Chapter 94: What I Wanted To Know
Tyrion overlooked the impromptu potluck.
“If that’s how it’s going to be I’m joining in. Make room for me,” he told Sen who was sitting across from Zariel-laat.
“For your fat ass?”
He laughed. “Picked that up from Zelle, did you?”
The picnic table elongated to accommodate the large leonid. “I can’t tell if that’s another insult or if you’re being considerate,” he muttered at the automatic transformation.
“Tyrion Snow, leader of this expedition,” Tyrion said, performing Sanshi’s greetings, his large frame shaking the table despite the people on it weighing it down.
“I am Zariel-laat.”
Zariel-laat and Everett caught up Tyrion on events.
“You just want to harvest the monster magic? Sounds good to me.”
“You trust this foreign invader?!” Zukai finally exploded, slamming his hands down onto the table, “He’s an inhuman monster. We should kill him!”
Everyone stared at the idiotic iron ranker. Aiyah, even Nara knew better than to say something stupid during impromptu diplomatic negotiations.
“Why is he talking? Someone get him to shut up,” Tyrion said with a growl. “Or I will.”
Sen flat expression expertly hid his self-satisfaction has he got up and dragged Zukai away with brute strength: This was a kindness, compared to the alternative of Tyrion.
“W-wait. You can’t do this to me! Unhand me!” He screeched all the while.
After a moment, the screaming stopped.
Sen walked back, a quiet Zukai dragged limp behind him. He tossed him into his own tent.
“…What did you do?” Nara asked.
“He’s sleeping.”
“He was just screaming.”
“He was very tired. He needed to be put to bed,” Sen said with the surety of authority-sanctioned violence.
“...right.”
Tyrion plodded over to Aliyah, who had started examining the magic collector once again after a break. A plethora of magic tools were set up on racks beside her or set aside in boxes or on top of cloths. She had constructed her own miniature lab, just for the sake of examining the device. Her Arcane Constructs had been modified to hold analysis crystals in the air, recording from various angles in a slow pan.
“You’re from the Magic Society?”
“I am. Class 2 researcher,” she added for credentials.
He whistled. “Impressive. What do you make of the device?”
Aliyah mulled it over, collecting her thoughts; she hadn’t quite enough time to give anything but an initial assessment. “It’s fine work. It’s clear that this artifact has gone through many design iterations. The ritual magic within it has been refined and optimized for efficiency. It collects far more magic than it consumes and takes barely any spirit coins or quintessence for maintenance. This uses but the barest necessary drop of mana, while all our rituals are slurping up mana like a silver ranker who's managed to eat themselves into obesity. I don’t see any additional process to convert the magic into another form, like spirit coins, so this is purely a collection device and nothing else.”
“Essence users can’t get fat,” Tyrion pointed out.
Aliyah gave him a long-suffering look. “That’s the point. Not only just this device, but our world stands to gain a lot in their mastery of efficient magic usage. It’s not very powerful, and limited in range, but for its purposes it doesn’t need to be. Specialized and efficient.”
“Huh. That’s not what I wanted to know.”
“Oh,” Aliyah said, taken aback, “What is it you wanted to know?”
“Does this device do what he says it does?”
“Oh, well,” Aliyah said, a little flustered over her excitement, “It does. It just skims off all the dirty monster magic that we don’t use and don’t know how to harness, aside from looting rituals and looting abilities. Completely harmless. Really, it has no room for other external processes. Not that I can tell,” she added quickly. “If I had more time, I might be able to give you a guarantee.”
Tyrion turned to Zariel-laat, “And you say you’ve been using this device for years.”
“Centuries,” he corrected.
Tyrion rubbed his forehead resignedly, “So if it does any harm, we would have realized it already.”
“That, or it does so little harm we can’t tell,” Aliyah hypothesized. “Or, our magic is so underdeveloped we can’t even detect the damage at all. That would be a genuine shock, so I shall hope for the hard work of many ritualists that we are not so entirely outclassed.”
“I hope it’s not that either. I want a list of all the locations these devices have been used,” Tyrion demanded to Zariel-laat, “If our researchers conclude that both this device and those locations are completely unaffected, then we can talk about cooperation on a wider scale.”
“You accept my proposal?”
“Temporarily,” Tyrion held up a stalling finger. “Objectively, making you our enemy does us more harm than good. We have a bunch of iron rankers to protect.” He gestured to the brunching iron rankers, who were being entirely unhelpful and annoyingly calm. They were still eating, gods damn them. Tyrion wanted more food. The skewers were about to run out! “Zelle and I can’t kill you fast enough before you go and kill all the iron rankers here.”
Zariel-laat looked apologetic. Even if he says he wasn’t using the iron rankers as hostages, that is what they were.
“So, what do we need to do?”
*****
Zariel-laat waited with the gathering specialists, protecting them from any stray monsters should any breach the protective encirclement. It rarely happened—the point of the exercise was to have the iron rankers gain experience in not only swarm combat, but combat while protecting others. Like John the healer, the gathering specialists were not helpless. Even without Zariel, they could fend off whatever stray monster that managed to sneak their way. One gatherer enlarged his spade, turning it into a spear-shovel, slicing a monster clean in half with its simultaneously crushing and cutting edge. Scratch that, not clean at all. The monster was bungled in a messy heap, more crushed than cut.
A shovel is a viable weapon, Nara re-affirmed.
The monsters of the forest were varied. Many shared similarities to the jungle ruins of the Celestial Book survival trial, but with variations expected of a more forested environment. There were tall, ambling, awkward giraffe like creatures that walked with stilt legs, called stiraffes. They weren’t physically dangerous, but they fired off razor blades of metal that ricocheted off the trees unexpectedly like boomerang pinballs. It made them priority targets to take out, but they approached slowly and attacked from long range. At iron rank, their aim was simplistic and didn’t intentionally utilize the trees, but shots often careened out from unexpected directions.
Eufemia’s Refracting Essence Ability, Power Thief, was a life saver, on top of all her other cancellation abilities.
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Ability: [Power Thief]
Special Attack (boon, affliction, magic)
Cost: Very high mana
Cooldown: 5 minutes
Effect (Iron): Make a magical ranged attack. You become able to use a random active-use ability of the target, who cannot use that ability until you have done so. It can be an essence ability or the inherent ability of a magic creature, but functions at your rank, not the rank of the target. You may not use the ability more than once. This ability cannot be used again until the copied ability is used. If not used within 24 hours, the copied ability is lost, restoring the target’s ability to use it.
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The stiraffes did not manifest with more than two or three at a time, so she could steal the ability of one of them, disabling its annoying pinball magic, copy her own Power Thief ability, and disable a second one. At iron rank, they didn’t have any additional powers beyond that, transforming them into powerless, miniature AT-ATs. If there was a third, various magical defenses or a high firepower blast from a caster or a ranger took care of it.
Unlike the Celestial Book trial, Nara couldn’t do much to set her own abilities up. There also weren’t any extremely powerful and singular bronze rank monsters for her to afflict. There was the rare bronze rank monster here and there, but they were on the weak end of the spectrum. Sen’s and Malik’s team had already gone through swarm combat book camp during the trials: Their current battle was mild in turn.
They turned to refining the intricacies of their teamwork and ability control, which the massive, combined battles and craziness of the Celestial Book trials did not allow for. Nara worked on combination tactics with her full team of familiars. Sage provided Nara for additional options to Node Jump to. If Sage was with an ally, she could teleport to them on top of providing them with the benefits of Nara’s boons, at a reduced maximum.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Sage could also be used as a moving, roaming node, flitting across the forest floor like a handkerchief blown in the breeze. Most monsters could not damage her. For those that could, she utilized tree cover to protect herself, or transformed into a small cloth to avoid the attack. Sage was too useful: at iron rank she didn’t have enough bodies for Nara to leverage. Keeping her out in the field granted Nara far greater mobility options but keeping her around an ally increased Nara’s ability to protect them as well as providing boon benefits. It was a frustration Nara was happy to have.
By default, Nara decided to sacrifice mobility to protect her teammates. Empowering them with more mana, health, and stamina regeneration increased their ability to unload damage, helping them help themselves.
“I’m going to go out a bit and practice some stuff,” Nara told the people in voice chat.
“Stay safe,” John said, like the dad he was.
She nodded, and pushed out further into the swarm, away from the fire blasts, lighting chains, arrow rain, and explosive blasts.
The Way of the Traveler: Dancer was flowing and smooth, capable of dancing around a single opponent or weaving through attacks coming from multiple directions. At least, that is how it functioned at mastery. Nara didn’t have mastery, and she hadn’t been practicing the flowing fighting style against multiple opponents as she should have been.
Now was the perfect opportunity. Within the forest, enemies hung on branches, throwing rocks. Bug and bird types swooped down from the sky. Ground based land monsters leapt and swung and bit. The uncommon magic effect shot out every now and then.
Dream’s Wake negated any attack Nara actively intercepted. It didn’t have to be with her sword. Her head, arms, and legs would do as long as she made a deliberate movement to intercept. While this handled the front side of her body nicely, Nara quickly realized her backside was almost completely exposed.
Nara didn’t have eyes on the back of her head, so enemies frequently took chunks of her from her backside, knocking her over and forcing her to teleport away to escape the dogpile. Aura could detect monsters, but it wasn’t as precise as eyesight or other senses. She could detect the monster approaching from behind her, but not how and when it would attack.
Despite all the time and effort she had put into swordplay, it was still infantile. If Nara gave herself some credit, maybe on the level of a toddler who happened to have a photographic memory, compared to the adult and fully mature Sen and Encio. She couldn’t immediately master the ebb and flow of The Way of the Dancer, so she developed a crutch.
Up until now, her use of Infinity Domain was mostly focused on what was in front of her. Attacks usually came from the front for Nara, who was the mobility attacker. She was the one teleporting above and behind enemies. If someone was behind her, she had fucked up and lost the entire positional advantage of her abilities. So, she shifted to applying Infinity Domain defensively instead of offensively, curving attacks away from her vulnerable back and spine. Together with that, she kept forward motion, expanding the space between her and whatever attack that was launched towards her back, which gave her more space to apply Infinity Domain’s effect.
When used skillfully, attacks didn’t hit from behind anymore. If they did at all, they were glancing blows, or softened from deceleration and air resistance. Large powerful monsters could get through, but those were the ones she put at her front, and the ones she should prioritize and kill anyway.
She started to feel it—the ebb and flow of battle. The breeze and currents of attacks and movement. She slipped through the cracks, her movement creating a riptide of wind that monsters couldn’t pull themselves away from. Her sword was a needle, and she was a thread, looping through holes and drawing embroidered patterns undiscernible to any observer but herself. She felt like a master rock climber that was able to identify their pathway up a mountain with just a look.
Not quite that level, she mused when a flightless bird monster shaped like a giant drumstick tipped its beak down like a dippy bird to puncture her thigh.
Chrome may be the cook, but today she was cooking—cooking up a symphony of death.
“That’s not even a metaphor for cooking,” Chrome pointed out flatly.
*****
After the monster gumbo they had just stewed, John and Nara held off on using their loot abilities.
Zariel-laat stepped into the clearing and set up his device. All the while, he explained to Tyrion and Aliyah how it was used. Tyrion had confirmed earlier that there were more of Zariel-laat’s people within the astral space. They had politely waited until negotiations had been concluded, and Tyrion disseminated instructions to cooperate with them. In exchange for helping the outers out, they would explain how their device worked and provide the crafting and ritual magic blueprints.
“I thank you for your patience,” Zariel-laat said, “Please activate your looting abilities now.”
They did, and the monsters evaporated into rainbow smoke. A translucent net of semi-corporeal magic was thrown from the top of the device, expanding like a tarp catching hot air. The rainbow smoke was held in place, forming a putrid smoke cloud beneath the net-tarp. Two of the four bags began to slowly inflate, sucking in streams of rainbow smoke.
Because Nara was in the know about the outers, she thought the timing of Zariel-laat and his people was a little coincidental. Why show up now and offer technological exchange and partnership?
She inched closer to him, crouching and staring up at him like an awkward gremlin.
“Hey.”
“Hello,” he responded, politely amused.
“Would you happen to know of The Advent?” she said with a conspiratorial whisper.
“I’m rather surprised you do. It is our knowledge the authorities of this world have only recently learned of their interference, and of their name.”
She only met the one outer, Zariel-laat, and Nara thought he was a nice person. A bit formal, overly polite, informative and helpful.
“Are the outers perhaps helping this world out?” She asked.
“What makes you say that?”
“The Advent seeks to undermine through sabotaging learning, progress, magic, and science. I’ve heard about the outers, just a bit. Up until this point you’ve remained on the sidelines, but now you’re taking steps to offer partnership and cooperation with mutual benefits. Your knowledge for this world’s excess magic.”
“If that is true,” Zariel-laat said with a smile, “It would be very kind of us.”
“Kind or smart. My world says a mutually beneficial relationship is the best kind of relationship. Game Theory and all that. You’ve chosen a time to offer technology and knowledge when this world needs it the most, undermining The Advent’s own efforts in the progress. You’ve established a reputation as peaceful and helpful, so that they’re open to negotiation and cooperation.”
“Kindness and sagacity,” Zariel-laat said, “They are not mutually exclusive.”
“That’s true,” Nara acknowledged.
“We’ve observed this world for a long time,” Zariel-laat said, with a faraway expression. “They have a great sense of camaraderie and intelligence in both life and combat, able to gain the upper hand even as they work with enemies. If it is to save others, then they may temporarily put aside their difference.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Nara concluded.
“However, if it is not necessary, then they are willing to exact their vengeance. I would not say we are any different, except that we no longer have the leeway for vengeance. Even should we be captured or tortured; we should not raise our hand.”
That hadn’t been in the Adventurer’s Record.
“Why?”
Why let it slide? Why come here in the first place? Nara didn’t know what she was asking.
“It is the same anywhere. An iron ranker is someone’s child, someone’s family. Kill the wrong iron ranker, and you will gain wrath.”
“There is no right iron ranker to kill,” Nara said. “We’re all people.”
“Of course,” Zariel-laat confirmed. “But that is the basis of our method. Treat all as if they are the wrong person to offend, the wrong person to kill. What we seek from this world does not need to be violent nor destructive. If we can communicate those intentions, then there is a path to enduring cooperation.”
“And the best way to communicate your intentions is with actions, not words.”
“Yes. Our world was much like this and any others, split but unified with nations, factions, and cultures. When the messengers attacked, we cooperated as unique pieces: It was not enough. There was still infighting, those that wanted to take advantage of the chaos, traitors and betrayers, tempted by Messenger false-promises of standing and power. Still, we gradually rooted those out, growing stronger to face the growing threat, surpassing all the weapons the messengers sent to destroy us. Until…the final weapon we could do nothing against.”
That must be what had ruined their world: The Dimension Ripper (name pending.)
“Why not just use that every time?”
“It renders a world worthless. A stable dimensional membrane is needed for their forms of dimensional travel. During mana droughts, our world offers nothing. During mana surges, the world is too dangerous. Back-to-back, from drought to surge, it is difficult to train others and live. Though we may be mana starved in droughts, it is the safest period. Moreover, there is one final reason they cannot ever use that weapon again.”
“What reason is that?”
“The Sisterhood of the World Phoenix punished them greatly for their transgressions against dimensional integrity, which the World Phoenix presides over. The group that attacked our world was annihilated by their hands.”
“They didn’t fix the membrane for you?”
“It is stable now, even if its ‘stability’ is not ideal for life.”
Nara shook her head, “That’s unfair. Your world got messed up and you got nothing in turn. Sure, the big bad got annihilated, but you guys just have to suffer through it?”
“The universe is not fair, so we create what fairness we can.”
“That’s a jolly good ideal to have. There’s just one thing that bothers me about your story,” Nara said.
“What thing? Is there something you do not understand? I will do my best to explain it.”
“So, the dimensional integrity of your world is shot, but how’s the weather?”
“The…weather?” Zariel-laat said, tilting his head in confusion.
“Do you have apocalyptic volcanic ash, blazing high temperatures, unlivable subzero temperatures, things like that?”
“No? The weather is ordinary. During droughts, more so than normal. Occasionally some non-magical storms. Typical weather you would find in low magic zones here. During periods of flood, the frequency of magical storms increases.”
“So nice sunny days, gentle breezes, clean water?”
“Yes.”
“I get that magic is necessary for essence users, but do you use it for everything?”
“Yes?”
“Why not use solar energy? Wind energy? Hydroelectric power?”
He tilted his head again.
“Do you…not know what that is?”
Nara rapped her head with her fist, thinking. They probably don’t have the infrastructure to create devices capable of capturing energy in that way anyway. Their world started off as a magical world. Why would they need non-magic infrastructure? Especially if monster waves destroyed it all?
“Coal energy then? Steam power, fossil fuels? That sort of thing. People do burn wood here and use charcoal. Oh, and I guess I do see magic windmills. Not quite the same, but you get the idea.”
“I have seen those sorts of things. We do use wood and charcoal as well, as well as magic windmills and vortex accumulators, although they are inefficient during droughts.”
Nara ruthlessly kicked Zukai from the part to make space for Zariel-laat: kids don’t get to sit at the adult’s table.
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[Zariel-laat Strek-hart] has joined the party.
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He accepted without batting an eye. He had communicated with his other allies within the astral space at a distance, so they must possess communication capabilities beyond Erras’.
“Look here, my Guide racial ability lets me access information from my world and this world that is considered ‘common knowledge’. More ‘accessible knowledge’ than ‘common knowledge’, in the case of my world. My world has a sort of global information infrastructure that anyone can access.”
Zariel nodded, “My world has something similar.”
“Magic based?”
“Yes.”
“Alright, fair enough. What world could possibly be insane enough to lay massive lengths of cables under the ocean in the seabed just to communicate information without using magic across the entire planet.”
“…You imply your world has done so. That sounds highly impractical.”
“If there’s an easier way, we’d like to know it. But enough about that, take a look at this.”
Nara operated her Guide Inquiry ability. Everyone connected could telepathically ask questions, but she demonstrated a few things for him.
“You might be interested in these topics,” Nara said, “Now, I doubt you’ll get to the level of mastery in just the time remaining on this expedition, but you might be able to whip up something with that Magitech of yours. Do you have something to record information?”
“I do.”
“Aye, then use that. Read enough to know what questions to ask, and just record the rest and take it back to your world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work with open ended questions like ‘what do I need to know to understand theoretical physics?’ I can try to explain anything you don’t understand, but I’m not an expert on these topics. Really, science is so advanced in my world that people spend their entire lives becoming experts. I couldn’t explain how the objects I use in everyday life really work. I get what a smartphone does but how the fuck do chips work…I mean I even know the physics behind that, generally, but it’s beyond what my mind can make intuitive sense of. Like how do electrons indicating one or zero enough times somehow translate into an open world 3D sandbox RPG with raytracing and realistic graphics? Do you get what I mean?”
“I did not understand a single word of the latter half of that.”
“Me neither, buddy, me neither.”