I try to adjust my new armor.
Goddammit, but this is uncomfortable. For all the jokes I used to get for wearing “boob armor”, at least the perv that made it was a good leatherworker and made it fit me perfectly.
This new armor, however…
I shuffle forward, trying to get the leather strap back into position, which takes me another few seconds and then I let out a sigh of relief.
I need to get another set, this is not ok.
As the pain is gone and turn the corner and come face to face with the pair of guards for our Lord’s throne room. I walk steadily, trying to make a good presentation after I had been chosen to be his personal messenger. Near random chance that I was in the right place at the right time or just the opposite depending on who you ask.
I take deep breaths trying to calm my nerves, though even if his presence is overwhelming, at least I have enough vitality to make it through ok. He is not the worst guy after you get through the surface layers, assuming that you can ignore his death aura.
As the guards open the doors, a faint stink wafts over to me, but I ignore it and press on.
I look at him, past his bony hands, gaunt face and the skull staff leaning against his ebony throne, I see the lonely person behind layers of masks not exactly of his choosing. The person that can’t really stand near anyone else for more than a few minutes without injuring them.
A system prompt shows up on the edge of my vision and then fades with me knowing exactly what it says.
An unnatural energy wafts over you, you lost one point of Health.
“Ohh, dear Valery. What news do you have for me?”
“Nothing new in the spot that the young man teleported to. The seeds are growing at an exponential rate and any mana we give then only furthers that growth.”
“Yeah, yeah, I don’t care about that. Tell me of the disturbance I felt in village 117. Anything new over there?”
“Something similar to the last month, except this time, there was not just seismic activity and mana fluctuations, but something that seems to be a portal. At least that is our best guess.”
“Uhh, a portal you say.”
“Yes.”
“How large?”
“About a millimeter or two in size. Anything that touches it is instantly obliterated. Though over time it seems to be stabilizing ever so slightly. Also, the disturbance position is right at the epicenter the mages calculated.”
“Their calculations had a 50 meter margin of error but… a millimeter or two in size you say? That is not large enough to send even the tiniest of my skeletons… if it is a portal.”
He looks at the corner of the room and extending his aura, pulls a few small bones in the pile, probably from a rabbit or another animal I’m not familiar with.
He folds and warps his mana and I feel the aura around him intensify. My health starts dropping every couple of seconds instead of every 30 seconds or so even with the near dozen meters between us, but in a minute it is over and I open my eyes stepping closer again.
A tiny skeleton, about 3 inches tall walks around in his hand.
“Yeah, can’t do anything smaller than this with my current abilities. The skill just won’t take hold. Well, it is decided. I will travel over and accompany the developments in person. That is the only way…”
“My lord,” I ask confused. Why would he leave his capital? We didn’t know, but many speculated that it was the source of his powers. He couldn’t have conquered the instance without his armies of the dead and the bones he found here are on a whole other level of power. Even the level 100 beasts on the other side of the dividing line can’t stand against the mammoth undead and the undead lieutenants of his army. At least not without a large numerical superiority.
And now he is going to stay away for a while? Did he give the impression that he was tied to this place just because he was in the mood for it or were there strategic reasons? After all, only a few villages actually fought the ‘Evil Necromancer’, the rest just joined his banner and were allowed to continue with minimal interference.
He nods and says:
“I have decided, I will base on this new village for the foreseeable future and only return after dealing with it or if unrest ensues. Now go away, I don’t want you dying from exposure to my Aura.”
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Necromancer’s POV
I watch the little thing hurrying along. She closes the door and I let my breath out relaxing my Aura.
The runes around this building contain my power. The only place I knew that I could have built this specific rune setup without paying the prodigious amount of mana that would require to power them elsewhere.
The insidious power of Death didn’t like being stopped and the cost was great to stop me from simply killing the entire population of my capital. But this development was too interesting to forgo. And if in the end, a village had to be quarantined, that was just the price that I paid for my power.
Who are you, traveler? A friend of a foe?
If you are a friend I welcome you with open arms, but if you are a foe, you will regret the day you were born as I crush you beneath my bones.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
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Nash’s POV
“Turu ru ruu, abatu ru ru ru ru. Cara sihin, natru va ras titu turu turu.” I happily sing along, a tune that nobody would enjoy given I’m still deaf tone even with all of the system’s advantages. But I care for none else’s opinion right this instant. The nonsensical words all fit together seamlessly in my mind and I keep the tune up.
I watch as over fifty new beings discover their bodies. They move around jerkily and slowly at first, but as they assimilate with the ‘brain’ I gave them I’m amazed at their sheer learning speed and my tremendous luck. This skill is perfect for a completely different purpose than it originally was intended. It is like they had always been missing a brain like this and now they were complete. What else could I do with it?
You can do anything you want.
Aspen? I call out already recognizing the mental signature.
This brain is amazing. It even comes with remnants of your memories. Just the impressions I get from you translate not only to feelings but nearly fully formed thoughts.
Ohh, what did I do? You can talk properly.
I’m still cute, now I just have one more organ and my capabilities have expanded… again. A tree by itself was never meant to operate at a moving being’s speed. This new development…
Well, you also got eyes and ears, but the brain is the main change…. Do you think it was a mistake to allow hundreds of seeds to acquire this capability at the same time?
Don’t worry about that. Plants are adaptable, even with no genetic changes. You can mold a bonsai into a miniature tree and keep it there with no effort. Being orders of magnitude smaller than normal is just how much they ould grow with the conditions they were given.
Don’t talk about torture like that to me.
Shush, I’m the tree, I’m the one that should be angry. He chides me lightly, but even without another word, the tension releases as I get up.
“Everybody back to the inner world. I’m going to the village.”
I already spent too long working on this and Merlin had called for help with the portal yesterday. Most have trouble understanding my English spoken words, but after a few understand the gist of my words and enter the portal, the others follow.
Less than a minute later I’m zipping along the sky in a quick and uneventful trip.
Even before I hit the ground, the long and narrow flying craft fits inside the inner world at nearly full speed leaving me flying mid air. I push mana and qi through the runes in my body for those last few seconds. The inefficient flight and enormous drag of my body are perfect in this circumstance as I try to bleed off speed as fast as possible.
“Hi, Nash.” Calls out the main operator as I hit the ground.
“Do you ever go home?” I ask curious to which I get no answer but a snort from the guy that seems almost tied to this place. Seen that I will get nothing more I ask: “The others…?”
“Both Merlin and Burges are supposed to get back here in an hour. Do you want to see the stats?”
“I already read through them on the flyover.”
“Oh well, you are welcome to poke it to your heart’s content.”
“That sounds delightful.”
I reach with my skills and fully extend the tendrils trying to impart a bit of myself combined with the perception field to really absorb the changes to the last design I helped to come up with.
There are no fundamental shifts, all the changes being just insular to the main mechanism where they concentrate their attention as they try to increase the mana output. Even with all of it being subtle, those small changes are what allowed them to reach this far. They nearly doubled mana handling capacity.
The sheer amount of mana used every second as the address got more and more precise seemed like a bottomless well. The concrete distance traveled is negligible and not the source of mana consumption, if it was, from a few rough calculations, a few inches would already exceed the mana we are spending each time we open the portal.
At least the system didn't make this transition millions of miles away. That would have been flat-out impossible for decades, if not centuries as we barely even knew the first thing about the entire field.
If Burge’s experiments were any indication, even moving a kilometer would put the scale of mana needed so outside our realm of what we could currently accomplish that it wasn’t even funny, though I believe that is because of our ignorance. It didn’t make sense that people had to spend all these resources to accomplish these trivial distances of travel, at least not after they understood what they were doing.
If Merlin’s powers developments were any indication, less mana with higher control or quality could be just as useful if not more so than doubling down on quantity.
Still, we didn’t know enough to make real portals or remote controls to change the channel that would enable proper interaction with the people on the other side without relying on massive mana batteries.
I connect with my Runic Language skill, writing with the familiar script forming channels for mana to flow at tremendous rates. Right below follows the beginnings of tremoundous backs of batteries well suited to dump their entire loads in seconds. Other skills peek their heads out, from Create to One Step Towards Connection activating every other second, but even if it is still something new, the upgrade to my understanding of the world around me takes a large step forward which is a tremendous advantage. Especially considering that One step towards connection works simultaneously with everything else.
I look at the dozens of points along with the formation that I can add mana storage and the holes I boar in the current batteries designs, opening the way for thick conduits touching precise spots that mana needs to go while tying it all to a single large and stable battery. Though given its ability to discharge in seconds if with slightly reduced mana capacity, calling it a mana capacitor is a more apt description.
I taste the individual runes that I’m connecting to and the impressions left behind. No matter if it is the silver, copper or wooden runes, all of them have intent behind them, the very reason they are not just random shapes scribbled by a child, but powerful artifacts capable of handling mana and doing tangible things with it.
I feel the intent behind them a lot deeper than I thought possible until something interrupts me. I push on growing a larger battery connecting further with the whole engraving, but something keeps me calling me back.
A hand grips my shoulder.
“Nash, we are gonna turn it on.” Calls Merlin.
“Ohh,” I say a little dazed “Yeah, give me a second.”
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important.”
“No, not really. Just growing a few more fast discharge batteries.”
I head inside just to check I didn't alter anything important and finish connecting things up properly before coming back.
“I’m done now.”
“Ok, then it is time to turn it on.” He turns to the main operator and simply nods.
With a glance at the readouts and a final tap of a button with everything already in place, Mana starts flowing into the portal with the main address and everyone’s best success so far. Like I just turned on cables flowing more electricity than what a city would need, there is a physical jerk and the portal drinks in all the energy.
Every single one of us but the main operator and his assistant stare at the formation of the pinhead sized portal. The smallest we could make it while handling even a tenth of this amount of mana and even that required a little gold alloyed in key parts of the runic matrix.
A second pass and the portal that was simply spatial distortions become a rough blob, then a foggy sphere and finally a portal that we can almost see to the other side off, which is not nearly good enough. Not with the exponential mana consumption needed for this last small step to make a fully stable.
“Stability increased by 1.5 percent approximately. Mana's output is 12 percent higher. Estimated total time 9 seconds.”
I reach a small tendril of my roots trying to enter the portal, but while the reaction is not quite as violent as the last time, the difference is infinitesimal.
“Hold for collapse… 4, 3, 2, 1, collapse.”