EmEs_etherious
patreon
Chapter 172- Team of Miscreants
🕑 Added 2024-10-12 22:59:00 +0000 UTCEther combined with technology was capable of some incredible things when professional magical engineering came into play. The aircraft Arthur was currently in was about as far from modern airliners as you could get, more akin to a spaceship from science fiction, shaped like a giant ball and yet it was somehow capable of rapid flight.
It was a cross between a military chopper, a fighter jet and a commercial airliner, a single vehicle that could fulfil the purpose of all three. The flight was so stable- courtesy to a number of magical runic fields inlay into the aircraft- and the boarding so spacious, that Arthur was sure he could attempt a backflip in the seating room without paying attention to the laws of physics that said doing so was a terrible idea. If Arthur hadn’t felt the slight lurch during take-off, he wouldn’t believe they were racing through the air at seven hundred kilometres per hour.
The aircraft provided by Lady Sleyca’s people on Earth was made of an ether-rich alloy more durable than anything their Tier-1 planet could currently produce. The woman herself was far too powerful to step onto the ether-starved baby world. The aircraft was lightweight and extremely responsive to ether when heated, a trait that made it a joy for enchanters to work with. Unfortunately, it meant that the aircraft was also incredibly weak against fire magic, which was why they’d been out of fashion since the last century.
That particular limitation was the only reason why the System allowed such a powerful tier-2 vehicle past the integration phase protection laws. All of this had been explained to him by Bonak, a bubbly young alien who served as Lady Sleyca’s youngest engineer. He also doubled as the aircraft’s pilot, which he’d named BonBon after his late grandfather, although the vast majority of the ship's features were automated processes run by a very basic AI. That was why the young man had so much time to relax. He was currently sitting across the table talking Arthur’s ears off.
“Yeah. And that’s how Miss Sleyca found me, rifling through her personal storage room.” Bonak said, his skin flushing in embarrassment at the memory. “It took me forever to explain I wasn’t trying to rob her and that I’d just gotten lost looking for the maintenance room.” He shook his head wryly, a very human action that looked out of place on his very alien face. Bonak was the first extra-terrestrial Arthur had met that looked… different to his human sensibilities. The young alien belonged to a species called Gujralite, a race that looked like a turtle crossed with an octopus that had somehow found its way onto land.
As polite as Arthur may want to be, Bonak had a frankly terrifying appearance and it had taken a while to come to terms with his golden retriever personality. “Ignore him,” Farah said, a teasing smile on her face. “The fool tells this story to anyone who’ll listen. This is the eleventh time I’ve heard it. This month.” The elf woman's words were at odds with the indulgent fondness contained in her gaze. Arthur had seen that look in older ladies before, usually directed at poppies or some other such pet. The dimensional mage or portable teleporter as she’d introduced herself found Bonak positively adorable.
Well, there’s no accounting for taste, I guess. It's always the older ladies that are into creepy stuff. Arthur knew his thoughts were more than a little rude, but the primal part of his brain instinctively shied away from the young Gujralite. It was a visceral response that recognised the alien as something ‘other.’
Bonak poked Farah with one of his many feelers. “Eleven times huh,” he said, punctuating every word with another poke. “That didn’t stop you from sitting through every retelling, did it? Admit it. You like my storytelling, don’t you?”
Farah tried to put on a stern face, denying Bonak’s accusations but failed almost immediately, descending into a fit of giggles. “Stop that, you little shit,” she laughed, pushing away his feelers. “It tickles.”
“Well maybe next time, don’t lie about how much you love listening to me talk in front of our guests. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.” Arthur watched the spectacle play out before him, a reluctant smile of amusement coming onto his face. Their antics practically screamed sibling energy and had a familiarity that showed this particular interaction had taken place many times. It did a lot to humanise the strange alien in his eyes, and he felt himself slowly relax. C’mon Arthur. If you want to travel the multiverse, you can’t be xenophobic the moment you come across an alien that actually looks alien, he chided himself.
“You’re lucky you're so cute,” Farah muttered, grabbing Bonak in a headlock. And there it is. I knew I recognised that luck. Guess I just know older women. Fara had lines of age marking her face, which meant that she was positively ancient for an elf, renowned for being one of the more longer lived races. Add on the fact that her high level of 231 should have slowed her ageing further, and Arthur suspected the woman was well over 500 years old. She had centuries of experience on him and had been using magic for longer than he'd been alive, and yet her level had stagnated at level 231.
Even with the higher levelling requirements he faced because of his legendary class, Arthur’s most conservative estimates had him hitting the system soft cap of level 300 within the next 200 years. It turned out that some people, like Farah, just hit their natural limits much earlier than that. Growing stronger after crossing the second class milestone became significantly harder, the monsters you had to hunt to continue to level at that point required parties of five rare classers to handle. That and the fact that the experience requirements grew almost tenfold meant most people just stopped trying at that point. Arthur wouldn’t be surprised if Farah hadn’t fought a proper monster in the last decade.
Now she was heading to a battlefield where she’d face the most dangerous foe of her lifetime. Sure, her job wasn’t to directly fight- she was tasked with locking down space to prevent the Harvester’s agent from fleeing- but that just meant she’d be the first to be taken out if he wanted to retreat.
Arthur was glad at least that Bonak had no part to play in the upcoming fight. With his measly level 113, he would have been slaughtered and Arthur would have been sad to see the joyous man’s life cut short. Besides Farah, Lady Sleyca had placed her strongest warriors on this execution squad, a man Arthur had hardly interacted with who would use his sound affinity to scout their enemy and disrupt his balance. Besides Ayesha and himself, he was the only other human on the team, and at level 239, he was a hair's breadth away from pushing up against the limits of power that System law allowed visiting aliens to possess during a planet's integration phase. It was moments like this where Arthur remembered he’d missed out on more than just an easy levelling zone when he’d been forced to sit out of the tutorial. Even now, months after the system’s arrival, he still didn’t know exactly what the integration phase was and what protections it offered the planet.
Besides Benjamin, their sound mage, their assault squad consisted of two level 190 elves, identical twins named Iroh and Ryka, both of them powerful wielders of fire magic. They would be their magical powerhouses for the upcoming battle. On paper, this was supposed to be an attempt at capturing their foe, but Arthur wasn’t so naive to think things would go according to plan. The final person Lady Sleyca had sent was a beast woman of Dire wolf heritage, a massive behemoth of a warrior that towered over everyone else at seven and a half feet tall. She looked like a wolf that had been dipped into midnight black paint, given the ability to stand on her hind legs, and then injected full of steroids.
A veritable slab of muscle with a presence that dominated whatever room she was in, a woman who despite her lack of magical affinity of any kind, had fought tooth and claw and used her physical advantages to drag herself into stardom as a fearsome warrior of great renown. There was much one could learn from Ursula, level 206 cosmic pugilist. A drive for power that bordered on obsessiveness and the relentless will to fight against the hand fate had dealt her. Arthur had taken an immediate liking to the huge warrior. He felt a kinship with her that was almost magnetic. There was just one teeny, tiny problem.
Ursula was terrified of him.
Sure, she’d hid it well and held herself together when they’d met but Arthur didn’t need to be an animal expert to see that she’d practically fled with her tail between her legs as soon as she could after meeting him. Arthur wasn’t an idiot. He realised immediately it must be something to do with his status as a half-breed, especially when the monsters that had gone into creating the foundations of that part of him consisted of two apocalypse beasts and a flame dragon, creatures far, far higher on the food chain then the dire wolf ancestor she hailed from. Seeing it from that perspective, it made sense that Ursula was scared of him, though it was a bummer that she could sense his monstrous side even through the aura suppression bracelet he was wearing.
In the last few hours, Arthur had grown used to the constricting feeling it placed on him, akin to being just a little short of breath all the time like he was wearing a too-tight weighted vest that prevented him from taking a deep breath. Already, however, he could feel its effects weakening, and he suspected he had another 48 hours with it instead of the weeks of use Iris had predicted. Huh, I guess seer’s can’t see everything , can they, Arthur mused. It was nice to know Iris had some limitations, though he’d preferred to have not found out right before a battle where they’d be relying extensively on her abilities.
Arthur had come as their designated healer, explicitly ordered to not engage the enemy unless the situation turned dire. They didn’t know if close proximity might allow the Harvester’s agent to use his predatory link to drain Arthur. He wasn’t too worried- his bestial instincts, which he’d come to trust implicitly were silent- and they’d be screaming to high heaven if his life was in any danger. Already, he’d used Homunculus Healing's tertiary effect to store enough healing affinity ether in his party members to recover a hundred thousand health points each, an absurd value which would quite literally expand all their healthpools tenfold.
That didn’t mean they’d be invulnerable or anything, a decapitation would still leave them very dead, but it provided a safety net against almost every other type of mortal blow. Arthur knew he wasn’t supposed to fight. Bonak, Ayesha and himself were all relegated to the side-lines for the coming conflict.
Despite that, Arthur could feel his heart rate begin to speed up. If the suppression bracelet could speak, it would have been groaning as it was forced to work harder to constrain Arthur’s aura. No plan survived first contact with the enemy. He’d get his chance at the bastard who wanted to make him a snack.
This AN is going to get old very fast so you don't have to read it if you don't want to. It's copy pasted from before. Feel free to ignore it.
Author Note:
Thank you everyone for all the support during my stories launch. Things turned out better than I expected but worse than I had hoped. Self-publishing means my story is only as successful as I am capable in marketing it, and I have never before in my life marketed anything. It's been an interesting learning experience to say the least.
That is to say, that releases will hopefully be going back to a normal two chapters a week baring any unforeseen circumstances that may blindside me. This will be getting old very soon, but once again, I make an appeal to everyone to please go and check out my books release. Leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads, posting it on anywhere you think people might be interested, telling friends and family. Every little bit helps so much more than you could know.
On a side note, if hypothetically, all my readers went and got a KU trial for free for one month (RR says its around 5,000), and read my story Etherious: Fresh Beginnings, entirely for free, all within 24 hours of reading this, a LitRPG story, could hypothetically break into the top ten ranks on Amazon Books. It's impossible, but one can hope.
Day dreaming aside, my book has currently passed 300 sales so far, calculated via copies sold and KU pages read. If by the end of October, my novel passes 1,000 sales, I will start releasing 3 chapters a week.
Comments
EmEs
Thank you for the corrections.
Stan Austin
1st paragraph indicates an aircraft carrier which is a ship, but there on an aircraft. Paragraph 11 indicates Farah’s ;even as bot 221 and 231
