The Iron Horse steadily crossed the mountains; “steadily” being one of those tricky words that sounds objective but is actually subjective. Truth, for example, considered it quite reliable. There might be a bit of front wheel wobble, and some excess vibration as it came up to speed, and if he was going to be pedantic, the brakes were ninety percent shot. On the other hand, he was permanently running Incisive, which should in theory give him plenty of time to avoid any little whoopsies. The patchwork Iron Horse was, therefore, utterly reliable and crossed the mountains steadily.

Surveillance had gotten heavy. He was through the back of the front lines now, and into the actual battle lines. The mines ignored him, of course. As did the tiny golems, the swarms of hidden demons and witchcrafted puppets. They were there to sweep out the conscripts that would come funneling down the road soon enough. No need to make them strong enough to pick up a mid tier hiding themselves. What could a single Level Four or Five manage, after all?

A mid level mage was a local calamity. Effortlessly capable of exterminating small units on their own. But so what? Say a Level Five could fight a thousand alone. How long could they do it for? How long could they keep casting? And how much easier was it to find a thousand conscripts than a single Level Five?

There wasn’t a country in the world that wouldn’t count trading a Level Five for a thousand Level One’s as a losing trade. Mid Tiers would get deployed as line-breakers, sent with heavy support to crack a strong point, opening a channel for the conscripts to pour through. They were the officer class, and treated as such. They were also heavy weapons platforms and treated like that too.

Buried off the trail, carefully concealed, would be assassin golems. There would be heavy needler batteries, carefully enchanted to target high cosmic ray concentrations. Each needle would cost as much as a worker might make in an hour. Possibly three hours.

Layered with enchantments to break wards, to dissolve flesh and crush souls, the ammo box would have its own guard of regulars, just to prevent any shrinkages. A full box of ammo would cost more than a house. Worth it, though. To be able to beat a mid level to death with your wallet? What could be more worth it than that?

You could always print more money. But there were now a finite number of Level Fours, Fives and Sixes in the world. Their numbers would not be replaced. The magic thinned by the day. Fewer and fewer would break through, even with arrays and elixirs.

Truth got a morbid bit of fun out of it. On the one hand, the combat doctrine of nations was to exhaust the most powerful spells and mages against waves of summons and conscripts, before sending in your own elites. But now, that calculation has been complicated. The doctrine made tactical sense, but did it make sense strategically?

Truth moved the pieces around in his head. The apocalypse wasn’t coming- it was here. It just wasn’t evenly distributed yet. So a smart, and particularly ruthless, person would throw their mid levels and most disposable high levels directly into the meat grinder immediately. Maximize the damage they could do, while they could still do it. In a year or less, maybe even just a few months, they would be wormfood.

Those Level One’s would be crippled when the magic faded to near-nothing, but they could still carry a spear if necessary. The Level Zero’s… he had to wonder what the training camps looked like right now. Universal draft, regardless of Level. Yet, strangely, they were being drilled hard on physical conditioning and formation marching, not weapons. Plenty of indoctrination. Plenty of sparring. No range time.

Maybe they would throw rocks.

This stretch of the front was quiet for the moment. Mortars delivered rains of cursed shrapnel across valleys, and snipers were playing their “funny” little games, but they were having to work for it. The deep forests made targeting a pain. You could use a spirit or a second spell to target, of course, but you might as well hand your victim a note letting them know the hit was coming in.

Truth let the iron horse do the running, carrying him and his thoughts through an active war zone. There was a barricade up ahead? Go around, through the woods. Dismount and carry the two wheeler over the deployed hedgehogs and around the ground demons. Stop and check if there were any political officers who could suffer a friendly fire incident. Then move on.

At some indefinable point, he crossed into Jeon. He really couldn’t say when. Not like there was a sign or anything. It’s just that the roadblocks were facing the north now. The patches had changed. Different model needlers.

He looked into the dead eyes of the conscripts, smelling the fear stink on them.

Welcome home, Truth. Ready to make it all better?

A few kilometers back from the front line, he found a general giving a speech. Olive drab uniform, edged in gold brocade, armored with enough medals to stop a comet. Level Seven, looked like, with a pair of level five guards. Truth hung well back, keeping out of sight.

“Soldiers, I tell you, we are going to win this war! We are going to win! You have all heard how the Tiger roared over the Great White Mountain, before the mountain erupted and flooded the Onis lines with lava. Even now, the Great White Mountain defends the nation.”

He was standing on the hood of a light wagon, declaming with practiced strength.

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“You see that red sky overhead? That is the Red Sky of Victory! You know why that sky is red? The volcano is drowning Onis in ash. Choking their cities, their crops, throttling the vermin-swarms of their peasant levies. The heavens and the earth alike help us. I ask you, what is there to fear when the world itself is on your side?”

He shook his great head slowly, lantern jaw swinging.

“There is nothing, NOTHING in this world Jeon needs fear except the weakness in our own hearts. Cowardice, defeatism, these are the enemies! Greed is the enemy! Listening to enemy broadcasts, reading enemy propaganda, spreading rumors and harming morale- these things are nothing but giving aid and comfort to the enemy! And shall be punished according to military law!”

Oh you could hear the blood and fire in his voice now.

“I tell you right now, so long as every true son and daughter of Jeon gives their all, fully commits their hearts, minds and souls to our nation in this moment of crisis, our victory is assured. I cannot promise you that it will be quick. It certainly won’t be easy. But as sure as the tiger rules the mountain, so too will Jeon stand supreme over the world!”

Truth saw some officers and NCO’s facing the crowd and pointedly applauding. Everyone got the hint. They stood up and cheered madly. It’s what you did, even if you despised every word. It was insane to look like you lacked spirit or were sabotaging morale. In the past, it was terminally career limiting. Now it was just terminal.

Time to leave. He pressed on, moving through the forest, hidden by the summer green. Someone would find the tire tracks eventually, but so what? What would they do about it? Who would they even tell? The tiger ruled the mountain, did it? Truth wondered if this was how it felt. Moving invisibly. Deciding what was prey and what would be ignored for now.

That night, he built himself a little camp site. The iron horse was laid on its side in the dirt and covered with pine boughs. For himself, truth made a little tent with his tarps and covered those with fragrant branches as well. No fire. He didn’t want to spend the energy hiding it.

He ate a cold meal, and looked at the stars through the swaying needles. Sally was somewhere up there with her family. Being healed, he hoped. Perhaps she was on the other side of the sky, that strange space the Shattervoid traveled through. Perhaps they could see the wrongs and rights of this mean little world.

You have some ideas about fixing Cup and Knife?

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Oh?

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I chalked it up to a moral judgment. It’s the kind of thing they do.

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Valid point. But that is what the spell does, so…

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What do you mean, “Isn’t” It literally is.

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Truth thought about that one a second. Vek had said that, hadn’t he? That he didn’t have the brains to recreate the bits of the spell that were missing from his recollection.

But it does seem to be a reality correcting spell of some kind. We have seen how it will shift damage around, letting it go some places but not others. Some changes cost more energy than others. There is a whole set of rules there we aren’t seeing.

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The System helped pull up the memory. The old man, something mischievous and lively in his eyes. “If you want to know the answer to a lot of things, including how Cup and Knife really works, answer that question first. Why can’t you imagine a better world?”

The old man had tapped the passage he had etched on the church floor all those centuries ago, and provided his own translation. “A pauper shall be a prince/ Wisdom ever sought and never found/ Arrogant humility/ A dream forbidden/ You cannot approach the Throne without knowing Truth.”

All the subsequent reworks of the spell figured that Vek goofed on the optimization. They didn’t bother to wonder why an Angel would care about revealing such a thing to Vek, and by extension, the world. Manda left that message on the church floor. He specifically clued us in to the… global mental block that’s in place. His acolyte demons in particular set us up for the revelation. And at the end of the day, Manda is an angel. He doesn’t do a single damn thing unless he thinks it’s furthering God’s will.

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A spell for repairing the world. Truth exhaled a cool breath. It was a shocking thought. Electrifying.

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Starbrite? Six hundred years ago?

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