I dropped Marshan from the party, frowning, mad at myself but more mad at the situation that had forced my hand. The man and woman kept stealing glances at me as we ran through the cold and dark.
I dropped my illusion, and the man stopped running.
“He’s Horuthian!” he shouted at the woman, pointing at me.
“Of course he is,” she said, shaking her head. “Or did you fail to notice the magic?”
“How can you trust him?”
“He saved me. And you. It only just happened, you should still remember,” she said with a snort.
“This isn’t the time,” I grumbled. “We have to keep moving. The soldiers are already organizing and will be on their way soon.”
“How do you know?” the man asked, turning on me angrily.
“Magic?”
“Ugh.” He shook his head.
I turned, staring into the distance. I could just see the movement of the large object barreling towards me, and I smiled.
The man saw my smile and glanced over, stiffening angrily. “You see? He’s sold us out already! He has reinforcements coming!”
“That… doesn’t make sense,” the woman said, frowning. “Why?”
I shook my head. “Not reinforcements. Just two of my friends.”
Buda came to a stop just before me, squealing and pushing his head into my chest, and Treepo leapt heavily onto my shoulder.
“Thanks for coming. Sorry we got separated there for a minute,” I whispered.
“What is this?” the man demanded, eyes whipping back and forth between my familiars.
“Just my friends. And my ride.”
I jumped onto Buda’s back and whipped up a haste buff for the two of them. The man and woman looked down at their bodies, feeling the increase in speed.
“That should help us move faster. Let’s go,” I insisted.
We ran for hours, pushing towards the small village that was named Freigel. The woman–whose name was Leiren–said it had been abandoned, and that if a force had been dispatched there by the rebellion then they were probably sent to gather information about the camp. She and the man, Toch, had been captured as part of a different scouting party.
Toch’s name ended with a voiceless uvular fricative, a language sound I hadn’t heard in this world yet. It was the same sound as I had heard in the tent when the soldiers discussed a second town, Roveich. I shook off the linguistic distraction to focus on the problem at hand. The two Velgeins suspected the leader of their scouting party had known about Freigel and had the information tortured out of him.
“If so, you got to us just in time,” Leiren said. “We may yet save them.”
Despite getting there in time and Leiren and Toch both vouching for me, the surprised group of Velgein freedom fighters did not take kindly to my visit.
“Surely he’s a spy,” their leader spat, leveling a blade at me. He was a huge man, bigger even than Toch, and the blade he held was extremely impressive.
A flurry of conversation in the native Velgein language fired back and forth between the scouts and Leiren and Toch. I grimaced. I didn’t like not knowing what they were saying.
“Nice sword,” I said. “So, yeah, sorry about this.”
The sword collapsed into rust.
The man leapt back with a shout.
“I’m not your enemy, but level a sword at me again and I will be. Understood?”
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The silent group stared angrily at me.
“Look. I was born in the kingdom, yes, and I’m of their blood. But what I saw in that camp and in the capital was unconscionable. I made a decision to fight for what’s right. So long as you’re only defending yourselves from an unjust invasion, I’ll do what I can to help. If you don’t want my help, I can leave.”
“Unjust invasion?” the man scoffed. “We’ve already been invaded. My countrypeople are in chains in your kingdom. They hold all our cities and foundries.”
“Fine then. I will help with your insurgency. Unless you’re planning a counter-attack?”
Leiren stepped forward, interrupting the party’s leader, and shook her head.
“We just want them out of our lands. We just want our freedom.”
“Everyone deserves freedom,” I said, nodding, turning back to the leader. “So. Do you accept my aid? We need to retreat to wherever your group is holding up, where it’s safe.”
“I still don’t understand what this one child can do, even if he has some magic tricks.”
“I’ve got… more than a few magic tricks.”
* * *
I traveled with the group of Velgeins for weeks, north and back westward. The mountain range that separated the two countries before the pass was opened swung north at the coast, blocking Velgein from the sea, although that prevented further invasion by ship.
Way up that mountain range, there was a massive series of caves that the insurgency was using as a stronghold. It was an old mine that had been depleted so long ago that it wasn’t on any maps, and so was off Horuth’s radar.
I came to discover that metalworking was one of the massive strengths of the Velgeins. With no magic, they had long since pushed towards improving their technologies, which included mining and metalworking. Apparently, most of the steel I had seen in the kingdom came from Horuth’s occupation of the north. Prior to that, the kingdom had only used iron.
Their occupation of the Velgein foundries and manufacturing centers was a compound problem, then. Horuth was outfitting itself with superior arms while preventing Velgein from arming themselves with their best, and largely only, weapon.
The insurgency was well-armed and well-populated, but not that well organized. I had no idea how to help with that, but obviously communications were a problem in this world and it made everything even harder. I couldn’t think of anything that would help without communication. With no magic at all, I couldn’t even offer to teach the Velgein people telepathy.
With no better idea than to improve my strength quickly, I was starting to eat skillfruit regularly. I had one hundred of them in my inventory, and I had decided to just eat them all. It wasn’t what I had wanted to do, initially, but if I could find and clear another dungeon, I could grow more. If I was going to help shake off the yoke of the kingdom from the north, it was necessary to use my every advantage.
The five soldiers I had killed when saving Leiren had brought me to level 24, which was emotionally a bit turbulent, as with the bandits, but I didn’t have the time to dwell on it. I needed strength, and if I was going to help Velgein I might have to kill more.
I knew that a lot of the soldiers were probably normally good people from the kingdom, that they were just following orders and trying to earn money for their families, but I also had the perspective of someone from Earth who had been taught about multiple world wars. “Just following orders” didn’t cut it, and war meant horrors. I hadn’t wanted to face those horrors initially, but I had committed myself. I knew it was the right thing to do, as ignoring this would make me complicit, but it hadn’t been how I imagined my life when I left Mirut.
Still, I believed the kingdom could be repelled. Flipping the scripts and getting weapon manufacturing back into the northerners’ hands would help, and I had a power I could use to disarm the enemy. With most of the soldiers present being relatively non-magical, there was a way to turn this around.
Should the kingdom rally and send combat mages, I would have to be ready for that, too.
My level 24 skill points went right into 4-point magic, and all my skillfruit points went into it as well so I could double-advance the skill to use my oxidation techniques to wider effect. After double-advancing the skill, I saw that mastery for 4-point magic would require one thousand additional skill points.
I had done the math on my father and Vorel’s levels and skills and had already assumed that progression would be the case, but now I had confirmation. It was a nearly impossible feat until reaching a high level, where it became distinctly possible, though still difficult. If I put all my points from levels 51 to 67 into the skill, only 16 levels, it would be enough to reach mastery, but even level 51 was very far away. It was so far away that if I put all my skillpoints from level 26 to 51 into the skill, it would be almost equal, but 25 levels worth of progress instead of 16.
If it were absolutely necessary to reach mastery fast, I would need more skillfruit, but I didn’t think it was. My knowledge of how 4-point magic really worked gave me a huge advantage. Reaching double-advancement was likely more than enough for now, if my goal was just removing steel and iron from the army’s possession. The rest of my skillfruit would double-advance 6-point magic in the meanwhile, once I could continue suffering the stomach pain of force-feeding myself the fruits.
By the time I had double-advanced both 4-point and 6-point magic, I still had eleven skillfruit. I was sufficiently sick of them by then, so I stopped until I knew where to spend the points.
I honestly struggled with the idea of using so many skillfruit. I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I felt like I had an understanding of how skill points, learning, and experience points all fit together, but this broke the rules. Where was my knowledge and power coming from when I eat these fruits? Knowledge coming from fruits made me think it was some kind of forbidden fruit situation, stories from Earth influencing my thinking, but I shook it off. Was it just some kind of weird magic thing? I hadn’t even really figured out where magic actually came from, either.
Double-advancing my 6-point magic let me cast stronger buffs, like I thought. I was no longer limited to the minor variants, and my new regular version increased the 25% boosts to 50% boosts. Double-advancement was a proper, qualitative improvement to my abilities, not just the quantitative improvements of reduced MP cost and ease of use.
Despite wanting to theorize more about skillfruit and experiment with new abilities, the practical matters at hand were much more pressing. The insurgency leadership had decided they were ready to use my power and take the nearest refinery. It was time to prepare to strike back.