Powerful spotlights came on from the helicopters, bathing Orlan and his knights in light. There was more than enough space for both large vehicles to land, but only one chose to descend for the moment. Alia put up another wind barrier without having to be asked, though this time it was less to protect the girls’ modesty than to deflect any debris tossed about by the wind. Of course some of the armor many of the knights wore made it obvious the wearer was female as it was clearly designed for a more feminine frame. Other more magically inclined knights wore ankle length robes, over their more minimal leather armor.
The chinook landed a good hundred feet from where Orlan and the first lance stood, far enough away that it was possible to have a shouted conversation over the helicopter, but close enough that they could retreat to it in short order. The other helicopter took up an overwatch position, partly opening the back ramp so a couple soldiers could provide covering fire if needed.
“Are those firearms?” Nallia asked, dismissing the glowing sign in favor of a large sun-like ball that lit up the whole field, “they look too small to cause any real damage.”
“Their muzzle velocity and rate of fire is far above anything on the other side,” Orlan replied, “even the small bullets are more than enough to kill a normal person, even a tier two might be injured by the rounds.”
“Fascinating, any chance we can acquire one for inspection?”
“I need to show you how to use the phone,” Orlan chuckled, watching the soldiers carefully approach them, rifles up and ready, “you should be able to look up lots of things on it.”
“Orlan?” the closest soldier shouted, coming to a stop a good twenty feet away, “so-called lord of this island?”
“That’s me,” Orlan confirmed, pulling his helmet off and storing it in his personal space, “if I didn’t know any better I’d say you boys were here to kill me.”
“We’ve been ordered to take you into custody,” the soldier replied, “come quietly and no bloodshed is required.”
“And why are you trying to arrest me?”
“We’re not police,” the man growled back, “we don’t need to read your charges.”
“And if I say no?” Orlan asked simply.
“Then we take you by force.”
“I think you’ve badly misjudged the situation,” Orlan said with a sigh, “you’re acting like you have the power here.”
“We’ve got you outnumbered, and we have proper guns not your little toys,” the soldier sneered.
“Alright, how about a challenge then?” Orlan said, opening his arms wide, “if you manage to hurt me with your ‘proper guns’ then I’ll come with. If not, you leave.”
The soldier didn’t even hesitate to pull the trigger, a loud gunshot ringing across the field. A couple sparks fell from where the bullet shattered against Orlan’s breastplate, not even leaving a scratch. Casually, Orlan lifted a hand to brush at the spot the bullet had hit.
“Nice shot, aiming for the gut? Cause lots of pain, put me down quickly, but unlikely to actually kill me if I’m treated quickly?” Orlan nodded, “well, seems like you lost.”
“Take them down,” the lead soldier ordered his own men.
“Don’t kill them,” Orlan snapped out an instant before gunfire erupted from the whole squad this time. The battle, if it could be called that, lasted barely a minute, and it only took that long as the knights weren’t aiming to kill. Considering their job was to kill monsters they didn’t have a lot of experience with non-lethal measures. Orlan, for his part simply stepped forward, vanishing from where he stood and appearing among the soldiers, lashing out with his gauntlet covered fists to disarm or knock out one soldier after another. Semi-transparent vines of greenish energy sprung from the ground, pulling any soldier caught by them to the ground despite their ghostly appearance. Bright flashes of light disoriented the soldiers, making it hard for them to tell what was going on until it was too late.
“There, now we can talk,” Orlan said, holding the squad leader by the front of the man’s harness after crushing the man’s rifle with the other hand.
With practiced skill the soldier pulled his pistol from the holster at his side, lifted it to aim right at Orlan’s uncovered head and fired. The ghostly outline of a helmet could be briefly seen as the bullet was deflected.
“Expanded Coverage, a pretty common enchantment,” Orlan explained on seeing the man’s shocked expression, “it extends the protection of armor to places that would otherwise be uncovered. It’s not perfect, being less effective than proper armor, but still useful. Also some of the girls in the second lance have used it to, well, let’s just say their breastplates could use a bit more plate.”
“Orlan!” Lailra scolded him, waving her staff menacingly.
“So, what now?” the soldier asked after a moment, dropping his pistol to the ground in an admission of defeat, “I’m sure our government would be willing to negotiate for our release.”
“Before we get to that, can you tell me what justification you had for arresting me?” Orlan asked.
“You’re a foreign military force on American soil,” the man replied after a moment, “the government can’t simply allow that.”
“But I’m a US citizen,” Orlan said simply.
“Ah… what?” the soldier stammered for a moment, “do you have any proof of that?”
“I should,” Orlan said, reaching out with one hand and rummaging around for a moment before coming back with a card, “here, my old driver’s license. It’s a bit out of date but still me.”
“That… changes things,” the man said, looking at the card carefully.
“Now as to what we’re going to do with you,” Orlan said, pausing for a moment to build some drama, before simply releasing the soldier, “we’ll be taking your weapons as compensation, call it battlefield salvage, but otherwise you’re free to go.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Orlan agreed with a smile, “I would appreciate it if you gave the leadership a message though.”
\-\-\-\-\-
“This ‘internet’ is fascinating,” Nallia commented, hunched over the cellphone while a couple other off duty knight crowded around her, “so much information that is so easily accessed.”
“When I left the internet wasn’t so… robust,” Orlan admitted, sitting across the small table from her.
“And immediate access to news from around the world!” she added, her mostly mono-tone voice at odds with her excitement, “we might not need the rift detection array if we had a few more of these.”
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“They can only report on a rift after it appears, the array should be able to predict them in advance.”
“Not to mention the other data the array can give us,” Lailra added, walking into the sitting room and joining Orlan on the couch, “from the power output to the type of rift.”
“All the rifts on this side have been beast rifts,” Orlan said, “the mages say the Aether isn’t dense enough to sustain a persistent rift.”
“Nothing is impossible,” Lailra shrugged, “the added mana from all these rifts could help thicken the Aether.”
“Maybe, we’re dealing with a lot of unknowns here,” admitted Orlan, “any progress on the mana allergy thing?”
“Some of our stealth specialists did some investigations, looks like around one in twelve people of this world have a blighted soul,” she replied a certain amount of hopelessness in her voice, “obviously we’re still lacking data so it could be off a good amount.”
“What about detecting people with it?”
“The mages are working on it, but they’re quite busy with attuning the detection array as it is. They did mention it would be easier if they had access to a few people with a blighted soul, said it would help develop a scanning method.”
“I’ll see what we can do,” Orlan sighed, finding someone with a mana allergy without endangering people was difficult enough. The best method they had right now was the same as people had used for centuries, inject the person with a small, hopefully non-lethal amount of mana, and wait for a reaction. It was effective but risky, not to mention it took time since any reaction to the mana could take hours to show. And that was sidestepping the issue of finding volunteers who would willingly submit to such an examination. With a groan Orlan pushed himself from the couch, taking a moment to stretch.
“Alright,” he said in a slight groan as he stretched, “the anchorheart is about full, so I’m going to work on getting back to sixth sphere.”
“Good luck,” Lailra replied with a smile, the other knights looking up briefly before returning to the cellphone, as Orlan walked out.
The process of tiering up, sometimes called cultivation by the more Asian inspired cultures on the other side, wasn’t an easy task, and being a Protector Lord both helped and hurt the process. The first requirement was a full mana pool, on one hand the added regeneration granted by the anchorheart made that easier, especially in a world with such a thin aether. However, his mana pool included the anchorheart, increasing the size of the pool massively the higher his tier. Combined with the constant drain of keeping the island aloft he practically needed a mana geyser before he could consider tiering up.
Several of his knights greeted him as he walked the halls towards the anchorheart chamber. Many of them were only pseudo-knights, they lacked combat skill and ability to be true knights but were skilled in management and otherwise running the protectorate. It was thanks to them that he could focus on fighting off monsters and the like without getting bogged down in day to day operations.
One might have thought that having the grand doors leading to the anchorheart chamber being unlocked would be a security risk, but in truth there wasn’t much that could be done to a stone while it was bound. People have tried multiple times to destroy the anchorhearts for various reasons, and no one ever managed so much as a scratch.
Sitting on the ground with the anchorheart hovering just before and above him, Orlan took a deep breath.
The first step to tiering up was having full mana, but that was the easy step. Second was a level of knowledge or insight into your element, something Orlan had in spades. Not only had he already been two spheres higher than he was currently, but he’d spent nearly a week inside a rift. He’d made plenty of observations that would help with the construction of his spheres.
It was the third requirement that was giving Orlan pause. Once one had enough mana and knowledge to construct their next sphere, they had to decide what, exactly, they wanted to do. Most people started with a single major mana attunement, but with each new sphere they could lean into one aspect or another of that element, altering their mana. This could specialize them in a specific aspect, like an air mage focusing on flight, or grant them access to abilities of other elements, like a water mage incorporating an aspect of rain to grant limited air abilities.
Not every aspect was created equal, but which were better or worse was hard to tell. Exactly how a given aspect will combine with one’s soul could be influenced by anything from how the user felt about their element to their surroundings. Orlan was in an even stranger position, having a unique mana type, so there was no knowledge about what aspects might be good or bad. For the most part he’d used his early spheres shoring up his weaknesses or leaning into his strengths, restraining the often unpredictable rift mana he used. He could simply reuse his insights from before losing his spheres, but after witnessing the interior of an unstable beast rift for an extended period he had other options. All in all the inherent abilities granted by his lost spheres were middling and he was sure he could do better.
There was one thing he’d noticed above all else while in that rift, and that was the ambient mana. Despite common belief an element didn’t create mana of its element, a fire didn’t generate fire mana for example. Aspected mana was simply mana with properties similar to the given element. So the ambient mana within the rift was largely unattuned, raw power of the Aether and far above either this world or the other one. Before it wasn’t something he hadn’t thought about much, but now he wondered where that mana came from. The void was exactly that, empty, yet rifts which passed through the void like bolts of lightning carried immense amounts of energy.
He spent close to an hour pondering this question, thinking of a way he could utilize it in his soul. Eventually he decided to wait on attempting to understand that particular question, there was a limit to what a given sphere of his soul could handle. The sixth sphere was advanced, but far from the deeper truths of the universe. Instead he chose to go with something similar to what he’d had before, the aspect of distance, but using his new understandings of rifts. Rifts didn’t just connect two places, and they weren’t as simple as separate spaces either, they were tiny worlds in their own right. Small and unstable, overflowing with power and destine to collapse, but small worlds nonetheless.
Focusing on the idea of miniature worlds within rifts he began to crystalize his mana, the final step of tiering up. It was also the most difficult, simply cramming more mana into his body would solidify it, but it wouldn’t become a sphere. Worst case he’d ruin his entire being, becoming a monster. Properly crystalizing a new sphere could take weeks, but thankfully it didn’t need to be done all at once. Which was good as shortly after he began the door to the anchorheart chamber flew open.
“Lord Orlan!” Nallia said, her characteristic monotone somewhat elevated, “there’s a new rift somewhere called… North Carolina.”
“The detection array reaches that far?” he asked, scrambling to his feet.
“No, I saw it on this,” she explained, holding up the cellphone, it’s display showing a breaking news report of what was clearly a rift.
“That shouldn’t be too far away by cutter,” Orlan said, striding from the room with Nallia following just behind.
“Lailra is having the knights get ready,” Nallia reported, opening her mouth to add more when the phone she held began to ring. This surprised her, not that you could tell from her blank expression, as she looked at it. Orlan snatched it from her and hit the answer button.
“Hello?”
“Am I speaking to Orlan?” a voice on the other side said.
“Yes,” he replied, “this had better not be a prank call.”
“I’m a representative of the US State department,” the man explained, “have you heard of the ‘rift’ event?”
“I have and we’re preparing to depart,” Orlan said, still walking purposefully through the halls of the castle.
“That’s why I was calling, to tell you not to get involved,” the man said, continuing before Orlan could reply, “the national guard is mobilizing, we don’t need your assistance.”
“All you’ll do is get those men killed,” the protector lord snorted.
“Our generals are confident.”
“Great for them, I’m still going.”
“If you do we’ll consider it an invasion,” the government man warned.
“When I became a Protector Lord I swore to always help save man from the dangers of the rifts,” Orlan said seriously, “you do what you need to do, and I’ll do the same.”
Before the man could reply Orlan hung up and shoved the phone into his personal space, where it wouldn’t have any contact with the outside world. Nallia gave him a curious look, but he stepped through space as he started retrieving his armor before she could say anything.
\-\-\-\-\-
“Looks like some kind of humanoid monster,” Nallia said, having retrieve the phone from him shortly after they departed, “no evidence of mages among them yet.”
“Damnit,” Orlan cursed, humanoid monsters were always difficult, being more intelligent than mere beasts. There was also an increased risk that some of them had formed something resembling a sphere around their core, which would grant them access to proper magic.
“How strong do they seem?” Lailra asked.
“Hard to tell, at least second sphere equivalent,” Nallia answered, working the cell phone like an expert.
“What’s the terrain like?” Orlan asked.
“More like we’re used to, nearest large city is a few miles from the rift, so only a few scattered rift events have occurred within city limits.”
“I want teams of no less than three,” Orlan ordered after a moment, “first lance is to focus on protecting the city and surrounding suburbs, second lance gets to hunt.”
“What about you, Master?” Lailra asked.
“I’ll move about as needed.”
“You’re only fifth sphere, remember, if there’s a core of tier three beasts they can easily overwhelm you.”
“I don’t plan to stray too far, but you know how I fight.”
“Just… be careful,” she said with a pleading look.