An impasse forms over the next month. Try as we might, the enemy is entrenched and nothing short of a war crime would get us inside. Under different circumstances, we might even consider such extreme measures if the cost was extracted only from the enemy or if the concrete danger they pose went beyond an eyesore and the need for a constant watch.
The few voices that tried to drum up support quickly lost steam with my steadfast position against any such attempt as long as the cost was in the dozens of people every second for an assault that would at the minimum last hours. Maybe even days of constant pressure.
I could be wrong, but it seems we have little to lose from leaving the enemy have this foothold except for tying up resources to nip any attempt they make to leave the pyramid. If they had multiple strongholds and a head start the situation might be different, but as long as the corridors limited the number they could bring out at a time or they somehow cleared hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed full time and flattened the defenses they couldn’t even use it as a slow way to transport their troops near our city.
Cutting off this hypothetical line doesn’t seem worth sending our best and brightest to their certain death. Developing better counters, improving assault methods and upgrading our equipment is the ‘only hope’.
I pit myself against the enemy attempting to crack at least a portion of the code. But best as I can work it out, even if I put forward my most extreme level of power and managed to sustain it for hours or even days that such an assault would require, I can only cover one corridor. Maybe with Alex’s help and a generous Mithril supply, I could do something, but the risk of losing that much of such a precious metal in any assault attempt sends shivers down my spine. Even if the most recent supply and info dump came with a little Mithril.
But the danger didn’t come from our loss, but the enemy's gain. A pound of Mithril in the elves or goblin’s hands would be disastrous. The enemy is already a genuine threat with barely any gold at hand and I hadn’t seen a single instance of them using Mithril. Even the ones in the instance had more access to it.
I run through the most optimistic math in a sanity check attempting the gauge the cost of assaulting all three corridors with our full power simultaneously.
Time, the rate of advancement and the best equipment we had without encountering any meaningful surprises. Under such conditions, our losses would be at the very least in the fifty to a hundred thousand range. Teams after teams burned in instants and any gain we made between attacks was lost as the vanguard of our assault was disintegrated by the system powered defenses.
There is nobody else but me who could take the full-powered attacks without dying in a single shot in such cramped quarters. Even the best team supporting a single overwhelmingly geared tank that would make fighting so cumbersome it might as well be impossible wouldn’t survive more than a few attacks.
Even applying constant pressure on the outer shield isn’t feasible as things stand. Without my presence, it’s too dangerous for the mages involved. The equipment needed to be within a couple of meters even if we didn't care for efficiency there is the mana disruption of the pyramid to consider. Ranged attacks simply split into their base components when traveling.
All that coalesces in my mind in a complex unsolvable puzzle. I had done foolhardy things in the past, but any time I even think of assaulting it head on, a hint of dread flows out from my gut warning me of the danger.
The smaller pyramid, especially just after they had taken over was just within my range. Here they have many more people, time to improve the defenses, what might as well be endless mana in the pyramid’s battery and much stronger defenses to make use of that mana.
If I had gotten greedy and assaulted the larger pyramid straight away, we might have caught them by surprise enough to gain some ground, but it wouldn’t last long enough. I doubt that luck would continue for the entire trip with twice as many people per meter fighting me.
My mind turns to something closer at hand that I can affect: my class trial.
The ten month countdown is over. Leaving Earth to defend itself rankles on me, especially given that I can’t expect more than a fraction of the upgrade this time around compared to breaking through to level 100. The whole endeavor almost doesn’t seem worth the effort. Not being here to prevent a disaster while attempting to grow strong enough to enact my will on the world and acquire the power to protect it.
Right now, there is a small chance that something of the sort may occur, but as far as I can tell, it will simply increase my stats a little bit along with adding yet another skill to my repertoire, as long as my plan to upgrade my main class succeeds. A new awesome skill is probably the closest that I can hope for to a fundamental increase in power.
But even as I want to rage against everything and curse the world for not giving me the power I need to protect humanity, I also know that easy power boosts are mirages. I can only trust what has a visible cost to acquire as I learn its intricacies and slowly develop.
I page one of my journals in the little hut I erected on the edge of Giza. The real estate was a relatively cheap piece of land to which they grated a relative level of ‘diplomatic immunity’.
Nothing convoluted, but they promise the plot of land for the next century which now with system seems such a short time frame, but that’s way longer than most natives can even dream of holding out against the invaders.
Skimming single lines entries, most of which deep down I will never get to at the current pace, especially given I simply add to the list which isn’t meant as ‘the real one’. That only gets entries I have pondered over while this is closer to a long term brainstorming session. It isn’t quite at the level of a corporate induced one with shameless people actually saying what comes to their mind, but it isn’t too far with only the loosest layer of filtering.
A few minutes later I get to the last page, without any insights or new nuggets that can drag another of those ideas to the forefront. Only the priority list remains, and as I look at it, I know that it’s missing something, but I don’t know what that may be. So I just keep going trying to find the next steps on the path. Hopefully, these are all roughly in the right direction, until eventually, I get a glimpse of my true desire.
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The sun angles further and further down, telling me that one of the few gatherings I was expected to show up to approaches. Nothing that will take ages, nor that will create a precedent that every person with the barest amount of authority could expect me to attend their parties.
This dinner is mostly a formality in deepening our relations and finalizing our treaty. We couldn’t simply remain here forever and writing down our intentions and parameters for our cooperation just sounds prudent. We brought a huge number of elites over hundreds of thousands of kilometers from home. Delaying their return could only be ‘justified’ if we were aiming to recapture the Pyramid in short order.
Even staying to protect the other pyramids isn’t an excuse. They are as reinforced as we could make them and secured against all known threats. Each one had a pocket of space tied to it and there was even a seed who volunteered to inhabit the second largest structure over here: the Pyramid of Khafre. Just with its attention alone, they would be able to operate all the faux inner worlds. If the enemy ever actually takes another pyramid, they are going to have a nice surprise in coming from the central chamber. Thousands of troops housed in relative comfort that wouldn’t even require Pando’s or another seed’s attention.
I had grown wood defenses and even added small stores of biomass to be used as fuel if they were cut off from the outside. That on top of days engraving even the smallest of roots in the pyramids with stories of freedom makes them absurdly resilient to system encroachment. They also act as a secondary backbone helping to power the runes hand engraved with tremendous precision on the metal plates, from that made up the bulk of the defenses.
We would be hard pressed not to lose any more ground with those entrenchments and a few hundred thousand elites likely wouldn’t meaningfully change the conflict if the enemy pulled something else from their hat. All that doesn’t even consider the small portion of allied elite troops who would remain behind after we signed a treaty. Even from the other side of the world, my help would grow with how much nature has grown directly from Pando was their city and around it.
It’s time to come back to our own village. We didn’t even have the ‘excuse’ that coming over here for support would take so long it would be useless. Transportation has once again changed. The relatively slow speeds of my ‘flying busses’ are still the same, but I continued to expand their size and now there are rockets. Only a limited number of people would ride them for now, but even with relatively basic designs, we can just focus on large scale fuel processing plants. This way I won’t even have to deal with the people that needed it pissed at me for taking it all without a warning during an emergency.
The hours pass with me slowly making my way through both the daily progressions and new ideas I had.
The sun starts to disappear behind a nearby building. Usually, I would simply keep working in the inner world as my other half took control of our body, but this time the weight in the air pulls my attention as he is the one that stays experimenting.
I walk out through the window and with expert control of my Qi float mid air towards the center of the city. I rely less on the root formations inside my body and more on my own ability to directly hold the runes in the air with enough precision that putting weight and moving doesn’t warp it into uselessness. Mimicking an air walk with timed pulses of propulsion and tiny air distortion on each of my steps ends up being a really fun exercise. I hypnotize myself into action and climb from a couple of meters to roughly 20 by phasing the levitating part of the exercise into one of my inner world pockets. It is plenty for my purposes.
Timing my steps with the humble pulsing acceleration and deceleration of the propulsion spell reveals imperfections all throughout the process. Even allowing a decent margin of error, I’m limited to a normal walking pace to be anywhere near convincing. Maybe if I was imitating an octogenarian, I could match the acceleration profiles to my standards, but at a normal walking pace, even a pre system user could probably tell I’m not actually ‘air walking’.
This exercise is probably one of the least efficient ways of moving around. That realization strikes me deeply and as a counterbalance I start practicing a rarely focused skill. Something the best mages all practiced, and filled whole sections of Merlin’s missives.
Real mana economy. Not the one I already understood and laid in many ways at the center of: transporting mana from one city to another for a small fee with the help of the root network. Which is fast becoming part of the new substructure of our reality. As important, if not more so than the internet backbone before all this began.
No, this mana economy is closer to the old miles per gallon standard. How much work I can produce per unit of mana. This is a metric that will indicate the increasing the differences between the average Joe occasionally flisking off a flame to start a fire, versus a talented and well trained mage. The mechanisms behind it are similar to how I use my will to make my spells more effective and less prone to simply disintegrating before the grey energy of the HLZ beasts and other enemies. But there is another dimension to using willpower to back a spell. Mana isn’t supposed to be simply thrown around by truckloads as we ‘lazily’ go used to do, but to be carefully dolled out. My inner world is an amazing tool, but constant access to ‘infinite’ mana instilled bad habits in me. So it’s time to overcome them. Pulling straight from my own pool, I feel the connection of my Qi and cycle it through the best Raw gem I found, set in the formation at my back. Perhaps half of the amount of resource I would usually wield for this, but as the runic formation I’m manually keeping in the inner world sucks in the resource and uses it all in an instant, I try to phase and restrict that usage to only what actually makes a difference, reinforcing my willpower around it.
It comes sluggishly, especially on a spell with ten times more runes than most mages could handle. These formations are intended to be engraved on solid matter, not power system user spells. The propulsion I expect comes, slightly weaker than normal. But what I pay attention to are the specific effects. The spell sucks in the mana like it’s pulling from a porous stone covering it. Starved from this resource, instead of being bathing it causes it to lose potency, but the way the mana consumption plummets makes it way more efficient.
“91% Effectiveness against 54% Qi consumption.”
Probably one of my best results ever, though not that impressive compared to other mages, who without infinite mana at their fingertips with the inner world had to scrape by in a similar fashion since day one.
After a fairly long training session, I approached the building. Aiming for a window in the two story mansion I was directed to I stop my air walk simply gliding forward. A hint of Qi nudges the window pane to the side, almost touching the flowers on the balcony and freeing up space for me to enter in a single fluid motion.
Shock graces the cafes of half the guests while the other shrugs at my antics in the age of the system. The one whose house I just entered cuts his words in half catching me from the corner of his eye and spins in my direction in a sharp turn. Hidden storms fill his face and he takes a step in my direction.
“Aja… Ohh, never mind.” His stormy expression instantly morphs into a flustered expression. But to his credit, he keeps his composure. He was just about to scold me for some reason. That thought nearly sent me laughing on the ground.
Then the moment is broken and both our heads turn back at a scuffling sound completing the picture. A child comes tumbling through another window, this one much more noisily than me without flight magic, but elegant to a fault… for a scrappy boy.
What calls my attention to this moment however is that Imissdhis approach. I have the bloody Perception Field… and I missed it.
The vague notion in my mind of what his intent had been morphed into certainty as I realized exactly what had been on our host’s mind:
“Ohh, you thought I was your kid. That’s why you wanted to scold me.”