Elven scout POV
I look briefly at my team near the edge of our territory.
Damn, I’m lucky. I get a wind runner and 20 other elves in my command. But the most important one is the wind runner. This early on and they are already managed to send to back us up. Now everything is in place for us to take over their world, slowly but surely. Though with wind runners at our back, it may not be quite so slow.
The clock runs down and we increase our pace from the light run. The magic of the wind runner extends to us all, as we all settle on a defined pattern almost like a flock of birds.
The wind parts before us, like we aren’t limited to the second tier in the skill adder, but near the third one. It is not quite as good as having a skill past level 200 and it only affects running in relatively smooth lines, but is enough and in many ways even better than actually having a high level skill. Instead of the ones in front of the formation spending more stamina, the magic helps us to share the burden, while each layer behind unburdened by breaking the winds can push us all faster.
Our pace surpasses a sprint as the threads of energy interlinking us bear more weight tying us together. Speeds that few of us could reach alone now come so easily we can sustain all day long.
With literally a thousand other teams doing something similar and a pace that rivals their flying vehicles, I tentatively put my faith in our success. On any other planet, I would be completely sure and logically I knew that our advantages are only going to mount for a long time, but something deep within me rebelled against that idea. I can believe that they are just waiting for us to poke our heads out to reveal yet another little surprise. Sometimes they come up with a way to kill us, other times ways to mitigate the damage they suffer or even a way to throw the game to the air scattering its pieces so that everyone has to scramble in hopes of having enough to keep playing the game.
But finally, we have room to stretch our legs and breathe.
I check the system screen to make sure our mana pools are linked and that the stealth field around us is working properly. It consumes a negligible amount of mana at minimum power. A darkening that steals the vibrancy of colors from the beautiful horizon.
An amazing stealth skill that works in both the visual domain and on life signs. Though under other circumstances we would be running it at higher power to make us all but invisible, both the mana cost and the fact that it had little effect on most of their detection methods makes the extreme end of expenditure useless and often counterproductive.
It took us a long time to get a good sense of their detection methods. They could notice us fairly easily on higher concentration spots such as around our village, but if we surprised them and managed to sneak away unnoticed, it took much longer for them to get pings on our life signs even with minimal shielding.
Lonle scouts had even managed to within a few miles of their settlements before detection.
We couldn’t actually sneak inside anywhere interesting with this strategy and the limits of our running pace meant a severe range limit. Furthermore, single scouts couldn’t do nearly enough damage to justify sending thousands to their sure death, but it did allow us to start piecing a map of our surroundings for a couple hundred miles.
As time passes my mind get used to the reduced light from the stealth skill. Then the sun sets and there is no color for the skill to take away, as the very forest naturally gives off a grayish and dead feeling. Which is strange for me even with how any of the trees are without leaves.
I’m a bloody elf. Even a dark forest is still a forest.
That feeling builds and builds until I have to do something. I look away from our left flank as I had assigned myself and instead turn my head to the others.
Then I freeze almost throwing our diamond formation in disarray.
“HALT.”
It takes only a second, but then everyone is neatly back in place. Everyone except for the three missing people in the ‘tail’ of our formation.
They are simply gone. Without a scream, a flash of mana or any kind of warning.
Everyone gapes when they realize what happened, but they have discipline and don’t ask stupid questions, nor start volunteering useless information. With a single glance around, I see that no one has a clue to what happened, and s they wisely keep silent.
They have been in hundreds, thousand of situations where delaying a single second would be the difference between life and death. When an errant word would be too slow and so everyone just keeps standing still. We are at a lower level compared to our normal power and we are fighting some of the strongest native combatants anyone encounters this early on. Even in their ignorance, they are dangerous and sometimes that ignorance is what made them even more dangerous. They don’t what is madness and would bring their downfall but any elves that died would still be buried even as the race killed itself.
“Circle formation.”
Everyone instantly complies.
Mana shields spring up around us while our magical stealther drops his skill and supports our defensive efforts.
“Three people missing,” I say in a calm and collected tone trying to piece together something by speaking aloud. “No known cause.”
My eyes catch something on the edge of my perception. And though I don’t have the most impressive number in the stat I have the skills and training of a scout. Still, as my head swivels my mind doesn’t know what caused it.
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“Contact at 72 degrees,” I say pointing in the same direction as another scout was watching that exact direction he had been looking. Thankfully he remained silent.
Then in the other corner of my eyes that same flicker under the moonlight and I start to wonder if it’s a single enemy or multiple ones.
Another moment passes and screams reach my ears as half a dozen eles stumble to the ground and splashes of blood coat everyone. I feel the shields around us breaking and half of my comrades are injured after the attack.
“Full shields.”
I scream almost letting the panic take over. Everyone starts to dump mana out, to make something much stronger and that our will couldn’t sustain over time. But now is not the time for caution or worrying about the fighting extending for hours, but seconds instead.
Then the ground buckles. As a grey blur hits our shield and the shield attachments to the ground overturns the soil. I do my best to put my will into backing it. I may not be a druid or any kind of real magical user, but acquiring and training the mana manipulation skill was a must for anyone that wanted to amount to anything in the elven Army. I push like never before in my life letting the shield consume my very will to back it and make it stronger.
Then almost like it teleported there, a giant beast looms over our defenses and I almost squeeze my bowels too hard.
A 20 feet long wolf looms over our shield slowly raking it with its claws. But a moment later, his tail comes down leaving a trail of red light. A mass as thick as my own leg crushes a small section of the shield and anything underneath that section of the shield.
Another elf dead.
The beast’s whole body burst with that same red glow and then I KNOW:
It is over.
Nothing I can do can save us.
“Ohh, great Yggdrasil, forgive me for I couldn’t spread your name to the heathens on this planet, where even the trees and animals are corrupted.”
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Onix’s POV
I hit the ground with claw and paw, crushing the last tall thin being and ending this threat.
They scream, they fight, but they are weak and the friend of the forest that brought me from the artificial place of the system helped me develop. Now, whoever invades his and Pando’s lands will have to pay.
A glance around and a couple of crushed skulls later to be certain no one will be getting up again, I run to the next group.
They paced faster than the wind, but I’m not the same puppy that thought himself all powerfull and the bearer of an infinite legacy that made me the rightful ruler of all wolfkind.
I’m on the path to becoming great on my own merits. To build on what my forebearers left behind and to reach an even higher peak.
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Nash’s second mind POV
My mind takes in simultaneous streams from a hundred different places. And one very important thing happens, the last enemy scout team is accounted for and eliminated.
Bloody wind runners. Now have an idea of who they are.
It took ten times the normal effort to run them all down as they kept such a high pace, even if they couldn’t fly. Well over double or even triple the normal pace for long distances considering how many stat their slowest fighters had. Although the actual runic patterns are far too complex for me to replicate given that it is an actual system skill, I directly saw what they were doing with my perception field and I think that with some work I can replicate it.
I don’t need to use a level 101 skill to let me part the wind before me, I can actively guide it open with mana or rather: Qi when I wanted the fastest possible speed.
It’s complex and had its limitations, an actual skill past 100 would be better in many scenarios, but it was useful and for their use case, running long distances through fairly open and flat fields. I doubt that I will achieve anywhere near the same level of finesse and mana economy, but I know deep down that it will work.
The principles behind it all, are not that complex and even as I move to another meeting meant to discuss our course of action, I simultaneously start to experiment in earnest. I’m not planning to interact and influence the direction too much.
In the inner world, a hundred different blunt bodies grow around different runic patterns. Externally they seem precise copies. Same weight, shape, surface smoothness and the direction of the wood grain, but the runes hidden inside differ wildly.
Then start the actual experiments, where I drop them all from a precisely measured distance. All of the ones based on the runic design of the enemy fail miserably, though on the more ‘normal front’ the runes work as I expected. High mana costs and humble results, but they are faster. Those I understood and could at a whim modify with a fairly high degree of accuracy towards the end result, but they are nowhere near the level I wanted.
Directly throwing wind mana into the air had always been an option, but I never tried to move it out of the way the ‘dumb way’. I simply hadn’t bothered because the reward seem so marginal for such a high cost.
But after seeing the possibilities I couldn’t leave something this useful on the table. Even if I’m the one making most of the experimentation, a few researchers who were fairly idle in the inner world between other projects start to gather up and add their own expertise.
The enemy guides the air with a technique using thousand of runes that all shift and slide like most class skills. So if I fail to reproduce it with my mana manipulation, engraving them would be useless. I could reproduce those additions on top of the base system skill, but the runes in the core are the heart of the skill and the rest only fine tunes it.
I can see the mana economy, It doesn’t drink dozens or hundreds of points of mana every second at high running speeds, but something that a group of twenty fighters could regenerate on the fly.
I simplify their design, trying to get it to work even minimally, while I input everything into a nice and neatly organized table sheet and working with the more familiar runes to reproduce the effect. Every few dozen seconds I drop the hundred teardrop shapes, trying to understand each of the runes that make up the enemy ‘construct’. It didn’t work off the bat in any of the configurations that I saw, but slowly I manage to get a better grasp of their runes. Enough to start delimiting their uses a lot further while giving me a concrete understanding of their use.
Another dialect of the rune language.
My body starts to move by itself as my other half takes control and walks to the meeting building on the other side of the Heart tree.
Though I wish to continue experimenting, I forcefully drag my attention back to where it should be after just one more trial to test a couple of quick hypotheses, drawing the utmost on my own ‘second mind’ and the seed I’m connected to. Simultaneously overhauling a dozen of the droplets while tweaking the others, I quickly drop everything, note down the results and then open my eyes.
The ‘Original’ half takes back to his own experiments.
He had been incessantly working on getting not a facsimile of a higher level skill, but actually crossing the threshold and that is a whole different level of challenge. My mind quickly switches gears as I see just about everyone coming gathered around the table.
“I think everybody has a good idea about why I called you here?” I ask.
“To give a report on the Wind Runners,” Paul says.
“Yes. I know that most of our troops saw and can give the broad strokes, but we will need to be closer to respond appropriately. So I plan to leave in a couple of hours with just about everyone that isn’t needed to keep the Pando’s city defended and right now, I want to relay everything I learned.”
“Yeah, the village may be relatively protected, but we can’t work effectively from so far away.” Says the Scoutmaster.
A glance around reveals that everyone feels the same and so with a grin I dive right in on my explanations.
Don’t you worry elves, we are coming for you and we know exactly what you can do.