“Not even half a day after we step out of our village these native humans not only assembled a strong force but managed to drive us away,” I say as we keep pace in our retreat.
Then our Arch Druid, Satomi of the Bright Leaves speaks:
“It wasn’t a total loss. I did learn a lot more than I had hoped after encountering such a strong enemy.”
“Yeah, I’m just glad they didn’t pursue us for too long. We escaped by the skin of our teeth. We will need to move covertly next time.”
“Ohh, no that won’t work, they know exactly where we are, even now. I can feel the gaze of that unnatural tree and it’s watching us this instant.”
“Ahh shit. At least they don’t know Elvish.”
“Yeah, we are going to have a long and arduous battle ahead of us. They managed to find us less than twelve hours and we need twenty four for even the smallest plot of land.”
“We need to report this back up the chain.”
“At least they don’t seem to have a primitive healer. That would be even more troublesome. As things stand with some reinforcements we can slowly with them down.”
“We also need to find out how they arrived here so quickly. What vehicle they used if any, their speed limitations and when they actually detected us. With a few more encounters we can get rough estimates, but most things will stay in the dark.”
“That and a lot of other things to prepare. Let’s just focus on getting back to our village first.”
With those words, I watch one most talented early invasion mind spinning as he tries to fit everything that we will need for the future. What scares me most of all are their decisive actions. No attempts to talk or negotiate. It would have served no purpose sure, but they didn’t know that. Their actions didn’t match our literature on Earth’s humans. Admittedly it’s limited, but still.
How did they find out that their only chance to hold out even a little longer and retain a modicum of power was to give us no quarter?
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Nash’s POV
My mind plays everything that happened forward and back. As I heal the more seriously injured people in the middle of the forest.
I walk back and forth on my memory palace in hopes I will learn anything more. Their strategy comes easily, along with their lines of communication, rough organizational charter, and hundred other details, but it is not enough. It is never enough, not while we are in danger.
Worst of all, my main question remained as inscrutable as ever, with only wild guesses without any foundation for me to rely on.
How could such a small group have 6 healers?
Did they send so many early on or do they have many more?
Worse yet, they aren’t mediocre representatives of the profession that lumped together wouldn’t be worth a dozen good doctors, but clerics with game worthy powers that can ‘instantly’ heal. Healers that cycled through combatants and returned them to the fight in seconds instead of hours, days, or even weeks.
If such game breaking capability wasn’t enough, their retreat was awe inspiring.
Sure, we chose not to pursue them for too long. Even during the brief chase over half of our troops with lower stamina and other physical stats stayed behind sucking their thumbs. But even with our much higher leveled people, their full retreat didn’t lose too many people.
Even with ‘everything’ on their side, the former 4000 thousand enemies managed to retain roughly 3000.
Though that number would grow. I had a feeling that their reinforcements wouldn’t be teleported by the system anywhere in Pando’s domain and their levels were not nearly enough to pose a threat to us just yet, but it was something to keep in mind.
Hell, if we were playing for keeps, with several hit and run attacks, even a couple dozen level 200 people and myself could devastate them if we concentrate on lethal attacks as it seems they are the only thing that would work with their healers.
Then my mind returns to what my hands were doing and I run my finger along a deep cut in another one of our fighters made through a seam in his deep steel armor. He nearly flinches in pain as I stimulate his nerves and I let myself connect with what shouldn’t be. Pushing out a thread of Life, the absolute thinnest strand I can manage streams, all it takes me are a few seconds and then I’m done.
The level 24 Spearman runs his own fingers again over the weak tissue loosely connected that would split apart if he put any force on it, but at least there weren’t any exposed nerves. A pair of trained medics rush after me with adhesive bandages to protect against any tearing as I go to the next patient. The full healing process that would have taken him a couple of weeks now shouldn’t take more than 5 days to complete and meanwhile, he would be in pain.
I could fully heal him, but Life is a precious resource that regenerates very slowly. Much more slowly than even health. Completely healing him right now, might mean some 5 or 10 other people that would miss out in the future. Or worse yet, another person that I wouldn’t just save from a bit of pain, but from the brink of death.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
I gaze at the dozen laid out patients in my section of the field hospital with a larger empty patch behind as each of them enters the inner world after my part is done. Inside the Inner World the larger hospital, with much better facilities is full of doctors and medics fixing bandages and cleaning more superficial wounds that wouldn’t need my help.
A couple of minutes later, I sit down and my mind goes straight back to the elf healers. Our instance only had a certain mob doctor by the time I left with healing powers. And out of the hundreds of other instances, we managed to contact, we only heard of about 100 people with any kind of healing power, which invariably stemmed from their class or subclass.
Not a single one had even the mildest hint on why they unlocked it beyond a general affinity for the healing arts even before the system. Even our own goblin Arch Shamam, Ajraah, wasn’t privy to that particular secret. Though he didn’t mention anything about the prevalence of healers from goblins. He had no idea how to unlock such classes.
Still, there were a thousand other things for me to worry about.
The trip back goes in a haze as I try to piece things together and plan for the future, and after arriving back at Pando I just drop most everyone off quickly.
Trying to rank order what I should spend my time on and what would give me the greatest return on my time investment seems an impossible task. Nearly letting the thousands of responsibilities and options overwhelm me, I walk into my rebuilt home. It used to feel familiar.
The shape is similar, it was made out of wood just like my last one and there are even a few of my belongings strewn about that Pando kept hidden before the system had done away with them, but it isn’t the same, and more important: it doesn’t feel the same.
The one redeeming quality are Pando’s roots reaching in from the outside, but just that isn’t enough to call this place my home.
Instead of ignoring this and powering through, I take the matter into my own hands.
I let the veritable ocean of Qi that accumulated over the centuries after Pando learned of my cycles fill me. When I feel that I can almost float in the air I let out the Qi, as a dozen runes form around me. I take the domain of the wood around me, dead and dried boards nailed down in places, and break everything so that the only thing they will serve is as firewood or food for new growth.
But from destruction comes creation as I touch Pando’s limbs. His attention gets drawn from whatever he was doing to me and then My room flows into existence. Solid walls with a different aesthetic than most human built homes. Flowing lines instead of square corners and a rustic finish instead of smooth clear walls.
But even there is something missing. It’s like my old home in some ways, but I don’t just want something like it, I want more. This home feels like a cake already with a cherry on top, the right weight to fluffiness balance and a nice thick layer of filling. But as good as this cake is, it lacks any icing that would smooth out the imperfections and give a certain flair.
The solution for my house strikes me like lightning: location, location, location.
The small and steady stream of Qi thickens out and I reach for the entire mass of roots underground along with everything that was becoming my home. Then Nature Qi mixes with the Earth element and I start moving the entire building. It is a crawl, all things considered, slower than an octogenarian that can only walk by leaning his whole body weight on a walker, but I don’t mind the pace all that much. After all, I’m not going too far away, only moving to the heart tree some 300 meters away still within the walls we built around the system transformation of the small village.
In the slow exercise that I do nothing to rush, in this simple action, a hint of enlightenment that often comes to me while I’m in motion strikes and peace reaches me.
My biggest shortcoming stares me in the face: my vision.
After I start to poke at it, I realize that I’m half blind, at least when compared to what I could achieve with my greatly increased stats. And not on a single stat either, on all of my stats, I barely had explored them.
The most important right now seems to be perception. I’m nearly blind and deaf if compared to my potential. Oh sure, I could make out temperature alterations on hundreds of a single degree in the air currents. I could hear dozens of people talking a kilometer away and almost make out the words. Even more, when I stopped for a moment it almost seemed that my vision was like a telescope with me making details a hundred meters away as clear as if it was a couple of paces away. Seeing the craters of the moon, and even a few details on further celestial bodies.
Too much had changed too quickly. Especially this last layer of percentual increases from my new titles compounding with the linear ones over my centuries asleep. In a spiral, my very lack of vision stopped me from noticing I wasn’t quite where I should be.
I had changed, I was fully aware of everything and acting in just about the best way possible. But anytime I get comfortable, unsettling movements under my feet prompt me to move. I can’t simply lean against a wall and let the world change around me while I follow my course with horse blinders on.
I try to deepen my meditation, even while moving the very floor I sit on and finding the frame of reference that helped me the last time around. That glass room encasing my senses that I carefully polished to perfection in the instance. Pando’s use of Mana through me didn’t directly affect my perception, and the raw increases in the stat improved all I can perceive in the world, but it is not my limit, it is far from my limit. With my mind in the proper framing, I use my exponential increase in stats to allow me to multitask, still moving ever closer to the perfect location.
Years ago I had become one with the world, in the mildest of senses, but I know that can be so much more and so I reach in to start to on the walls.
This is the best mental image I came up with and mentally summoned a soft cotton polishing pad and a bit of the finest paste I could conceive of. Then, with smooth circular motions, I flatten out and make the world clearer to me.
I knew that one day I would break this glass, but even now, having roughly doubled many of my stats and developed so much beyond the last time I spend real time on this exercise, I still felt the instinctive fear of what I would see if I did that.
Fear that the unfiltered chaos of the world would sear my brain and I would never heal. Truths so deep that any philosopher would prefer blinding themselves rather than confronting them.
Still, each of my moves seems to make the glass ever so slightly thinner.
The world simply disappears after I meld my home with the heart tree and all of my attention goes to the simple tasks, filling myself beyond anything and everything I could hope for. The actions of purpose. The world in its place and me simply a part of it. No worries, no higher brain functions beyond that which came naturally. I reach a state of restfulness that often didn’t come even after a good night’s sleep.
Then I move to the next side and the next and the next. From the floor to the ceiling, everywhere the foggy whiteness from sandpaper on acrylic gives way to the thinnest of cristal panes. Unlike the last and impossible as it seems at first glance given my mental image, a positive loop forms. The very act of eliminating what stops me from fully engaging with the world is like cleaning dirty glasses and allows me to see smaller and smaller details on the walls so I can go over again and again over the same spots and remove even what seems to be atomic sized imperfections.
Then it’s over.
A moment later I realize that I spend a lot longer than expected as I see too many dust particles for a few hours meditating.
A ping to the network returns a precise time and date to me.
18:12 41 days after return.
Holy shit, I spent four days on this.
Now I will get my deserved sleep.