The Fusionist Book 5 -- Chapter 7

Chapter 7

A “Provider”?

Larek could extrapolate what that meant given what he’d seen of the city and its environs; a Naturalist was someone who could provide the people with food through the use of their spells. He could only assume that any of the individuals who did the same, whether it was killing monsters for the meat or even supplying clean water, was similar in stature.

Of course, that information didn’t help him much at the moment, because he was surrounded by around a dozen Martials that, while they didn’t have their weapons out, were threatening enough in their arrangement around him that he had little doubt that they would attack him once they ensured that the woman in his arms was safe. However, as he looked at the Martials surrounding him, he could see that while they looked intimidating toward him, there was a mixture of reactions to the starving people around the area – and he took note of that as an idea began to form in his head. He also briefly looked over the man who asked him the question, noticing that both his leather and steel armor and his axe had Fusions on them; poorly made Fusions, at least compared to his own, but they were still present. Seeing them and assessing the situation, something he found so much easier with his recent experiences, he made a decision.

His old inclination when facing this sort of conflict, and being confronted by such a person, was to shrink back and bow to the authority of those that were obviously more important or more powerful than he was. He used to let people walk all over him and take advantage of his non-confrontational nature; it wasn’t something that he ever intended to be like, but his view of the world and other people had shaped him that way when he was younger. However, his experiences in the Kingdom, followed by his independent travels throughout the Sealance Empire, had changed his mindset.

He wasn’t the same man who had been forced to leave his life behind, nor was he the shy and awkward Mage student who didn’t know what he was doing. Well… he was still awkward at times, but he’d learned that such a trait didn’t define him, nor did it limit him in the slightest. That was because he was strong in his own right, especially when it came to creating Fusions – even if most Martials and Mages of the SIC might not consider a Fusionist to be someone with such an inner strength.

Now all he had to do was channel that same confidence he had in his own abilities and project it outward. It wouldn’t be easy, but the plan he had considered earlier came to the forefront of his thoughts as he abruptly changed his mindset. You can do this, Larek.

Standing up a little straighter, he stared right into the eyes of the Martial who had addressed him, fearing that he might have to suppress the urge to flinch away at the murderous gaze staring back. Surprisingly, the anger in the other man didn’t bother him in the least. He wasn’t sure if he just didn’t care what this person thought of him, or if he had been through so much that such a petty display of faux dominance fell flat from perceived ridiculousness, but the end result was the same.

The man actually flinched at what he saw in Larek’s stare, though he recovered quickly enough that he might have been the only one to see it. After that, the Martial seemed even angrier as he tightened his grip on his battleaxe handle – but Larek didn’t care at that point.

“Who are you to be asking questions of me?” the Combat Fusionist asked, his voice projecting with a strength to it that he’d once taken time to tone down while he had been attending the different Academies, but he now unleashed it at full volume. He had to admit that it felt good not to have to restrain himself when he spoke, because what came out felt natural and right.

It seemed as though his defiance and subsequent question had shocked the rest of the Martials surrounding him and he could sense them shuffling in place uncomfortably. As for the one he was still staring at, it had the opposite effect. “You don’t get to ask the questions here—” he said, taking a step forward and bringing his weapon down from his shoulder, now holding it with both hands across his body. Larek cut him off before he could say any more than that.

“Oh, no? And why is that? Are you the pitiful excuse for a leader that runs this city?”

His confrontational words and confident tone had the desired effect. First, the other Martials shuffled in place a little more, muttering under their breath as they looked at Larek.  From what he could hear of those mutters, they were a mixture of slander against the Combat Fusionist and a smattering of agreement and discontent. As he somewhat expected from his earlier observations, not all the Martials were content with what was happening outside the walls.

Second, and most important, the barrel-chested man began to step forward with his axe positioned in a way that Larek thought was designed to sweep from right to left, likely to decapitate the stranger making him angry. As angered Martial did exactly that without more than a second’s hesitation, Larek was nearly too slow before he managed to use his Pattern Cohesion via his Pattern Manipulation Skill to create a floating shield that blocked the battleaxe before it could be swung more than a foot. As it thudded into the glowing blue Pattern construct, it didn’t bounce off as if it had hit something metal, but instead simply lost all momentum as it came to a stop.

“Attacking random people now?” Larek asked, even as the man pulled back his axe as he looked suspiciously at the defense that had stopped his blow. “That’s just rude. And here I was arriving to help the people of this city, but I guess I can leave all of them to you; I’m sure that, as the leader here, you have a foolproof plan to feed all these fine people you have here,” he continued, glancing around at the starving figures in the background.

The man chose not to respond verbally but to attack again while Larek was distracted, but the Combat Fusionist simply moved the shield with a thought and blocked the blow. A second strike that happened nearly too fast for a normal person to see was swept upward from below, but his practice with his Pattern constructs meant that his ability to move them was as fast as his mind could process the attack. With such high mental stats and an Agility that allowed him to perceive the quick movements, it was easy enough to prevent the battleaxe from hitting him.

Of course, he was also standing still, which helped immensely; if he was forced to move his body while controlling the shield, he wouldn’t have been nearly as successful.

“Ah, ah, ah! No more of that, if you would. Throwing a temper tantrum never did anyone any good.”

The man took a step back, a furious rage igniting in his eyes even further, as he brought his battleaxe above his head. “No one disrespects me like this!” As soon as Larek saw the manipulation of Stama moving through the Martial’s arms and into his axe, he knew it was time to take an even greater risk than what he’d already been doing. Absorbing his Pattern shield, he quickly formed another construct, but this time it was something he’d never tried before. Wrapping a layer of his Pattern Cohesion around the entire upper body, upraised arms, and even the weapon of the angry man, he hardened it so that it was similar to his shield – and just as inflexible. It was a crudely shaped form that he had created, looking more like a lopsided tube than the tightly fitting second skin he originally imagined, but if it worked, it really didn’t matter what it looked like.

Thankfully, it performed exactly as he had hoped. The battleaxe-wielding Martial was essentially stuck in place as Larek’s Pattern construct surrounded his upper body, though it was loose enough that he had a tiny bit of wiggle room. Not that it helped him, of course, because he couldn’t break free or slide out of the impenetrable barrier—

The Battle Art that the man had activated went off, which turned out to be a blade of concussive force that was supposed to fly out from the edge of the battleaxe once the Martial swung it down, cutting whatever it hit in half. That, of course, didn’t happen, but what did happen was that the concussive force created from the Battle Art simply emanated out from the edge of the blade in a concentrated ray, slamming into his Pattern construct in a focused area, causing it to flare with a bright light that nearly blinded everyone .

Larek felt a pull on something inside of him, and a brief glance at his Status revealed that his Pattern Cohesion had just been drained by a little more than 300 points; in the grander scale of his high Pattern Cohesion, this wasn’t that big of a deal, but the fact that the Battle Art – powered by Stama – had damaged his Pattern construct certainly was. He felt his manipulation of the construct automatically pull more Pattern Cohesion from his body to instantly repair the damage, but he now knew that his previously impenetrable shield was anything but impervious to damage. Is it vulnerable to all Stama-based Battle Arts, or will Mana-based spells damage it, too? Or is it simply vulnerable to any intensely concentrated forms of damage?

He banished those questions from his mind as they weren’t important at the moment. Instead, he focused back on the situation, which was dealing with this monster of a Martial before he managed to drain all of Larek’s Pattern Cohesion.

“Now that I have your attention, maybe you’ll listen—if you don’t stop that, I’ll be forced to take drastic measures.” The Martial used the same Battle Art and tried to punch a hole through the construct again, which caused even more Pattern Cohesion to drain from Larek to instantly fix the damage it caused.  This was followed by the man using his Stama to do something to his body that obviously increased his Strength by a bit, because while the construct didn’t bend or break, it was being pushed against with such force that there was a constant funneling of his Pattern Cohesion to maintain its rigid shape.

“LET ME GO!” the man screamed, veins bulging in his neck as he attempted to use raw power to break free. “Vanders! What are you waiting for? KILL HIM!”

Out of the corner of his left eye, Larek saw one of the Martials surrounding him start to move toward his position, but all it took was a look in the sword-wielding man’s direction to stop him in his tracks. “Don’t even think about it,” he said, deliberately turning his attention away from the Pattern-held Martial as if he was no longer a threat. “We’re simply having a friendly discussion, and there’s no reason to bring violence into it.”

Amazingly, that was all it took for the others to hesitate and stay where they were, allowing Larek to look at the enraged individual again. “Now, where were we? Oh, yes, you were about to tell me who you were. And stop doing that; you’ll strain yourself if you’re not careful. Besides, you’ll need the energy to fuel your Body Regeneration Skill if you continue to pursue your misguided attempts to kill me.”

If anything, this only caused the man to start foaming at the mouth in his rage as he pushed himself even further, burning his Stama at a prodigious rate as different Battle Arts were activated in an attempt to break through what was holding him trapped.

Larek, slightly worried as he saw that his Pattern Cohesion had now dropped by over 3,000 by this point, sighed dramatically. “Fine, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

With another part of his concentration, which he freed up from what was keeping the Pattern construct intact, the Combat Fusionist looked closer at the Fusions on the man’s weapon and armor. The Fusion on the battleaxe was a basic Sharpen Steel Edge +4, nothing too fancy, though the magnitude was higher than was normally created by most Fusionists. That was because it would take an average Fusionist about 6 hours to create it, which was a lot of time to devote to a single Fusion that would fade in a month or two.

As for the armor, the steel plates sewn into the leather undercoat had individual Strengthen Steel +2 Fusions, not as impressive as the one on the battleaxe, but the Martial probably didn’t need anything more than that if he had a relatively high Body stat to help protect him.

In all, the Fusions weren’t anywhere near being crudely done, but they also weren’t so well constructed that they didn’t provide Larek exactly what he needed. Using small threads of Pattern that he siphoned off of the construct, he fed these into the different Fusions, aiming for areas that were slightly thinner or less well-defined. Like cracks in their armor, his own Pattern worked itself quickly into these imperfections, widening them and inserting itself temporarily as a replacement of a containment barrier here, or a chink in the Mana Cost section there.

In all, it only took two seconds for his agile mind to sabotage every Fusion on the Martial’s person, including a small ring he noticed at the last moment that was giving the man a Strength Boost +2 on his left hand.

When everything was ready, he yanked out his own temporary Pattern fillers in the Fusions at the same time, pushing it all back into the construct holding the angry Martial. Nothing happened for a second, but then each of the Fusions suddenly experienced a catastrophic failure in their grid formation, causing them to collapse – and to release the Mana inside of them… explosively.

It wasn’t anything near what happened when one of his Weaken Fusion stones broke apart, let alone causing the same destruction as when Larek’s Air Skimmer blew up. Instead, a series of small, concentrated explosions erupted all over the man’s upper body, destroying the armor that protected him while doing terrible damage to the flesh underneath. The Martial’s left hand which originally held the ring with the Strength Boost +2 Fusion was completely obliterated, along with a small portion of his wrist. Neither of those results was life-threatening, as even though the man had been injured severely, Larek was 99% sure that the Martial’s Body stat and Body Regeneration Skill were high enough that he’d recover – and if they had a good enough Healer around, he’d also be able to have his hand regrown just like new.

However, the largest explosion came from the Axe, which was completely obliterated as the detonation was contained in a small space within Larek’s Pattern construction. The resulting blast drained another 1,000 Pattern Cohesion from the Combat Fusionist, but it was worth it to see the head of the weapon shatter into hundreds of pieces, along with half of the steel haft. He was suddenly glad that he had enclosed it in his construct, otherwise the shrapnel from the explosion might have hurt or killed some of the innocent bystanders still watching the confrontation.

A few seconds after the explosions were over, Larek reabsorbed his Pattern Cohesion from the construct, letting the battered and bloody – and unconscious – body of the Martial fall to the packed dirt ground. The silence in the immediately area after what had just happened was slightly uncomfortable for Larek, but he simply looked at the man who had moved before.

“Vanders, was it?” The Martial nodded after a moment, his shocked gaze moving between the fallen leader and Larek. “It’s nice to meet you, Vanders. We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot here, so I’m hoping that you’ll be able to correct that. Do you think you can do that?”

Vanders fully looked at Larek as he swallowed nervously. A hesitant nod was all he got, but it was enough.

“Excellent! If you would, detail some of your friends to pick up your fearless leader here, as he’s going to need a Healer to get better. In the meantime, how about you show me around so that I can see where I can be of the best use?”

“Borex… he’s not dead?” Vanders asked, looking shocked as he stared at the fallen form of the Martial leader.

Larek chuckled. “Of course not! It would be rude of me if I killed him for being an absolute jerk. He was simply under a misconception that I was going to put up with his misguided attempts at intimidation, as I don’t have time for that.  Now, you better hurry if you don’t want to prolong his recuperation… or perhaps that’s what you’d rather have happen?” he asked with a wink. “There’s going to be some changes around here, hopefully for the better, and you seem like you’d be much better amendable to such changes. Would you like to be in charge now?”

“W-what? But I thought—”

“That I wanted to be in charge? Absolutely not. I just don’t have time to mess with inflexible, power-hungry idiots like Borex here,” he said, indicating the still-bleeding Martial leader lying face-down in the dirt, “if I’m going to find a solution that will feed all these people while also making the surrounding lands safe from the Apertures.”

“You’re going to… what?”  Vanders seemed confused.

“We can discuss it more later, but first things first, let’s head inside so I can put my good friend here down so that she can recover. Come on, get a move on.”

Without waiting for the rest of the Martials to move, Larek began walking toward the city gate, passing by the heavily injured Martial leader without a glance.

All the while, the Combat Fusionist’s heart was beating so loudly that it felt like someone was pounding on a large drum inside his chest. A portion of his mind was practically gibbering at what Larek had done, expecting the Martials to call him out at any time for his arrogant speech and for injuring their leader. Another portion of his mind was simply trying to maintain his façade of confidence, while a third was working on a solution to provide to these people what he had just promised.

Because he had no idea how he was going to both help feed the starving people around the city while also making them safer from the threat of the Apertures nearby.