Days of work turn the system’s presence into background noise as I keep exploring and making Aether constructs inside my little soul island. Ideas that had seemed so close when I started prove to be harder and others are just another Tuesday.
Training my willpower to resist the system when it’s always present just a few feet away becomes part of my routine and it does wonders on that front. And that it is only raw willpower, it doesn’t even take into account the hundreds of ideas that I can test in a repeatable and reliable way to make my defense more effective. Less brute strength and more finesse.
Even acquiring more stat points eventually gets boring as other things start to poke in and progress starts to halt. I have a long way to go and simply increasing my stats a little bit further with ever larger and more complex Aether constructs is not a sustainable way to progress. I’m starting to understand these constructs with the help of my natural gifts and my new subclass. Constructs that I had to learn how to tie together so they don’t clash with one another. Having watched the overarching patterns of adding new system constructs to my soul came in handy. Though luckily, I don’t seem to need to worry about the constructs in the middle of my soul interfering with the ones on my island.
My little island couldn’t take too many of these growing constructs and would fill in hours if I just went nuts crafting as quickly as possible without any concern about the size and density. Though the fact that I can make them smaller and better as I improve is a hopeful sign.
The hours and days I spend give me a feel for the situation. And what I can do on my little island goes worlds beyond hiding from incursions in my soul, whether from the system or other people.
Soul tethers stretching to other people help to ground me. My Aether capabilities, the study of souls and the system and just about everything that I focused on after coming back perfectly line up.
And the main skill I work on, polearm mastery, crosses the threshold. From 99 to 100 and soon after 101.
The problem now comes with my other skills. I manage to take that one across with Blackwood’s help. The blueprint was imprinted in my staff for the polearm mastery skill. But my other skills are a different story.
Still, an hour later leaving my soul and entering the fight in earnest, I spin with my staff and I can feel the lingering system’s reluctance even after it ‘gave’ me this, but each move clears a few more cobwebs.
The demonstration of my polearm mastery is no lesser by the system’s fading attention and with my swinging in the middle of the enemy, causes them to fall in droves.
Control over each of my moves is absolute and the wind simply parts before me. My sky high stats are given the room they need to exert more strength and now the limitation becomes gravity and the ground’s strength level.
I don’t aim to end lives, but carefully measure my strength to ‘permanently’ incapacitate. Without any healers with them, the few elves of the group I catch up to will stay down long enough for me to come back to them and put them in the inner world. Though even as I spin madly, I avoid giving myself away too much and showing that I’m actually the Aether wielder they supposedly killed. I don’t want to let them know that I’m alive.
Still, the careful balance that we achieve with the occasional scouting runs feels like it’s teetering on the brink of collapse. Not because we couldn’t sustain the rhythm against the roughly 40 million enemies, but because they are likely to stop being so timid and attack in full force.
We don’t have any proof, I haven’t been able to get their planning sessions as I was they increasingly communicated in code or telepathy, but their course of plan has to be a full on assault.
Then, after a long wait, it comes.
Their command lines pass the word and tens of millions of troops form up in a giant block.
In less than half an hour they are approaching the edge of their territory and all our preparations seemed flimsy.
I open my eyes, even as not only myself but a dozen other seeds keeping careful track have already updated the map on the precise position of the enemy and their movements. The last flying bus that was coming our way in the original main bunker to defend against the enemy’s assault is as ready as it can be.
The bunker has been expanded multiple times and now houses nearly 70 million troops like sardines with multiple layers underground. Only a 200 meter wide upper fortification is exposed and everything else is well protected under layers of rock dirt and most important: nature.
Several meters thick roots substitute a lot of the copper and silver that runes ordinarily would require, though the advantages of metals are still in place where it matters, the very runes summoning our tremendously powerful shields. Gigantic batteries some made of copper others from roots sit beneath everyone to put even what I carry in the inner world to shame but that is the magnitude of what we were dealing with.
Any other planet would be putting themselves in immense danger by hiding behind anything like living nature against elves, but we are in another league when it came to nature with Pando on our side. Today, we are the rulers of nature.
Then what I dreaded and anticipated comes. Waves of mana bolts, fireballs, lightning strikes, earth manipulation and every other type of attack batters against our shields and we return the favor. The goal is to drain the opponent’s mana stores as fast as possible.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
I can feel the mana flowing through our channels and theirs, even as the system tries to hide before me, every second mana measured in the millions leaves the fingertips of their druids and the dozen Archdruids that now spearheading smaller groups in both defense and offense efforts.
The concentration of mana almost blinds me and I know that even with my training, the mages on our side can only witness a few of the major happenings because staring at this much mana is not much different than trying to stare at the sun. But I don’t have to rely simply on the system’s mana manipulation and the sense that comes attached to it, nor even the specialized skill that some people acquire: Mana Sense. No, I cheat my way into being able to observe even the tiniest candle flame spell amidst this storm of power.
I use the perception field.
It takes me a few seconds to grasp it all, but when I understand the flow of battle my mind turns to the best placements for my wrenches in their carefully constructed plan.
I reach out with my portals, opening pinprick sized connections to the magical focus points of the largest spells and send my will through with dozens or even hundreds of points of Qi.
Out from my heart, comes a story I didn’t want to embrace, but it was the right choice today, a story of failure. A story of putting so much pressure on yourself that you simply crack when the time is right making a magnificent presentation falters at the worst possible time.
The will of hundreds of Druids around the large scale attacks hitting our shields threatens to punch holes in it, instead of simply depleting its mana first. We do have precautions against that to a point, but they strain our capabilities. My efforts start to bear fruit. Instead of perfect spheres that hit exact spots, their attacks move without balance. They veer off from our shield's weaker points and they lose a little cohesion giving more time for the shields to deal with their impact.
Instead of punches a professional boxer that drives all their power in s slip second, a twisted wrist, an unbraced shoulder, and a hundred little parameters cushion the blow.
The problems I introduce in their formations are compounded as a few of our talented magical users start to further tune the shields to cope with the enemy’s attacks. From the main one powered by runes larger than an elephant spreading all throughout the fort to the small and brittle ones with only a few mana points each, but are individually prepared for the attacks. They only have fractions of a second but after the launch, our mages still manage to erect those basic shields.
If that wasn’t enough, water and dirt plates pop up in the air in front of attacks as the idle seeds with faux inner worlds start to work overtime. They don’t have anywhere near my range, but it’s still enough if they get very close to the walls and others I worked on maximizing distance instead of volume. The last few with inner worlds were like long baguettes reaching just over a kilometer long in a single dimension. That was my current maximum without introducing weird artifacts or spending way longer than I wanted.
So even if those seed avatars or bonded seeds with someone I trusted were hiding underneath they could still open small portals given their roughly 500 meters range.
Best of all, they are now an extension of my will. It is strange and I haven’t spent nearly enough time to understand that, nor did the thought is risking seeds to position pieces of the inner world amidst a battle excite me. But under the right circumstances, their own inner worlds can extend my own range. They only have to touch my own inner world temporarily granting me a larger inner world.
I still don’t know what would happen if I tried to take this to the logical extreme reaching daisy chaining long strips, maybe even reaching further than my theoretical maximum range, but it is just another entry in the thousands of things for me to test.
The currents of Aether in the air start to thicken up, even as the number of people that know that I’m alive is quite significant, the enemy hopefully still is in the dark.
Without my presence here, our side wouldn’t collapse, but I can also feel the couple percent of mana that I’m saving from our shields.
By myself, I would accomplish little. Even with all these defenses, meters thick copper, silver and gold infused rune formations, they need the will of millions of living people to reach their full potential, but in the middle of these many mages, over a thousand willpower and near one hundred points in soul let me púsh it ever so slightly higher.
The elf's attacks come like a metronome, down to the millisecond whenever I fail to interfere. But even when I don’t manage to get in the way in the way I wanted, they still lose some of their punch until our edge is not marginal from a numerical superiority or access to more resources, but we are winning.
I try to measure their mana pools, even if it's something that I couldn’t measure directly without breaking through their soul shells, but I can infer based on how they handle the mana, their apparent stats and a pinch of math. Soon my best estimate shows itself to be very promising.
They are spending roughly 40 percent more mana than we are second to both attack and defend. Best of all, they don’t have a direct link anywhere and can only rely on the mana pools from their own people.
The fight seems a lot more promising now. Even without outside interference, we have a lot more people here, giant batteries buried underground and home-field advantage.
In a straight contest, we are ahead by every metric and by such a huge margin that the victory won't even be a real challenge. By the time they run dry, we would have roughly half of our mana reserves if we didn’t even touch the batteries.
Still, I’m not comfortable, so I reach out and start to engrave runes, writing a story of power and resiliency matched to the runes I add around Pando’s roots spread in the vicinity. Small symbols revolve around the meter thick trunks that make the individual large scale runes powering the main shield. That adds a tiny edge on top of the work from hundred of engravers, but I can see no better use of my time.
Ten minutes pass, fifteen and then they orderly retreat freeing me up to concentrate only on my engravings.
With their experience, understanding of how we like to fight and proper formations, only a few perish, most of which were left in the very field buried.
The enemy retreats just a couple of kilometers, roughly a kilometer inside their territory. Then they pull the first upset. A thick stream of mana from their city.
I don’t understand the mechanisms, but mana is coming from the batteries in their own city and disappearing into each of the elves. If I’m not mistaken, pools that were starting to run low in minutes are refilled and they don’t even have the violent reactions we had when doing the same.
My own mind starts spinning and I reach out trying to increase our own mana recharge rate from around the world to this spot. Better safe than sorry. But no matter how much I want, there are limitations on how fast I can recharge without spending a lot of time thickening the engraved root connections.
The equation suddenly became a lot more complicated, but even then, even now, we could probably still squeak by with our home ground advantage.
And then, ten minutes later as they are once again arrayed against our shields, they are the ones throwing wrenches into our plans.