7 – The Floating Island
As I slept, Agate went out to track down my Amphibious All-Purpose Vehicle.
There was an emergency locator radio beacon that the AAPV was broadcasting, whose location could be triangulated by receiving the signal at different locations.
Agate had eventually found it hiding in a forest near the east coast of Albion—if you could call the edge of a floating island a coast.
Albion was an island country only 300 km away from the coast of Tristain, though the distance varied throughout the year as the island moved around sometimes, even overlapping Tristain occasionally.
As for how the AAPV could be 'hiding'?
That was because it had an AI controlling it. It was another instance of the same AI I had on the portable computation core in my armor, which also ran my visor systems including the lie-detector software I used on Louise, though the two instances were too far to communicate effectively on high bandwidth wireless channels.
Its name was Offensive Bias, obtained in the Worm plane by making a copy of the AI superhero Dragon, and named after an AI from another story. It was also one of the key pillars behind the meteoric expansion of my power base during the final phase of my month-long stay in Worm, capable of unlimited parallel processing and exponentially growing productive capacity with Tinkertech and modern technology.
When Agate phased into the interior of the AAPV, Offensive Bias delivered a report on its activities.
The AAPV had the misfortune to appear in the middle of an ongoing pitched battle, while I had disappeared without a trace or any discernible cause. As per our entry risk scenarios, Offensive Bias considered my disappearance to be either a planar travel accident or enemy interference.
The protocol for this was to avoid attention as much as possible, while broadcasting the emergency locator beacon so I could try to find it, and gather information in the meanwhile. If I didn't find it within a few days, it would take other steps to locate me instead.
Because it appeared in the middle of a battle, it had caught the attention of both sides. A bulky tank-like vehicle appearing on an early modern battlefield packed with melee combatants looked grossly out of place. Stealth capabilities onboard weren't advanced enough to achieve visual cloaking at such close ranges, even if the Tinkertech worked—and it didn't.
One side actually tried to attack it almost immediately, while the other seemed to think the AAPV was on their side.
But Offensive Bias saw no need to participate in the battle, and flew away after extending the wings and engaging the magnetoplasmadynamic thruster system.
Modern MPD thrusters were still in the experimental and prototype stages, and none of them were suitable for low atmosphere flight due to the extremely low thrust generated. Like other ion engines, this technology was developed mainly for interplanetary travel because their mass ratio and specific impulse efficiency and were many orders of magnitude better than chemically propelled rockets. But even though these were the most efficient ion engines, they still suffered from the low thrust.
In space, acceleration was basically irrelevant when you could continuously thrust up to higher velocities by Newton's first law, but in atmosphere, drag forces and gravity made acceleration far more important.
As its name implied, the AAPV was a vehicle that I wanted to work in all sorts of environments—land, atmosphere, water, and space. That meant forms of propulsion that required a medium such as jet engines which inhaled air were unsuitable, and something like MPD thrusters was ideal.
The limitation of modern MPD was the extreme power requirements needed to generate higher thrust, and the extreme weight that such power generation would add to the whole setup.
That just happened to be a problem we had solutions to. Of all the Tinkertech we had access to, most broke down without the Wormvoid physics, but often there were principles and components that we could learn from and use. The more examples of Tinker designs in a single section of the tech tree that we had, the more we could advance our non-Tinker tech beyond that of modern technology.
So while we were mostly limited to Worm's 2011 tech, some of our tech was actually decades ahead.
The most advanced area by far was in power sources, specifically nuclear power, because energy was the foundation for every Tinker regardless of specialization—you couldn't do anything without it. And the energy requirements for most Tinkertech were off the charts even though almost everybody built only small-scale tech meant for a single person's use, so everybody had really powerful reactors, the majority of which were based on nuclear principles.
The AAPV was thus equipped with compact nuclear fission reactors that could handle the necessary electricity required for the MPD thrusters, enough to break the sound barrier even with the terrible drag it suffered from its volume-maximizing form.
Still, relatively speaking, the reactor and thruster systems did take up a lot of space and weight just because the vehicle was so small, while also adding some risk of catastrophic failure, but when I had left Worm I wanted to make sure I had the ability to run away from any overwhelming foes.
It didn't need to go anywhere near the speed of sound to escape this battlefield, though, as the Dragon Knights were moving at less than 100 km/h.
They could only watch dumbly as the streak of light disappeared into the distance.
Eventually, Offensive Bias found its current hiding position and sent out smaller stealth drones for reconnaissance on the locals.
The report had me thinking about whether it was really a good idea to plane shift with the AAPV. Though it had stealth and camouflage capabilities, it wasn't to the level where they wouldn't attract attention if I landed in a populated area.
Before this world, I'd been lucky enough to enter without witnesses, but in the future…I wondered if I might be better off keeping a lower profile, and only going back to Worm to get it if I actually needed it at the cost of two extra interplaner trips' worth of planar energy.
After Agate found the AAPV, she went to investigate what felt like unusual mana clusters she noticed underneath the floating island.
That led to the discovery of the massive windstone deposits buried inside the earth, and Agate dug her way in until she could experiment with their mana.
I vaguely remembered from the little I knew of the story something about windstones powering airships and being the reason that Albion floated, but didn't know much more about it.
Nevertheless, Agate experimented and found that she could use them.
'It's a bit like jewelcraft. Although we don't have the mystery for imbuing or manipulating jewels with spells or prana, if it's a naturally forming source without an enchantment, extracting the pure mana should be easy. It's not that much different from drawing the greater source of the environment into our magic circuits, except we focus on the mana deposit in the windstones,' she informed me.
Although Agate didn't have a true soul, she had high quality magic circuits formed from pseudo-spiritrons, which is why she could do this experiment independently from me. In fact she had much more prana to spare compared to me and my one trash tier artificial circuit, even accounting for all the prana that went into maintaining her core functions.
'Theoretically, because the stones have wind element mana, we could use them to cast wind spells without having the affinity ourselves, at least for spells based on our own thaumaturgical system, not the ones the Halkegenians use. We'd have to create the mystery ourselves, but I thought it wouldn't be very hard. The stones already have an effect without being part of a spell—we can build off of that, without having to manipulate the mana from scratch,' she said.
'Any luck so far?' I asked.
She was still there, flying around with several wind stones attached.
'Only a little. I've only managed to figure out how to use the stones to float if I have one attached to me, but it's not very efficient yet. I have to levitate the stone to keep it attached to me, which costs almost as much as levitating myself directly. The net gain is too small, and I can't use it to generate propulsion yet, so if I actually fly with it, the gain turns into a small loss instead when I have to propel both myself and the stone.'
Agate wasn't the only one busy while I was asleep, however. The Offensive Bias instance I kept with me wirelessly controlled a small humanoid robot to finish optically scanning the books Louise lent me into electronic storage.
After I was up to speed with Agate and Offensive Bias' activities, I retrieved the robot, storing it within one of my armour's many flexible compartments, and headed towards the dining hall.
Last night, I spent some time making adjustments to my Armoriont armour, completely revamping the shape and texture.
When I first arrived, there hadn't been enough time to do more than minor adjustments like the coloration, leaving it as a contiguous and smooth pearlescent crystalline full-body armour. Cellulose nanocrystals were the primary material the Armoriont was composed of, so that was its default appearance. However, it was possible with some time and effort to substantially change the appearance to mimic other substances, or even change the actual composition by absorbing and reprocessing biomass or metals.
While it couldn't easily mimic metal, I could still transform it into something a bit closer to local styles and still provide adequate protection. Something that without close observation or specialized expertise, might be seen as merely the eccentric attire of a high ranking noble rather than something clearly unnatural or foreign to all of Halkegenia.
Portraits and pictures of local knights showed that they typically wore light armor in the form of cuirasses with minimal limb plating, steel greaves and leather or fabric for the rest.
It took several hours to make all the new adjustments, but most of it was done automatically by my Armoriont as I slept after I developed the design for the outer layers.
The result was something inspired by fantasy dragon scale mail, using gleaming golden scales similar to but more resplendent than the texture of the blue dragon familiar I'd observed on campus. An opening on my helmet would allow me to eat with the locals, but my eyes were still covered by my visor which now functioned as a one-way mirror.
A crystal shield plate was affixed to the front of my utility belt, depicting a kaleidoscopic spiral sure to give anyone headaches with its intense iridescence and optical illusion of moving, with a physical golden crown on top and two dragon supporters on the sides to form a heraldic coat of arms.
I left two high shoulder guards in the silver crystalline form, underneath which I had grown a two-piece red cloak, because all nobles wore cloaks around here.
The cloak pieces' outer layer was red silk, but the underside was more of the silver crystalline cellulose with more of a membranous texture, and the cloak itself was very thick.
That was because they had the secondary purpose of serving as wings. The base of the wings protruded from my back, but the cloak and shoulder guards hid most of the wings from view, disguising the visible area as part of the cloak, so that it would appear as though the cloak was a magical artifact instead of a biological appendage.
I strode into the dining hall and found it already packed with students, most of whom turned and stared as soon as they noticed me. My enhanced hearing allowed me to hear them whisper and speculate about whether I was a new teacher.
"…no way, he looks too powerful to be just a teacher…"
"…that coat of arms looks foreign…and they make my eyes hurt…"
"…must be worth more than a castle…"
"…could it be that noble who was summoned by the Zero's failed familiar ritual yesterday?"
A brisk walk led me to the staff table, where I was met with some confusion and wariness until I greeted the Headmaster Osmond and professor Colbert with a friendly wave.
"Good morning, headmaster Osmond, professor Colbert. I must admit I am impressed with the accommodations I've had the pleasure of taking advantage of so far. It does the Academy great credit to treat its guests with such dignity."
"Ah…is that you, Lord Axion? Good morning to you as well. Forgive this old man for not recognizing you right away. You look very dashing in that splendid armour. Even a king would be envious to own a piece so stunningly majestic. A work of art, that is," said Osmond.
"Oh my, that can't be native to Halkegenia. It looks a bit like dragon scale but I've never seen any so reflective. Where were you keeping all of that yesterday? Do you have a method of storing items in very small spaces? Or perhaps a spell of shrinking? That would be truly marvelous. And how can you see out of that?" Colbert asked in quick succession as he stood up to examine my armour.
"Jean, exciting as it may be, you are being impolite to our guest. Please have a seat and join us, Lord Axion," said Osmond.
Colbert hastily apologized and I took a seat beside him with a disarming smile.
Colbert proceeded to introduce me to his colleagues as people continued to stream into the dining hall.
When the food was served, I joined them in the local custom of pre-meal rites to the Founder.
As far as I could remember, none of these people were important to the plot, but it wouldn't hurt to socialize a little bit, which was mostly me answering their curious questions.
In a civilization without advanced entertainment technologies, people took great joy in hearing the tales of faraway travelers. It was true historically on my Earth, and it seems that was the case here too.
I indulged them with vague descriptions of some common household technologies like cars and microwaves, stories of heroes battling against evil mages and monsters, and accounts of my personal heroics.
It wasn't long before breakfast was over and everyone began leaving the dining hall to start their classes.
Louise was just about to leave with a sulking Saito who hadn't partaken in the nobles' meal when I intercepted and waved them over with a call of their names.
They looked confused for a moment, until I clarified who I was. I told Louise that I was done with her textbooks and the two followed me to my room to pick them up.
As they departed for class, Saito was given the role of book mule.
Saito stayed back and complained. "Do I really need to follow her around the whole day?"
"That's your job as my familiar!" Louise cut in when she noticed he wasn't moving.
"But I'm so tired…I barely got any sleep yesterday. I don't know how I'm gonna survive sleeping on a pile of straws every day."
I gave Louise a disapproving frown. "Did you really make him sleep on hay like an animal?"
She looked down with embarrassment. "I wasn't expecting to have a human familiar, so I didn't have a bed prepared for him."
"Well, you'd better find a solution soon. If your familiar is too tired because you aren't taking care of him properly, he won't be able to perform his job, and you'll have nobody to blame but yourself for it."
"Yes, I understand, sir Axion. I'll talk to the headmaster about getting an extra bed," said Louise with a sigh.
I nodded then turned to Saito.
"If you're feeling tired, just sleep in the classrooms. You're not a student so the teachers can't tell you off."
"Oh, that's true! Hehe…I can be a delinquent and not get into trouble!"