Chapter 41
Lieutenant Soto walked forward, occasionally stopping to check the surroundings and ensure the line of infantry and vehicles behind her was progressing smoothly. The element had been forced to stop for a little more than an hour, but they were now back on the move.
The bear creature attack had been completely unexpected, causing the various command teams to halt the column while they discussed the odd occurrence.
“Anyone have any idea what the flying fuck that was all about?” Captain Miller asked.
“Maybe the Ice Elves are experimenting with bioengineering?” Lyndis had suggested.
“I somehow doubt that. Their tech doesn’t seem quite as advanced as ours. Instead, it seems to have been supplemented by the system. I think it’s much likelier that it was someone’s battle pet.” Captain Williams had interjected.
“Regardless, we will have to adopt a much higher security posture. Maybe have the vehicles roll down the center of the column with infantry on either side? We can intersperse my tanks between the supply vehicles to offer some enhanced protection.” One of the tank company captains supplied.
“Better the tanks than the exo-mecha pilots. We need to conserve reactor energy as much as possible until the attack since we have very limited re-supply on that.” Captain Miller seconded.
The impromptu meeting continued on in that vein for another few minutes, various officers and senior NCOs voicing ideas on where the creature had originated, how likely further attacks were, and the best ways to counter the threat. Eventually, everyone decided that Captain Williams would make the final call since Savage Company was serving as the main backbone of the attack, and had the most soldiers over level 5. In accordance with the new role, Matt had decided to elevate the security posture to 50% for the rest of the day, and if no further attacks happened they would drop back tomorrow.
In the meantime, the idea to have vehicles travel in the center of the column was approved, with tanks and supply trucks interspersed along the length. The 3 tanks that were essentially acting as Pathfinders and cutting the trail would rotate with the exo-mecha pilot changes, and there would be 3 tanks bringing up the rear.
The element followed a preset course, stopping for a 30-minute lunch at a large commercial trucking stop, allowing the supporting engineers and fuel techs to mix up the right combination of fuel to keep the tanks running smoothly. The supply trucks took straight diesel fuel, but tanks ran better on higher-grade fuels.
During the stop, Lyndis had decided to make a visit she hoped she wouldn’t regret later. One reason the element had three tanks leading the way was that the elf prisoner was in one of them, being watched carefully by Matt. When Lyndis had been told about the plan, she’d been very resistant to the idea, but after Captain Williams had pointed out that the base didn’t really have anyone powerful enough to keep an eye on her, and that she’d been linked to him via the contract, since he was the only one high enough level to use the damn thing.
Apparently, the [subservience collar] allowed someone of a relatively low level to control someone of a higher level, but there were limitations. The [Prisoner of War Contract] allowed one commander to take prisoners from another commander’s forces, and limited how much outside forces could be used to buff said prisoners. Basically, it was an item that allowed you to be sure your prisoners had a much harder time escaping, in exchange for offering a system contract allowing for the prisoner’s release under certain conditions. The more limiting the release conditions, the more a prisoner’s forces could buff them.
Hence the need for the collar and Matt wanting to keep a direct eye on the prisoner. Something about some of the Captain’s abilities seemed to supersede parts of the system, which was very odd, but Lyndis wasn’t complaining.
“What do you know about the system enhancing unintelligent life?” Lyndis asked after being admitted into the tank.
During Lyndis’ earlier interaction with the elf prisoner, she’d kept her facial expressions fairly neutral, but at this question, the elf smiled for a moment. The dichotomy was striking. While she suspected the elf to be a bit of a bitch, the amount of predatory glee the smile gave off made Lyndis wonder if smiling meant something altogether different for ice elf society. The mechanics of different societies' evolution wasn’t something that’d really been covered during the training leading up to the transfer into the SRGs. She made a mental note to consider the implications and focused on what the elf said.
“Well, obviously the system is going to affect all life on your planet. Why wouldn’t it? The system is about organizing and formalizing the transfer of life energy as exp more so than anything else. Obviously, any predatory animals are going to very quickly level up and mutate. I’d suspect any trades related to food production also produced highly boosted individuals.” The elf princess informed.
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The revelation was enough of a shock that both Matt and Lyndis had no idea how to react. The idea that there was some beef or chicken farmer out there with enough levels to give someone like Lyndis a challenge was utterly alien. If they’d known that before the system arrived, maybe Earth would have come up with a different strategy to handle the invasion.
Lyndis would have loved to share the information with the eggheads back at the Pentagon, but the various communications networks had degraded enough to make that kind of range difficult. And then there was the issue of whether they should trust what information the captive provided.
“I don’t know what you mean. Even if that was true, wouldn’t that mean there’s some space monster out there living on an asteroid that has thousands of levels after smashing into worlds and destroying them?” Matt shook his head. “Maybe make your lies a bit more believable next time.”
The elf responded by laughing as if Matt had just told the funniest joke she’d ever heard. “You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to, but there are certainly some races of intelligent plants that do almost exactly what you are describing. They are not the sort of thing that even powerful entities like my Mother wish to tangle with.”
Matt and Lyndis gave each other a look, and silently agreed to discuss this later, away from the elf and the men crewing the tank. Lyndis exited the vehicle and returned to her exo-mecha, more determined than ever to spend more time browsing through the [System Initiates Guidebook] that had come as a reward for the level 5 quest.
*******
SFC Jennet Ming and a hand-picked group of others, a few from each unit that was part of the element sent to retake Fort Eisenhower, met later that night after a halt had been called for the day. The camp had been set, and dinner had been served. Now the group found themselves gathered in a field just inside visual range of the airport where the element had camped. Captain Matt Williams had assigned Jennet to come up with a training regimen, allowing members of all units to practice their abilities and become familiar enough with each other to prevent friendly fire.
All the new abilities and spells represented a significant threat if their users didn’t understand how they worked, or the side effects, as had been proven during the earlier monster attack. Jennet had specifically included Specialist Wallace, wanting to both finish what she’d started earlier and provide something of an object lesson to the other soldiers. The man stood to one side of the formation, head hung somewhat due to the obvious feelings of guilt.
She doubted he’d been meaning to cause a possible friendly fire incident, he just likely hadn’t realized she could move vastly faster than anyone else while turning partially incorporeal. After she’d had a chance to process things and find out what had happened from various perspectives, she blamed herself just as much as the private.
Maybe the American way of doing things was starting to rub off on her, but she couldn’t help it. Objectively it was a better method of doing things than how she’d been trained. If she accepted her part in the failure, she would improve. If she shut the whole incident up, nobody in the future could learn from her failures, and she herself might make the same mistake again if she didn’t really understand what’d happened.
She had Justin demonstrate what he’d done, firing rounds off into the tree line, but not draining both stat pools. Afterward, she demonstrated her own abilities and then explained to the group of now slightly confused soldiers what was going on.
“Today during the Squirrel-Bear attack that you all either witnessed or have heard about, Specialist Justin and I almost had a friendly fire accident. If he’d been any faster, or if I hadn’t been willing to listen to my gut, I would probably be dead. The various unit commanders have decided that we need a chance to train our system abilities and spells, as well as develop a familiarity with what everyone is capable of so that we don’t have something like this afternoon’s incident happen during the attack on Fort Eisenhower.” Jennet explained
“You will start by forming up, lowest ranks in front, highest ranks in the back. Then you will each show us your abilities, targeting the tree line that specialist Justin has so kindly outlined for you. After we’re done with that, we will determine use cases for your abilities, and come up with basic tactics that can make use of multiple soldiers triggering abilities to coincide with each other. You will each pick your replacement for tomorrow’s group. By the time we finish the march, we should all be familiar with each other’s abilities.” she ordered.
Jennet motioned Wallace over while the others formed up. “I’d like to have a one-on-one with you after the training if that’s okay. Something a bit less formal, so don’t worry about bringing a battle buddy.” She explained.
“Roger Sarn’t. Or, I guess, okay. I’m sorry about earlier by the way. I just couldn’t accept the thought of losing any more friends. I didn’t think you would act. I guess it just goes to show how inexperienced I am.” Justin replied.
“Now worries, Wallace. I didn’t really consider that someone else might have the ability to take out the threat. I’m just as much at fault as you are once all is said and done. It might not be very professional for me to acknowledge it this way though, so keep it to yourself. We both need to re-focus on our training. Both our armies have policies and training presidents in place to prevent situations like this. The system might shake things up a bit, but we’ll have the opportunity to correct that with this training. We’ll talk later.” Jennet told him.
She wasn’t sure why, but she felt her stomach flip-flop a bit at the thought of talking to the man alone.