Scouts from another village near the high-level zone.
“Come on, the mobs on the other side don’t ever cross to this side even with a single paw. See the chalk line marking the ground and trees?” I ask my companion.
“I’m not blind.”
He gives me the stink eye, but I ignore it.
“It’s about a meter back from the actual dividing line between their territory and ours,” I say getting right up against it.
“Well, I don’t want to risk it either way, so I will stay protected back here.”
“Come a little closer to get a better look.”
After he comes to my side I take a small step forward extending my arm and waiting for the beast in this region to come over. A minute later, paying close attention to the forest beyond, I hear a disturbance to my left and pull my hand away just in time as the beast takes an impossible leap from 20 meters away, trying to chomp my arm.
I stumble but manage to catch myself before falling on my butt. After a moment with my gaze still fixed on the beast, I see the coward some 30 meters back who is calling out of the corner of my eye.
“See, that is why I don’t want to get too close.”
“That is no excuse. In the worst-case scenario, I would have injured just my hand. See, the beast is just sitting there.” I point to it before getting right up against the line again and waiting. “Now come back here, otherwise you will just be proving you don’t deserve to be in the Scout Core.”
“Oh, come on that is not fair. That is a bloody saber tooth. A level 133 saber tooth. I can scout from back here just fine.”
I shrug, trying to impart just how little I care for his opinion.
“You are the one who wants to join the Core.”
“I already joined the Scout Core.”
“Pfft… You are on probationary status at best, if you don’t show you have the guts to go somewhere we have proven to be safe, do you think we will trust you to head into actual danger? You are going to have to change your attitude a lot to continue with us, including ditching your metal armor for leather or gambeson.” I say exaggerating his situation, but only a little. He has to get over his unfounded fears, we need real scouts, people who learned and use their judgment while approaching danger but never crossing the line. Dead scouts are just as useless as cowards, and a litle push would get him to the rigth place.
Though I have to admit, the majestic and dangerous mob in front of me scared the pants out of me. Even now it’s sitting there, looking back and forth between us with intelligence that belies anything non-human.
It takes a while for my trainee to come back to my side, but as he arrives at the dividing line, the crouching beast gets up relaxing its body. I never saw it doing anything like this before.
“Is that normal?”
“Uhh?”
“I thought that they could wait for hours without moving.”
“Well… we are always learning something new and this just comes to show that sometimes you need to be right against the edge of danger to see something.” I look at my companion, but just as I turn my head, a white blur appears on the corner of my eye and pain strikes me.
My vision starts turning red and my head is twisted downward at an unnatural angle. I look at my foot as I start falling to the ground, trying to assess the injury there, except I can see nothing wrong with it.
I’m in shock.
I have heard of people being so overwhelmed sometimes that they couldn’t even feel where injuries were. I try to brace myself, but I don’t even twitch a finger as I hit the ground. My companion is dragging himself on the ground with a big dent in his metal helmet.
I try to smile but only manage something lopsided, as the very stuff of life flows from my veins and I slip away.
Perhaps your cautiousness saved you. Saved you… Save…. Fade…. Pain…. Blackness.
---------------------
“They haven’t come back, what do you want to do?” I hear from my partner as we stand at the meeting spot.
“Let’s go look for them. The boy just joined the Scout Core, they could be in some kind of trouble.” I say.
“No need.” Another scout shouts as he approaches in a jog. “We found the boy, and already started organizing a search for his partner.”
“Is he fine?” I ask.
“No, he has a big dent in his helmet. The cumbersome thing saved his life actually.”
“Well, even if I don’t agree with a scout wearing metal armor, we can’t deny there are some advantages. So what did he tell you guys?”
“Nothing,” the new arrival says downcast.
“What? How could he tell you nothing?” I ask, wondering why the boy would be playing given the serious situation.
“He is injured. The helmet may have saved his life but he is having trouble speaking. All we managed to drag out of him is that he doesn't remember anything. We found him wandering, lost as a boy scout dropped in the middle of a jungle before his first lesson.”
“So why didn’t you use your Health potion on him?”
“I did, that is how we even managed to get this much out of him, but we can’t remove his helmet, it is too mangled. Another pair of scouts are taking him back to the village so they can remove it with proper tools and give him another potion.”
I scrunch my face. “If the damage was that extensive, I’m not sure the commander will see the need. Potions are rare, he may decide to cut his losses.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“We need to know what happened.”
“We do, I just hope the commander will agree,” I say.
-----------------------------------------
Nash’s POV
I watch as Merlin stands just centimeters away from the cast for the mana battery as a pair of metalworkers tilt a two-foot-tall crucible suspended in between them with a long pole. Mana melds with the molten copper in a beautiful intertwining visible only to people with high enough mana manipulation skill and mental stats. And it means that of those present only the two of us can appreciate the stunning visual in its entirety.
As the red hot glowing goo flow in the channels, like dropping thick syrup in a maze, his skill and concentration are fully engaged with the formation in front of him.
I feel the hot air buffeting me by the 12 hundred ingots being poured in the mold mixing with his meta magic, well over a ton of metal. Melding different aspects of his skills to achieve the pinnacle of our manufacturing capability wasn’t strictly necessary, but it was a step beyond what everyone else would manage.
Almost a minute passes, the internal structure is formed and he passes to the next mold with the rotating crews grabbing another crucible of molten copper and pouring it in the prepared clay mold.
I ignore the heat, steam, and sizzling droplets of metal spewing throughout the process, focusing with all my senses on the unfolding magic before me. Mostly I rely on my perception field and the mana manipulation skill which, notwithstanding its name, allowed me to sense mana.
I follow the intricate patterns being formed, not in the physical sense, though that is almost simultaneous to the point I can almost feel the system grabbing hold of the metal and allowing it to integrate into something capable of affecting mana.
Merlin’s engraver skill and a tendril of mana connect him to the runes pouring after pouring as I try to piece together how everything fits together. Without noticing I find myself sitting on the ground enwrapped by what is unfolding before my senses.
Something simple, yet beyond my comprehension for the simple reason that I did not have more than a basic understanding of magic fuelled by observations and a few lines here or there to help guide us along the path of magic.
Each time a new disk is formed, I look for the briefest of moments, the instant where creation happens…. and I learn nothing new.
Once, twice, a dozen times and all I’m left with is the bewilderment plaguing all children who see a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat. I don’t even know if it was some high-level concept so beyond us mere mortals that I might as well give up or something tantalizing just out of reach, something which only required watching the process one more time to reveal all of its secrets to me.
Never before since arriving in the instance, the scale of what I was attempting to do hit me as strongly. There was nothing we could do but soldier on, but we simply didn’t know what were the most productive and best ways to improve and where to dedicate our time.
Something just fine if all the tension and conflict were of the type that happened back on Earth as we went about with our lives. Ignoring the danger of a nuclear holocaust, the worse we could expect is a war killing a small percentage of our population.
Now, if we played things wrong our entire civilization was at stake if the hints I uncovered were to be believed. If we screwed up, the best we could hope for is to be treated as serfs on our own planet.
I once again let all the thoughts drift away like a helium balloon in the gentle wind and pay attention to what is in front of me. It’s all I can do at this exact moment, and so it’s the perfect action. There is no doubt, I go all in on absorbing everything my senses tell me about the pouring metal and what Merlin was doing, not just trying to replicate it, for I could probably do that easily enough after training, but to understand the process.
I get a couple of ideas of how to improve minutely my engraving or rather runic writing skill, but that is not the holy grail. The mother of all engravings would require me to understand and be able to separate where the skill began and where it ended. My goal was to understand how it worked on a deep level, a level beyond the mere user, but of someone who inhabited the world, who became one with the world not only in name but in reality.
But after an hour, I realise this goal was not for today. Merlin finishes the 63rd pouring and walks over to me. Though he doesn’t need to shake me like when I was consumed sending mana to the forge. I lift my head to look at him and he returns my smile before saying:
“So, did you like the show?”
“Mehh, I have seen better.”
“Ohh, you wound me.” He says faining being stabbed in the heart.
“Now with all seriousness, the way I believe you used your skill doesn’t mesh well with growing runes using nature magic, but there was a point or two that were…illuminating.”
“What did you find out about how it works?”
“You use your mana as a conduit and allow the skill to take hold like that, probably while holding the formation in your head very firmly.”
He nods seriously at my summation before speaking: “That is just about it, the trick is to allow the stream to become a ‘conduit’ for the skill’s active effect. It took some experimentation but I managed and soon enough other mages will be able to do the same.”
“Yeah, but there is too much I don’t get. There is something about the process in the instant the system takes control to ‘transform’ the metal into something that will be able to use mana.”
“Yeah, I tried to study that instant after my first success but to no avail. The instant when the system affects its changes is obvious but I run into a brick wall every time I try to parse what exactly is happening.”
“Is it my impression or these batteries can store less mana per unit of weight compared to something ‘properly’ engraved?”
“Yeah. Each of them perfectly engraved by someone of my skill would be able to store up to 12k mana, which works out to about 10 mana points per kilogram, but with this method of casting the runes instead of slowly tapping a chisel I can make a batery good for about 7k mana. That doesn’t even account for my higher skill level, I think the others will have trouble getting past 5k for batteries of this size.”
I shrug and we start walking back leaving the area, before saying with a grin:
“That is still over 400 thousand in mana storage for an hour of work from someone with the engraving skill.”
“We need a lot more than a single person.”
“Yes, but all the other jobs can be automated if we try hard enough.”
“You are really digging hard on the idea of automation aren’t you?”
“I have seen the potential and do you think the last person to leave the instance will have the time to be digging rocks, cutting trees, and feeding the smelter more fuel? If they need to do more than a small number of tasks like that, which they will have to do because we can’t account for everything they will need, they won’t have the time to focus on leveling or enjoy whatever benefits are to be gained from staying in the instance longer.”
He nods sagely and looks to the horizon.
“Perhaps you are right, still you are light years ahead of everyone else with your roots.” I look at him confused before he continues speaking. “You can control them to do a lot with only a small attention paid to it.”
“And what does that have to do with anything?”
“Are you always this obtuse? You are the obvious choice to remain in the instance.”
I cut a half-laugh off and my expression melts into a pensive one.
“Maybe, but I can think a couple of people that would be good choices. You and Alex come to mind, but we can probably find other people.”
He shakes his head.
“I will admit that we will probably remain longer, but the last one has to be you.”
“It’s still too early to say anything definitive, let’s wait a while longer before continuing this conversation.”
So we both turned silent and split to go our own ways. I think of Pando back on Earth. I couldn’t bear to overextend my stay here, but I might have to suck it up. With the way time was handled, Pando had already spent years and Earth’s transformation was still happening. I need to learn more about it.
We didn’t know enough about the finances and advantages of choosing a single person instead of taking other courses of action and a hundred other things to boot.
Making rigid and inflexible plans right now was just bound to break them and possibly ourselves in the process when the time to implement them came to.
Perhaps pushing for a single person was the wrong choice: a small team, something hybrid or even foregoing the instance altogether. The last option may not be likely, but it was always possible it would provide an advantage we considered critical.
I shake my head one last time before entering Pando’s coin mint, I had done some work, but it went neglected for too long and it was one of the ideas I had to generate income that wouldn’t rely on the system directly. For some reason that sounded very important.