Just a Guy and a Gate to the Multiverse - Chapter 26 (Patreon)

Chapter 26 - Urû’baen

I really wasn’t sure if that would work, but fortunately, it did. Now the big question was, how would it turn out?

[ Absorption Type Skill detected… ]

[ Incorporating ability into existing Absorption Type Skill: World Attunement ]

[ Done. ]

[ World Attunement Lvl. 3: This Skill allows the User to adapt their own body or another person’s body to the current Universe they are in. It grants the User the average talent of the people living in that World, enabling them to use its corresponding power systems. This Skill has a cooldown of five years.

Passive Effect: The User understands the local language of the World he travels to.

Modifier Effect: You may specify a variation of your current race that exists in your current Universe to attune to, but you will still only receive the average talent of that variation, even if they possess special properties.

Passive Effect: The User can freely access the power system of any Universe that doesn’t require a dedicated resource like Mana, Chakra, Ki, and similar, or a biological disposition like Quirks, Midi-chlorians, Bloodlines, and similar, freely in said Universe. Warning: To be able to use that power system outside of said Universe, he still needs to use a World Attunement.

Sub-Skills:

Lifeforce Manipulation: The User possesses the ability to sense, absorb, transfer, and store Lifeforce. Power and range are determined by the User’s base stats and degree of mastery. ]

As soon as the entire description appeared in the text box in front of me, something inside me fundamentally changed. It was as if my body had rewritten itself. The only time I had felt something similar was after a World Attunement.

Of course, I didn’t have a World Attunement just now.

But I felt like the most important ability needed to use magic in this Universe had truly become a part of me, as if it had turned into an innate Skill.

Its usage hadn’t changed. I could do exactly what I had done before, only without relying on the power system of this Universe. Just like that, without a World Attunement.

Sure, by itself, it was basically just a close-combat life drain and a method to restore my own stamina. But still, being able to store my stamina for later use was already an extremely valuable Skill.

Another trump card for a dangerous, exhausting battle, plus a sensing Skill for living presences.

And that was only if that was all I could do with it. I still had some ideas I wanted to test.

In the next moment, more text appeared in my vision.

[ Please select one upgrade for the Skill: World Attunement.

Raise the talent bar to above average.

All Passive Effects apply to anyone traveling with the User through the Multiversal Gate.

Increase the number of people affected by one use of World Attunement by 5. ]

Hmm, less straightforward than the upgrades for my Multiversal Gate. Let’s see, raise the talent I would get to above average. Honestly, this was very vague. What even was above average?

Average was simple. Take the talent of everyone in the group I specified as the target, then give me the average of that. But how did you define above average? What came after that? Gifted? Talented? Genius? Exceptional? One in a lifetime? One in a generation? One in all of history?

To be honest, I didn’t need to understand these parameters. I wasn’t going to choose it, even in the future. It would take the fun out of my journey a lot faster. At some point, I would become so talented that everything would come to me easily. What would I do then?

I was a gamer for a part of my life, and when I was younger, I cheated too. It may have given me what I wanted quickly, but soon after, I stopped playing the game because I lost all the fun. Of course, there were different kinds of cheats.

There was the easy kind, like a cheat code, an exploit you got from somewhere else, or outright using some tool to edit the game or your save. That kind was cheating.

And then there was cheating the system. Figuring something out yourself, whether it was an exploit or just the most efficient playstyle, was different. It was something you got yourself. It was your own work, and that kind was fun.

The other two choices were the only viable ones. After all, I was planning to recruit people soon. I wasn’t sure what the best option was. Ideally, I would like to have both since, in the long term, they were both so useful.

Sharing all my passives, especially the language one, was useful. It would make things a lot easier. But I believed I could overcome at least the language barrier in the next world. At least, it was a possibility.

Yet the other passive would always be useful.

So would sharing an actual World Attunement with others. Especially the next one, the immortality one.

At the same time, I believed that once I got it, I could reverse-engineer it too and give it to others after I got my hands on my dream. Now, the question was what the better move was.

Wait, if I considered the order of worlds I was planning to visit, then the active World Attunement for more people would be more useful. I could bypass the language barrier in the next world.

I was confident I could reverse-engineer the immortality one, but not the World Attunement after that. And it would be useful if more people had it. Until then, I wasn’t planning to visit a world that had a power system my second passive ability could use.

While I had an idea to get another upgrade for my World Attunement Skill before I actually needed it, the chances of it working were slim and hard to predict. So going for the safe option I needed more, and that I couldn’t work around, was clearly the better move.

I picked option three, increasing the limit of people who could use World Attunement at once by five!

Once again, more knowledge appeared in my mind, as if my understanding of the Skill had deepened.

And at the same time, I realized I had forgotten that I wasn’t alone here.

“Are you okay, student?” Oromis asked me with a bit of worry on his face. “I’ve been trying to talk to you for several minutes.”

“Ah, sorry, Master Oromis. I was just thinking about whether there is a way to transform other forms of energy in nature into a usable form that we can power our magic with,” I lied quickly.

I didn’t think Oromis believed me, but he still humored me with a reply. “Many have attempted to find a way. It often ends in disaster. Have you any ideas?”

Of course, he would directly come up with a follow-up question. He could be quite petty, but the joke was on him. It was a topic I had been researching in my free time a bit. Although not too much, since I wouldn’t be able to use this form of magic and the Ancient Language outside of this world.

“I’ve considered a few attempts. But the most likely method I came up with is to replicate the photosynthesis plants use to turn sunlight into energy my body can use,” was my simple reply.

“Yes, that one actually works. But it isn’t very effective. The process is quite slow. There are several elves in Du Weldenvarden who have transformed their bodies into something closer to plants and nourish themselves that way. But I believe it is not what you had in mind. Incorporating that process into an actual spell to power itself isn’t something anyone has figured out yet,” Oromis replied patiently.

“I see…” I mused, having probably already seen some of them. There were all kinds of elves interested in body modifications. Animal transformations were quite popular, but it seemed plants were also a thing. “Then what about…”

———

— Urû’baen, 8000 —

A massive city built out of tall, spire-like structures piercing into the sky stretched out far, far below me. Those walls surrounding the entire city would have been an impressive sight if I were down there, right in front of them. If I remembered it right, they were 300 feet tall, with catapults and ballistae mounted on their battlements at regular intervals.

In the center of the city was an enormous black citadel, with six emerald towers incorporated into the structure. A castle worthy of a tyrant. Not that I expected anything less from a guy like him.

Also, the city was protected from above by a large overhang made of stone, over half a mile wide and five hundred feet thick at its narrowest, which formed one end of a massive hill that sloped off into the northeast for miles. When the city had still belonged to the elves, they had placed countless spells on the overhang so it would never collapse onto them.

Yes, this city had once belonged to the elves. It had been their stronghold outside of Du Weldenvarden, to be precise. Until Galbatorix conquered it and turned it into the capital of his Broddring Empire.

In true conquering tyrant fashion, he had built over the elven structures, creating his own imperial style.

Under the elves, the city had been called Ilirea, but Galbatorix had renamed it Urû’baen, which was actually a mocking insult to everyone else. It was a bastardization of Dwarvish and the Ancient Language. Uru was Dwarvish and stood for “Elders,” while baen was a powerful word for “grief.” Yep, he was mocking the dwarves, elves, and Dragon Riders with Elder’s Grief.

I wouldn’t expect anything less from a megalomaniac like him.

What was I even doing here?

Well, I wasn’t really here. This was the project I had mainly been working on during the last few months I spent in Ellesméra, besides my studies. I was going to take full advantage of my canon knowledge and get as many benefits as possible.

This was a recon mission for now.

I was still sitting nice and safe thousands of kilometers away in Ellesméra, staring at a screen while enjoying the view of a fantasy capital belonging to an empire while piloting a drone.

A real drone, not one of those quadcopter drones. Well, I built them too, but this was a real military drone. I put the knowledge from my perks and studies to good use in order to develop a UCAV combining the technology of the Fallout universe and the magic of this world, while producing it with the alchemy of the Fullmetal Alchemist universe.

This baby was nuclear-powered by several of my infinite fusion cores, flying at an altitude where anybody looking up would mistake it for a bird with the naked eye. At least, if they could see it. After all, it was cloaked with Stealth Boy technology.

Not the best stealth technology I could think of in the multiverse, but it did what it needed to do with infinite power. Although it was limited to the size of relatively small vehicles, nothing bigger than a human or an unmanned drone.

I couldn’t use that tech to cloak my house.

But the neat thing was, nobody in this world could see or sense it. Galbatorix, like everyone else in this world, was limited to sensing life. This was purely a machine, nothing they could sense with their common methods. And why should they cast a spell to find a drone flying several kilometers above their heads, which they could neither see nor hear since it was flying so high?

From now on, I had an eye permanently on Urû’baen, one that I was constantly connected to no matter where it was, thanks to scrying magic. Of course, I couldn’t maintain the spell permanently. I didn’t have enough magic for that. But there was nothing to worry about.

Thanks to advanced Fallout robotics knowledge, creating a simple AI that maintained flight and recorded everything going on down there was no challenge at all.

To be honest, I could have ended this war right here and now if I had chosen to. I knew how to build nukes. Even Galbatorix wouldn’t survive a nuke exploding directly above his head. But that would have killed everyone else in that city, and I preferred to keep my humanity rather than turn into a monster who easily deployed weapons of mass destruction. Many of the people living there were innocent and forced to serve Galbatorix.

No, this UCAV was not equipped with nuclear warheads. It was a pure recon and carrier design. No actual weaponry.

It was fully equipped with night vision, infrared cameras, and purely thermal cameras, whatever I could use to see what was going on inside that city. And right now, my focus was on a big heat signature coming from the castle.

Shruikan, Galbatorix’s own dragon, the one he had stolen and enslaved with magic after his first dragon had died, driving him mad. That thing was massive. But I had already expected it. I had been looking for it. That was where Galbatorix’s throne room was.

One of the locations of interest I had to mark down.

Time for Phase 2. After all, since it was not carrying nuclear warheads, I had designed my drone to carry something different.

After entering the command, a hatch opened on my UCAV, and several more camera feeds appeared on my screen. This time, they were five quadcopter drones dropping in altitude toward different locations I had already marked in the city after observing it for a while.

Three were heading for the palace, while two headed directly into the city. While there was not much of interest for me in the city, I was a rather careful person and liked to have more eyes on the ground. As soon as the quadcopter drones, each equipped with their own Stealth Boy and fusion core, were close enough to the ground, they opened a small hatch themselves, and even more camera feeds appeared, this time with audio.

My quadcopters were nothing more than simple invisible carriers with basic cameras that also acted as mobile charging stations, thanks to the infinite fusion cores built into them. They carried very small spider drones, which I had designed based on existing models I collected in the Wasteland, but much smaller. They were no bigger than regular spiders.

I thought the originals were made by the Chinese, but mine did not have any weapons. All they needed was to be small and have a camera and microphone to record everything they saw and relay it to the quadcopter drones, which had stronger communication devices built in. Those drones sent it directly to the UCAV now permanently circling above the city and always watching, which instantly sent it here to me thanks to scrying, or stored it until I connected to it.

The automated routines programmed into my spiders made them explore and record this place until they were low on power, then return to recharge at the quadcopters. I could also specify certain places where they should always stay, like Galbatorix’s throne room. It sounded like a good idea to have eyes and ears there.

No one could sense them, after all. And they were as small as real spiders, able to crawl up walls and across ceilings, then hide in nooks and cracks. Of course, I could also directly control them. But for now, besides always having one in the throne room, it was better to let them explore the castle.

There were still quite a few places I had to find. The throne room was easy, thanks to the big-ass dragon sleeping in it. But I would also like to have eyes and ears in Galbatorix’s private quarters, and most importantly, I wanted to have eyes in his royal treasury!

From now on, Galbatorix would make no move without me knowing of it. And that way, he would deliver himself to me on a silver platter. This was the kind of cheating I loved to use!

[ End of the Chapter ]