“So we can summon dragons now. Doesn’t that mean this is pretty much over?” Matt asked as the four of them sat upwind from the charred battlefield.
Some of the buildings Benjamin had caught on fire half an hour ago were still burning, the dragon fire had burned so much hotter that all of its fuel had been consumed almost immediately; only smoldering ashes remained. Benjamin’s magical flamethrower might as well have been a disposable lighter by comparison.
Benjamin was slightly annoyed but not entirely surprised that was his friend’s takeaway. When he’d told them about how he’d been to a tiny version of hell, and explained what Miku’s plan was, they’d listened with great interest.
Not even Raja had bothered to ask him how such an impossible thing could be possible. They’d all been here long enough to know that the world no longer had to make sense.
Or rather, this world had a certain set of rules, they were just radically different from the rules that applied on Earth. That a demon from somewhere beyond either world might have a totally different set went completely unquestioned. One day, when the war was done, Benjamin would research all of that and try to figure out the math, but right now, they had more important things to do.
However, when Benjamin started to lay out his ideas for soul surgery and that he might be able to start fixing himself, Matt immediately changed the topic back to the war, which was just about right. He couldn’t say he blamed them, but this wasn’t an issue he could just drop. It was too important on a variety of levels.
“Well, we can’t,” Benjamin clarified. “I certainly can't without a little DIY soul repair, but Ethan can. I can probably find other people in the army that might be able to, too, but you have to understand, it’s a big damn spell. Even channeling for only a few minutes, Ethan took a soul strain debuff and—”
“Oh, fuck him,” Emma shouted. “I don’t care if it makes him spontaneously combust. He deserves it.”
“It might, actually,” Benjamin said with a sardonic grin. “Spontaneously combust, I mean. Twenty mana a minute - that’s a lot of power.”
He still didn’t know why humans could take so much more mana than even inanimate objects composed of very conductive metals, but they could. Benjamin might be able to summon a dragon with his focus if he tried, but if he tried to hold that summon for several minutes, he was sure it would melt down to slag and then explode violently, just as his hunting horns had done all those months before.
“Good,” she spat. “I hope it fucking hurts too.”
It probably did, but Benjamin said nothing. It would only encourage her. Instead, he pivoted and answered. “He’ll pay for his crimes one day—”
“Dude looks like he’s already paid plenty,” Raja quipped, making a grotesque face that was still ten times more handsome than Ethan was now.
“He’ll pay for his crimes one day,” Benjamin said, “But for now, he’s an asset, the same as my focus or your knives, and we’ll need him if we want to beat the Giant Rhulvin army that’s heading this way.”
“A flight of dragons strafing the whole thing like a bombing run would definitely move the needle from impossible to merely challenging if you could figure that out for us, Benji,” Matt said with a smile.
“That’s why I was telling you. I think for this to really work, I’m going to need to do what I can to fix my own system and—” Benjamin started to say, trying to return to the topic at hand.
“Benji, didn’t you just tell us when we were hanging out with those statue kids that, and I quote, “Sometimes I feel like I’m one wrong move or level up away from falling to pieces?”” Emma asked in a tone that was both smug and concerned. “Don’t you think you should just maybe… I don’t know, stop?”
“Yeah, probably,” he agreed. “If I knew when to stop, I wouldn’t be in this mess. None of us would. If I’d stopped, we’d all be happily brainwashed and fighting the servants of the Arboreal Throne or harvesting vegetables on a plantation somewhere.”
It came out more bitterly than he meant for it to, but he didn’t apologize for that. Emma meant well when you got past all the sharp edges that had become her favorite defense mechanism.
She’d raised a valid point, but it didn’t matter. His error-riddled system might indeed implode if he fucked with it too much, but then, it might well do the very same thing if he left it alone. He could feel parts of him creak under the load whenever he emptied his mana bar or refilled it in a single go.
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I’m level 9 now, at least, he thought to himself. There might be something I can do to shore things up. All the experience might have been earned while he was a brain in a jar reflecting on things he could do, but thanks to the subjective nature of his system, it still seemed to count.
Whatever it was the Rhulvin system tracked had grown during his time in isolation, even if all the experience was theoretical. Still, even if he put every last point into strengthening his soul stat, he doubted that would do much to change things. It was going to take more drastic measures than that. Fixing the thing the way he’d been thinking about probably would, but that might have drawbacks all its own. Benjamin had given this a lot of thought.
Honestly, given the time he was trapped in his least favorite Rakshasa’s little hellhole, he might have given this one thing more thought than any other problem he’d ever considered. He’d addressed and readdressed hundreds of what-if scenarios, but until he checked some things in their collection of phylacteries, he still wouldn’t know for sure.
If he knew one thing, though, it was that they weren’t yet strong enough for the battle that lay ahead. They could lay gemstone minefields, bombard the enemy with missile volleys, and even attack them with dragons, and all that still probably wouldn’t be enough.
Even with all those advantages, pitting their four thousand-plus soldiers against the tens of thousands that the Summoner Lords had mobilized and landed would be a death sentence, and even if they won by some miracle, they’d have nothing left for whatever came after.
While his friends debated what the right tactics should be, he filled a database he’d designed while time was paused and let it populate with the identities, classes, levels, and all the other vital statistics of everyone contained within it. Once that was done, he sorted it based on a few assumptions before interrupting Raja to declare. “There are fourteen people that could theoretically summon a Moray Dragon out of the 4,193 people we fight beside. Of those, four could probably cast it without serious damage based upon my current model of the soul.”
“Why can’t you just give everyone the spell?” Matt asked. “Or even a smaller version… like that hydra Ethan summoned originally.”
“I suspect dozens of people could,” he said as he ran the new parameters quickly. “38. Not hundreds or thousands. 38.”
“Why so few?” Emma asked, visibly annoyed that Ethan could do something that she couldn’t. “You’ve tweaked my spells plenty; why can’t you just give me that one?”
“If I tried to add it, your system would probably reject the change,” he said with a shake of his head, “But even if it didn’t, using it could easily blow a fuse and end up doing real soul damage. If it was bad enough, it might even kill you.”
Benjamin sighed. “If I was an evil mastermind, I could just give everyone the spell, command they use it, and rule over the ashes of the aftermath with the cripples that managed to survive such an awful attack, but I’m not a Rhulvinarian, so we won’t be playing it like that.”
“But why?” Matt asked. “Is it just a power thing? Or…”
“Power is definitely part of it. Like plugging a big appliance into a tiny circuit,” Benjamin agreed, “but in most cases, it's more like a flavor thing. It’s like…”
For a moment, Benjamin struggled to think of a good metaphor.
“It’s like you’re a dark red. Say, brick or maroon. Emma is more like crimson, so some of her spells and abilities are close enough I could swap them between you two and it would probably be fine. Me, I’m more like blue. At least, that’s where I started out. I’m pretty much completely incompatible with you guys.”
“Nah, you’re red Benji,” Raja said. “I’ve seen you cast your vampire spells plenty of times. They are very, very red.”
“That’s true,” Benjamin agreed, “But not important for this. What is, is now that my system is broken, I can put pretty much any spell I want inside of it, and it will be fine, but these summon spells are bright green like Ethan, so if I tried to give any of you those spells, your system would not be happy with you.”
The conversation about who was actually what color was in no way helpful, but it did provoke a few laughs. Benjamin decided that the color metaphor was probably a good one, and he tucked that away to play with it later.
“If we can’t kill Ethan, can we at least kill the bitch that’s possessing him?” Emma said finally when she got tired of the topic.
“I mean, can we? Yes.” Benjamin answered with a shrug. “Should we? Probably not. I could put together a spell to give Ethan the Bound to Serve debuff and control him directly, but I kind of think she might have her uses still.”
“Are those uses important enough to justify the possibility that she might break free and mind rape you to death?” Matt asked.
Benjamin looked at where Ethan was standing on a hilltop just far enough away that he wouldn’t be able to hear anything the four of them said while he stayed in sight. In a lot of ways, letting Emma execute both of them right now would be easier, but he felt like that would be wasting a pair of valuable pawns that had fallen into their lap.
“Yeah,” probably, he agreed. “Maybe we just tie her up extra good, just in case. I just… I’ll tell you later when I work the bugs out. She’s the only person we have that can get close to Lord Jarris, so I was thinking maybe we could give her a big fist-sized emerald and use her as a suicide bomber before the attack starts and sow some confusion. That’s gotta be worth something, right?”
His friends were unsure, but they didn’t disagree, and once the conversation was over, and the fires of the false town had died to ashes, the four of them got their army moving and headed southwest to where their destiny awaited them one way or the other.