Mila
After reading through the system prompt showing the rules of the War of the Chosen’s final round, Mila took a deep breath. Then she looked more closely at the giant metallic room her army had arrived in, and all the many, many windows, in every direction, showing outer space.
On one side of the room were five large screens showing five different environments—a desert, a glacier, a forest, a city filled with high rises, and a flaming hellscape—and under each screen was a portal which, through sharing Aalam’s stronger senses, she could tell led to a battlefield of said environment.
As expected, their army couldn’t use externally powered artifacts like golems, or single-use artifacts like plagues or explosives, but this time the creator couldn’t use them either, and, like the last round, anyone sent to a battlefield couldn’t come back, though this time there were five battlefields instead of three. The biggest change, however, was that neither she nor her opponent could send as many people as they wanted to any of the battlefields at any time. Instead, after half an hour, they would each start to take turns sending out one member of their army at a time to any battlefield of their choice, and, if they didn’t do so within 30 seconds, a random member of the army would be sent to a random battlefield instead.
They could still use all their standard artifacts—armor, weapons and the like—which was better than they’d expected, but it would be extremely difficult to not lose a single soldier while taking all five battlefields, so Mila was sadly considering abandoning her goal of achieving full completion for every single round.
“Commander Aalam, your analysis,” Mila sent through her law armor to the telepathic channel used by the entire army, allowing everyone to hear.
“There is a divine level forcefield around this room, so there is no way to send anyone out to scout without sending them through the portals. But the forcefield doesn’t block the sensory domain of Ruler’s Domain, which makes it likely the forcefields on the battlefields won’t either. The mana signatures coming from the portals make it seem likely the battlefields all have the elemental mana concentration one would expect from looking at the screens above them, which might have effect on combat. And, while the portals all lead to outside my detection range, I can confirm their endpoints should all be within 100 kilometers of each other.”
Mila took Aalam’s words into consideration and then started giving orders. “Those with long-range vision skills, see if you can find where the battlefields are through the windows.” She moved to look outside as she spoke but was unable to see anything except the vast endlessness of space even with the fifth highest perception of everyone in the army. “Commander Aalam, tell me more about those portals as you learn more. I also want to know how those video feeds above them work, especially if they are live, if what they look at moves, and if you can disable or manipulate them.”
“Understood.” Aalam acknowledged her order and then focused his full attention on the portals and video feeds, leaving Mila to think about how to handle the new rules with what she knew about their opponents.
* * *
“General, we found the battlefields.” After about a minute, Irena called Mila over to the other side of the room to look out the windows, but Mila couldn’t see anything, and neither could Aalam.
The sensory domain which was still part of Ruler’s Domain was an absolutely broken ability, but, when compared to specialized long-range scouting skills, it wasn’t very useful for trying to find things extremely far away. Irena, however, whose Perception was above Mila’s after using Aalam’s excess nascent energy to max out all her stats, had the Extreme Vision skill which greatly improved her visual acuity, an effect even further enhanced by the Third Eye Princess uniqueness she and Mila shared. So, when Aalam figured out the general location of the portals’ exits and passed that information to the army, she’d been the first to find what Mila’d been looking for and started sharing her senses with Mila and Aalam.
Far, far away, at least a couple thousand kilometers, Irena could see several battlefields seemingly twisted together into an odd orb-like shape, and neither Irena nor Mila could really figure out what they were looking at. Aalam, however, seemed to fully understand.
“Five battle zones, twisted into the same space. From inside, they should all look like 120-kilometer by 120-kilometer flat terrain, and my guess is they are fully isolated, but I’ll be able to know more when I get there. The sensory domain of Ruler’s Domain should be able to see through all the zones at once, however, and, from what I can see, there is a good chance their environmental effects are linked into a five element cycle, so there might be some hidden conditions from one battlefield to activate a death zone in another.”
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Mila turned to look at Aalam. “Size of the compressed space?”
“A sphere with a radius of about 130 kilometers.”
Mila took another deep breath. Ruler’s Domain, as a skill which combined Sensory Domain, Heavenly Spark Domain, and Ruler’s Raiment, was effectively two domain skills at once. First, there was the true ruler’s domain, a combination of the added defense from Ruler’s Raiment, but quite a bit weaker, and the Law suppression and heightening abilities of Heavenly Spark Domain. Its most useful effect, however, was that the area it covered, while not large and pretty much only useful in close combat, was part of Aalam’s Territory. Combined with Aalam’s Emperor uniqueness, this basically meant the huge boost to all stats Aalam received when in his own Territory could be activated anywhere. Second, there was a sensory domain, weaker than the Sensory Domain skill of the same grade and rank, but not by much.
Compared to the Heroic grade Sensory Domain Aalam had used during the last War of the Chosen, however, the sensory domain granted by the Fabled grade Ruler’s Domain was much better, having a radius of about one eighth of the user’s Aura stat instead of one twelfth, and for Mila that was currently about 28.3 kilometers.
Given Aalam’s Aura stat, the radius of his sensory domain should have then been about 111.5 kilometers, but there was one other major way the sensory domain of Ruler’s Domain differed from Sensory Domain. Unlike Sensory Domain, Ruler’s Domain was a noble category skill, and Aalam’s Heavenly Spark Psycrafter Prince class greatly increased the power of noble category skills, a threefold boost, while his Emperor uniqueness provided the same level of boosting, also greatly increasing the power of noble category skills. Added together, this was a sixfold boost, and six levels of boosting for a skill was equivalent to raising its grade, in this case doubling the skill’s range and making it much easier to control.
Aalam’s sensory domain was more than large enough to cover the entirety of the five battlefields, while Mila’s was not.
“Commander Aalam will enter first to scout and see if we can manipulate the environment. But our opponents have a higher average power than we do, so we can’t have them all avoid Commander Aalam if we want to win.” Mila turned to look at Javier Garcia. “Commander Javier, over the next twenty-five minutes, do you think you can modify Commander Aalam’s body so he can pass for Commander Isaiah while wearing his armor?”
* * *
Javier
Javier Garcia felt excited, and extremely thankful he’d deliberately chosen to upgrade his Body Enhancement skill to Body Modification when advancing to E rank. It wasn’t a full disguise skill like Ms. Li required for going off planet, but it would advance to have such capabilities by the time he was C rank, and that had been his main goal. He’d never dreamed his choice might prove pivotal for the army of Earth during their first battle with the force who’d put bounties on all of their heads.
Javier didn’t show his level of excitement, however, carefully maintaining the constant act of indifference he always kept up, controlling his aura and face as he answered Ms. Li’s question. “Yes, General, but I’ll need quite a bit of extra flesh.”
Ms. Li turned to look at Brom Karendesh and his assistant. “Mr. Darra, I hate to ask this of you, but would you be willing to—”
She didn’t even have to finish her psychic communication as Darra Jur, Brom’s assistant, started walking over to Javier. “No problem, General. Happy to finally be of assistance.”
Darra took off his armor, stripping down to his underclothes, as did Lord Aalam, and Javier started using his Body Modification skill, along with his recently advanced middle grade Law Pupa of Cells, to move flesh and bone from Darra’s tail and left arm to Lord Aalam, transforming the supreme leader of Earth to grow about half a foot and gain roughly 40 kg of mass.
While Javier had been a doctor before the integration, he’d been a pediatrician, not a plastic surgeon, so the work was nowhere close to perfect. But, with Lord Aalam’s law armor, which blocked all external senses from penetrating through, and which Lord Aalam could modify to fit his new size, it would be good enough. And Javier had done the easy work to change Lord Aalam’s skin color to that of a European, so he could even get hurt without the ruse falling apart as long as he didn’t lose his helmet.
* * *
Brom
Brom watched as Darra, before the fighting even started, proved more useful than he himself had been during the last round, or would be during this one, and he felt frustrated. While he wasn’t at the same level as Lord Aalam, Ms. Li, or Isaiah, he was at about the same level as Ms. Krol, Nitya, and Javier, having taken so, so many of the United Federation of Planets' resources, yet he wasn’t expected to fight.
Sure, it was part of the contract he’d signed with Ms. Li, keeping his identity safe so he wouldn’t get involved with any of their enemies and could freely take back the Bronze Legion when he grew strong enough. And, sure, Earth’s enemy was the Primordial Humans, a divine faction, with other divine factions likely wanting them dead as well. But he’d developed many friendships with people on Earth over the last couple decades, and it felt so wrong to not be able to help them while still receiving so many benefits.
Brom watched as Lord Aalam entered through the portal to the hellscape zone and couldn’t help but clench both his hands into fists.