01/02/ AWAD 201

The research team of King Laftus was abuzz since the detection of the otherworlder’s arrival, but one particular researcher wasn't too happy. Jaf managed to connect the target to the world of the god killer, but all the credit went to his supervisor.

Jaf would have been fine if they had just given him just a small raise, but no! They didn’t even give him that. Already fuming when starting up the reconnaissance equipment, he punched the mana-scape scan in irritation when only static showed up. A sense of foreboding came over him as he shook his hand from the pain.

Jaf flung a spell to lift up the outer shell shielding the inner workings and searched for any sign of breaches. Nothing came up. Still hoping for the static to only be a malfunction, he scaled down the settings. His breath quickened and his eyes dilated. The mana-scape was rapidly oscillating.

Focusing his own raw mana sight also indicated the abnormality faintly. That could only mean two things, and one more test would make the cause clear.

"Hey Raifus go see if the boss is available. I think he is going to want to see our readings," Jaf called out.

No matter the results, a lot of people were probably going to die.

Jaf concluded that being a grunt wasn't too bad actually, leaning back into his chair with a smile. Experimenting with random spell loops was fun. Most importantly, the poor son of a gavitch who had to report this, in other words his boss, wasn't him.

01/04/ AWAD 201

“You detected the rising of a Kajin two days ago and you are only telling me now? Why?!” Laftus asked furiously.

Plans would have to be adjusted. More soldiers would be necessary and construction of his spearpoint city would have to be sped up.

“Well sire, we had to look into more details to confirm and actually did manage to find out more,” a bumbling research overseer tried to cover his foolishness.

Laftus growled, “why did I create your division?”

The fool in front of him mumbled, “you said that it was to come up with innovations to give to the people and therefore keep them happy and to--”

"Alert me to events exactly like this!" Laftus roared. "Since you have proved so incompetent in your job, you can be the one to alert General Nagatas to come to the war room and Count Hafard, Count Fasiar, and Count Gatarn to send in their reports."

Chances were great that the otherworlder would get away from him at this rate. Not only was this a potential catastrophe or even a cataclysm, it even made another problem worse! Well Laftus supposed this was another way his days of laziness came back to bite him.

Laftus directed his secretary, “Kevisa, retrieve Nagatas’s report on the army and make copies of the reports for myself and for Nagatas.”

She handed him a file from a cabinet.

General Nagatas and the other reports arrived a couple minutes later. Kevisa did as directed and Laftus flipped through his copies with a cursory scan before frowning.

"Nagatas, I heard from my research division about a Kajin rising, but according to further investigation of the mana-scape the Kajin may prove abnormally powerful. More improvements of the army would be appreciated, but I don't know what should be changed exactly," Laftus muttered.

Nagatas shuffled through his army report and pointed at something on one page, "Sire, your army should be formidable with muskets capable of flinging spells increasingly farther and longer lasting equipment to the credit of the research division, but you need more recruits."

Laftus grimaced when he looked at the numbers Nagatas pointed out, "you have my permission to alert the conscriptors. Normal conscripting might attract attention, so frame the increased conscription as for guarding settlers. My other issue is the rebellion of some of my aristocracy.”

“They are planning to muster a combined army without my sanction,” Laftus almost snarled. “I don’t have time for insurgents, so this will mostly be a subjugation. Surviving serfs and land can be distributed to the aristocrats remaining faithful. Prepare the army. We will hit them hard before they realize the spatiath systems don’t fade.”

General Nagatas bowed twice before leaving.

01/05/ AWAD 201

Laftus nodded to Nagatas in appreciation at the assortment of troops in formation. They were decked out in the best equipment his research division could offer, a thousand strong. Not being able to bring all of his army to bear stung, but he couldn't show weakness to the other rulers.

Nagatas would take another thousand troops to subjugate a different insurgent noble.

A gate exit materialized a few paces away, and a man stepped out. Laftus’s troops tensed up until they realized he was a comrade.

“My lord, the spatiath has been activated and is ready for use,” the man announced, kneeling to Laftus.

Spatiaths was the moniker given to paths in the spatial realm. Experiments using spell loops to construct spatiath beacons were astounding successes.

“Proceed as planned.” Laftus commanded.

The spatiath courier retrieved mana from his spatiath operator, and that mana contorted to encompass them. A burst of mana from the spatiath operator tore open a hole in their realm’s fabric, and Laftus found himself in the spatial realm along with his troops.

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Spatiath beacons passed by as they rushed toward their first target. A minute passed and they managed to cross the over five hundred mile distance. Spatiath beacons were arranged in a distorted circle around where the target would be in the spatial realm. Laftus’s troops split into six, leaving Laftus an escort and mustering around five beacons equidistant to each other.

Laftus commanded, “start the countdown for synched re-entry!”

After a ten-second countdown, nine hundred of his troops disappeared from sight, re-entering their realm, the interrealm. One of Laftus’s escort immediately readied an imcap for viewing with a bird’s eye view and showed Laftus’s troops having the target’s fortified manor surrounded.

Laftus made a feral smile at his first target’s encirclement. Count Favan possessed over a thousand serfs but appeared to want more. Well, the insurgent count definitely gained more men paying heed to his actions.

Horns were blown and shouts rang. Count Favan’s men noticed the army surrounding them. Not even a minute passed and over five hundred cavalrymen thundered out of the manor. Laftus’s first target insurgent noble, Count Favan, rode at the center.

Laftus’s troops fired their spell canons but ceased fire witnessing how the target and his cavalry managed to evade. They couldn’t waste ammunition considering they had four hundred and three more targets left to subjugate.

Meanwhile, the target and his cavalry continued to charge. Clearly they believed they could break free of the encirclement. Five hundred cavalrymen would have difficulty beating nine hundred troops but beating two hundred troops would be within easy reach.

Laftus nodded his head, understanding his current quary’s thoughts. They underestimated his spatiath network’s versatility, though! Before the target and his cavalry reached the northernmost regiment of Laftus’s troops, the other four regiments appeared beside their northernmost brethren, having briefly returned to the spatial realm. With too much momentum built up, the cavalrymen became fish in a barrel.

A couple bombardments of lightning broke down the enemy’s defense wards, and then Laftus’s army shot a lobby of earth spells encasing the broken enemy in stone.

Laftus strolled up to the man wearing the most gaudy armor, Count Favan. His escort had protested leaving the spatial realm, but he wanted to see the expression of the first person he defeated.

Count Favan’s expression of bewilderment was delicious.

Laftus laughed, “you truly believed you could get away with treachery didn’t you?”

Encounters with other targets went similarly, as expected. Nagatas led a series of thrashings with the edge magitech provided. The insurgents must have thought enchantments like the spartiath beacon’s enchantments had unravelled. They thought wrong. They thought a war of attrition would work. They thought wrong.

Laftus viewed the new barrenness of the surrounding lands through his imcaps with dark satisfaction. Containment enchantments were used to strip away farmland from the insurgents. An innovation intended for settling the wilds, but their effects mimicked burning and salting land. His rabble rousers pinned all the blame on the insurgent nobility for revolting.

Even a serf uprising with enough numbers would cause problems, but the infrastructure improvements Laftus had planned would re-cultivate their loyalty. The insurgents would lose before they even truly realized the futility of the fight.

Laftus bizarrely felt gratitude. Insurgents would be put down, especially the aristocrats who dared raise a hand at him, but the easy civil war allowed him to riddle his outerlands in spatiath nodes. A smile danced on his lips at how an invasion against his country would fare. Invaders couldn’t even hope to deal serious damage with the farm lands moved farther inland.

Kevisa set a stack of papers on his desk and interrupted his happy musing. Laftus banged his desk with his forehead. The truly tiresome part of the campaign began after the actual conquest: distributing the plundered lands.

Laftus sighed. Not all the ringleaders were dumb enough to flee when he gave them chances in secret. Only about three-fourths of them fell for the trick and allowed for ‘accidental’ killings of them in the heat of battle. Hopefully, not too many of about the hundred insurgents left would be forgiven.

01/16/ AWAD 201

“Kevisa, call in a masseuse and get these documents filed,” Laftus pointed out the stack of papers to his right.

Leaning back into his chair, he glared at the other stacks of paper and groaned. The weeks after the suppression of the insurgency had been a constant march of paperwork. His bureaucracy couldn’t handle things without precedent on their own, so some of the paper pushing spilled into his lap. Creating a city with so extensive innovations caused a scramble of demands by his aristocracy. They wanted similar cities.

There were still many ruffled feathers from the distribution of the insurgents’ lands and had to be appeased since they adhered to their loyalty contract specifics. Laftus groaned at how many more names were left on the list of complaints apparently unique or significant enough for his review.

Laftus was enjoying a nice massage when the mana-scape rippled chaoticly, and he froze when the rippling disappeared in an instant. A lecture by the scholar who raised him, Kafsan, came to mind. Despite the destructiveness of the gods, some records were apparently left about the time in their reign, and hero summonings occurred even then.

“One thing was noted about many of the heroes. When a ‘hero’ decided to back a god or goddess, all magic entailing the realm that deity represented spiked in power. If a ‘hero’ chose the god of fire, then the strength of all fire magic spiked. The goddess of chaos was an exception, though. Her domain rose from the clashing of all the different realms, the interrealm, our realm. She enhanced and fed on discord, so a declaration to follow her by the ‘hero’ caused a chaos of some kind in the mana-scape which she would devour.”

Laftus snarled quietly, “the prophecy has been completely fulfilled hasn’t it?”

Kevisa came back with her breath in a disarray, “sire!... The research division has requested for me to pass on a verbal message. May I do so?”

Laftus nodded uneasily.

Kevisa whispered, “the hero has decided to back the goddess of chaos, and the result suggests… the goddess of chaos survived the War against Divinity.”

Laftus already knew, but having his research division confirm remained disturbing. If there was a goddess of chaos, then the other deities might come back. At least, talks of dealing with the otherworlder should become much more productive.

He ordered, “Kevisa tell Baron Yevin to send a variation of the letter we sent before but including the fact the otherworlder has likely aligned with the goddess of chaos.”

Kevisa nodded and bowed three times before leaving.

Laftus picked up the next piece of paperwork but found his hand shaking. He was afraid?

The otherworlders of previous records almost always seemed god-like in might, especially the God-killer. They almost didn’t seem real in being such absurd existences, and a similar incarnation of power sided with the gods.

Talks of cooperation should become much more productive. became immensely more productive. Every ruler knew how large of a threat the otherworlder posed. Instead of the mockery of a suggestion to meet if Laftus offered a new city as the location for the meeting, the location of the meeting was set in the wilds.

Unlike before, a tense silence reigned after the ture topic of discussion came up. No one, not even the rulers grew up without the stories of how powerful otherworlders were and the heights of might they could reach. Everyone simply sat in silence.

King Jerom, a young ruler like him, jumped up and slammed the table, “cooperating to track down and obliterate the otherworlder is obviously the best course of action.”

A random king scoffed, “you are a fool if you believe such a thing is possible.”

His name was… ah, Aldress.

King Jerom shot back, “then I guess we all get to be overthrown by the otherworlder.”

Aldress and a couple other kings fumed and the meeting devolved into bickering.

Laftus shook his head to himself as well. After having his call to eliminate the otherworlder jointly rejected, he looked more deeply into the ongoing wars. Before, only a cursory monitoring of the bloodshed was necessary. A lot of the rulers had genuine blood feuds with each other to his surprise.

“I believe we should still consider options near King Jerom’s suggestion,” a greying man called out.

The arguing came to a sudden stop. No one wanted to anger King Salverus.

Laftus raised an eyebrow. The time Slaverus had waited to begin the actual discussion was surprising. Salverus ended up as the de facto moderator, since he had the most conquered rulers under his belt. A calmer and considerably more competent version of Laftus’s father and also someone Laftus had hoped to damage as much as possible in the opening attack of his original course of action.

King Aldress spluttered, “what do you suggest then, King Salverus?”

“For now, since everyone here appears to have accepted me as the mediator, I should be the mediator no matter the level of cooperation agreed upon. My army stands above you all in strength, but I have far too much lands to consolidate under my authority for more gains to interest me. Although some may be catching up.”

Laftus almost gulped and noticed some kings lightly cough. He sighed, realizing his plan before the otherworlder showed up probably would have failed, if he hadn’t noticed so many threats. Hopefully Salverus didn’t know too much about him.

In the end, a system of warnings was agreed on. A joint-hunt was out of the question, but sandwiching the otherworlder between armies was possible. The rulers of the armies might decide to re-engage their feuds after killing the otherworlder, but that was still acceptable.