Broken System Ch. 98-99 (Patreon)

Ch. 98 - Staying Focused

Before they could get back to doing anything productive, Benjamin had to rest. All of them did. Somehow, they’d managed to come through that tide of green blood without a single casualty, but as a result, everyone was exhausted.

So he kept the breaches iced over, and once everyone had eaten and recovered the following day, Benjamin melted his tiny glaciers so that they could be melted with fire spray so that those entrances could be more permanently sealed with stone. He’d expected them to be bricked up with stone and mortar, but it was only when they started closing them up with their strange stone magic that he realized he hadn’t seen a trace of mortar in the cavern.

Instead, the stone children sang together in a teeth-rumbling choir that made the bedrock go as soft as clay, and then they slowly molded it back to the shape it had been before in a process that had more in common with the potter's wheel or a bonsai gardener’s deliberation than any construction crew he’d seen before. No one said anything to Benjamin about the buildings he’d detonated with his crystal experiment, but the look in the eyes that the stone children gave him said plenty.

Of course, on the flip side, Phosdan and the others were less angry than he thought they would be when it came time to tell them that he and his friends were ultimately to blame for this.

Did you think that when you started to sack their plantations and kill their summoners, there wouldn’t be innocents caught in the crossfire?” Granitia asked. “Every fight with those bastards kicks up a hornet’s nest and a full-blown war? Forget about it.”

“Honestly, I’m surprised this is the worst they’ve done,” Feldsparia agreed, “When they attacked the coast for the first time, they created tidal waves and—”

“Don’t give them any ideas,” Granitia sighed. “We both know that as soon as they lose their foothold and the humans retake their cursed harbors, they’ll do all that and more.”

Benjamin filed that information away under 'end of the world' but otherwise said nothing. He and Raja helped them repair the damage as best they could by lugging rubble into neat piles to be melted back into the floor while Matt and Emma went on a second purge through the tunnels.

They knew they’d never get them all, but once this was done, Benjamin planned to do another run through those caverns in a few days and purge them all with fire one more time just to be sure.

He mentioned that he’d interrogated their ghostly prisoner to the stone children, but he spared them the gory details. He saved those for when he was alone at night with his friends. It was there that he told them that the same tool that shackled all of their souls had been intentionally crippled by the ones that installed it.

“So there’s is what… better than ours?” Emma asked. “In every single way? Then why are they losing so bad?”

“Not every way,” Benjamin corrected her. “They have access to thousands of spells and abilities that we don’t and can shift between them in ways we can’t, for starters. Some of those abilities are—”

“But you shift your abilities around all the time. Ours too. Isn’t that pretty much the same thing?” Raja asked.

“Yeah, I mean, I am, but that’s only because I’m hacking their system,” Benjamin said. “It's not something that’s normally allowable, and the only way I can do it is by editing the code of the spell each time. They just click a button and move their shit around.”

“So the Rhulvinairans can come back to life, they’re more powerful than us, and they can adapt to our strengths and weaknesses. They’re unbeatable, immortal monsters.” Matt said with a shrug. “I miss anything?”

“They have secret back doors into everything, and no matter how many of those I find and close, they’ll probably still find a way to get inside our heads and scramble our brains or trigger the self-destruct,” Benjamin smiled grimly, “But no, other than that - I think you just about covered it.”

“Okay, so then what’s the good news?” Raja asked, with a hopeful expression on his face. “There is good news, isn’t there?”

“Sure,” Benjamin answered with a smile. “If we die, we’ll die together. Best news I got.”

Raja’s smile drooped, but the hopelessness of the line was enough to make Matt laugh. It started as a chuckle, but as it spread throughout the group, it became enough of a belly laugh that it echoed strangely off the cavern’s ceiling far above them.

After that, they talked about the goblins, his bombs, and the other weapons he was only part-way finished with designing. He also told them his supposition about the prince's words and that the further they got from the frontier, the less well-equipped he expected the defenses to be, though he admitted that was a gut feeling more than anything.

They all took advantage of the downtime to handle their level-up, too. Each of them had finally leveled up again in the short, violent conflict, though Benjamin noted he only actually achieved level 8 when he had immolated the flock of paper birds. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

NAME: Benjamin Newsome

RACE: Human

CLASS: Mage(Error)

LVL: 8

EXP: 16,011/18,000

BPs: 5

Mind

INTELLECT

17

WILL

12

MANIPULATE

9

Body

AGILITY

6

STRENGTH

11

APPEARANCE

10

Soul

ANIMA

7

SPIRIT

12

CHARM

9

RESOLVE:  77/77

HEALTH: 77/77

MANA: 11/11

STATUS EFFECTS:

Soul Scar (crippling): -10 to all actions,-75% mana, No natural recovery of health or mana.

Nature’s Gift: +5 to all actions,

SKILLS

Knowledge (academics): 35

Craft (programming): 65

Knowledge (internet): 25

Magic (Runic): 80

Dodge: 25

Team Work: 40

Diplomacy 63

Leadership: 20

Awareness: 35

Resist (Social): 35

Survival: 20

Athletics: 15

Craft (primitive): 10

ABILITIES

Obstinate: +20% resistance to social attacks and charm magics

Blood Mage: Reduce Mana by half. Mana may be freely refilled at the cost of one health per mana. Immunity to life drain effects.

Optimized Mage: All spells cost 1 less mana

Elemental Attunement: +10% effect to all elemental spells

Finally, the day after that, Benjamin rejoined his hosts in their cramped workshop, where they got back to the literal drawing board. Only the designs on the bombs had been finalized, but they would be of limited utility. Though obviously effective, they were each only a single use, and once they left the caverns of Lasthome, Benjamin was not optimistic about his odds of finding any more fist-sized diamonds or rubies. They experimented with quartz crystals that he made with earth works, but they were of such inferior quality that they were closer to firecrackers than hand grenades or artillery shells.

There was the slight problem of getting them to the enemy and getting out of range before the larger ones blew, but Benjamin had an idea for that, too. They could easily launch the things to try to breach a wall with a catapult or something similar, but that would make for the most expensive siege in history. He thought leaving them behind as traps might be a better move. After all, they knew the runes required to create a rift beacon, thanks to all the ones they’d destroyed, so it would be the easiest thing in the world to build those in a few strategic places and leave whoever came through the portal a nice welcoming gift in the form of a couple tons of diamond infused shrapnel.

None of that was what they were focused on today, though. Today, they were trying to put the finishing touches on Benjamin’s Focus.

“You’ll never be able to pick this thing up, you know,” Jasparian told him.

“That’s what they invented carts for,” Benjamin agreed as he studied the final drawing of the giant gilded bronze cylinder. Though he had some hopes that he might be able to miniaturize it someday, if he wanted to route the mana of his army through a single console, it was going to have to be pretty beefy, at least for now.

Up until now, he’d made due, binding a single enchantment to whatever crude object he had around that could take the strain. What they were going to build here was a quantum leap beyond that, though. Instead, this was the product of a hundred intentional design decisions.

The focus was a pair of nested cylinders with a patch panel and a water reservoir to assist with cooling. Each of those panels was going to be physically engraved with a

Given the temperatures that they projected this thing might run at when he was going full throttle, he expected that it would be somewhere closer to a steam engine than a true computer, but it would do for now.

With this, he would no longer need to run the risk of channeling large-scale versions of his spells through his fragile soul. Instead, he would be able to operate at a scale that even the most powerful Summoner Lords they’d encountered to date would find challenging.

But I’ll be tied to a wagon and basically a sitting duck while I do it, he sighed to himself.

Still, that was what his friends, and hopefully his armies, were for. It was just like that cursed fox demon had told him at the very beginning of all this: mages needed a team, or they were dead meat.

They debated the finer points for hours, adding more ridges here and increased depth to the carvings there as they went. It was all to increase surface area points, of course, but by the end, she had no doubt this thing was going to look far fancier than the barrel inside a barrel that he’d imagined initially.

He was right, too. Once they’d decided on every detail and started working, there was little for him to do besides watch everything take shape. So he sat near the forges while they hammered the ingots into approximate size before taking them to their lathes and workbenches for more detailed work.

While the stone children slaved away in slow motion, thanks to the hasten effects of his codex, he worked on the new spells he could use with it. Benjamin wasn’t sure if it was simply spent on this magical world or if it was just his stats because, as always, no matter how much he improved his intelligence, he never felt a lot smarter. What he did feel, though, was small.

He’d been thinking too small this whole time. They all had, except for maybe Matt. His friend was using ferrous armor now to isolate himself from the effects of hostile magic since all the healing he ever needed would be inside his shell with him in the same way that he’d been using healing magic to augment martial abilities almost since the beginning.

Why hadn’t Benjamin been doing likewise, though? He could see the rune patterns of his friend's spells, and he’d glimpsed plenty of spells on the character sheets of the men and women he’d freed, but for whatever reason, he had it stuck in his head that he needed to cast variations of the spells he’d purchased and that simply wasn’t the case. Those were just chains to bind him.

He needed to do more with what he had, so he started trying to figure out what a mass healing spell would look like with Matt’s runes or if something like artillery was possible if he borrowed a few things from Raja. While he doubted he could make a whole army sneak the way that Emma was able to. A single jolt of hasten for a few seconds across his entire force at the moment two opposing forces met mid-charge could be the difference between life and death for dozens.

And now that he couldn’t simply get the other side to switch teams at the drop of a hat, a lot of people were going to have to die. Too many, honestly, but it was what it was.

For the next few days, that was all he did. He watched his focus take shape, and he worked on his spells and waited for the time to pass. And then, eventually, more than a week after the four of them had arrived, it was done. His weapon had been created, and they were finally ready for whatever it was that was going to happen next.

Ch. 99 - The Way Forward

Benjamin thought that he was going to have to light a bonfire and somehow summon the Throne of the Sky Sea to let her know they needed some kind of draft animal, but that proved not to be necessary. The stone children helped them build a cart to bring the thing to the surface, and there was already a giant tortoise waiting for them, which made Raja crack no end of jokes about which Renaissance painter they should name it after.

No one else really got that joke, but Raja found it to be hilarious, and he kept finding new ways to tell it. As the evening wore on, and the tortoise started to wander off while they were struggling to hoist the focus onto the thing’s shell, Raja suddenly shouted, “Where are you going, man? Does Master Splinter need our help?”

Matt made his displeasure clear, with a noise that was much a growl as the words, “knock it off,” while he used his magically enhanced strength to pass timbers up to the stone children. They carved each one differently so that they interlocked with each other, building a sort of platform that seemed almost mounted to the shell without a single faster. It was like one of those puzzle toys but on a grand scale. It was only with this was done, and their turtle was equipped with both a wide sundeck and a sturdy ladder, that everyone worked together to wrestle the giant bronze object into place.

“Let’s see a demonstration of this blasted thing,” Matt said. “Because if it doesn’t work, I’m tossing it overboard.”

“Well, before we do anything like that, we… kinda have to fill it with water,” Benjamin said hesitantly.

“Bah!” Matt said, walking away and leaving everyone else to handle it. In the end, a few minutes with a bucket brigade. It was only when all of that was done, and he'd played with the patch panel a little bit, that he felt ready. Triage was out because no one was hurt, and neither Speedway nor Frontline were showy enough. In the end, even though he didn’t like the idea of needless destruction, he decided he was going to have to use Bombard.

Focus Spell List:

Bombard (30 mana): Infuse up to 20 projectiles with Impact.

Frontline (2 mana/person): cast a limited version of mage shield on up to 100 people that will absorb 10 damage each before failing

Speedway (1 mana/person): Double the move and attack speed of up to 100 people for 6 seconds.

Triage: (15 mana) Heal the most badly injured member of your network in range by 50 health, and all other injured personnel in the same network within 30 feet by 10 health..

None of those spells actually existed on his spell list, of course, and he couldn’t even cast most of them with his current mana pool. Instead, using a macro, he changed the nature of status, and then a moment later cast status. So, at this point, it was just a variable.

Update status. Cast status. It was as simple as that.

Only, behind the scenes, it wasn’t very simple at all. Not only did he have the errors that plagued his own system to deal with, but he was now using the arcane programming that he only partially understood in ways it was never made for. While that was common enough in the tech world, it was less so when the computer you were hacking to bring to sporadic life was your own soul.

While Benjamin worked with the hardware to get everything up to speed, he chose the goblin mound as a target and then asked everyone to stand back. Once he was ready, he gave the command to Raja to launch a Fusillade, and his friend shouted right back, “Cowabunga, man!” before firing a single arrow up into the night sky.

It glowed like a green tracer round with the magic his friend had imbued it with, and at its apex, it split apart into more than a dozen arrows. Normally, they would have fallen amongst the enemy as a storm of burning shots before they vanished, but not tonight. Tonight, as soon as they split, a second spell was cast on them as he tried casting bombard for the first time.

It was not a complex spell, but he’d never cast something with even half so much mana before, and he felt an electric thrill go through him as he emptied his own mana pool and dented everyone else in the party as he spent the next two seconds weaving the spell into being.

Benjamin was a little surprised at how long two seconds felt in this circumstance. He’d intentionally limited the magic to take it easy on the tool he was using, but as it was, it only completed as the projectiles neared the ground at the end of their arc.

Neither the tight timing nor his unwarranted fears about the machine exploding violently affected the explosions that followed. In the past, Benjamin had compared his friend’s spell to a missile launcher or a bazooka. It was a terrifying thing to be anywhere near, and Benjamin had long had faith that when the time thing, it would damage wood and stone as easily as it pulverized flesh.

Now he had that proof. The explosions detonated one after another across the hillside in a succession of violent shockwaves that crushed a number of tunnel systems that had been visible in the moonlight before dust shrouded everything. It was loud enough to startle the turtle as well as their hosts, and embarrassingly, Benjamin almost fell to the ground. Fortunately, his friend caught him by the elbow.

“Nice,” Raja said, clapping him on the back. “I have a feeling we’re going to be using that a lot.”

“Well, there’s lots of other things we can do with this, it’s more than just artillery,” Benjamin cautioned them. “We can—”

“Yeah, but when one of your options is a freaking air strike, why would you want to use any other options?” Raja demanded.

“We’ll see,” Benjamin said, climbing down to rejoin everyone else.

More congratulations followed, and even their hosts seemed satisfied. “Well, I wasn’t convinced it would work, but it did,” Jasparian told him as he gingerly shook Benjamin’s hand. “How many times in a row do you think you can use it before it explodes?”

“With a spell like that?” he said as he did some quick math in his head. “Eight, or maybe ten times. With a smaller spell, we could keep it up all day, but then it really isn’t meant for small spells, is it?”

After that, they said their goodbyes, though they were only going to camp here for the night since it was too late to travel. Still, they made several more trips down to retrieve the gems and other equipment that was still in Lasthome before they were finally ready to call it a night.

In the morning, they discovered that with some effort, they could all ride their strange mount. Of course, that wasn’t actually feasible since, without anyone to lead it by a tether, it quickly wandered off track. It was nice to catch a break, though, so frequently, two or three of them would leisurely sit atop their tiny island while one or two people led it slowly southwest through the sea of grass.

If they traveled this direction long enough, they would eventually reunify with some or all of the forces they’d sent this way or the place on the map where Lord Jarris offered to meet them. If they went past that, then they would eventually reach the inner sea and all the places where the real battle would be fought. Benjamin worried about things like retaliatory tidal waves as they went and what he could possibly do to stop his enemies from summoning insane new monsters at whim, but at least when he was riding atop their turtle howdah, he no longer feared ambush.

Now, instead of being constantly surrounded by the humid, claustrophobic grass that towered over his head by a foot or two in most places, they glided along at just the right height to finally see the Grass Sea as it really was. Benjamin wasted more time than he should have over the next few days just enjoying that view. Other than the occasional boulder or tree island, and once when they passed near enough to see a still smoldering plantation that had been smashed by their forces, they were constantly surrounded by that gentle swaying motion that went off so far into the distance that sometimes Benjamin really could believe that this place was infinite.

Eventually, though, all good things had to come to an end, and five days after they left Lasthome, they found a band of centaurs that offered to lead them to the nearest army. No one bothered to ask the horse people how they’d managed to locate them.

The ability to just know where everything was at all times, thanks to the Throne’s eyes in the sky, was all well and good when they were on their team, but Benjamin couldn’t help but worry about what it would be like if they finished this war, and the tables were suddenly turned. He was under no illusions about what the fae thought of the ‘manthings,’ after all.

For now, that wasn’t a concern, though, and they led them to a large camp where a couple of thousand humans waited for them. That was the good news. However, as they quickly found out, once greetings were finished and reports were made, that was the only good news. The bad news was that this was pretty much everyone. In the weeks Benjamin and his friends had been gone, there had been some costly victories and some even more costly defeats.

One of the splinter armies they’d created had been annihilated to a man when they’d been ambushed by icy giants, which gave Benjamin flashbacks of the lesser elementals they’d faced not so long ago. The other groups had survived long enough to reform, but all of them had taken costly losses. Almost two dozen more plantations had been burned, and thousands of the enemy lay dead, but the cost wasn’t one that they could bear much longer.

“What about the enemy forces,” Benjamin asked, partway through another conversation Matt was having with the centaurs about another fighting retreat their people had endured. “Any sign that they’re running out of men?”

“The only one that’s running out of men here is you, I’m afraid!” Gwarn laughed. “But you will kill a few thousand more before you are spent, and that’s progress we can drink to. You’ve set the damn summoners back at least a decade at this point. Perhaps two!”

“Progress would be finding another way to get reinforcements,” Benjamin grumbled. He had no interest in explaining that to the centaur tribes, though. Their animus was hardly personal. As long as someone was dying and the battles were thrilling, they weren’t particularly interested in the finer points. For Benjamin, though, nothing less than full-blown victory was going to be enough, and as many miracles as he felt like he had up his sleeve right now, listening to story after story about the bloody meat grinder that some of the magic-fueled battles became, he was under no illusions that those would be enough.