Egypt: Ajax’s Dad POV
The news I was bringing to Ajax seems so unimportant now. I want to step forward and stop him, but I can’t. I know I can’t. We aren’t in the safe world I helped to build before the system.
I feel him walking away, fighting against the horrors of the system.
A single word gained weighs in his mind.
A word that Nash spoke to him and that seemed to have become his ideal. A word I had repeated often enough trying to inculcate in his mind. He steps out of the window leaving a void in the room. A void that no mere sound or mere light could replace.
I wait a minute before walking inside only to see the envelope he left for me. The barest hint of a sad smile graces my face.
Dad,
Don’t worry, I will be back, but I have things to be about. Responsabilites I cannot shirk. I hope you understand.
Love you, Ajax.
Yes, the hated word I taught him.
“I do understand. I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
I look at the city that is my responsibility from the window. You aren’t aiming quite this small. You want to protect this world, to become one of the shining beacons in our fight against entire empires in this galaxy, not just this city. Yet you are so young.
The minutes pass as my mind comes back to itself and I find peace.
I cannot shelter you forever. This letter just represents what I trained you to do my whole life. As much as it hurts, the world won’t wait for anyone to step forward. It didn’t even wait for you to grow a beard. At least you voluntarily took the first step to becoming a real man. Waiting for reality to smack you upside the head to get you into motion can be much more painful.
My mind comes to balance and my own responsibilities, the millions of troops that need moving, the reinforcements of flying vehicles to allow those movements in a timely fashion, a constant stream of supplies and a thousand other details.
Where we could best use our slow vehicles heavily reliant on chemical fuel or the mana highways for simple flying vehicles and even the much faster flying faux inner world ones.
My request for reinforcements from Pando’s village was denied and I understand their reasoning. We already have a small contingent permanently stationed here and they have problems of their own. They need every troop they can get.
Their casualties keep mounting. Catualies that I have no doubt will arrive here as soon as we start to confront the goblins in earnest.
Closing the window pane, I step towards my own responsibilities trying to find a way to reconcile our place in this new world.
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Void: Aspen’s POV
Alone.
Friend was taken by the ruthless eye in the sky.
Nothing but the void of space...
Worlds between me and Nash. No preparation and the friend of the forest is so far away the connection seems ready to break as it stretches to infinity. A connection I can only barely feel occasionally.
Sure, there are plenty of people in the inner world, but none are him. The only remnants of Nash are gravity and lights kept in place by an extension of his will even from this far away.
I know he didn’t want to be so far away, but he is.
He is on a land so far away that if I could reach Earth through the void I would only be one step of a long journey towards where he is.
I’m weak, so weak. I need to be more helpful. My friend always helps me, but now I have to find a way to pay him back.
Thousands of seeds here and on Earth approach my level of power. Some haven’t had time to let their roots fully develop. I cheer for their success, but I’m the oldest one. The first beyond Pando. I have a bond. I should have a bond, I should…. BE more.
If this keeps up, with everyone but me developing, I will fall behind to wither and die. The only special thing about me is the time I spend connected to Nash and the territory I’m ‘allowed’ in the inner world. Even this will be taken away if I’m useless.
He will cry, he will drag me around with his power, make a larger brain or gift me more Aether than a thousand other seeds had received to try and make me greater. He will warp the world for me, but nothing he does will make me more than what I am. Not if I don’t take this step by myself.
I feel for the huge mana stores in my inner world home. It’s far from infinite, but it recharges quickly enough and for the first step I prepare to ‘use’ it all, though in a way that only a fraction of a fraction will be wasted.
Drawing as much as I can, straining the limits of my willpower and control, I simply take from a battery, twist it into a knot and send it to a different battery without relying on the runic traces. It’s the barest of steps to my goal, but as my very mind warps, I find tiny adjustments to be made that help me move a little more mana with a little less effort.
Nash’s obsessive training for everything under the sun starts to make a hint more sense. This is what he seeks, the feeling of progress. The placement of a valued goal and the sense of motion that takes concrete steps toward bringing it to reality. My mind approaches his, as the thoughts of little old Aspen seed are shed in place of the grandiose philosophy of responsibility in a human mental frame.
Giving the whole of myself towards the goal, even if only for a limited amount of time induces the purpose of motion.
What starts at hundreds of mana points over days grows to well over a thousand without any external runic help and that’s when I feel the edges of my real limits.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Before I simply didn’t know where they lay. Not when alone, not without actually training with a hint of Nash’s mentality for days on and instead of the sparse moments seeking our immediate survival.
Still, even if I know that the easy gains are over, something drives me to keep going. There is a path forward in my current heading, but that path isn’t enough. Like Nash’s outlook on a significant portion of his problems, trusting his digestive system to tell him things, I know that this isn’t the best way forward. I need to find soft and supple soil rather than breaking through solid stone.
I keep going for hours still, trying to think of how to progress further. Growing the roots underground will do nothing, though I test that with a dozen other ideas just in case. Altering their shape into runes could be helpful in the right circumstances, and is my normal modus operandi. But my mastery of Nature is something I already took to a very high standard and now its help seems closer to a crutch to my actual goals. Sometimes it will be the right answer, but raw willpower is more versatile and closer to my goal.
A flash of insight makes my entire world shift.
An idea that I would never consider under normal circumstances. Not because I hadn’t seen its beginning, but because I’m not Nash.
I’m going to ask for help.
In many ways, it’s the same as we already do, but there has to be a way to make it greater. To meld the willpower of every single seed in the inner world in a single entity in truth, at least when it comes to wielding mana.
I broadcast my thoughts and invite every single one of the seeds.
“It’s time to train.”
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Trial: Nash’s POV:
Month three trial:
You have discovered the weakness of this beast and handly demonstrated your ability to defeat it. (99/100 points)
Passed
I glance at the last month’s system message. Now I’m minutes away from the fourth summoning, left wondering what kind of beast will pop up now. I needed to pay attention not to get crushed even by the first mob, the Elephant. I should have never been in that much danger, that had been my lack of experience.
To remedy that, the system simply makes the enemies stronger and in many ways stranger. The trial seems off somehow. Even in the previous version, full completion and discovery of the easter eggs implied that someone could go above and beyond the system’s limits and account for that. Sometimes by such wide margins that it wasn’t even funny.
It was expected that I could at most reach 200 meters of range if I somehow got my skill to level 200. Instead, I saw over a kilometer from myself in a sphere and a few of my inner world/perception field tentrils reached well over a dozen kilometers.
This, like so many others, is an aspect of the system that touched upon something more, but I just don’t have context for the mechanics behind it. Mobs invisible to the system’s perception field, easter eggs too far away to see with it at normal range and so much more that didn’t seem to suffer from the limitations of the system.
I glance in the direction of a faint disturbance, a confluence of threads of Aether that even when I arrived just a couple of months ago would have completely passed me by.
The system is preparing for its mob spawning. I train my perception field in the region as my mind and body prepare to battle. Even standing there the breeze that somehow phases through the barrier on the edge of this territory. Nothing larger than air molecules passes it but my mind just makes impossible plans to throw wrenches upon the system’s works. That image got stuck there for decades and it never really left me.
I know the system isn’t truly the enemy, but it still irks me often enough. The true enemy, the council, hides behind layers and layers of soldiers attacking our world. They are so far away that the mere thought of striking at the root of the problem boggles my mind.
So I will act locally.
And right now I only have a single enemy I need to contend against.
My mind is trained for when the moment comes.
But before this, I witness a temporal and spatial phenomenon that I try to decipher, but most of it still passes over my head. The barest of glimmers into how to replicate the feat is followed by a near erasure of everything imprinted in my memory, not by the system’s actions, but simply the limitations of the human mind in trying to remember the configuration of a billion of folding edge of space stretched into temporal locks and supported through vast distances.
But it's not about actually remembering how each tiny hair falls, but the physics ruling. Feeding the right instincts in me. Each time I witness it, I build a clearer picture of how reality works until one day I will be able to replicate the feat.
That moment is gone and only a single enemy is left behind. But this time it's not a giant beast, but a magic user and one that barely reaches my armpits.
He sports a feral look, broadly resembling a goblin shaman, but even shorter in stature and there is not the same type of ‘conscious’ intelligence in its eyes. Its mind ‘only’ works at a similar level to an intelligent beast.
No, it’s closer like a beast that almost crosses to threshold of sentience. Even less than most of the bunnies I encountered in the instance. As far as I can tell, even if I gave it a push, it would fail the transition only suffering as a result. I may meddle with life, but there are intrinsic characteristics I cannot mess with, nor is the desire for absolute control the correct mindset.
With the perception field fully trained on it, I analyze every inch of its makeup, searching for the weaknesses in its flesh, but a grimace pops on my face.
“The rules have changed again haven’t they?”
I don’t give up the effort, making use of the time until it gets within range.
At some 500 meters, I feel power thrumming just beneath its skin. He would rival Merlin in more ways than one. This is what we have to fear on Earth. Hordes of this enemy right now would wipe us out. With all my tricks, and ways of empowering even the humblest of our fighters, some are only level 100. We need to grow a lot. Eventually, the enemy will be let off its leash. Even at this level without anyone else to protect, a single enemy is already straining my capabilities
And its level 200+ skills are the largest portion of problem.
Grocknisch - Level 276
A subsentient being of low stature capable of instinctive use of magic.
That line, it almost…
A single point of mana fills the construct of a fireball and streaks toward me like lighting.
Faster than a bullet, I almost failed to dodge even with my reaction speed. Willpower streams to my body shield and the potential Qi I’m keeping in reserve ready.
But the enemy...
It attacked me from 400 meters away. That surpasses the normal range even from our best mage teams with mithril enhanced magical turrets. I wonder if even Merlin could do this. Though a single fireball wouldn’t have killed me, it would add damage.
Subsentient.
I stare into its eyes and start to make sense of that word.
It may not be a human, but its strategic mind is orders of magnitude greater than even the HLZ beasts and the last three mobs the system send my way.
The little green bugger stands off, not taking a step closer, as it manipulates nature to grow defenses of its own before continuing its barrage of attacks.
Lightning, wind, fire and earth separate and together attempt to skewer me. My very first proper magical duel. And I’m going to end it all, with a punch… if I can… as soon as I figure out his weakness and demonstrate it to the system with gusto.
Dodging all but the rare attack that manages to corner me, I avoid using my scarce Qi, compared to my usual stores.
I look closely at the enemy’s attacks to decipher what gave it tremendous range and how it could possibly have achieved that. They come not like a thrown ball of dirt that simply kept its momentum, but fully controlled all the way through. Its fireballs are as cohesive at 400 meters as I would expect of a magic user of its rough power could shoot just 150 meters using normal skills. Just about the longest normal range we could reach without my inner world shenanigans.
My perception field takes in the next couple of attacks until I realize the trick and a huge smile shines in my face.
Driving my own will on the next fireball headed for my face I extend my hand out, forcibly pushing his faux willpower out and finding no resistance. The attack almost explodes in my hand, but I slide my own willpower in place. It takes concentration to manage this but this is only the first step, I don’t need to actually turn the enemy’s attacks against him.
A loose pathway to victory or at least stalemate is before me.
“Ohhh, this is going to be interesting.”