Author's Note:
Chapter 64: The People on the Other Side of the Wave
"So you met them on the boat?" Ikki, Setsuna, Tatsuya and Naofumi were sitting together inside of a repurposed store house next to the Cal Mira island resort town, trading information regarding the other worlders they fought against.
"At the time I just thought they were normal adventurers. Something was a little odd about Therese though." Naofumi explained while he thought about the accessory he had made for her.
"Do tell." Setsuna stated but she was interrupted.
"Apologies for the wait Heroes, I had to tend to the navy." Even if the four heroes and three seven stars they had with them were to pool their collective abilities porting the entire navy back to their native countries was impossible, so they had to be sent back the old fashion way.
"I hope you all don't mind that I'm joining in." The old turtle used his tail to climb onto a nearby storage crate, followed soon after by Yuki, Ake, and Rat.
"Not at all, I believe there are to be explanations abound in the next few moments." The Queen stated looking down at Naofumi. "You were talking about the blue haired woman yes?"
"Therese. She commissioned me for a accessory, when I gave it to her she was acting like I just painted the Mona Lisa." The Queen was not familiar with the term, though Tatsuya was quick to explain.
"A famous artwork, oft considered one of the best in my world, though I won't speak for these three." Tatsuya stated while he looked to Naofumi to finish explaining.
"She was rather insistent on paying me as much as possible for it, which was strange considering that she had already provided me with the most valuable materials and the rest was just cheap crap I looted from the island monsters." Naofumi explained as he continued to ponder the mysteries of the gem she had given him.
"Do you have more of the material that she had given you?" Naofumi pulled out the accessories he was keeping inside of his shield, a bracelet for Raphtalia, and a hair clip for Filo, bits of the ruby like jewel lodged inside. "Let's get to business then." Tatsuya held up his jewel and examined it closely, suppressed surprise on his features a few moments later. "Did you do this on purpose?"
"Did I do what on purpose?" Naofumi asked cocking a brow suspiciously.
"Make the energy inside of this thing circulate." Tatsuya stated bluntly.
"Circulate?" Naofumi was clearly lost here.
"Like Blood flowing through one's veins." Tatsuya explained, prompting a guess from Naofumi as to what was going on.
"What about this?" Naofumi pulled out another accessory, a amulet this time, made entirely from materials that came from this world.
"No, it's not the same, it must be a unique property of the material she gave you." Tatsuya concluded as he scratched his chin.
"Hmm. Bring in Filo and Raphtalia." The two had gotten quite a few hits in against Therese during their fight, for their efforts there were a few bits of blue hair lodged in Filo's claws that Naofumi now fed to his shield to get some answers.
'Conditions Met. Jewel Hair Shield Unlocked. Equip Bonus +5% Jewel Growth Bonus. 4Hours'
"'Jewel?' Oh I don't like any of how that sounds." Naofumi stated letting out a groan.
"She comes from a race of sapient gemstones? Is that even possible?" Ikki's face looked like it had been screwed in confusion.
"It shouldn't be possible for floating sentient rubber balls to be a thing either." Tatsuya stated as he pulled out two halves of a balloon from his bow, with Rishia's help he performed a biopsy turned necropsy on one of the balloons. He found no internal organs, no veins or arteries, and nothing approaching magical formula to explain how the little monsters can do literally anything. "And yet they have swarmed in mass outside of the castle grounds."
"It would explain the rock lodged in her forehead." Naofumi conceded as he scratched his chin. "And it would also explain why her bracelet is vaguely sentient, cause I know I didn't put in a feature that makes it apologise for attacking people." And it may explain her reaction, presuming that he just created a super version of her species that is.
"So there is a race of Sentient Jewel people on the other side of the wave? Good to know. Now than, what do we know about the scythe wielder?" The Queen asked turning her attention to Ikki who near as she knew was the one who got a chunk of L'Arc for his weapon.
"I unlocked two swords from his blood. The Elf Blood Sword and the Dwarf Blood Sword." Ikki explained prompting a surprise look from Naofumi.
"Elves and Dwarfs? What do the norse have to do with anything?" Setsuna asked it once again made clear that she had never played a video game in her life.
"They're common races in fantasy games." Naofumi added in. "I expected to run into them when we first arrived here."
"What can you tell us about them?" The Queen asked, figuring that some idea of what they're dealing with was better than none.
"Dwarfs are short and stocky, live deep underground and are expert miners and craftsmen, they seem to have zero problems keeping up in a fight with normal humans in spite of being half their size." Naofumi explained what information he could think of off the top of his head.
"Being short would be conductive to living underground, fewer resources that need to be consumed, and smaller tunnels that would have to be dug. It would also be a consequence of it too, living deep underground means being closer to the planet's centre of gravity, the crushing forces hampering one's ability to grow taller while the added strain forces bigger muscles to compensate. Eyesight will have suffered assuming that they spent too much time without a consistent light source, hearing and smell will have gotten better though." Tatsuya followed up with a biological explanation based on the information Naofumi had given him.
"The other one is Elf, which are usually depicted as living in the woods, being taller than humans albeit a bit scrawnier and a lot more flexible and with a lot better hearing and eye sight." Naofumi explained once more and allowed Tatsuya to add in his own explanation.
"If they evolved while on the tops of mountains that would account for increased height and reduced muscle mass. If their forests are like the ones of this world better hearing and eye sight would make it possible to get the drop on any aggressive predators while getting the drop on any prey." Tatsuya explained though that now left another explanation that needed to be addressed.
"What can you say about hybrid's of the two?" Naofumi shrugged his shoulders, leading to Setsuna to follow up.
"Cross breeding is a messy business in my experience. Randomly taking parts from two creatures, even ones close enough to each other to breed, and slapping them together expecting them to mix well usually does not turn out well." Setsuna spoke from experience too, her father never had to worry about going on a berserk rampage when he uses his full demon form.
"L'Arc didn't look like he had any problems like that." Naofumi stated bluntly.
"And would it be like that immediately? No. But there are historical and palaeontology evidence of traits we only find in one species today that were originally spread over multiple." Birds and their dinosaur ancestry was a fine example of this phenomena, wish bone there, hip bone there, wing bones over here, it wasn't hard to build a bird out of a bunch of different dinosaurs. "The road getting there would be hard and brutal, and by that point in time he would be a new species all his own not two separate ones put together." Setsuna was going to argue her point more but Naofumi smacked the table and brought the conversation back into focus.
"We should assume that L'Arc has four growth corrections, six if we think of elves and dwarfs as being subspecies of humans. Cherry picking through Tatsuya's colourful descriptions from earlier L'Arc's baseline stats should be stronger than a normal human's, with better hearing, sight and smell with more agility to boot." Naofumi summarised their three way conversation from earlier.
"That would be tough to beat, if we didn't have Rat's whip and time to grind he definitely would have been a problem." Ikki added in while he thought about what else they knew.
"What do we know about the other two?" The old Genmu asked feeling like there was a long drawn out conversation that he wasn't apart of in the months before.
"Glass the Fan wielder is a spirit, her body is made up of spirit energy, she's weak against devices, Setsuna's purifying and miasma attacks, and our Soul Eater weapons, and powered up by the presence of Spirit energy, as became apparent after she drunk the battlefield dry. Ethanobolt is a monster given human form, like Filo or Yuki, rabbit near as we can tell, though the fleet following him around everywhere thanks to his weapon is a bit more concerning." Ikki took the liberty of summarising their past meetings with the newcomers.
"Ah I see. If there's enough talk about the heroes of the other worlds I would like to touch upon the ones we got here." The Genmu stated having taken notice with a great many things during the battle. "For starters I noticed that the Shield and Whip Hero's came into the battle riding atop some rather impressive ships: in the sky. Sprouting tentacles."
"That would be my cue." Rat gave the same explanation she gave the others about how she cloned the krakken from the wave and grafted several bio-plants that she shaped into weapons and ship bits onto them.
"I see. How many of these do you have?" The Queen and the old turtle proceeded to negotiate with Rat over the ships much to her increasingly apparent joy at the situation: She was originally booted from Faubrey after it became apparent that her efforts to create weaponized monsters were seen as blasphemous in the eyes of the country and church, now though? Now she could write the doctrine.
"I don't mind selling a few of the Krakens off to you fine folks." Rat smiled as the situation unfolded. "Faubrey was starting to get a bit too uppity for my tastes anyway, so I think this is a wonderful opportunity to put them in their place." While Rat was scheming to wipe out the air plane from existence Rifana came and interrupted with a knock.
"Sorry to interrupt everyone. Does anyone know where Cerbi and Beru went off to?" Setsuna cocked a brow at her suspiciously before she brought up the slave interface and pinpointed the direction and distance of the two monster mutts.
"They're hanging around the Hero Totem Pole." Setsuna stated bluntly and that was when Rowdy came in.
"Boss. The count's in a fit, wants us to take the monsters back to the islands. They've all crowded around that totem pole that they got in the middle of the main island."
"Oh dammit." Naofumi summarised the situation elegantly. The two three headed dogs had satisfied looks on their faces, surround on all sides by dozens of the Karma Dogs, having burned through them with heroic stamina. "Rat." Naofumi stated though the mad scientist was already ahead of him. "A bitch every last one of them, already knocked up too. Give em a few days and they'll have laid their eggs and be ready for the next round." Rat stated already making plans to nab a few specimens for her own experiments.
"Your monsters are quite impressive lady Spear Hero." Cerbi and Beru took notice of the old turtle walking up to them and stretching out his hand to pet them and growled in response. "And now their blood will flow through the heart of Cal Mira."
"I'd rather not upset the eco-system, I think we've done plenty of that as it is." Setsuna stated looking to Naofumi and knowing about the fruit bearing trees that he blanketed the islands with.
"If that is the case, perhaps we could take them? These two at least very much resemble a finished product if you ask my opinion, although the extra heads will probably work their way out of the gene pool in time. It would not surprise me if this is remembered as a the second coming of the Filolials." The old Turtle explained scratching at his chin.
"Well that makes sense, those two are hybrids of two of the nastiest monsters to hit Melromarc." Naofumi commented prompting a glare from Setsuna who felt like she had been insulted. "In any case, I'll move the others back to the islands before Setsuna's mutt's knock them up too."
To be fair, they were more inclined to try and eat penguins, rabbits, and squirrels then they were the Karma dogs, still they were all pretty high level and with growth bonuses to boot, which also meant that even without the heroes to support them they'd still be a pain for normal rank and file adventurers to deal with. That said Naofumi and the other heroes didn't feel inclined to kill those they had fought alongside with, They'd let the old turtle and the Queen decide what should be done with them. Still not killing the monsters meant that their business at Cal Mira had come to an end at long last. But more unpleasantness was on the horizon.
"Are you finally going to tell us what is so important that you've had to be so careful about everything?" Naofumi barked glaring at Tatsuya with blatant annoyance on his features.
"There is a country which means to make us it's enemies, I say this because they were founded for that singular purpose. What's worst is that they have the means to beat us, even with the power of our legendary weapons." Or rather because of their legendary weapons. Naofumi didn't miss the fact that Tatsuya was sporting a Sitera Destiny bow when he got here, so this mystery place was where these blasted destiny weapons were coming from? Good, they couldn't risk them arming anyone else to take shots at them like they did with Malty.
"Until we either leave Cal Mira or the activation event stops we won't be able to portal over." Even then Tatsuya knew it wouldn't be guaranteed, they might've gotten that portal jamming field back up and running while he's been away. "If we act as if there's no urgency in going then they might drop their guard on us. Aside from that there was the exhaustion induced by the battle against the wave as well, taking time to recover is also the logical thing to do."
"So we're all taking a bloody vacation. Fantastic but so what?" Setsuna stated making her opinion clear.
"The entire country is our enemy right? Unless you've got a army waiting to hold it and a new government to take it over then trying to do anything over there is absolutely pointless."
"The situation is... complex. I believe I've located the exiled rightful ruler of the country, who should be there at around the same time we arrive, and the current government's actions have incited a rebellion so personnel shouldn't be a issue." None of which was a lie, provided that Naofumi brought Raphtalia along.
"Are they going to be enough?" Ikki asked addressing the elephant that was in the room with them. "With all do respect to this country you seem intent on taking is not worth all of our time: not when there are waves to bat away and other-worlders coming here to kill us."
Taking the country: sure they have the strongest weapons in the world and some of the most powerful personnel so it would not take long. But holding the country? That they could not devote those same all powerful weapons and army of ridiculously strong individuals to permanently.
"If nothing else, we will stop those destiny stone weapons from being made."
"Fine. You'll have me and my party." Naofumi stated, and in truth he was the most important one whose help they needed to secure, if the reports of monsters allowed to rampage had not been lies.
"Until the Next wave hits us." Setsuna stated bluntly.
"Who knows, maybe it'll pop up there." Ikki made his own opinion clear. "If there's a country there's a hourglass, and if there's a hourglass there's a wave." Ikki's logic had a hint of troll in it, but it was sound: another army belonging to the enemy to beat back, and with it the promise of more materials to bring to bare against whatever god was responsible for this madness.
"Fine then. The whale?"
The wave proved itself a rich harvest, the monsters had been dragged to the shore, most notable the pieces of the inter-dimensional whale had been beached, Setsuna turning the corpse into a weapon against L'Arc and his efforts to destroy it be damned. The harvest was rich, four weapons from the fish men who had come down from the sky, and over a dozen from the corpse of a dead nightmare.
"Water slash!" Ikki split a column provided by the resort owner with the blade taken from the crystals that lined the body of the whale. Well if a future boss is on fire they know which weapon to use.
Tatsuya was tending to the dead, reanimating dead adventurers and soldiers as he said he would, whatever couldn't be fixed would be stored away until he had recovered from the initial strain but there would still be limits, for if the matter that the monsters tore off of the bodies could not be similarly stored then it would expire in time. So the rule of triage was in effect, anyone still in one piece was stored, any one who could be reassembled was stored, the rest would be saved now, while he worked on others tomorrow. It was when Tatsuya started to groan from the throbbing pain in his head that the others made him stop.
"Your power is great but it is not without consequence. You must stop now." Ryuteimaru spoke, prompting looks of surprise from the members of the three parties who had been helping Tatsuya to store the dead.
"He can talk?" Rishia asked looking shocked.
"I think it would be more accurate to say he can talk now." Tatsuya replied looking up at the dragon. "The Dragon core I presume."
"It's good that you understand the situation Hero." The dragon stated looking over the field tent where people who had received Tatsuya's blessing were recovering. "It makes one of us."
"Please then, ask away and allow me to enlighten you on my actions." Tatsuya stated his intent made clear.
"I have seen your actions through this one's eyes and memories. I would not have brought you into my country if I knew how truly little you care to save this world: I would have eaten you instead." The spectre of another dragon explained through Ryuteimaru's mouth. "And yet here you are risking your own good health to save people as good as strangers to you."
"I fight wars here the same way that I fight them on my home world. During the battle I keep those under my command alive, afterwards I raise the dead to fight another day: if they do die then I have to go out and raise another super powered army to claw my way back to my world." Tatsuya stated bluntly, the people before him something less than human in his eyes, merely tools that he uses to smack aside the waves using brute force.
"I find myself having a difficult time reconciling the man in front of my with the one who scrambled to save his comrades when he thought them drowned."
"The situation was... complex." Tatsuya stated, and by his own admittance he made a mistake when he restored his allies first instead of his C.A.D.'s, not a major one mind you, but there's a reason he relies on them instead of just feeling people up when he uses regrowth.
"The situation was, you didn't know if your friends were okay or not and you panicked." The spectre of the Water Dragon informed bluntly making note of the confused face on Tatsuya's face.
"Impossible. My ability to feel strong emotions were... mostly removed." Tatsuya explained somewhat hesitatingly.
"'Mostly Removed?'" Rishia asked a horrified look on her face.
"You should probably do a better job of explaining." The creature that had borrowed his Dragon's body stated. "If you have my dragon's memories then you should understand the depths of my destructive capabilities. In this world I have a Legendary Bow to keep me in check, I didn't have that in my world. Extreme measures were prepared and taken. One of those measures were taking away the potential reasons why I world burn my world." Tatsuya weighed options and debated the merits and demerits of the situation at hand.
"Hence why 'most' of your emotions were removed. But not all." The body snatching water dragon stated bluntly.
"Another of those measures taken was preparing a leash, a person was created for the singular purpose of one day becoming my wife. My remaining emotional capacity was dedicated entirely to her, and she is the umbrella reason why I want to return to my own world as quickly as possible." Tatsuya explained deciding that this dragon did not have the capacity to threaten his world or his sister.
"But things are changing, you are changing." The water dragon observed looking at Tatsuya in curiosity.
"Yes. That would seem to be the case." For the first two Month's on this world he had nearly gone mad with worry for Miyuki, his rampage against the balloons was proof of that.
Anger should have been one of the emotions that were wholly removed but the painful reminder of what Miyuki might have been going through right at that moment stoked fires like he could not believe, then he spent two months with the influence of sloth seeping into his mind, now Setsuna had removed that influence but perhaps a new one had taken root, the opposite of apathy was empathy. This world was evidently trying very hard to make him feel things he was not equipped to process and that was a bad thing for everyone involved, this world especially.
"Say you are right and I am starting to acquire something resembling emotions. What about it?" Tatsuya asked wondering if he would have to kill his dragon before the day was done.
"Your opinion if you fail to stop the waves?" The dragon stated sensing the situation was starting to come down to brass tacks.
"Inconvenient." Tatsuya replied bluntly. "If the waves aren't stopped the theoretical ticket back to my world I was promised will never come."
"So you wouldn't mind seeing your friends and allies destroyed in the process?" The dragon asked, and Tatsuya found himself unable to give back a proper response. Based the information he's been given the only conclusion he could reach was that it would bother him a great deal.
'New Reinforcement Method Unlocked.'
Tatsuya saw the notification flash across his eyes, he turned his attention to the alien intelligence inhabiting his dragon but saw that it had already disappeared instead opting to read up on the new method.
"'Job Level. The Hero is able to select a 'job' for either himself or his comrades using energy from materials that he has fed to his legendary weapon. Said level can be increased once every day.'" Tatsuya read out loud prompting a look of confusion on Rishia's and the others features. Tatsuya ignored them as he went through the list of materials that he had stored inside of his bow and stopped when he came across a pile of monster eyeballs.
"'Sniper? The Sniper's long distance eye sight and accuracy is dramatically increased.' Yes Please." Tatsuya turned his eyes to those present as he thought through on what kinds of jobs to give them.
Author's Note:
drmcgraw186: SP potions and potion enhancement skills will go a long way to her recovery. I didn't think of that.
RonaldM40196867: True. It's not a wise policy. I have plans to that effect.
superpierce: Thank you for saying so.
