A day later, I watch the round table in the command building as the others discuss plans. Though I don’t stand on their side. Instead, I’m flying through the sky, while they are comfortably seated inside my inner world. That detaches them from all the inertia and momentum I experience and that would still be true even if I choose to jink about pretending to be a fighter jet.
The mechanics all happen behind the scenes, neatly taken care of by the system, but the soul strain for any such jinking would induce is very much real and that is why I accelerate at a leisurely pace in a straight line. It will make little difference on the final time for a trip this long, especially on this final stage. Less than an hour in total compared to the most extreme profile I would dare to use, so I just conserve my strength. The closer I get to the end, the less I push. If my own inner world, the one carrying the greatest mass in the hundreds of millions of tons of soil, metal and plant matter the other smaller faux inner world was still connected to me no matter how far apart we were. During my time in the void, for the brief rests I took, I could feel the people in the instance slowly increasing and diminishing the mild strain their small vehicles put on me.
And now, as I reduce my own effort to nothing, I feel the as dozens of dozens of other groups move hundreds of miles away from me with their own vehicles powered by faux inner worlds. I can’t pinpoint them, or even know how far apart they are, just that they are changing speed.
I glance inside once again at Paul, our head enchanter and village chief sitting at the end of the table while Jason, our military commander, takes the opposite side with dozens of other dignitaries on the long sides of the table.
One of them, a chronically contrarian diplomat keeps arguing a dead point.
“We have to get to them before they manage to get too far away. This group managed to get hundreds of miles inland after skipping your fort. Soon, it will be useless to pursue them. They could…”
“They could do nothing. There are no settlements weak enough on this side of the continent that a scattered group would be a threat. On the other side, if they stick together or even split into a few more we can pursue them easily. Rushing in without following the plan, however much you disagree is going to get more of us killed than strictly necessary.” Says Jason and I internally nod. “Sure, they split into fewer groups than I imagined, 40 groups of roughly 20 thousand. But that won’t change anything. This is a real fight and while our half attack their village, the rest pursues. After we deal with their city, then it will be time to reassess. That is the plan for a hundred reasons that I AM NOT going to repeat it. You have all heard it time and again and I’m getting tired of your crap.”
After the impassioned speech, Russel chips in: “That’s the best plan we have, and the time to change it without new information would have been before we left. Any alteration now would just be confusing to our troops.”
“That is… there wasn’t time, he…” The diplomat looks around for support and finding none he chooses the wiser course and shuts his mouth just shy of seeming a petulant child.
A few more directions in this last meeting near the end of our flight and then everyone splits apart to their own endeavors.
I simply study everyone’s reactions in amusement. Such a disparate group. I wouldn’t trust a couple amongst them with my spare cash to buy an ice cream cone, but the situation forced everyone. As much as their views were different from mine and Pando’s village, I looked into their heart and they were under no mistaken impression that we could negotiate nor did they have hidden agendas that were more liable to get our troops killed than to help our efforts.
I hurtle through the sky, now ready to tap the breaks as the sleek lines of my craft cut the thin air of the upper atmosphere and the mana rocket finishes colling off.
By now, I could have switched to another propellant rather than steam, possibly to something that wouldn’t even require mana with how much of our old tech tree we reclaimed, but I kept using the same old steam rocket. Under other circumstances, it might make sense and eventually, I would switch but the value of simplicity overcame any marginal gains that a higher delta v or saving some propellant mass could provide.
The reliability, the raw power that I didn’t have to carefully balance and a dozen other small advantages are too much to pass up to save a little mana, especially as I would have to set up production lines for anything that I might want to use as fuel and oxidizer. That would come in addition to what I was already helping to get started for other industries.
The old rocket equations that so entertained me when I was a pipsqueak now make more intuitive sense after having used them on practical stuff, but even they are also swept to the side as I go back to analyzing yet another runic blueprint. I have at least an hour before landing, and I should make good use of the time.
We acquired more and more designs from all sorts of sources and I want to get back to this mental frame before attacking. Though I’m no genius of minutia that could speak on the tiniest difference between two sets of runes at length like Merlin, sometimes I felt that even completely unfamiliar runes made sense in a general way. Usually, I needed to stare at them for a while, but that is why I practice the skill. Each time I succeeded it came more and more easily, almost like the skill of learning new languages.
Sure, the second language is hard as you literally rewire your bring o accommodate something unfamiliar, but the third one is easier and the hundredth would probably come by itself. If I went that route, powered by the system’s mental stats, I could probably become fluent in just about anything in less than a week.
Still, when I didn’t even know the alphabet the runes were written in, learning became significantly harder. Though I have to admit that they tended to follow a similar overall structure.
Instead of simply experimenting with them, I use my knowledge of Aether to pass over the armor with runes and develop a deeper understanding of the effect of magic. Something greatly enhanced by my direct observation of the final effects with my perception field on these specific specimens. From the mana passing through the runes, the will backing that mana, the flows splitting and recombining, the transformations the mana goes through all the way to the final effect. All that is meticulously stored in my memory palace.
I focus my perception field on it again, trying to replicate what I witnessed every which way. I see the effects, and even the tiniest of mana flows can’t escape me.
I use all my skills to connect to it and let myself be fully absorbed back into the endeavor after the brief break to watch the meeting. But I still fail to get anything beyond what I had already learned on previous attempts. I know that there is more to it so I go to the next exercise, this one not on the ‘stolen’ equipment from the enemy, but a new rune pattern that was discovered by spending a few precious few system points. Or rather a copy. The original was producing a strange field of lightning that debilitated anyone inside a 10 inches wide circle.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Even I had to take care when I entered it even with all my defenses and insular skills that help me shrug off most effects. But we had not just failed to understand these runes, unlike the equipment that we took from the enemy, these could seemingly only be powered by the system using its interface.
Though it took mana from our batteries, anything that we directly gave to it simply failed to produce a reaction, and even trying to meld our own mana with the system’s failed. Any mana that wasn’t directly guided by the system simply phased through.
It is strange to watch shapes that you know work simply becomes intangible to mana from certain sources.
My mind overthink this and a thousand other dilemmas and I deepen my connection to the hundreds of examples that I physically have in the inner world. But soon I only have 15 more minutes, so I start to apply the ‘breaks’.
With only half of the total army and even this number reaching well over a million troops, the inner world starts to seem cramped.
Soon, we wouldn’t be able to do these trips without constructing layers on top layers to house everyone even if they stood shoulder to and were organized with their provisions.
Even now, I still hadn’t hit a full 10 square kilometers on the main surface and that’s accounting for all the areas that I didn’t want anyone stepping over.
I glance at my gardens, forests and other places for the variety of plants to grow. I’m especially careful about the section split for growing nuts, berries, seeds and a few of my other favorite foods. The instance had been a nightmare, but now I had it all back and nothing could take them away from me.
Cashew trees just beside blueberry bushes, tall pines near fig trees. And each of them is the real deal, no facsimile that I made to resemble their Earth counterparts, but everything exactly as I remember. Though even with nature magic, keeping them all healthy in such close proximity took some doing from a few of the calmer seeds that didn’t want to do more than grow in peace. The disparate needs that each tree had in nutrients, water concentration and sun exposure consumed their attention. Though I was just grateful for their help instead of being resentful as a few other people felt when I told them about those seeds.
They had already multiplied a lot, most of it at my request and after Pando confirmed that each split diminished both parts in an intangible way, I became a lot more selec in my requests, though a few seeds still wanted to become more. In the end, they are still living beings and I need to ket that in mind instead of starting to think of them as a resource as others insisted on doing.
With a head shake, my eyes take in bright red fences to stop anyone from going there by mistake and stomping over the more sensitive spots in my inner world. Then my attention goes back to where it should be right before we land: looking for any surprises.
My inner world and therefore perception field is much larger than when I came back to earth, with even a pair of spotlights on the very edge of my capabilities at over 2 and a half kilometers away, but that is nowhere near enough to glimpse the village, I spin it around me watching out for any surprises they might try to pull while I use another of my favorite senses: vision.
Tems of scouts carrying telescopes train them on the village looking for anything out of place, but nothing shows up.
On the final approach to the island, I can finally see their village with my perception field.
Nothing has changed in the last 12 hours since I looked at the growing island while still in contact with Pando’s root network, but when I don’t know what half of their defenses could do and the other half I only learned by witnessing in action, I can only dread over what else they could pull.
Everything gets more complicated when you don’t have any idea what your enemy is hiding in their sleeves.
Still, we brought a lot of toys this time and the dynamic is bound to change one way or another.
Hundreds of ship sized flying buses deposit our troops on the edge of the island. With numbers actually coming from Pando’s village slowly skewing into obscurity. This time we had only 80 thousand compared to the total number of a million troops and a similar total number spread with the pursuing parties.
Coordination is unparalleled, but even then there are limits on how fast we can physically move such large numbers. Even as the first second and third lines out of ten move on the attack we still haven’t deposited half of our troops.
I sit at the edge of the island, nearly a kilometer from where the action is. But I can reach past their walls all the way to the back line, so I’m still close enough to make a difference anywhere in this battle. After dropping a few dozen shield generators around me and ‘hiding’ in my bunker, I can dedicate all my attention to the usual stuff.
Even with all my efforts, we had failed to find a single other healer returning from the instance or ‘create’ one and my Life stores were dwindling. Lines of injured people coming back to the inner world have days or weeks long wits for natural healing if their injuries presented a low likelihood of death. I can’t afford to heal milder injuries, I can’t spare either time or resources. Only the worst injuries saw any Life and I could only hold it together because of my increasing control and longer healing songs.
With one of these songs, I even managed to hit 13 notes for a total savings of roughly twenty percent in simple cuts that I only had to ‘glue’ together. The most common type of injury and therefore the one I had the most practice with.
That is besides the one that I learned as they got their healer back on his feet that had been 21 notes long and I even managed to add one more note to that for a staggering 40 percent savings whenever I had to regrow tissue damaged by fire and it was even fairly effective to recover in most other forms of tissue loss. Though that was a fairly rare injury type.
With two minds and my double now fully integrated with the seed, we could be a lot more purposeful in our actions. Another aspect that helped to alleviate my concerns was the powerful fields that increased the recovery rate under the beds of the injured.
It was expensive to maintain, but an Asian doctor on the other side of the world working with low level enchanters had developed the improvement.
I glance at it and marvel at the changes to the complex set of runes they managed to get working almost poking at random, instead of understanding their modifications. Even if I was the greatest magical genius, thinking that all discoveries should be mine or at most from one of my talented colleagues would be the height of arrogance. Sure, I could do a lot but billions of humans were on a whole other level for the parallelization of efforts. Even if the ones that returned earlier as a general rule were not the most talented as the system measures such things, this many people working together could accomplish magnitudes more than the smaller and separated instances, let alone a single person. No matter how talented that person is.
I look at the design and feel the runes. It has severe drawbacks for hospital use, but despite those and the high mana cost, we made accommodations. With it, a larger field can be concentrated around a single person. In trade, an erratic field reaching at least 10 meters wide in all directions negatively affecting everyone including the doctor and staff. IN trade, their recovery rate roughly doubled compared to our best normal fields which was still in the 6 percent range. Though we couldn’t afford the mithril and gems to give everyone 12 percent extra recovery.
However, those aren’t the only improvements in our healing efforts.
We develop stronger and faster compounds to glue cuts together, improved salves and healing aids, new techniques to speed up recovery, minimize blood loss and all types of useful effects. Best of all, most of those solutions can work simultaneously with my own healing efforts on those heally injured to save even more Life.
Still, I’m still the only ‘proper’ healer in the world and every death is on my shoulders. But there is also a simplicity in the lack of alternative, the crystal clear surety that I’m taking the only right action. On that first moment, it lacks moral and technical quandaries trying to tear my mind and willpower apart. But that was balanced by other decisions, such as which people do I work on? Who’s is beyond help and I shouldn’t waste my Life trying to heal? Where should I draw this line? But those questions only prompt me to choose between two options and in the chaos of battle, I don’t have time for doubts, only action.
I sit in relative safety while transporting and healing everyone I can. And I keep healing until there is no more need and calm reigns all over the battlefield. Not a single weapon clash can be heard and even the enemy’s magical attacks have stopped.
I open my eyes to see the distance between both armies after this change in the battle.
Now that the battle has come this is the next phase, it’s time for me to don another set of clothes. So I take off my white lab coat suited for a doctor and put on armor meant for conquering and destruction.
I shift my body and mind ready to become chaos incarnate and then I let loose on their city to repay what they have insisted on inflicting on our planet.