“If he believes it is the best use of his group, then he has my permission. How is the second wing of the Gudalo flying citadels faring?” Josh asked.
“They are moving northwest near to the old location of Quindar’s lair where the portal is located on the island within the nearby lake. The area is filled with Ooinfa. They will provide long-range fire support so as to not get caught within the illusion spells. They will move from the air, dropping their forces on the four Ooinfa-controlled citadels, concentrating their forces on one citadel at a time. With their suppression abilities, they should be able to counteract the illusion spells to a great extent, as well with the Band-Aid’s ability to reduce the effect of magic cast at our people. They will be arriving within a few hours,” another assistant said.
“Good. Have all of the reserve citadel forces on standby and ready to replace those active as soon as possible. I want those citadels moving throughout the day and night in order to defeat these portal groups,” Josh said.
“Yes sir!” The two assistants turned back to their work as Josh looked toward the Jakan citadel.
A red and blue streak left the citadel and headed for the flying citadels.
“The Jakan will take nine days to think it over and consult with their people back home,” Fire said in a private chat with Josh.
“Good. Dwayne, I want you to send forty percent of your people back to Terra for immediate reassignment. We’re going to bolster our numbers at the different portal locations and clear as many of them as possible in nine days.
“After those nine days, we’ll be back here. If the Jakan decide to ally themselves with us, we’ll move them around to deal with the different threats we’re facing. If they decide to not take our deal, we’ll have to hammer them with everything we have and seal off that portal, even if it means we have to break it. Having a long, drawn out battle with the Jakan will only weaken us.” Josh talked to Fire, Water, and Dwayne in the party chat.
If he could, he would grant mercy. But if the Jakan decided to fight, then a number of players would lose their hard-earned levels, making them a weaker force, and they would lose the people of Emerilia without the ability to replace them.
They had to draw a line, and be ready to enforce it with everything they had when the time came.
“Understood,” Dwayne said.
“Agreed,” Water said.
“I will lend my help with overcoming the other portal locations,” Fire said.
Josh’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Then I thank you for your help,” Josh said sincerely. He had yet to see what amounted to a god of Emerilia go all out. He’d seen Deia do it a few times and he was shocked at her awesome display of power. However, her mother was nearly twice her age and there was no true record of her fighting personally.
“I will not participate. I am needed for the Pandora’s Box Initiative. Also, it would be good if we kept some trump cards hidden at this time,” Water said.
“Gotcha.” Josh wasn’t privy to all the details about what the Pandora’s Box Initiative was doing. However, the number of people who seemed to have disappeared into the program was tremendous. All of them were geniuses in their field. “I hope that we won’t need them in the near future.”
“You and me both,” Water said.
The top of Josh’s scalp tingled at Water’s tone.
***
Party Zero looked down upon the Alturarans who controlled a few of the citadels at the portal located inside the Densaou Ring of Fire and east of the Orun Free States. The Alturarans were a race of sentients who had taken on inorganic bodies as their planet had died, trapped in these bodies for centuries, splicing their memories and minds from one generation to the next until they had lost their history and identity. Now, when they interacted with organic matter and creatures made of organic material, they wished to destroy them, to make the universe as dead as they were. They were largely formed from crystals and were great practitioners of using Dark Mana to change their own bodies to attack and create various poisons to kill off organics.
A shimmering mist of green hung over their portal, a poison that they were pumping into the air. They would make more and more of it as time went on, using it to kill off anything in the area around the Densaou Ring of Fire and then Emerilia as a whole.
The Nalheim had come over to Emerilia and moved to some territories around the Densaou Ring of Fire, pledging their allegiance to the dragons who lived in the desolate area within the ring of volcanoes. The Nalheim needed the warmth to survive and thrive, making the Densaou Ring of Fire an excellent place for them to live.
When they had first arrived, they had been fighting against the Terra Alliance. In a twist of fate, they were now on the same side as the alliance as they faced off against the Alturarans.
The Terra Alliance was using all manner of grand workings and different ranged spells and attacks on the Alturarans. However, the Nalheims’ disrupting attacks that they cast with their spears or with their massive Nerhoun mounts were highly effective against the Alturarans.
The dragons had also come out to support the attacks against the portal near their home.
None of the Alturarans looked the same but they were placed into different classes. There were normals, heavies, tanks, ranged, mutated, and worms.
The normals were just normal, low-level Alturarans; they had not only close combat abilities but also ranged ones. Heavies were larger versions of the normals. Tanks were ones that were focused on defense; ranged those with more ranged attack focus. Worms were massive long creatures that could make it through a portal and then would eat their way through the natural vegetation, turning it into power. They could supply this power to the other Alturarans or use it themselves to create massive Dark magic spells. Mutated were Alturarans that might fall outside of these categories. They were unpredictable and the most dangerous, but they were the rarest.
The portal was located in the middle of the citadels. Originally it had been buried in a hill but now the hill had been blasted apart, revealing its hollow center.
Three of the worms gathered around the portal. Rot seemed to spread out from their bodies as they created a circle around the portal. Alturarans swarmed over them. Under the thunder of the guns and ranged attacks, they weren’t able to make it very far but there was no break in the firing. If the guns stopped, then the tide would rush forth.
The Nalheim mounted on sky screams worked to pick off any of those that made it past the line of destruction that the Terra Alliance had carved into the ground.
Dave had a grim look on his face. “If I could use just one of the grand workings we’ve been working on with the Pandora’s Box Initiative, we could wipe them clear of Emerilia,” Dave said over the party chat with cold anger.
“There’s nothing that you can do about it.” Deia gripped his hand.
Dave took a deep breath. The air shifted around him as his Mana circulated. “Well, there is one thing I think we can do,” Dave said, his eyes focused on the Alturarans.
He looked to Malsour, who was in his human form. “I’ll need your help.”
“What are we doing?” Malsour asked.
“Making a disrupting ray. Can you ask the Nalheim to come and see us? We’re also going to need Shard’s help with modulating everything.”
“I’ll contact them,” Malsour said.
“Deia, give me two hours and I might have something to deal with the Alturarans,” Dave said.
“Will it be something to get the Jukal AI’s attention?” she asked, with a worried expression.
“Well, it might be, but I don’t think that it’ll trigger them coming after us and looking into our secrets—just taking what the Nalheim have and making it on a much larger scale.”
“Okay.” Deia nodded and squeezed his hand. “Good luck. And let me know if you need anything.”
Dave gave her a smile and squeezed her hand too. He could see that she was blaming herself for the loss of Jekoni and Anna.
He turned and headed for one of the entrances into the soul gem island below the citadel. His eyes passed over Steve. His playful demeanor was dulled as he stood off to the side, looking out over the citadel and the landscape.
Dave wished that he could do something for Steve to help him through the pain he was suffering. However, he knew that if Steve needed his help, he’d come to him, and if he didn’t in some time, then Dave would go and search him out.
Dave shared a look with Malsour. The two of them had solemn and hard faces. Dave opened up a private chat with Malsour. “After this, we’ve got to do everything in our power to speed up things with the Initiative. As soon as we can, we’ll work on that battleship. I also want to work through the destroyers. We don’t have many ships, so we need to make sure they’re the strongest possible.”
“Agreed. And if we can create these disintegrating rays, then maybe we can use it for the ships.”
“It’s not a question of if—just how much time it will take,” Dave said as they walked through the citadel. People moved out of the way as a cold air made their cloaks rise behind them slightly.
Once getting Malsour’s order, nearly fifty Nalheim arrived on the flying citadel within ten minutes. Dave and Malsour met them in one of the bays that were used for the drop platforms. Already people milled around, ready to board the platforms at any minute.
Dave and Malsour took a number of the Nalheim’s weapons and watched them show how they used them. With Dave and Malsour’s Intelligence, they had nearly perfect photographic memory. If they thought on it, then it would be like replaying a video.
Armed with a few dozen spears, Dave and Malsour each took a few of them and started to destroy them. The magical coding and runes filled Dave and Malsour’s minds.
“Shard, I need you to translate some magical runes over,” Dave said. In one hand he held a Mirror of Communication while his other hand flickered over his interface screens as he quickly put down the runes that he had perceived through destroying a number of the spears. Although he knew the runes that were being used, he didn’t know how they functioned because of course, every runic language just had to be different.
“I can do that,” Shard said as Dave started to send over the runes. There were a few hundred of them, so it took time. As he sent them, Shard was sending back a translated version of the runes that was in Dave’s format of runes.
Dave and Malsour looked over the translated runes.
“Okay, so it uses vibrations but also has a light wavelength variation,” Dave said.
“Everything has a resonate frequency. If it’s possible to tune right in on the frequency of what you’re hitting, then up the amplitude—you can shake it apart. The light wavelength is pretty similar—basically goes through all manner of different wavelengths until it finds one that is capable of destroying what it’s hitting.”
“The most complicated thing about these weapons is not the way that it uses vibrations or light to break things apart. It’s the fact that it goes through all of these different possibilities in such a short time. Hell, I’m not even seeing all of the coding that would be needed to do this! If there isn’t anything to regulate it, then how is it supposed to work?” Dave looked to Malsour.
“Well, there is one other variable when these weapons are being fired—the user.”
“The Nalheim?” Dave stopped his walking and closed his eyes as he went through the different images that he remembered of the Nalheim using the weapons just moments ago.
“It must be.” Malsour watched Dave, clearly hoping that he was right. Otherwise they would need to code nearly an AI-level intelligence to use these weapons.
In Dave’s mind, he watched the arcane as it moved through the Nalheim.
It moved from both of their heads; when they shot their spear forward, it was like an electric shock. He’d thought it was just a blunt-force Mana burst that activated the spear. The sheer amount of Mana being tossed out made it look heavy-handed. Now that he studied it closer, he saw that from one of the heads came the changes for the vibration attack, while the other head sent down commands for the light vibration.
“When we asked them, they said that they were just attacking.” Dave shook his head. “They’re doing complicated light and audio vibration on the fly. That large discharge of Mana with their shots was them figuring out what kind of modulation they need to make. If we could get them working with the automated miners, then we could experience a thirty percent increase in how fast they mine, at least. They just keep on attacking with everything each time instead of refining it down. Also, all of the different sound and light wavelengths are timed differently. They all travel so fast that we don’t really perceive that it’s all these different attacks. If they were to combine them all together, there would be no change, but because they’re just perfectly timed, so that they don’t interfere with one another, they’re able to hit a target in the space of microseconds with all of the different wavelengths.”
“When I was looking at the conditions that they lived in, I kind of looked down on them, but it seems that I was the idiot,” Malsour said, in awe of the speed at which they were able to cast the all-encompassing command spell that activated the spear fully. It allowed them to have extremely powerful weapons, without the need for massive magical arrays to control them.
“An impressive feat of them understanding their strengths and utilizing them to their fullest,” Dave said in a praising tone. “Though it means that we’re going to need them to use the disrupting ray. We simply don’t have the time or resources right now to code an AI to control all of this on the fly.”
“If we are able to set up a terminal or something that could record what they’re doing, I can check all of the different wavelengths—see which ones are functioning and isolate them down. So, we would need them to fire the first few shots, then I can go from there, removing the extra wavelengths,” Shard said.
“Perfect. Once this is all over, we’re going to need to get them into a lab to have them shoot their spears, record it all, so that we can get down the information of how they time the different wavelengths. That, more than the fact that they’re using different wavelengths, is hugely important. We can shoot all kinds of wavelengths of light and vibration at a target, but if they’re not staggered then they’ll cancel out each other. I’m not going to lie, I’m a bit in shock of it all,” Dave admitted.
“I’ll get a few of them to come down here, see how we can hook them up to the system to get them to control the beam,” Malsour said.
“Okay. I’ll look into the coding, try to get a better feel for it and code it into the flying citadel’s weapon banks,” Dave said.
“Meet you in the command center?” Malsour asked, backtracking toward the drop platform area once again.
“Sounds like a plan!” Dave continued on his way. There was no time to waste.
***
Dave looked over the coding in the main weapons’ banks. The flying citadel was a lot different from more conventional weapon systems.
A weapons bank was a soul gem storage core. It held a number of different Magical Circuit plans. When one of them was selected, then the various “mounts” would change over to the new magical coding, altering the soul gem constructs throughout the flying citadel to bring down different spells on the enemy. This was how the citadels were able to suppress the Xelur’s ability to gather up souls to increase their power. However, they hadn’t used the mounts but instead the magical circuitry had spread through the citadel, giving it more power and a larger effect.
These banks held myriad different codings. Now Dave had input the coding that the Nalheim used for their spears. He didn’t play around with the runes at all for fear that if he altered them now, they wouldn’t work properly. He didn’t have the time to troubleshoot it all and try to increase its power. It was too foreign to him right now.
Dave slid in the coded plate with the spear’s attack engraved into it.
It lit up. The mai
n weapons banks copied down the information as changes went through the magical coding throughout the soul gem island. Now it would only take someone activating the right weapon coding and they could bring up the disruption ray magical coding.
Dave moved to where Malsour was with five Nalheim. They were all around a single station that had magical inputs on either side. This would take their modulating spell, then run it through the main weapons banks, activating the disruption ray.
“Keep at it,” Malsour said. A device the Nalheim used translated his words. They continued to press their hands against the input ports.
“Something wrong?” Dave asked through the party chat, seeing the expression on Malsour’s face.
“They’re not able to do it,” Malsour said.
“Can they do it with the spear still?”
“I’m not sure.” Malsour looked over to them and exited the party chat. “Could you use your spear and attack that wall?” Malsour asked one of the Nalheim, pointing to a wall of the room.
“Yes, King Malsour.” The Nalheim summoned their spears from their bag of holding. They stabbed their spear out. A hole appeared in the soul gem wall.
Malsour and Dave looked at each other; Malsour rejoined the party chat.
“Okay, so that shows that they can still do it. Maybe it’s not them but the interface? They’ve become used to using their spears so much that it’s nothing more than a reaction at this time, but doing it by force sends them around the bend?” Dave asked.
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