Chapter 470: The Decision

Iona’s request had briefly stunned me, but one thing I prided myself on was rapid decision making. It had been trained into me for years, and I’d honed the skill to a high degree.

“Go!” I shouted, wanting to be loud enough that Iona could hear me. Then I dashed off at top speed to where Katerina was waiting, my mind working furiously on four tracks.

Auri revealed herself and started flying towards Iona, wanting to hitch a ride.

Iona and I had a solid bond of trust. She was already starting to take off as I sprinted away, Auri, just barely managing to grab onto Fenrir’s tail - and her little perch there.

Good. The three of them were set.

The first track was reviewing my impulse decision. There was never any question in my mind of who’d I’d go with. I knew Iona. We had a solid, strong bond of trust. If she saw that I was about to head out with the Legion, and still thought she needed me, well, that was easy.

She needed me.

Just like she had my back when I was proposing wacky and wild adventures like tax fraud for a good reason, I assumed she was trying to pull me for a good reason.

We were fast. Whatever Iona needed to do couldn’t take that much time, and the Legion was going halfway around the world. The current plans called for at least a week of adjusting to the new environment before we started marching, and campaigning was 99% boredom, 1% sheer terror. The odds of the Legion getting into a serious scrap before I returned was almost nothing.

If I wanted to, I could throw a bunch of numbers into a matrix and calculate the estimated lives saved on either end. I was willing to bet if I did it, I’d end up with ‘go with Iona’ to be the correct decision in that aspect.

That was before the fact that she was my partner. That I wanted to propose to her. Between my eternal job and my hopefully-Immortal partner, I knew which one I was picking.

Katerina was going to chew me out, but hey, she could only really chew out Soldier Elaine. Sentinel Dawn wasn’t present.

Arachne was a different question, pun intended. If the last reporting in was standard, she’d ask me a number of questions to meditate over. The harshness of the questions would depend entirely on how she thought of it, but they’d be designed to be introspective.

Night would approve. I saw the way he slowly stepped though the hallway of names, thousands upon millions of dead friends staring back at him. I’d heard the pain and longing, the excitement and memories in his voice as he told us of his tale of Aetherion, and the friends he’d met and lost there. I was confident that he’d choose his closest companions any day.

Artemis would tell me to do whatever I felt like doing, while Julius would disapprove of me flitting off.

The second mental track was easy, figuring out the best way to tell the Legata.

The third was trying to work out the various implications of me leaving now. I’d be very visibly leaving… from the troop section, after declaring that I wasn’t going to be around. Plausible deniability! See everyone, look, Sentinel Dawn is not here. She left.

Sure, rumors would fly, and it’d be all-but-confirmed that I was around once people walked off a spear through the heart, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to be able to claim that I wasn’t there with something resembling a straight face.

A number of different factions would be quite unhappy if I was openly running around, flaunting my level and class combination, or my Immortality.

My fourth thought process was working out what to tell the Legata. I settled on short, sweet, and couldn’t complain back at me.

I teleported out a notebook, ripped out a blank page, and used some quick [Lepidoptera] work to utterly cheat. I wrote out a quick letter with razor-thin lines of my runedrawing skill, the magic failing to find a proper ‘spell’ and simply burning itself into the paper.

Nobody said I ever needed to use skills the way they were supposed to be used. Finding new and unusual ways to capitalize on my skills was a skill in and of itself! I wish I had more time to experiment with everything. To read, to learn magic, to-

If wishes were fishes I’d drown.

Kat,

Errand. Meet you in Han

D

Short, sweet, to the point. I was just barely done writing the message when I got in range of Katerina.

[Rapid Reshelving] teleported the message in front of her face, and she snatched it out of the air. I didn’t wait to see her reaction, snapping my wings open and blazing after Fenrir.

It took me a lot more work to catch up with him than usual! He was growing his third class fast, probably helped by a hefty dose of Iona going out and getting levels, sharing her experience with him. I was still faster, but fundamentally wyverns were one of the lords of the sky. One of the fastest creatures out there. I was only able to catch up with Fenrir thanks to all the stats I had in speed, my extensive study of various types of flight improving my skill, along with my biomancy changes. I didn’t think it’d last terribly long though.

I flew next to Iona, and drew an often-used set of runes, letting us talk without the wind grabbing all our words.

“What’s up? Where’s Nina?” I asked.

Iona quickly explained that they’d ended up in Aerie Heights after an adventure and a half - she’d tell me the rest later - and the three of them had stumbled upon a slaver ring run by a harpy flock. Iona had torn through them like a knife through hot butter, and too late realized there was a dead man’s switch that had been tripped.

“... Nina’s feeding mana into the switch to delay it, but we calculated it won’t last much longer. Instead of trying to find a healer or an expert that can handle the collars willing to go with us, I figured it’d be easier to grab you.”

I lifted an eyebrow.

“What do you need me to do?” I asked.

“Ideally, [Rapid Reshelving] can take the collars off, and have the skill gem embedded do its thing harmlessly.” Iona gave me a quick breakdown of what she knew about the gems and collars. “In much less ideal circumstances, well, nobody can die with you around…”

I pulled a face.

“Getting their heads blown off only to heal it back on is not a pleasant method.”

“Beats slavery or death though, yeah?” Iona countered.

“That it does.”

Iona gave me a detailed breakdown of everything she knew, including Nina’s mana regeneration. I frowned, running my own calculations.

“I think… I think you’re off a bit.” I said, going over what Iona had told me.

“What! Where?” She protested. “I’m not a wizard like you are, but I did read your notes and I know the basics!”

I nodded.

“Yeah… the basics… you’re missing a loss factor. Nina’s losing a small percentage of what she’s putting in. Normally not too important, but it changes the math of when they’ll go off. We’re going to be late.”

Late in this context meant dozens of deaths.

Iona swore, and it felt like Fenrir figured out a way to get a tiny bit faster. Like going from a run to a sprint.

I hit him with [Sunrise] and [Dance with the Heavens]. We’d need to be as fast as possible to make it.

We were able to catch up a little more while making our mad sprint to Aerie. Iona had found me by sheer virtue of our unbreakable bonds of love… and asking Artemis where I was. Aerie bordered both Exterreri and Vollomond, although her excursion deeper into Exterreri to find me at the Sixth’s camp had badly hurt her calculations.

I stayed quiet with the thought that maybe if she’d gone to see Night or Arachne, that they would’ve had a faster solution. Then again, finding them in Sanguino might’ve taken just as much time as flying to the Sixth’s camp, with less guarantee that it’d work out.

We had time for the long version. Nina and Iona had made it to Vollomond, no problems, and had landed in a random village. Helped out with a few things, the mayor ended up being a werewolf that was developing a taste for human flesh, the usual for a wandering Valkyrie and her squire.

It was always the [Mayor]. Unless it was the [Butcher].

They kept traveling around, lurching from place to place like a pair of drunken sailors, trying to help in whatever way they would. Usually it was fairly mundane help. A tree turned into logs for an elderly widow to make it through the winter nights, or commonly, simply going away and not eating through parts of the villager’s stores was the most useful thing they could do.

Then they hit rumors that a local mine was stealing people away and forcing them to work in its depths. Nina had wanted to go in mace swinging, but Iona had preached temperance. Investigation.

Fenrir perked up at this part of the story, and I got a few rare words from the wyvern.

“Fun. Complicated.” He snorted proudly at himself.

Iona patted his neck.

“It had rained the whole time, blasted wet season.” She said. “To all of our surprise, the mine was only a little shady. Not enough for me to start putting heads on pikes, but a few [Miners] were released from their contracts.” She chuckled to herself. “First day, first hour we were poking around, and the owner promptly presented them to us, declared they were released from their contracts, and asked if he could help with anything else.”

Mines in Vollomond prompted a memory, one of my teammates in the Gladiator Gauntlet. His family had owned a mallium mine.

“Was it a mallium mine?” I asked.

Iona looked puzzled for a moment.

“No, copper, why?” She asked.

I shook my head.

“Not important, go on.”

The disappearances and the mine were unrelated, no matter what the locals thought. But the fact that there were people vanishing out of their bed was still unresolved. Careful investigation had led them to a harpy flock raiding out of Aerie, kidnapping people and selling them to various markets in Omospondia.

Which led to the current issue. Iona had happily smashed the slaver ring to pieces, tearing through them in a way only an enraged Valkyrie could manage, only to find out after the fact that the slavers had a safeguard against a slave rebellion. One that Nina was doing her best to delay.

“How about you?” Iona asked once her story was done. I could see what she was doing.

I gave her a little nuzzle.

“I’ll tell you when all of this is over. Let’s plan.”

Aerie Heights had the single most famous magical landmark in all of Pallos. I didn’t count the Dragoneye Moons, because they were because of a skill, and they weren’t on Pallos.

The Shattered Mountains.

There was nothing like them in the entire world, although the flying island the School was on was a distant cousin. It was like a mountain range had been elevated into the sky, then a god had smashed them into thousands of floating splinters. Some were the size of a pebble, a deadly hazard to anyone flying through at high speed, while the largest chunks were literal mountains just hovering there, slowly turning on various axes.

The mountains were dotted with caves, some barely more than an impression in the stone, all the way to vast honeycombs hollowing out the mountains. The flocks of Aerie Heights made the caves their home.

It was hotly debated if the mountains were ‘naturally’ floating, if a god was directly responsible for keeping them afloat, if this was some Classer’s powerful flex - my personal favorite theory, like Lun’Kat’s moons - or if the mountains and stones were filled with massive reserves of untapped Skyte.

Harpies called the Shattered Mountains their home, nobody else able to fly nearly as well as them. There was a whole clamor of the harpies ruling the sky and shitting on - sometimes, quite literally - the people who lived on the ground, but that wasn’t important right now.

“Last time, confirming this is the path?” I asked Iona, going over the crude map we’d made. She tapped her fingers on a particularly long loop.

“Yes, but I think you should be able to skip past this part here. There’s a gap, but it was too narrow for Fenrir. Think you can find it? The hideout’s fairly well hidden.”

I chewed my tongue thinking about it, the question having been passed back and forth a dozen times.

“Yes.” I finally said with more confidence than I felt. “You’ll be powering yourself towards it. If I get lost, I’ll retrace my steps and find you.” My senses should help dramatically with that. I could see a blade of grass waving from where I was, hearing Fenrir when he wasn’t trying to be sneaky would be easy.

Iona pointed.

“There are the gates.”

I was off like a shot, blazing through the sky towards a pair of pillars that Iona had nicknamed ‘the gates’. They were like a pair of columns, stretching half a mile in height and thicker than a house, marking an ‘entrance’ to the endless, occasionally-shifting maze that was the Shattered Mountains.

I ignored other fliers, harpies occasionally squawking indignantly as I flew past on a mission of mercy.

I only had limited experience flying against floating obstacles. The School fortunately had a ‘flier’s obstacle course’ that I’d occasionally run through, but it still felt weird to be going under an obstacle.

The occasional rock was easy enough to dodge. They didn’t really move, and between my senses, reflexes, small size and dexterity, I had no real issues.

I paused at an intersection, working on orienting myself, trying to balance ‘rush, people will die’ with ‘haste makes waste’ and ‘I’m going faster than Iona and Fenrir.’

An echoing explosion was a worrying, solid signal of the direction I needed to go, and I took off towards it. I quickly saw the entrance to the hidden cave the slavers had been using, and blazed inside, taking in the scene in an instant.

Nina looked terrible. The kitsune had huge bags under her eyes, and was shaking with exhaustion. Tears had dried on her face, and she gritted her teeth as her paws stayed firmly on the central enchantment, feeding what mana she could into it.

Splashes of blood all over the walls ended in long bloody smears towards the entrance of the cave. Perfectly spherical cutouts in the walls mixed with patches of soot and a dozen other traces of a fierce battle that had been held here.

My heart sank as I saw the various elvenoid slaves that were scattered across the room. Young to old, three different races, men and women, but less than half of the number Iona had told me about. Only 18 left. They looked starved and malnourished, huddling in various parts of the cave. Their chains had been broken, and only half of their manacles were off. Iona had figured out the dead man’s switch while removing them, and had immediately taken off.

I wasted no time on fancy introductions. I grabbed the nearest collar with [Rapid Reshelving] and teleported the entire thing off. It ‘only’ cost me 20,000 mana, a pittance against my reserves, and an impossible amount of magic power for most people.

I moved fast. I was starting to focus on the next collar I needed to teleport when the first one began to activate its spell array, effectively exploding. I sliced the room in half with [Mantle of the Stars], protecting me and the victims from the explosion.

An explosion had to go somewhere. By giving it an easy outlet, it didn’t batter against [Mantle] until something broke.

“Elaine. You’re here.” Nina sighed with relief and passed out, her hands slipping off the sigils. I teleported off a second collar in the time it took her to speak and pass out, then swore as I saw her hands slip off.

Things went very quickly from there.

I could see the faint traces coursing through the sigils Nina had been fueling, recognizing that they’d triggered the moment Nina’s hands had slipped off. Dashing to it and trying to pump my own mana into it wouldn’t do anything, the deadman’s switch had already activated.

18 people still needed saving. I only had 10 fingers. I split my mind as far as it would go, each part focused on saving lives.

[Mantle of the Stars] was relatively weak as far as shielding skills went, but I had a lot of power to put behind it these days. I picked the two biggest, toughest looking men, and wrapped their collars with fancy applications of [Mantle], leaving a hole for the explosive energy to escape from pointing in a relatively harmless direction. I was making a snap judgment here, going off appearances and not running [Identify] to check levels and class archetypes to try and work out who might had the most vitality. For all I knew, the delicate-looking grandmother in the corner had so much vitality that shielding her neck was the better call, but I had to made a call. An assumption. I could only pray it was the right one.

A third [Mantle] wrapped around a medusa’s head. The slavers had cruelly sheared off her snake-hair, and I didn’t know what they’d regrow as, how long they’d be, if they’d lash out at anyone nearby, if she had a powerful Fossil or Poison element… too many unknowns. Better to just hide them for the moment. That required no gestures on my part.

A spellbook fell out in front of me, already turned to the correct page. I caught it with my knee and surged mana through the spell. I blasted a tightly-clustered group of 4 - a small family, by the looks of it - with the strongest dispel I had in my arsenal, neutering their collars and draining the skill out of the gemstones. I could only hope it was enough.

I snapped my arms out to either side at a speed that would be impossible without the System, spreading my fingers in a way that would suggest a dozen broken bones if it wasn’t for my dexterity, and shot 10 [Nova Lances] around the room, each one [Imbued] with [Dance with the Heavens] and some of my best images.

Two of the lances I needed to make emergency edits to, my high-speed thoughts the only way I was able to do them in time. I didn’t have a pre-made template for ‘heal all injuries except burning holes I made in people.’ I had to make two different crude ones on the fly that would fix whatever nastiness the collars would do, while not interfering with my beam.

As Nina’s head cracked on the hard stone floor, all hell broke loose. All 14 remaining charged collars exploded almost at the same time that my beams arrived.

I wrapped Nina up with a loose covering of [Mantle], protecting her to the best of my ability. I didn’t quite have the ability to mentally ‘cascade’ [Mantles] and dictate which ones broke first. Either they’d all hold, or they’d all break.

Most of them were normal. People were healed as the explosions ravaged their face and broke their neck, metal shards being extruded from jellied eyeballs as delicate necks snapped into shape then back out of shape like a pen being clicked. Eardrums burst and were restored, brains were rattled, and people lived.

They shook, they rolled, they screamed in agony and generally made keeping my life-saving beams on them difficult.

Two of the beams were tricky.

The first one went clean through a man’s arm, burning a neat hole the size of a grain of sand, before hitting the woman he was shielding and going through her chest. The two spasmed in pain, and I gritted my teeth as my [Nova Lance] carved new and interesting patterns in their flesh. None of the healing I was providing was designed to handle charred flesh and Radiance-created holes - indeed, it was explicitly casted not to fix them, otherwise I’d instantly heal the first man before my beam could finish going through him, dooming the woman he was shielding.

The second pair was just as bad as the first, but the only good angle I had involved going too close to the first woman’s heart.

In all this, Nina was barely shielded, ragdolling as she was pelted by a dozen different blasts, getting cut up by the flying shrapnel. My loose [Mantle] took the worst of the hits, but I couldn’t afford to try catching them all. Otherwise, the two [Mantles] that were wrapped around collars risked breaking. I took an ungainly hop forward, carving deeper into the four people I was applying my special [Nova Lance] to, then doing a sort of back-flop to keep my hands aimed at everyone, but getting my foot on Nina, keeping her alive.

The explosions were short and violent, ending almost as quickly as they’d started. I killed my [Lances] as I hopped up to my feet, sprinting to one end of the room as I sent a harmless [Nova Lance] and [Kaleidoscope] butterfly over my shoulder to the other end of the room, healing the first pair I’d been forced to burn through. I made it to the second pair, brushed them both with a healing-infused finger, then sprinted back over to the first pair, heaving with [Oath]-induced nausea.

Burning through one person to heal both them and a second person wasn’t a violation. Nowhere close. However, the nanosecond they were out of immediate danger, the moment the slave collar’s explosive fury had finished venting, my [Nova Lance] was undeniably doing harm with no good attached. The circumstances were unusual enough that I wasn’t eating a full-blown [Oath] penalty, simply experiencing significant nausea and discomfort from putting my toes over the line.

Wasn’t even losing a level.

Ha.

Not that losing a level in [Oath] was actually a penalty. I had too many of them banked.

I made it to the pair I was running to, laying hands on both of them. Mostly for the lady I’d sent the [Kaleidoscope] butterfly to - an image of full-body total injuries healed was far too expensive to [Imbue].

I spent a moment looking around. Satisfied by my success, I let myself slump down against a wall just as my body finished dumping adrenaline into my system.

Success.

Nobody had died.