acaswell
patreon
Chapter 195: Mountains - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2024-01-19 06:25:29 +0000 UTCAfter we discussed our abilities with the group, the next night, as we set up camp, Old Mo pulled me aside and asked me a few questions.
“Miria, have you thought about what you want to do in the future? What do you want to be when you grow up?” Old Mo hesitated. “I know you’ve already talked about your healing ability, and I was talking about a backstory that might work for you. But does that… make you happy?”
I didn’t need to think much about it before I nodded. “I like healing people,” I said. In our previous life, on the world of the black sun, Sallia and I had both healed people for several years before we had left the city as adventurers. I distinctly remembered how nice it had felt to heal people. It had been a good way to get money, Achievement, and I felt good doing it. Healing was probably the ideal job for me in this world, unless more opportunities to explore the weird manifestation essence items cropped up.
Old Mo smiled. “If you like it, then that’s good to hear. I don’t need to change any of your backstory, then. Now, we still have a few weeks to a month of walking before we arrive, which should give you just enough time to learn the language Normally, that wouldn’t be enough time to learn a new language, but there are so many shared words and grammatical rules between Vernese and Semurian that it should be easy. Does that sound good to you?”
I nodded.
That night, and every night afterwards, Old Mo sat down with me for an hour or two and drilled information into my head. How I needed to act, as a ‘fallen noble’ from Semuria. How to speak Semurian. What I needed to talk about whenever people asked about my past.
Old Mo also extended the same training to the other members of the group, although he spent the most time teaching me my role. By the time we arrived at our new home in Damilius, we would be able to play our roles perfectly - or so I hoped.
Of course, everyone participated except my mother.
The aftereffects of the drugs my mother usually took still left her in a semiconscious state most of the time, but she now seemed to retain at least enough self-awareness to walk on her own. However, my mother also suffered from withdrawal symptoms every night, which I had to strain my essence pool to negate. Every night, my mother started trembling and shivering, almost as if she was dying of hypothermia, and so I dribbled water onto her forehead and used it to apply renewal over and over again. Even though my mother didn’t have any conscious periods during the three days after the encounter with the soldiers, she didn’t create problems for the rest of the group either. It wasn’t perfect, but I hoped that my mother could last until we got to our new home.
Sallia and Felix, who were now also known to have abilities, became able to use their abilities constantly as we marched forward. I constantly fed Felix information I gathered using my spatial sight and soul sight, and he relayed everything useful to the group through his ‘ability to sense other minds.’
This came in relatively handy, as a few other groups of people came near our group during the three days of marching. They seemed like other groups of refugees, which was lucky - I wasn’t sure whether the Vernese military was tracking us down after we had wiped out the group of scouts, but I was worried that they would send a group too big for us to handle. I didn’t want to meet with any other groups along the way, just in case they were actually Vernese soldiers in disguise or something. our situation wasn’t good enough for us to help them out, either, so I could only wish them good luck as we continued on our way.
Meanwhile, Sallia freely used her own powers to make our journey more comfortable. We ran across a few streams and rivers, and rather than undertake potentially dangerous river crossings, Sallia just had us stand on larger pieces of metal and then floated us across. Her parents seemed to be getting more used to the idea of Sallia having an ability, while the group of parents was also growing more comfortable with each other.
Of course, my mother still wasn’t really welcomed by the rest of the group. The group seemed to have grudgingly agreed that having a magic healer justified the cost of bringing along a drug addict suffering from withdrawal. However, the other group members still didn’t really seem to approve of my mother’s presence. But I felt that was to be expected. Even with the full range of abilities I had available to me, I was starting to feel the strain of dragging my mother along with us during our flight from Verne. It was understandable that the rest of the group was frustrated with her presence. None of them got verbally or physically abusive about it, and I figured that was probably the best I was going to get.
On the third day of travel, the hills we had been traveling through started to get larger and more omnipresent. We were now practically traveling alongside the mountain range, and Old Mo intended to stick next to the mountains until we eventually reached a mountain pass that would lead us into Damilius.
Unfortunately, the hills seemed more populated with soldiers than Old Mo had anticipated. As we got closer to Verne’s borders, we ran into an increasing number of scouts from both sides of the conflict.
We were still four days away from passing by the actual front lines, and we were already starting to run into troops from the two armies. Seeing coalition troops this deep in Verne, I had a strong suspicion that things were even worse for Verne’s military than I’d heard about. The coalition army’s scouts were breezing through the front lines as if they weren’t even there, and I felt that the coalition scouts were definitely more common than Verne’s soldiers, even though we were firmly in Verne’s territory right now.
I was able to scout out the location of potential threats in advance, thanks to my soul and spatial perception, so we were still able to avoid running into any other people. But I was getting increasingly nervous. Even though we were successfully dodging any actual contact with scouts, that didn’t mean that they weren’t able to find our trail. And I didn’t want to know what kind of force they might send after us if they noticed us.
“Old Mo, what should we do?” I asked, after our group dodged the seventh scout of the day. It was nearly dinnertime, but our group had already dodged seven different scouts scouring the area. We had even heard a shootout happening between two scouts as they took potshots at each other from a distance, and while we had stayed far away from the shootout, I was becoming more and more tense. I still needed to sleep, and if a scout saw our group while I wasn’t scouting, we would be found and potentially attacked before I could respond. I didn’t want to get shot in my sleep.
Old Mo also gritted his teeth, and looked at Felix.
“Are you sure we’ve dodged seven scouts today?”
“Absolutely positive,” said Felix. “All of the areas we dodged were occupied by people, and… their minds were filled with violence,” said Felix, after a few moments. Of course, in reality, I had known they were scouts because I peeked at them using spatial perception and saw their army insignias, but that wasn’t one of the abilities we had pretended Felix had.
Old Mo gritted his teeth. “Both armies are putting a lot more emphasis on this area than expected. I wonder why…” Old Mo gritted his teeth, and then sighed.
“The way I see it, we have two options. First, we can keep going as is, and hope it all works out. We’ve been dodging scouts so far, and Felix’s mental perception gives us a range of detection and mobility that is far beyond what I had originally expected. Thanks to that, we haven’t even run into a group during our time in the hills. If Felix is able to keep it up, maybe we’ll be safe from any problems. And if we do run into a smaller group of soldiers, maybe Sallia can fight them off again.” Old Mo turned towards Sallia. “How many shooters can you handle at once using your metal manipulation?”
“I can probably deconstruct a few guns per second, or move around a much larger number of bullets per second,” said Sallia, after some thought. “Maybe… twenty?” Of course, Sallia couldn’t move that many bullets at once - but that was how many bullets Sallia and I combined could handle, if conditions were almost perfect for us.
“Twenty…” Old Mo frowned harder. “A standard Verne scouting force is usually a group of ten people spread out over a certain area. Unless they’ve reorganized the military since I was part of it. So Sallia can, theoretically, handle the average ten-person scouting force. but that’s also a rather dangerous idea to rely on, since Sallia will need to sleep sometimes, and there’s always the chance she could mess up in the middle of a battle. One mistake could leave one of us dead, even with Miria’s healing on hand,” said Old Mo. “So the other option I was thinking of was to head into the actual mountains, instead of hugging them the way we have been.”
I looked at the mountains. It would be much harder to travel through the mountains than the foothills, and probably much colder. It was still a month and a half way from winter, but the temperature had been steadily dropping for the past month or two. The mountains would only exacerbate that.
Of course, the cold also meant that most soldiers wouldn’t be as willing to travel into the mountains. Frostbite and hypothermia were very real threats to the soldiers in the army, and unlike our group, they wouldn’t have access to magical healing to remove the problem.
“Are there any special features in the mountains that might make it more dangerous?” asked Felix.
Old Mo frowned. “Well… there are old legends that it used to be the heartland of the old Zelyr empire, and a lot of archeological digs have found old Zelyr settlements in the mountain ranges of the continent. Sometimes Zelyr settlements have strange, artificial creatures that use some kind of twisted essence. They can be dangerous.”
Artificial creatures? Twisted essence? I frowned. That sounded… awfully familiar. Thus far, I had been assuming that this dimension was actually raiding other dimensions throughout the multiverse or something, but Old Mo’s mention of the ancient Zelyr empire made me wonder if there was more to the story.
Anise’s eyes lit up.
<Do you guys think that the Ancient Zelyr are linked to whatever the facility researching Felix was doing?> asked Anise.
<It’s definitely possible,> I said. <If we get a chance, I think it’s worth looking into.>
“But the odds of us finding an old Zelyr ruin are very low,” said Old Mo, either unaware of or politely ignoring our mental conversation. “Apart from that, we just need to keep an eye on temperature. Miria, can your healing handle things like frostbite?”
“I can even regrow lost limbs,” I said. “Really, as long as it’s not a mental problem and as long as you aren’t dead, I can heal almost anything.”
“That’s quite impressive,” said Old Mo. “In that case, I personally favor going into the mountains over staying in this area. Does anyone have any objections?”
“I like the idea of running into fewer gunfights,” said Anise’s father, after a few moments. “And I’m willing to trust the little girl about her healing powers.” He looked protectively at Anise. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt from a stray bullet or something.”
A few other group members chimed in in agreement, after a few minutes, the decision was made. We were going to travel into the mountains.
Author’s Note:
Join my Discord!
Comments
Rain
TFC
Arkeus
Thinking about it, it seems like the best comparison to what they are trying to pretend is post ww1 russian nobles fleeing to other countries.
