The Power of Ten, Book Five: Versatile Wizardry

“Which is exactly what happened to Aelryinth, according to the one Sending that reached me. I don’t know if it was because of one of us, Divine recognition, surviving that damn Death Curse, or what, but we’ve got this Bloodline of a Void Phoenix now.” I shrugged it off. Just one more thing to Karma up and make useful...

“Uh-huh. A bunch more abilities to buy, Levels to take in order to get the Feats and Masteries needed to get good at said abilities, all for a ten to twenty percent edge in something somewhere, hopefully stacking several times, and maybe a real cool reusable power or two?”

“You are familiar with the process!” I then remembered Briggs’ Rantha Racial Class. “Never mind. You’ve got so many broken passives as it is...”

“I’m a Melee Forsaken. All I’ve bloody got is passives and Stats,” he rumbled, his big arms crossed across an equally massive chest. “The Racial Class is awesome, I’m not denying it. But we both know it’s just giving us benefits internally instead of having to Christmas Tree for the same things. You know how damn expensive just getting Fast Healing and Regeneration is.”

“Yes, yes, and a Healing Domain Divine Caster can have Healing Reserve at One if they want it.” Which wasn’t the same as, but was damn close to Fast Healing... and it worked on others!

“I got over most of my envy of Powered when I realized the people of our world didn’t have all the sweet stuff from Power of Ten. Then I realized that a whole lot of Powered people didn’t have any of the sweet stuff from this world, either, and basically, didn’t have any power to speak of. Not much different from Primos and Forsaken.”

“I admit to being shocked all the humans here were Powered, but it makes sense on an evolutionary basis, especially with the lower population. If they didn’t have something to fall back on, the Beasts would just run over them,” I nodded to him.

“Yeah, painful experience has shown them that mundane solutions to things just don’t work. The ecosystem here is so damn wonky...” He shook his head, far smarter than most people realized, totally able to see that this world should have just collapsed ecologically with all the monstrous predatory species, and it hadn’t. “You realized what’s going on below the surface geographically?” he asked, glancing at me.

“They don’t have other worlds to compare to, so sure, I realized it pretty quickly. Humanity is stuck into the narrow bands around the rivers and shores of the seas and larger bodies of water. Our heaviest conflicts come with trying to expand out of those zones, while the pressure is constant, but not all that overwhelming, to keep the water-adjacent territories.” I narrowed my eyes. “The Emperors on the land have deliberately placed and allowed Humanity to sit between them and the seas. They want us soaking up any and all of the incoming attacks from the seas and oceans.”

“Nice,” Briggs nodded slowly. “The general human attitude is that they fought so proudly for lands with access to water and fishing and wetlands and hold onto them with everything, so they don’t realize that the Land Emperors don’t want them at all. Sure, it discomfits some of the amphibious types, and not surprisingly, that’s who most of our conflicts are with.

“It’s hard to track, of course, but everything I’ve been able to quietly dig up seems to show that true land-dwelling species that try to hold shore positions do horribly, even the amphibious ones. They either submit to the Aquatic species or they slowly watch their young get picked off and eaten, and are unable to hold the territory unless it’s a good distance inland.

“The only exceptions are the species that hold unassailable terrain advantages. No Sea species is going to test the Sahara’s Sand Emperor, as they just die lost and alone in the sun and sand. If they go ashore in Antarctica, they just freeze under the weight of the Ice Emperor.

“Trying to reach the mountains of K’un’lun is insanity. Traipsing into the North is just asking to die lost in the trees and the storms. Invading the Amazon means fertilizer for the trees as you rot away. Contesting the skies with the Avians is ultimately suicide.

“But there’s an exception, of course.”

“Them damn adaptable Humans, making any terrain their own terrain with their Formations and defenses and busy-business,” I said knowingly. “All of us so puffed up on our greatness and smarts that we don’t realize we’ve been allowed to develop all this for a reason...”

“And then we get full of ourselves and get taught a lesson when we go intruding where and when we shouldn’t, get smacked down, but don’t learn the lesson about the true powers of the world.” Briggs sighed heavily. “The egos of some of the Sages out there rival demon princes and dukes of Hell, Fae. This whole society is based on gaining power, because that power keeps the society alive. But the societal pressure has less and less weight as you get stronger, and when the mages start gaffing it in favor of their own pursuits, and exploiting society for their own benefits, well, it’s caused more than one disaster.”

“You think I didn’t notice that Humans are the only species that doesn’t have a Ruler or Emperor?” I sniffed. “Sure, we consider it makes us unique here, better than the Beasts. It does, but it also makes us unnatural, and Humanity doesn’t realize it.”

“Hey, unique is much more complimentary than unnatural, thank you very much!” he scoffed grimly. “It’s all the stupid Beasts which are the problem, not Humanity!”

“Any other fascinating insights into our situation here?”

He glanced at me again, and sighed. “It’s true there’s no one in Heaven here, right?”

“Correct, as far as I can tell.”

“So there literally is no Higher Cause worth fighting for here. That leaves the Low Cause. How bad is Dark Magic infiltrating Humanity, from the perspective of the Beasts?”

“It’s corruption, a disease, and an infection, wholly unnatural. The Beast Realm is actively and mercilessly hunting down and expunging Dark Bloodlines whenever they are found. Humanity proliferating such things would have already led to our extermination at the hands of the Great Beasts without the Dark Realmlords preventing such moves.”

“Is there a Realmlord here on Earth, holding them off?” Briggs asked reasonably.

“No, but that is because there’s Light influences preventing them from making easy appearances. However, the Dark and the Light test one another constantly, and the Dark Lords can reach into this Realm now and then to make personal moves, which is why the Beast Emperors aren’t acting against Humanity by fiat. They have to find reasonable excuses that won’t draw the ire of the Dark Realmlords when they act.”

“Fuck me. So Humanity is the only force that can push off the various Dark centers of power, because we’re the ones who are helping establish them here?” he groaned.

“That is basically entirely correct.”

He took another deep breath and looked at the ceiling. “That’s not how the conflict is being seen, of course.”

“Here I am, acting all surprised that a primordial conflict between Axiom and Evil might be misconstrued as something else entirely? Like, oh, a Church conflict, and a personal grasp on power and control over mortal society?” I asked brightly.

“Ah, so you do know the Church of Light would vastly prefer to execute all Dark Magic users outright and get rid of them, and instead has been forced to acknowledge their Elements as valid fields of magical study.”

“Clever girl sometimes read in her downtime, imagine dat, dur!”

“Sama showed you our library, right?”

“All those personal records of the Church of Light not allowed to be read by the unwashed masses that she stole on a lark eight years ago? Nope, don’t know nothing about such a sacrilegious act as that. Do you think I want to be executed as a heretic or something?”

“I don’t know about them, either,” he agreed piously. “Seriously, she gets an idea in her head, and there’s no stopping her.”

“You know she says the same damn thing about you, right?”

He whistled exactly one note as he looked around at the whole of the Coralost Compound and its White Mana Zone, the product of literally years of focus and labor. “Yeah, can’t imagine why. I’m such a moderate, cheerful dolt of an Ancient, I am. Can’t possibly be thinking beyond my next bed and meal.”

His Sun bloomed forth as he looked contentedly on what he had made. I just closed my eyes and rocked back in my seat at the force of destiny streaming slowly past me.

Nobody on this planet had a freaking clue how dangerous a Source was over time, and I wasn’t going to be the one to tell them. Nulls were dangerous, too, but they were dangerous in who they chose to back. Sama standing behind Briggs was the foundation building the mountain that was rolling forward.

“So, I should be able to alleviate your goldweight situation completely,” I told him. “The KIA boys and any other Powered we rank up aren’t going to have any issues with it at all if they are making shit of their own, and they get a shot at Seeds as we gallivant all over the landscape. What’s your immediate goals?”

Briggs was the builder, Sama was a semi-directed tool acting in support of their mutual ambitions. It wasn’t that Sama wasn’t a long-term thinker, but Briggs actually built Big Stuff, Sama helped gather materials and defend with nasty normal stuff. It was what she was best at, and if she had side hobbies that often related to arseholes getting what was coming to them, Briggs was naturally happy to accommodate her.

“I have to expand the White Zone, but I can’t do that without Babe’s approval, and I’m not sure how to do that.”

“Recruit Michigan’s Totem Beast. Got it,” I nodded. “I think that one’s actually pretty easy.”

He gave me a long-suffering eyeball. “Really.”

“Sure.” I sent over plans for something, he looked at them in his Visual File, and whistled that one note again.

“You need to stop intruding on my awesomeness,” he informed me loftily. “Yeah, I’m gonna start on this right away, I think.” He looked at the details in his Visual File, shaking his head. “This is actually a good way to recruit just about any Totem Beast, I’d think...”

“Are there really that many of them around?” I had to ask. “I mean, Babe kind of took over the spot of one, he’s not a ‘real’ Totem Beast, as I understand it...”

“No, he’s not. But he’s what we have, so he’s what we work with. He’s not even a true Emperor-Class Beast...” Briggs frowned. “Do you know, every single Human tribe and territory in the world used to have their own Totem Beast?”

I blinked. “ALL of them?” I repeated for emphasis.

“I haven’t been able to find any that did not. Records are also very sketchy, but the fall of the Totem Beasts, and the rise of the magic civilization among Humans, also coincided with the first rise of Dark Magic among Humans...”

“Huh.” Wasn’t that just an amazing coincidence, she thinks flatly. “More research into things you aren’t supposed to know?”

“Sama has a bad habit of getting into forbidden archives and making off with stuff. You’re not the only one with Polyglot, you know. Some of that stuff can’t even be translated by anyone still alive.”

“Which means relying on the dead, who have their own agenda...” I sighed, and he grinned again.

“The military has finally cleared our revised communications standards,” he informed me quietly. “Finally being able to access radio waves that don’t alert and alarm the crap out of Beasts was a huge step forward.”

My expression was a bit interesting. So, Briggs being the one breaking open the communication standards of the world was important. This world had an internet, cell phones, and video, but it all went kibutz with active magic around. As I’d been told, using coms or cell phones around Beasts attracted wild and deadly attention, helping them zero right in on you since the communication bandwidths used a variant of Lightning Magic. The Energized Materials used in most stuff reacted to magic, so even filming or photographing actual magic was a very difficult thing to do, meaning special effects in video were very lacking with the crappy technology alternatives.

Briggs and Sama were the ones changing that, here in the Coralost Compound and its White Mana Zone. Building was always going on here, new people were coming in, leading research was being done, and production facilities were starting up nearby.

It meant more money, power, and influence, too. Basically, Briggs and Sama were leading a different kind of tech revolution, and the most amusing thing was, they had no true competition for it, because most of it wasn’t possible without a White Mana Zone and Typeless Mana workers!