The next few days were spent traveling deeper into the grasslands so they could strike the next few likely targets from an unexpected direction. This was a good thing because Benjamin was lost in his own little world as he tried to sort the data from the last battle. He sat there on top of his meandering turtle, surrounded by bands of warriors, while time seemed to crawl by in the real world.
He rarely took note of the way that the birds seemed to hang there in mid-air at a fifth of their normal speed. Instead, he was lost in his inner world of glowing red runes as he shuffled and reshuffled them into something resembling a comprehensible order.
The spell database in his error-riddled system was still less than cooperative, and it produced spell options for him that were practically random whenever he opened it, but he really didn’t need to anymore. He still might snag one if something particularly compelling like earthquake ever came back up, but now he was doing something different: he was sorting through his event logs of the battle and building himself a database of every unique spell or ability he recorded.
After that, he planned to go through every member of their army and do the same thing. Since that would take forever, he was still in the process of designing scripts for it on his codex, of course, but once the hard part was done, things would move quickly. At least I hope they do, he thought as he found yet another bug to unravel.
This would not only give him the ability to freely upgrade the most frequently used spells to make the men and women who fought for him that much stronger. It would also mean that he could look for patterns in a much broader fashion than he’d been able to so far. Until now, he’d largely been forced to tweak existing spells, but as he learned more and more about the way they worked and the way the runes interacted, he was gaining flexibility.
He just hoped that flexibility would allow him to avoid too many more bombs. They’d kill if they had to, of course, but finding some new way to convert the enemy to their own side would have been infinitely more preferable.
Benjamin was even making gains to that effect. Though his system still wouldn’t let him target a spell in any of the privileged ranges, he’d picked up some of the message traffic that the opposing Summoner Lords were doing to cast their spells and issue their commands in the moments before they were liquified, and the results were quite encouraging.
It turned out those orders came with password protocols and that the enemy still wasn’t encrypting their message traffic. At this point, he was sure that wasn’t a limitation implemented by the system. He’d figured out a way to implement that functionality across the network that fueled his focus out of the paranoia that told him that if they succeeded in hacking him in the middle of a battle, they could hack his whole army. It was a terrifying event that would probably never come to pass, but if he’d been able to use greater runes as a proxy for prime numbers to encode his traffic, then why couldn’t his enemy do the same?
He saved his progress and let the spell dissipate as he returned to the real world, and time around him sped back up to normal as he rubbed his eyes and sighed in frustration.
“Giving up already?” Emma asked with a laugh. “Last time, you lasted two hours before you came back up for air.”
He didn’t bother to explain to her that it had been more like ten hours the way that his time moved when that spell was active. He also didn’t bother to point out that he’d been so involved with what he was doing that he could have kept at it all day if his brain would just stop asking dumb questions about why his enemies were so backward.
“I just don’t understand the Rhulvinarian,” he sighed, “They’re so fucking backward.”
“I don’t suggest you try to understand them,” Matt answered. “You stare too long into that abyss, and we might have to put you down ourselves, Benji.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that too much,” Benjamin laughed. “No monomaniacal urges to control the world and enslave mankind yet.”
“You’re not the type,” Emma said in a way that almost sounded like an insult. “You’re a hero through and through, Benjamin.”
“I appreciate your faith,” he smiled, ignoring her insult. “I technically have access to everyone in the army, so I could go full dictator pretty much whenever I want.”
Both of them laughed at that, and honestly, he was a touch hurt by it. “Benji - I trust you to have my back and my immortal soul, for that matter,” Matt said in a tone that was only vaguely patronizing.
Before Benjamin could figure out the best sarcastic comment to respond with, though, Emma piped up. “So, what doomsday weapon are you building for us today?”
Stolen story; please report.
“All of them,” Benjamin said, with a smile that widened as the incredulity on their faces deepened. “So mostly, that makes me wonder why our enemies aren’t doing the same thing.”
“I mean, it's that soul damage thing, right?” Matt asked in a tone that was nearly certain.
“While it is true that I get away with cutting more corners for myself than I would for you because my soul is already irredeemably fucked up,” Benjamin agreed, “I don’t think that’s it. I think they’re just hidebound.”
“Sorry, I don’t speak fancy,” Emma said. “So unless you’re talking about getting me some new leather armor, you’re going to have to rephrase.”
“Hidebound. Formulaic. Set in their ways,” Benjamin clarified, trying not to give her room for another joke. “It means they’re set in their ways. Like, they just do it this way because that’s the way they’ve always done it, you know?”
“Well, if it ain’t broke…” Emma said with a smile.
“Exactly,” Benjamin agreed. “Nothing challenges them anymore.”
“If that were true, then all the Thrones would be under their heel, and they’d already control the whole world, wouldn’t they?” Matt asked, pointing at Benjamin like he’d caught him in a trap.
“Correction, Nothing challenges them magically,” Benjamin said. “The Arboreal throne will crush them if they get too close to her woods, and the centaurs will ride down a caravan that takes too long to reach safety, but magically the fae of this world have no interest in rune magic. For all we know, it was that way on the world before that and the world before that.”
“Wait, you think they’ve done this before?” Emma asked as her expression darkened. “Is that in the system or—”
“I have nothing to prove it,” Benjamin answered, “but some of the stuff that Prince Agardian has said makes me think they’re nothing but pure parasites. They move from world to world, drain it dry, and then they move on to the next one. Earth just seems to be one of many places that it’s convenient to steal more humans from whenever they need to top up.”
They kept talking for a long time after that, but it took a long time to get back to the topic of weapons. Benjamin explained to his friends, including Raja, when he joined them, that he was trying to make a list of as many abilities as possible so that they could understand them and make new weapons.
Everyone was pretty on board with that, but Raja quickie asked, “Why not like - make those rifts they like making so much and just drop a bomb through it and be done with? It's like a drone strike but with fewer steps.”
“Well, we don’t have enough gems to start indiscriminately bombing everyone,” Benjamin disagreed, “But if I could figure out how the portals work, then we would definitely start using them to our advantage. Could you imagine sending Emma and a handful of other shadow dancers through something like that? They’d turn the enemy to hamburger before they even knew they were under attack.”
That answer made Emma smile way too brightly, and as Benjamin asked her questions and watched the sea of grass slowly pass by, he opted not to tell her the true reason he wanted to do that. If he could deploy his own personal spec ops ninjas and take out whatever summoner was in charge of a given force, they might be able to steal whatever passwords he had from the orders the asshole gave before he bled out and free some or all of the poor bastards that opposed them.
Matt would give him shit for trying to find a peaceful way out of every battle, but in this case, it wasn’t a desire to avoid bloodshed. Well, at least not completely. It was the only way they would ever get reinforcements beyond the meager help the Throne of the Sky Sea provided to them.
After that, they stopped for a time to have lunch, and once that was done, he dived back into his project with both feet. He was as frustrated as any of them by his lack of progress in some areas, but these spells didn’t exactly come with instruction manuals.
Benjamin had tried several times to cast the exact same rift spell he had in his logs. Instead of opening up the same flaming portal he was so used to, though, the spell merely fizzled. That sometimes happened when he included some of the key runic sequences in the incorrect order, but in this case, he was pretty sure that it was because the spell was trying to target a point that was out of range for him, and he wasn’t sure why. Hell, he wasn’t sure which part of the spell was coordinates at this point.
It was much the same with the summoning spells. He had a few examples of those now, like summon Inferno Swarm and summon Frost Ogre, but they weren’t any clearer. The runes that followed the summon spell were much longer than they should have been, and Simon had no idea whether they were specifying whatever world or dimension they were pulling these creatures from or if it was some kind of binding on the thing being summoned.
These were questions he should have been able to answer by reading books on the subject. Really, just a few answers would have been enough for him to test a wide variety of assumptions, but even asking the Prince did little good because the man didn’t know either. All he knew about any of the spells that Benjamin really dug into was that they worked, which was less than useless. Knowing how to turn on an appliance did not grant you any understanding of either the power grid that supplied it with energy or the engineering that made it work, and if he was going to have a rematch with Lord Jarris, he definitely wanted to know how these things worked.
Honestly, Matt and Raja had both argued that even checking out whatever it was those birds had been talking about was a bad idea. For once, only Emma was on his mind about paying it a visit, and that was only because she wanted to slit the man’s throat. In the end, they’d compromised and agreed to send a scouting party to see what awaited them there, but even Benjamin knew that ever being anywhere the enemy expected you to be was a profoundly bad idea.