1020 S.A.
The System’s avatar stands in a remote wilderness valley in the northwest of Breibone. Despite the remote location, a deep pit lined with stone is there. The avatar works, reviewing and editing several screens of code, and occasionally bending over to manually tweak a bit of the enchantment in the ground. Every ten minutes for the last few hours, it hits a big red button and a sphere of space in the center of the pit fluctuates, distorting. Each time, it is more extreme and lasts longer.
Finally, the distorted space turns into an opaque pink, a tear from this reality into another. A few minutes pass as the System waits silently, until a black mass the size of a dog tumbles through. The creatures stumbles and is seemingly uncoordinated, as the rent behind it closes.
The avatar plugs away at the code, an dattempts to have the soul enchantment of the System latch on, but the System is refusing to target it, as it can’t see the Eldritch. After more experimentation, the avatar concludes that it simply doesn’t have a soul.
Frustrated, the avatar begins working on a way to bashhack the System to do something useful. But an hour in, unprompted by the System, the tear in space opens back up and the creature jumps back through.
The avatar frowns at that. He didn’t think that was possible. Then shrugs as he resumes his work.
Weeks later, he’s done and with another hole in space torn, and another test subject arrived, the System is ready to use alternative senses to identify the creatures, these Eldritch. And while the System’s soul enchantment can’t latch on, it is able to create a small lightweight traditional enchanement to tag them for tracking purposes, so now it’s trackable by the System.
So far, the specimens he’s seen tend to vary wildly in size, shape and lethality. He’ll nee dot expriemtn a bit to figure out what kind of “level” should be deisgnated for each.
Alright then. Let’s see what kind of damge you can do.
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1022 S.A.
After the Second War, the pantheon rarely convenes. Some don’t particularly care if they function well or dysfunctionally. Some are still wary of the others. And some are just lazy.
But sometimes something important enough happens.
And so, as the rest sit or stand in a circle around them, Alldir, Argast and Adonite drop two Eldritch bodies onto the floor of the cntral reposium on Godhome.
The Brute looks with confusion. His senses are incredible sharp, and he’s seen all there is to see, though he can’t quite wrap his mind around what that is. And it doesn’t really help that he was among the last to know given that well, he doesn’t care too much about anything besides fighting.
“Explain,” he delivers monotonally.
“The System has identified them as soulless parasites invading Ager from another dimension,” Adonite begins. “They apparently tear their way through space, kill what they can, then return to whereever they come from, taking our experience with them. And despite their appearnaces, they aren’t animals. Unlike animals, they are truly ‘soulless’ is and so the System can’t latch onto them correctly. The System has a hard time detecting them, but given enough time, it has some workarounds to attempt to do so.”
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The Brute rarely looks happy, but his face sours more at this. He glances at Alldir.
“I agree with what she’s said so far. Calling them soulless animals ins’t a bad anaology. They’re weak compared to us, but we observed the for a fair bit and they killed their way through beasts and mortal races alike with relative ease, then siphoned away the exprienece before the System could.”
“Could you recover the expereince from them when they died?” the Brute asks.
“No. We couldn’t figure out where the expeirence was to recover. There’s no soul, so where is it?” Argast shrugged. “But they do seem to be storing it. We watched one open a pink rift up and escape.”
“You let one escape?” the Brute frowned even deeper.
“We hadn’t seen one do it before. Improtant to know what they can do.”
“Can we stop the rifts from opening?”
“No. None of us are experts at that kind of space magic. And the System isn’t even remote to having that capability.”
“… how big of a problem is this?”
At this point, the System avatar speaks up. “As of right now, I detect about two hundred on Ager, and that’s about what the long term average has been for the past month. But it’s been slowy trending upward. And given that the System wasn’t built to detect things that aren’t connected to it, it’s hard to say how much might be missing.”
“Can you improve the detections?”
“Yes. I’ve only spent a few months on this, but I’m srue it can be refined further in the followign centuries.”
The Brute looks with undisguised disgust at the Steward. “You haven’t spoken yet. Why?”
The Steward stops scratching his chin, and focuses on the Brute. “I actually have many of the concerns you have. Though I’d point out that we can’t be guarding Ager constantly. We agreed not to live there anymore. Sending this scouting party down was already very… unorthodox.”
The Brute snorts. “I won’t let the locust eat the farm.”
“But better that we simply let the mortals deal with it. The livestock are capable enough, and two hundred Eldritch is nothing compared to the billions of mortals, animals and plants connected to the System. Sure, if more come through, it might be a signficant drain, but right now it really isn’t.” The Steward gets up to walk over to a map of Ager with major religious sites. “Adonite and I can coordinate with the temples and priests to spread awareness about these and make them a high priority target. System, can you make it so that to the extent you can identify a Eldritch, you can reward the mortals for killing it?”
The avatar affects thinking about it. “I could divert some experience their way from the common pool.”
The Brute’s gaze sharpens. “I thought you couldn’t draw the expeirence from the Eldritch?”
“No, but any expeirence awarded to the mortals will either help them make more or come back to us ueventually.”
“Very well.”
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In 1022 S.A., when the System first implemented its backhand way of tracking the Eldritch, it took about a week to pick them up.
By 1032 S.A., when Queenie was a [Slime], it was down to a day.
By 1122 S.A., when Emil was a [Paladin], it was down to an hour.
By 2022 S.A., when Cota and Tanaka were [Human] and [Catkin], it was down to a minute.
Throughout, the System had built itself a nice little user interface for itself to automatically control the rate at which Edritch were summoned across Ager. It had a big pink button. And it had expriemnted with the parameters enough tthat it could have reasonable control over what it would entice through.
Unfortunately, sometimes the Eldritch decided to open up their own portals and come through. But the System could account for even that. And, at some point, it even managed to figure out hot to control that process.
By 4969 S.A., when two [Celestials] fought back a massive incursion, the System could detect new Eldritch in less than a second.
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