“Are you sure he’s not crazy?”
“He’s got the Levels I’d have expected … and the temper.”
Lane sighed. He’d been dealing with that issue for the last hour. And yes, it was an issue. A much bigger opportunity, a boon, than a problem, but one that could still cause some trouble.
For all the chaos that had filled the last three months, no one, and that meant no one, had expected a random First Lieutenant of the United States Marine Corps to wake up from a nightmare so violently that he accidentally threw himself through the barrack’s drywall, then calmly stand up, dust himself off, and go wake his superior officer to declare himself the reincarnation of General George S. Patton, war hero of the Second World War.
Now, that wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounded at first glance, Patton had been an ardent believer in the idea of reincarnation and, according to himself, existed as a warrior in one incarnation or other since the dawn of mankind.
The idea of his return was only partially in question.
What to do with him, on the other hand … that had been the subject of many, many discussions. First with advisors, then the defense minister, then a brief talk with a particularly enthusiastic member of the White House’s press corps, and now, finally, he’d roped General Collins into it, the man in charge of Washington’s defenses having had the misfortune of passing by just as the previous conversation had wrapped up.
“What exactly do you mean by ‘he has the temper’?” Lane finally asked. There was a difference between a commanding officer who took a city and sent the radio transmission of “have taken Trier with two divisions, what do you want me to do, give it back” when ordered to bypass said city after he’d already conquered it, and the man who’d beaten the tar out of a G.I. in a field hospital after said G.I. had admitted to only being hospitalized due to shellshock.
Patton, unfortunately, had done both.
The former was going to be a lot of fun to deal with, but ultimately could be worked with.
The latter was a problem in everything from discipline, to morale, to public relations. An absolute nightmare, to be exact.
“More passive-aggressive than aggressive, but I don’t know how much that is down to him not being one of the highest-ranked, if not the highest, in any room he walks into,” Collins replied. “Hold on …”
The general pulled out his phone, tapped at its screen a couple of times, then turned it around for Lane to see.
It was a video, clearly taken from a camera in the corner of a room, grainy and low quality in general, but it was still easy to tell what was going on.
One of the men, with his back to the camera, was a USMC captain, based on the insignia visible on his shoulder.
The other was someone Lane would not have known yesterday, but as of an hour ago, most people in the upper echelons of the United States government could recognize him on sight.
First Lieutenant Johnathan Miller, the one who’d, in all likelihood, become an ancient.
“I’m genuinely not too sure what to do here,” the captain said, sounding, well, unsure. Understandable, given the situation, and giving the impression this clip was only the tail end of a much longer conversation.
“Well, Sir, regardless of who I was, today, I am a lieutenant and that makes it your prerogative to figure this out,” ‘Patton’ replied. “Pass it up the chain, then someone will get back to us in three to five business days, until then, I’ll do my job and fry the monsters.”
The tone was largely polite, with just the barest hint of underlying snark, which was nowhere near enough for even the most zealous guardian of military protocol to punish him for.
“Why ‘fry’?” Lane asked.
“It’s a Skill called [Thunderous Gaze],” Collins explained. “Supposedly, when he gets mad, his eyes start sparking and he can even hurl lightning bolts. After the video was taken, Miller headed to the shooting range and obliterated a few targets. That’s what sold everyone on the fact that, at the very least, he wasn’t the same Lieutenant Miller who went to bed the previous evening.”
… Lane really should have grabbed the military officer for a meeting well before everything else.
“What about his rank? I’m not sure I want to set a precedent for reincarnations being given what their ‘previous selves’ earned, be it rank or property.”
He wasn’t too against it in the here and now, but precedents were dangerous things. And, quite frankly, he was a little worried about people faking reincarnations, simply by gaining power and coming up with a plausible story.
Just look at the Vogt siblings. Those who cared to find out could easily discern that their power stemmed from a combination of tutoring by literal legends and being able to take part in battles well above what they should be able to contend with thanks to the protection of the ancients. Which, in turn, lead to massive power growth.
But if they’d just popped onto the world stage last week, with their strength as it was right now?
Granted, their accents would have made maintaining the ruse tricky, but if they’d claimed to be, say, Joan of Arc and Nicolo Machiavelli, it wouldn’t have been something he could have dismissed out of hand.
“George S. Patton was Army, Johnathan Miller is Marines,” Collins announced. “All other things considered, that is a very solid reason to keep Miller’s rank as-is. And it won’t even be a fig leaf justification.”
“He is still calling himself ‘Miller,’ right?” Lane asked. That was the latest as he knew it, but he wanted to make sure he had it correct.
Collins nodded. “He says he is who he was born as, and that is Johnathan Miller. In this life, at least.”
Another point in the “keep him as a lieutenant” column.
“Sanity check:” Lane finally announced, providing the plan he’d been cooking up since he’d found out about everything.
“We pull Miller from his current posting, keeping him at his current rank, and put him on one of the squads we’re power leveling against Bosses in isolated areas. He does well, we bump him up a rank, then reassess. Meanwhile, we look at what Skills he has, and whether they’d be better used in the field or at the planning table and decide future postings from there.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“Would that work?”
“Mostly,” Collins replied. “It lets him earn his rank while wiping out as much doubt as we can … but Patton, rather famously, led from the front. Regardless of how his powerset shakes out, he’ll be best placed in whatever area is under contention, and then, he’ll stand on the front lines as a berserker or glass-cannon mage, whatever his true power winds up being.”
“Thank you, General Collins,” Lane said, one of his Skills prodding him into action because a new issue apparently needed dealing with …
“Can I pass the suggestion along to the Marine Corps?” Collins offered, realizing that Lane was being dragged away.
“Thank you.”
And just like that, Lane ran off to put out yet another fire.
***
Miller/Patton, two weeks later
Magic was wonderful. Truly wonderful.
Granted, the eggheads classified Skills granted directly separately from spells with the former being only accessible via leveling while the latter was learnable.
Though that was an even more academic distinction than it already was until the United States actually got full access to the Europeans’ magical knowledge.
However, in the privacy of his own head, he could consider his miraculous abilities to be as magical as they were, and by God, [Offensive Momentum] was overpowered.
Not good, not strong, it had breezed straight past “borderline” to comfortably settle in the literally game-changing.
Yes, there was something incredibly satisfying in blowing stuff up just by looking at it, and [Thunderous Glare] was one of his favorites not only for its offensive applications but also for how effectively it could communicate his displeasure.
However, Miller and his group of Force Recon Marines had been going strong for twenty-eight hours by now, and were showing no signs of slowing.
Mind you, this wasn’t twenty-eight hours of deployment, or even twenty-eight hours in enemy territory, but twenty-eight hours of near-constant combat against boss-class monsters, with perhaps twenty minutes being the longest break between engagements.
[Offensive Momentum] did exactly what it said on the tin, and did it well. It allowed him to maintain his momentum when continuously attacking, banishing tiredness, alleviating fatigue, and granting slowly but steadily escalating power, their strength ever-growing as the Skill continued to work at full blast.
Not to mention that their vehicles and movement speed, in general, benefitted from the effect as well, allowing them to flit from place to place, while using the truly miraculous modern communications systems that let Miller arrange for supplies to be placed en-route, as well as replacements for any weapons or gear that wound up unusable after a fight, which had happened more than a few times.
It was strange, attempting to reconcile all the various sets of memories. This time around, that was.
Previously, he’d just started remembering things bit by bit, growing up as “himself,” regaining mental maturity as he reached an appropriate age.
This time around, the awakening had been rather … sudden. Very sudden.
Funnily enough, not knowing had failed to change the direction of his life one iota, he’d still been entirely himself to the point where the System had given him [Born Soldier] as his Class. A good temporary set of powers until he regained his true power.
Another thing that was rather amusing was that up until two weeks ago, he hadn’t considered his phone to be anyhting special. Yes, a smartphone was miles better than the flip phone he’d started with, but having the world at his fingertips was nothing new to him.
However, from even his previous life’s perspective, let alone anything even earlier, it was a bonafide miracle.
“Who’s next?” Miller asked the Sergeant in the driver’s seat. They’d just gotten redirected to a new target, and it was the driver who’d gotten that information. Despite the fact that the rights and responsibilities he’d been given were well above what his rank would account for, he was not a four-star general in this life.Most orders came from so far on high that the only information he got on the goings-on came in the form of orders, as they were issued.
His life in the twentieth century had inarguably been his most successful one, filled with the greatest achievements. His previous crack at command as a Marshal of France under Napoleon hadn’t been too bad exactly, however, he’d been too inexperienced in command, being aggressive while in the hot seat required a very different approach than going for broke as a lone soldier.
Every life, every death, all was a lesson to be learned in one way or another.
“Living dust devil, Field Boss, Level 39, westernmost edge of California,” came the report.
“Thank you,” Miller said and pulled out his phone to check the route he’d planned. The eggheads had set up quite the interesting website for the purpose of tracking monsters, where reports triggered certain automated responses that would eventually escalate to the point of surveillance satellites checking the area.
That was the one positive of the fact that the monster invasion was a global issue.
Everyone was busy, and needed their troops at home.
Cutting loose a few special forces units to screw with an enemy was perfectly possible, true.
But large-scale, hard, or even impossible, to hide from satellites actions had to be inevitably postponed.
And when the satellites were less needed to guard against enemy fuck-fuck games, those with the appropriate orbits could be used to feed the hunt for monsters.
So, Field Boss to kill here, air monster, best stay in the humvee cause it was too heavy to throw around easily, combined use of grenade launchers and [Remote Detonation] or anti-tank rifles and [Guided Shot] to break the core, then turn the cactus monster that actually supposed to come next into fertilizer.
From then on, go pick a fight with the metal refinery that had grown legs and started stomping on shit, he’d likely have to step in there as while this current situation wasn’t helping level much, there was also a certain degree of safety and expediency to consider. One humvee of Marines wasn’t going to do much against a building-sized Raid Boss, they simply weren’t carrying enough ammo for that.
The dust devil came into view soon enough, but a moment before the first shots were fired, his phone rang. While an emergency alert popped up and blocked his ability to pick up the damn phone. And the radio also crackled to life, yet it couldn’t be heard over the painfully loud combination of his ringtone and the unmissable buzz of “shit’s going down.”
Muttering profanity under his breath, Miller tossed his phone into the back so that even if it had somehow glitched into making that infernal racket until its battery ran dry, it was far enough away for him to hear what was being said on the radio.
And at the soonest opportunity, he’d find a way to remove that emergency alert from his phone. It was not doing him any good at the moment, in fact, it seemed to very much be working against him.
“Transmission unclear, please repeat,” he announced into the radio.
“Nation Boss sighted in San Francisco,” the radio replied. “You are ordered to take your group there in all due haste, and place yourself under the command of General Greer.”
Miller bit back a curse as he replied “Understood, over and out,” then replaced the radio in its holder.
“Swing past these Field Bosses on the way,” he ordered, indicating several points on the map sprawled across his lap.
A little bit of mental math let him know that they were around an hour away. By the time they reached the City by the Bay, [Offensive Momentum] would have well and truly run its course. The specter of sleep was already looming in the distance, and while using the Skill didn’t incur some kind of debt they’d have to pay off later, a simple eight hours would be enough, it would hit almost immediately once magic was no longer propping them up.
“Yes, Sir.”
And while the Humvee blasted off in a new direction, Miller rolled down the window, removed his seatbelt, hung most of his torso out of the car to get a direct line of sight on the living dust devil that didn’t have anything he wanted to keep intact in the way, and unleashed [Thunderous Glare].
Sparks flashed in his eyes, rapidly coalescing into a pure orb of power that left two eye-searingly-bright spheres sitting in the center of his face.
The discharge came and went so quickly that any observers could easily have missed it, his eyes were suddenly back to normal, Miller pulled himself back into the car, and buckled back in while in the distance, the monster fell apart.
And three seconds later, the roaring boom of thunder rolled over them all, as the noise of the impact finally reached the humvee.
Three more Field Bosses along the way should let them maintain their boost with a comfortable cushion until they got their orders and engaged the Nation Boss.
Miller had also made sure to plan the engagements so that the offensive portion of [Thunderous Glare] would be available for every single Field Boss, minimizing the delay.
Simple. All very simple.