The Fusionist Book 5 -- Chapter 43

Chapter 43

“They’ve already left—and good riddance!” the guard shouted, laughing along with the others at the gate. “Always so annoying with their insistence that we all head into the Calamity and sacrifice ourselves to the monsters there. Like that would ever possibly work. It’s suicide to go deep inside there; everyone knows that!”

Thinking that the guards would be no help, but hoping otherwise, Larek asked if he knew exactly where they went.

The still-chuckling guard simply waved off to the north. “Who cares? They marched off into the Calamity three days ago and haven’t been seen since. We’re all the better for it, you know? The entire city has been walking on eggshells for weeks now, just waiting for a spark to set them all off, but fortunately the Strike faction decided to depart and do what they’ve been saying they’d do.”

“Is there anyone who might know a bit more specifically where they went? My, uh, uncle was with them and I need to reach him to convince him to turn back.”

The man shook his head. “I’m sorry to hear that your uncle was with them, but I can’t say I hold much hope that they’ll succeed. As for more information on their exact route, I don’t… well, actually, I believe I heard that there was one member of the Strike Faction left in the city, who stayed behind to maintain their Faction facilities. You can check there, though I would seriously reconsider even stepping a foot into the Calamity’s territory. Around the edges might be relatively tame, but as soon as you get about a day’s walk inside, there are things that will obliterate you as quick as a thought.”

“Thank you for the warning,” Larek said. “I’ll take that into consideration. In the meantime, can you tell me where to find the Strike Faction facilities?”

The guard did so a few seconds later, letting them into the city. There were members of the Defense Faction at the gates that checked them for potential, but upon mention of being interested in the Strike Faction, they were immediately dismissed as a lost cause and told to go on their way.

The two of them navigated their way through the city of Warshdin, which was larger than some they’d visited a few months ago as they way their way to Rushwood, though it was only about half as populous as Peratin. It was big enough that it still took them about 10 minutes to find their way through the overly complicated layout of streets to arrive at the Strike Faction facilities – or so he assumed. The fenced-in compound was only barely visible from the street, as the wooden barrier surrounded what appeared to be a number of large buildings, but as to their exact purpose, Larek couldn’t tell.

What he could determine was that the area was almost completely empty of people. It was extremely quiet compared to the rest of the city, proving that the guard had been accurate in saying that the entire Strike Faction had left the city to go into the Calamity. Well, all but one, apparently, which he could vaguely sense with his Magical Detection Skill and his still-improving combat awareness. The source of the flux in the ambient Mana was in one of the buildings near the gate leading into the compound, which he could only assume was because they were meant to monitor the only entrance he could see. Granted, he could probably leap over the walls or use his Pattern box to fly over, but he didn’t have a real reason to do that yet.

Instead, he walked up to the sturdy gate and knocked loudly and with enough strength that the gate shook a bit from the impact.

Almost immediately, the person on the inside stirred at the noise as they moved slightly before pausing for a moment; a few seconds went by before they moved even further, heading to the right of the gate on the inside of the compound, where they seemed to be climbing up a ladder. Only about 30 seconds after he knocked, a face appeared over the top of the wooden walls, peering down at the two of them.

“W-What do you want? No one’s here.”

Gauging by his appearance and slightly nervous stutter, the young man that called down to them was expecting the worst. He wasn’t sure how bad the tension between the two Factions had gotten, but the Martial that was practically shaking as he spoke seemed ready to break at any time. A quick glance at the remaining member of the Strike Faction’s internal source of Stama, which he could now detect in most people due to his Skill, he was very new to utilizing his potential as a Martial.

That’s probably why he was left behind. He’d be more of a liability than an asset inside the Calamity’s territory.

“Hello there! I’m well aware that no one is inside – which is the reason I’m here in the first place. I just have some questions for you—”

“I don’t know anything. Go away!” the young man shouted, before disappearing off the top of the wall.

“Hey! Where are you going?” he shouted back, but there was no answer. From his Magical Detection Skill, he could sense that the Strike Faction member was already nearly down the wall and was likely going to be heading back into the building nearby.

Now was the time to take a little more drastic action. Turning to Nedira, he said, “I’ll be right back.” With a few steps forward and a giant leap, his hands managed to reach the top edge of the 25 foot walls, and he immediately pulled himself over. Dropping over to the other side, he landed just in front of the young man, who reared back in horror at Larek’s appearance.

“It isn’t polite to just walk away when I was asking you a question,” the Martial Fusionist began to say, but the Strike Faction member panicked and drew a sword from his belt. With a clumsy lunge in his direction, Larek easily sidestepped the slow strike and grabbed the man’s wrist and arm, and with a squeeze he disarmed the relatively weak Martial in a matter of seconds. He could sense some fumbling within the young man’s Stama pool, but rather than risk the Faction member hurting himself, Larek reached out and flicked his temple hard enough that it knocked him out.

Yet another maneuver I learned back at the Fort.

Laying the unconscious body of the young man at his feet, he walked over and removed the bar on the gate, before opening it just enough that Nedira could slip through.

“What did you do?!” she hissed when she saw the Faction member.

He waved off her concern. “I just knocked him out; he’ll be fine.”

She made him carry him inside the nearest building, which appeared to be an overly large guardhouse for the compound. He could only assume that the Strike Faction spent almost as much time and manpower protecting itself from the other Faction in the city as it did assaulting the nearby Apertures that such a building was needed.

Placing the young man on what appeared to be his own bed, he was about to heal him to wake him up when he stopped and looked around.

It quickly became obvious that this was more than a guardhouse. Judging by the maps pinned up against the walls near a sitting area, as well as scattered papers along a few tables, it was either a staging area for the leaders of the Strike Faction or the Martial he had just knocked out had brought it all there to study it.

“Looks like this is exactly what we needed,” Larek said, waving at all the maps. He could see that they mainly concentrated on the vast circle of land that the Aperture’s territory inhabited, hundreds of miles in diameter, though he wasn’t quite familiar enough with the geography of the area to pinpoint everything precisely. He had a general understanding of the area, but he’d never really finished all of his Geography of the SIC classes, after all. Then again, the landscape was likely vastly different inside the Calamity as it conformed to Aperture at the center.

“Yes, this is precisely the kind of information that’ll help us find the Strike Faction and Verne, if he’s still with them,” Nedira said, beginning to look over the pinned maps. Larek started perusing through the papers on the tables, and as he began reading what appeared to be large quantities of notes, he began to obtain a better picture of exactly what the Calamity really was.

“This is… this… how do they expect to get to the Aperture, let alone close it?” he asked in a whisper, shocked at what he was reading.

“What are you talking about?”

Larek waved at the papers that he was still looking through. “The Calamity. I didn’t really understand what it was until now; or at least, if these notes are accurate, I’m beginning to comprehend the sheer enormity and danger they propose.”

“Why? What did they know?”

He picked up one paper and tried to summarize what it – and the other papers – said for her. “According to this, the Calamity started when a single Aperture was left to grow larger because it was being used to accumulate resources. Apparently, the original monsters were Steel Slimes, which were slow relatively resistant to physical damage but highly vulnerable to most magical spells. The steel that came from their bodies was used in weapon and armor manufacturing, as well as a number of other projects, and those in charge of keeping it culled got greedy and let it expand so that they would have more to farm for additional steel.

“At some point, some of the Steel Slimes evolved into Rainbow Slimes, which had the same physical resistances but also had a higher resistance to magical spells. They were also much faster, stronger, and deadlier – a bad combination for anyone fighting them. It doesn’t say here what happened after that happened, but I’m guessing that they were taken completely unprepared and were therefore unable to handle the stronger Slimes; the end result was that they inadvertently allowed the Aperture’s territory to expand yet again – which is where the major problems began.

“Similar to how the large Aperture underneath the desert of Lowenthal absorbed the other Apertures underground that it intersected with, so too did the Slime Aperture – though in a different way. Unlike what he Umbral Demons did, which was essentially to consolidate all of the other Apertures into one single, giant Aperture, the original Calamity Apertures instead keep the other Apertures exactly where they are; that means that all the absorbed Apertures still operate where they’re originally located, converting the landscape around them, and continue to churn out monsters. They also don’t grow any larger than they were when they were originally absorbed into the Calamity – which seems like it could be a benefit.

“However, it says here that these ‘subservient’ Apertures cannot be closed; they are permanent fixtures that perpetually produce more monsters. More than that, most of them have begun to evolve their monsters despite not expanding their territory, depending on if they are culled frequently or not. That means that most of the Apertures around the perimeter are relatively weak still, but the further one gets to the original Slime Aperture, the more evolved and stronger the monsters will be.

“These notes here,” he continued, picking up a different paper, “say that the monsters are highly aggressive, especially if you move further into the Calamity’s territory. Borders deep within the Calamity are a bit more fluid, meaning that if you attack the monsters from one subservient Aperture, it’s entirely possible for adjacent Apertures to send their monsters as reinforcements.

“But what makes the original Aperture nearly impossible to close is the fact that once it obtained the subservient Apertures, it also can’t be closed. At least, not in a way that the SIC members in the past were able to figure out, as they had to retreat when they were overwhelmed by every monster within its territory that came to defend it. But the Strike Faction, as well as the remainder of the SIC leadership, seems to think the only way to actually close the Calamities is to kill every single monster from every Aperture after they attack the original Aperture.”

He shook his head, overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem that the Strike Faction faced.

“How do they know that?”

“Huh? Oh, uh, where… oh, here it is,” Larek responded, finding a different paper with notes on it. “Apparently, early on in the Calamity’s expansion, it was noticed that attacking the main Aperture – in this case, the original Steel Slime one – paused the creation of monsters from all the other Apertures within its territory. It was hypothesized that this was due to all the monsters converging upon the central Aperture for defense, leaving the influence of subservient Apertures that normally controlled them, so they were unable to initiate the creation of additional monsters. Based on observations, each Aperture can only produce a fixed number of monsters until they expand their territory, and without being able to tell if their monsters were still active or not, they are held in a kind of stasis state. At least, that’s what these notes say; I haven’t seen it myself, so I can’t say how accurate it is.”

“Their hypothesis makes sense to me,” Nedira said after nearly a minute of silence as they continued to look through the notes and maps. “What doesn’t make sense is why they chose to do this now, and with a limited number of Faction members. It seems like suicide to go in there with less than 100 people – but apparently they did just that.”

“How many did they have?” Larek asked.

She picked up a list of names with Specializations marked next to them, along with a few notes. “Only 92, though half of them seemed to be veterans of the SIC. That will help them, but against… how many monsters is there likely to be?” she asked, seeing that he also had a list – but it was a list of known Apertures inside the Calamity.

“254 subservient Apertures, all with their own monsters. The number of monsters varies with each Aperture, of course, but for a brand-new Aperture I’d say that they number between 40 to 200 depending on their strength. Even if there were only 40 per Aperture, we’re still talking about over 10,000 monsters – and that’s not even considering what is around the original Aperture. The real number is likely many times that, as these notes say that at least half of the subservient Apertures had expanded at least once before they were swallowed up, and with perhaps a third of them that haven’t been culled in a while possessing stronger, evolved monsters, I can’t even hazard a guess at how many there were. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were 100,000 monsters inside – and that could be low-balling it.”

They stood there in silence as his words seemed to suck all the life out of the room, but he shook it off as he continued. “What I don’t understand is how the Strike Faction expects to kill all of them, if their hypothesis is even true. With only 92 members of their Faction against 10,000 monsters, I might be able to see them being able to succeed, if with major casualties, but ten times that amount or more? No, it doesn’t make sense.”

They continued to look around the tables and on the maps, and while they found “V.” listed as accompanying the group, the exact route they were going to take to get to the center, an inventory of supplies brought with them and approximate travel time (which was listed as three weeks of hard travel), and even an inventory of individual weapons, armor, and Fusions – which were relatively basic and standard, ranging from +1 and +2 boosts to Sharpening Fusions – there were no notes detailing what they were going to do once they got to the central Aperture.

“There has to be some sort of plan, as they wouldn’t go unless they thought they could succeed,” Nedira muttered, and Larek couldn’t help but agree. As they were going over everything again for the third time, looking for whatever they might have missed, the Fusionist heard a groan from behind him, and he turned around to see the Martial he had knocked unconscious starting to stir. It was an indication of how new the young man was to being a Martial that he didn’t even have a high enough Body Regeneration Skill to fix him quickly enough to wake up faster; by his estimates, Larek thought that they had already been looking through everything for almost an hour.

“Perhaps our friend here has some idea. Shall we ask him?” the Fusionist asked.

It was at that point that the young Martial sat up with his hand rubbing his temple, his eyes bleary-looking as he looked around. He suddenly froze when his vision cleared enough to see Larek and Nedira standing there, staring straight at him with predatory gazes.

“Yes, I think that would be a wonderful idea.”