Chapter 271

Even a couple weeks later, after my class trial and everything that came from it: the level increase, a new subclass and skills, I’m still amazed at the fundamental changes happening.

Every aspect of my training was accelerating and what might have taken me a month before, usually will still need 29 days, but more often than I could hope for, it feels like I could do it in half the time.

Especially research lines along new runic patterns and new rune applications while reinventing old schematics to improve efficiency, power or even cover for the weaknesses in our engravings and magic tech.

Amidst it all, I even take up another project in my free time which somehow feels right, though I didn’t know exactly what prompted me to do it. I carve out very carefully a story on the heart tree, a story of truth. Of the unending pursuit of excellence and the patterns of nature, both an old beast opening its earth maw and swallowing cities, but also our beloved puppy bringing joy with its myriad forms of beauty. I try to weave a tapestry that tells all that I can perceive and what the seeds keeping me company think should be there.

I tie everything together, trying to add to the defenses already there that Pando either made or asked someone else to make not just in a concrete fashion, but in a way that will make sense in the metaphysical realm. I have no idea why, but after realizing the possibility, I had to go through with it.

There is even a proper ring of gem magical focuses buried in the middle that would be tremendously powerful at an unbelievable range with the other tricks that I pulled. I hoped that day would never come and the enemies could only reach the very outer tendrils of Pando.

In this exercise, I can even feel the loose and unformed Aether around our planet coalescing around the heart tree while at the same time spreading everywhere that Pando is. A Natural Aether field thick enough that even spread over most of Earth I can still sense it. Everyone had their own opinions about Pando, both enemies and allies. But nobody could deny his power, so even the enemy unconsciously added to this field, much to their chagrin.

But time waits for no man and even as I squeezed as much as I can in my days and nights, a change occurs in the enemy’s movement patterns. That change arrived just a couple of days after our own attack in which I acted stealthily as in the last few months. But just because I didn’t expose my presence, doesn’t mean that I didn’t help, a LOT. Even as my stores of Life dwindle further and the number of attackers grows to a nearly unprecedented level.

Even the time I spent purely healing, instead of causing mischief or havoc amongst the enemy shifts.

Already their numbers had swelled to 12 million the past month, and reinforcements were constantly arriving, which our best projection put at 40 million on top of the 4 million still alive from the last round. Luckily, this is likely the last turn where their growth will geometric quite this significant. When they go back down to something that resembles linear growth or even a limit I will be more settled.

Sure our projections are fairly speculative, but we aren’t working with no information and their conclusions seemed solid to me in a way that only truth does.

I see a stream of troops arriving at their camp. and the way that they move feels different.

They are… energetic. Recapturing some of the spring in their step from our first meeting with them. They now have HOPE.

“Ohh, shit.”

The other shoe that I was waiting to drop seemed to have come down. I didn’t know what it was yet.

They are now confident in their invasion. Even if they can’t leverage their numbers just yet, they are bound to become a giant thorn in our side.

Even in the best case scenario, what we could hope for was for our permanent casualties during actual battles to go from less than ten thousand total to be measured in the millions for every full scale confrontation, and that assumes they don’t catch us off guard.

I connect to the root network and the magical interface, both linked directly to the computer banks. There I find a library of audio recordings from the enemy’s camps. I listen at tenfold speed through everything that was marked with both the Elder and the Archdruid tags hoping to catch something that my other half missed. But even as more time passed even as our translations improved we got less and less useful information from new recordings.

More of their words came in code.

I doubt that they actually know I could fully listen in around the clock, even inside the supposed safe zone or what are the mechanics of my skill. But I had enough hints that they suspect even their people of becoming traitors. Possibly only one, but even one could be catastrophic if they were allowed to run rampant. That belief in something in the likelihood of a traitor was the only reason that we still occasionally got something otherwise their protocols on critical communications would go through a complete overhaul and we would get absolutely no useful information.

I spend hours pouring over everything in my breaks or when I’m working on something that doesn’t take much mental effort. I absorb what is happening in real time and what had been recorded, from their voices and actions to even the faces of new arrivals and their defenses. But in the end, nothing calls to me.

The only thing that I get a hint of is the Elder fiddling with a system screen, though observing its contents is an order of magnitude more than my perception field can return to me.

Then something changes.

I sense their territory increasing, but not the extra couple hundred meters as their island grew with the help of the system and their city swelled outward and upward. That had already happened and this is something else entirely. The shift is about adding a small county’s worth of territory to them or maybe even more. A growing circle becomes theirs.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Three kilometers, five, seven, ten, twelve. All those milestones they cross in record time, but then the expansion slows.

I can feel Pando’s roots melting like there are rotten pieces of fruit even as I try to weave my will and reinforces them. Some of the strongest natural materials without direct system reinforcement. Roots made of fibers that had grown to rival Kevlar simply disintegrating in instants.

Pando drags all his will to fight the encroachment reinforced by every single seed in range. But it is not to be, because we aren’t fighting the enemy’s power, but the very system.

Still, this is good practice and I keep calling to the seeds still groggy or so engrossed in other projects they didn’t notice what was happening. Though a decent portion of the ones I manage to scrounge together are so young they don’t have a fraction of the strength of an ‘adult’ seed.

Still, everyone is focused, even if we don’t know what difference it is going to make against the system. Slowly their expansion loses momentum but it doesn’t stop.

The older and more established roots seem to survive slightly longer and the few that I spend any time on are even a little beyond that, but it is not enough to stop.

It takes half an hour, but until that invisible wave reaches a crawl and then it vanishes into thin air. Not a slow drop-off, but a simple absence of pressure. Precisely 22 kilometers from the center of their power now ‘belongs’ to them. Given the precision of distance, maybe we didn’t do much if anything at all, but anything that trained us against the system was a victory.

Twenty-two kilometers in radius. Over 15 hundred square kilometers are now in their hands. Something seemly insignificant compared to Earth’s land mass, but somehow it felt wrong. Just a glance of my perception field screams the nature of that place is now hostile to us ‘natives’.

I call for a meeting with the heads of the village, which had started as just 2 people: the commander and the engraver, but now expanded to 6 core members which they tried to keep stable instead of indefinitely expanding the inner circle making such meetings even more onerous affair.

In a simple room on the other side of the heart tree, we meet in the center of our ‘government’. With functional furniture and few adornments, this is a place of work, not an ostentatious display to awe foreign dignitaries. I watch everyone standing and then all their heads turn to me after the wait they ‘suffered’ while I was fighting the system, though none of them look more than mildly annoyed that I ‘made’ them wait.

“Thank you for coming on short notice and waiting around for me. But I think everyone has an idea of what I’m going o say, don’t you?”

“They expanded their territory.” Our military commander says without mincing words.

“Yeah. They expanded the radius to precisely 22 kilometers or roughly 1500 square km. I tried to fight it with Pando and the other seeds, but I’m not sure if it accomplished anything beyond slowing their advance by a few minutes.”

“And now they are at the doorstep of our forts.”

“I think nobody here is under the delusion that this won’t change anything. Now, the real fight will begin. We know too little about the future, but the days of one regular attack at the end of the month may be over. We need to step up our strategy. We probably should increase the number of troops stationed nearby and get even more ‘ready’. Flying under the radar and reinforcing our forts worked once upon a time, but we shouldn’t rely on this strategy. ”

The commander nods and starts to speak his mind:

“We will need to be flexible. We don’t know what tactics they will use, nor what are their real objectives beyond the obvious.”

“Before they started to talk in code or not at all, they made clear that territory is a fundamental metric to them. I don’t know how or why, but I think that so far we managed to hold out marvelously... now that may change. What did your scouts report?” I ask the one responsible for coordinating those efforts.

“When they cross the boundary, they felt something similar to entering their city walls, though weaker. We could probably still fight well a couple of miles in, but that is going to depend on how it scales and it WILL diminish our fighting abilities.”

“And we no longer have home ground without Pando’s underground root network. I can kinda cheat if I’m nearby with my inner world. But all of Pando’s roots that weren’t buried at least 5 kilometers below the ground turned to mush.”

Everyone’s eyes bulge out upon hearing that and their minds start to spin even as the commander continues.

“My scouts reported that comms were using more mana to get through, but I hoped you could fix it.”

“No, not fully. At least not by regrowing the network. There might be other workarounds. Everything in that place is now dead. Growing so much mass near the surface for the network might have been a waste of time, but it is done.”

The head enchanter and the village’s defacto leader pitch in.

“Well, thank you, regardless of any concrete benefit. I know you probably want to get back to your projects, so if we need any more information or help we will leave a message or just ask you.”

“OHH don’t worry, I have a thousand other projects and ordinarily I would have already left, but for this… I can pitch in half an hour because we are going to need an amazing plan if we hope to make it through.”

Everyone nods solemnly at that and then we start earnestly working.

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Elder’s POV

I telepathically send to my counterpart as our mouths speak of very low critical things out loud.

“You were right. You may have turned into a pessimist, but your predictions are eerily accurate as to their capabilities. I spend roughly 20 percent more Invasion Points per square kilometer than if they didn't contend the territory and we didn’t absorb any of their settlements nor something else interesting. We only rolled over a higher concentration of roots from their cursed tree.”

“How far did we extend?”

“22 kilometers. Choosing a round number that they will recognize might throw them off. Maybe even convince them that their fight didn’t make any difference.”

“I’m not sure, but it can’t hurt. Too bad we couldn’t reach the full distance. Three more kilometers and we would be on the doorstep of their closest forts.”

“It wouldn’t make much difference. With the cost to extend on a permanent settlement like that with the system… we will have to take it by strength before expanding further over the coming month cycles.”

“It was due time that we managed to get a few wind runners with us. Our pace is too slow. Running everywhere at a normal pace takes forever to get anywhere interesting. That is probably the most significant advantage they have over us. Mobility. The wind runners will help us to close the gap.”

“Don’t get too ahead of yourself. We still don’t know where their main city even is. Let’s hope that it is around Pando’s old place because if it isn’t, I don’t see us managing to find it in less than 6 months unless one of our other efforts succeeds. They may lack experience in a lot of areas and their knowledge of system combat is only impressive compared to other new integrants, but they have a lot of strengths and we failed to capture even a single one alive. Their portals with those inner world space bags Nash left behind rebuffs most of our efforts to capture their people.”

“The problem is that we hadn’t managed to embed spy nor scry anything beyond about 50 miles. That’s why I tell you to not underestimate them.”

“I know. But now we have real strength, so let’s go crush them.”

He finishes the joke that that wasn’t supposed to be funny, but I still laugh. Just wait for us to crush you like the bugs you are. Then the world will return to the natural order.

If you think that we will let you reach a balance you are sorely mistaken. You won’t even get a small piece of territory. We will ground you into dust until there isn’t a single human standing on this planet. I will make sure of that.

That sounds like an elf like thing to say.