It would have been nice to wander about where there was no 'civility' to have uncivilized around you all the time. So I had thought. And yet young again or not the liveliness I had been missing was there for the taking.
I riled them up like a fire.
Who didn't want to see two princes duel for the empress hand, especially there were many waiting for me to have my tongue burned out in this very courtyard, nobody rooted for this underdog promising wealth either way to their future reagant. That suited me, I wanted them shocked, the more horrified and awed they were at my upheaval the better.
He chose his arms well, a one handed and single edged blade fitting the title of sword, neither short or long and with a buckler attached to his left arm.
I could have played it any type of way. If he had been a challenge, I'd have chosen the same, except I'd have wielded the sword in my left hand and the buckler fixed on my right arm. He'd no doubt sparred with most who fit the same style, who opposing would be traditional weapon and shield clashing, and the edge would have worked. I was right handed, but preferred to fight left handed that way.
The same was naturally true of me when I used a bow, even as a child at play with them I'd done so. My first youth it had been so playing with toy bows only young, but in my second it had been a habit I was broken from young to do the same thing in melee combat. Only in my own time did I remain left hand dominant with them, mainly after finishing training in my second childhood.
I'd never seriously used either before in my first life at all, and only fighting with my hands did I not deviate from right hand dominance, but I found ambidextrous training to increase how fluidly I could attack or defend with weapon or shield. Each side of me understood both intimately, whether a weapon or shield was in my hand, yet my right side leaned towards defense.
The left wanted to strike and draw arrow or throw projectiles, and the right block or create openings. When I used my right hand aggressively it was more natural for it to be measured rather than unrelented.
If he had been someone I wished to kill I would have chosen a longsword only. Likely he would have decided on a larger shield, since I challenged and he defended, his would be the right to adapt to the situation. There was elegance to the reason he could have altered his armor or arms. If I was attacking, I'd have what I brought, he'd have an armory and scouts intel.
It was natural he defend well, and I be certain how I'd attack initially from the start, his reaponse be damned. That was how sieges went, duels between royal and imperial individuals were similar. He wasn't quite capable, so I went without arms or armor, since my hands were all I ever needed. This mockery made him rage, which robbed him of victory for certain.
Maybe even more than if I had only chose a weapon, or just armor.
Armor would have been the better bet of the two against a challenger in my case, if I chose only one, since it meant gauntlets to protect my hands. I couldn't put my fist through adamant without ki, though it wouldn't be impossible forever anymore, he was not strong enough to wear much more than adamant foil. It was an ultra thin plate over a mithril layered platesuit. I could strike him through it.
A blade can cut a person through armor, forget needing to penetrate it at all, even with mere physical force of the body alone a normal human with slightly less than normal attributes could strike another with a sword and cut them through above average steel armor. Even if it was a bit thick, they could do it, if they applied just most of their untrained force.
Chinks were not required at all.
Not just a bruise, you could slash another man wide open, even though the blades edge never touched their flesh. The shape of the blade and the forces involved could abruptly alter the shape of their armor for a moment, kinetic energy and relative density being what they were, there was a reason cloth and leather ended up outside as well as inside suits of metal.
It wasn't just cushioning, shock dispersion, and to cause a blades edge to slash more than bash its shaped charge deep. Thrusts were deadly but easily repelled, the one who swung more powerfully and had more leverage usually won, armor less required than arms.
Armor and arms or not, with my opponent well equipped but ill experienced, being covered in fantastic metals would only net his defeat.
The moment he'd drawn back to strike with weapon and kept his shield stupidly still, I sprung the trap and grabbed him by the waist clinched tightly to my chest, that move unnerved him not just because he had never experienced it. He was nearing that age of maturity and awkwardness, so a boy his age seeming to put him in a bear hug about the waist with his pelvis to their chest disturbed him.
He didn't suffer thoughts of disgust long before he was striking the ground behind me crown first, flaring out gold alloy and splaying its gems out to neatly clatter a few times before settling around him, still unconscious and falling by the time I stood up. He was knocked out only a few seconds, mostly because a mana enchantment upon his person roused him, I'd held back little since it took more of what I had with a young body to do it.
That suplex stunned the crowd more than him, if anything they were the ones who were truly knocked out by it.
Next a callous but careless meager backhand sent his still dizzy self sprawling with a slap to the helmet audible beyond the courtyard and into the surrounding halls of the palace, back down to strike the scuffed but not shattered stone tiles, these were wide and thick but obviously replaced white marble without any cushioning. The fall harmed him more, the strike had only put him right off balance.
The sounds were magnified to be blown out of proportion in this narrow area, his wearing armor which made more sound and made him heavier just really added dramatic effect to the royal and imperial perceptions. The pinging of the strike, clanging of metal as he fell, slipping sounds that made a low grating noise as he went sliding.
When he stood the second time he did so more quickly, but like a beast it was just instinctive. Any sure stance of body or form of arms was gone.
It wouldn't have mattered anyway, because I was wearing the Pits of Papao, gloves with ludicrously rare gem in the palms and a hell of a volumous appetite for storing stolen items, by the time he stood I was stripping a shocked boy of his armor and arms with him thinking he had somehow won. I guess the instinctive push he rose with convinced him so.
When I began to walk away with him out of his armor he took notice. The bastard was so used to other people armoring him up and taking it off for him, besides having in no way won from the push, he had let his enemy literally disarm him completely from a few small shocks. Everyone was watching, his parents, the whole division would hear of it now.
I was pretty sure his crying and kneeling signalled surrender besides the rest, but I couldn't formally walk out of the courtyards inner combat circle until he did that or was unconscious for more than a few seconds if not dead, and he had knelt with both knees down at once for the duration instead of one with his face looking to the floor.
I knew he wasn't trying to win that way, by me walking out prematurely, but I'd heard of such losses. He just wasn't prepared to do it, and it took him minutes to try. Every moment he took waiting made him look worse in front of those he knew, they could not interfere or even communicate through the combat circle of an official duel. Anyone would know what they were waiting for him to do.
Anything else.
Seizing all the power of his ki he could muster, he tried to force my face to the floor, which was a shame because that inefficiency in his method was the only reason it did not happen. He was trying to do it by pushing my head down, instead of creating a path of negative pressure the way I'd easily fall if he pushed my head from behind.
My neck-bones were compressing to the point I could hear sounds that to the ear were like popping and cracking. It wasn't so much damaging bones as it was pushing them together, and pushing gases and fluids around in them. When I put his face down for the few seconds it took to force my victory I only wished to distance from myself. I couldn't do that though.
I didn't like what I was doing anymore than the crowd did, but if I detatched from reality I wouldn't get myself back.
I also noticed he wielded more power with ki than he could survive himself. All I could suspect was that someone had grafted a dynamic ki crystal into him somewhere, I'd never heard of it, but it was the theoretical feasibility I championed in my mind. Thing was, if he had power he could not control, how was it being controlled? Was it that he could not or had be been possessed?
He'd had things go his way more than I had them go mine, so I could at least take relief in that the universe had seemed to choose his side.
We'd had the duel of wit first in which he figured himself to do what I would, try and use his stronger aspects to break my will from the start, except it was more in my favor than the duel of war. He had not known his own strength or weakness, so he could not know mine. His father did not have that issue, and the way he was cupping the back of his boys head, you could tell what his last lesson learned was going to be.
The proper way to face the floor, final and forever.
I did not leave, but stayed to deny the ransom of his belongings, leaving their servants to scrape up the gems and broken crown split into three pieces in the combat circle. The fury his father felt then was not easily palpable, just a sigh with a few subtle shakes.
I was already talking with the princess. The real one, not the display model, the girl that boy had been promised to the princess through without him or his father knowing she was the most unkempt, filthy, sweaty, bloody, bruised, farthest from effeminate acting individual in the courtyard. Her guise was as a common page boy.
Even her own father was unaware of who she was, so he could only sneer at both of us, and would even go so far as to begin a rumor that I was having a relationship with a page boy that he didn't know was his daugher yet. At least, if things went as I'd seen, that was how they'd go.
The fact she'd come up excitedly and held my hands bounding around me, well, she was an excited girl even if she didn't even know she was the princess herself, just that she was supposed to act like a boy for all others to see. Of course she got the wrong idea when I blushed, thinking I was just embarassed because she was a stranger.
I was blushing because she was perfect.
Never had there been a more serpentine soul, a more broody bride to be, nor a more dark dreamer delved into devolution. Here was a girl who already hated guys, boys weren't bad in her mind and they wouldn't be with my hand fickling fate to will and whim, but though she was protected from worst hardships there had been many she was meant to discover. This was the way Valkyrian empresses learned.
See from a peasants persepective, a commoners collective, a nobles networks, a royals roads, then you'll have an imperial impartiality. If you can't subject yourself to the powers you wield, then they'll wield you.
Being groped as a girl, berated as a boy, neverminded as a noble, coddled as a commoner, railed as a royal, and purposefully ignored as a peasant? That had made her more mature of minds and manners than children had a right to be, except Hally was reborn from a higher floor, and there was a familiarity I couldn't not consider.
"Hailey?"
That 'uh-oh' face said it all.
"Who? Me? I'm ha- no, not, not Hally. I'm not Hailey either, my name tod- we don't know each other. I'm just a page boy."
"Ahuh. One with no respect either I suppose, a little too thin for a page boy, and whose hair and skin are a bit fine. For any person, even a girl, especially a boy. Do you remember-?"
I whispered for a couple of minutes in her ear before she gave me a double answer. The only type that I'd known to take the most seriously since leaving earth were those like that, signs where any opposites were both true at once, they were like the footprints left behind by something. It was distressing for her, more than rebirth after death.
"You don't know what it's like to be lost to yourself, all the light of the world gone with your awareness of it. But that's the way we were in that place. I have remembered and dreamed of things about that beautiful place, but I didn't exactly experience it firsthand. None of us did until we were here. For two thousand years I was asleep, and for as many I have been alive. Twice.
"I just can't impress it on you, what it's like to have been in the dark and yet lived, then come into the light from the light place you start remembering only to find it's dark instead. Two millenium I wasn't there, yet I was more there than I can put into words without good examples I can't make many of. Not in single categories that way.
"But I remember you if you are who you say. Those last memories were some of the only ones I never forgot, the ones where we'd survived, except then there was your world at a time when all of us from both were being put together. We didn't mesh well and it didn't end happily."
"Nobody could expect different. It wasn't as bad as I figured, you didn't wipe them out. I've heard many languages and seen many human cultures that your worlds people have gotten along with."
"Yeah. Barely, they didn't have a lot of power or survivability to start, but we lost much over time to them like you said. We had to lower ourselves.. to.. so much, it.." She went despondent and looked to sink into herself, physically and psychologically, her bodies demeanor and her eyes a reflection of her mental state.
"They ran prices up and down to compete or cut us off from resources, murdered towns whole and stripped them of what was usable, all to take over cities until they wormed their way into the capital itself. Living in the slums suited them but they didn't think that was enough, so the first ones championed powerful and just people to serve as mercenaries for.
"Machines and weapons are nice, but they are loud, and for some reason killing a lot of things and drawing in carnivorous beings all the time kept getting your people killed without them figuring that out for awhile. They were reborn children later like everyone else, at least, those without enough experience or else powers to resurrect.
"They're rebuilding efforts mostly failed, the large group efforts did, so in desperation they turned their weapons on those who'd rebuilt together the hard way. Oh yes, your worlds women were even worse than the men, and that's saying it nice.
"Our men only knew how to be honest, yours were better at dishonesty and that was their edge for competing. Our women were more free before the concepts of freedom your world brought to this table, your women took more of it than the men did though.
"Do you know how even our men expect us to dress now? An Empress no less! The things that they do with their hair alone would drive a person insane, it's literally someones full-time job to do hair. There are three who take care of makeup, and one is a man!
"I'm so glad I was reborn a child again, and a noble instead of an empress. It's so much more peaceful to have gentle prospects, and have lost power that was peerless for my ilk. Imagine my surprise, reborn a Valkyrian noble, only to find your peoples blood mixed into it. There's a grandfather to this body, a horrid man, an imperial from your world.
"One like you who never chased or reached imperial status, but instead of virtuous he's corrupt. You-."
"Stop. I do know what two millenium without conscious is like, first. I just came out of that fog myself. Plus neither of us are exactly only virtuous, I told you it was just another half you were blind to, but I told you never expect you wouldn't find failures in learning to contend with it. The worst thing was trying to disconnect it from yourself in any way.
"It was hard not to fight fire with fire, so you ended up doing it, but you remembered the whole time that limiting the potential for fire in the first place was the best you could do. That's life, when people around you get out of control it happens. But you haven't escaped your fate, or karma, or even your status. You're going to be heiress here soo-."
My mouth was covered. When she kissed the back of her hand, the palm of which she held against my lips, Hailey had all sorts of looks pass over her face. None of them were the ones I'd imagine, she seemed to just look at me and entertain the idea with every range of emotion passing over her body and mind. Her whole physique and eye were speaking.
Eyes and queues, vision and all were on me, images of us and this empire reverted to its prior glory.
"Then, I suppose, it's my hand you come for. You were right once when you said all that would happen did. I trust you. You were never bonded to me beyond ceremony of a guardian, however, back when I already had a primary charge you were the secondary public official. This time, I want you to be both, if we're to officially wed."
"Not just officially. Wed-wed, all the official nonsense isn't something either you or I will concern with, your father will handle all that as reagant."
"Show some skin when you say that at least, I'm not marrying a man who can't produce the first sign his face and feeling connect. Not if it doesn't when he asks that."
"There's no rush Hailey, we're twelve. Also, as you're dressed, it would probably be best if you kept your hands to yourself. On the note of that whole showing skin business, I know you like me better because I don't. I can truly hide where my mind and feelings are because they are always in plain sight like yours.
"Now you are merely aware of doubt. You don't need to doubt me. Just make sure you never trust me. Both of our wishes will come true, just not enough to fulfill our dreams. That's not saying we won't both be happy, but our dreams are too lofty to truly come about, that's the way they should stay.
"I'm not going to lie and say I can give you that much. You won't be disappointed, that I can promise, especially when you hear my dream."
Both of us were interrupted shortly. The emperor had sent the heiress he at least knew was not his daughter.
"Excuse me?" She cut in.
"One moment." I said. "I'm sort of blind to a lot of things, literally, my vision isn't exactly limited but it's very different. My voice sounds like it does, soft and flat, because I can only speak with very meager tinges of ki. Really I'm unable to speak very long, and have things to say. I need you to be the one who puts more queens on my chessboard.
"Queens to rule kingdoms, not here, but in the prime division. Nine to be exact, though I won't have an empress in a queens place, you'll have to be the figurehead of the ship I'll be the icebreaker of. That's another thing I need besides marriage, I'll enforce old policies as you do, and promote them. As well anything else you command."
"Oh no, you don't - that's a little too old policy for my taste. Even your people left this a matrilineal world, and that long ago the emperor ruled, you take the military and law side while I get the civil and commercial. If you have an empress wife and nine queens it would upset the appearance of my power. I'd be mocked off the throne."
"Not necessarily Hailey, you'd only be mocked if people saw me as you imply, but what if they did not see me as an enigmatic emperor fool enough to unseat shared power? That would naturally lose both of our percieved power, public acceptance of the many.
"What if they saw a conquering king, become an emperor with enmity towards them, one holding their empress wife and hostage?"
" You're - in - sane." She said, now more eager to speak than ever, yet sensing as I did we needed to wait another time. I couldn't exactly push a princess around, claiming to be a prince of a kingdom that had no power in this world was all I could have done with any fervor. I needed to do some recruiting, and soon, for at least a few dozen attendants of many types.
That meant a lot of purchases and figuring out where to go, asking directions and questions besides negotiating prices and wages, but there was this thing to take care of first.
"See you later, Halbert." I said to Hailey with a wink, making her blush.
"You're fight was brutish. You made Clay look like a rabbit rolled over by a dog, and he had all the advantages. In my super experienced opinion, you shouldn't have let him touch you at all and armor would have mitigated most of that near-loss. You're pretty stupid for buying your way to an empress in hand, you know.
"It won't be taken serious without courtship."
"Of course it will. Money talks, fool. People take it serious who have it. A child wouldn't know how important money is. Did you die before ever reaching adulthood, or something? You'd have had to earn a lot of experience and die young quite a few times to do it without losses. I guess you're a pretty good killer then.
"Must be why they made you the mirror maiden for her."
I didn't know who she was, but I hadn't seen her at all when seeing the future. An unknown that big could potentially make or break my plans, and with my trash luck, it would probably be break.
"Tell noone, say nothing, you'd get both of us in deep shit otherwise. I don't know how you know so much about me, but I swear, if you reveal my name I'll kill you. The rest isn't worth killing over but for that I'll kill you. Konagi Demon-King Killer died honorably, though she lived dishonorably, in every other life she lived. This one lives good in this one."
"Your body and this world mean as little as your name to me, honestly. I don't know who you are, and that makes me suspicious of you. That's all and no more. The rest was just guesswork, but if you've never reached adulthood truly it really explains the money thing. You can change your ways, but that doesn't mean you have to ignore your sign or station. Even an assassin has that much control.
"Don't just kill those who need to be killed for a living, pick the ones you can rob who have what you need. If you just stick around waiting for the odd job, you aren't utilizing your full potentials."
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
"What would a Jester know about it? It's not money that's ever the issue, I have a problem with authority. It always escalates. Once you start to kill, there's eventually going to be the one you can't escape from. The thrill of being the solitary offense against all a superior defense has mustered, infiltrating for sometimes very swift and sometimes very slow kills, all to exfiltrate out alive when you step out of the ashes.
"What do you know about it? Jester." Smug, this girl, Konagi. Smug as grim.
"Not much. I've only killed a few hundred people starting forty years ago, althought I lost the experience for it when I was thrown in the divided world. I survived its near barren and unimaginable labyrinthine depths, with only the basest of espers to keep me alive through it though I should have wasted away. I brought down the moon, hunted evil folk for sport.
"That was back when I had the potential to see more whenever I was looking. Now, I'm left to seeing more of less, primarily since I achieved the state above transcension imperials hold. It's harder and takes longer to develop and I'm at the base of it. I lost all cultivations and yet I cultivated something greater. Blooming twice isn't really what I expected, but it beats losing those powers forever."
"You really are a Jester, even though you're serious. That means you're the guy everyone has been saying reached the prime division. So, you did all that, and then died? Floor one took down number one?"
"No. No death, I went from the divided world here, and ended up a child. To be honest there was a woman who came along willingly and another unwillingly dragged into it by me. Actually, frankly I kidnapped her with some pretty morbid motivations, but that was on a whim of wrath. I was in a darker place then.
"At any rate I know I need you to call for me to come back here, so I should probably shut up before you don't. Assassin or not, I'm not offenseless either, both as a threat to others and myself or society at large and the people around me. Since we both have secrets we've shared and know that we have the power to ruin each other, I'll assume I won't see you at the end of a knife tonight?"
"I wouldn't make that assumption in general but I can vouch I won't be involved in any way. Not personally or impersonally, direct or indirect, not even by sharing anything you said. I like this deal, it's better than messing with my sleep or risking my job."
"Can I ask? How did you die?" I asked this but needed only see her look for some type of answer. That look had viewed vengeance, it had victored in a vendetta too great to mention offhand. "Honorably." She muttered, after the sick smile subsided, and then took her leave back into the palace.
Hailey had gone as well, so I left too, I didn't have free reign of the palace. Besides that I'd drawn too few looks for too long to be comfortable there.
There were indeed some watching the dozen-domes, hallmark of reaching the twelfth division, the thirteenth had the thirteen-treasures. These were harder to get, the latter were given to the first thirteen to reach that division, but the former were set up with defenses. Solid ones.
A solid barrier of espers, magics, ethers, all enchanted and energized by all the energy the crystals inside them produced while rapidly refilled by their triple regenerating dynamics, and the domes themselves were some metal element that the planar-prism colossal crystals would repair.
It was an incredibly hard and heavy metal, so dark and heavy it absorbed and so distorted the light around it, but those distortions were still. How they looked when I moved looking through the distortions made it seem as if they were altering time, because I could see a man leaving their proximity seconds after he had removed himself. The image walked at speed, time belated.
These constructs were devious. The methods that had the most obvious effect were the furthest from the way to get in them.
The magical and ethereal power and energy they used were actually rigged, they were in place to neutralize a large mass and its force after such an encounter busted open their physical barrier. They were absorbing energy, as fast and intense as it came, and as they did this they made room for the exact incoming amount. It looked like they waned, but they weren't waning or waxing.
They were transplanting the energy into the void-steel domes, immune to magic and etheric power, highly resistant to esperic powers but even more resistant to physical damage of all types.
And yet, though the few able to leave marks noticed physical damage was possible, they also learned it would restore faster the more it was damaged. Spreading it out hadn't been attempted, instead instinctively people had tried one spot for long periods of time, and each dome had people attempt to open it everyday for over two millenium.
Groups tried as often, rarely even the most powerful had tried together, and many different methods were recorded with the most noteworthy known to most who retained serious interest in them.
An adamant drill made motor and all of that metal, it's bits actually shaving off many small recovered pieces, but the many bits all grinding unto dust amounting to a thousand pieces to one.
An adamant saw had done the most physical damage, it had been well condensed and then formed with limited sharpness, yet even though it pulled off the most material none had seen the connection of spreading out the forces. The reason men had scored it themselves with adamant had been when numerous individuals attacked.
Powerful individuals had queried aloud that somehow groups of weak individuals with less quality adamant weapons left marks they couldn't using pickaxes, a few powerful men using sledges near each other had cracked it some once, except that had used up two and the third had been nearly too bent to use effectively by then.
By the time the casts I'd moulded were dry, I poured in the molten adamant and waited for cooling. It took an hour without ice magic to speed up cooling.
A lot happened after that in a short time. On my end, I sent individuals I more or less created with the limitation they were not able to be made in a state of fruition to Kate, with another priceless storage item with all they'd need and all to carry of the loot.
The big planar-prism crystals went with them, as did all the equipment, the tiny magic crystals were what I sought, those three-hundred and the twelve planar which weren't too big to carry. Animals and peoples, equipment and larger planar variants went. It was then, I knew with the tiny planar how one could tap power they did not have. It cost potentials of all powers you had, costs too high for my blood.
But only if used to that end, otherwise their energy was useful and it was in a virtually limitless form, already charged and ready to be used for any purpose in an instant.
The void armor had no time effect in its shaded proximity, but wearing the heavy armor or using the weapons made one faster. How it did this without strengthening I could only imagine relates to the time it didn't outwardly change, and even foolish me knew it had to be speeding up the one in it instead.
For persons it had offensive use in speeding them up inwards.
For places it had defensive use in slowing attacks down outwards.
The adamant I'd used and the domes were dematerialized before I could claim either, yet, I'd expected that could happen due to the manner of breaking into the domes I'd chosen. Adamants ultra-high thermal threshold meant it's molecules had expanded quite a bit, the force of all those molecules consistent contraction all over the denser material overwhelmed the more still void steel molecules.
While they had an advantage in slowing time, those molecules were predisposed to stillness, it had taken a consistent total surface contraction to merely push in at that whole entirety only a little forceful to open. There'd only been a little force the adamant could exceed it with by the time it did.
I wasn't sure this would work, regardless of the bet I'd made that I could have lost. I never had stopped to realize I had indeed gambled, twice so far, but some of the knowns I had seen did overlap in unknown areas one could merely form suppositions over. If I called that perspective all of collective knowledge and memory at the end of time, made into a single record, it felt true. Lie or not, it had.
The experience hadn't been conscious, and even my elevated unconscious mind was overwhelmed, likely lowering the former and raising the latter was why I'd had the breakthrough to fruition I felt like I wouldn't have otherwise.
Others had done all I had except that. Many had done things I couldn't at my best, but now even my weak self stood a chance to surpass those who had left me long ago. If anything it was fruition I'd been destined to achieve in order to make or break upon this place and live or die with the others.
If I achieved full fruition then going back in time to change everything, even for Earth, this would not be impossible. Of course, the impossible was getting to the point to be able to. If I'd not done as I had, how would I have come this far? Even my mistake of reflecting love out to stay there and love in staying where it was, failures that were successes.
There was little love here to find, corrupt love not so much.
The immovable and indestructable void-steel could be moved and destroyed by a supposedly inferior density and hardness metal surrounding it. Heat made the adamants molecules move, and that motion was the key, moving something so close to truly still was still feasible for even my near powerless self.
The empty space inside it was an important factor, otherwise it would have resisted. If it were me making a mockery of people by producing something meant to be unobtainable, as these troves had gone until the end in the future I saw, I would have made them solid void-steel. This devil was cracked.
I wasn't cracked anymore, just destroyed into something I shouldn't be yet had to, an exact life outcome or death outcome would signify whether I freed or damned everyone besides me. And there was no pressure, none whatsoever, even though I do not mean I was at all confident.
My opposition had left what seemed to be traps for fools to mock them, so naturally I'd mock them and make fools of them and their traps where possible. It was unlikely to happen again so easily.
Divine steel gave me hope to. Light, medium, and heavy armor were each like another layer of skin, barely reducing movement range or speed, each may as well be the same thickness yet together the defense and offense potential were immaculate for increasing all physical dynamics. Not just all four basic physical attributes, but the dynamic two as well.
It leaned towards strength more than void would speed, the other gains were shallow by comparison, and yet the unrestrained mobility was the potential for an edge in all ways void steel had only in defense. Speed increased strength in that way you could move faster and decrease the strength needed to perform an act. By power, the dynamic attribute they shared.
Strength increased speed in the more fundamental way, it was the increase of driving force put into performing an act, where strength was intensity it was speed that was frequency in the equation of power. Power was both strength and speed when it was physical.
Strength was the short intense dash, quick, but very draining as quickly. Speed was the long marathon, fast, yet the draining feeling came slowly. These metals embodied the aspects. It was such I took one of each, divine for short-term and void for long-term uses, an exemplary battle and war suit.
The divine steel was as flat and dull a gols as the void steel was black, it rang more towards a thinly gilded bronze than true gold, and it sat on the body like the skin-tight suits they were. They did not compress or pinch, you couldn't feel them, and they slid on like air. There was an increased sense of full body muscular tension with each of the three layers, more each one.
They adapted to each person or could be sealed to one by me, else transferred by the owner after.
For weapons I'd gone with variety. The two archetypes of metals had three types of forms of armor of thirty sets each, while altogether that total was a hundred and eighty I put the real number at half. The light and medium together would equal nearly the heavy divine steel armors potential. For the void the same was true, those in the light and medium a bit slower though lighter.
The hundred and eighty weapons had to be balanced for versatility. Still I was fond of the speed of a hefty void-steel konobo and naginata doing their work, blistering speed with a bursting of power at the end. Wearing divine suits, one could strike a mighty blow empowered by quantum using such weapons and send attacks forwards or backwards in time a few seconds.
That one was me if I reached full fruition. It required the incomprehensible strength of divine steel armor, in particular, a full set of it I'd sealed to myself. The third void steel weapon was thirteen arrows and a bow with a cable for a string. The void steel cable was something I knew I'd never be able to make. The nature of the metal was stillness.
It was incomprehensible that a springy work could be made of it.
Only superfluous divine steel could have been alloyed as a core inside of it somehow, and yet to suspend something managing momentous molecular motions in another that was still, truly a clever craftsmens claws had created a considerable cable. Pulling at that cable was unmaking and making the made universe, ripping reality readily.
With the items assorted together that way...
You could snatch a victory that had already occured from the stomach savoring it already, only for them to have died and been defeated without ever knowing it. What could be more tumultuous and torturous to enemy morale than witnessing reality ripped readily from them, their efforts and sacrifices, than them vainly cheering at their own defeat with success stolen?
Until the day I could wield that set I had to make do of the antithesis.
Void steel armor with divine steel arms wasn't as exciting of a long-term potential, but it leveled the field for a boy with no powers against the twelfth divisions higher threats, immunity to powers with planar-prisn crystal attatched. I'd add an adamant cup of a small sized to it in a few places just incase. Odds are molten adamant would never come my way, but when you find a weakness, you patch it.
The inner hollow of even one tiny cup shape upon it made it impervious, especially with a defensive fire barrier upon the adamant and with an empty fire energy crystal inside powering it. Any thermal energy the adamant picked up would go to the crystal inside it, ward heat away from it, and I could eventually shield its outside with ki.
Without my own internal energy levels sitting saturated within me, natural invulnerability to powers were gone. They'd all sat at the highest level, but in truth, there was no decent way to refill them in ten years or so. Only my plans for the bitter balance of a hellish harem would bring me to full fruition with a cost to said company I'd have to try and make it up to on the very off chance the devil here lost.
The one I had to be was losing to win. Pyrrhic victory aside, I wanted all of the last enjoyment I had coming. As a christian I'd avoided all I could of evil, as a man I'd done the same. Rather than having to soak in all of it I only needed a measured evil, one still tied to the thing I could not have pure if I wanted to, the love that fruition needed and the conditions for victory had a narrow gap.
Being made much faster in void armor with divine weapons strong enough to send a very heavy man in a very heavy adamant suit arcing through the air, at twelve years old, that would do for now. A weapon that could enhance the dynamic of force beyond mere physical powers constraints was always welcome. Ki augmentation and both ki and qi conduction by divine steel weapons would be adequate.
The crystals were admittedly hard to put away in the Pits of Papao, and yet I did where they'd be safe and usable, though the ten planar-prism crystals I put in them divided with the other crystals acted to make it possible. The modicum of power each tiny triple dynamic crystal added was more than larger specimens added. Little or not, I could just about call myself a novice without blushing now.
Eventually their power supplements would grow as my ability did.
After that it wasn't a bad time to go recruiting, enough people had watched me to spread the tale, and people were quite shocked to see the space empty where for so long there had been a wonder they could only wonderingly question what was inside of.
The rumor I started about myself having been born of a sacrificial ritual my parents had endowed my birth with would not yet be repeated for this act, but those who heard it would start to wonder, and that was my second step. Not the recruitments and hirings alone. Convincing people I was someone else they were looking for had to start now.
Faking oneself as a prophet they had prophesied to them, it was a new low I admit and destined to backfire yet rather than treat it like a fallback plan I had to start it now. War wasn't always direct, but it could be long easily with high contention between forces, add hard to the mix and you get earthly hell if no worse.
"You, Prince of Papao, wait for me." Ths mirror maiden of Hailey's demanded. Konagi. Neither of us had actually shared our used names at any point, yet we'd shared our real ones, and neither of us had given up our real name sharing it. Paladin and Assassin training had that and spirit-weapons in common, though there was a third neutrality neither knew. Others did.
We couldn't be told what it was, the word was senseless to both equally, and a thing lost to the gains.
"I take it you knew them? Just my luck. Does anyone else?"
"Higher up and waaay lower down. They were an unscrupulous bunch for sure, but I didn't just know them, those are my - were my own gloves." Konagi said so decidedly, but wrongly.
"All can make the same items. I've got more than one of them, but the Pack and the Pigaches of Papao are as useful as the Pits."
"I heard of a Pack, but Pigaches?"
I held up the pair of pointy toed shoes with a bell on the end. Konagi chuckled and waved them out of her sight, and I put them in the Pits since they wouldn't go back in my material space for awhile. My inventory was full of daily necessity and emergency items.
"They suit you, Jester. But are they like the gloves?"
"Pretty similar. Snatch from the air or steal from the touch of your feet, but you can also use them to sling out items with a kick. Even if emptied you could run across rocks while picking them up, or dirt and sand if not gravel, kicking sand in an enemies eye when you're not around sand could be good."
I offered her a set of the three, and she took them with a gracious look, but was more interested in admiring them after they were in her hands.
"That does sound quite useful. I don't suppose it would take in objects bigger than the surface area it touches, so how an object contacts it would effect what it could take in based on that factor?"
I nodded. "Right, you can't use it to absorb a door or window, you'll still need your lockpicks, ropes, grapple, and to break what you can't bypass. But think of it, you have to slow down or maneuver to steal with your hands, in the right circumstance you could run around stealing with those and never need to do more than keep running.
"Think of if you got in a treasury and were being chased. Oof, right? But even if not why bend over to scoop up what you can scoop while you scoot? If you need to run you can, if you don't you can take the time to slide long vertical objects in through the soles. They're wider than the gloves and since they are, bigger things can go in.
"The pack is largest, but it has the most space and least alternative uses, you'd havd to slow down to use it. It has the benefit of being a storage item with long straps though, you can sort of use it like a minor catapult. You make use of that centrifugal force, let an object out at the right time in the arc, and a big rock can pick up quite a bit of force.
"There's no deadlier, trickier, hungrier or friendlier backpack."
She had already flung a rock from hers with a fairly speedy arc aimed over the nearest buildings, it whistled out as if thrown from the pack at her own full potential of a throw, a fact I should have warned her about since it added that force to the centrifugal forces.
"That rock didn't whistle, it woofed." She noted as I had.
Four or five seconds after it went, and just after she said that, we heard the sound of a clambering in the distance. If it was just a single noise with light follow-ups, I'd have maybe said it sounded like a board or two splintering and then perhaps pieces falling, if that sounded like what happened.
"Whatever that was is a coincidence. A fist size rock just couldn't make all that noise, not even if it knocked a house down." I said as if promising, lying through my teeth because it wasn't impossible, I just wanted her to doubt she was responsible if she ever figured out whatever she fucked up. I had no idea what it was, but whatever it had been was made of a lot of wood and not a little glass, and was expensive.
I couldn't even afford to sit around and listen to it break while in the vicinity of the direct line that the rock had gone.
"Are you sure? I don't think so either, but it went out of sight faster than any arrow, maybe even like a bullet."
"What name do you use? I suppose Alyseus will do for me, it was my second name after all." I changed the subject and started walking away. This encounter had likely ended with at least one person killed, by the size of the building we seemed to have heard crumpling, maybe even more.
"Hally. It's not mine, but that's what I go by here, when I'm not here you know the other. There are questions I'd like to ask, need to y'know? Also, are you sure-."
"What type of questions?" I interrupted.
"The type that would suit the ears of a certain suitors would-be in-laws."
"Very well. Ask away." I conceded with a click of the tongue before and after saying so.
"First, let's go gather your friends. There's curiosity about the company you keep."
"Oh? Fine, but I won't tolerate poking or prodding at any of our personal lives."
"Good. Are you whole, healthy, fertile, what's your exact species now and races before now? Will you consent to your status being screened before the serving imperial court?"
"Yes to all questions, and I'm a human with mostly Irish, some Cherokee, and a little French blood. That's what I know of anyway, you know how that goes."
"Do I?"
"I would imagine so if you've been reincarnated a bunch. You get reborn as an elf or something that has pixie blood, I know you have to know what I mean, and not just because a lot of lineaged have pixie in them now. You get the big picture, but there are little gaps you just can't be aware of. Thousands of years of ancestors to quantify.
"We had other humanoid species in our bloodlines before all this, back when there were neandarthals and denisovans we interbred with for a time, and with people interbreeding between populations all of history I can't really say anyone has a full picture of what their genes tell as a story. I don't know for sure, but it would stand to reason we can't be certain.
"There were other species besides those two more well known ones, at least one in Africa and another one found in a relatively isolated population of some shorter people whose name and region I forget. The same thing is true for all modern humanoid species and races. Those differences don't apply to me, but the ones from Earth do. I don't know what they are myself."
"There's a geneticist for that."
She was right, there was, a man who was the head of four others. The group had a hell of a time making sense of me.
It took a few years for me to reach that middle ground again. The journeyman level in powers and in particular the vessel element, doing the dirty deeds I needed to situate my future party towards the path of a harem not made wholesome so cleanly, meeting many of the divisions much longer standing citizens and the occasional new party to arrive in the capital square from the prior divisions dungeons end.
By the time I was fifteen again the basis for survival were met again once more.
Natalie and Heitir, the first as a rule had forgotten a long time ago what I asked and had cold feet already from the start, despite her agreement and thought on the matter of pulling Heitir into a less unideal relationship than before. It wasn't jealousy or empathy, just apathy about the whole thing when it was time to act.
The second was readily and gratefully lulled into it, at least making Natalie a smaller factor in the primal plan of mine. Heitir genuinely enjoyed the three of us sleeping together in the same room and bed, but in truth she was the only one who did. Me and Natalie preferred sleeping alone in our prior lives, we grew used to it although there was plentiful frustrations.
That was because none of us were having sex. We were pacified to any stress over intimacy with the opposite gender because it was around us all the time, even in our young brains with older minds, learning to eradicate such excitements to be able to sleep normally around temptation was no laughing matter. You don't have to be a nymphomaniac to know it's so.
Pacified to the stress or not, I'd learned the subconscious needs might not be sexually motivated but they are certainly conducive towards causality, but just because I had didn't mean that those two did.
It wasn't strange in this world for a male to have females more powerful than them protecting him, but what was strange to people was two adepts learning from a journeyman, if I knew better in their eyes I should naturally be at least as able as them. This was a sign of some weakness that had been discrediting me to people at large for good reason. They were wrong, but they should be right.
All the crystals energy should have more than made up for the difference, in a way, they bolstered the power I could use and intensity of act was the primary quotient to build powers. They regenerated their energy three times a day fully, once every eight hours, and the two together meant more acts of intensity so faster gains.
Except, those crystals had gone to Natalie and Heitir to condition themselves, by adept stage in all powers they reached but did not hold the state of transcension the way I had only reached elevation and touched ascension the first time. I didn't need crystals for my developments, at all. My growth was not slow by any means. For what rate it developed, I was shooting to the sky truthfully.
Sleeping between two budding and hormonal teenagers who'd both been grown once, that had provided more lust than I could care to descrive, and both hated about every distraction to a minor extent that wasn't when we were altogether. That was when all of us came together content.
It hadn't been easy to win them back over for some months into the first year. I'd pulled no punches when they started becoming physical threats enough to contend with me at the highest level, while I loathe to admit it, I know no man was ever harder on women than I was pushing and prodding them. I moved them neither gentle or rough, just as fast as they could healthily.
That had meant a lot of sparring before the fighting ever began, they'd become more than rivals in romance, yet the contentions made them more content with each other as time went on. Supportive as sisters they'd had to become in order to push each other towards the goals they shared, the idea they were rivals at all waned to a minimum.
All of us discouraged that notion, that we were in any way divided, and the world we lived in made it impossible to remember what monogamous life had been like for men in my case. For them it was the opposite to a higher degree, much more so because there were less men for women to be polygamous with. Humanoid nature, gender differences, and societal pressure; these three things were responsible.
It wasn't that there weren't monogomous men or polygamous women. Individual, group, and natural shared human and divided gender views, all came together. They came together with the least pressure inside or outside the person living in the divisions this high up.
Men protected and cared for women with their lives since women produced life. They were just more likely to be carried when weak in any way, by men or women, while individuals or groups would be more likely to have dropped men who were weak. By the time the opposite became true the damage was done, including the damage done by women who produced three female children to one male by frequency.
The y-chromosome had already been on the outs before all this. Man had really gotten the short straw, unless they were living men in the upper divisions. There, the hell tried to trick you into thinking it was heaven, but it was just more hell. Nobody wants to be groped like an endangered pet, but if some did, I liked to think men would not be high on that list. At least, not put there to stay.
People needed to be challenged to grow, and here men were being coddled at a time we were fewest, also being lowered to their weakest by sin of women stripping them of all that made them men.
Many adult women complained to Natalie and Heitir that they should be teaching me, or stop fighting me so seriously, and they were berated by our female peers as lesser women for every act of care or concern I showed them. It was mostly behind their back, but larger groups challnged them with that to their faces. After all they were but two, yet we were in a world with a high population of teens.
Few were born here, this was the world in which it was made known getting even teens through to the next division was too improbable for consideration. A man with twenty wives might get two through to the next if the whole family worked together. This world was the last line for families in a sense. You grew up here to move on.
Konagi was an exception in that she had moved forwards enough to do so alone after the first two traverses through with others, for this divisions dungeon, anyway.
I still had a year until the wedding was to happen. Hailey had only been revealed heiress recently by this time.
But for me every evening and night had become another battle in a war that had started around that same time. In retrospect it would be easy to say why, the two were making moves together, and joining forces the way they had done to first beat me in a fight not long before. That had made them bold, since, but they'd beamed about it after so many bruises and cuts to do it.
If I'd not meant to kill them I could say I had held back, but if I hadn't truly pushed them as far as I could one step at a time they'd never have gone so far so fast. It was a mistake to let them get as close together as I had been with them.
Oh there was no new distance between us really, sure they created the perception of some, but it was only in my head that it could try and persist as an existing thing.
All that came about was the two joining their power against me together, one attacking one flank for me to move forces, the two alternating one after another as a strategem.