CHAPTER 301 – AN EVOLVING STRATEGY
Tom woke spluttering. Water running over his face… he was drowning. “What?” he gasped, half choking and coughing the liquid out of his lungs as his bodies spasmed upwards into a sitting position.
Survival realities kicked in. This was not life or death. Nothing was attacking him. He could see everyone around him.
Giggling at him.
He knew what was happening. Seething internally, he patted himself down to assess the situation. His chest was wet but not overly so, and there was a small amount of liquid on his bed mat.
What had happened? His sleepy brain pieced together an explanation.
As always, everyone was looking at him and Harry held a cup… it was empty…. had he, really? “Did you really wake me by throwing water over me!”
“You didn’t seem to enjoy the poking,” the ritualist explained in a reasonable tone.
“What the… I felt like I was…”
“You were also snoring,” Toni informed him.
“That’s not a reason to dump a cup of water on me!”
“It really isn’t,” Everlyn agreed, giving Harry, Thor and Toni the clear culprits a disapproving look. “Just because you look like teenagers doesn’t mean you need to act like them.”
Harry scratched his head. “Maybe, but maybe not. It could be that we’ve got young people’s hormones running through us.”
“Don’t be a fool.” She glared at them. “You were being bullies and should be ashamed of yourselves.” She turned to him, kneeling down to get closer to eye level. “Are you okay Tom?”
“I’m fine.” He scowled at Harry. “Don’t do it again. That crossed the line.”
“I’m sorry, man. We were talking about creative ways to wake you… and then there was a bet… and um… I knew you wouldn’t mind and…”
“Resist the temptation in future!” He growled.
“It’s childish.” Everlyn stated firmly. “And counterproductive, and the way you wake him with the spear is already bad enough.”
“It’ll do. We’re not getting a dedicated Tom waking object.” Keikain objected as he handed Tom what looked like a breakfast roll. His eyes hadn’t left the scout. “Tell me Everlyn, what do you want to do? Buy a padded pole or something?” Keikain switched his attention to Tom not needing an answer to his rhetorical questions. “Sorry about their stupidity, but putting that aside from your body language I assume you had another dream?”
“Why do you guess that?” he asked through a mouthful of food. There were eggs, cheese and sausage along with being a little spicy. It was delicious.
Keikain waved the question away. “Basic observation. You’re always more tired and scatterbrained after one of them. Now what is it?”
Tom recounted everything to them and then within five minutes of his unceremonial waking they took off at a run still discussing all the details of the spear domain and potential implications of the dream.
Like always, while he had been unconscious the strategy for the next day had been debated and refined. They were doing the same as yesterday just more of it. The stretch aim was to clear the boss monsters from almost all the remaining outer zones. Then, on the following days, they would attempt the more dangerous inner routes. The ambitious plan required them to travel almost a hundred and fifty kilometres and fight over thirty different bosses with only a small section of the travel aided by the chosen.
On earth… well, a marathon was forty kilometres… and they were planning on running over three and not on nice paved roads. Instead, they would be sprinting across vegetation with uneven footing and having to pause regularly to complete a strenuous fight … battles that would use far more energy than the travelling.
It was ridiculous. Or at least absurd if you thought about it with the sensibilities from their previous life. If they were still rank four… just running that far would have been impossible, let alone with the additional modifiers, but they were no longer that weak. They had all boosted their attributes to the point it was achievable.
But neither Tom nor anyone else had any illusions about the task in front of them.
This was work, and it would not be enjoyable.
He ran and focused on his footing the whole time. As a result, he only tripped three times. The mistakes were not surprising, as even though he concentrated to the best of his abilities, his head was still pounding and his eyesight was swinging in and out of focus. Their first opponent was thirty, two-metre-tall preying mantises. Toni with her air magic and Harry with his arcane magic tore through them like they weren’t there. It was an easy fight as they both exploited the monster’s vulnerability to both types of magic while Tom kept their attention.
They finished with him beaten up and everyone else uninjured.
Then, straight after the fight, they took off. Tom’s legs already felt like jelly. The fights blurred together.
Exhausted and looking forward to lunch they approached another of the ponds. Everlyn had joined them and she immediately raised her hand to tell them to take defensive positions while she examined the opponents. This threat was classed as a mid-boss, but because they were probably semi-sapient, they only had two chosen in support.
The elder zoomed up to Everlyn. “Perceptive one. Pausing in this location is dangerous. The loaka are highly aggressive and we’re central enough that they will be aware of your presence. When we’re fighting by ourselves, we fly high and we still have to rely on speed to get in and out and even then we drop sensing arrays and are usually forced to relocate multiple times in most battles.”
“Yes,” Everlyn replied absently her eyes fixed on their target. “The second elder shared that with me, unfortunately we don’t have your ability to avoid the fight. My assumption is that we’ll be ambushed mid fight.” She shook her head in a way Tom knew was annoyance. “This is more annoying than I hoped. They’re fortified down there. I kind of wish we could use meteorites… a single volley would flush them out pretty quickly and remove their defensive advantage.”
Tom stared down at the mid-boss rated threat that they needed to eliminate. He couldn’t help but agree with her. His meteorites would be devastating. Their targets lived in a series of mounds around the always present pond. There were five of them in total, and if he was allowed to use his spell, he would be able to destroy all of them. They were solid fortifications, eight metres high, spherical and had been created from magically fusing rock. Without an overpowered spell like Harnessed Meteorite, they would be difficult to crack.
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Eight metres tall was significant. They were the size of a three-story apartment block back on earth. The monsters which lived there were like bouncy beach balls that would come up to his waist. For a moment he watched four of them processing some of the vegetation near the lake. They hovered around machinery, bouncing on the spot while their magic moved the ever present native bushes into a metal contraception that spat out mulch, juice and seeds. It was a production line of activity, with simple mechanical tools and it was all being operated without hands.
“Telekinesis,” he said after a moment.
“Yes,” Everlyn answered. “It’s their common trait. Look,” she pointed. “It’s interesting those doing work are bouncing constantly, but the sentries are dead still. It makes them hard to spot.”
Her words were eerily accurate. Tom’s eyes had initially skipped over the sentries. How was a mystery. Their perfect spherical bodies, now that he was aware of their presence stood out like a sore thumb against all the disorganised nature below. In some ways they were like loot portals. Now that he had spotted them he couldn’t look away. “What’s that they’re using. Camouflage and psychic distortion?”
Everlyn snorted. “Neither.”
“The sentries are camouflaged,” Tom argued immediately. Excluding their shape, they blended almost perfectly into the background, unlike the workers whose blue colour made them extremely eye-catching.
“Yeah, but not by a skill. That’s just paint and discipline.”
Tom looked at them with growing respect. It was hard to believe they weren’t cheating with skills, but Everlyn wouldn’t lie about something like that.
“Can you tell us anything useful about how they’ll fight?” Michael asked finally. “Is it possible to draw them out into the open?”
Everlyn shook his head. “Nope, they’ll retreat into their mounds and defend from there. They have a lot of interesting skills.”
“Dangerous?” the healer asked.
“Mostly non combat.” She pointed at a discolouration on one of the buildings. From this distance, it looked like a really old layer of paint where large parts of it had flaked off over time. “That’s not decorative. That’s powerful ritual magic.”
“What does it do?” Michael asked.
Everlyn shrugged. “Don’t know. The descriptions I’m getting from my identification is not particularly illuminating. Some of them seem to be specialised in material reinforcement, others summoning, light, environmental control… it’s really random.”
“Harry,” Michael demanded, turning to face the man.
Thor silently handed over a spyglass, and the ritualist put it to his eyes.
There was a pause as he moved the instrument around to focus on the different buildings. “They’re rituals, not my flavour but close enough. I can definitely decode their purposes, but it’s going to take some time.”
The elder shifted. “Perceptive one. I feel obliged to remind you that we’re not safe here.”
Everlyn initially looked annoyed at the interruption then more contrite when she realised the value of the reminder. “Agreed. Let’s bunker up.”
Michael stood straighter like that was his cue. “Tom, Clare and Thor drop your barriers.” He gestured to indicate where. “We’ll hopefully get a chance to give them a test run and find out how deadly they are.”
“Dedicated Healer. I think you meant hopefully not.”
“Exactly what I intended to say.” Michael agreed immediately though not at all sincerely. “I wouldn’t kill any of them if I could help it. But better safe than sorry.”
The elder had sunk at Michael’s initial blood thirsty comment but now returned to his usual height. “Dedicated healer. I couldn’t have said it better myself. We can pray that the presence of the barriers will deter them.”
Tom suppressed a smile at the comment. The barriers that Michael had chosen did not have that purpose. They were all of the invisible but lethal variety when you triggered them. Michael was right it would be useful if they got to see how they functioned in practice. He checked the spell he had been instructed to buy.
Spell: Intelligent Lighting Barrier – Level 4 – Tier 4
Create an invisible, undetectable, adaptive barrier that will strike anything attempting to pass. The force of the shock used can be adjusted for enemy types and resistances.
Size, efficiency and maximum strength are improved with levels.
Cost: 60,000
The cost of the proposed spell had annoyed him, but the logic behind the request had been unimpeachable. The lightning flavour was to take advantage of his titles and affinity and the high tier was driven purely because getting invisible, lethal and adjustable all together required the higher expense. Plus, putting extra responsibility on him was perfectly reasonable. Out of all of them, he was best positioned to cope with the purchase price.
Tom focused on the perimeter that Michael wanted him to secure. He touched the spell as he concentrated and tested its maximum length. It would take three repeated casts to cover the area. With no reason to wait, he started casting the spell.
He was surprised by how intuitive the ability was. Its usefulness scaled with lightning affinity rather than magic, so the naturalness of the spell form should not have been a surprise to him… But… it felt like there was more to it than that. He could see the different levers embedded into it, and most of them were just alternate versions of what he did with his pseudo Spark domain. Instinctively, he shaped it to go around the vegetation and to only fill the empty space with dense energy. Electricity followed natural laws, so he positioned the cores of power, where the lightning would originate from, away from conductive areas. That meant he shifted them to avoid the stems of the plants that led to flowers and certain varieties of rock. Without worrying about it, he tweaked the sensing domain to the specific enemy. He focused on flesh and blood detection as opposed to the other versions such as elemental which he knew from experience cost more energy.
Every step he did was logical and improved the efficiency by leaps and bounds. It was difficult to assign a single rating to the ward, but he reckoned he had pushed the number of loaka that it could kill from the high thirties into the fifties.
The feel of the spell abruptly changed.
He froze in surprise.
It suddenly felt far more malleable and… was there extra plasticity there? Cautiously, he played with it. There was an additional level of flexibility available and when he reached the end of the ward, he found he could increase the length beyond what he had previously considered to be a hard limit.
Was that just as a result of him changing the parameters? If it was that was an important fact to learn to have extra options on a defensive ward had to be a positive.
Then a different idea occurred to him. It was more than the ability to extend the spell he had felt the abrupt change in how it was responding.
It had got more powerful.
Tom stepped into his system room and stared at the wall.
Spell: Intelligent Lighting Barrier – Level 6
His spell had upgraded two levels. No wonder the area that it could cover had increased. A smile of elation crossed his face.
But why?
For a moment, he struggled to understand what was happening, and why the spell had levelled. Then he remembered what it was doing. It was primarily a static sensing spell linked to discrete energy stores that could produce defined levels of electricity in response to stimulus.
It’s architecture excluding the stasis component that allowed it to be cast away from his body was almost identical to what he had built into his pseudo spark domain. Like an epiphany, understanding blossomed through him. Apparently, his actions to use those hard-earned lessons from the tutorial to force the ward into a more efficient configuration had demonstrated a comprehension of the barrier spelt that awarded him extra levels.
He returned to the real world and reassessed his task. It was easier now. Rather than casting the barrier three times like he had planned his new spell would only require two segments. Tom took advantage of the new freedom to expand the length by fifty percent. Then he immediately cast the second link.
A single large section was superior in this situation than multiple smaller ones. Their opponents wouldn’t swarm over a wide space or apply barrier breaking techniques, which were situations where lesser barriers would outperform. Instead, they would try to break through in a concentrated area and having a larger barrier meant that there would be extra energy available to kill them at least when compared to a perimeter created by a series of smaller wards.
Defended from the threat of an immediate ambush, they settled down to wait while Harry gathered the information they needed to succeed.