Chapter 131- Might Of The Empire (Patreon)

As Jiran and Olive were dashing to the north through the main mass of Graymin, the wall of Mortan rumbled. Stones turned fluid and shifted until a wide tunnel was revealed. Several thousand men and women of the 43rd Brigade poured out and organized themselves behind the wards. They hustled to form two lines—spears behind shields, before advancing to meet the pawns.

Jiran and Olive both sighed at the same time. “What are they doing?” He lifted his chin in their direction.

“Farming,” She clicked her tongue before lifting herself high enough to see over the pawns being crushed under Jiran’s aura. She spun in a full circle, a brief smile at her new ability crossed her lips as she took in everything around them. She hovered to his side and explained. “It’s standard procedure; once the average soldiers manapool reaches eighty percent, they use the wards for defense while attempting to gain EXP. Once they reach forty percent, they pull back behind the walls.”

“How does that work? I thought EXP wouldn't be earned in parties with more than five people. They’re clearly all working together, and don't the wards count as help from a higher tier?”

“They are only clearing space for now, they will move beyond the wards and then spread out into parties of five. With the wards right behind them, it's relatively safe. It’s not a very efficient method as individual Graymin tend to move from party to party after receiving an injury. Since they rarely stay in place long enough to be finished off, the EXP gain is invalidated. Regardless, given enough time, soldiers have a high chance of reaching the fifth tier.”

“Since you don’t seem to disapprove of what they’re doing, it must be the timing. You going to tell me what’s bothering you about them coming out here right now?”

Olive sighed again, “They’re using you. I know for a fact their mana hasn’t recovered to eighty percent. Also, farming always riles up the Graymin, which is going to make our own expedition more difficult.”

“Oh, is that all? I don’t mind. I was thinking of helping them anyway.  Besides, this was already going to be too easy for you four, so this is a perfect opportunity.”

“What?! You don’t mind being used so brazenly? It is times like this I am reminded that our upbringings were very different. You realize they didn’t even bother to communicate with us first? And what do you mean, ‘too easy.’ You are taking this far too lightly, the Graymin are not to be underestimated.”

Niya, Cameron, and Mayalyn charged through the horde and arrived at their side just as Olive finished her heated argument. As Jiran flashed them all a welcoming smile, three jets of pressurized water appeared above them and blasted the gore from their armor. As they raised shouts of annoyance and alarm at the impromptu shower, Jiran spoke.

“No point wasting all these lower-tier pawns. We’re going to assist the army in gaining some EXP. Spread out and back them up, I’ll gather any tier fives that appear and you can group together to take them down, or join with the army’s tier fives. It will slow us down, but we’re going to finish before lunch at the rate we’re going so we might as well help out a little.”

Cameron and Niya grinned at each other like maniacs while Mayalyn shrugged and casually cleaned some gunk from under her claws. Seeing them all on board, Olive sighed again before giving herself a little shake and squaring her shoulders. An overwhelming feeling of pride bubbled to the surface and Jiran flashed his teeth at his friends, his party.

“Niya, focus on keeping their mana as full as possible. Find someone who can organize drained groups to come to you so you’re not running all over the place. When you’re almost out, shoot me a flare and I’ll recharge you. Cameron and Mayalyn, you’re on defense. I don’t want to see a single casualty today. If someone needs emergency healing, bring them to me or Niya, whoever is closest. If you can’t cover all the groups, only let a few of them outside the wards at a time. Olive, coordinate with the officers, I don’t know anything about the chain of command or unit structure. Can you keep everyone in line?”

“Alor!” Her shouted salute was a reminder that beneath the girl he’d come to know, was a princess through and through. While giving them their directives, her entire demeanor had shifted dramatically. Her face had morphed to a steely determination that any veteran would envy, and her posture became even more regal and militant than usual.

So this is an imperial princess ready for war.

“Anyone have any improvements, suggestions?”

Niya shrugged, “Until we get in the thick of it, it’s hard to say what we can do better. I’m sure we’ll muddle through, as usual.”

Olive stepped forward, her voice crackling with authority and her eyes glimmered with excitement. “Jiran, I know you scouted for rooks earlier, can you make another pass? Niya, make sure you stay behind the wards so wounded soldiers don’t have to be brought into danger for healing. Mayalyn, can you break up the larger groups of tier fours so they don’t overwhelm the smaller units of soldiers? Cameron, remember to protect the men too.”

Cameron looked to the side with a whistle, eliciting a grunt of laughter from Jiran., “Alright then, let's do it!” Together, the party dashed toward the distant line of soldiers.

Cameron turned to follow after Olive. Though he looked over his shoulder at Jiran with a wry grin, “Ugh, really? ‘Let’s do it?’ You had such a good thing going.” He chased after his cousin, quickly catching up with her and speaking loudly enough Jiran could overhear. “Hey Olive, speaking of Mortemer putting his foot in his mouth; you gotta hear how he just convinced the 3rd Voicers that he’s some unknown, mysterious ninth tier with dual aspects!”

“What?!” Olive’s composure shattered as Cameron howled with laughter. Jiran didn’t hear the rest of their conversation as he quickly moved out of range.

He flew just over the top of the pawns, no longer killing them relentlessly. His destination was only a short distance away; an inconspicuous circle of cleared ground in the center of the horde. The beasts failed to perceive the circle, shuffling around it as they pushed south toward the soldiers.

“I assume you two want my help with something. Out with it,” Jiran faced the center of the circle. The air shimmered for a second before revealing Reihnhardt and Ravenna. The man wore a pensive expression as he regarded Jiran while Ravenna licked her lips with a smile. She stepped forward to talk but Reihnhardt raised his hand and a single eyebrow before she rolled her eyes and stepped back.

“Thank you for accepting our invitation. We are here because of your report regarding the new corruptor variant you discovered in Boornock. Not that beast in particular, as there has been no further damage to the formations. We are, of course, interested in the rare tier seven variant you claim to have fought. You said it was wounded and we would like your assistance tracking it down and finishing it together.”

“No thanks,” Jiran counted his fingers, “She’s still missing an arm and her mana is completely depleted while yours is at less than half. I’m not interested in killing a tier seven while protecting the both of you. But that’s not the real reason. I’m disappointed you two are more interested in gaining a single point of EXP than making sure your soldiers are protected. If another tier seven shows up while my group is helping the 43rd, you’re welcome to join in for the kill, but I won’t be leaving my party to take you on a hunt.”

It’s probably a terrible idea to showcase that I can recharge a higher-tiers mana. That’s a quick way to end up locked in a tower as a mana-battery for the rest of my life. I will if I have to, but for now, I’ll keep that little secret to myself.

“That is reasonable. And it is reassuring to know you are confident we could defeat another tier seven together. Thank you for your explanation, Master Mortemer. We shall offer our assistance to the soldiers until the time comes that you may need us,” Reihnhardt bowed while Ravenna curtsied.

How did he convince her to stay quiet? Whatever, doesn’t matter.

Jiran left the circle of their auras and made one more sweep across the horde to pick off any rooks. Finding none, he made his way back to the city wall. The soldiers had been organized into groups of five hundred. One group at a time would leave the wards and then split into a hundred units of five. Olive and Cameron took up the flanks while Mayalyn dashed back and forth in a flickering blur. True to their word, Ravenna and Reihnhardt were there as well, stepping in whenever a party was about to be overwhelmed or pulling out injured soldiers before they took a killing blow.

Of the roughly six thousand men and women, only about one hundred of them were tier five. They pushed forward to hold the line while the groups of five hundred tier threes and fours would cycle out with the reserves behind the wards. Niya waved to him from behind the wards and he dropped down next to her. Several dozen soldiers lay groaning nearby, sporting gashes and missing limbs. Mana Omnis allowed Jiran to quickly determine that none of them were in danger of dying.

“Report, grunt!” Jiran’s joke earned him a punch in the arm before Niya hooked a finger at the injured.

“I ran out of mana.”

“I see that, but they haven’t. They’re the ones who want to be healed, only seems fair to use theirs.”

“W-what? Y-you would take a wounded soldier's mana?” A woman with a strong jaw and wide shoulders stood from the man she was attending. She trembled and wrung her hands, refusing to look directly at Jiran or Niya.

“Yup, I’ll do one better, too. Any party that has an injury can donate all of their mana to healing that injury, then whatever’s left will be distributed to the other groups,” Niya chuckled at his suggestion, and as Enthralling Touch sent a stream of mana into her, she advanced on the wounded soldiers with a wicked gleam in her eyes.

Jiran watched her work for a minute, shaking his head at the whimpering of her first victim before he left to find Olive. He dropped down beside her and relayed his idea. “Oh, that is diabolical. They’ll be far more interested in protecting each other than taking risks for a single additional kill. I love it. I’ll inform Lt. Colonel Britses.”

“Great, thanks. Any issues on your end?”

“Nothing I wasn’t trained to handle,” She sped away toward the wall, leaving Jiran checking his party window to see if he was needed elsewhere.

Noticing that Mayalyn was running bone-dry, he flew straight up, hoping any rooks that might show up would aim for him and not the soldiers below. When he caught a flicker of red and blue amidst the most intense fighting on the battlefield, he smiled and dove. Mayalyn was panting and completely soaked in gore again when his aura wrapped around her. Jiran didn’t miss the fearful gazes of the nearby troops as they moved subtly to keep their distance from her.

She fell backward into his aura with a sigh, her eyes closing as a blissful smile settled on her face. His mana refilled her core and cycled through her blood, bringing a healthy glow back to her cheeks. Elemental lightning and metal flowed into her skin to replace her depleted Enhancing reserves.

She stretched her arms over her head and shivered as his mana became hers, “You are amazing! Remind me to do something nice for you later.”

“Well, since you asked, I spotted a neat-looking place the other day. It’s on the way to Niya’s friend. Want to stop there with me and check it out?”

“Do you even need to ask? Of course I want to go! Let me guess, you have no intention of telling me what it is?”

“Am I already that predictable?”

“Mmhm,” She mumbled with a nod, her eyes still closed and her relaxed smile wider than ever.

“How’s your EXP? Making good progress?”

“Halfway there. This is not fair, you know. Your lightning and metal make me too strong. These beasts are slow and soft. I never would have dreamed I would be so close to tier five on the very day I reached tier four.”

“EXP is the easy part. Filling out your growth and attributes will be much more of a challenge. Well, up ‘n at ‘em. Can’t expect these soldiers to protect themselves.”

She hopped to her feet and gave him a clumsy salute with her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. “Soar, yes Soar!”

Jiran’s aura tracked her as she leaped back into the thick of it with a wild frenzy. She was right, her claws swept through the tier four pawns with laughable ease. She was easily twice as fast as them, and her new armor deflected any lucky blows that made it past her nimble acrobatics.

He took a few seconds to observe the others around him. Though their armor was mostly uniform, there were plenty of differences to separate them. Some wore fancy mementos of family and lovers. While others only wore the scars of combat, tanned skin, and the thickly calloused hands of a life of labor. The differences were more than cosmetic; the soldiers from rich or noble families used techniques that shone brighter, reached further, and hit much harder. Meanwhile their commoner counterparts had to expend additional mana to achieve the same results, quickly draining themselves before being relegated to the reserves, and often sustaining significant injuries in the process.

Why is there such a difference? Shouldn’t the army have trained them up to a higher standard? Are we so hard-pressed that we need to throw lower-class citizens on the front lines without teaching them the basics?

A spike of anger flared in Jiran’s chest and he clenched and released his fists a few times before it quickly faded. Taking to the air once more and not seeing anything that needed his immediate attention, he dropped into the middle of the Graymin a few hundred meters north of the fighting.

Mana Omnis revealed hundreds of blazing manapools buried within their chests. Jiran reached out and tapped a single, delicate synapse of the framework. His intent moved through the thread, racing outward in all directions and connecting with hundreds of cores simultaneously. Enthralling Touch was a subtle ghost, slithering through their dark bodies, stealing and pulling their mana to him with the speed of thought.

Unlike the last time he drained multiple Graymin at once, he didn’t kill them. Instead, he left them alive for the soldiers to farm. As their mana was stolen, each affected beast stopped dead in its tracks to stare directly at him. Then, as one, they threw their heads back and screamed. Unlike every time before, this screech was fully audible. Their combined voices were filled with sorrow, pain, and agony. The ground and air trembled as the scream rippled away from them. Each beast that heard it took up the call until hundreds of thousands of voices screamed in unison.

Far to the north, two massive figures appeared on the horizon, arcing through the air in a leap that took them high into the sky. Jiran had been relentless all day in his search for rooks and instantly spotted them. Recognition came a moment later and his eyes widened as adrenaline pulsed through him.

Reihnhardt and Ravenna appeared at his sides, their eyes also glued to the new arrivals. His aura cut off the screaming Graymin around them, bringing a brief moment of peace. “Two at once is more than I bargained for, we must retreat behind the wards.”

No way. I’m not the same as I was the last time I fought a tier seven. At the very least, I’m confident I can hold them off long enough for the soldiers to retreat. If these two stay, then I shouldn’t get any challenger density as they won’t be solo kills.

“There’s only a few seconds before they get here, the men outside will die. Retreat if you want, I’ll hold them off myself.”

“As if I would run and hide when you’re finally going to show me what you’re made of,“ Ravenna growled deep in her throat while shaking her head, the look in her eyes making it clear she had no intention of leaving.

Seeing Jiran’s confident determination, and Ravenna’s stubborn refusal, Reihnhardt shot a blue flare into the air and stepped up to stand beside them.