The rules behind this mock battle were simple. He would take one of my lenses as a way to show if he would’ve been hit or killed by my laser, and I was allowed to start with one lens in the air, but I had to have my second lens at least 15 meters in the air. This height limit was implemented to ensure that I would be aiming at the ground, and to avoid unnecessary collateral damage.
We would start with us being 25 meters apart. He said he was giving me a huge handicap by doing this. I thought he was just toying with me by doing that. I didn’t think I could beat him, but I knew I could at least land a good hit. The signal for the start of the match was the materialization of his axe.
Above Gus’s head, his axe materialized. The match was on. He immediately began running to the left while I ran to the right trying to maintain the distance between us. After a few seconds passed, I was finally able to get my other lens 15 meters high in the air, but it was nearly impossible to focus on where Gus was and where my second lens was aiming. Getting the second lens aligned with the first proved to be insanely difficult while in the middle of combat, but I was able to manage somehow. I should also mention that for the small, muscular man that Gus is, he is ridiculously fast. Somehow he was able to close the gap between the two of us by roughly 10 meters while he was carrying my heavy lens as basically a shield. That guy doesn’t run out of surprises.
Looking back at the 15 meter high lens, I couldn’t find where its ray was shining. While searching for the ray, Gus just kept closing the distance between us with his axe in hand. My god his strides are huge! Barely finding where the light ray is being shown I start to move in that direction, slowly changing where the ray is to meet up with myself, hoping to slow down Gus’s pursuit. My plan ends abruptly as Gus’s axe flies ahead of me, taking my legs out from underneath me. He was smugly smiling as he helped me up. I challenged him for another match, but once again it felt super one sided. My speed in getting the 15 meter mirror set up was much quicker. Incidentally, this also helped with knowing where my light would be reflected instantly. Changing the orientation of my hands, fingers, and wrists played a huge role in controlling the orientation of each lens. Even though my speed and accuracy of manipulating the lenses increased, it didn’t matter against Gus. In the short amount of time it took me to get my bearings with setting up the lens and seeing where it was aimed, Gus had already known the perfect counter. He started off the fight just running straight towards me, closing the distance quickly. I didn’t react immediately, instead preferring to set up the lens aiming for a quick victory, but I didn’t expect him to throw his axe from the ground straight at the lens. I looked up to see the light shining through the axe as it flew into the lens, shattering it to pieces that glittered in the sky as they fell and slowly dematerialized.
Gus instructed me to remake the lens and that we would have another match. I was all game. I was definitely getting the hang of this gem, and I would for sure be able to land a hit. The third battle started off the same as the one previously. Gus rushed towards me, as I set up the lens. Once again, I’m faster with setting up the lens, even though it is always in the same spot. The axe is thrown at it once more, but this time I am able to move the lens out of the way of the axe. After the axe throw I’m able to rematch the lens to the light ray from the first one even further up in the air. Unfortunately, as soon as I get the lens paired back, my face, which is focused on the lens in the sky, meets Gus’s fist. He sent me flying with that punch. I swear he wasn’t holding back at all. I yelled at him asking why’d he have to go full force with that. Of course, he replied with a smug look as always saying that I should learn how to take a punch because there are gonna be much worse people that hit much harder in here.
I pressed him on what he meant by “in here”. He meant in the tree of course. Were we really really in a tree? He said that all eternals have roughly the same experience of how they got into the tree some people being sacrificed, some people accidentally wandered in, some took a nap on a root and woke up here, and some offered themselves to the tree, but one thing was all the same that we all were put in contact with the tree outside, and now we’re stuck in here. Apparently, the immortal individuals in the tree are called eternals, and they are pretty sure that only the people from outside the tree, who were brought into here are eternals. The really interesting thing he claims is that there are only around 10,000 eternals in the tree, so most people you meet wouldn’t even be eternals. I asked him if only eternals were brought into the tree what other people would there even be. “The Kijin of course” is how he responded. His jargon irritated me. I pressed him again on what he meant by “Kijin”. He explained Kijin as people born in the tree. The only two types of people in the tree were the eternals and the Kijin. Kijin are the mortal humans in the tree. They had come about originally as the offspring of eternals, but they didn’t inherit their immortality. As time went on civilization began to expand. The Kijins numbers grew from having more offspring, but the number of eternals that entered the tree had stagnated.
Gus had said that he was a part of the third wave of eternals that had entered the tree, which meant that he was between the 3001-7000 eternal to enter the tree. The third wave had occurred around 1200 years ago and lasted for around 20 years. During those 20 years around 4000 new eternals had entered the tree. The other waves each show a certain part of the history of the tree. He said that the first wave, also nicknamed the ancients, consisted of the first 500 eternals entering the tree. He wasn’t sure of how long ago they had entered the tree since they are nearly all recluses that don’t show themselves in society. It was around the third wave when most of them disappeared from society. During that time most of them were heroes of their small towns and had reached what we thought was the pinnacle of power. The ancients were hunted down by the fresh eternals of the third wave, so that they could obtain the power that they had accumulated over their long years. The ancients were all hunted down, and lost their powers. This resulted in them returning to new base gems after they respawned. Nearly all the ancients couldn’t reach the same heights they previously had, such as guardians, heroes, or even gods of their respective small villages. As the saying goes they were big fish in a small pond, but once that pond grew into an ocean, they simply became average.
The second wave had started around 1500 years ago and lasted for nearly 100 years. During this wave another 2500 eternals were brought into the tree totaling 3000 eternals when combined with the first wave. Civilization starts to begin with the second wave. The increase in the number of individuals led to the ability for more people to find each other naturally in the world. People banded together to create small civilizations and this is around the time when the Kijin were able to establish a foothold inside the tree rather than having their lineage die off after a generation or two. This was only possible by the help of multiple eternals coming together with the similar goal to survive together.
The fourth wave is the newest wave, and it consists of the last 3000 eternals entering the tree. This wave occurred 500 years ago and lasted for 3 years. It was the first time that the tree was flooded with so many individuals, and it quickly led to the emergence of the spawning area trader’s post that we had visited. It proved insanely profitable since a single leech head was worth its weight in gold. During this time, civilization was starting to go into full swing. Many nations had formed a few hundred years before the fourth wave, and these last eternals had to choose to conform to these societies, or be on their own. This led to large scale conflicts. Nations fell, tragedies were commonplace, and life as an eternal became more dangerous than it already was during these times. Over the next hundred years, tensions between these groups slowly eased as the new eternals found their places in society. The remaining tension lies in the fact that the third wave eternals are still in many of the positions of power in their respective societies. Whether that be politically, financially, or their long lineages making up most of the population in these societies. They feel as though they have to fight against a rigged system where they can’t succeed against the third wave eternals.
Gus said he worried that I might be the start of a fifth wave of eternals, but he said there was always a sprinkling of a random few eternals every couple decades. The main issue that concerned him was that I had a second gem and that was unheard of. If there started to be a fifth wave and each eternal had two gems that would turn the power balance of civilization on its head in the tree. It was one thing to have two people with complementary gems work together, and a whole other thing if one person could control the same two complementary gems. The boost in power could be exponential depending on what gems the eternal got. It is also this reason why he was warning me not to let others know about the fact that I have a second gem. If one of the many governments found out about me having two gems, I would undoubtedly be hunted down like a dog and experimented on to find out how I got this power, and what they had to do to get it. They would do anything and everything except kill me in their experiments, so that they wouldn’t lose their precious test subject. If they were to accidentally kill me then they would just repeatedly hunt me down till they were able to acquire my power for themselves.
I had asked Gus how I knew I could trust him after hearing all this. He simply replied by slapping me on my back and laughing while telling me to shut up and quit overthinking. Gus told me I needed to live like someone with one gem. In order to get into the city we were going to I had to either provide my citizenship information to prove I was a citizen, or if I was an eternal and didn’t have citizenship for this country I had to register for citizenship. Any previous crimes committed in this territory or any allied countries they had information from would make it impossible to get their citizenship. When registering for citizenship I will need to let them get my gem on record, as well as name and lineage(if I had any). They take the gem on record to maintain a certain level of control over any eternal citizens they might have. If a crime is committed with a gem matching the one on your record then all individuals with that gem are prime suspects. Lineage is used to hold eternals accountable for their actions against the state. If an eternal causes damage, but is no longer around to be held accountable, then their lineage is held accountable instead. This has led to some lineages completely abandoning their names that tied them to their progenitors and leading to new family names spread throughout the tree. When I have to register, Gus instructed me to always choose one gem as my main gem to use and one as a last resort. The main gem is always the one I should register for citizenships, and that I should do everything I can to keep the other gem hidden.
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Before we knew it, nighttime was approaching. We had talked all this time still in the area where we had fought those mock battles, which left the score at 0-3. I will get a point next time, I swear upon it. We walked a bit more until we set up camp a little further down the trail. Laying on my back I could see the moon and stars start to appear in the sky. It looked similar to our own sky, but when I asked Gus he said that it is most likely a copy created from the sky outside the tree. I wasn’t really bummed out to hear that. Even though I died in here once already, I’m having so much more fun in here then I did back in that old village. I never really fit in there, and I don’t know why. It always seemed like I was ostracized for something that I never knew. People had avoided me like the plague, with my uncle being the only one there for me, but even he wasn’t able to be there in the end. The sound of the river fills my ears as I start to nod off. It really is quite soothing.
The next morning comes about as always, with Gus waking me. At the end of today we should reach New Dale. We eat a quick breakfast from the rations in our bags. I’m actually amazed at the quality of food that we got from that shady trader. Both of us had a package of bread, jams, jerky, and preserved fruits. Even though there was a lack of customer service, the product we got was amazing. Gus was saying that it always feels bad making that trade, and that we were getting ripped off hard, but it is normally best to make the trade anyways. Leech heads possessed a rare resource that was only available in the spawning pools and is extremely expensive, but the longer you wait to process the resource the less valuable it is, and it deteriorates at an extremely fast rate. The cost of the leech head when fresh compared to the bag and everything we got is around 50 to 1, but the cost of the leech head when we would get to the town compared to the bag is 5 to 1, so the leech head would lose 90% of its value.
After we both finished our breakfast, the journey started up again. In about half the day, we would probably have exited the mountainous region, and start passing by some of the farms that we could see from up here. In order to pass the time while walking, I practiced using the lenses once more. After a little bit of time, Gus started to get involved in it. The goal of this training was to have two lenses above me preventing them from getting hit by Gus’s axe while guiding one nearby me as a shield, and bonus points for having the two lenses pass light from one to the other for an extended period of time. Each time Gus was able to destroy one of the lenses it would take a minute or two to reconstruct it. During that down time, Gus would give me tips on how to control multiple lenses at once. The main idea was to give each hand one lens each, and have the different parts of my hand control different parts of the lens. The whole hand controls the x, y, and z axis of one of the lenses. Instead of the lens mirroring the hand, the hand applies force at those areas of the lens relative to myself. Whichever lens would be further left at the time would be controlled by the left hand and whichever was controlled by the right hand would be the right most lens. Guiding the lens down below me was pretty easy as well. When fiddling with the lenses above with my hands I guided the lens below with my elbow. Nearly all of the manipulation with the two lenses above were done with the hands, so it only involved use of the arm beneath the elbow. Therefore, the lens below followed along and was able to stay relatively steady.
Hours had gone by, and I had improved a ton against Gus in our little game. When we had started off I looked so awkward trying to control both of the lenses in the air. I would have my hands flailing around looking a fool, with a ton of unnecessary motions involved. Now I was much more controlled, and personally I thought I looked really cool. At the start I could last around 10 - 20 seconds against Gus before one went and shattered, but now I just had my longest rally against Gus being 20 minutes. I was also able to keep my laser uptime to roughly 30%. The main issue though was controlling the focal length of the lens and where both were aimed. Even though it wasn’t part of the game I kept trying to keep the light nearly horizontal, but small inaccuracies made that way too hard. The laser would be wobbly and connect for a second, get lined up, and then disconnect again. This means that the lack of accuracy in a fight where my lenses are being targeted will most likely lead to them not being able to contribute. The fact that I’ve been able to work this out this far though, is pretty awesome.
After the last rally of practice with Gus, he suggested transitioning to practicing the three mirror techniques to work on invisibility. I practiced for a few hours, and it really wasn’t that hard to do. The main thing that made it hard to do was connecting the input light data from the mirror behind to the display mirror in front. This was taxing because it was all done by manual mental effort. My mental focus on the image coming in from the input and moving it to the output was the conduit that made it function. A small cheat I found to get around this was to take data as an image from the backside and just display that image to the output constantly. That way I wouldn’t need to be a conduit for the invisibility to occur, but this did not account for any changes in the environment behind me. This was a static low cost solution compared to the dynamic high cost variation. Both of these techniques I would assume would be very helpful. The last technique Gus had me practice was the blinding ability with the lenses. This was especially helpful when you only had one free lens if your others get broken. All this one does is absorb the light it receives and outputs it at the target in an obscuring light. This is also quite easy to aim since it doesn’t matter much about the focal range allowing the creation of a larger field of light to hit the target with.
Our training had taken a slight break, as we heard something coming from higher up the mountain forest. The sounds of trees crunching and crumbling echoed from afar, but quickly started to get closer.
“Set up your lenses, Now”, Gus said, materializing his axe, turning towards the sounds.
Sending both lenses up, I move the amplified light ray towards where the sounds were coming from in the forest, with the third down below acting as a one way mirror. Crashing out of the forest, in the hill above us was what looked like a six legged bear with a long snout and a beaver tail coming straight at us.
“Fuck, a Badgerbear”, Gus sadly exhaled.
Gus immediately sent out his axe while remaining hidden behind the mirror. He took a swipe at the bear, but it did nothing. It didn’t break through even its thick fur, but that didn’t stop Gus who went for a second swipe at his eyes. His attempt was met by the bear’s claws swiping through it, forcibly dematerializing his axe. Gus turns to me immediately saying, “Why are you hesitating? Do something!”. I completely froze. The bear is now only 100 meters away. I go to shine my light at the beast for a second, and it has an effect, but before the light could cause any real damage it slams its tail into the ground sending it flying in the air at a ridiculous speed. Its trajectory is sending it straight into the lower lens. We can’t win. Just survive. With these thoughts I convert the lower lens that the bear is targeting into a blinding light, and bring the higher lens hurtling towards the ground, and immediately convert it to a one way mirror. The blinding effect worked, but it still flew straight into that lens and shattered it on impact. The badgerbear landed in the river only 20 meters away from us, still slightly dazed from the blinding light. The rushing of the river didn’t affect this beast at all. The bear stood on its rear and mid set of legs in the river rubbing at its eyes for a few seconds and then turning to the position where we were currently at. It looked for its target for multiple seconds before returning to rubbing its eyes a few times. This repeated for around a minute till the bear ran off the other side of the river smacking its tail flying off to the neighboring mountain range.
A few minutes pass while I continue to maintain the invisibility of both of the lenses.
“How the fuck did we survive”, Gus whispers.
“I should’ve asked that trader if the badgerbears were still hibernating or not '', he continued.
“I shouldn't have frozen at the start of that”, I say looking down at the ground.
“It’s fine. You did great. You’re the reason we're both still alive.” he said, still in disbelief of the situation.
Materializing his axe again in his hands he continues, “Wrap your hands around me and bind your lenses to your elbows. Try to make sure to continue the invisibility. We are getting out of here before more of those come.” I do as he asks, wrapping tight around his chest interlocking my hands. He grabs onto his axe with his left hand and we start to leave the ground. Air blows by at a fast rate as I see the ground fly by underneath us. These many different sensations make it hard to focus on being a conduit for the invisibility of the lenses. Something drops on my head after a few seconds of flying, and I look up to see many drops of blood fly by in the air. Gus’s whole left arm is bloodied up even though we have only been in the air for roughly 30 seconds. We had covered a ton of ground in those 30 seconds though, seeing as we were currently above the farms. “Shouldn’t we stop? You're hurting yourself.”, I ask worriedly. “I need a healing mage. The only place for that will be once we get to the city gates. Don’t worry we should be there in about 20 seconds”, he said while smiling clearly, still occasionally wincing from the pain in his left hand.
We finish passing all the farms and arrive at the main gate for the town. A 15 meter wall surrounds the perimeter of the city preventing people and monsters alike from getting in unpermitted. We slowly land and much more than 20 seconds had gone by since he said we would be there. I land on my feet and pick up the stumbling Gus. A nearby guard sees the condition Gus is in and runs over. “Call a medic”, he yells to the other guards, as Gus starts to fade into unconsciousness. “Please help him!”, I plead to the guard. He nods in response, picking up Gus, putting him over his shoulder, and running towards the gate. I follow behind him to not lose Gus. “You’ll be fine Gus, You’re gonna get through this”, I say tearing up grabbing his non bloodied hand. Gus slowly opens his eyes and manifests that same smug smile he usually wears, “Don’t worry, I know I will be”.