That makes sense, but we should keep in mind that all the founder's treasures are more long-term investments. Because only a void mage can get any use out of them and MC isn't one, and even for a Void mage they aren't direct power ups with known effects. The Ring of Andvari and the elven healing ring that belongs to Tiffa are a different sort that the MC might be able to use right away, like Derflinger.
Any Means Necessary (Selfish OC SI, Multiverse) [In Tower of God]
- Thread starter Eiri Fllyn
- Start date
- Crossover
That makes sense, but we should keep in mind that all the founder's treasures are more long-term investments. Because only a void mage can get any use out of them and MC isn't one, and even for a Void mage they aren't direct power ups with known effects. The Ring of Andvari and the elven healing ring that belongs to Tiffa are a different sort that the MC might be able to use right away, like Derflinger.
18 – Long Live the Emperor!
18 – Long Live the Emperor!
"Father, will you deny me even now? Or am I just a mistake you'd rather forget?" Her voice was soft and filled with a palpable sorrow.
"What is—what is going on!? What have you done to her, Cromwell?!" The King shouted in anger and confusion.
Cromwell shook his head and gave the King a piteous look. "I have done nothing but do as the Founder commanded, to rescue her from the life of destitution you put her in. Tiffania may be born of blasphemy, but she nevertheless has the blood of Brimir flowing through her and is a princess of Albion. She ought to be treated as such, not abandoned and left to fend for herself with no guidance in Brimir's Gift and forced to live in conditions even commoners would be appalled at. The responsibility for the sin of her birth rests not with her, who had no choice in being born, but with you, King Henry, who chose willingly to lay with an elf."
Murmurs broke out among the onlookers and many calmed down after the initial shock of having an elf in their midst. On the side of Reconquista, most found the Lord Protector's logic reasonable, even if they still instinctively wanted to kill her on sight or flee in terror.
"Is that so? Is that how you feel too, Tiffania?" The King asked after he carefully turned his face blank.
"I don't hate you father. I hate what I am but I can learn to live with it. But as Lord Cromwell says, I don't wish to be hidden away anymore. The sins of the past can only be atoned for after accepting that they happened," said Tiffania.
"Haha…hahaha!" The King suddenly laughed, and he covered his face as the laughter became an uncontrollable, deranged laughter. Nobody understood what the King found hilarious about this situation.
"It seems he has gone mad," Cromwell said with an expression of disgust.
"CROMWELL!!!" The King roared thunderously. "Whatever lies you've fed her, at least you won't be able to keep it up after I cut off your tongue and take your head today! By the Founder, Tiffania your birth was not a sin! Your mother was a wonderful woman and I loved her with all my heart, just as I love you! Not all elves are our enemies! Many are peaceful and would rather put an end to the millennia of pointless conflict! They don't want to kill all humans, and why should we continue to fight and die to take back some mythical Holy Land without even a reason other than that the Founder said so thousands of years ago? How does anyone know if the Founder still wants us to do it after all these failures? Shouldn't he have delivered to us victory already if that's what he truly wanted?! I believe that none of our crusades have been successful because the Founder doesn't want us to win! He wants us to make peace!"
"So now you openly admit to being a heretic! Look closely men, this is the true face of your king!"
The faces of the Reconquista soldiers looked grim, and some disbelieving, as if they had only now understood the character of their king.
Cromwell continued, making grand gestures with his hands. "But fear not, the will of the Founder is with me! Today, He will deliver me victory in this duel, tomorrow, He will deliver us a glorious victory as we take back the Holy Land!"
Both men drew their wands while Tiffania quickly stepped back.
As according to the tradition of officiated dueling, a handkerchief was dropped by a 3rd person outside of the duelists' sight. Then, each of their chosen seconds shouted to begin when the handkerchief hit the ground.
The king moved swiftly and started casting a blast of wind at Cromwell, who instead of dodging like most mages, apparently cast some sort of counter spell that blocked and dispersed the incoming attack.
More wind blasts of increasing size and power were launched by the king, until it turned into a massive barrage of blasts. Although individually they were not particularly powerful, in sheer quantity and speed the king was outcasting most mages and would have made it impossible to dodge.
Cromwell continued to disperse the spells, then manifested a thin barrier of water in front of him. The barrier was not very solid and a hole appeared every time a blast hit, but it also regenerated just as fast so nothing got through it.
Then a vortex of air formed in front of the king, and it rapidly fired more of the air blasts without him having to continue to actively cast each one. Every blast reduced the size of the vortex slightly, so it would run out in a few moments.
The King, thinking that he held the advantage before Cromwell could find an opening to counterattack, decided to pull out his secret trump card.
"Pentagon"-class magic.
This was one of two techniques passed down exclusively in the royal houses of the Brimic kingdoms, which allowed for casting a spell comparable to Square-class magic without being able to stack four elements in the normal way.
The other was known as "Hexagon"-class magic, which achieved something similar but required two mages of Triangle class to pull off.
These techniques were an important reason the royal houses stayed in power even when they didn't always produce Square-class mages, allowing them to have an answer to direct magical challenges from the strongest of nobles.
With Pentagon magic, a royal mage could cast a delayed magic of Triangle class, by forming the first two elements but not completing the third, then casting a full Triangle class magic. The delayed spell could then be manipulated to combine with the full powered Triangle spell, with the fully formed three-element stack taking the place of the incomplete third element of the delayed spell structure.
Once combined, the resulting spell wouldn't be as powerful as a theoretical true five-element stack spell which was not known to be possible, but it would be comparable to a Square class spell in potency.
First the king reached into his robes and took out a vial of red liquid. It was his own blood, which was required as a medium to cast Pentagon magic. This was a key reason that Pentagon magic hadn't been exposed to the nobility as a whole and learned as a common technique. Aside from the secrecy, there was in fact a difference between the royal lineage and the other nobles, just as there was a natural born difference between nobles and commoners.
There was power in their blood, inherited from their ancestors and from Brimir himself. And like magic in general, the inherited strength of that power wasn't solely dependent on the inborn talent of their parents whom they inherited it from, but also from the magical strength of the parents at the moment they conceived the child.
This meant that if the royals did not actively practice and use the Pentagon and Hexagon magics, their descendants would find it harder to use them. Correspondingly, even if the royal line intermarried with powerful noble families and produced children who legally became part of the noble house instead of the royal house, the strength of the special royal power would fade dramatically within a few generations if they never learned how to use it, and so their descendants would be significantly weaker than the main royal line.
He shattered the vial with a strong grip and started incanting.
Soon all the mages present could feel the power thrumming in the air. An enormously powerful spell was about to be cast.
From King Henry's position, four miniature tornados began to form and spread out, surrounding Cromwell.
Static charge crackled in the air and yet Cromwell appeared unable to respond as he continued to block the relentless assault of air bullets.
Finally, the king started a new set of incantations and prepared to fully combine the Pentagon structure.
Suddenly he stopped mid-incantation and his face went slack for a moment. The tornados petered out as if the spell powering them lost cohesion.
When the king came back to his senses, he looked around in confusion while Cromwell smiled, walking forward as the air blasts had expired.
"What's wrong, King Henry? Was all that just for show? You had us all thinking you were about to cast a big spell," said Cromwell.
The king tried to incant another quick spell, but again his mind seemed to blank before Cromwell seemed much closer than before.
"Oh? It seems that your magic is failing, King Henry. I can see that you are casting, but nothing is happening," said Cromwell.
A wave of whispers broke out among the watching crowd.
"What, what is this?!" The King demanded while pointing his wand at Cromwell. "What did you do?!"
Cromwell shook his head and sighed. "King Henry, you still don't understand? Magic is the Gift of the Founder! And the Founder has deemed fit to take it away from you in the middle of this duel. There can be no clearer sign than that! You are no longer fit to be the king of Albion!"
"That's impossible, you lie! You did something!" King Henry shouted and again tried to cast, only for the same thing to happen. It was like his mind shut off temporarily as soon as he tried to cast anything, and he woke up again to find his spell had failed.
"This duel goes to me by the will of the Founder! May the Founder find forgiveness for you in the next life, King Henry!"
With a swish of his wand, a streak of high pressure water formed in the air in front of Cromwell, then it whipped across the king's throat, then slashed again several times across his chest and waist.
The king stayed upright for only a moment, shock and bitterness plain on his face as blood spurted like a fountain from all the cut areas, before crumpling to the ground.
Seconds passed in silence as if the crowd couldn't comprehend the sudden conclusion to the duel.
Then someone started clapping, and like clockwork the rest took the cue and began to cheer. Except for the royal knights, who looked to be in despair.
Some mages went to check over the body of the king and confirmed that he was dead. Then the cheering continued unabated for nearly half an hour.
Many more men filed onto the castle grounds as the royalists fully surrendered, while the body of the king remained there in clear sight of all, as evidence of the duel.
Cromwell then addressed his troops.
"The war is finally over! Let it be known that we, Reconquista, have won by the clear will of the Founder!"
Then just as he opened his mouth to continue speaking, he stopped. "Hm?" He looked up slightly and gasped.
Then he bowed deeply. "You honor me with your presence, O' Founder!"
The troops looked around in confusion as nobody could see anything there.
"Of course, your will is my command!" Cromwell then got up and turned back to the body of the dead king. He knelt down and put his hands together, speaking a few prayers.
Then he held his hand out to the body and whispered something indiscernible.
Suddenly, the blood on the ground started flowing in reverse, going back into the king's body, and the wounds he had suffered rapidly regenerated.
Cromwell stood up and waited as the dead body came back to life.
There was a deafening silence as the onlookers watched the impossible happen before their eyes.
The former bishop-turned-revolutionary broke the silence with a loud and clear voice.
"King Henry, the Founder has decided that to atone for your sins, you can earn salvation by fighting on crusade to the Holy Land. As such, I have used the power of the Void given to me by the Founder, to resurrect you so that you may serve the Founder once more. Having witnessed the will of the Founder first hand in our duel, and now through the power of the Void, do you now understand the error of your ways and accept the Founder's very generous offer?"
The king looked at him for a moment, then looked at himself. He touched his throat in disbelief.
"I'm alive? That's impossible!"
"King Henry, you've said that many times today. But I must correct you, impossible things become quite possible when the Founder desires it be so."
"But you killed me! I was dead! I know I was dead! I saw things! I was on the other side!"
"So you were, but then, the power of the Void is a miraculous thing. More importantly, do you want to stay dead, and go back to the hell that awaits you? Or earn salvation by fighting in the name of the Founder?"
"I…" The king seemed to hesitate, looking around. The troops watched quietly, but more than a few of them seemed to be in awe. Even General Fairfax's eyes looked like they were popping out of their sockets and his hands were shaking on his horse saddle.
After a moment, the former king Henry seemed to make up his mind. "I understand. I accept. I shall join you and the Founder on this crusade. From this day forth, I am no longer the king of Albion, but just another soldier under your command, Regent."
"No, not Regent, Henry. The Founder has finally revealed His plan for me. Not only shall we crusade to take the Holy Land, Reconquista must unite all of Halkegenia to do so! When we attack the heathen elves, all those who believe in the Founder must come together as one! Nobles, commoners, it doesn't matter who they are, as long as they trust in the Founder!"
Cromwell gestured grandly with his hands.
"There shall no longer be separate kingdoms ruled by kings and queens squabbling for land and petty arguments among themselves! Instead, there shall be a single republic governed by a council of the most worthy and talented nobles, chosen by all the faithful of the Founder! Therefore, as the holy duty assigned to us by the Founder, we must spread the revolution to every corner of Halkegenia, and establish a single, holy, revolutionary empire of the Founder that shall last for ten thousand years! And it is my duty to lead us onward as the Emperor of the Republic of Holy Albion!"
"I—I see. Very well then, long live Emperor Cromwell of the Republic of Holy Albion!" The king was the first to kneel and bow.
Soon, the troops all began to kneel and bow.
"Long live the Emperor!"
"Long live the Emperor!"
A great fervor took hold of the crowd gathered as they screamed and cheered.
"Long live the Republic of Holy Albion!"
"Long live the Republic of Holy Albion!"
Again, and again, the cheering continued unabated.
"Long live the Emperor!"
"Long live the Revolution!"
"Long live the ten thousand year empire!"
Each time somebody came up with a new slogan, yet another wave of cheers erupted.
Cromwell smiled gleefully as he took in the moment of his complete and total victory.
Everything that he had worked for in the past years had finally borne fruit.
The first step toward a new era.
Then his head exploded into a shower of blood.
Simultaneously, the resurrected king Henry dropped like a puppet with his strings cut.
A black dot descended from the sky like a meteor while a blur of loud cracking and popping sounds could be heard.
Dragon Knights patrolling in the air fell down not even having had a glimpse of what killed them before they died, leaving their familiars to rage in confusion and sorrow.
General Fairfax quickly barked out orders for water mages to get to the newly proclaimed emperor and for his troops to form a protective perimeter.
But like the Dragon Knights, the men who tried to get near the wounded—dead?—emperor were struck by unknown means and dropped like flies.
"What the hell is attacking us?!" General Fairfax yelled out.
That question was soon answered as ten round white flying things that looked like large multi-legged metallic insects swooped down and unleashed a storm of bullets on the unprepared troops even as they dropped small objects which exploded only to release apparently nothing visible.
Some mages tried to counterattack but they flew far too fast and were too agile to be targeted effectively—or at all, as they found out.
By the time some of the mages realized they were getting shot by gunfire and could shield against it with wind spells, hundreds of men already lay dead on the ground.
The bullets were being fired at an impossible speed, as if each of the white flying things were an army unto themselves, the equivalent of a thousand men firing muskets all at once in every direction, with extreme precision better than even the greatest of veteran marksmen.
In the midst of the chaos, the falling black dot from the sky finally came into view then hit the ground with a tremendous impact next to where Cromwell lay prone in a mess of blood, revealing a black armored figure that the royal knights recognized.
A tiny cylindrical object dropped onto the ground. Shortly after, a flash of light and an intensely loud bang blinded and deafened everyone who was looking in that direction, hiding whatever the figure intended to do.
By the time their vision cleared, the black knight hovered in the air, looking down on the soldiers below, while the ten flying objects circled around him.
"Oliver Cromwell is dead!" The black knight announced in a booming voice.
"How dare you!" General Fairfox thundered, pointing his wand at the new enemy, fighting off nausea from seeing afterimages and phantom ringing in his ears. "Why have you done this?! Who are you?!"
The voice that rang out next was one that carried a strange weight, as if the words themselves were filled with power, and the sound echoed in the air.
"I AM VOIDSTARTER, DREAMBREAKER! I AM LIGHTBEARER, DARKBRINGER! I AM HE WHO SEES BEYOND! I AM MUURLETH, PRINCE OF DUALITY, LORD OF THE INFINITE!"
The newly named Muurleth then waved his hand towards the troops below. "And all of you will now obey me as the supreme authority of this land!"
"Ridiculous! You just killed the man ordained by the Founder to be our emperor! What makes you think we'd agree to bow down to you?! You should be executed for your crime!"
A deep rumbling chuckle reverberated in the air. "Executed? Why don't you give it a try then?"
"Gladly! Everyone, attack!"
With that, the general started to incant a spell, only to find himself unable to move, let alone wave his wand, before he promptly collapsed onto the ground, his muscles refusing to listen.
Numerous cries followed and his eyes roamed around to see every other soldier similarly fallen and struggling to move, some even making strange moaning and gurgling sounds as if their mouths couldn't move properly either.
"What's wrong, General? Weren't you going to attack? Execute me for my crimes?" The mocking voice of Muurleth reached his ears once more.
"What devilish magic is this?!" Fairfax shouted with outrage.
"Pathetic! Your deceased leader was no prophet! He was but a charlatan! Or do you think that this too, is the will of your God? That all of you are powerless against me now? Magic is the Gift of your Founder, is that not what Cromwell claimed? So where is your magic then? Where is your God that should smite me for the terrible sin of killing his messenger?"
Against the piercing words of Muurleth, Fairfax could find no response, and neither could his men.
He had thought to witness the power of the Founder's Void today, and he did witness it…or so he thought. But if Cromwell truly was blessed by the Founder, how could he have been killed so easily? How was it that this total unknown could come in and crush them all with barely any effort, and even seemingly inflicting the same condition on them that afflicted the former king of Albion during the duel against Cromwell?
Without their magic, without their wands, without being able to even move, they were powerless! Sure, some mages knew how to cast wandless magic, but purely mental magic casting was almost unheard of. Even the wandless, silent kind needed certain movements or other mediums to aid in casting.
"It seems you are finally starting to understand. Your God was a lie from the beginning, or it has abandoned you. Your leader was a fake and your cause was only the ambition of a man who used you for his own ends! The power of the Void? Resurrecting the dead? Nothing more than a trick, puppeteering a body without a soul that instantly failed as soon as the caster couldn't maintain the spell! All worthless in the face of true power!"
At his words, the attention of everyone went to the now obviously dead again King Henry of Albion. Although no injuries or blood reappeared on the body, that was all the more damning, for it meant that Muurleth had not simply killed him a second time.
"Now that your leaders are dead, and all of you are defeated, by the right of conquest, by your principle that magic is nobility and therefore the strongest magic is the most noble, I am your new ruler!"
With that, Muurleth flew down and landed in front of Fairfax.
Then he grabbed onto the general and lifted him up by his plated neck cuff in the air with one hand.
"And you will submit, or you will die!" The self-proclaimed strongest mage squeezed the armor plate, and Fairfax felt his throat getting constricted as the armor bent unnaturally under the incredible strength being exerted.
With his other hand, the black knight lifted the general's helmet and forcibly took it off, tossing it aside to reveal the aged grey-haired veteran underneath. He moved closer to the general's face until they could be mistaken for kissing from the wrong angle.
"What will it be, General?" The soft voice that spoke up close now was both mocking and insidious, with an airy, distorted nature that hinted at something distinctly inhuman behind the ominous black helmet and blazing red lights glaring out from what should have been eye holes.
The old veteran couldn't help but feel chills running down his whole body as he stared into those terrible, angry lights.
His back shook with a feeling he hadn't felt for a very, very long time.
Fear.
Of this strange being and its strange powers.
Of impossible things happening on this day that he never could've even imagined.
But most of all, of the sinister idea growing in his mind that perhaps…the Founder had truly abandoned them, for having believed in a false prophet and rebelling against the legitimate king of Albion, committing countless atrocities in their wake.
Why else would this "Muurleth" suddenly appear, with hundreds of mages, and even more commoner soldiers, rendered powerless in mere seconds under the strength of but a single, impossibly strong being?
The pressure on his throat relaxed, then the dark being asked again. "Your answer, then?"
With a hard swallow, the general said, "I…submit. Lord Muurleth."
"Louder, General. Let your men hear your decision, loud and clear!"
Fairfax gritted his teeth before he shouted. "I, General Thomas Fairfax, chief commander of the Reconquista armed forces, by the authority vested in me as the highest ranking officer after the death of the Lord Protector Cromwell, do unconditionally surrender and acknowledge that Lord Muurleth is the true, legitimate, ruler of all Albion! Long Live Emperor Muurleth!"
A dark chuckle escaped from Muurleth. "Very good, very good!" Then he—it—continued to laugh to the heavens even as it carelessly tossed the general on the ground again like worthless garbage.
"I will be back, General Fairfax. When I return, I expect you and your men to be ready for further orders. If there is any dissent in the rest of the kingdom, you would do well to quell it before I must take matters into my own hands."
Then Muurleth slowly hovered back into the air and turned around, apparently just leaving the rest of them there.
Fairfax cursed quietly and hoped that whatever spell Muurleth had ensnared them in would pass quickly, he had landed in an incredibly uncomfortable position and still couldn't move any of his muscles.
But if Muurleth was truly leaving them, perhaps there was yet hope…
Yes, Muurleth might've defeated his forces at the castle, but they still had a much larger army spread out occupying the whole kingdom, and most of the deaths in this battle by his guess looked to be of the commoner soldiers and demi-humans. For whatever reason, Muurleth seemed to avoid fatal damage to the mages, perhaps because he intended to use them as his army in the future.
All they had to do was regroup, muster the most elite forces, analyze the battle, and come up with a strategy. Why, they still had a grand fleet, the Lexington, and the most powerful cannons in the world. If they could just find the right opportunity, they could blast Muurleth into smithereens—
"Ah yes, before I forget," Muurleth came back down suddenly and hovered over Fairfax. "Make sure none of your subordinates get any funny ideas just because I'm not here."
Then he flew up and around and boomed in a loud voice. "Look closely and carefully, soldiers! I am a fair ruler, but unlike the weak former king of Albion, I can and will obliterate anyone who dares to challenge my rule! And, as the symbol of rebellion, the Lexington must be destroyed! Therefore, watch closely, and let all of Albion know, any who dare to raise the hand of rebellion again under my rule, shall meet the same fate. Behold!"
Then, he made a grasping gesture towards the Lexington in the distance which was floating in the air in formation at the head of ten other ships only a couple of kilometers outside the castle's outer perimeter. His hand slowly tightened into the shape of a fist, even as he spoke a guttural, deeply unnatural, incantation. "Ghaagznafar din talukgar!"
For a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then the unthinkable followed.
A streak of something tore through the sky faster than sound, too quick and too small to be visible—
A bright flash of light—
A thunderous boom and a tremendous shockwave—
General Fairfax and the other paralyzed soldiers could only watch in horror as an enormous fireball engulfed the entire capital ship and all of the ships near it. Burning debris fell out of the sky like a rain of meteors.
Even on the ground, at such a distance, they felt the gale winds created by the enormous explosion buffeting their faces.
"Burn this image into your minds, and know that I, Muurleth, now reign supreme in this land!"
With that, Muurleth finally flew away, leaving the soldiers to lament their fates.
As the minutes passed, not only the soldiers at the castle, but all the residents of Newcastle, the troops aboard the many other ships which had participated in the siege, and even people from other cities tens of kilometres away, all witnessed a sight that would be spoken of in terror for years to come.
As if leaving indisputable proof that the Lexington had been annihilated by Muurleth, a massive dark mushroom cloud formed in the aftermath of the explosion, towering high into the heavens, with a ring of smoke expanding horizontally outwards.
"Founder save us…!" Fairfax sobbed pitifully as he finally understood, that they simply couldn't—couldn't afford to—fight this demon.
O O O
A/N: In case it wasn't clear, MC took the Ring of Andvari when he released the flashbang.
"Father, will you deny me even now? Or am I just a mistake you'd rather forget?" Her voice was soft and filled with a palpable sorrow.
"What is—what is going on!? What have you done to her, Cromwell?!" The King shouted in anger and confusion.
Cromwell shook his head and gave the King a piteous look. "I have done nothing but do as the Founder commanded, to rescue her from the life of destitution you put her in. Tiffania may be born of blasphemy, but she nevertheless has the blood of Brimir flowing through her and is a princess of Albion. She ought to be treated as such, not abandoned and left to fend for herself with no guidance in Brimir's Gift and forced to live in conditions even commoners would be appalled at. The responsibility for the sin of her birth rests not with her, who had no choice in being born, but with you, King Henry, who chose willingly to lay with an elf."
Murmurs broke out among the onlookers and many calmed down after the initial shock of having an elf in their midst. On the side of Reconquista, most found the Lord Protector's logic reasonable, even if they still instinctively wanted to kill her on sight or flee in terror.
"Is that so? Is that how you feel too, Tiffania?" The King asked after he carefully turned his face blank.
"I don't hate you father. I hate what I am but I can learn to live with it. But as Lord Cromwell says, I don't wish to be hidden away anymore. The sins of the past can only be atoned for after accepting that they happened," said Tiffania.
"Haha…hahaha!" The King suddenly laughed, and he covered his face as the laughter became an uncontrollable, deranged laughter. Nobody understood what the King found hilarious about this situation.
"It seems he has gone mad," Cromwell said with an expression of disgust.
"CROMWELL!!!" The King roared thunderously. "Whatever lies you've fed her, at least you won't be able to keep it up after I cut off your tongue and take your head today! By the Founder, Tiffania your birth was not a sin! Your mother was a wonderful woman and I loved her with all my heart, just as I love you! Not all elves are our enemies! Many are peaceful and would rather put an end to the millennia of pointless conflict! They don't want to kill all humans, and why should we continue to fight and die to take back some mythical Holy Land without even a reason other than that the Founder said so thousands of years ago? How does anyone know if the Founder still wants us to do it after all these failures? Shouldn't he have delivered to us victory already if that's what he truly wanted?! I believe that none of our crusades have been successful because the Founder doesn't want us to win! He wants us to make peace!"
"So now you openly admit to being a heretic! Look closely men, this is the true face of your king!"
The faces of the Reconquista soldiers looked grim, and some disbelieving, as if they had only now understood the character of their king.
Cromwell continued, making grand gestures with his hands. "But fear not, the will of the Founder is with me! Today, He will deliver me victory in this duel, tomorrow, He will deliver us a glorious victory as we take back the Holy Land!"
Both men drew their wands while Tiffania quickly stepped back.
As according to the tradition of officiated dueling, a handkerchief was dropped by a 3rd person outside of the duelists' sight. Then, each of their chosen seconds shouted to begin when the handkerchief hit the ground.
The king moved swiftly and started casting a blast of wind at Cromwell, who instead of dodging like most mages, apparently cast some sort of counter spell that blocked and dispersed the incoming attack.
More wind blasts of increasing size and power were launched by the king, until it turned into a massive barrage of blasts. Although individually they were not particularly powerful, in sheer quantity and speed the king was outcasting most mages and would have made it impossible to dodge.
Cromwell continued to disperse the spells, then manifested a thin barrier of water in front of him. The barrier was not very solid and a hole appeared every time a blast hit, but it also regenerated just as fast so nothing got through it.
Then a vortex of air formed in front of the king, and it rapidly fired more of the air blasts without him having to continue to actively cast each one. Every blast reduced the size of the vortex slightly, so it would run out in a few moments.
The King, thinking that he held the advantage before Cromwell could find an opening to counterattack, decided to pull out his secret trump card.
"Pentagon"-class magic.
This was one of two techniques passed down exclusively in the royal houses of the Brimic kingdoms, which allowed for casting a spell comparable to Square-class magic without being able to stack four elements in the normal way.
The other was known as "Hexagon"-class magic, which achieved something similar but required two mages of Triangle class to pull off.
These techniques were an important reason the royal houses stayed in power even when they didn't always produce Square-class mages, allowing them to have an answer to direct magical challenges from the strongest of nobles.
With Pentagon magic, a royal mage could cast a delayed magic of Triangle class, by forming the first two elements but not completing the third, then casting a full Triangle class magic. The delayed spell could then be manipulated to combine with the full powered Triangle spell, with the fully formed three-element stack taking the place of the incomplete third element of the delayed spell structure.
Once combined, the resulting spell wouldn't be as powerful as a theoretical true five-element stack spell which was not known to be possible, but it would be comparable to a Square class spell in potency.
First the king reached into his robes and took out a vial of red liquid. It was his own blood, which was required as a medium to cast Pentagon magic. This was a key reason that Pentagon magic hadn't been exposed to the nobility as a whole and learned as a common technique. Aside from the secrecy, there was in fact a difference between the royal lineage and the other nobles, just as there was a natural born difference between nobles and commoners.
There was power in their blood, inherited from their ancestors and from Brimir himself. And like magic in general, the inherited strength of that power wasn't solely dependent on the inborn talent of their parents whom they inherited it from, but also from the magical strength of the parents at the moment they conceived the child.
This meant that if the royals did not actively practice and use the Pentagon and Hexagon magics, their descendants would find it harder to use them. Correspondingly, even if the royal line intermarried with powerful noble families and produced children who legally became part of the noble house instead of the royal house, the strength of the special royal power would fade dramatically within a few generations if they never learned how to use it, and so their descendants would be significantly weaker than the main royal line.
He shattered the vial with a strong grip and started incanting.
Soon all the mages present could feel the power thrumming in the air. An enormously powerful spell was about to be cast.
From King Henry's position, four miniature tornados began to form and spread out, surrounding Cromwell.
Static charge crackled in the air and yet Cromwell appeared unable to respond as he continued to block the relentless assault of air bullets.
Finally, the king started a new set of incantations and prepared to fully combine the Pentagon structure.
Suddenly he stopped mid-incantation and his face went slack for a moment. The tornados petered out as if the spell powering them lost cohesion.
When the king came back to his senses, he looked around in confusion while Cromwell smiled, walking forward as the air blasts had expired.
"What's wrong, King Henry? Was all that just for show? You had us all thinking you were about to cast a big spell," said Cromwell.
The king tried to incant another quick spell, but again his mind seemed to blank before Cromwell seemed much closer than before.
"Oh? It seems that your magic is failing, King Henry. I can see that you are casting, but nothing is happening," said Cromwell.
A wave of whispers broke out among the watching crowd.
"What, what is this?!" The King demanded while pointing his wand at Cromwell. "What did you do?!"
Cromwell shook his head and sighed. "King Henry, you still don't understand? Magic is the Gift of the Founder! And the Founder has deemed fit to take it away from you in the middle of this duel. There can be no clearer sign than that! You are no longer fit to be the king of Albion!"
"That's impossible, you lie! You did something!" King Henry shouted and again tried to cast, only for the same thing to happen. It was like his mind shut off temporarily as soon as he tried to cast anything, and he woke up again to find his spell had failed.
"This duel goes to me by the will of the Founder! May the Founder find forgiveness for you in the next life, King Henry!"
With a swish of his wand, a streak of high pressure water formed in the air in front of Cromwell, then it whipped across the king's throat, then slashed again several times across his chest and waist.
The king stayed upright for only a moment, shock and bitterness plain on his face as blood spurted like a fountain from all the cut areas, before crumpling to the ground.
Seconds passed in silence as if the crowd couldn't comprehend the sudden conclusion to the duel.
Then someone started clapping, and like clockwork the rest took the cue and began to cheer. Except for the royal knights, who looked to be in despair.
Some mages went to check over the body of the king and confirmed that he was dead. Then the cheering continued unabated for nearly half an hour.
Many more men filed onto the castle grounds as the royalists fully surrendered, while the body of the king remained there in clear sight of all, as evidence of the duel.
Cromwell then addressed his troops.
"The war is finally over! Let it be known that we, Reconquista, have won by the clear will of the Founder!"
Then just as he opened his mouth to continue speaking, he stopped. "Hm?" He looked up slightly and gasped.
Then he bowed deeply. "You honor me with your presence, O' Founder!"
The troops looked around in confusion as nobody could see anything there.
"Of course, your will is my command!" Cromwell then got up and turned back to the body of the dead king. He knelt down and put his hands together, speaking a few prayers.
Then he held his hand out to the body and whispered something indiscernible.
Suddenly, the blood on the ground started flowing in reverse, going back into the king's body, and the wounds he had suffered rapidly regenerated.
Cromwell stood up and waited as the dead body came back to life.
There was a deafening silence as the onlookers watched the impossible happen before their eyes.
The former bishop-turned-revolutionary broke the silence with a loud and clear voice.
"King Henry, the Founder has decided that to atone for your sins, you can earn salvation by fighting on crusade to the Holy Land. As such, I have used the power of the Void given to me by the Founder, to resurrect you so that you may serve the Founder once more. Having witnessed the will of the Founder first hand in our duel, and now through the power of the Void, do you now understand the error of your ways and accept the Founder's very generous offer?"
The king looked at him for a moment, then looked at himself. He touched his throat in disbelief.
"I'm alive? That's impossible!"
"King Henry, you've said that many times today. But I must correct you, impossible things become quite possible when the Founder desires it be so."
"But you killed me! I was dead! I know I was dead! I saw things! I was on the other side!"
"So you were, but then, the power of the Void is a miraculous thing. More importantly, do you want to stay dead, and go back to the hell that awaits you? Or earn salvation by fighting in the name of the Founder?"
"I…" The king seemed to hesitate, looking around. The troops watched quietly, but more than a few of them seemed to be in awe. Even General Fairfax's eyes looked like they were popping out of their sockets and his hands were shaking on his horse saddle.
After a moment, the former king Henry seemed to make up his mind. "I understand. I accept. I shall join you and the Founder on this crusade. From this day forth, I am no longer the king of Albion, but just another soldier under your command, Regent."
"No, not Regent, Henry. The Founder has finally revealed His plan for me. Not only shall we crusade to take the Holy Land, Reconquista must unite all of Halkegenia to do so! When we attack the heathen elves, all those who believe in the Founder must come together as one! Nobles, commoners, it doesn't matter who they are, as long as they trust in the Founder!"
Cromwell gestured grandly with his hands.
"There shall no longer be separate kingdoms ruled by kings and queens squabbling for land and petty arguments among themselves! Instead, there shall be a single republic governed by a council of the most worthy and talented nobles, chosen by all the faithful of the Founder! Therefore, as the holy duty assigned to us by the Founder, we must spread the revolution to every corner of Halkegenia, and establish a single, holy, revolutionary empire of the Founder that shall last for ten thousand years! And it is my duty to lead us onward as the Emperor of the Republic of Holy Albion!"
"I—I see. Very well then, long live Emperor Cromwell of the Republic of Holy Albion!" The king was the first to kneel and bow.
Soon, the troops all began to kneel and bow.
"Long live the Emperor!"
"Long live the Emperor!"
A great fervor took hold of the crowd gathered as they screamed and cheered.
"Long live the Republic of Holy Albion!"
"Long live the Republic of Holy Albion!"
Again, and again, the cheering continued unabated.
"Long live the Emperor!"
"Long live the Revolution!"
"Long live the ten thousand year empire!"
Each time somebody came up with a new slogan, yet another wave of cheers erupted.
Cromwell smiled gleefully as he took in the moment of his complete and total victory.
Everything that he had worked for in the past years had finally borne fruit.
The first step toward a new era.
Then his head exploded into a shower of blood.
Simultaneously, the resurrected king Henry dropped like a puppet with his strings cut.
A black dot descended from the sky like a meteor while a blur of loud cracking and popping sounds could be heard.
Dragon Knights patrolling in the air fell down not even having had a glimpse of what killed them before they died, leaving their familiars to rage in confusion and sorrow.
General Fairfax quickly barked out orders for water mages to get to the newly proclaimed emperor and for his troops to form a protective perimeter.
But like the Dragon Knights, the men who tried to get near the wounded—dead?—emperor were struck by unknown means and dropped like flies.
"What the hell is attacking us?!" General Fairfax yelled out.
That question was soon answered as ten round white flying things that looked like large multi-legged metallic insects swooped down and unleashed a storm of bullets on the unprepared troops even as they dropped small objects which exploded only to release apparently nothing visible.
Some mages tried to counterattack but they flew far too fast and were too agile to be targeted effectively—or at all, as they found out.
By the time some of the mages realized they were getting shot by gunfire and could shield against it with wind spells, hundreds of men already lay dead on the ground.
The bullets were being fired at an impossible speed, as if each of the white flying things were an army unto themselves, the equivalent of a thousand men firing muskets all at once in every direction, with extreme precision better than even the greatest of veteran marksmen.
In the midst of the chaos, the falling black dot from the sky finally came into view then hit the ground with a tremendous impact next to where Cromwell lay prone in a mess of blood, revealing a black armored figure that the royal knights recognized.
A tiny cylindrical object dropped onto the ground. Shortly after, a flash of light and an intensely loud bang blinded and deafened everyone who was looking in that direction, hiding whatever the figure intended to do.
By the time their vision cleared, the black knight hovered in the air, looking down on the soldiers below, while the ten flying objects circled around him.
"Oliver Cromwell is dead!" The black knight announced in a booming voice.
"How dare you!" General Fairfox thundered, pointing his wand at the new enemy, fighting off nausea from seeing afterimages and phantom ringing in his ears. "Why have you done this?! Who are you?!"
The voice that rang out next was one that carried a strange weight, as if the words themselves were filled with power, and the sound echoed in the air.
"I AM VOIDSTARTER, DREAMBREAKER! I AM LIGHTBEARER, DARKBRINGER! I AM HE WHO SEES BEYOND! I AM MUURLETH, PRINCE OF DUALITY, LORD OF THE INFINITE!"
The newly named Muurleth then waved his hand towards the troops below. "And all of you will now obey me as the supreme authority of this land!"
"Ridiculous! You just killed the man ordained by the Founder to be our emperor! What makes you think we'd agree to bow down to you?! You should be executed for your crime!"
A deep rumbling chuckle reverberated in the air. "Executed? Why don't you give it a try then?"
"Gladly! Everyone, attack!"
With that, the general started to incant a spell, only to find himself unable to move, let alone wave his wand, before he promptly collapsed onto the ground, his muscles refusing to listen.
Numerous cries followed and his eyes roamed around to see every other soldier similarly fallen and struggling to move, some even making strange moaning and gurgling sounds as if their mouths couldn't move properly either.
"What's wrong, General? Weren't you going to attack? Execute me for my crimes?" The mocking voice of Muurleth reached his ears once more.
"What devilish magic is this?!" Fairfax shouted with outrage.
"Pathetic! Your deceased leader was no prophet! He was but a charlatan! Or do you think that this too, is the will of your God? That all of you are powerless against me now? Magic is the Gift of your Founder, is that not what Cromwell claimed? So where is your magic then? Where is your God that should smite me for the terrible sin of killing his messenger?"
Against the piercing words of Muurleth, Fairfax could find no response, and neither could his men.
He had thought to witness the power of the Founder's Void today, and he did witness it…or so he thought. But if Cromwell truly was blessed by the Founder, how could he have been killed so easily? How was it that this total unknown could come in and crush them all with barely any effort, and even seemingly inflicting the same condition on them that afflicted the former king of Albion during the duel against Cromwell?
Without their magic, without their wands, without being able to even move, they were powerless! Sure, some mages knew how to cast wandless magic, but purely mental magic casting was almost unheard of. Even the wandless, silent kind needed certain movements or other mediums to aid in casting.
"It seems you are finally starting to understand. Your God was a lie from the beginning, or it has abandoned you. Your leader was a fake and your cause was only the ambition of a man who used you for his own ends! The power of the Void? Resurrecting the dead? Nothing more than a trick, puppeteering a body without a soul that instantly failed as soon as the caster couldn't maintain the spell! All worthless in the face of true power!"
At his words, the attention of everyone went to the now obviously dead again King Henry of Albion. Although no injuries or blood reappeared on the body, that was all the more damning, for it meant that Muurleth had not simply killed him a second time.
"Now that your leaders are dead, and all of you are defeated, by the right of conquest, by your principle that magic is nobility and therefore the strongest magic is the most noble, I am your new ruler!"
With that, Muurleth flew down and landed in front of Fairfax.
Then he grabbed onto the general and lifted him up by his plated neck cuff in the air with one hand.
"And you will submit, or you will die!" The self-proclaimed strongest mage squeezed the armor plate, and Fairfax felt his throat getting constricted as the armor bent unnaturally under the incredible strength being exerted.
With his other hand, the black knight lifted the general's helmet and forcibly took it off, tossing it aside to reveal the aged grey-haired veteran underneath. He moved closer to the general's face until they could be mistaken for kissing from the wrong angle.
"What will it be, General?" The soft voice that spoke up close now was both mocking and insidious, with an airy, distorted nature that hinted at something distinctly inhuman behind the ominous black helmet and blazing red lights glaring out from what should have been eye holes.
The old veteran couldn't help but feel chills running down his whole body as he stared into those terrible, angry lights.
His back shook with a feeling he hadn't felt for a very, very long time.
Fear.
Of this strange being and its strange powers.
Of impossible things happening on this day that he never could've even imagined.
But most of all, of the sinister idea growing in his mind that perhaps…the Founder had truly abandoned them, for having believed in a false prophet and rebelling against the legitimate king of Albion, committing countless atrocities in their wake.
Why else would this "Muurleth" suddenly appear, with hundreds of mages, and even more commoner soldiers, rendered powerless in mere seconds under the strength of but a single, impossibly strong being?
The pressure on his throat relaxed, then the dark being asked again. "Your answer, then?"
With a hard swallow, the general said, "I…submit. Lord Muurleth."
"Louder, General. Let your men hear your decision, loud and clear!"
Fairfax gritted his teeth before he shouted. "I, General Thomas Fairfax, chief commander of the Reconquista armed forces, by the authority vested in me as the highest ranking officer after the death of the Lord Protector Cromwell, do unconditionally surrender and acknowledge that Lord Muurleth is the true, legitimate, ruler of all Albion! Long Live Emperor Muurleth!"
A dark chuckle escaped from Muurleth. "Very good, very good!" Then he—it—continued to laugh to the heavens even as it carelessly tossed the general on the ground again like worthless garbage.
"I will be back, General Fairfax. When I return, I expect you and your men to be ready for further orders. If there is any dissent in the rest of the kingdom, you would do well to quell it before I must take matters into my own hands."
Then Muurleth slowly hovered back into the air and turned around, apparently just leaving the rest of them there.
Fairfax cursed quietly and hoped that whatever spell Muurleth had ensnared them in would pass quickly, he had landed in an incredibly uncomfortable position and still couldn't move any of his muscles.
But if Muurleth was truly leaving them, perhaps there was yet hope…
Yes, Muurleth might've defeated his forces at the castle, but they still had a much larger army spread out occupying the whole kingdom, and most of the deaths in this battle by his guess looked to be of the commoner soldiers and demi-humans. For whatever reason, Muurleth seemed to avoid fatal damage to the mages, perhaps because he intended to use them as his army in the future.
All they had to do was regroup, muster the most elite forces, analyze the battle, and come up with a strategy. Why, they still had a grand fleet, the Lexington, and the most powerful cannons in the world. If they could just find the right opportunity, they could blast Muurleth into smithereens—
"Ah yes, before I forget," Muurleth came back down suddenly and hovered over Fairfax. "Make sure none of your subordinates get any funny ideas just because I'm not here."
Then he flew up and around and boomed in a loud voice. "Look closely and carefully, soldiers! I am a fair ruler, but unlike the weak former king of Albion, I can and will obliterate anyone who dares to challenge my rule! And, as the symbol of rebellion, the Lexington must be destroyed! Therefore, watch closely, and let all of Albion know, any who dare to raise the hand of rebellion again under my rule, shall meet the same fate. Behold!"
Then, he made a grasping gesture towards the Lexington in the distance which was floating in the air in formation at the head of ten other ships only a couple of kilometers outside the castle's outer perimeter. His hand slowly tightened into the shape of a fist, even as he spoke a guttural, deeply unnatural, incantation. "Ghaagznafar din talukgar!"
For a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then the unthinkable followed.
A streak of something tore through the sky faster than sound, too quick and too small to be visible—
A bright flash of light—
A thunderous boom and a tremendous shockwave—
General Fairfax and the other paralyzed soldiers could only watch in horror as an enormous fireball engulfed the entire capital ship and all of the ships near it. Burning debris fell out of the sky like a rain of meteors.
Even on the ground, at such a distance, they felt the gale winds created by the enormous explosion buffeting their faces.
"Burn this image into your minds, and know that I, Muurleth, now reign supreme in this land!"
With that, Muurleth finally flew away, leaving the soldiers to lament their fates.
As the minutes passed, not only the soldiers at the castle, but all the residents of Newcastle, the troops aboard the many other ships which had participated in the siege, and even people from other cities tens of kilometres away, all witnessed a sight that would be spoken of in terror for years to come.
As if leaving indisputable proof that the Lexington had been annihilated by Muurleth, a massive dark mushroom cloud formed in the aftermath of the explosion, towering high into the heavens, with a ring of smoke expanding horizontally outwards.
"Founder save us…!" Fairfax sobbed pitifully as he finally understood, that they simply couldn't—couldn't afford to—fight this demon.
O O O
A/N: In case it wasn't clear, MC took the Ring of Andvari when he released the flashbang.
"I am really looking forward to the reign of our new Dark Emperor..."
"Shut up, you're drunk."
"Well, that too obviously! The King is dead. Lord Cromwell is dead. GOD IS DEAD! Or even worse, he just doesn't care and left us here to die. Let me at least have something!"
EDIT - No more half-measures, then. Looks like MC decided to shoot Subtlety in the head... and Cromwell too. In the end, a modern sniper rifle beats the range of a "Detect Evil" aura.
It would be interesting, watching the same events unfold from MC's point of view; the reasons he had, for escalating so quickly.
OTOH, I wonder... Maybe Tiffania will eventually become (sort of) what Amy/Amelia is to this timeline's version of Worm. Perhaps a kind of Dark Empress, with some "encouragement" from MC?
"The world hates you? Fuck the world. You don't owe them anything. For once, ask yourself: "What do I really want?" And know this: you have the power to make your desires become the new reality. Nothing can stop you from changing the world, if you really will it."
She does have the royal blood for it...
"Shut up, you're drunk."
"Well, that too obviously! The King is dead. Lord Cromwell is dead. GOD IS DEAD! Or even worse, he just doesn't care and left us here to die. Let me at least have something!"
EDIT - No more half-measures, then. Looks like MC decided to shoot Subtlety in the head... and Cromwell too. In the end, a modern sniper rifle beats the range of a "Detect Evil" aura.
It would be interesting, watching the same events unfold from MC's point of view; the reasons he had, for escalating so quickly.
OTOH, I wonder... Maybe Tiffania will eventually become (sort of) what Amy/Amelia is to this timeline's version of Worm. Perhaps a kind of Dark Empress, with some "encouragement" from MC?
"The world hates you? Fuck the world. You don't owe them anything. For once, ask yourself: "What do I really want?" And know this: you have the power to make your desires become the new reality. Nothing can stop you from changing the world, if you really will it."
She does have the royal blood for it...
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Wait but isn't Tiffania dead? correct me if I am wrong about this (I haven't slept in 25 hours) but wasn't there that whole orphanage murdered thing? or were they just kidnapped? my brain recalls that confrontation with Matilda pretty much dead and Tiffania dead or missing... and wasn't that just... what's her name? (Mind of God?) pretending to be Tiffy?
God my head hurts too much to look it up right away... but I'm like 82.73% positive that that's roughly what occurred here...
God my head hurts too much to look it up right away... but I'm like 82.73% positive that that's roughly what occurred here...
- Location
- New York
99% dead, but not yet confirmed... Mc probably will confirm it when the Elf that was just talking, keel over dead.
Yeah I assumed as such although on a side note, what do you think will be next? a MC point of view or a world reaction chapter? Personally hoping for the latter with the chapter following that being the MC point of view.
- Location
- New York
World reaction to what is effectively a man capable of leveling armies by himself. That and him being a super duper heretic that is now in control of a nation of heretics. Even Cromwell paid lip service to the Faith, not put it to the literal flames. Que ensuing panic and mass riots everywhere. Oh, and the Pope has to do something now.
I could do a reaction chapter, or have another combined MC POV/interlude section as in the past few. Which reactions do you think would be most interesting to see, if I did?
- Location
- New York
Pope, followed by the Germanian Emperor, then perhaps the ordinary peasants. When religious doctrine is fundamentally challenged and found wanting... well there's going to be some serious upheaval.
19 – Water Stone
19 – Water Stone
[Kaleidus]
After the battle at Newcastle, I retreated with the AAPV to a secluded spot to experiment in peace.
The Ring of Andvari was held in my hand. All along the flight, I could almost feel it calling out to me, waiting for a new master to take a hold of it. At the same time, it contradictorily felt cold and distant, as if it didn't want to show itself.
'Agate, stay alert. I'm going to try it on,' I thought.
'I'm with you, as always,' she thought back.
Through our mental link, Agate could take control of my nervous system and force me to take off the ring if this went badly.
'Remember I can't stop you from shutting me out though, now that you've got a magic circuit. If you get taken over and they figure out how to do it, I won't be able to do anything. Or a powerful enough magic might even take me over too.'
'You'll just have to be quick about it then. I trust you. You were made by Zelretch, after all. If something can take you over as well, then at least we lost to a worthy opponent.'
'OK! YOLO!' She conjured up the image of a V-sign.
Actually, I was quite wary of any potential traps. I could joke about it with Agate, but in reality, I was not ready to have my journey end here.
"Derflinger, you there?" I pulled him out of his sheath.
"Yeah. You gonna try that on?"
"I am. Is it safe?"
"Don't look at me. I'm no expert."
"Well, you've got more experience than me, at least. Any tips?"
"Try touching it to me."
I brought the ring to the flat of the blade. Derflinger hummed for a moment.
"Hoooly, this thing is actually a water stone! Haha, I take back what I said about the Water Spirit. There's no way she'll tell you anything!"
"What do you mean? What's a water stone anyway? Is it like the water version of wind stones?" I asked.
"Pretty much. There's stones for every element, except probably Void. Water's the rarest of them all though. Fire's second. Most people have probably never even heard of those two. Earth is relatively less common, but the nobles do use them. Wind stones can be found everywhere. I couldn't tell you why it's like that, but I can tell you that the rarer the stone, the more powerful it is. But you can tell already, can't you? The magic in this is on a different level from wind stones. And it's damn big too. You'd be lucky to find one the size of a grain of coarse sand, and the Water Spirit would fight you to hell and back for that, let alone a stone this big."
Looking closely at the ring, I could see the blue crystal on it was a pebble like round shape nearly a centimeter in diameter and half a centimeter thick. Compared to a grain of sand, it must have been at least a hundred times larger.
"Why is that? Why's it so important?"
"Because Great Spirits like her are born from a sufficiently large mass of smaller spirits and colossal amounts of magical energy. But before they become Great Spirits, the energy slowly accumulates over many thousands of years into these stones. So this thing is actually like a baby Great Water Spirit. It's not really alive or going to turn into a new Great Spirit anytime soon, especially out of water, but you get my point. If this belonged to the Water Spirit of Ragdorian Lake, she'll think of it as part of herself, so there's no way she'll tell you anything about how to use it. Remember that these stones are a limited resource. When it runs out of magic energy, it goes poof. She's not going to let that happen. You'd have a hard enough time convincing her to give up a single tear, which is also technically a part of her body, and this could be worth hundreds or even thousands of tears."
"That sounds pretty impressive. I assume the Water Spirit's tears are a rare reagent the nobles here use?" I did seem to remember something of the sort when Saito visited the Water Spirit in the story.
"Oh it's more than impressive. This really is a treasure beyond measure. I can't believe Myozunitonirun would even give it to somebody else. They must be a newbie, an idiot, or arrogant fool that thought they could take it back easily. I'd freely admit that this stone might well be more valuable than me. Heck, I'd trade me for one of these. Partner, you really lucked out on this one."
"So any idea how to use it? And there's no trap right?"
"No traps that I can see. Mind you, I already told you I'm not an expert. If there is a trap set by Myozunitonirun of all people, I probably can't find it anyway. As for using it, try to see if the spirits inside can help you out. There should be enough to at least understand you and do what you want, even if it won't be able to speak to you like I can."
"Alright then, I'm putting it on. If there is a trap, please use your ability to take over my body and remove it from my finger."
"Sure."
As one last precaution, I started cycling magical energy through my magic circuit.
Then I put the ring onto my left index finger.
As soon as I did so, I felt myself connect to an incomprehensibly great power.
I had the impression of an entire ocean being condensed onto my hand, but the impression soon faded into no more than a minor presence in the back of my mind.
'Doesn't look like it's doing anything to your mind yet,' Agate transmitted.
'But it is a little odd, isn't it, for it to have a presence in my mind at all? For example, Derflinger doesn't, and we have to actually talk out loud with him,' I thought back.
'That's true. I'll keep watching and try to find out what the connection is for,' said Agate.
I tried to send magical energy into it, hoping it would somehow give me an idea of how to use it or awaken some of the spirits Derflinger mentioned, but nothing happened. It rejected my energy and stayed stubbornly inert.
"Nothing's happening Derf. How am I supposed to ask spirits in it for help?"
"Dunno. Just will it?"
I did my best to 'will' the damn thing to activate or talk to me, but I couldn't feel anything different. Even if I focused in on its presence in my mind, no response came back.
Infuriatingly, after focusing on the presence for too long, it apparently retreated back into the ring.
"O spirits of water, please lend me your power!" I said.
Then I tried a few different languages and variations but, again, there was nothing.
Finally, I tried the words that Cromwell uttered when he erected the protective ward.
Still nothing.
Agate spoke up then, and phased out of her position in the Armoriont. "When the elves use spirit magic, they have to make some kind of contract with the spirits, right?"
"That sounds about right, yeah," Derflinger responded.
"But you don't know how they do the contract?"
"I probably do, I just can't remember. Haven't been owned by an elf for a few hundred years, I think."
"We have some contract spells of our own. Why don't you try that, Kaleidus? Let's modify a familiar contract spell, using the one you have me with as a base," she said aloud, so Derflinger could hear it.
"That's not a bad idea," I said.
"There's one nice thing about having a stone like this. You can skip the part where you have to summon strong enough spirits to you, because they're already in the stone," said Derflinger.
"Do windstones have spirits too?"
"Technically, yes, but they're too weak and dumb to do spirit magic with. To find any that are good enough, you'd need to go a lot deeper into the windstone deposits. The ones you're carrying definitely don't have any you can use."
Without further ado, we got to work on devising the spell.
It took almost three days of non-stop experimentation, aside from sleep, before we successfully contracted the spirits of the water stone.
When we did, a whole new world of possibilities opened to me.
The ring didn't actually come with any built-in spells, nor could the spirits cast any automatically without my will directing it. But I was already used to trying to invent spells with Agate, and I had some idea of what the ring was capable of.
It would only be a matter of time before I mastered it.
The only drawback was…
These spirits had a will of their own. They weren't exactly intelligent, but they definitely had some kind of instinct—one that aggressively urged me to protect the stone, and protested against anything that would exhaust the power of the stone and make it smaller. And because it had a will, if it became angry it would refuse to do anything for me.
It constantly tried to pull me towards large nodes of water elemental energy, such as lakes, where it could slowly—excruciatingly slowly—recover its power. So slow that it seemed almost meaningless to make the effort, as neither Agate nor I could not tell the difference in it after hours of waiting, but it did make the spirits happier.
For their help in casting magic, these spirits demanded a price on every use of the water stone. The preferred one was to give them a net gain of water elemental energy, which was not possible for me. According to Derflinger, the elves had a method of artificially creating windstones, so they might know how to do something like that, but he'd never heard of them creating the other types of element stones. He thought it was simply too hard to gather the requisite energy for the other elements.
The alternative price was vital energy and life force, and the drain was proportional to the great power of the stone. That would be scary for anybody else, and I imagined that Cromwell had traded many years of his lifespan to use the ring.
Fortunately, I had plenty of that to spare because of my unique biology and could regenerate it indefinitely. As long as I didn't overtax myself within a short time period, I could recover by consuming enough nutrition with the help of the Bionanite Swarm and Armoriont, and suffer no long-term consequences.
Sadly, vital energy was not the same as water elemental energy, so the water stone would still shrink over time. It was unclear what the spirits needed this vital energy for, but it wasn't unique to these spirits. Derflinger told us that all spirits except artificial ones like him generally accepted vital energy as payment for spirit magic contracts.
So I called it a contract, but it was a rather loose pact rather than a contract with clear terms and conditions. It wasn't as though the spirits could understand legalese, even the magical kind, if I wanted to establish terms. I give them some energy, the spirits would help me if they felt like it, and that was that.
'You should break the ring!' Agate thought to me.
'What? Why?'
'So you can take the water stone out and put it in the Armoriont. The ring itself doesn't do anything. That way it'll be harder to steal.'
After thinking about it for a bit, that made a lot of sense, so I did as Agate suggested.
It was actually quite hard thanks to the amount of Mystery on it, but Derflinger was sufficiently powered up to cut it.
I kept the silver ring band for future use because it had decent Mystery thanks to being pretty ancient.
As for the water stone, I went a step further and implanted it directly into my body instead. My bionanite swarm used the Armoriont to grow a new organ beside my heart to hold and integrate the stone within the circulatory system.
At the end of the day, the Armoriont was also something that could be detached, even if it was more or less a layer of my body now. So putting the stone in my actual inner body was even better.
In fact, there might even be a benefit to integrating it with my body. The water stone was a very powerful natural nexus of water elemental energy. You could say that it "breathed" water elemental energy like humans breathed air.
It was a process that went both ways, absorbing water energy from outside, and releasing it back. And because the human body was made of 70% water, and it was directly connected to my bloodstream, I hoped that by osmosis, I might eventually gain a personal affinity to water, or just gain Mystery quickly as well. The stone was even older than the ring band.
To an extent, windstones did this "breathing" too, but they weren't so much nexuses as mere deposits of mana, the density being too low, and they tended to dissipate in the open air instead of drawing in more energy in a sustainable fashion.
Finally, there was the fact that if there existed a hidden trap, it was more likely to be on the ring than the stone. The ring was after all, artificial, while the stone was a natural thing that also had spirits protecting it. It was also more likely to activate while worn as a ring because that's what you'd expect people to do with rings.
Now that it was implanted, I just had to drink a lot more water and absorb a lot more moisture from the air to compensate for the stone's thirst.
With that done, it was time to consolidate my control over Albion.
O O O
By the time I made contact with General Fairfax again, he had successfully taken control of the main fleet and the majority of Reconquista's forces.
I could tell that he did not like what he had done, and he only stayed 'loyal' to my cause out of fear. Nevertheless, he was a competent military man, and even with Agate I found no evidence of him conspiring against me, so I had nothing to complain about. Perhaps, eventually, I could persuade him that serving me was not such a bad thing.
He moved efficiently to capture Londinium first, which was taken essentially unopposed, bringing the court nobles under control.
A number of nobles elsewhere unsurprisingly refused to submit immediately, so the civil war continued for a few days.
However, resistance was weak and with a few more appearances by Muurleth and judicious use of non-nuclear explosives and chemical weapons, any overt opposition was quickly crushed. In some ways, the resistance worked to my advantage, because crushing these nobles militarily would allow me to force through more reforms to centralize state power, and it would be seen as less tyrannical to do this during a power struggle than to start a fight during peacetime.
However, despite the novelty of ruling a country, I had no real interest in administering it. Prior to finding out that Cromwell could protect himself from spying, my plan was to steal the ring in secret, then use it to control Cromwell, and by extension, the whole of Albion, from the shadows.
This was because the glamour and prestige of ruling meant nothing to somebody like me, who could travel the planes at will. I wasn't going to live out my life here. I was only interested in the material benefits that ruling a kingdom could give me.
The most important benefit was the army of mages under Reconquista's control. There were lots of things which would be more efficiently done through the use of subordinates than for me to deal with in person.
Things like the long-term research of the nobles' magic and spirit magic. Not only could the mages do the research for me, they were also a readily available source of experimental specimens. Of course, I wasn't a comically evil magus, so I wouldn't be using my own subordinates as experimental subjects. Good management rewarded loyal and competent subordinates after all. But the criminals and enemies of the state who rebelled against my rule would have no such protections.
To inspire loyalty, I picked a few of the top mages like General Fairfax and persuaded them to commit to Geas oaths. I found out unfortunately that the stronger the magic they had, the weaker the compulsion of the Geas on them, and Triangle class mages and above could basically completely ignore it. I couldn't even keep them immobilized or force an involuntary action for an instant, unlike with Saito or the people back on Worm. Still, I did it, if only for the psychological effect.
Another important consideration was the wind stone mining operations in Albion. This was a massive source of magical resources that may prove useful to me in other planes. It still had to be confirmed once I plane shifted, but considering that magical energies and magic circuits seemed to work on Worm just fine, I figured that a crystallization of mana would have a good chance of still being useful as well.
While I could extract it myself, it was clearly more efficient to simply take the refined stones from Albion's existing operations whenever I needed more. They even had techniques for extracting, refining, and using it that I wouldn't need to otherwise steal or re-invent.
The same concept applied to recharging Derflinger. With an army at my command, I could simply order a bunch of mages to attack me in a "military readiness exercise" or some such nonsense and quickly charge him up.
Finally, it's never a bad idea to set up more power bases in case anything happened to my other ones, which were all concentrated on Worm at the moment.
It would be even better if eventually, through the Shaitan's Gate connection to Saito's Earth, I could acquire modern tech supplies and magical supplies, with only one plane shift instead of two.
At the site of the battle, nuclear fallout unfortunately contaminated some of the area and caused radiation sickness in the residents of Newcastle. The nobles were mostly fine as the water mages healed the symptoms, but many commoners had already died.
The nuclear missile launched by the AAPV that I pretended was a spell had been manufactured on Worm's Earth M2 base by Offensive Bias in conjunction with Bakuda. Similar to our highly advanced nuclear energy tech, the weaponized version was also quite advanced. Due to the very limited size of the AAPV, it was necessary to maximize energy density and yield to weight ratios on all our weapons, so nuclear was an ideal fit.
The missile we detonated was only about 5 kilotons, weighing in at just 12kg. That was one-third the yield of the first nuclear bomb ever detonated on Earth, but a hundred times smaller, achieving a yield-to-weight ratio near that of the highest ratio ever recorded. If we made a larger bomb, we could actually exceed the previously thought theoretical maximum for thermonuclear devices at 6 megatons per ton, but miniaturization to this level and converting to a missile was a substantially more difficult task, resulting in a worse ratio.
We had made adjustments to minimize nuclear fallout and concentrate direct explosive power, but in the end, eliminating radiation simply wasn't possible without a major technological breakthrough, one which we never achieved.
Nevertheless, I was happy with the result. Some ships and mages had to be sacrificed, but it was worth it to cement my control and reputation.
Aside from control of the military, I devised a new religion centred on Muurleth. In the short-term, there would be great chaos and resistance, but in the long-run, I could not expect to maintain control during long periods of absence off plane without some extraordinary methods. While fear was still fresh and strong, now was the best time to make religious reforms.
Equally important was the fact that by making Muurleth out to be a god instead of a mortal man, it would give a sense of familiarity when I gave a mortal king the divine right to rule. Rather than being a faceless person taking over the kingdom, it would seem as though they had merely changed religions. And if Brimir gave the nobles magic, Muurleth would give them knowledge. Considering that Brimir wasn't around to give any more divine gifts or do much of anything visible for the people, wouldn't many people find the enlightened Muurletheism more appealing?
The only problem was the inevitable conflict with the existing Church. I didn't want the kingdom to get embroiled in any pointless foreign conflicts, especially not when I was away and unable to provide support, so I'd have to find a way to stave off any crusades coming our way.
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
[Agate]
It was supposed to be my chance to shine but I was totally defeated before I could do anything!
But now the Ring of Andvari has been broken apart! Hahaha, revenge is mine!
Since Kaleidus is busy with politics and other boring stuff, I'm in charge of our magic research.
There's so much to do!
We know the water stone is capable of many incredible things. But Cromwell, a natural water mage, had years to figure them out and Myozunitonirun to help.
We have to start smaller and decide what to focus on. Many of the more complex spells like mind control, anti-scrying, and resurrection that we saw Cromwell using might need to have more basic skills mastered first. For example, the resurrection spell also healed the body, and that kind of healing is already an advanced water magic.
Each time we use the water stone even in training, it will use up the energy inside.
So let's get to work on…(choose 2)
[] Physical Water Manipulation (macroscopic)
[] Physical Water Manipulation (microscopic)
[] Healing Physical Injuries
[] Healing Diseases
[] Mental Influence
[] Warding
[] Corpse Reanimation
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
A/N: The MC POV portion took much longer than I expected, and it is quite important so the reactions will have to wait until next chapter.
The magic training will happen in the background, until the next training vote. Choosing the area to train in doesn't guarantee any results, but Agate will comment on the progress as it happens.
Important Note: I think the forum has changed since the last vote. There's an "Open voting" button and I'm not sure what it does, but I checked it. Who can tell me how this works?
[Kaleidus]
After the battle at Newcastle, I retreated with the AAPV to a secluded spot to experiment in peace.
The Ring of Andvari was held in my hand. All along the flight, I could almost feel it calling out to me, waiting for a new master to take a hold of it. At the same time, it contradictorily felt cold and distant, as if it didn't want to show itself.
'Agate, stay alert. I'm going to try it on,' I thought.
'I'm with you, as always,' she thought back.
Through our mental link, Agate could take control of my nervous system and force me to take off the ring if this went badly.
'Remember I can't stop you from shutting me out though, now that you've got a magic circuit. If you get taken over and they figure out how to do it, I won't be able to do anything. Or a powerful enough magic might even take me over too.'
'You'll just have to be quick about it then. I trust you. You were made by Zelretch, after all. If something can take you over as well, then at least we lost to a worthy opponent.'
'OK! YOLO!' She conjured up the image of a V-sign.
Actually, I was quite wary of any potential traps. I could joke about it with Agate, but in reality, I was not ready to have my journey end here.
"Derflinger, you there?" I pulled him out of his sheath.
"Yeah. You gonna try that on?"
"I am. Is it safe?"
"Don't look at me. I'm no expert."
"Well, you've got more experience than me, at least. Any tips?"
"Try touching it to me."
I brought the ring to the flat of the blade. Derflinger hummed for a moment.
"Hoooly, this thing is actually a water stone! Haha, I take back what I said about the Water Spirit. There's no way she'll tell you anything!"
"What do you mean? What's a water stone anyway? Is it like the water version of wind stones?" I asked.
"Pretty much. There's stones for every element, except probably Void. Water's the rarest of them all though. Fire's second. Most people have probably never even heard of those two. Earth is relatively less common, but the nobles do use them. Wind stones can be found everywhere. I couldn't tell you why it's like that, but I can tell you that the rarer the stone, the more powerful it is. But you can tell already, can't you? The magic in this is on a different level from wind stones. And it's damn big too. You'd be lucky to find one the size of a grain of coarse sand, and the Water Spirit would fight you to hell and back for that, let alone a stone this big."
Looking closely at the ring, I could see the blue crystal on it was a pebble like round shape nearly a centimeter in diameter and half a centimeter thick. Compared to a grain of sand, it must have been at least a hundred times larger.
"Why is that? Why's it so important?"
"Because Great Spirits like her are born from a sufficiently large mass of smaller spirits and colossal amounts of magical energy. But before they become Great Spirits, the energy slowly accumulates over many thousands of years into these stones. So this thing is actually like a baby Great Water Spirit. It's not really alive or going to turn into a new Great Spirit anytime soon, especially out of water, but you get my point. If this belonged to the Water Spirit of Ragdorian Lake, she'll think of it as part of herself, so there's no way she'll tell you anything about how to use it. Remember that these stones are a limited resource. When it runs out of magic energy, it goes poof. She's not going to let that happen. You'd have a hard enough time convincing her to give up a single tear, which is also technically a part of her body, and this could be worth hundreds or even thousands of tears."
"That sounds pretty impressive. I assume the Water Spirit's tears are a rare reagent the nobles here use?" I did seem to remember something of the sort when Saito visited the Water Spirit in the story.
"Oh it's more than impressive. This really is a treasure beyond measure. I can't believe Myozunitonirun would even give it to somebody else. They must be a newbie, an idiot, or arrogant fool that thought they could take it back easily. I'd freely admit that this stone might well be more valuable than me. Heck, I'd trade me for one of these. Partner, you really lucked out on this one."
"So any idea how to use it? And there's no trap right?"
"No traps that I can see. Mind you, I already told you I'm not an expert. If there is a trap set by Myozunitonirun of all people, I probably can't find it anyway. As for using it, try to see if the spirits inside can help you out. There should be enough to at least understand you and do what you want, even if it won't be able to speak to you like I can."
"Alright then, I'm putting it on. If there is a trap, please use your ability to take over my body and remove it from my finger."
"Sure."
As one last precaution, I started cycling magical energy through my magic circuit.
Then I put the ring onto my left index finger.
As soon as I did so, I felt myself connect to an incomprehensibly great power.
I had the impression of an entire ocean being condensed onto my hand, but the impression soon faded into no more than a minor presence in the back of my mind.
'Doesn't look like it's doing anything to your mind yet,' Agate transmitted.
'But it is a little odd, isn't it, for it to have a presence in my mind at all? For example, Derflinger doesn't, and we have to actually talk out loud with him,' I thought back.
'That's true. I'll keep watching and try to find out what the connection is for,' said Agate.
I tried to send magical energy into it, hoping it would somehow give me an idea of how to use it or awaken some of the spirits Derflinger mentioned, but nothing happened. It rejected my energy and stayed stubbornly inert.
"Nothing's happening Derf. How am I supposed to ask spirits in it for help?"
"Dunno. Just will it?"
I did my best to 'will' the damn thing to activate or talk to me, but I couldn't feel anything different. Even if I focused in on its presence in my mind, no response came back.
Infuriatingly, after focusing on the presence for too long, it apparently retreated back into the ring.
"O spirits of water, please lend me your power!" I said.
Then I tried a few different languages and variations but, again, there was nothing.
Finally, I tried the words that Cromwell uttered when he erected the protective ward.
Still nothing.
Agate spoke up then, and phased out of her position in the Armoriont. "When the elves use spirit magic, they have to make some kind of contract with the spirits, right?"
"That sounds about right, yeah," Derflinger responded.
"But you don't know how they do the contract?"
"I probably do, I just can't remember. Haven't been owned by an elf for a few hundred years, I think."
"We have some contract spells of our own. Why don't you try that, Kaleidus? Let's modify a familiar contract spell, using the one you have me with as a base," she said aloud, so Derflinger could hear it.
"That's not a bad idea," I said.
"There's one nice thing about having a stone like this. You can skip the part where you have to summon strong enough spirits to you, because they're already in the stone," said Derflinger.
"Do windstones have spirits too?"
"Technically, yes, but they're too weak and dumb to do spirit magic with. To find any that are good enough, you'd need to go a lot deeper into the windstone deposits. The ones you're carrying definitely don't have any you can use."
Without further ado, we got to work on devising the spell.
It took almost three days of non-stop experimentation, aside from sleep, before we successfully contracted the spirits of the water stone.
When we did, a whole new world of possibilities opened to me.
The ring didn't actually come with any built-in spells, nor could the spirits cast any automatically without my will directing it. But I was already used to trying to invent spells with Agate, and I had some idea of what the ring was capable of.
It would only be a matter of time before I mastered it.
The only drawback was…
These spirits had a will of their own. They weren't exactly intelligent, but they definitely had some kind of instinct—one that aggressively urged me to protect the stone, and protested against anything that would exhaust the power of the stone and make it smaller. And because it had a will, if it became angry it would refuse to do anything for me.
It constantly tried to pull me towards large nodes of water elemental energy, such as lakes, where it could slowly—excruciatingly slowly—recover its power. So slow that it seemed almost meaningless to make the effort, as neither Agate nor I could not tell the difference in it after hours of waiting, but it did make the spirits happier.
For their help in casting magic, these spirits demanded a price on every use of the water stone. The preferred one was to give them a net gain of water elemental energy, which was not possible for me. According to Derflinger, the elves had a method of artificially creating windstones, so they might know how to do something like that, but he'd never heard of them creating the other types of element stones. He thought it was simply too hard to gather the requisite energy for the other elements.
The alternative price was vital energy and life force, and the drain was proportional to the great power of the stone. That would be scary for anybody else, and I imagined that Cromwell had traded many years of his lifespan to use the ring.
Fortunately, I had plenty of that to spare because of my unique biology and could regenerate it indefinitely. As long as I didn't overtax myself within a short time period, I could recover by consuming enough nutrition with the help of the Bionanite Swarm and Armoriont, and suffer no long-term consequences.
Sadly, vital energy was not the same as water elemental energy, so the water stone would still shrink over time. It was unclear what the spirits needed this vital energy for, but it wasn't unique to these spirits. Derflinger told us that all spirits except artificial ones like him generally accepted vital energy as payment for spirit magic contracts.
So I called it a contract, but it was a rather loose pact rather than a contract with clear terms and conditions. It wasn't as though the spirits could understand legalese, even the magical kind, if I wanted to establish terms. I give them some energy, the spirits would help me if they felt like it, and that was that.
'You should break the ring!' Agate thought to me.
'What? Why?'
'So you can take the water stone out and put it in the Armoriont. The ring itself doesn't do anything. That way it'll be harder to steal.'
After thinking about it for a bit, that made a lot of sense, so I did as Agate suggested.
It was actually quite hard thanks to the amount of Mystery on it, but Derflinger was sufficiently powered up to cut it.
I kept the silver ring band for future use because it had decent Mystery thanks to being pretty ancient.
As for the water stone, I went a step further and implanted it directly into my body instead. My bionanite swarm used the Armoriont to grow a new organ beside my heart to hold and integrate the stone within the circulatory system.
At the end of the day, the Armoriont was also something that could be detached, even if it was more or less a layer of my body now. So putting the stone in my actual inner body was even better.
In fact, there might even be a benefit to integrating it with my body. The water stone was a very powerful natural nexus of water elemental energy. You could say that it "breathed" water elemental energy like humans breathed air.
It was a process that went both ways, absorbing water energy from outside, and releasing it back. And because the human body was made of 70% water, and it was directly connected to my bloodstream, I hoped that by osmosis, I might eventually gain a personal affinity to water, or just gain Mystery quickly as well. The stone was even older than the ring band.
To an extent, windstones did this "breathing" too, but they weren't so much nexuses as mere deposits of mana, the density being too low, and they tended to dissipate in the open air instead of drawing in more energy in a sustainable fashion.
Finally, there was the fact that if there existed a hidden trap, it was more likely to be on the ring than the stone. The ring was after all, artificial, while the stone was a natural thing that also had spirits protecting it. It was also more likely to activate while worn as a ring because that's what you'd expect people to do with rings.
Now that it was implanted, I just had to drink a lot more water and absorb a lot more moisture from the air to compensate for the stone's thirst.
With that done, it was time to consolidate my control over Albion.
O O O
By the time I made contact with General Fairfax again, he had successfully taken control of the main fleet and the majority of Reconquista's forces.
I could tell that he did not like what he had done, and he only stayed 'loyal' to my cause out of fear. Nevertheless, he was a competent military man, and even with Agate I found no evidence of him conspiring against me, so I had nothing to complain about. Perhaps, eventually, I could persuade him that serving me was not such a bad thing.
He moved efficiently to capture Londinium first, which was taken essentially unopposed, bringing the court nobles under control.
A number of nobles elsewhere unsurprisingly refused to submit immediately, so the civil war continued for a few days.
However, resistance was weak and with a few more appearances by Muurleth and judicious use of non-nuclear explosives and chemical weapons, any overt opposition was quickly crushed. In some ways, the resistance worked to my advantage, because crushing these nobles militarily would allow me to force through more reforms to centralize state power, and it would be seen as less tyrannical to do this during a power struggle than to start a fight during peacetime.
However, despite the novelty of ruling a country, I had no real interest in administering it. Prior to finding out that Cromwell could protect himself from spying, my plan was to steal the ring in secret, then use it to control Cromwell, and by extension, the whole of Albion, from the shadows.
This was because the glamour and prestige of ruling meant nothing to somebody like me, who could travel the planes at will. I wasn't going to live out my life here. I was only interested in the material benefits that ruling a kingdom could give me.
The most important benefit was the army of mages under Reconquista's control. There were lots of things which would be more efficiently done through the use of subordinates than for me to deal with in person.
Things like the long-term research of the nobles' magic and spirit magic. Not only could the mages do the research for me, they were also a readily available source of experimental specimens. Of course, I wasn't a comically evil magus, so I wouldn't be using my own subordinates as experimental subjects. Good management rewarded loyal and competent subordinates after all. But the criminals and enemies of the state who rebelled against my rule would have no such protections.
To inspire loyalty, I picked a few of the top mages like General Fairfax and persuaded them to commit to Geas oaths. I found out unfortunately that the stronger the magic they had, the weaker the compulsion of the Geas on them, and Triangle class mages and above could basically completely ignore it. I couldn't even keep them immobilized or force an involuntary action for an instant, unlike with Saito or the people back on Worm. Still, I did it, if only for the psychological effect.
Another important consideration was the wind stone mining operations in Albion. This was a massive source of magical resources that may prove useful to me in other planes. It still had to be confirmed once I plane shifted, but considering that magical energies and magic circuits seemed to work on Worm just fine, I figured that a crystallization of mana would have a good chance of still being useful as well.
While I could extract it myself, it was clearly more efficient to simply take the refined stones from Albion's existing operations whenever I needed more. They even had techniques for extracting, refining, and using it that I wouldn't need to otherwise steal or re-invent.
The same concept applied to recharging Derflinger. With an army at my command, I could simply order a bunch of mages to attack me in a "military readiness exercise" or some such nonsense and quickly charge him up.
Finally, it's never a bad idea to set up more power bases in case anything happened to my other ones, which were all concentrated on Worm at the moment.
It would be even better if eventually, through the Shaitan's Gate connection to Saito's Earth, I could acquire modern tech supplies and magical supplies, with only one plane shift instead of two.
At the site of the battle, nuclear fallout unfortunately contaminated some of the area and caused radiation sickness in the residents of Newcastle. The nobles were mostly fine as the water mages healed the symptoms, but many commoners had already died.
The nuclear missile launched by the AAPV that I pretended was a spell had been manufactured on Worm's Earth M2 base by Offensive Bias in conjunction with Bakuda. Similar to our highly advanced nuclear energy tech, the weaponized version was also quite advanced. Due to the very limited size of the AAPV, it was necessary to maximize energy density and yield to weight ratios on all our weapons, so nuclear was an ideal fit.
The missile we detonated was only about 5 kilotons, weighing in at just 12kg. That was one-third the yield of the first nuclear bomb ever detonated on Earth, but a hundred times smaller, achieving a yield-to-weight ratio near that of the highest ratio ever recorded. If we made a larger bomb, we could actually exceed the previously thought theoretical maximum for thermonuclear devices at 6 megatons per ton, but miniaturization to this level and converting to a missile was a substantially more difficult task, resulting in a worse ratio.
We had made adjustments to minimize nuclear fallout and concentrate direct explosive power, but in the end, eliminating radiation simply wasn't possible without a major technological breakthrough, one which we never achieved.
Nevertheless, I was happy with the result. Some ships and mages had to be sacrificed, but it was worth it to cement my control and reputation.
Aside from control of the military, I devised a new religion centred on Muurleth. In the short-term, there would be great chaos and resistance, but in the long-run, I could not expect to maintain control during long periods of absence off plane without some extraordinary methods. While fear was still fresh and strong, now was the best time to make religious reforms.
Equally important was the fact that by making Muurleth out to be a god instead of a mortal man, it would give a sense of familiarity when I gave a mortal king the divine right to rule. Rather than being a faceless person taking over the kingdom, it would seem as though they had merely changed religions. And if Brimir gave the nobles magic, Muurleth would give them knowledge. Considering that Brimir wasn't around to give any more divine gifts or do much of anything visible for the people, wouldn't many people find the enlightened Muurletheism more appealing?
The only problem was the inevitable conflict with the existing Church. I didn't want the kingdom to get embroiled in any pointless foreign conflicts, especially not when I was away and unable to provide support, so I'd have to find a way to stave off any crusades coming our way.
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
[Agate]
It was supposed to be my chance to shine but I was totally defeated before I could do anything!
But now the Ring of Andvari has been broken apart! Hahaha, revenge is mine!
Since Kaleidus is busy with politics and other boring stuff, I'm in charge of our magic research.
There's so much to do!
We know the water stone is capable of many incredible things. But Cromwell, a natural water mage, had years to figure them out and Myozunitonirun to help.
We have to start smaller and decide what to focus on. Many of the more complex spells like mind control, anti-scrying, and resurrection that we saw Cromwell using might need to have more basic skills mastered first. For example, the resurrection spell also healed the body, and that kind of healing is already an advanced water magic.
Each time we use the water stone even in training, it will use up the energy inside.
So let's get to work on…(choose 2)
[] Physical Water Manipulation (macroscopic)
[] Physical Water Manipulation (microscopic)
[] Healing Physical Injuries
[] Healing Diseases
[] Mental Influence
[] Warding
[] Corpse Reanimation
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
A/N: The MC POV portion took much longer than I expected, and it is quite important so the reactions will have to wait until next chapter.
The magic training will happen in the background, until the next training vote. Choosing the area to train in doesn't guarantee any results, but Agate will comment on the progress as it happens.
Important Note: I think the forum has changed since the last vote. There's an "Open voting" button and I'm not sure what it does, but I checked it. Who can tell me how this works?
Alright, so lets consider these options one at a time, though as a reminder, we are suggesting 2 to focus on.
[] Physical Water Manipulation (macroscopic) - So, This one is probably the closest to the standard Water Magic Mages in setting can use. While this isn't quite worthless, at the moment, MC has no real need for it. The only argument I can consider for choosing it is that it may make the others easier to do. However, this isn't certain one way or the other, so I can't vote for Something that might be a waste for MC right now.
[] Physical Water Manipulation (microscopic) - This one is likely more precision Water Magic, things like water illusions, water binds, phase changes, and similar to the above, may make other options easier, but as it stands, I also cannot recommend it for voting.
[] Healing Physical Injuries - This one is useful, but unnecessary, since we have access to Amelia with a world hop.
[] Healing Diseases - Now, this is useful, as fiction worlds in general are chock full of powerful people who die early due to illness, but this is more of a medium priority.
[] Mental Influence - This is the one I'd put as the best option, as like disease, fiction universes have a plethora of individuals that will align with whomever can release them. Also, MC DID just leave from Worm, which has a number of Masters. This is just about the best option for MC from both a selfish and a use perspective.
[] Warding - This is another fantastic option, as we know from firsthand experience how strong that ability was. Also, again, MC did just come from Worm, where BS Thinkers waltz about and fuck up everything. Another option that definitely gets my vote.
[] Corpse Reanimation - Ah, now this one is another medium priority, as, from an information standpoint, being able to return the recently deceased under MC control is very useful. It also has quite the intimidation factor, as we saw. Really, if the two above weren't so fantastic, I'd be voting for this.
That being said, my vote is:
[X] Mental Influence
[X] Warding
AKA Screw you Worm. Also, a very nice chapter, interesting to see the depths of Derf's knowledge. Truly, if he could remember more he'd be the greatest tool MC ever acquired, and even without that he's still just about the greatest asset MC could have gained in this world. Well, next to the Ring.
*Edit*
On further contemplation, I'm genuinely certain the first two will make the others easier, but, as it stands, it really depends on how much time MC will be spending on it before the next big event, and going by prior events, I dont think MC has enough time to max out his abilities in both versions of water control. Or, rather, he WILL have enough time to master both, but nothing else. While the others are harder, and likely far more difficult to master, getting even a third of the way into usability for any of the latter options is much more useful, as MC already has quite a lot in the way of firepower, which is mainly what the first two provide (again, alongside likely building a better foundation for other uses of the water stone).
[] Physical Water Manipulation (macroscopic) - So, This one is probably the closest to the standard Water Magic Mages in setting can use. While this isn't quite worthless, at the moment, MC has no real need for it. The only argument I can consider for choosing it is that it may make the others easier to do. However, this isn't certain one way or the other, so I can't vote for Something that might be a waste for MC right now.
[] Physical Water Manipulation (microscopic) - This one is likely more precision Water Magic, things like water illusions, water binds, phase changes, and similar to the above, may make other options easier, but as it stands, I also cannot recommend it for voting.
[] Healing Physical Injuries - This one is useful, but unnecessary, since we have access to Amelia with a world hop.
[] Healing Diseases - Now, this is useful, as fiction worlds in general are chock full of powerful people who die early due to illness, but this is more of a medium priority.
[] Mental Influence - This is the one I'd put as the best option, as like disease, fiction universes have a plethora of individuals that will align with whomever can release them. Also, MC DID just leave from Worm, which has a number of Masters. This is just about the best option for MC from both a selfish and a use perspective.
[] Warding - This is another fantastic option, as we know from firsthand experience how strong that ability was. Also, again, MC did just come from Worm, where BS Thinkers waltz about and fuck up everything. Another option that definitely gets my vote.
[] Corpse Reanimation - Ah, now this one is another medium priority, as, from an information standpoint, being able to return the recently deceased under MC control is very useful. It also has quite the intimidation factor, as we saw. Really, if the two above weren't so fantastic, I'd be voting for this.
That being said, my vote is:
[X] Mental Influence
[X] Warding
AKA Screw you Worm. Also, a very nice chapter, interesting to see the depths of Derf's knowledge. Truly, if he could remember more he'd be the greatest tool MC ever acquired, and even without that he's still just about the greatest asset MC could have gained in this world. Well, next to the Ring.
*Edit*
On further contemplation, I'm genuinely certain the first two will make the others easier, but, as it stands, it really depends on how much time MC will be spending on it before the next big event, and going by prior events, I dont think MC has enough time to max out his abilities in both versions of water control. Or, rather, he WILL have enough time to master both, but nothing else. While the others are harder, and likely far more difficult to master, getting even a third of the way into usability for any of the latter options is much more useful, as MC already has quite a lot in the way of firepower, which is mainly what the first two provide (again, alongside likely building a better foundation for other uses of the water stone).
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[X] Physical Water Manipulation (microscopic)
[X] Mental Influence
Microscopic seems good for assassination purposes and Mental influence seems like a good supplement.
[X] Mental Influence
Microscopic seems good for assassination purposes and Mental influence seems like a good supplement.
- Location
- Earth
[X] Healing Diseases
[X] Mental Influence
I think an anti Master ability is very very useful and it is an obvious pickup. It is a tossup between healing and warding, but warding is a bit vague. Healing will come in useful if for say an exotic disease got him sick in another world, or if he wanted to use healing as a bargaining chip in future worlds.
[X] Mental Influence
I think an anti Master ability is very very useful and it is an obvious pickup. It is a tossup between healing and warding, but warding is a bit vague. Healing will come in useful if for say an exotic disease got him sick in another world, or if he wanted to use healing as a bargaining chip in future worlds.
- Pronouns
- He Him
[X] Mental Influence
[X] Warding
with the bionanite swarm diseases and injuries aren't as much of a problem compared to enemy spells or mind control
[X] Warding
with the bionanite swarm diseases and injuries aren't as much of a problem compared to enemy spells or mind control
- Location
- New York
[X] The Bare Necessities
-[X] Mental Influence
-[X] Corpse Reanimation
Mental Influence because mental manipulation is a key part of nearly every fantasy and sci-fi universe.
Corpse Reanimation because it would open up a whole new avenue of research, resource, and exploitation. That and it's hard finding a non evil/holy reanimation process that also lets you tap the targets memories and skill set.
-[X] Mental Influence
-[X] Corpse Reanimation
Mental Influence because mental manipulation is a key part of nearly every fantasy and sci-fi universe.
Corpse Reanimation because it would open up a whole new avenue of research, resource, and exploitation. That and it's hard finding a non evil/holy reanimation process that also lets you tap the targets memories and skill set.
- Location
- canada
That's very fascinating. It makes sense in context given how important the ring was to the lake water spirit.
Hmm... I wonder if there are ways to charge it up without elven magic techniques...
Well those are pretty loose terms indeed. Definitely can't be relied on for emergencies and back-up plans in that case, but still useful to try to use it first in case it 'feels like it'.
Whoa man, first I thought Agate just went Yandere, but that rational logic can't be denied. The stone is what's magical and important, and the ring just a holder. Yes, more secure holding is a nice idea.
Ok wait that's a little too much! He just went and shoved it into his body?! Wut?!!
Oooh... well, while the idea has some merits, it still sounds essentially BS from imagination and ideas from fantasies. But then what is magic but fantasy anyways lol.
I KNEW IT! Agate was Yandere all along! No other magical tools will get the best of her and live/survive! Bwahahahahaha!!!
As for votes:
[X] Healing Diseases
[X] Warding
Warding is a major concern given how he was influenced magically just recently, so that's the first and biggest priority to get immediately.
As for the rest however, [] Mental Influence I see as useful, but not yet most useful immediately if he doesn't have targets to use it on. [] Corpse Reanimation would only be useful if there were important people that just died recently that could be of great use, but none comes to mind at the moment. Both skills should probably be practiced at the same time to get the effect of reanimation and ensuring total loyalty of whoever is being reanimated.
Neither of the water control skills are too interesting at first. Since while both are probably crucial in proper long-term efficient usage of the water spirit magic, he has more time later for that sort of thing to practice it.
That the leaves [] Healing Physical Injuries and [] Healing Diseases as choices. While he has many ways doubtlessly to heal himself and probably some medical ways to heal others, healing diseases seems to be much harder, specifically for the existing water mages that can heal wounds but not things like unknown diseases. Understandable given how the magic in the setting seems to work best with knowledge and understanding, which most people in the setting don't have that much of by average Earth standards. Thus the more valuable skill to get by comparison is [] Healing Diseases, which probably would cost less power than healing wounds due to less total volume/area of effects needed than regenerating larger areas of physical damage.
The [] Mental influence could also be argued as the best 2nd choice, but only if the MC has plans on exactly who he can safely attempt to use it on, because I doubt the very powerful mages could be influenced so easily due to how they would already have great amounts of Willpower to cast with. But one specific extremely valuable person surely could be influenced Greatly for sure if the []Healing Diseases is chosen. (Cough*Cattleya*cough)
Quixotic_being
Fulfilling every contract to the letter
[x] Mental Influence
[x] Warding
We are probably returning to worm in the future. Better to do this now.
[x] Warding
We are probably returning to worm in the future. Better to do this now.
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