I ponder on how to unlock the pyramid a second time. The enemy had done that before with our Aether Icon, but it went inert after we pushed them out. Trying to replicate what they did is fruitless. We will have to find our own method, but without any clues, I keep climbing another set of stairs under much more danger. A more immediate part of the problem needs my focus, something that I believe is all but hopeless, but if I figure out how to do it without being in too much danger, we will push the enemy back thousands of kilometers.
Twenty months since our return and we seemed to have permanently lost a big piece on the chessboard.
The small corridor on the first pyramid only fit one human which made the figth considerably different. Climbing the Great Pyramid of Giza, I mentally organize what a full assault would mean. At least 5 lines. One by my side in the main corridor, and two lines in each of the other corridors. Under such conditions, even our strongest fighters would get chewed up. With weaker system defenses or if I was stronger, I could probably just widen my stance and make use of the extra space to give me freedom of movement. I may even be able to bring more equipment with me to make up some of that gap, but even if I could probably get that edge on the enemy in a couple of months of training, the enemy wouldn’t be at a standstill Each day, they grow stronger as the system slowly lifts the restrictions.
This simple pyramid is in many ways the strongest fortification on our planet. The system’s attacks are insane, its shields recharge faster than anything we could build and the enemy had time to prepare knowing exactly what my strategy is with a much larger manpower pool.
I taste how solid the mana of the first shield layer is. It rings stronger than yesterday when I broke it with the huge formation I dragged up here. With space and the help of a few mages, it was almost trivial. Deeper inside, however, I will be much more limited.
I glance at the new contraption that we had no hope of fitting in there, let alone make the bends. Not unless we used so much mithril I made it portable, along with enough of the metal to protect its internal structure. Otherwise, the very system would see it destroyed before we got to the first turn in the zigzagging path. The corridors were probably the most significant change to the pyramid’s original layout made by the system though far from the only one.
Even if I somehow managed to make a fireball or some other type of attack that could switch directions mid air multiple times, which would allow as much support from outside the pyramid as we wanted, the internal formations and system’s restrictions would definitely destabilize it. It seems as if the very system wanted to provide a ‘fortress’ without any weak points refined over the eons.
I send my Qi and will into the machine at my back and an extremely powerful if unfocused beam of space strikes the shield. Then it cycles to fire, lightning and a few other exotic forms of energy we had seen from the enemy, both intended to break the enemy’s shield and to measure the effects. Cracks form in seconds, with my other half recording the entire process in my memory. Then the enemy finishes their own preparations. A single fireball, with a few hints of Earth, but so focused that it resembles more magma than an actual fire spell shoots out aiming for my head.
But I’m well protected and it strikes our formation, cracking the small shield and eating a chunk of the wood and steel. A crater on the outer runes reduces the effectiveness of our attack, but only by a marginal amount collapsing the enemy’s shield in another few seconds.
I slowly make my way back doing my best to protect the team of mages with me.
With all the equipment I could produce or order from our craftsmen, it took something the size of a bus to crack the enemy's shield in short order. Without it, I would be stuck in a kill trap without the firepower or the defenses to be an effective threat.
Even with my recovery and toughness, waves of attacks meant to instantly kill several people at my level and leave only ash behind is too dangerous for my taste. I would either have to spend an inordinate amount of Life to just hold still and probably be forced to retreat.
Yes, I have enormous pools of stats, but the enemy’s position doesn’t just give them a small edge in combat, they sit on a true fortress. Aether icons don’t seem like the type of place to be lost except with overwhelming differences in power or incompetence on the part of the defenders. I need a fundamental change in the dynamics or a way to pull a giant rabbit out of a hat. This time it seems not even my inner world shenanigans aren’t gonna be enough.
It almost seems easier to kill and capture most if not all elves in their city to staunch the flow of reinforcements and only them come over here to finish the job. Maybe there might be another option such as draining their mana to a low enough level and shutting down their defenses.
Half an hour later, I leaf my book of knowledge atop the Queen’s pyramid. After having gotten as much knowledge about Aether Icons as I was willing to spend, I read the intervening pages, trying to find the tidbits of knowledge written on it that might be useful for me in the sea of information I cram on it every day. My mind turns over the problem. Or rather the dozens of problems on my plate, all with unsatisfying answers. After another few fruitless minutes, I return the leather bound engraved book to the pedestal, ready to absorb everything of value that we hold. Hopefully, it will replace whatever I used up to learn very little.
I didn’t get even a hint of how to unlock the pyramid below me. If I dedicated my time to it, I might succeed, but there are a thousand other paths that I could take that are a better use of my time. This doesn’t feel like a path I’m meant to walk.
Then a unique opportunity manifests.
I feel slight changes on the portal of the enemy just a kilometer away. I had idly looked at it, before, but something interesting and that might teach me more than passively watching it while increasing its mana usage by striking the ‘space chord’. I wouldn’t crack those secrets in a single day, but that doesn’t matter, if I can simply take another few steps I would eventually figure it out.
Connecting to it as closely as my perception field allows, I trace each line created, maintained and infused with mana by the system. There is a fundamental imbalance, as the Elf’s city disproportionally sends mana through to power both sides, this one is only meant to keep itself stable.
Even in standby mode, the other side used millions of mana each second to sustain the portal open and billions of mana each second while transporting someone. But that’s only a burden to the huge number of elves on the other side who can afford it. Over here, the couple of living goblins and Elves only pull a few dozen points per second from the system’s stores. My estimates aren’t perfect, I still can’t directly sense mana being used by the system except in the final step, but it shouldn’t be too far off.
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I open tiny inner world portals trying to maneuver as close to the spots outside the pyramid that are twisted to allow for travel, but the distance from their portal seems to protect it ever so slightly. Still, my natural space manipulation powers come in handy to strike at the long string of space as I impart more and more momentum to the chord making it ring out louder and louder increasing the amount of mana they need to input into it.
Conjuring up a song and story of dissonance, my new class and skill creep into everything I do making my actions more impactful.
I won’t get to anything so overwhelming they can’t afford it any time soon, but with some work, I every smidge more of mana they have to spend when measuring in the billions, it will make a difference. Even if it feels like an empty victory.
Inside the inner world, the team working with me on portal experiments slowly wakes up and gets in place, drawing more formations and trying to further refine our current understanding of the runes used to achieve such effects.
The only one who had actually unlocked the space time manipulation skill, though still at skill Level 17 sighs loudly barely an hour into work and I go over his work. I take my mind off the large engraving I was molding loosely meant as a teleporter like the one used to bring me the bread loaves inside my class trial.
“Are you trying to cram as many direct space runes as you can in the same engraving?” I ask genuinely confused.
“I’m trying to understand how they interact with each other, if they were all the same dialect I feel like would have already figured it out, but it is like trying to speak redneck, Carribean, the old tongue mixed with half a dozen other variations. All of them may technically be English, but they don’t meld. This is giving me a headache.”
“You know that if you tried to turn that on it would explode in a rather spectacular fashion?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m not stupid... just an idle thought. No need to threaten the planet with my stupid experiments.”
As he says that, my own mind turns over the possibilities.
“I think that you are onto something. A way to get traction under our wheels. We have been with little progress not induced by external information in one way or another for a while.”
“Won’t it be dangerous?”
“We can mitigate that,” I say while drawing a sphere around his blueprint. He bulges out his eyes. “And we aren’t in the instance.”
“We can… put it inside one of the isolated pockets. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s so obvious.” His grin builds and builds I leave my current and actually go to implement the design even if I can see that it’s not finished. With a few hasty connections to make sure all the runes are connected to the mana supply, though without the same level of care and balancing he had been trying to achieve previously. I stream the results so that we can both look at it. As I’m about to turn it on, I think better of it and move the bubble of space in the void of my inner world then I pack it with dirt and erect a few space tuned shields… just in case.
Most things were absolutely safe in their own pocket of the inner world, but I might just discover something I don’t want today with this experiment. If it somehow managed to jump and damage another bubble with people or important documents, I would cry.
By now dozens of other researchers are around me intent on extracting all the data they can. I glance at the portal in the enemy occupied pyramid seeking inspiration and throwing a few points of my Qi into the mix which shouldn’t interfere with the results except to give me more control over what is happening.
I look at the underlying structure of the portal runes, the magical property that system users impart into the physical with their runic engraving skill. Or a similar type of skill such as the one I ‘invented’: Runic Language. Each point of mana and Qi pushes it closer to the edge.
A simple nudge in the wrong direction would collapse the whole thing killing the roots holding the runes in place. The warping of space is so direct and dissonant compared to the stable bridge of the system.
Even the song of dissonance I ring on it sounds like a masterpiece compared to whatever I’m doing here.
Then it is too much and even the dead remnants of wood crumble. A dull echo of pain hits my soul as the small space distortion explodes and nearly phases through the thin shield meant to protect against a few dozen mana and a couple of Qi points fed into it.
I stare at my hand wondering why it didn’t even give me the level of working control I had come to expect from my own resources after the runes faded.
“That’s new.” I hear from my counterpart.
“Indeed. It mostly phased through the dirt and the shields and it hit the outer walls of the pocket with way more strength than I expected. We need to properly tune the shield and figure out how it happened.”
“Well given the inherent instability, moving it to a larger pocket is probably the best thing. A meter of travel to the edge is not enough time to properly dissipate the power. We need at least ten times that distance of dirt.”
“I still want a space tune shield that works against…. space phenomena.”
“Come on, no need to be a douche. I designed a decent shield.”
I prod at the phantom sense of pain this little taste of what could have been and that would be if I screw up my experimentation while pushing more power.
“Nope. Not being a douche, you have no idea how painful soul wounds are and this whole endeavor screams of torturous pain if it goes awry. I want the shield and a few other extra precautions. The wall of my inner world has a high tolerance to all kinds of stuff, but this shouldn’t exist.”
We work in dozens of similar designs, testing everything and figuring out not what works, but how to break those runes and by consequence how much we can push them. Which ones don’t go together, which ones are more effective and the critical weaknesses we need to armor over.
The pocket of space I create in the end is about 30 meters wide with multiple layers of a properly tuned shield and loads of packed dirt, stone even a layer of a steel alloy that sounds promising to replace deep teel in higher end applications.
With an abundance of caution, we even push the envelope. Even if layers of protection fail, I should still keep my soul intact.
Putting on a gauntlet of both cut and raw gems, I pass my Qi through one of the best raw gems I found which is compounded by all the small gains of my skills and ways of handling my Qi.
I learned way more than I expected in a couple of days, but all things come to an end. New understandings and insights arrive more sparsely. Each hasty experiment that taught us a dozen things at the start needed a lot of tuning to only point in the direction of the next experiment. I reached a higher tier of skill and I got a rather large team moving in the right direction, but it’s time to move on.
“Already?”
“Yes, I’m not well suited to simply work on a single thing, I will keep tabs and help out a couple of hours each week, but I need to clear my head now. I do have a dozen projects staring at my face, begging for attention.”
The faces of the researchers, a single one of which actually managed to achieve something that no one on Earth as far as I knew had accomplished turning the very simple Space/Time Interaction skill into Space Manipulation as I had. With the help of a few talented seeds, it should be enough to keep their progression steadily climbing.
I take a couple of steps out of the newly built research center in the ‘diplomatic grounds’ and my compressed spine relaxes ever so slightly.
Walking on the ground, through a place with much less uniformity than I would expect of the steel, concrete and glass in old earth’s ‘modern’ buildings. Now, the reforming cities are different in shape, appearance and modes of construction. From my vantage, I see buildings ranging from solid rock shaped by stone singers in a medieval style past forest dwellings resembling the ones I build with living wood all the way to near copies of our old architecture. Ocasioanlayy I see even more daring designs given the options opened up by magic. Floating pieces, illusions and more are just the common choices for those who have the money to spare and the willingness to experiment.
Ready to explore whatever the world has to offer, I take off the mantle of Earth’s protector from my shoulders for a little while to walk in freedom amidst the maelstrom of people.