’s Ice made them skitter and bounce across the field.
The first effort had failed due to the reflexes and skills on the other side of the battlefield. The lack of distractions, the fact that it was an opening blow. The second wave went better, but we were still being pushed back. The elves were focusing on destroying the Legion’s weapons, defanging most of our fighters. Invincible was still carving a path through the elves, and Iona rose up in smoking victory, stomping down on the dead elf’s skull.
The fact that Invincible was still going strong under sunlight had me puzzled for a moment, before I cracked a mental grin.
Smoke and mirrors. I didn’t know which ones he was using or how it worked, but it was clear there were layers upon layers of deception going on. He’d earned his title honestly.
The battle ebbed and flowed until the elves broke and ran.
They’d been fighting for vengeance, while we’d been fighting for survival.
----------------------------------------
A council was assembled again.
We were able to skip the funerals entirely, because there were no funerals. I was [The Arbiter of Life and Death], and I had decreed that nobody on our side should die.
The elves got stacked into a mass pyre that Auri casually lit, flash-flaming them away, but leaving a pile of weapons, armor, coins, and other trinkets they’d been carrying. The loot promptly vanished into the Sixth’s coffers.
I wanted to be in touch, so I attended the council meeting. I didn’t want to be in it, but I didn’t want to separate too hard from Iona. There was no telling when, I don’t know, a tidal wave would crack Massa exactly in half and we’d be on the wrong sides of it or something.
The infuriating thing about the meeting was it was happening at mortal speeds. The war was going on at Immortal speeds, people who could think and move faster than me were zipping around the globe, causing death and destruction. Multiple cities could be falling in the time it was taking us to discuss things, and never before had I so keenly wished for a [Dictator] to simply issue orders and make things happen. Usually a terrible system of governance, there was a time and a place for decisive leadership and orders, and a time and a place for slow discussion.
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It was probably a good thing I wasn’t the boss or vaguely in charge. Dictators had the nasty habit of not stepping down, and then it all went to shit.
“... we pay taxes, we expect the Legions to protect us!” One of the [Guild Masters] slammed his fist onto the table. “Yet the city is twice destroyed in the span of a week! How can we possibly…”
I was reviewing my notifications at the same time I was listening. Go go [Luminary Mind]!
[*ding!* [Seraph of the Dawn] leveled up! 948-> 982. +512 Speed, +512 Vitality, +1024 Mana, +1024 Mana Regeneration, +1024 Magic Power, +1024 Magic Control per level from your class per level! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid) per level! +1 Strength +1 Mana Regeneration from your Element per level!]
Blah. One downside of [Seraph of the Dawn] being such a ‘broad’ class that wanted to explore and learn, and was fine with fighting, was there was no ‘extra’ potency to the situation. Unlike [The Arbiter of Life and Death], which got an extra large boost when I was acting as a Sentinel, [Seraph] didn’t get any such bonuses.
At the same time, there were a few hundred ‘your army has slain…’ notifications. I’d gotten credit for every kill, the System considering the entire army as participating in the battle. That, and I split experience in half with Auri - and she split her experience in half with me. Given how many fireballs and meteor strikes she’d been throwing around, I wasn’t too surprised.
It also helped with my other class leveling up.
[*ding!* [Sage of Tomes] has leveled up! 840-> 909. +1500 Magic Power, +1500 Magic Control, +700 Mana, +700 Mana Regeneration from your Class per level! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid) per level! +1 Mana, +1 Magic Power from your Element per level!]
That was a nice number of levels, [Endless Pursuit of Knowledge] pulling its weight.
[*ding!* [Etheric Aegis] leveled up! 525 -> 526]
Kinda needed to get hit to level [Aegis] up. While it hadn’t been a huge winner this fight, there was no telling when it would be. If it hadn’t been for that damn speedster removing my helmet, it would’ve done so much more.
[*ding!* [Event Horizon] leveled up! 842-> 860]
I was happy with it.
“Iona.” I muttered quietly out of the corner of my mouth. “Do you think you can grasp what’s needed here at the meeting while I class up?”
“Brrpt!” Auri immediately threw a flaming salute at me, letting me know she was ready and willing to do WHATEVER NEEDED TO BE DONE! Her trumpeting cry had, of course, cut through the entire meeting. Iona’s lips quirked in barely-contained amusement as half the heads turned towards us, the [Guild Master’s] tirade cut short.
“Go.” She encouraged me. I needed no urging to flee from the meeting, dropping into the world of my soul.
The last thing I saw were a dozen lights appearing around Auri, my little pyromaniac deciding she needed to class up as well.
----------------------------------------
Librarian was there, dressed from head to toe in the armor of a Sentinel, shield on her back and sword at her hip. It was a shame that I needed to perform the fastest classup ever.
“I’d like [The Elaine], unless a dramatically better offering is available.” I was fairly certain there wasn’t a better offering. I’d capped out the quality a healer class could give me - there was no better.
In theory.
In practice, who knew?
Librarian’s hands shimmered, and a star-studded book appeared in her hands, [The Elaine] written on the cover. I flicked it open to confirm no ugly surprises were about to fuck me.
There was a famous play about not looking closely at a class choice, and I didn’t feel like ending up as its second act.
[The Elaine] - Celestial - The Healer. The Mother of Modern Medicine. The author of the Medical Manuscripts. Daughter. Friend. Lover. Wife. Bonded to a phoenix, friend to the vampire progenitor, born in ancient Remus and foe to the fae. All these titles and a thousand more are yours, by right of birth and virtue, by action and deeds. Claim the mantle, claim the word that is now more than a name, and become [The Elaine]. +200 Strength, +200 Dexterity, +800 Speed, +800 Vitality, +4,000 Magic Power, +4,000 Magic Control, +2,000 Mana, +10,000 Mana Regeneration per level.
I skimmed the table of contents and the first three pages before snapping it shut.
“I’ll take it.” I confirmed, smiling sadly at Librarian. “Hopefully next time I can spend more time here.”
She smiled with a tear in her eye and shooed me off.
“Go. People need us.” She said.
I woke up a moment later.
----------------------------------------
I came alert in a dusty and dark room, Iona holding vigil with Auri being the sole light source. A wet mask was over my face, and I started to wrinkle my nose until I became aware of just how much dust and ash was in the air. I canceled the notifications, already feeling like I could do so much more.
“Shit.” I swore. “How long have I been down?”
“Half a day, sun’s just going down.” Iona said. “Everyone’s alright enough. Katerina and the [Governor] got round to convincing everyone else of what has to be done.”
Those words seemed to age Iona three decades. I’d never seen my lover look so old, so frail.
“What has to be done?” I softly asked.
“Full scale evacuation of everyone. Distribution of land and settling. Reforging of spears and swords into plowshares and farming equipment. A light network of roads to connect everyone.”
It sounded pretty good to me, which meant I was missing quite a lot.
“What am I missing?” I asked.
“It’s midsummer. Most of the crops should’ve been planted already. Most of the people don’t know one lick of farming. There’s going to be people assigned to utterly infertile or destroyed areas that don’t have a chance. The haze is going to strangle the new shoots in the cradle. Fights over desirable places to live and farm are inevitable, and there won’t be the Legions or really anyone else enforcing any sort of law and order. Monsters are already disturbed from their lair, their homes gone, and will more than welcome fresh meat delivering itself to their jaws. Trees need to be cut down and land tilled before seeds can even get into the ground. It’s going to be really bad. And that’s the best case scenario.”
I closed my eyes and imagined it, shuddering as the images played before my eyes.
“Bad.” I agreed, chewing over a few different scenarios and seeing them all play out worse. “I imagine riots are one of the biggest things we’re worried about?”
“And all those entail, aye.” Iona easily agreed. “An aspect less known. The Sixth is planning on marching a hundred miles away to a river, then setting up a fortified encampment. Enclose off hundreds of acres of farmland, use it to live. Somewhere between a large village and a small town, Katerina’s gambling that established structure and law and order can let them begin farming on a large scale, with fewer worries. Bring in most of the camp followers, and let the pretend city that is a Legion encampment turn into a real one.”
I could see the shape of it. I was both surprised and not. One of the old, old contingency orders for a ‘Lost Legion’ was to settle down, build a town, and make a go of simply surviving. I’d encountered the contingency in the Han Empire, but never expected for it to be triggered in the heartland of Exterreri.
It made sense, in a terrible way. ‘Best we can do now is survive and wait’. I suppose there was a reason that contingency existed, and it wasn’t because of how often Legions went roaming in hostile territory. It felt a little early in some respects, but if everyone was staring down the barrel of starvation, we couldn’t afford to have idle hands not working in agriculture. Exterreri’s tradition of the farmer-soldier, and most soldiers looking to retire on a farm after their service was paying dividends again, a long-looking policy bearing fruit again.
Pun intended.
“Trying to organize the entire town into similarly sized groups wouldn’t work, would it?” I asked the Valkyrie. Iona sadly shook her blonde hair.
“No, there isn’t the time or the food reserves. Whatever that elf did ripped through the city. He wasn’t kidding when he called it a death knell. Anyone wanting to stay and scavenge here is simply going to starve.”
My mind flashed to the library, a mental scream at the endless troves of books that had probably rotted away, destroyed forevermore. I put the feeling aside.
“What do you want to do?” I asked her. I had my own thoughts, but Iona seemed especially torn up about the current situation. It was a direct blow at the letter of her [Vow] - to share her bread with people who had none.
“The way I see it, we’ve got a few options.” Iona turned a little more business-like, a flame igniting in her green eyes once again. She straightened up, shedding the weight that had been bending her back.
“I think it goes without saying that first, we need to continue to participate. I was able to do so much in Ephesus, I can’t see us ducking out. We need to move, to travel, to help wherever we can. Save lives where we can, shield people from all this Immortal nonsense being thrown around.”
The sudden venom in Iona’s voice caught me off-guard. I’d just about gotten her round on the idea of being Immortal herself. It had been quietly and tacitly understood that she’d be with me for the long haul, that it was the only way she could fight Lun’Kat as her patron goddesses wanted.
The Immortal war felt like it was undoing a large chunk of that progress, the worst of the worst Immortals could do coming in full display. A problem for another day.
“Yeah, of course.” I easily agreed. “Do we want a base of operations, or to fully free roam?”
“Well, let’s discuss that. Pros and cons on both sides. Fully roaming has benefits. We’re not tied down, we can do long trips. People aren’t counting on us at a particular location. We can go wherever we think we’re needed, no pressure points. We don’t strip any one area by foraging too much.”
The arguments felt weak to me, but I let Iona continue.
“As for settling down, we’ve got quite a few options. First. We continue with the Sixth. Katerina’s explicitly extended an invitation and generous terms for us. Second. We double back to Orthus village and the bunker there. The Valkyries know the region as a headquarters, and our friends will look for us there. Third, we try to find a large settlement that needs our help, and bounce around the area. Maximize the number of people we return to by default. Fourth, we look for a place in Rolland, Lithos, or some other mortal nation that could possibly need us more than an Immortal nation does. There’s something to be said for defending those without defenders, although admittedly, the mortals in Immortal nations are probably feeling the hammer harder than mortals.”
“Brrrpt!!” Auri pointed out the Northern Continent was an entirely valid place to base out of as well. “Brrpt.” As well as trying to hitch a ride on the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft.
“It’s got to be Orthus.” I said. “The School’s a good idea, but with it always traveling, it’ll be hard to get to it when we want. I’ve got a decade of travel maps in [The Library of Infinite Wonder], but there will be extended times we can’t get there. Similarly with the North, the Wardens won’t appreciate us, and it would be difficult to cross the ocean to actually help people. I’m a War Sentinel of the Sixth, but more explicitly, I’m a Sentinel of Exterreri. Everyone. Katerina sounds like she’s starting a town, and that’s great, but at that point, they’re no longer actively going out and trying to fight invading armies, not that we seem to have any here. I’m not a pocket healer for a single town, I’m a Sentinel of a nation. There’s no sense in me making sure a bunch of farmers are all set, not with the Optio lines Katerina’s got. My talents and ability to save people are wasted there. At which point, it becomes a question of where do we think we can do the most good, or, on a smaller level, where we want to stay. We can’t just ignore it all. If I wanted to ignore everything, I could just go into [Tower of Knowledge] and wait everything out.”
“Brrrpt…” Auri protested. She hadn’t meant it like that.
“Nina, Amber, and everyone else is going to be looking for us.” I said. “They’ll never find us if we go to where the Sixth is planning on settling in. Becoming a needle in the haystack won’t get us our friends, and I refuse to believe they’ll die to something so mundane. Skye, Titania, and everyone else is in Orthus. I’m really not sure how it’s a discussion?” I said.
Iona shot me a brisk nod.
“I just wanted to make sure all our cards and options were out on the table. There was a slim chance you would want to stay with the Sixth instead.”
I shook my head. My loyalties were torn, and yet, the solution looked crystal clear to me.
“No no, I can simply come by now and then. It can be one of the first surviving towns we swing by. Plus, with so many people in the area, in need of a monster slayer and arbiter of justice - isn’t that exactly what a Valkyrie is for?”
Iona looked far too pleased at that.
“Yes. Your eyes haven’t flickered at all, have you checked your notifications from classing up yet?”
I hadn’t, wanting to keep my full focus on Iona. I pulled them up.
[*ding!* [The Arbiter of Life and Death - Celestial] has evolved into [The Elaine - Celestial]]
[*ding!* Congratulations! [The Elaine] has leveled up to level 1024->1266 +200 Strength, +200 Dexterity, +800 Speed, +800 Vitality, +2000 Mana, +10000 Mana Regen, +4000 Magic Power, +4000 Magic Control from your Class per level! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid)! +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regen from your Element per level!]
[*ding!* [The Stars Never Fade] has upgraded to [A Drop of Eternity in a Sea of Starlight]!]
[*ding!* [Aurora Curialis] has upgraded to [Domain of the Healer]!]
[*ding!* [Etheric Aegis] has upgraded to [Clad in Twilight]!]
[*ding!* [Event Horizon] has upgraded to [The Mantle of Dusk and Dawn]!]
[*ding!* [Zenith Everlasting] has upgraded to [Elaine Eternal]!]