Just seconds after I walked back in my long left home, I had time to realize what was happening and little else. Not enough to say goodbye to my parents, and just the minor moment to see them again before all of us were moved instantly. I had no reason to worry, not for my parents, and that was all I thought I'd have to worry with.

Well it had been decades, and another body and mind that wasn't as healthy ago since I'd experienced living close to a woman my age. I was prepared for that and unprepared in all the right ways to be protected from the worst of it. Then, I was in the capital in a building I couldn't recognize from the inside.

Of all the things I could've done after taking stock of the building that we, me and those seven women were in, I had one major concern above others and it was preparing them before anything else. There was a week of leisure, one week to do what you wished with but only the obvious incentive being to prepare.

Everyone knew there'd be a free high quality list of items and supplies; A fine weapon of choice, fine armor of choice including suits of plate and heavy shields, more than one type of armors free to those who understood how to layer themselves in armor and why they should.

Many could not, but more would not that could handle the burden of heavy armor. It wasn't that people didn't understand the doublet and brigandine because almost all wore those, some so with a chest plate or metal cuirass, but the seeming restrictions of movement and strength were what prevented near any from those suits of full armor.

Of those few who took such, most had indeed made out well and taken a platesuit as well as entire chainsuits for a middle layer, they had chosen brigandine shirts, trousers, boots, and gloves as base layers. Even a cloak of Akyrian brigandine, fine chain links woven full of finer and loose alchemic threads, leather stripped fine-most and added after the loose threads.

The resulting cloak looked about as flexible at rest as a sheet of wood, it was actually only a little less pliable than suede gloves though. There were many designs for such cloaks, but like my own traditional full length cloaks the longest stopped here at the ankle when styled to an individual. A winter cloak wasn't just long, though.

They were heavily hooded and draped to stop at the top of the chest where they fastened, in this way you could throw one on and it would compliment most coats so as to prevent any weather getting to you besides hold the garment more securely to you.

Most chose bright colored spring cloaks nobles would wear, things that were closer to scarves, few chose rain cloaks that were really just fall cloaks with treated guts sewn to their exteriors. Style and current conditions had guided mosts decision making.

Daggers and short-swords, they would take a dagger and call it the latter, or a short-sword and think it was a sword. Otherwise many were correctly naming their weapon of choice, but they'd choose an example of a weapon suited to a few duels or battles. The specimens for wars and whole lives use went mostly unclaimed.

Naturally, sharp and light and fine called to most, and they got what they wanted instead of what they needed because that was all they knew. Most took a bladed weapon, a bow and at least a couple quivers of arrows. They'd have been better off taking crossbows, but, they hadn't used any and few really knew what they were doing.

Oh, they liked to think they did, but though they did they outsmarted themselves.

'Heavy equipment sucks! Crossbows are bulky and blocky, unwieldy things you leave laying around and can't trust when the mechanical parts corrode. It takes too much work, you can't just leave it around, but you can put a bow up any place dry and string it when you need. Lower maintenance, lower upkeep for ammo, and fletching arrow shafts is easier and cheaper than smithing metal bolts.

'It's cheaper to spend less metal, and bolts end up deep in trees and the ground or a corpse you don't find too often. Bowstrings are cheap to replace, mechanical parts are not, and you have to be careful of over oiling mechanical parts and the moisture parting from oil and corroding the metal you want to keep. Rags and oils, constant efforts maintaining, no thanks.'

Not even good bows, most chose a stout horsebow thinking they'd found a good shortbow, or knowing how to care for and make use of their composite natures. For something small to have power, instead of wood, horn and bone and sinew were used more often but these were nothing at all like wooden bows.

Some few for sure had used and cared for composite bows, and many had no doubt used recurve bows, but the Akyrian horsebow was not something they understood. You had to prepare these for use, they needed to be warmed by repeated drawing, and redrawing to get them into the shape for use they needed warming. The tension would get those old dead molecules warm by friction, or, you would have nothing.

No power, no accuracy, no control of the bow and the difference in how it would perform even then was not comparable to a longer recurve where you had more room for error, and the extra height and draw of the bow provided both more power and accuracy, besides control. You could have more control with a horse-bow, but, less room for error meant you needed it before hand like you'd also need to know how to use and keep them.

Water would destroy them, and even if maintained, they'd last longer in warm and dry climate than they would in temperate Valkyria. Short melee weapons meant less leverage and so less power, without more traditional reach, and with no heft or mass to more greatly empower your strikes at a distance you were not at advantage of speed without stealth or cunning.

You were just at a disadvantage of reach and power which was fine if you were fighting amongst others like this, but if you came across someone with a heavy weapon it wouldn't be good, and if they had on a platesuit you may not even have the advantage of speed if the person had a throwing weapon or a bow as well. If they were conditioned to it, near no advantage.

With a platesuit you weren't just more defensive, and offensive through the virtues of being protected, the extra mass of what you were wearing meant that in reality when you struck out after you began exceeding the restrictions that strike was empowered by all the extra weight you could put behind it.

We'd thought wrong of what armor was, because science had never quantified men who were conditioned their whole lives in platesuits, and to look at it as a training weight that would make you more truly powerful when you took it off was only the more obvious truth. The other was that with armor on, and your whole body having on what was essentially a compression suit that was the lining, you were more powerful.

There was even more heft to you that you exploited, and besides knowing you were more defended and being less troubled by defensive actions, you gained more in unstoppable quality of yourself than you lost in maneuverable quality to your motions. At the end of the day, there was a reason that a knight or samurai was powerful and wore armor to war instead of doublets. To be more powerful.

Our modern minds like to consider guns superior, but would you rather be the man with a gun, or the man who wore a masterful steel platesuit with kevlar and ballistic shrouds toting a light machine gun you suddenly had far more accuracy with because of the extra fifty-five pounds of armor on your person? I'll just say it, don't bring a gun to an armor fight, you'll lose the war.

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You burn, drown, shell or snipe such a person, but don't think you run up and engage them with superior speed and maneuverability when you know you're not equal to the task. Close quarters will belong to the heavier, harder and more immovable, it would be long ranges or overwhelming forces that the lighter has to muster in turn to win by using mobily as offense and defense against such a person.

Strength would always be strength, and speed would always be speed, yet it was only where strengths mass and speeds mobility met that you found true power. This was why you only wanted 'enough' armor, why it was good to find your limit and always push it, but wouldn't be adding or subtracting weight to your armor often in your life.

Anything else is confusion because there isn't sufficient understanding to say anything knowledgeable about what you haven't perspective of. They would not like to hear, 'You're just too weak to wear it, too ignorant to know why its more superior than not, and since you don't think you need it or plan on adapting to it you'd rather naturally try and rationalize it as inferior and think mobility as better all around.

It was not, in no medieval war did someone in combat wish for more mobility with theirselves surrounded, but would quickly wish they had more defensive and offensive potential, not any who were combatants. Only the desperate, the ones losing, those with a dire need or urge would want mobility. It's only natural, movement is life.

A mind that hasn't witnessed the transformations of men towards this truth again and again can't quantify it, then there weren't any who lived and died that same way to learn it from, but science did know what power was. Force and velocity coupled; with matter and mass as a part of force, all that was left was adding velocity to the equation.

Nobody wants to think that the knight was stronger than them, but the scientific mind outright wanted to object that there was abundant volume of intelligence they'd know firsthand from their experiences we just didn't have, the truth of which was the only reason it wasn't simply supreme was the same thing that made it seem like it. Density.

These people understood density better in some ways for true, they'd learn much more quickly because it was old knowledge, but by the time a few developed concrete methods for dealing with platesuits again most would have simply conditioned themselves to learn the strengths of armor themselves.

The wise seeks to know firsthand, only the fool assumes secondhand that a countermeasure is superior in all forms and fashions as if a counter to anything simply undid any power or use to it, so the wise followed the wise like the fool followed the fool and history would repeat itself once more.

I knew they'd get back to making guns, but in their first defeat the people from my world had lost the belongings they'd come with. If they'd taken over a city, then the things they came with they would still have, but they didn't and no control here meant the best left alive from their original offense and the second wave had to start again with nothing once more.

I'd gotten no further in my plans than making a supply store for those who'd been run out into the desert in their defeat, because there had been no time to help them adjust and learn. Now I was responsible for not only myself but party members I would naturally choose over any others. The short-term balance of the parties made were great.

The opposite was also true, where most were like mine with a leader of the opposite sex and a group of the same sex, the divisions for long-term unity was simply non-existant. It could not be more imbalanced if racist leaders had led, and only led groups they discriminated against, and their charges had all also been racists against their leaders race.

Thing was, the more like you somebody is, the more likely you were to conflict with them. If you were a teenage young male who was weak, would you want to pick a fight with a grown adult woman who was strong? Gender was an even more intense factor than race, or age, but as well the important parts were weak and strong after gender. Not age, or race.

Age or race meant nothing besides weak or strong, at least if you had a mind that knew how to gauge threats, which we all do. Only some martial arts and some time in the gym would have given the poor youngster a chance to win that one, since he never developed his body and mind to it, he has no chance against a woman his mind will tell him he couldn't lose to.

Condition, health, muscle mass and overall weight, ability, skill, technique and knowledge, these were more critical than even gender. The sexual factor meant less in combat than these, but it meant more than age, and age meant more than race. Races largest contribution to combat was negative.

More people always killed amongst their own relative ability level or lower, their age group or lower, their wealth or lower, their knowledge or lower, but at the end of the day sexes were hesitant to fight against each other naturally far more even than races fighting against each other, and every race has killed more of their race than any other with no notable exceptions in history.

How long have humans been around? Long enough that even those who are genetically jewish folk have killed more of each other, far more than even the holocaust had, and killed more of each other than anyone else since that madness affronted all races. No, we each were of a race, and only our own race were the most fit to judge and condemn each other.

Anything else was too blasphemous to all of us, most identified racially, so a person killing on that premise would always only amount to honest labels of mad and insane besides ignorant as hell itself.

Gender identification was stronger and deeper even than race, people of different races would become equals quickly in each others eyes, and in love and war it is easiest to see gender is above even race where all is concerned. It's more universal than race, naturally it means the effects are greater in all of us since we all share them.

It's only sad more people did not mix their race and identify with increased health, though it has happened with every race and culture it wasn't enough to change how people foolishy identified racially, as increased genetic dynamic between such groups yielded children with more diverse immune systems and genes. The things we subconsciously were atttracted to in our mates.

If they were more healthy and attractive, why wouldn't it be more natural? People learned they should not marry their brother or sister, that their cousins were poor choices for the sake of offspring and theirselves they didn't imbreed, but even the most distant person of the same more 'pure' race individuals participated in the act of something not too different.

Because x race mates with x race, that's what we saw, our eye identified more with people of our eye than we let our heart identify with people of our heart. Natural isn't always what is best, the individual decides that for themself and chooses these things, but we do not have to identify most with the more obvious things.

Some do not identify with the gender they were born with, others did not identify with their own race, and rather than foolish these were wise people who knew themselves and were more afraid to not live the life they saw in their hearts eye than live it. They feared wisely, did as their heart willed. They'd learn multiple races knowledge firsthand, not secondhand.

These women were like that, those of my party, not just other people but women of the opposite gender than me. More than that they were the people of a confused world where control all assumed was an abscence of it instead. It was rejection of truth for conveniences sake, easy was better than hard, elegant was better than simple and efficient.

We'd say, 'As long as it works.', and know it was ultimately made to fail so that you bought another as soon as was convenient, at the most conveniently priced store, that was within a convenient range of where we were, from conveniently designed to keep you coming back businesses. Not places you'd visit once or twice, but your whole life, all of your life paying fealty to what was made before you had any say.

All owned and operated by people who only thought or cared for one thing; money. Whether you were rich or poor you needed money, only money didn't need you, so logic dictates naturally competition for things that have limited supply. Imagine living and dying for an imagined concept, percieved in paper or plastic held in hands for short moments, that you trade everything you love for.

Madness and insanity were poor words, deficiency suited better. We were defunct and deficient, devolving so long we had long accepted all dying. The world had been dead enough when we got to it, what more could we hurt something long decaying, something we all wished at one point would just disappear or die and leave us alone?

Responsibility for only eight? I could live with that, one way or another we could and would live. We wouldn't live in a dying state 'surviving' that wasn't life or living but confusing them, not even if the whole of Valkyria burned around us would I abandon my charges.