Game of Monsters - 207

Overcoming, Projected

“Why do I feel the need to punch this guy in the face?” Issei asked and Joshua raised an eyebrow, following the boy’s finger as he pointed at Kokabiel.

“You’ve got good instincts,” he commented idly. After all, Issei had been on the other side of the world when he’d fought Kokabiel and Joshua was pretty sure he had never mentioned the fallen to the Boosted Gear holder. Very interesting that. Was it his dragon side that took notice of something or was it just some randomly very accurate feeling Issei had gotten?

He mentally added checking on that at some point next to the pile of projects he had waiting for things to no longer be busy and serious.

“Thanks?”

“Anyway, yeah, I’d let you, but I kind of need the guy,” Joshua continued, taking a deep breath in.

“You know I’m here, right?” the fallen asked flatly, but he was thoroughly ignored.

“Whenever you’re ready, Issei,” Joshua said, waving his hand and activating a bunch of already placed spells. The boy nodded, donning his Scale Mail immediately and starting to accumulate Boosts. From there, he summoned True Longinus, making Kokabiel straighten out of some instinct alone apparently, and then he started calling on the Egyptians.

Set, god of War, Chaos, and Storms.

Horus, god of War, Sky, and Kingship.

Sekhmet, goddess of War and Destruction.

Onuris, god of War.

Joshua called on all the War gods he knew of in the Pantheon and even some that he didn’t. Then he called anyone that might even be relatively or tangentially connected to battle or wielding a spear. His soul strained the smallest bit, but not enough to cause real damage. Nothing a day or two wouldn’t patch up and nothing that would take him out of commission. He couldn’t risk that for something so small in the grand scheme of what he was working on.

So, he had to use what he had in hand and what wouldn’t leave him out of commission to continue working on his other projects.

Issei’s Transfer, for example. Or his Egyptian back up. From there, he had spells and arrays in place. Margalo was signing overhead too, even, and Friday was at least attempting to play support from where she now resided inside him, apparently trying to imitate the gods’ support. There were a bunch of things that he wasn’t even sure if they were helping, but he guessed he was about to find out…

With all the pieces in place, it was just a matter of getting to it.

Joshua did notice though, as everything piled together, the spear in his hand felt… heavier. Not in a way that made him struggle, or that made him think it might reject some of the things he’d pulled – like the Egyptians, which was a genuine concern –, but in the sense that it made him feel like the weapon was… matching the vibe, as it were. Like it could tell something was coming and was matching the intensity in its own way.

After dealing with Setan Kober and Carnwennan, Joshua was admittedly used to weapons with some amount of sentience and even – maybe, possibly – sapience. Still, no offense to the kris and dagger, but they weren’t quite a match for True Longinus. Everything that came from the spear felt so much more… imposing. Like it needed to be seen, heard, felt, and it wouldn’t be ignored. Not because it was loud or demanding, but because you could tell it was important.

Joshua simply nodded to himself, closing his eyes for a moment to feel the spear better. Then he took a deep breath in, opened his eyes and shifted slowly, meaningfully, into a stance with the weapon in his arms. The anticipation coming from the Sacred Gear shifted into something more… eager, excited, like it was whispering to him ‘finally’.

“Now,” he said and all spells honed on him, the blessings of the gods and goddesses sharpening. Margalo’s song intensified and Friday pushed with all her might inside him.

[Transfer] Ddraig announced from inside the Boosted Gear just as he went to stab forward. Joshua felt the immense spike in energy, strength, power that came with the ability. He was no weakling on a good day, least of all with all that he’d piled in that one attack, but the boost still managed to be insane. The Boosted Gear wasn’t a Longinus for nothing, he supposed.

Joshua wasn’t focusing on that anymore though, at that point. No, he was focused on his form, aided by the deities that knew better than him. He focused on True Longinus as it sang, feeling how it pierced the air as if it were a block of stone, resistance that had nothing to do with the physical world hitting the tip of the weapon. He focused on that new sensation and pushed forward all the same, knowing that he’d reached a milestone and not sure if it was the one he’d been looking for.

Stab felt like it took minutes, maybe hours, even though it was probably a second, maybe less. Time seemed to slow down and Joshua took it all in, bit by bit. The power, the gods, the resistance, the spear and finally… the piercing.

Contradictory to how the entire moment felt so long, the ending felt like a flash, something that could be missed by so much as blinking. One moment he was stabbing forward and the next True Longinus was going through air, space, dimensions. He watched the small tear in space for the longest split second ever before realizing that he needed to continue the experiment, cutting upwards and opening a rift to the Dimensional Gap. It was much too easy, he noticed, once the initial opening was there.

‘It worked,’ he thought, eyes wide with disbelief.

“Georg?” he said and the Dimension Lost user seemed to start at his call. Apparently, he had been a bit too surprised by his achievement, but Joshua would cut him some slack. He did spread his mist around after a moment, covering the tear… and just like it opened, it was closed. Joshua, then and there, wasn’t aware of the eyes on him. He was only aware of his own satisfaction

[Quest Complete: Open a way to the Dimensional Gap.

Rewards:

+ 30 levels to Spear Mastery

+ 20 levels to Spatial Magic

+ Skill Updated: ###te# of #e#ven

+ 10 to all Stats]

‘If that’s not Heaven, then I don’t know what it could be,’ he thought idly, taking a deep breath in and then letting it out wearily. That single second had taken its toll, evidently, but it had been a very productive second. Especially for the other rewards he got. Those would come in handy.

As for the mystery skill… He’d deal with that some other time.

Focusing back on the present and dismissing the screen, Joshua considered the fact that he’d need to finetune the amount of power and skill necessary to open a hole to the Dimensional Gap. Maybe he could afford a few less deities stretching his soul thin or maybe he could do without Boosted Gear if he played things well enough. Now he had basically doubled his Spear Mastery levels too, so that probably helped, along with the overall stat increases.

The one that he had to deal without was Boosted Gear though, since he couldn’t count on Issei being on hand. Especially since part of Project Spear’s aim was to not have to rely on Georg to get in and, most importantly, out of the Gap. Maybe it was prideful of him, or something along those lines, but he’d long since stopped trusting others as much as he trusted himself to get things done. At least, when it didn’t come to matters that were way beyond him, like politics.

This was something he could do, clearly, so he’d rather rely only on himself.

“Thanks for the help, Issei,” he said, turning towards the Boosted Gear wielder. He hadn’t had as much time for him as he’d wished those days, but he still talked to him and Aika on occasion, especially when he went to tinker in a quiet corner of his cafe in Kuoh. “I’ll make a few calls and you’ll have your super date, promise,” he added and the kid beamed at him. That had been the low, low price of his help and Joshua was more than happy to help.

Hell, he’d have done it without the deal thing, but Issei could find that out at some other point. Maybe when Aika was hearing, so that she could get a good laugh out of it. As it was, he had other things to do, so…

“Do you want to go back on your own? I have things to handle over here still and I don’t want to take your time,” he added, taking a deep breath in – he was doing that a lot, but he found it helped him focus his mind – and running his fingers through his hair. “Might want to use some of your free time for something, huh? Now that Aika’s busy.”

“I guess,” the boy said with a chuckle. “There was a game I wanted to try out.” Joshua thought it wise not to ask what game it was. Issei had gotten a lot better, but Aika wasn’t really a great influence to rehabilitate the perverted little shit, so…

“Have fun,” was all he said in response before the boy left. Then he cracked his neck and turned towards Georg. “Let’s go, I want to try out some other things,” he said, whatever good mood he had managed was pushed aside in favor of his next bout of testing. He could have taken a break, but the entire thing with True Longinus hadn’t taken too long and the data he’d gotten from it could be used at some other point.

Time to move from Project Spear to Project Silence.

More precisely, Project Silence: Bubble.

That’s why, once Georg warped them into the Dimensional Gap, Joshua got to work. Spells were layered one by one as he created a small array that had a very simple, but not at all easy, job. What the magic was supposed to do was, as the name of the project indicated, create a bubble in the Gap. More precisely, it was supposed to create a bubble of Dimensional Gap that was separated from the rest of the voidspace.

For one, it would be a good enough attempt at giving Ophis what she wanted, maybe. For another, it was bound to have some interesting information for him to work with, Joshua thought. One way or another, he was going to gain something, even if the test didn’t work at all, he’d likely learn something.

‘Ok, that one didn’t work out… not that one either… maybe this-nope…’ he thought, casting spell after spell, trying out different array ideas. Most of them collapsed at some point, some sooner, some later, but none of that was a surprise. Casting magic at all in the Gap was a struggle, Joshua already knew, and it’d be a while before he truly got the hang of it. Probably until he had it all figured out, really, since the Gap’s very nature was what worked against his casting. He doubted he’d be able to learn how to cast consistently without enough understanding to fulfill Ophis’ request.

Unfortunate, since that meant he was forced to try and kill two birds with one stone.

‘Ok… that worked… sort of,’ he thought, looking at the bubble he’d finally managed to create. It worked, for sure, but the inside of it was nothing like the Gap outside. Instead of a bubble with Gap outside and inside, he’d made more of a… weird balloon. The thing was half-filled with his magic, which he imagined was not at all “Silent” for the purposes of his endeavors.

He’d learned a bunch of things though, so that was good.

“Let’s go back,” he told Georg, who promptly took them back.

Joshua still had a lot of tinkering to get through.

[}-o-{]

“This field has been thoroughly arrayed to counter spell failures,” Joshua announced, walking in first and gesturing around with his arms while his class of valkyries followed after him. At his words, they looked around at the seemingly normal space with awe written all over their faces. “Feel free to test any modifications you’ve made to your spells. If you want me to check them, just ask, same if you have any doubts in your process,” he said, turning to address them more directly. “Go wild,” he instructed and he would have chuckled if he weren’t so tired.

He felt like he was always tired those days.

Not long afterwards, they were already going at it and all of them were failing miserably. They didn’t seem to mind too much though, considering they seemed more impressed by his failure suppressing array than anything else. He almost worried they were messing up on purpose just to watch his spells in action, funnily enough.

“You do realize this is a revolutionary thing on its own, right? Associations would throw themselves at you for this thing,” Göndul commented as she walked beside him while he checked attempts going on. So far nobody had asked for guidance, so he was letting them flail a little before stepping in. “How’re you not House of Water’s director already?”

“Don’t feel like it,” he commented. Ravel herself had commented on the matter once, and she reminded him by clearing her throat from behind him. He resolutely didn’t turn to look at the devil. “I have other things to do, like studying and tinkering. I can’t be bothered to play politics or manage a place like this,” he said with a shrug, getting a laugh out of the old valkyrie.

Idly, Joshua noticed how interesting it was that the woman felt old to him, even though Gabriel didn’t and she was definitely older than Göndul. Maybe it was a race thing, but the angel just didn’t feel old, while the valkyrie did. It was like the immortal races just got stuck somewhere in “adult” and never really stepped into the “old” stage, somehow.

Curious.

Or maybe it was just the fact that he had the woman’s granddaughter in his class that affected his view, admittedly.

“Can’t say I blame you,” Göndul commented and Joshua was almost positive that he heard Ravel groaning. Girl didn’t know when to give up and she should really learn. The day Joshua voluntarily did something political without literally needing to or being forced in some way was the day the world ended. “Politics are a nightmare for people like us.”

“People like us?” he asked, eyebrow raised. Not that he disagreed, but he wasn’t sure what she meant like that and it made him curious.

“Direct people,” Göndul answered with a smile and he chuckled. That was fair. Politics almost always needed some sort of subtlety that he just didn’t have. Even his dabbles into politics had been fairly straightforward, really, and that was because it could barely be called politics, what he did. “I can’t be bothered myself and I imagine neither can you. We have more productive things to be doing than exchanging meaningless words for hours on end, beating around bushes and playing games.”

“Politics are productive, even if I don’t have the patience for them,” he said, because he’d never look down on that. Not with all the help he needed to get in regards to the subject. Besides, he was fairly sure Ravel would do something drastic if he didn’t say something. Something like telling Yasaka and the others. That wouldn’t end well for him.

“Professor Davis?” a valkyrie off to the side called shyly and he realized that it was Rossweisse, interestingly. She seemed very reluctant to do so, but that might have something to do with her grandmother standing right beside him. Joshua nevertheless nodded and approached her. “I just… had a few doubts about this spell. The only problem I can think of is in this specific ring of runes, but I’ve triple checked it and I can’t find the issue,” the valkyrie explained, gathering courage.

He looked at the rune rings she’d written, applying what little knowledge he had on the subject to try and see if he could find the problem directly. If not, he could take guesses or try to read a pattern in the failure results. Spell failures were random, yes, but random in the same way gacha were random. Most of the time, there was some measure of predictability with what a failure would do depending on where the mistake was.

They weren’t dependable enough to be usable in any way, sadly, but they were dependable enough to tell something… sometimes. Especially in highly controlled situations such as the one he’d offered his students. It was why he’d offered them the chance, since he couldn’t really help them much with the actual spellcrafting, being a novice in the runic system himself.

“Well, I know next to nothing, but this spot here looks odd to me,” he commented, pointing to a spot in a completely different ring from the one Rossweisse had mentioned. “If not that, then maybe analyse if there’s any consistency in the spell failure result. We can check it if you think this is done well,” he told her, running his fingers through his hair and preparing to actually do some teacher work.

“Yes. Thank you, Professor Davis,” she said and he was surprised none of the valkyries, especially Rossweisse herself, reacted in any way to him talking about the runic system. Even if he’d prefaced with the fact that he was new, he’d expected some kind of reaction. ‘Valkyries are much more polite than my usual classes,’ he thought to himself with a slight grin.

[}-o-{]

Next order of business, while Friday had fun poking at the new ideas for the Bubble, was some more work on other branches of Project Silence. In that particular instance, it was Extraction, which was the branch that dealt with taking a piece of the Gap and moving it somewhere else. Where? That was still up in the air, but it could either be an isolated space created by Joshua’s magic or – being tentatively and very warily considered – giving Dimension Lost a slight push like he’d done with Issei and get Georg to use his Balance Breaker, Dimension Create.

He didn’t think he trusted the guy that much, but if it was an option and it could work… Well, he’d done riskier things already in the name of chances. He had a feeling he might do worse as time passed and the deadline got closer. He was aware, but it wasn’t like there was much else he could do. Especially if things didn’t progress as fast.

He might have to indulge some of the ideas that had his partners going for a resolute “no” every time he brought them up.

As it was, Joshua was inside the Gap, trying to use magic to manipulate… the void, or whatever weird ass element filled the entire space. There were some parallels with Bubble, but Extraction could also include just pushing a bunch of it out of a hole – maybe made by his new progress with Project Spear or through Dimension Lost – towards whatever destination they had in mind. It was a matter of finding the method that worked best for his goal…

Or that worked at all, since he hadn’t gotten to that part yet.

‘It’s taking entirely too long to figure out what the fuck fills this place,’ Joshua thought with a grimace. He’d been working on it for a while, but he didn’t feel any more inclined towards either the void theory or the element theory. ‘Please tell me it’s not some eldritch combination of both things,’ he pleaded to whatever ROB might be out there listening in.

If it really was, then he’d be annoyed, very much so.

‘... Wait, did that work?’ he thought, pausing his long, consecutive string of spell tests. He’d been kind of mindlessly casting, checking results and noting them down. He wasn’t even expecting anything to work anymore. The fact that he was a little tired and so done with that work already might have helped with that. He was snapped back to things when he noticed a weird shift because of his spell though.

‘Ok, I’m getting some tea whenever I get back,’ he noted idly, slowly casting the spell again. Sure enough, there was an odd shift there, not in the Gap but in the spell. It wasn’t collapsing or failing. No, it was kind of the odd perception that one got seeing through hot air or maybe a disturbed water surface. The spell “wobbled”, for lack of a better term, before eventually fizzling out. ‘Interesting, very interesting,’ he thought, taking a deep breath in and eventually moving on after recasting that a few times and noticing that the effect repeated itself.

He was definitely coming back to that one though.

Nothing else stood out from that test session, unfortunately, but one sort-of success was better than none. And besides, it wasn’t like the failures didn’t help in their own way. Every bit of information was useful, even if he’d rather things go well. So long as he didn’t find himself hitting his head against the wall like when he’d first started with Project Silence, Joshua would be happy. Or happier, at least.

“Ok, let’s go back,” he said, his body relaxing once he took the first step back to his home. “See you around,” he added then, waving dismissively towards Georg. The man didn’t say anything as he walked away and Joshua didn’t care for it, really. He had stuff in his mind, so he just walked to the table where he usually worked on stuff and sat down. Maybe he’d even be mostly done when Kunou finished with her classes and came to do her homework.

‘The wobble though… what was that about?’ he wondered, tapping his pencil on the notebook page for a long moment. ‘Maybe it actually interacted with the Gap, just not well enough or the right way…’ he mused, slowly starting to write down ideas. Most of them sounded far off the mark, but nothing could be outright dismissed when it came to the Gap.

“Dad?” a voice greeted and he blinked, looking up and smiling. The look on Kunou’s face gave him pause though, because there was something weird about her at that very moment. Her eyes had widened a little in a strange surprised expression. Also, she wasn’t looking at him per se, but a little up. “Why is your hair black again?” she asked.

And Joshua’s brain had to reboot, because that was about the last thing he’d expected to hear.

Sure enough, once he checked, he realized that, indeed, the magic he’d used to turn his hair blonde had vanished at some point. ‘The Gap, but why and why now instead of any other time?’ he wondered to himself, curious. That was one weird side effect to suffer from, especially after a while going there. He was pretty sure he should have noticed if it were the normal Gap erosion. Maybe one of his spells had done something odd when it failed?

“An experiment, I guess,” he commented, turning to give Kunou an apologetic smile. “Sorry about that,” he added, more seriously. After all, he’d dyed it to better resemble her when she’d been a bit… touchy about differences between them. Besides, he kind of liked the look and it made Kunou happy. It had become his new normal at some point, without him even realizing. “I’ll change it back-” Joshua started, before pausing.

Kunou had approached him while his mind wandered and she reached to touch his hair gingerly. He was almost worried if not for how… oddly calm the girl looked. After running her fingers through it for about a minute, he saw her smile.

“You can keep it like this if you want,” she mumbled shyly. “You don’t have to change it back.”

“It’s no bother, Kunou, I promise,” he told her with a grin, but she shook her head.

“You changed it for me, but I don’t mind… Not anymore,” she said, moving to sit on his lap, leaning against his chest and fidgeting with his family locket. “You’re my dad,” she added, as if that explained everything… and it kind of did, he supposed.

“I am,” he replied, hugging her against his body. “I love you,” he added, kissing the top of her hair and getting a giggle out of her.

“I love you too, dad.”

[} Chapter End {]

Hey guys! How’s it going?

Lots of looks into the voi- I mean, into Joshua’s projects… or are those the same thing? Even I don’t know anymore, honestly. Couldn’t leave the chapter without some fluff though, obviously, and Professor!Davis makes an appearance once again. I feel like it’s been a while, but my memory’s not great so…

Either way, I hope you guys enjoyed the chapter.

Discord Link: discord.gg/UTDransjJZ

Random Question: Have I ever asked what color your hair is? Mine is boring brown.

See you.