Being woken up in the middle of the night by a night raid was not what I had in mind by “more excitement.”
I sprung up from my bed to the sound of Lea yelling for us to wake up, armor snapping up over my body, and threw myself out of the tent.
The flap tangled me up for a moment, an incoherent string of swears erupting from my mouth as I struggled to kick off the cloth.
Before I had even left the tent I’d already taken stock of the amount of enemies in the area. 16 guys, most at tier two, a couple in the tier three zone. I didn’t waste a single moment springing into action.
I launched myself at the nearest one, lightning sparking forth in a volatile explosion as my feet lifted off the ground, making use of my flying skill.
From there I summoned a singular sword in hand and immediately fired several [Binds] off capturing some of the lower-leveled goons surrounding us. Lea was an absolute whirlwind of action and destruction.
She wielded a glaive in her hands and had an absolute area of territory that she controlled around her. She calmly walked forward, any enemy that got too close was rent apart by the glaive as it whirled, kicking up a storm.
Jazz was nowhere to be seen, but occasionally I’d see someone drop from seemingly nothing letting me know that he was doing his job taking enemies down from out of sight.
I let loose a few [Webs of Lightning] letting the surges carry themselves through the entire camp, the purple hue coating the surrounding area as it jumped through multiple opponents, creating an arcing web of chaos.
Running forward I engaged the closest person still standing, he had double daggers and was completely dressed in black from head to toe.
After a quick flurry of exchanges, dedicating two minds to watch his blades, he swung, his arms moved so slowly that I was able to just catch it.
[Level 32²]
I snorted after reaffirming his level and hooked my sword under his arm and revoked his privilege to have two of them. He fell screaming to the ground and after checking to make sure that I still had several of the bound up, I put him out of his misery.
I didn’t jump to the next opponent immediately after dispatching this one. For the simple reason that there were no more enemies to fight. Everyone was either dead or captured.
The hum of Lea’s glaive came to a stop and she took a deep breath as she surveyed the area around her, “Head check, Alex?”
“Alive.”
“Jazz?”
“Uninjured.”
“Excellent. Jazz, make sure the two that Alex captured stay that way. Alex, I took a hit when they initially rushed the camp, I want you to heal it for me.”
I promptly made my way over to her and placed a hand on her side. Running my vision over her I could see a splotch on her leg from where she took a single arrow from someone at range.
My vision snapped over the field covering everyone and their weapons, my minds working overtime.
No one had a bow.
“Not clear!” I yelled immediately, sprouting barriers around Lea and myself along with Jazz and the two prisoners he was standing over.
“What do you see?” Lea asked, keeping her eyes panning our surroundings as I grasped the arrowhead and yanked it out, eliciting a slight groan of pain from her.
The wound faded quickly as I healed her, pumping just a little extra juice into her, just in case.
“You were hit by an arrow, but I don’t see a bow among the fallen, there’s possibly a survivor hiding at range. I don’t see him anywhere, but a sufficiently high stealth skill would be enough to bypass my sight.”
We kept our eyes peeled, Jazz once again having gone invisible. [Electric Sense] told me he was hovering nearby, not getting out of range of the rest of us, but also far enough away that he wouldn’t get caught in any area effects.
I used [OWN] to scan the area, everything within my 2/3rds of a mile radius coming under scrutiny from my 29 minds. Nothing came up in my sight, and given that neither Jazz nor Lea said anything they didn’t see anything either.
“No poisons?” I asked Lea.
“What?”
“Arrow, no poison notifications?”
“None,” She replied, “but I haven’t exactly taken the time to check all of them, I’m not losing health, stamina, or mana in any capacity. Right now that’s all that matters.”
I nodded in response.
“What’s the plan?” I asked, “I’m not sure I really want to sit here waiting for them. Maybe one of them ditched the bow, maybe the guy ditched after he saw us completely dismantle a sixteen-man group. I’m not sure I want to wait around and find out, especially if he’s bringing reinforcements.”
For a moment, Lea didn’t say anything in response.
“I agree, we’re packing up and leaving. Alex, you’re on watch, if you see anything move in the surroundings, I want it reduced to charcoal. Jazz, help me pack this shit up, then we’re grabbing our prisoners and relocating.”
For once Jazz didn’t scoff, make a snide remark, or even say it in a caustic tone. He just said it simply and respectfully, “Understood,” and returned to help Lea as I kept an absolute lockdown on our surroundings.
I went ahead and started channeling a bit of mana into my [Storm Call] skill, letting thunderstorms cloud overhead in preparation to smite something with the wrath of god.
Nothing so much as even twitched, bushes swayed normally, no tree branches creaked in a way that they shouldn’t. It also helped that I could see through every individual leaf on every tree. I could feel the onset of a headache, but I persevered through the pain of the information overload.
It didn’t take long for my two teammates to finish packing everything up, Jazz handed me my bag which I quickly slung over my shoulder.
“Alright, we’re done. Alex, we’re leaving fast, can you carry all of us?”
I looked between everyone and made a noise in the back of my throat that was something between a groan and a rasp.
“Can we knock out the two captives? I don’t need them struggling while I’m trying to fly, I’ll end up dropping them.”
Lea immediately stepped over and kicked them both in the head, rendering them unconscious.
I raised an eyebrow in surprise. Doing that required just the right amount of force, otherwise, you’d kill them.
She shrugged at my look, “Skill,” she said simply.
I grabbed the two captives and hoisted them up. I used my armor to supplement my strength, the wood giving me the ability to carry the two guys without significant effort. From my back, I sprouted two seats for my teammates to stand on, along with some handholds.
“Hop on and hold on tight, this is going to be really awkward cause I haven’t taken time to plan out properly how to carry so many people.”
Jazz hesitated for only a moment before climbing on. Lightning erupted from my shoulders, causing both of them to flinch and Jazz to let out a slight yell of alarm.
“Stop wiggling,” I had to practically yell over their shouts, “The lightning is just aesthetic, but I can’t turn it off.”
“You could’ve warned us,” Jazz retorted.
“Now is not the time,” I said distractedly.
I heaved upwards with my overwhelming burden. My flying skill was not necessarily made to carry so much. But I made it work. I slowly climbed the first ten feet, making sure I had a good handle on everything while also making sure to keep an eye on our surroundings.
Nothing in sight. I rocketed upwards, quickly clearing over a hundred feet before laterally launching us towards the east, eating up the distance between us and Istvel.
“Where are you headed?” Lea yelled over the wind.
“Towards Istvel, unless you have a suggestion!” I yelled back.
Not hearing a response I kept our current pathing.
Fifteen minutes of high-speed flight brought us to our destination. The town… hell, it was so small it was barely a collection of more than a dozen buildings. It was a village if I’d ever seen one.
The village was so small I almost missed it in the dark. If I hadn’t been using [Electric Sense] and [Mana Sense] to keep track of our surroundings I would have missed it. As we approached I slowed us down.
“We’re here?” Lea asked as I started lowering us to the ground.
I nodded in response, “Village is quiet. People were inside the buildings, and nobody moving around except for one house on the south side. Nothing active on the perimeter or outside from what I can see.”
“Good, the town’s too small for there to be an inn or the like. So we’ll camp nearby for the time being. How far away are we from the village?”
“About a thousand feet. Give or take a few hundred.”
“Understood. Alex and Jazz, I want you both to use your creation skills to create us a small hut. About 25 feet of space for us to work with. I’ll watch the prisoners.”
I quickly threw up barriers around us, using the full 100 feet, or I guess slightly more than that. I had leveled in my classes, I didn’t have time to appreciate the fact at the moment though.
I dropped us to the ground fully, letting Lea and Jazz step off the makeshift carriers I had made for them, at the same time I unceremoniously dumped our two captives to the ground as well. Lea pulled out a sword and shield from… somewhere and stood watch over them.
Walking over to Jazz I asked, “So how do you want to do this? You haven’t told us much about your metal summoning so I don’t know a lot about your capabilities. It looks like it’s expensive for you to summon though. So maybe I form the outside and you form a secondary, thinner, inner layer?”
He just nodded curtly, which I returned and we got to work.
I started with one side at a time, as we were right now I didn’t feel comfortable standing still trying to use [Rest] to recover any of my mana that I expended. Too high a risk of me getting sniped, once I got some walls up then I’d be able to do so.
So I quickly worked on doing that, as I raised the first wall I dedicated a few minds to managing my barriers, shifting them around to more accurately defend us from the open angles we still had left. Jazz made similar use of another skill.
One he hadn’t showcased during our little spar, or even in any of our drills. Liquid metal started to flow out of his hands and then stretched to fill in the gaps between my barriers. Once I finished a section of the wall, he’d take some of that liquid metal and have it harden over the inside of the structure itself.
As to why it was on the inside rather than the outside, well that was easily explained in terms of cost to benefit. His metal is sufficiently stronger than my wood in terms of direct durability. The cost of it is proportionately higher though. So it costs a ton of mana for him to even generate close to the same amount of material that I could with the same capacity.
Even then, the metal he was using to cover the inside of the dome was only about two inches thick. Two inches of steel is a lot. Two inches of magically enhanced steel? Nearly unbreakable. But on the off chance someone could warp it? It was better to have my wood in front of it, softening the blow since it’d be easier for me to replace the wood and for him to only fix the minor damage that was done to his metal.
It took about thirty minutes of combined work, but we eventually had a dome that completely covered us along with several small holes in places to allow for airflow and a door that we’d be able to use to enter and exit the structure.
Once it was finished I removed the barriers I had surrounding us, letting them fade away. Lea relaxed slightly as we put the finishing touches on.
“Good work,” She announced as we stopped working, “Now, Alex, see if you can wake just one of them. Start with the lower level one if you would.”
I nodded and walked over to him, pulsing a bit of healing through him. He didn’t immediately wake up though which caused me to frown.
“What’s wrong?” Lea asked, immediately picking up on my annoyance.
“Healing him didn’t wake him up, so on the healing side there’s not much I can do…”
“But?” She asked, picking up on the fact that there was something I wasn’t immediately saying.
“Well… Being away is a matter of the state of the brain, and a large chunk of the brain is handled by small spurts of electricity, given that I can control them it’s possible…”
“Possible that you could wake him up,” She finished for me, causing me to nod in agreement, “And what are the risks of failure?”
“Uhh, him… dying?” I said hesitantly.
She pursed her lips, “Go ahead and try it on him, but if it doesn’t work, we’ll just have to wait for the other guy the old-fashioned way.”
I nodded and turned to look back at the tier-two man bound by wood, lying on the ground.
I turned all of my minds, except for a couple, to observing him and looking deeper. Using [Electric Sense] I was able to see the path that his nerves were taking. His entire body was sluggish in his unwilling rest. The senses dimly light up with sensory information that is fed back to the brain.
Which flashed more brightly than the rest of the body, but it too seemed fairly dull in its glow compared to Lea or Jazz. I reached out a hand to rest it on his head. Somehow touching the thing I was trying to manipulate helped me sense what I was trying to manipulate better.
I felt the flow in his brain as the energy slowly circulated around as the brain did its job of keeping the body alive. Impulses were sent to the heart telling it how it was supposed to time its beats. Impulses are sent to the lungs telling them when to suck in air and how long to hold it for before releasing it to make room for more.
I reached into the brain and very, very gently grasped some of those impulses. I had done a very little bit of research into human anatomy. The only reason I had done very little was because there wasn’t in-depth research into how the brain exactly worked yet.
And I hadn’t exactly done any of that kind of research when I had lived on Earth, and even if I had I likely wouldn’t have remembered any of the specifics, or even enough to be useful at this point. So I wasn’t entirely sure which part of the brain handled sleep. My only hope was that disrupting small parts of the brain would cause him to wake up.
So that’s what I did, I gently caused parts of the brain to light up with activity. Matching the energy level to everything else that was going on. The first part of the brain at the back of his head that I hit didn’t do anything that I could see. So I moved to the front part and sparked some activity there.
His entire body convulsed lightly, quickly causing me to stop and observe the body's functions. I took note of exactly what I had done with my minds and logged it away for the future.
“What happened? Why did he do that?” Lea asked quickly.
“I think I hit the part of his brain that handles movement. I don’t know a lot about how brains work simply because no one has done any research on it, but there should be a part of his brain that controls his sleep and wake cycle. I just need to find that and zap it.”
“How do you even know he has one if there isn’t any research done on the topic?” Jazz asked pointedly, causing me to halt what I was doing.
Fuck, I hadn’t considered that they might be suspicious of how I knew things I wasn’t supposed to. I thought I was being careful but this was, quite possibly, my biggest blunder so far.
“You’re just gonna have to trust me when I say it exists,” I said, trying to deflect.
Jazz scoffed and Lea pursed her lips, I could practically see her brain erupt into high-speed thought as she cataloged the conversation, trying to read between the lines.
But in the end, she decided to let the conversation drop and just nodded, gesturing for me to continue.
I nodded and slowly zapped other parts of the brain, causing his body to complete other actions. Unfortunately one of those actions was to completely void his bowels and bladder.
I sighed in frustration and very nearly just deep-fried his brain in anger. It took all of the discipline I had for now, and possibly the foreseeable future, to reign in all of my minds’ unified anger. I kept working through his brain and eventually, finally, I seemed to hit the right spot.
The guy convulsed awake before groaning loudly and promptly puked.
I immediately spammed a few heals through his body, I probably should have considered that zapping his brain with a watered-down taser would probably cause problems to his body. Oh well, I knew how to wake people up from now on, at least humans. So that was a plus.
Yay for human experimentation!
“Fuck,” He hissed, “My head aches like a bitch, where the hell-” He opened his eyes and saw the three of us looming over him.
Lea smiled, it was such a sweet-looking thing that belied the anger and viciousness I could see lurking just beneath.
“Hello there,” She said, her words sounding like honey, “If you’d like to live the rest of your short miserable life as pain-free as possible you will tell us what you know.
“Or, if you’re a masochist,” She continued calmly, “you simply just have to avoid telling us anything and you’ll be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams for your effort.”
The man's face paled instantly.
Through his brain, I could see the rampant fear running through his brain.
Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for him.
