RCJoshua
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Chapter 124: Yeast in Dough
🕑 Added 2023-10-29 14:47:36 +0000 UTC“Shit. I can’t climb that, guys. I’m sorry, I just can’t.” Matt was staring at a cliff face. It wasn’t dirt, and it wasn’t cracked, for the most part. It was a sheer, smooth rock face, and Matt was from a planet that was flat-and-ruined. Even with his powers, he couldn’t get up.
Artemis had scouted ahead and found that the pass was completely, totally packed with demons, geared for war and in formation. Even if they could fight all of them by strength alone, the pass was crowded enough that they might get crushed by the weight of the crowd. There was no way through but up.
Luckily, getting to the wall itself wasn’t much of a challenge. The region had long since given way from grassy plains to solid tree cover, and that cover grew within a hundred feet or so of the base of the cliffs. They could hear demon bird scouts and see their shadows blocking the bit of light that came down through the canopy, but they hadn’t been spotted yet.
“That’s me then, I’m afraid,” Brennan said. “I have some rock-climbing experience, even if I haven’t used it since Earth. And I’m pretty sure my STR stat is higher than yours. We’ll take any edge we can get. This is all me. I’ll drop a rope afterward.”
Brennan quickly assembled what climbing-specialized gear he had, which wasn’t much, mostly consisting of a pair of gloves and every rope they had on them.
“Alright. I’m off.” Brennan smiled and kissed Artemis on the cheek, then turned to the wall. As they were waiting for the next patrol of birds to fly over, it occurred to Matt that there was at least one thing he could do to help Brennan up the wall.
“Brennan, wait.” He shrugged out of his pack and then out of his brand-new stealth cloak, wadding it into a bundle and tossing it to him. “Any edge, right?”
Brennan grinned, throwing the cloak over his shoulders. “Sure thing. Any edge.”
—
One thing was becoming increasingly clear to Matt as time went on. In an even fight, one where Brennan didn’t know anything about Matt or his limited bag of tricks, Matt would probably get his ass handed to him. Brennan was almost certainly higher-leveled than Matt, that much was obvious in his first attack. He had higher stats, almost to the point that skill or tricks couldn’t surpass. But even without the stats, Brennan was precise. He was so casual that it was easy to confuse him for being a bit dim, but that wasn’t the case. Matt was sure of it.
As Matt watched Brennan scale the rock face, he knew that no stupid person could climb a wall like that. No dumb person would have done well with a precision-based, planning-heavy class. It just wasn’t possible. Deep down, Brennan was a genius.
It showed in every foot of wall he rapidly ascended. Matt could tell the hand and footholds he was using amounted to little more than slight inconsistencies in the wall. Where he could stop, he’d only do so to gain additional leverage, pausing only momentarily and pushing off hard after. He got every foot he could out of any particular handhold. When he couldn’t find something to add to his momentum, he’d impact his hand or foot with the semi-hold to keep moving. He was flying up the wall, multiple meters a second, as if he had wings and all the climbing was just for show.
If Brennan was telling the truth about not climbing in Ra’Zor, then none of his climbing technique came from Earth, where he had the body and capabilities of a normal man. He was adapting to his new capabilities on the fly, getting the most out of what his body could do without any skill assists at all.
“He’s insane. Matt, he’s going to fall.” Lucy was watching every movement as well, barely breathing.
“He’s not going to fall. He’s crazy, but he’s going to do it.”
“I know, right?” Artemis said, not realizing Matt was talking to his invisible friend. “I reacted the same way, the first time I saw him do something like this.” She smiled, just a bit, enigmatically. “Although I acted on it a bit differently than I expect you will.”
Matt searched for some response for a minute, then decided better of it. A flapping sound filled the air as the next bird patrol came by. The team was closer to the edge of the trees, and were ready to support Brennan. Alone on the rock face, he had stopped to draw less attention.
“Do you think they will spot him?” Matt asked.
“Not if they don’t look up. He’s above them now.”
They looked about even to Matt, but Artemis was the expert. Despite her words, she still nocked an arrow to her bow, and stared intently at the birds. It turned out she had over-planned. Moments later, the birds had moved on. Brennan started flying up the cliff face again, now with plenty of time. He didn’t waste it. Faster than Matt could imagine possible, he was already grasping the edge of the top of the cliff. A few moments later, the rope snaked down.
“Stupid, stupid. He should have waited until the patrol passed again. Matt, Derek. Come on. We have to hurry.”
Derek was the first to the wall. He had explained to Matt, briefly, that his class relied entirely on stats, with no techniques to speak of. Everything was training now. Matt had almost tried to apologize for stripping him of his class, however unintentionally, before he found Derek was happy about it. Watching him climb the rope, he realized better why. He was strong. Even Artemis, who hit the rope behind him, was struggling to keep up.
Matt was slower, but not by much. He shoved his shovel through his pack straps and started climbing. With the rope, they were faster than Brennan had been, but not by as much as they should have been. The swaying made things hard and while no one seemed scared of heights, they also had nothing but air to cushion a fall.
Derek reached the top, and slipped over, as did Artemis. Matt half expected that their situation would become like a movie, where the last one on the rope would end up in trouble, trying to climb while the enemies snapped at their feet. It didn’t happen. He made it to the top uneventfully. Keeping low, everyone made their way to the edge of the cliff where it fell away to make the pass.
“Well, it could be worse.” Brennan said, looking down on thousands of demons armed to the teeth and dragging not one but four more demon heart bombs on floating wood platforms.
Artemis slapped the back of his head. “How, Brennan? How could this possibly be worse?”
“We could be down there with them.”
“We should be down there with them, Brennan. They have four of those weapons. That’s one for every colony between here and the capital, as well as the capital itself. Thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands of people, are in danger. We have to do something.”
Derek blanched. “What? What could we possibly do against that many? We have to get in front of them, get help, and come back. It’s our only hope.”
Artemis kicked the ground in front of her, stirring up dirt from a large crack where erosion had split the ground. Unfortunately, the cliff was sturdy enough that she couldn’t separate any of the dirt. Instead, she just threw dust into the air.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit. There’s not enough time. By the time we get back to them, we will have lost another colony, and there’s nothing we can do. We…”
Her lament was cut off suddenly by a sharp cry from above. Matt wrenched his head upwards to see two bird-of-prey demon-men flapping above them, screeching their heads off. Artemis loosed an arrow at one, barely missing it. It was too late anyway. Below, they could hear the shouts of the army as it became aware of the threat above it.
—
Every system instance was a little bit different, but they all followed an identical set of rules. Long ago, the main system had settled on a unique, low-effort way of doing less work with one of the more strange rules, a rule that stated that planets could not be allowed to stagnate. Even when the system instance struck a balance, it wasn’t allowed to strike a perfect, stable stillness. It had to chase moving targets, keeping one side a bit stronger than the other in an eternal game of ping pong.
But even the best laid plans eventually move towards stagnation. That meant that, sometimes, new blood was needed. Where one system instance’s context-specific interpretations of the rules had come to a standstill, even a small piece of another system’s ruleset could spread new life and energy through it, like a small piece of yeast in a large bowl of dough.
This wasn’t the Ra’Zorian instance’s first world-to-world invasion rodeo. Hell, even the current demon lord was a transplant from another planet, having taken down the previous, lackluster demon king. He had at least done much more with the powers he gained compared to the previous unimaginative asshole. The Ra’Zorians hadn’t had a word for zombies, but that’s what the last guy had created. Shambling, mindless, easily dispatched zombies. The new guy was subtle. Understood the score. Worked within the rules. The system instance liked him, honestly.
Subsequent invasions had been helpful, but not nearly as much as the instance liked. If there was one black mark on its record, it was the sheer amount of reincarnation it had to summon every year just to keep the energy-circulation lights on. The last few invasions had promised to help with that, but the people who had come hadn’t understood the tactical situation on the ground, or tried to go right after the demon lord, or experienced death by a thousand cuts before they got halfway to him.
It helped, but not nearly enough. That said, the system had reason to be hopeful when Matt first showed up. No system instance was doing all of its own math since the main system had long since abstracted the amount of counterbalance each system instance should provide in preparation for a new invasion to an automated calculator.
The device wasn’t sentient, and didn’t explain how it had come to its conclusions, but it always worked. It sat, soaking in information from a thousand worlds, learning, and somehow spun out the right answers every single time. Nobody questioned it. There was no reason to.
This time, it had cleared the system instance to hand over an incredible amount of power to the demons in preparation. For once, the system instance had been tempted to question the auto-calculator’s judgement, but he didn’t. The demon lord had been hinting and nearly begging for a city-slaying weapon for decades, and now he finally got one. Did it cost him a bit of his power every time he used it? Sure. Was the thing on a hair-trigger and hard to transport? Yup. But it would level a city just fine.
Then Matt showed up, and he was, well, less than impressive. He took out some ants, and didn’t show a single spark of creativity doing it. He took down a bar full of demons, but any non-mook could do the same, and invaders were usually pretty bright. The reincarnators that weren’t usually didn’t make it through to the invasion level of things in the first place.
But even by the time he murdered the demon-bar, things were getting weird. He’d eat things, and get powers. And the powers didn’t make sense. He could multiply his power output. There were downsides to how he did it but it was much less limited than it should have been, like the skill wasn’t obeying the system’s algorithmic limits on skill powers at all. On top of that, he was carrying a shovel, a damned shovel, that somehow ignored the restraints of mana-based objects completely.
Was it possible that all this shit was happening according to some rule? It was. The system instance had limited insight into the stats, powers, and general history of people from other systems. His ignorance was part of the point of the whole invasion system. It made for messy balancing, and messy balancing made for chaos, which was the exact ingredient for shaking up a stagnant balance. Without confirmation, there were certain actions he couldn’t and shouldn’t take. Right now, he didn’t have that confirmation. Matt wasn’t telling him what was going on, despite being asked multiple times, but that didn’t in and of itself constitute the evidence he needed. He also needed proof.
But he’d get it. Oh, yes, he would. Because he’d do anything to avoid escalating this stuff up to middle management. If one, single, solitary reincarnator thought he could disrupt the careful equilibrium that the system instance had built up, he had another thing coming.
Comments
Jake Holland
Huh. I thought it would take longer before the Razor System got pissy with Matt.
