IsekaiWriter

You do not need to read the footnotes. They just explain how certain magics work, and serve as a reminder for how mana cost is calculated.

So I'm pretty dang powerful for a plant. But what is power if you have no need for it? The only person I care about, Orrian, says he has far more mana and many more skills than I do. Apparently the "Elf village leader" titles gives you accelerated mana and skill gaining proportional to the populace and average living conditions. In comparison, the "Human village leader" title gives you accelerated mana and skill gaining proportional to the amount of taxes you collect. What I'm getting from this is that human titles tend to be inherently corrupt. But that's a tangent, I'm talking about myself here. I've started properly mana grinding using "Vibration sensing" with a radius of 9 meters. That consumes 110 mana a day. This of course has the backlash of being very bad for my poor little soul, but Orrian's skills can heal plant souls. Apparently' we're far more robust than humans, at the downside of being waaaay slower thinkers. Luckily "Time manipulation" can negate that.

Orrian is doing paperwork, as he always is, so I appeared behind him in the form of whatever he thinks his "Female self" would be and said "Orrian, I'm bored as Hell." He gave me a very, very judging stare. This is probably for two reasons. 1:I look like him, but female. 2: Hell is not a swear word in this language.¹This joke was unclear. They have an equivalent that they DO use as a swear word, but here Briar actually said the English word for Hell, which Orrian obviously doesn't know. When other characters use hell as a swear word, they are saying it in their language, and I, the author, am "translating" it for you. He rolled his eyes, saying, "Go read a book or something." "I've read every book in the village!" And I have. There are 7 books in the village, 5 are fiction and 2 are history, and I've read all of them. Paper is rare and expensive in this world. The paper Orrian uses for paperwork is partially made from mana and will deteriorate after about a week. "You really oughta do more for the women in your life." I say in his father's voice. That would be an insult, but I look like his father now so he just starts laughing. Well, he chuckles. Perhaps I need to up my comedy routine. "What do you do in your time off?" "I eat, sleep, and entertain my wife." "Ah, you see, I am incapable of doing those things. Subsequently, you should entertain me." Orrian stood up, picked me up, and chucked me about 2 kilometers away from the village using some form of super strength. I'm sure he loves me, and is just playing the tsundere. I land neatly using telekinesis on my pot. This is about the 200th time I've done this after all.

My 18 meter wide ears are picking up someone talking. It was probably about a kilometer away so it was rather faint, but I could hear it. Many people talking. Things moving, stuff being dropped, and men yelling. This is odd. As far as I could tell, every elf was still in the village. This requires investigation! Super Briar to the scene! I flew to within 200 meters of all the noise, then sent in my clairvoyant eye to look around.²The mana cost on that is now 1/25 + (distance * 1/25)per hour. Using this at a range of 200 meters would cost 8 mana an hour. Bandits. A lot of bandits. And they had 5 trebuchets, each loaded with what looked like some variation of the fireball spell, one that will last until it hits something, then explodes. They had 20 of the firebombs lying in a pile near one of the trebuchets. I counted 23 bandits. They all looked like men, but I'm honestly too far away to  tell. If I get too much closer they might notice I'm spying on them. There's a cage near the tents with an elf boy in it. His name is Richard, and he went out hunting 3 days ago. He was supposed to come back tomorrow. His arms are in shackles and his torso looks like they beat him quite a bit. The poor kid is only 16. Then one of the bandits, he looks very leadery, looks me right in the eye. He immediately starts shouting "WE'VE BEEN FOUND OUT! FIRE THE TREBUCHETS IMMEDIATELY!" WELL FUCK IT THEN. I guess I'll have to fight. The village is 3 kilometers away. Trebuchets are supposed to have a max range of about 300 meters, but I suspect these ones will be powered up by magic. I don't think these are bandits now. These bombs will do nothing but kill the elves and burn the forest, leaving nothing to pillage or loot. They're probably some anti elf organisation. Orrian hasn't told me about their villages relations with humans, just that they're too remote to really have any. If I don't stop these guys, he'll never have a chance to explain further.

First up, I need to get closer. All my magic costs more mana at range. Activating illusions and making myself look like the "scariest thing"³Two notes here: mana cost and the function of that skill. Mana cost is 4.8 per hour since there's 23 bandits and an elf and it costs 0.2 each. The other note is that "scariest thing" has to fit into the size proportions Briar specifies. If Briar wants to be 8 feet tall with 4 limbs, then everyone will see them as the scariest thing that is 8 feet tall with 4 limbs, even if they think something 10 feet tall with 6 limbs would be scarier. and using telekinesis to shoot myself into the camp at ridiculous speed, I activated time slow on the bandits. There were 23. For 23 mana a minute, I can slow each of them down by 87 times.⁴0.1 + (0.2 * ((1 + 9 ) * (1 + 0.62) * (1 + 1/5 * 87))) 
Oh dear god. Yeah this is where the math gets juicy. This is how the time manipulation mana cost is calculated. That formula is assuming 2 things. Each bandit has a mass of 0.062 (the average for a human) and is roughly 9 meters away, the closer ones offsetting the further away ones. I got the number 87 by plugging in numbers until the output was as close to 60 as possible, then divided by 60 to get the mana cost per minute. 59.716 is the output here. Isn't math fun?

POV: Leader of the Anti-Elf Group

Things are going great. The trebuchets are ready, the firebombs have been made, and the elf we captured told us the exact location of the elf village, so we don't have to send scouts out to find it and risk alerting the elves to our presence. Or it was going great. Until that eye over there showed up. I detected it with "spy detection" a skill that alerts me to anyone who is looking at me and shouldn't be. This is not good. "WE'VE BEEN FOUND OUT! FIRE THE TREBUCHETS IMMEDIATELY!" My men immediately scrambled away from their games of cards and ran to prime and fire the trebuchets when *it* appeared out of no where. A shadow demon, 8 feet tall.⁵Something like this: https://imgur.com/gallery/QiRbVjF/comment/186286855 All of my men froze in their tracks. At first I thought it was out of fear, but then my "Physic magic⁶What does and doesn't qualify as a physic magic will be explained in depth later. resistance" trait went off. Shit, this thing is using magic to stop everyone from moving. In under 5 seconds everyone's knives, swords, or whatever pointy object they had on them had risen above their heads and been shot through their throats. Mine was too, but I dodged it easily. A couple men tried to get up but another blade through their neck stopped them decisively. The only survivors were myself, my right hand man (he made half the fire bombs, I made the other half), and two other men who had the "Physic magic resistance" trait. Six of my men, including myself and the right hand, had it but I guess the other two failed to dodge despite being able to move freely. One of the men ran at the monster from behind, but was quickly killed with a sword through his back. This sword went much faster than the others. The other was killed in the same way.

I fired a magic fireball at it, but the fire passed through it, as one would expect for a shadow monster. Right hand yelled "How the heck did a fireball go through a troll?!?!" A troll? There's no way to mistake that thing for a troll. The door to the elf's cage swung open and the elf blazed out of it at near mach speed.⁷Briar made him go 50 times faster. He was able to run at this speed since he was also allowed to think faster. That's incredibly suspicious. Why would the monster help the elf? Actually, how the hell did a shadow monster get out here in the first place? Then it hit me. Upon realizing it was an illusion, the shadow monster disappeared, and was replaced with a very fast potted plant zooming at me, along with 40 swords covered in the blood of my comrades. The plant stopped right in front of me, but the swords made no such attempt. I managed to dodge the swords using my "warp" skill, but my right hand man ended up with a sword lodged in his heart. He was tough, but probably would die in under a minute. I made frantic swings at the plant, but it was clearly using it's time manipulation to fly around me at mach speed. I had nearly no mana because just a few minutes ago I spend nearly all of it making firebombs! I can't defend myself with magic! The swords cut and stabbed me. I was covered in bloody wounds and bruises. The only thing keeping me alive were my many defensive traits. My left hand was cut off, but before I could scream the last thing I saw was a huge explosion of fire and ash.

POV: Orrian

A huge explosion in the distance. Burning bits of tree and rock showered the forest. Every woman, and child (about 150 of them) grabbed a bucket of water and rushed to put out the fires. Every man (75 of us) ran to the source of the explosion. In our sprint, we ran into Richard, who was covered in bruises and dressed in rags. "There's a group of humans from the Minia Empire, Briar came and killed them all, but one of them lit off bombs!" Two men took Richard back to the village and the rest of them went to put out fires but I rushed ahead with a speed skill to see the crater. A huge clearing surrounded by burning trees. Not a blade of grass in sight. Nothing, not even Briar, could have survived that. I fell on my knees and wept for the one I had spent so much time with.

It's been a week after the incident. We managed to put out the fires and save the forest but we're moving anyway. We'll move into neutral territory where the Minia Empire won't be able to bother us. I'm going through my belongings, selecting what I want to keep, and destroying what I don't. I cast a spell to destroy all of the mana paper⁸As mentioned earlier, most paper is actually made out of mana and deteriorates over time. in my office, then searched through all my desks. In one of them lie a single sheet of paper. A real sheet of paper. I didn't even know I owned one. On the other side was a letter.

"If you're reading this, I'm already dead. Or am I? I never did tell you what 'Relatively transcendent' does, did I? In short, it lets me cheat death, so weep not, my dear friend, since I am still alive! Elsewhere in the world, ready to go on yet another adventure! Should we ever meet again I hope to find you in good health, and ready to give me more water.

-The most mischievous plant you know, Briar"⁹Briar was intentionally being cringy with this letter. Briar probably stole the paper from someone at some point.

I smiled for the first time in a week.