Chapter 1439 - “And that right there is why you suck.” (Patreon)

Miranda looked at the map of her – well, technically Jake’s, but who was really keeping track – Territory, and smiled, pretty damn happy with recent events.

One would think that Jake’s absence would be detrimental to their Territory, and while him being gone hadn’t helped, it hadn’t been an issue either. In fact, over the past eleven months or so, the Territory had expanded to more than three times its previous size, despite fighting far trickier and more powerful opponents.

In all cardinal directions, they’d managed to expand, with their conquests towards the south and east in particular having proven successful. Miranda knew that William wasn’t very happy about putting his karmic magic to work in this way, and knowing what had happened in his and Jake’s Tutorial, she could understand his complicated emotions, but at the same time, she couldn’t deny how damn useful he was.

She knew enough about politics to realize that an alliance of many smaller factions with individual goals, who’d banded together only for survival, was incredibly fragile. Big egos, individual ambitions, and, most importantly, a lack of proper cohesion were easily exploited, and someone like William was the perfect person to do so.

Despite her high expectations, he somehow still managed to surpass them, as William, quite frankly, felt too effective to be fair. He had not only manipulated everyone in the alliance in record time, but also encouraged the southern leader to ally with the Holy Church and have them invade, weakening both the alliance and the Holy Church while giving the Milky Way Galaxy the perfect chance to strike.

Holstred had managed to seize a large area that formerly belonged to the Holy Church, and it didn’t even take two full weeks before the alliance was effectively dead and gone, their Territories divvied up among the surrounding forces, with the Order taking roughly two-thirds.

Overall, it was a massive success, and by now the size of the Territory belonging to the Milky Way Galaxy had already surpassed the entire surface area of Earth by several orders of magnitude, and this expansion wouldn’t stop anytime soon. Getting a Territory this big did lead to many logistical challenges, but Miranda was up for facing them, and she felt a lot more confident with people like William on their side. She knew Jake still had some trust issues towards the young man, but Miranda had started to soften up to him... which, honestly, was a bit of an unsettling sentiment. Not because she had any reason to find fault with him, but because, when it came to a karmic mage like him, could one ever truly tell whether positive feelings were genuine or simply a result of his magic?

Either way, Miranda wouldn’t judge him based on her own thoughts about him but on his results. As long as he continued to be a valuable and trustworthy asset, it wouldn’t be fair of her to treat him as anything less than an ally.

Right then, as Miranda was considering whether they should try to expand further east or west next, Lillian entered the room, back for the first time in many months after helping Tramon lead the assault on the former grand alliance. Well, her job had mainly been to handle matters after the battle, seeing as someone had to be in charge of properly claiming all the land, establishing a few Outposts, and dealing with the Vassals they’d taken.

“Welcome back,” Miranda smiled as she looked at her trustworthy coworker.

“Glad to be back,” she responded with a nod, clearly tired. Understandable, as last she’d heard, the Vassals were a bit annoying to deal with. Then again, which Vassals weren’t? The Behemoth’s Territory was their most useful Vassal, and even then there was a lot they had to put up with, striking a proper balance between fairness and tyranny.

“Hey, don’t look so down. You did more than a good job, and I heard nothing but positive things from the other Administrators who worked alongside you,” Miranda continued to smile. “I also heard your deployment served as a great opportunity to practice your magic. Rumors are going around about quite a few impressive formations.”

“It would be a waste not to at least try to practice when I was stuck there anyway,” Lillian sighed. She’d put down over a dozen different formations, knowing that they would never be activated. Their only job was to further prove that the Order of the Malefic Viper was acting defensively, which had played into Miranda’s plan to destabilize the alliance.

“Yeah, that part wasn’t the most interesting,” Miranda said apologetically. “But can I take it that you’re not interested in a similar deployment next time?”

“I’ll do whatever is best for us, but I wouldn’t complain if I was asked to do other things,” Lillian answered honestly, before adding, “Truthfully, I would also be fine with not being in charge. Having to make the bigger decisions and plans just isn’t me. I prefer to just carry them out.”

“That’s fair,” Miranda shrugged, understanding the sentiment. She also found it utterly anxiety-inducing to be the one in charge to begin with, and honestly had mainly gotten by with the guidance of her Patron. Plus, she’d been weaned into it slowly.

She’d gone from leading a few people at Haven and making a small village to that village expanding, the Fort joining their small faction, and all else that had happened since then. It had all come in small steps until she now effectively led most of the galaxy, with the council there mainly to advise her at this point. If she’d been tossed straight from leading a single city to serving as a general in a virtual world fighting against the rest of the multiverse, she would find it overwhelming too.

“And here I hoped to get someone to share the blame with when I mess up catastrophically so I had someone to throw under the bus and escape the wrath of the Order,” Miranda said, letting out a loud, exaggerated sigh.

“I sincerely apologize for ruining your plans,” Lillian responded in a deadpan tone.

“Apology accepted. Now go get some rest,” Miranda said with a smile.

“Oh, one last thing,” Lillian said. “Where’s William? I haven’t heard what he’s been up to since passing through the Outpost and returning here.”

“He went to relax for a while. Do his own thing to wind down after unraveling a large alliance,” Miranda responded casually. “And then he went to join Valhal.”

--

“Your moves are weak, and you should feel embarrassed,” the knight wearing full armor said while wielding two swords. “I know the system fucked up when it made me, but you too, huh? If not, why else would you suck this much?”

The knight’s opponent responded in anger as a heavy mass of magic shot towards him, only for the monk to poke forward and dismantle it entirely. “See? You just throw stuff like a kid who’s barely learned how to use mana. Wait, is this your unique restriction? The system made you a dumb-dumb on purpose?”

“Your insults are not helping,” the floating Unique Lifeform responded.

“Oh, that’s okay, I wasn’t trying to help,” Minaga shrugged, making his oversized metal pauldrons fall off. He scrambled to pick them back up as the King tried to take advantage, but the B-grade clone casually slapped the attack away, sending it to strike the ground behind him instead.

With the pauldrons back on, Minaga tilted his head, nearly making them fall off again. “I was being serious, though. Your control is bad. Your mana output is high. The inherent power in your blows is high, and the combination of the three types of magic you possess is powerful, which is why you’ve managed to do well so far. But it’s also why you suck.”

“Enlighten me. Where do I fall short? Where have I failed to properly utilize the means given to me?” the Forest King asked, genuinely looking for advice. It was why he had come here, so trying to remain prideful seemed foolish. Besides, Minaga had already proven his point.

The B-grade version of Minaga he was fighting had only just evolved, making it several levels lower than the King. Stat-wise, it was weaker than the King by a fair margin, yet no matter what he did, the other Unique Lifeform was utterly untouchable.

“Well, let’s just take an easy example,” Minaga said, raising a finger towards the King before he spoke: “Think fast.”

Despite feeling the danger and trying to dodge, the King was sent spinning through the air, a hole through his arm as if a finger had just poked through it. Stabilizing, he wasn’t ready as Minaga struck again, leaving several more holes in his body. Instinctively, he activated his defensive barrier and, to his shock, saw the powerful attack dispersed. It was also only then that he realized how “weak” the attacks had actually been.

“You see that? What did I just do?” Minaga asked, having at some point switched out his knight outfit to look like a gunslinger.

“Force projection,” the King answered, clearly recognizing his own form of magic.

“Exactly,” Minaga said with a nod. “Now you do it.”

Responding, the King focused and released a blast of force towards Minaga. The Unique Lifeform blocked it rather easily before just staring.

“That’s it? Mate... you've got to stop. You just throw it like a kid who’s never evolved to B-grade and started to learn more about conceptual power and exploring their own capabilities,” Minaga said, shaking his head while looking like the most disappointed creature in the multiverse.

“Okay, let’s try this,” he said, instantly snapping back to being his usual self. With a wave of his hand, he summoned a small wooden plate, about the size of a human palm, and made it float beside him.

“Make a hole in this. No, don’t blow it away, don’t destroy the entire thing, just make a hole,” Minaga said.

Despite Minaga’s previous taunts, the King wasn’t stupid and knew what the other Unique Lifeform wanted him to do. He was trying to teach the Forest King how to better focus his power and pinpoint it, something he’d already attempted to do many times before, but he’d always failed to make useful progress, making him decide to focus on improving his blasts in other ways.

“Compressing the power of my blasts to focus their impact area is something I’ve attempted to do many times before, but all it often results in is instability and the blast losing too much power and cohesion while in flight,” the Forest King said, raising his hand as he tried to repeat what Minaga had done.

He compressed the energy and shot it towards the plate like a bullet, but as he suspected, it lost too much power forcing its way through the air, and by the time it reached the plate, it had not only started to lose much of its shape but had grown too weak to break through.

“As you can see, the-“

“Try it again,” Minaga cut him off.

The King looked at the other Unique Form with exasperation as he nevertheless did as he was told. After another failed attempt and more wasted time, he continued speaking.

“I only see futility in-“

“Again.”

Suppressing his desire to just leave already, the Forest King yet again did as asked with the exact same result as before. Before he could even say anything, Minaga spoke yet again.

“Come on, go again.”

The King collected himself as best he could before shaking his head.

“No. This is a complete and utter waste of time. I’m not arguing that it isn’t possible, but it’s a complete waste. Why try to make a pinpointed attack rather than a far more powerful blast, capable of not merely poking holes but blowing through my opponents? The amount of power and focus required to make such an attack feels utterly wasteful,” the King said, believing himself to be very reasonable.

Minaga just looked at the King before sighing. “And that right there is why you suck.”

“Why? Because I don’t want to entertain your antics, or are you arguing that I don’t want to work hard for improvements but want them handed to me without effort? Unlike what you might believe, I have worked hard to achieve my goals, and-“

“Again, why you suck,” Minaga cut him off yet another time. “I watched you for fifty years in Nevermore. I’ve seen you over these last few months, and I noticed that your abilities and skills are all incredibly powerful. You’ve clearly put a lot of time into improving them, making you one of the strongest creatures at your level, even among Unique Lifeforms. I’m not even saying you can’t keep being like that and make it to godhood, but I am saying that it would mean you suck more than you have to. Of course, you sucking is relative, and I compare you to me, which is honestly unfair due to how great I am, but you could at least strive to live up to one-thousandth of my awesomeness.”

“Then what are you saying I should do? For what reason should I learn how to concentrate my blasts in such a fashion?” the King asked, having calmed down a little as clearly Minaga was being serious about passing on a lesson... or at least he thought so until he saw the other Unique Lifeform casually shrug.

“I don’t know. How would I? I’m not you.”

“What do you-“

“But you don’t either, do you? Know what you can learn, that is,” Minaga cut him off, seemingly just doing it for the love of the game at this point with all his dramatic pauses. “I’m not saying learning how to do something you deem useless will make you stronger or create a useful technique, but I am saying that you don’t know whether it could potentially lead to something in the future.”

Minaga was clearly more serious than before, based on the look on his face as he continued.

“As Unique Lifeforms, we are born with limits. Restrictions. Mine were far worse than yours. When first created, do you know what I was capable of? That’s right, nothing. I could punch stuff. Maybe gather some mana and blast it out. Without my high stats as a Unique Lifeform, I would have died early on, and even with the superior physique of a Unique Lifeform, I couldn’t fight foes my own level. I had to run, learn from them, observe them, and copy them. I made everything from scratch, and one thing I learned while doing that was how sometimes, you have no idea what lessons you need to learn.”

Raising his hand, Minaga summoned three glowing runes, one giving off an aura of pure force, another glowing golden, and the final one resonating with the soul. “You are in a far better position than I was, but you are also limited to these three things. Clearly, you’ve worked to improve your understanding and found methods of merging them to get stronger, and that’s all fine and good, but my advice is to stop being so goal-oriented.”

Dispelling the runes, Minaga gave him a big smile. “Play around, learn all you can about the tools you have, even what may seem useless. Just have fun learning everything you can do, even the most useless stuff, and you may one day come to realize that the sum of all those useless moments led to something truly great.”

Minaga teleported over and slapped the King on his shoulder several times as he smiled. “You’re gonna live for a long time unless you go and die to something stupid, so enjoy that time. Do stupid things, make up wacky ideas, and pull them off. Find ways of using your magic that no one else has thought of. I’m not saying to neglect your fundamentals, but don’t only focus on what you think might lead to immediate improvements. Embrace every part of your Path and what makes you unique, and perhaps one day, you might even become one-hundredth as awesome as me.”

The King was in thought for a while, taking the words in before slowly nodding.

“I shall attempt to take your words to-“

“Oh, but I did lie when I said I didn’t know that focusing your blasts into bullets would be great, because damn, that would be super strong and you do just suck conceptually at shaping your force magic.”

“Are you truly cutting me off every time on pur-“

“Yes,” Minaga said, bereft of shame. “Yes, I am.”