A New Star Chapter 100 (Patreon)

I moved carefully towards the city, still not sure of what else I would find. I also wasn’t sprinting straight at the walls, even in The Dark, as that was a foolish notion. I came to appreciate that choice in just a few moments, as I was attacked, even from where I was within The Dark. I had already had that proven as possible to me when that strange bird beast had managed to harry me within The Dark, and now I saw yet another thing capable of reaching within that distinct plane and making alterations. Of course, this wasn’t just some small change, despite my phrasing, but was in fact an attack, and of quite an extreme proportion, if I did say so myself.

I had apparently crossed some kind of line in the sand or some such, and the city had decided it was time to go from mostly passive defenses to active defenses. If there were anyone alive in there, they weren’t giving people approaching much of a chance, though my use of a separate, parallel dimension didn’t exactly scream good intentions. Still, the response had more of a flavor of automated systems than of any higher intelligence behind the wheel, which I was a bit thankful for, as it gave me something of a chance to outmaneuver the system without getting totally obliterated.

This was also how I learned what one of the functions of the large, central tower was, as it was what was responsible for the attack leveled against me. In the span of a few seconds, a massive formation appeared hovering in the air over the tower, a vertical circle of golden light that had to be a hundred meters across, the entire interior inscribed with hundreds of runes. After three seconds of charging up energy, a blast of energy lanced out of the tower, not quite a light speed attack, but it was fast, so much so that I barely had time to dodge even though I had been alerted to the circle’s appearance by the gathering mana. I was glad to be within The Dark as I dodged, as I didn’t want to have to deal with all the other traps and defenses as I was leaping away from a massive beam attack and just barely dodging it.

The only fortunate thing about the tower was that it took a second to reset or recharge between shots. If the thing had been some kind of machine gun, firing off blasts at a few dozen or hundred per second, I would have been in some real trouble, maybe even needing to use one of my couple aces still up my sleeve. As it was, it was still hard to avoid, considering the size and power of the blast, the beam wider than my torso and not perfectly straight. I was interested to study exactly what kind of mana and energy they had used to form the blast, but I would like to do so when I wasn’t in danger of being vaporized. The beam wasn’t exactly perfectly straight or even, with some variability in size and a few slight angles that gave it a bit of a jagged appearance. All of which were clues to ponder, but again, to ponder after I had stopped getting shot at.

I retreated through the edge of the cleared area around the city, not having really made it all that far towards the walls, and then moved back even further, still dodging shots, though the beam could just pound straight through solid stone. It could certainly destroy stone, as I had ample demonstrations of as I dodged the shots, but a thick shelf of stone was too much for it to punch through in a single attack. Learning that also helped me in getting out of the range of the tower, which I suspected was even further than where it stopped shooting, but it was clearly in some kind of defensive mode where it was keeping a certain perimeter secure.

I had gone all the way to the slope of one of the surrounding mountains, though the beam had last attacked right at the foot of the mountain. It was a bit hard to guage its exact range, as there was no simple valley between any of the surrounding mountains and the city. There was just a sharp, steep chasm, hard to cross and decidedly unfriendly, and it was that way with every single mountain and the city. It was to the point I was pretty sure that some of the areas had been specifically engineered by the city builders themselves to be hard to pass, the people who built the city transforming the valleys into impassable roadblocks.

Once I was far enough from the city, I surveyed the area again, all the more suspicious in the way I could not see over the wall and into the city proper, even from the elevation I was at. I was also keeping my eye on the tower considering that the array had not disappeared from the sky above it. The golden circle still remained in the air about a hundred and fifty meters above the top of the tower, glowing golden in a sky full of gray and dull clouds, the wind whipping through the high mountains the only background noise to an otherwise still and silent place. I tried to examine the runes used in the array, but they were not large, even given the array’s size, and the distance was rather far at this point. I made a mental note to come back with some way to sketch things out, having not thought to bring a little notebook or the like with me. It might also be nice to see if I could get something that would help enhance my vision, though I had a fear that most people would simply use an affinity to overcome the distance.

That was one thing I was finding a bit annoying about this society; even as they progressed through the steam age, or their equivalent of it, they were still very mired in a history of affinity use to solve problems. It was fine, when it worked, and when a population had plenty of people with affinities that solved a problem readily available, but it was a bit excessive in the Settled Lands. Need to send a message? Affinity for that? Need to check something far away? Affinity for that. Need to treat wounds or a disease or do advanced diagnostics? Why, there are healing affinities, who needs to study medicine and medicinal theory. I was starting to loath affinities as quick fixes for complex problems, but at the same time, there was certainly demand for novel solutions. After all, trains and automobiles had already been invented, just to mention two of the big ones.

I dismissed my musings, or griping, about affinity reliance for now to give the city a last once-over. I was very curious about the place, far more now that I had actually experienced it in person and seen what all the fuss was about, but I was not getting past the defenses at present. I could push things, I supposed, and try to see if there were some kind of energy limit on the tower, but dodging the beams had not been a fun experience. Nor a particularly safe one, if the singed state of my cloak was any indication of anything. I would rather gather more strength, both personally and of extra personnel, before making any other attempt at the city. And, hells, for all I knew, the place was still occupied and they just didn’t want any company, friendly or not.

I turned and made my way out of the valley, heading west as I did so. I wasn’t quite done with exploration just yet, but I was still on a time limit, and I intended to circle back in a way that was different than the route I had taken to reach the city. The more familiar I became with the Wilds, the greater the benefit to me would be, and I was doing my best to chart out the Ice Peaks right now. I had a fairly good sense of direction, bolstered by my affinities, funnily enough, considering my earlier complaining, and getting lost was little concern. I generally knew where I was in relation to the Settled Land in general and to my families territory, though I had moved far to both the north and west. I was hoping I was still lined up properly, but I was definitely going to need to circle back east, more than a bit, to get back to the estate.

First, I would explore, then I would head back to the old mages tower. Along the way, I spent plenty of time walking through The Dark, as I didn’t want to be bothered, though I kept my guard up, again thinking of the several things I had now encountered that didn’t give a damn about this separate plane of existence. I was a novice at the use of The Dark as well, my ten years of utilizing the affinity barely having scratched the surface, or even the surface of that surface. I had so many questions, about what the affinity was, how it worked, and why it led to this separate plane. I had spent some few hours experimenting with every other affinity I had, and Alex with hers, and nothing else linked to some separate dimension or plane boundary the way The Dark did. There was Alex’s high affinity for death, which had led us to meet Death Itself, or one of It’s incarnations, but that was a separate matter entirely.

Still, thinking of both did raise the interesting question of what else could happen with certain affinities. Some seemed rather obvious on first glance, and others were entirely a mystery, much to my chagrin. I had enough compatibility with several affinities that I should, and should was doing a lot of heavy lifting here, have access to something beyond the depth of power itself, were anything like that to exist. I had not found anything, not just in terms of a separate plane, but any other kind of interaction, though if it was something like a link to a higher power or being like Death, I would not find out until such time as fortunate, fate, and willpower met at a crossroads.

The Ice Peaks were large enough, and more than difficult enough to traverse, that I had really even left the central part of the range by the time I had made it back south far enough to see the Shiverwood, or the wester edge of it. The land to the west of the Shiverwood was some very rough terrain, and I was not looking forward to venturing there, not any time soon. Besides, I was of a mind to stay out of the affairs of the two empires, now and into the future, though I was bumping into imperial princesses and retainers with more regularity than I would like for that goal to remain firm. Still, I entered the Shiverwood and moved through the sparse region of trees of its western flank, finding an almost entirely different biome as compared to its central area, the animal life, plant life, beasts, and terrain all different to various degrees.

It presented a lot of opportunities to gather new and novel ingredients, though I had to limit myself. Not necessarily because I was worried about denuding the countryside of plants and minerals, but more because I had limited carrying capacity, which was a constant annoyance I had to find ways around, including stashing things in certain ‘safe’ locations as I was exploring and then doing dedicated runs to transport those goods to an actual safehouse. I wasn’t going to do any of that here, so I simply gathered a sample of this, a cut of that, a bit of this, and kept them all in my backpack and attached sample bags as I moved on. It took more than a day for me to reach the mountains that separated the Wilds and Settled Lands, and another day to carefully make my way back to the mage’s tower.

I always exercised more caution when I was in these mountains, which was a bit ironic, but I was much more concerned about running into people from the Settled Lands than I was about a random beast or even people from the other groups that clearly lived in the Wilds. I suppose that said something of my fellow man and our so-called ‘civilization’ down here in the south, but that was something to complain about at a different time. For now, I had goods to catalogue, preserve, and move back to the estate, which was an easier process than running around the Wilds transporting things, but still tedious and time-consuming.

Fortunately, with my great physical strength, I could carry quite a lot if I was assured that I was in relatively safe territory. While I was wary of others, nothing in the Settled Lands had demonstrated any ability to track me in The Dark, other than Z-rankers, and if one of them was around and hostile, well…I wasn’t necessarily fucked, but it would be very tough, and it would push me to do things I wasn’t prepared for yet. Though it would not be all that long now.

I carried everything to my lab at the estate initially, and, even with my strength, it took me three trips to bring everything in, by which point the lab was stuffed rather full of materials and objects. I quickly sorted through it to separate into what I was selling and keeping, moving everything I was selling to a second room. After that, I did a rough sort of everything to make sure I had it all and had it arranged in some semblance of order. I wanted to take the other goods, the ones I had stashed in the nearby storeroom, down to Pietr right away, so after I was done with the initial sorting, I grabbed several large crates, filled them, and hoisted them all while walking into The Dark.

The trip to Pietr’s was uneventful, other than the man’s swearing and turning a strange shade of red, but he was an excitable sort of fellow, and I just dismissed it. Besides, Pietr had gotten stronger over the last ten years I had known him, but I had gotten immensely stronger. If we both fought with our lives on the line, I would likely win, and that wasn’t even counting those aces I was still holding up my sleeve, even now. Despite his bitching and bellyaching about everything I dumped on him, the man was happy, which I could tell by the way he popped a cigar out of the case he kept in his jacket and lit it up. I left to sort and sell what he needed to after admonishing him not to ruin the goods with tobacco smoke, which he just waved off while growling something about all the years he’d been doing this shit, a proclamation that would have inspired more confidence if he weren’t still a petty, two-bit gangster after all those years.

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