Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School (62/?) WiP 1 (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Here is the Work in Progress for Chapter 62 I hope you guys enjoy! :D And just as a quick reminder with regards to the announcement post last week, the revised version of Chapter 61 will be delayed until the first week of January! Anyways, I hope you guys enjoy this Work in Progress! The full chapter will be released tomorrow! :D

Dragon’s Heart Tower, Level 23, Residence 30. Holo-tent.

Thacea

A veritable sea of light.

As far as the eye could see.

A luminous horizon whose brilliance was obstructed only by crowded blades of grass; with jagged edges and sharpened tips as numerous, as dense, as varied, and as chaotic as the spread of wild wheat in the abandoned fields of Yorn.

Confusion quickly set in, followed closely by gross disorientation, as I struggled and failed and struggled again to make sense of it all.

Before finally, my conscious mind gradually caught up to the realities my eyes bore witness to, and a gut-wrenching realization began consuming my heart whole.

As the longer I stared out of this glass enclosure, the more I was able to focus on each individual ‘blade’ of ‘grass’.

Though I would be remiss if I maintained the pretense of humoring those frankly, naive misnomers; purposefully chosen by a mind that waged a futile battle between the world being presented to it and the reality it thought it knew.

A mind that only sought to protect itself from that which was otherwise impossible. A reality that should not exist.

A reality that advocated for a manaless city of fantastical wonders.

A city of towering monoliths.

For how was the reasonable mind supposed to come to terms with the existence of a city as dense in unfathomably towering constructs as a weedseed field at harvest?

Artificial constructs tall enough to be seen from a distance, large enough to obstruct the horizon, and most distressingly of all… numerous enough to be mistaken as but an element of the landscape itself.

Simply put, a mind could not.

At least, not without a gradual buildup of doubt and inferential evidence, courtesy of an entire week’s worth of the reality defying antics of a newrealmer.

This left my mind with little choice but to concede.

And for a regrettably familiar feeling to begin gnawing at the fibers of my very being.

For as we crossed expanse upon expanse of well-kept greenery, soaring just shy of the forest’s canopy within this glass and metal tube, I couldn’t help but to remember that same reality shattering week that all but broke my worldview.

A week of humiliation, of social browbeating, of being thrust into a similarly alien world; save for the lack of care and personability of this particular demonstration.

A week that left me with a feeling of complete and utter…

Dragon’s Heart Tower, Level 23, Residence 30. Holo-tent.

Thalmin

…Smallness.

That’s the best way I could describe it.

For the closer and closer we got, the easier it was for me to see what lay in front of us.

And it wasn’t a castle or fortress, nor was it a city or town.

It was a temple.

A church.

A monument constructed to light itself.

A construct larger in scale and caliber than anything I’d ever seen or even imagined of.

I’d never felt so small before.

At least, that’s what I wished to believe.

For there were but two instances in my life I remembered feeling anywhere close to this small, this insignificant, this… impotent in the face of overwhelming odds.

And both instances were born out of the Ritual of Fealty, and the brief glimpse we were provided of the heartlands of the Nexus itself.

Dragon’s Heart Tower, Level 23, Residence 30. Holo-tent.

Ilunor

No.

No. No. No. No. NO!

How could she have known?

She could not have known.

It is impossible for her to have known.

And yet, what was straight in front of us, no, in front of our sights via the aid of this manaless sight seer… was undeniably… almost undoubtedly…

A bastardized facsimile of the Crownlands.

A place so sanctified that even Nexian natives, and those races sanctified by His Eternal Majesty himself, must wait patiently for entry.

A place that the newrealmer could not have known about. And thus could not have drawn from for inspiration.

So how could I explain the sight that stood before me?

Logic now dictated that there remained one sole option.

That it was genuinely what it was purported to be… an accurate visual record of the world the newrealmer hails from.

Which should not have been possible. For what was being shown was far, far beyond the capabilities of any adjacent realm, or even those realms outside of the Nexian crownlands.

This would’ve placed this newrealm on a similar enough standing to the crownlands.

Which again, is impossible.

So perhaps there was a third option?

An option that was nominally questionable, far-fetched, and unlikely.

But when set against the backdrop of impossibility, the far-fetched and unlikely suddenly felt the most probable.

Rultalia’s rule truly did apply in this instance.

As I calmed my internal turmoil, and accepted the improbable justification - that all that I saw was the work of nothing more than a truly brilliant, truly gifted artist.

Everything, from the manaless carriage, to the ridiculous nature-bridges, were most certainly the creation of an unhinged mind. A mind unburdened by the limitations of reality.

Which would explain everything.

And lend credence to the Earthrealmer’s eccentric personality.

For perhaps they were a race of actors.

Living out fantasies, and at times, managing to turn fantasies into tangible reality from ramshackled, unorthodox methods born out of their mana-less forms.

For if a race were truly deficient in mana… I could only imagine just how far they would go to overcome it through denial, through fantasy, and through limited successes of bringing those fantasies to life in unwieldy ways.

That conclusion, and that train of thought, was promptly interrupted by the likes of the mercenary prince, whose wide eyes and bewildered expressions clued me into his gullible state of mind. “Emma, what is this?”

“Like I said…”

Dragon’s Heart Tower, Level 23, Residence 30. Holo-tent.

Emma

“... this is my second hometown.” I announced gleefully, gesturing towards the ever encroaching spires of composalite and paracrete.

“There are many names for it, something to be expected from a legacy stretching over a millennium. But accounting for the time period since incorporation the few names that have truly stuck around have been: The City of Dreams, The Sleepless City, The City So Big They Named it By Committee, and my favorite… The Empire City, or well, the Capital of the World is another one that has a nice ring to it. Ultimately though, there’s one name we all thankfully agreed upon. One that bothered no one for it appeased no one. No one, except for rail enthusiasts perhaps.”

The train quickly passed by a sign you’d be hard-pressed to read, but one that I’d slowed down the simulation explicitly to hammer home my point.

WELCOME TO ACELA

THE NORTHEAST MEGALOPOLIS

THE FIRST INCORPORATED MEGACITY IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE

HOME OF THE LARGEST SKYSCRAPER HERITAGE ZONE

BIRTHPLACE OF SUSTAINABLE URBAN LIVING

POPULATION: 500,203,127

GLIDE SAFE, THE ACELA WAY!

“Acela. Or more officially, the Megacity of Acela.” I spoke giddily through a barely contained grin, before gesturing at the rapidly approaching city.