I contain the bubbling feeling in my chest that arises at my sheer luck. Sure training, monstrous stats and my newly elevated skills allowed me to capitalize on that luck, but as the vibrations of my staff travel back through it and I feel the enemy Elder going unconscious, my first thought is to grab this opportunity by the horns. So I open up a portal behind him perfectly angled and allow him to enter my inner world.
A simple Qi formation explodes just millimeters off his skin as I had done with the healers and Arch Druids wielding that twisted instrument. Once again nothing is stopping me nor does the portal seem solid like it had for the Titan and other enemies. That might have more to do with the defeated look on his face before he fell unconscious or the certainty he would die.
My formation pushes him down faster reducing the risk someone might rescue him from very unlikely to all but impossible. They can always pull a new stunt, but the sooner I’m done, the lesser that risk.
These new basic runic patterns that I could use with greater ease and speed are a small wonder. With the largest victory to this point in the bag, I rush forward, as the world prompts me to be better, much better than even a month ago or a day ago without my level 102 mana manipulation skill. Though I didn’t manage to watch in peace inside my soul, I know most of the improvement centered around that level 102 skill that “mispronounced” the resource. I didn’t use the system’s resources… ever.
There isn’t a hint of mana, health or stamina in my pools by now. I can fill part of my pools with them any time I wanted, but I had worked long and hard to do the opposite relying solely on my ‘own’ resources.
My eyes fully trained on the flow of the battle trying to pinpoint where I would be the most helpful. Their leader is gone, safely tucked away in my inner world but the rest of the enemies is still very much alive and fighting. The sheer inertia of the fight is such that even if a wave of people saw him being captured they have trouble coordinating a retreat.
Shock at what they witnessed overwhelms a few and how high up he really is further sinks in. He isn’t just some common leader and the fact that I heard the elder moniker being thrown just lends credence to my hypothesis.
They simply can’t believe he is gone after less than a minute of single combat. Some probably assume he is dead, but enough got an eyeful of my portal that a proper debriefing will reveal his actual fate. During this battle, however, I don’t have to make the job easier, nor will I allow them to retreat unchallenged.
The strange corrupting instruments that lend the Archdruids limited control of nature lose a lot of their efficacy as 4 of the 12 common ones are now in the inner world plus the stronger one from the Elder.
I let a mad smile meant to scare children and elves show. I reveal the hint of madness that is in everyone, the hint of chaos less concerned with the battle and more with extending its influence. They likely don’t have anything that can injure me any longer so it's time to channel my powers to the fullest.
I charge into the fray capturing those I can and eliminating those I can’t. They have willingly come to our doorstep with arrogant little faces and lousy insults.
Every single one I kill comes with a price, a price I wasn’t ready to pay on the day that the system arrived, a price that might have outright broken me back then. A price I do not assume as given for anyone standing against me, but for invaders like them, I will willingly mar my soul in the protection of our planet.
Maybe not every single enemy is quite deserving of death and the haze of blood surrounding me blinds me to the fine points and possibly better answers and paths to follow, but in the end, I’m still weak and this is the least worst path to protect those I love.
I become a spinning top, balancing against my staff and mowing down the enemy, I push and push for greater speed, greater power, greater efficiency and greater skill. The Aether around me coalesces further, as it seems that I have taken another small step in turning it tangible.
Our side rightfully believes I’m strong, that I can overcome anything and the hundreds of enemies failing miserably are proof of that. The enemy sees a rabid dog that is also a talented Aether wielder and they have neither bait to control my movements me nor a sturdy stick to defend themselves.
I don’t let anything stand in my way even the moral quandaries spin in my head.
Thousands of elves are like a field of corn while I carry a very sharp scythe.
It takes a while, but their numbers dwindle allowing for less and less outright violence and more prisoners. The constant stream of reinforcements slows and soon everyone’s attention snaps them out of it.
The single word, from a fairly familiar voice, is clear.
“Retreat.” The second Archdruid takes command. This order didn’t get lost in the cacophony of thousands of lieutenants or even the random Archdruid, but it came from a former command that everyone knew. Someone that cut through all the noise.
I witness them recovering from their first real military failure.
Anything before could have been spun or even fairly told as simply a limitation of their numbers, but even the elven race’s training has its limits and we reached them.
The old Arch Druid may not be a brilliant strategist or the greatest warrior, but he knows his limits and he manages to evacuate in an orderly fashion. The magic of the wind runners extends to the whole army stronger than ever as they flee with their tails between their legs faster than ever before.
“So you kept a little in reserve and you might still be keeping more.”
They are impressive, but even the best trained soldier can be overwhelmed under the right circumstances and today… today was our turn to pull the last rabbit out of our hat.
“Anyone who is injured, make your way to the hospital for treatment.”
“Repair crews, patch up job on the wall.”
“Mages…”
Orders keep coming down the line but I let it all fade. Keeping track and helping where he can is my other half’s job. My attention goes to the few very interesting things in the inner world and mostly a certain someone that is sedated in an isolated and very well-protected cell on one of the outer pockets of space. Now I have a better use for it rather than turn it into another faux inner world or push it somewhere to rejoin the main pocket of the inner world.
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I feel whatever changes he went through compared to the first time I saw him.
Power, skill level, stats, equipment. Not the very slow increment that seemed to be unlocked each month as the next levy arrived and raised them to a higher power cap. But what he achieved… he suddenly grew a lot stronger, almost like he went from level 99 to 102 as I did with mana manipulation on the start of the attack before he realized I was alive. It did lack a tangible ‘weight’ increase, so he is probably still in the same tier. Maybe it is more appropriate to say raised from roughly level 150 to 199. Or from 190 to 200 almost crossing the threshold, but not quite managing it.
It was a mostly linear increase in power and I even felt a hint of Aether manipulation from him but only at the last moment. Something that nobody on the enemy's side seemed even remotely capable of so far. Even in old empires with all the knowledge and population in the world, Aether manipulation seemed absurdly rare.
Then his missing hand strikes me harder than the first time I saw it. For all of their vaunted powers and expertise in healing, their healers still failed.
I glance at a couple of small pockets of space I stored the little caustic void I managed to get. The energy is slowly fading, but it is still deadly. I try to feel for it, this hint of another plane's medium brought into ours. Somehow, I know that summoning the caustic void inside the inner world is ‘impossible’. But… after it crossed that first barrier in the ‘real world’, I could guide it through my portal to contain it for a while.
It wasn’t very effective as a form of defense given the huge soul strain moving that energy inside induces, but it is useful for experimentation.
At this pace, I only have half an hour before it fades away. Ideas start to form even if ordinarily they would be stupid.
Even with all my advantages, I only survive those streams because I was for some reason unusually resilient to the void. I only have a few data points, some of which aren’t even first hand, but second hand knowledge mixed with inferences. His shock and what I learned however tell a story: higher constitution wasn’t supposed to be a very strong defense against this type of energy.
Only two things survived with any reliability, Mithril is one, a magical metal that broke a lot of conventions being the current pinnacle in both magic conductivity and strength. Then came the Titan’s skin. I start to separate a few materials for tests, but they aren’t quite as critical as another experiment I wanted to run.
The single most effective defenses against such attacks seem to be real stats.
Not the hollow improvements that relied solely on the system’s constructs to entirely raise the toughness of the body, the muscle contraction speed or even externally empowering the body’s energy systems to make running for days on end almost trivial at the speeds of a sprinter from old earth. No, only real and tangible changes to someone’s body could protect them from that energy.
The time limit on any experimentation comes to mind and I wish just for a moment that I understood space and time better.
Sure making time pass faster is if not impossible at the very least absurdly difficult beyond artificial environments such as the instance, but there has to be a way of making time pass slower. Even before the system, we had a solid hypothesis, simply accelerating objects close to the speed of light.
Slowing time might not be immediately useful in many circumstances, but for what I’m doing now, it would be the perfect answer and in the right conditions it would be deadly.
My mind whirls with the two main immediate priorities. I call researchers, a few who worked in the runic design to preserve computers, not only from the system but also from the elements and time. I can’t leave this question unanswered. If I can extend even a few more minutes, I should take the chance and they might figure out something I may not even think of testing for.
Eventually, I might learn how to use that instrument to produce more of this caustic void energy, even more dangerous than the chaotic void near a planet or other large mass such as the instance. But if the equipment of the elves is any indication, it might take years of concerted effort so I have to move considering this amount of void is all I’m ever going to get again.
“Do our best to preserve the contents of this pocket of space,” I ask of them. A few are familiar enough with it, that they don’t ask stupid questions and in seconds I already forgo their presence, concentrating on the arriving people and trying to delineate what I’m actually gonna be testing.
If the time window increases, great. Otherwise, I will just make the best that I can in the time I have left and get good baseline data to compare.
Streams of people start to arrive coordinated by my other half using the parameters we established.
“You all probably already know roughly what we are doing here, but I wanted to test a few things. I think you know about the caustic void that ate my limbs away last time around and I want to test it on you. Only a droplet each and I will heal you up back to full. It’s probably closer to a needle bite and it probably won’t even fully cross your skin. But I didn’t want to start without everyone understanding what is going on and that I can’t promise what the results will be.
“No time to waste, we are on a clock, just go ahead.” Says a short bald hammer wielder in the front and I can see agreement in everyone’s faces with their helms off.
“Take off your gloves then,” I say before starting to work.
I open portals from that pocket inner world with the largest concentration of void. The researchers work with eh void in the smaller pockets to avoid any interference or even hastening the time frame. But their limitation is not quantity, but time. If they managed to preserve even a thousandth of the void I have over here, I will call myself lucky.
With carefully timed micrometer wide portals opened as close to people’s skin as I could open them allowing micro jets of black energy to shoot out repeatedly.
Almost like a single pixel printer.
Everything I can perceive gets logged in my test of 116 people initial, divided into twenty three groups, each between 4 and 6 people with similar constitution and other stats distribution along with a few other critical aspects. I repeat the test three times back and forth along the line to account for the void energy concentration diminishing allowing me to draw a better graph and isolate the effects more precisely.
More groups of people with as wide a range of constitutions as I can muster up arrive and I test them, but the lack of repeatability for the first test limits the usefulness of the test. Still, it is more data and I have little to lose at this point.
After that brief testing, a few things are clear as day to me. With my intelligence stat as high as it is, I don’t even need to get pencil and paper to graph it a dozen different ways while taking averages and manipulating the data for it to make sense.
The most resilient people were the ones that had gotten the tree soul scruff stat increasing treatments. The factor that accounted for roughly 80 to 90 protection of protection is the Constitution stat. But within it, over 80 percent isn’t the total number, but the base value before any addition from the system. I couldn’t precisely pinpoint at a glance to confidently say whether multipliers were effective on top of base stats. That will require pen and paper or a computer, but multipliers do seem to amplify the effect of base stats more than flat increases in stats.
The outliers and worst affected in the bunch are the few of us who chose the perpetual 10 in all their stats early in integration. Their baseline protection seems to be around 5 constitutions.
I look at everyone, feeling a hint of what they passed through and closing the very small void injuries goes relatively smoothly. They each gain tiny round scars, but the system doesn’t fight just regrowing their skin and even they could have done that in a couple of days with the natural regeneration, which a few volunteer to test.
I leave my own healing for last, given that the lower concentration of the caustic void, similar tests can’t even redden my skin and a continuous stream takes a few seconds to do more than reddening my skin.
At this level, it will likely be back to normal in minutes.
I try to integrate all that without looking at my own results closely. But even the fact that I don’t kill off a single cell, would massively skew the results. Almost like dividing by zero. Still, eventually, I would need to manage those comparisons and as the last drags of Void, weak and unfocused puff out, I use them at different ranges trying to compare how they affect other people from destroying cells to only reddening them as it happens at low concentrations with my skin.
Still, even my best estimates are wildly affected by an unknown factor, part of which must be my Body stat.
Even if the system was in just about every nook and cranny that I dug up, in this its touch is minimal and maybe one day I will be able to create an even greater separation between what is mine and what comes from it. Though as I look at the constructs in my soul, I don’t have a clue where to start.