Hiro Matsumoto Guardian Daimyo of the Three-Fold Alliance

Something fundamental to his nature had just changed.

He had been sitting in on another meeting when it happened, attempting fruitlessly to bring order to the chaotic morass that was their Coalition.

A deep thrum reverberated through the Land, originating from the temple on the mountain. He briefly noted the few others who were sensitive enough to look up, turning their heads in the direction of the temple searchingly. But almost immediately after the warning of change moved through the Land, the change took him.

An entirely new network of Mana Distribution patterns whirled into being inside him, rearranging what had already been burned, and then regrown from his Well the last two times he had experienced such a change. The Faction had grown, and the council now oversaw a Kingdom.

“He has done it,” the elderly samurai whispered, a rare smile playing across his face, despite the internal discomfort he was experiencing as his power structure was rewritten.

Then a howling force tore through the manor and Hiro was caught up in the fresh winds of a spring storm, dancing to the melody of inevitable change. Suddenly he was gone, the wind had not picked him up in the sense of moving his body. Instead, his newly rewritten Mana Pathways reacted jubilantly to the advent of the wild power coursing through the room and channeled a new power.

The world around him blurred and time swirled in ascending and descending spirals as his new ability instinctually bore him toward a distant destination.

Since coming back from the grave, he had happily accepted the limits of his new powers. His purpose had always been to protect his people, and the loss of his freedom to travel from their Faction’s lands had seemed a small price to pay for such power. He had understood and accepted his role in the coming fight would be to secure their home base and provide as much support as he could from the Alliance’s lands.

Now, however, he was being pulled far from the valley where his people had built their refuge. The strange magic blowing through him was taking him to a new place, one that was both foreign and yet rang with a familiar note of joyous, creative, energy.

Then he was there, landing lightly on his feet. The moment his body made contact with the local land, he learned that it too had been added to his Faction’s holdings and it told him of everything that had recently occurred in its domain and some things that were still unfolding.

He stood there for a long moment, on the flattened top of a mountain-like structure built at the beginning of the Land’s story. The area around him was already undergoing a transformative renewal as not one, but three of Origin’s Facets settled into the peak and remade it. There were five other peaks, and even now he could only dimly sense 3 others. The fourth, however, he could sense much more sharply. A power aligned with his was currently contesting it vigorously… He was just in time.

“Hiro?” A familiar, but confused voice called out.

The Guardian Daimyo turned toward Tilly’s shocked face and noted the new altar now sitting at the center of the area. Soon this entire mountain would be remade to better support its new authority.

But there would be no time to explain. He had work to do if the coalition was to stand a chance of gaining the foothold it needed to wage war against what was coming. Even now, he could feel the distant crashing of cloven feet, the acidic burn of the tide of demonic armies headed this way.

“Jonathan Tillman, I must go. Plant the seed and bring our forces here. Direct our elites to the other peaks, we must delay them as long as possible if we are to stand a chance,” he called, eyeing the distant battle eagerly.

“Hold on, I'll come with-”

Hiro smiled fiercely, enjoying the surge of potential that animated his newly upgraded body as he leaned into the powerset bestowed upon him by Origin’s Breath.

In a blink he was gone, slipping through time and space to land in between Erash and the pair of Level 88 Elder Fiends that she had been contending against. Without missing a beat, she lowered her staff, reaching up to wipe some of the dirt and blood marring her normally pristine features.

“I felt the shift…but I must say, this is a pleasant surprise,” she breathed out in relief. The winged Fiends screamed in protest at Hiro’s interruption, their hatred-laced calls joining the others who flew toward the peaks on twisted wings, attempting to claim them ahead of Corruption’s main force.

“The die has been cast… let us see just how far providence will carry us.” He replied, smoothly drawing his sword and taking a step toward the growing crowd of enemies attempting to win before the battle had truly begun.

…

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Ichiro, Level 79 Samurai Hatamoto

Something momentous rippled through the Weave. Ichiro had been consciously blocking out the vast majority of his awareness of its captivating patterns as he tried to pay attention to the meeting and its almost endless bickering. Then everything around him had burst with animated movement. Whatever the source of this change, it was reorienting many of the destinies represented in the Coalition, including the powers assembled in the manor’s courtyard.

A moment later, his father cocked his head with a grunt, and looked off into the distance, as if he too could see the change. An expression of awe bloomed on his features for the barest moment before he whispered, “He has done it.”

Then an energy unlike anything Ichiro had ever felt tore through the courtyard, and several others looked up at its passing, including the ancient wizard and the Honu Elders.

It howled silently through the room, invisible to all but a few, and then it was gone, his father along with it.

Ichiro immediately lifted as much of his mental block as he could handle, his eyes dancing across the rapidly changing pattern as he attempted to draw some conclusion from all of the changes.

Jonathan Tillman had done something, that much was clear. But why were all of the threads in this room suddenly being pulled toward the center of the city, and what did the gaping hole in the pattern at the top of their mountain signify?

“Please excuse me,” Ichiro said quietly, as the others in the room started to shout at Hiro’s sudden disappearance. The old wizard raised his voice attempting to take charge of the situation and Ichiro passed out of the front gate of the manor almost unnoticed, before accelerating to his full speed and racing toward the slowly filling gap in the Weave at the mountain’s top.

Less than twenty breaths later he was there, looking at a large newly formed cave where the temple had once stood. The entrance, the weathered statues… it was all gone. The shock of the sudden loss hit him in his chest, rattling his normally iron control on his emotions.

“You will see it again soon enough, along with that rambunctious father of yours,” a weathered voice whispered comfortingly from behind Ichiro.

He spun on his heels, reaching for his sword in a smooth dangerous motion, only to find the elderly farming couple standing at their ease. These two had been so instrumental in the agricultural advances the Alliance had enjoyed… But something was off.

Even with much of his awareness blocked off, he should have been able to detect their presence on the Weave before they spoke. How long had they been there?

He searched his senses again and felt nothing. It was as if they weren’t there at all to the vast majority of his sight. The couple calmly observed him as his mind raced through the possibilities that the disappearance and now this discovery could represent.

“Go ahead and take a closer look, but I’ll warn you, you might want to squint those eyes of yours. You're still new to this after all.” George said leaning happily against his wife in a relaxed posture.

“Do be careful dear, best take the smallest peek possible,” Edna added.

Ichiro was dumbfounded. The loss of his sight had resulted in a Skill that he had only just begun to understand, even after months of practicing. It had allowed him to detect infiltrators throughout the coalition’s forces and when he entered into a full battle trance it gave him such an elevated understanding of the time and space around him that he bordered on prescience.

But this was completely new. The two before him were absent in the pattern unfolding around the newly changed destiny of the mountain. Something about their calm manner and the work they had been doing for his people for months meant that he longed to trust them, even though they now represented a complete unknown.

“Very well, if you will give me a moment,” he said, bowing. Whatever they were, Ichiro had always believed that a little respect went a long way.

“Oooh, I do like it when they are polite, George!”

“Hush woman, the boy needs to concentrate.”

Allowing their exchange to fade to the background of his thoughts, he rose from his bow, slowly releasing the mental block he had carefully constructed all those months ago. Without it, he would probably still be lost in the Weave’s intoxicating intricacies and it was the only thing that allowed him to function with any normalcy.

The construct mainly acted as a sort of opaque, hazy window through which he limited his exposure to the reality underlying the plane to a bare 10 percent of the information he was capable of taking in. Locking in his breathing technique and the rigid support a lifetime of meditation provided for him, he slowly eased the block, allowing the intricacies of the Weave to come through in greater clarity.

His iron Will dug in the heels of his soul, fighting against the almost irresistible urge to marvel at the many pathways playing out before him. Instead, he focused on the couple, seeing for the first time that his initial impression had been wrong. It wasn’t that they were absent from the Weave. Instead, it seemed to behave strangely wherever it touched upon the couple’s cosmic location in reality.

Curiosity growing, he minutely relaxed the mental protection a little more, allowing in more information.

Then he saw it. The Weave was turning in on itself, inverting into an entirely different metaphysical space wherever it touched them. It reminded Ichiro of hiding your stitch on the inside of a seam.

Once he saw it, all control slipped from his grasp, for beyond that inversion was a whole universe of power. The roots of the destiny from the couple before him reached out and touched upon the entire plane, stretching far past Ichiro’s comprehension. He would have prostrated himself before them, terrified of the advent of their power. But his whole body had locked up, rigid in an attempt to not be lost again in the terrible majesty of reality as it yawned open before him.

“There there, dear,” one of them said. Its words reverberated along the parts of the pattern between them, and somehow imparted to him the strength to pull back from the brink.

“Gahhh,” He gasped, like a man coming up from the depths. His body flinched along with the desperate breath and blood-filled tears ran in streams from his eyes.

The strength fled from his knees, and he was about to collapse in relief when the old man was suddenly next to him, bearing him up in a firm but gentle grip, “Sorry about that. It's a trick some of us old-timers use to keep a lower profile…We would have spared you the trouble, but it is likely you will need to know the secret very soon.”

“What are you?” Ichiro asked in an awed whisper, screwing his eyes shut and wiping away as much of the mess on his face as possible.

“Names are a hard thing and most of the time, I think we prefer Edna and George. But we have other names, ones more suited to the responsibilities we bear…” The elderly female satyr whispered gently.

“But the most helpful answer to your question would probably be the names we were first given upon waking,” The man next to him said, his voice heavy with intent, “I was, and still am, known as Endurance.”

“And there are those that would call me Strength,” Edna added, “Though very few of them understand anything of the meaning of my name.”

The revelation was so overwhelming that for the first time since his capture all those months ago by the Corrupted tree, Ichiro’s control began to slip. Whatever else their presence represented, the fact that they had been here for so many of the trials that had struck his people and done nothing…

It was just too much. His carefully cultivated calm began to fray and words burst from his mouth as if spoken by someone else. Someone much angrier.

“But how? Why?... Shouldn’t you be doing-”

He could hardly believe the slip as it was happening and belatedly cut himself off before he voiced a full criticism of such powerful beings.

“-More?” George finished letting go of Ichiro as the strength returned to his legs and his mental block reasserted itself.