Author's Note: I Have good news! As I only have two chapters of Cute Heroes left to publish I've decided to give them to you all as a Christmas Gift, I would've kept quiet until it was actually Christmas but people keep asking about them, so one chapter will be on the 24th and another will be the 25th. As for Stellar Effect? I've been working on it, but I've also been working at a snail's pace, so as intended publishing will be saved for January on that front. Read, Review, Favourite and enjoy!
Abracadabra: A weapon created by Mictlantecuhtli that resembles magician's gear, composed of the hat Abra and the cane Cadabra.
When used together, they create what at first appearance seems to be sleight of hand, but quickly escalates from doves to bombs and even entire vehicles being launched towards their targets.
It has yet to be understood how Abracadabra conjures its various attacks, and not even the user can fully predict what mysterious things will happen.
Excerpt from Rodin's Weapon's Catalogue
Leon's eyes were twitching as he looked at the sight before him, several airships were dragging along whole ass chunks of islands to his own, complete with shoddy buildings on those islands. Directly in front of Leon, a man dressed in the uniform of the Royal palace was standing in front of him, the sheer mass of finely groomed moustache that was on his face making it hard to read.
"Let's hear your explanations over Coffee shall we?" Leon asked as he indicated for the man to lead the way.
"Most generous of you sir." The Messenger replied as he accepted Leon's offer for a place to stay and something to drink. "Your actions in the Capital have not gone unnoticed Sir Blackmore." The Messenger explained having finished sipping his Latte for the time being. "The Royal Family wishes to extend its gratitude to you for disciplining their son for his foolishness. As do the Redgrave, Atlee, Winchester and Patton Families for defending their honour. Thus you have been officially promoted to the rank of Viscount."
"And what does this have to do with the island ruins that you are dragging out to my island?" Leon questioned with a brow raised.
"Naturally, the Royal Family recognises that asking someone with the territory of a Baron to fulfil a Viscount's duties is folly. Thus this is an island from the Lafan County, with all of the people who were originally living on it. Additionally." Because of course there was more news. "The Winchester Family has already prepared a slew of Armours suitable for use as farming implements to help boost your crop yields."
"How exactly is an armour supposed to do that!?" Leon snapped having just lost his patience. "These plants aren't wheat to be scythed down whole sale, they must be plucked and the originals left intact so that they can grow more!"
The Messenger looked surprised by Leon's statement.
"Our apologies then." Leon would keep the Armours though, mostly for the extra parts and raw material so that Nick can remake them into something useful.
"Is there anything else you have to tell me?" Leon looked less than pleased with the newest development.
"Nothing I have to tell you no, but you may wish to hear of the latest news regarding the Five Fools." So his little nickname for the idiots was starting to become wide spread eh? Leon gestured for the Messenger to continue.
"In addition to the terms and conditions that were set upon them during the renegotiation, Each of the five have been formally disinherited from the line of succession for their respective families." Which is natural, since that was what they had bet in the first place.
"Anything else?" Leon questioned one last time, as it seems that he now had some extra territory to manage.
"You are to arrive back to the mainland ahead of the end to the winter break."
Hearing that Leon let out a sigh as he left to get to work. As it stood, Leon was still under Umbra's thumb, so he didn't have the time or luxury to fix the Lafan's folly. Instead Nick once again found himself donning the combination of Abracadabra after getting the reports on the condition of the town. It wasn't just Marie the Lafan's were abusing to serve their own ends, the entire Lafan Territories buildings needed to be torn down and rebuilt, everything here was made using the cheapest materials possible, and it had been a long time since they saw any maintenance. As it turned out, this particular island use to be Olivia's home town, so naturally she had the job of trying to convince everyone that the Cantankerous man in the mage hat wasn't going to leave them all homeless.
"I don't have the time or care enough to build individual houses for every one of you." Saying that Nick swung his staff once, and the buildings that were in the worst shape were already destroyed, organic and inorganic materials sorted individually. Nick continued to skilfully wield Devil arms as he laid the foundation, the sewage lines, the plumbing, electrical network, all the while building up the apartment complex that was big enough for the entire town to live inside and more.
"So he's doing this again." Cordelia's glasses gave a dangerous flash as she examined the situation.
"You know what he's doing Miss Cordelia?" Olivia asked sounding puzzled.
"If he's building that the same way he built the mansion there will be several machines inside designed to handle the laundry, dishes and sewage maintenance processes automatically." The maid explained looking less and less pleased with every word. "We are basically useless."
Olivia gave Cordelia a pat on her back as she comforted her. Nick built the apartment with lots of extra space for people to expand into, either over the generations or through immigration, similar apartments dotted the entire compound. After the Apartment was built the next issue was the place of business, so Nicks took another plot of land and repeated the incident with the apartment only instead of building a apartment he built up a small mall with built in stores to replace all of the ones that he would be tearing down. With all the buildings now only occupying a third of the territory that they use to the last part that needed to be addressed was farm land allocation. Simply put, the farms were in only slightly better shape than what the buildings were, the people were doing their best with whatever mulch and fertiliser that they could manage, but the Lafan's had been thorough in their exploitation.
Right now proper fertilisers had to be brought in from the main compound. Clarice was the one who was deciding the ratio's for the farm allocation, sure it was easy to say that they were going to tear out all the old crops and replace them with Coffee plants but that was that and this is this. Even if they do need to make money, even more important than that they need to eat food too. Luckily though it wasn't in the cards for them to do that, for one thing over saturation of the market would just lead to the value of their product dropping, and with the accelerated plant growth magic in the Umbran clan's arsenal they can multiply their yields several fold. So basically the Situation with the Coffee company was handled for now.
"Yah know, delegating all of my business stuff to people who don't even work for me is exactly the kind of thing that's gonna come back and bite me in the ass." Leon stated as Umbra outfitted his wrist with a new mana draining device.
Unlike the Purple orbs which absorb and compress his mana for storage this new device would use him to continuously power the magic in the room. It was a good thing his compression type limiter wasn't being used here either. The walls were lined with moon stone, and the ceiling was made out of glass or some other kind of see through material, because of that the light from the sun was poring down into the room and filling Leon's body with magical power, it was quite possible that he could fight at full capacity all day in this state, which means that he's going to be fighting at full capacity all day.
"What am I even going to do here anyway?"
"Fight." The room, the island, the very compound itself disappeared to the sky around them and a fleet of ships that had not been there earlier. "Fae Illusion magic, with a touch of the Umbra time magic. You won't be able to interfere with this moment in history but for you it will be very, very real." As Umbra explained, it wrapped around Leon and formed the Umbran Armour. And right on time too, because the second set of jet black gold trimmed armour just entered the arena, and it wasn't any armour that Leon's ever seen before, a Black Knight and his black sword.
If asked what the toughest boss in the first game is there would probably be a variety of 'obvious' answers: Sir Richard Fia Dragneel, Angelica's champion during the duel against the love interests, the 'God of the Earth' Fanoss used to siege the capital.
However the figure universally agreed upon as the game's biggest paywall is Vandel Him Zenden the Black Knight of Fanoss, appearing in the second year of the game the Black Knight is the most skilled warrior in two kingdoms, and even worst than that wields the most powerful armour in the game short of the Arroganz P2W item and carrying the most hideously powerful sword in the entire game, The Knight Fall, the blade itself is made from a unknown combination of metals, one that makes it extremely adept at breaking apart the dungeon materials typically used in the construction of airships and armours.
Defeating the Black Knight requires that you've either purchased the Arroganz already or have managed to over level the love interests to the point of madness, the latter only possible through a NG+ play-through. If he does have a weakness it's a tendency to zero in on singular opponents while ignoring other potential threats.
During Fanoss's initial rather messy separation from Holfort among the casualties on the Principalities side was Vandel's Wife and young daughter, ever since the man has sworn to personally burn the Kingdom of Holfort to the ground, it's islands shattered and scattered into the void below. If a opportunity to kill the black knight should make itself known, then the top priority must be killing him at all costs.
Excerpt from Diary 1
Clarice was busy inside of the office that she had scrapped out for herself. As she understood it the building in question used to be the base of operations for some sycophantic thug that the Lafan's had act as the mayor of the town, what records were kept were kept here, Clarice had managed to convince Nick's not to tear the building down firstly for being one of the buildings in relatively better condition and the second for the extensive documentation inside that she was now sorting through as she transferred the documents to another building. That said Sarah came in a few hours later, alongside Jillian, carrying Nick's table with them as they went before putting it down in the middle of the room.
"What are you two doing?" Clarice also noted Angelica and Olivia coming in behind.
"Entertainment." Jillian stated as she got the console working the way that Nick had shown her. "You need to unwind."
Jillian made the table produce another three dimensional hologram, this one featuring Leon being stared down by what suspiciously looked like the Black Knight of Fanoss.
"Yet more technology that the Blackmores have picked up in their travels." Jillian summarised, make no mistake they will be confronting Nick about this matter later on, but for now they were going to be far too busy watching Leon fight against the Black Knight.
Leon was the first to make a move against his enemy, both of the guns in his arms opened up blazing as the Black Knight charged forward, not only blocking the majority of the shots but once he was mid way through he swung his blade and all the shots that had piled onto the weapon in question were sent flying back at Leon. The ensuing shower of shrapnel hit like a missile, and as Leon was shaking off the shrapnel in his vision the entire mech suit, and him were bisected by Vandal's sword.
"Simulation Terminated." To Umbra's voice the hologram disappeared back into the table.
Thinking back, the Five Fools were just that, over puffed teenagers wielding armour that while still a cut above most others, with the exception of Greg's, was still far below the best of the best out there. Leon on the other hand it can be inferred doesn't actually spend that much time as an armour pilot, in fact it could actually be assumed that he wasn't that good at it either.
As the girls were starting to get worried about Leon the hologram reappeared. This time Leon wasn't wielding the Umbran Armour, he did however have two spiked gate like doors strapped to either arm and was still in the pilot uniform, or his approximation of it. This time the Black Knight charged first, sword forward like a rhino's horn as he got a running stab at Leon. The Much smaller human sized opponent moved out of the way very easily, space warped around them at Leon's dodge as suddenly the Black Knight was squashed between two one story cube blocks, more notable to the girls however was the change made to Leon during this brief period of time.
"Is there a reason why he was naked just now?" Jillian commented more surprised than anything else at the surprised Strip Tease.
Angelica gave a faint blush as she remembered Leon's lecture in the dungeon. Pay back was sweet. Olivia on the other hand had turned beet red her eyes glued to Leon's form. It spoke volumes about the quality of the armour that Vandal's response was to just punch the mass of stone away and resume chasing Leon. The young warlock had gotten behind Vandal in the confusion, once again his hair wrapping around his body and forming clothes, and so started to wail on his unprotected back with the two gates acting as brass knuckles, sliding forward to give his blows that little extra reach and punch. Didn't even do a dent against Vandal's Armour, Instead the blade wielding monster just spun around, sword swinging to chop Leon in half.
The world flashed to the imagery of a Clock spinning backwards as Leon was suddenly much farther back than when he started, not only that but his hair clothing was coming undone again and from two magic circles at either side of him turrets larger than most armours emerged to go on the offensive, firing more rounds as Vandal continuously swung his blade to deflect the stream of bullets, still with ease as for the most part the shots in question were still coming from one direction. It did however keep him relatively distracted as Leon wound up another punch, this time his hair sending forth a giant mechanical arm to slam into the Black Knight. Vandal changed the angle of his blade and instead of landing a blow the punching arm split itself on Vandal's weapon before vanishing into thin air.
"That is an extremely sharp sword." Olivia commented lightly.
"We think that it's made out of something that breaks apart dungeon materials." Sarah stated as she let out a sigh. "We haven't actually been able to study it, on account of the lunatic who keeps swinging it at us."
Leon had a look of contemplation on his features. By now the young Warlock was realising that Vandal's weapon was acting as a hard counter to his favourite summoning magic, while the idea of making Umbra constantly take hits was entertaining to the young warlock he wasn't fond of sharing in his slave's pain. That only really left them one option. Leon swapped out the Tartarus for another set of weapons, the Shadow Boxer as he worked to continuously dodge the Black Knight's attacks. Leon's entire body seemed to disappear in a mirage, and in his place a single black figure seemingly divided straight down the middle.
"Did anyone else just watch Leon turn himself into a demon?" Sarah asked and the other girls nodded.
The Tartarus reappeared and reattached themselves to Leon's arms as the Black Demon and Black Knight re-engaged in battle, this time it was two against one, the two halves splitting up so that they could both strike Vandal from opposite sides. While theoretically a sound strategy unfortunately that was all it was. Whatever Vandal's armour was made out of, it was stronger than what Leon could break through even with two Devil Arms empowering him, meanwhile Vandal remained just as able to cut down Leon even if he already was cut in two.
"Leon is going to be okay right?" Olivia asked as she nervously looked at the table.
It was taking longer than last time for Leon to come back from his break. Finally the hologram reappeared, again Leon was back in the Umbran armour and being stared down by the Black Knight. There was no exchange of gun fire this time, Leon just cranked the thrusters and flew forward as fast as his machine was willing to carry him and Vandal obliged his wish to play chicken, and more important than that had a sword out in front of him waiting to skewer Leon as he flew forward. The girls winced as Leon was about to be skewered again, instead however the Umbran Armour simply disappeared, Leon on the other hand maintained his momentum even as he switched over his summon, a crimson scaly arm bigger than most armours punching Vandal in the face and sending the master swordsman back.
"Oh he's getting into the groove of it now!" To be fair most people don't get three shots at the Black Knight.
A pair of turrets made out of stone and hair appeared next to Leon as he opened fire aiming at the Knight's face and chest. Naturally the Black Knight did another charge as he prepared to fling off the shrapnel again at mid range. As it did so though, a massive block of stone appeared again, on that folded open to reveal a bell that rung once, and suddenly the shrapnel was turned into a big ball and thrown back at the Black Knight. The Knight of course cut down the ball as easily as he cut down any other fool that got too close to him, and was immediately greeted by a giant fist made of hair and crimson scales, and then Leon got cut in half again.
"Is the Clock trying to train him or is it just doing this to make him suffer?" Jillian asked looking at the fight with concern.
"Shh..." Sarah on the other hand just quietly put a finger on Jillian's mouth. "No responsibility, Only abs!" Well, they can't argue with that logic.
Name: Erica Aoki
Gender: Female
Rank: Lieutenant Commander
Age: 32
Date of Birth: June 8th 2014 AC
Date of Death: December 29th 2046 AC/1 Shattered
Biography: Lieutenant Commander Erica Aoki had a rather notable childhood. Originally raised by her Grandparents Erica was formally emancipated at age 16 citing her Grandparents roles in the Deaths of both her Uncle and Mother across two separate occasions. Following her graduation from college Erica had a rather impressive Career in the JSDF where she fought in the Multiverse wars of the 2030s all the way up to the point of the Shattering. A rapid series of promotions meant to fill in the gaps of losses suffered against the inter-dimensional invaders saw her placed as Captain Commander of the colonial ship Luxion as it was about to be deployed to support the the Adam and Eve Colonies.
Tragically the Luxion was shot down in battle and although the crew of the Luxion survived and the ship was able to repair itself with time by then the mana poisoning of the other dimensions meant the deaths of not only the Captain and Crew but also one of the last of the old human Militaries.
Personnel File for Lieutenant Commander Erica Aoki
Three broken piles of scrap metal and two intact armours sat on the assembly line floor untouched. Useless all of it, better to be broken down for raw materials in Luxion's opinion but the Queen was insistent, something about a birthday gift for her son or some such nonsense. The Scrap metal was thrown into a Vat full of Nano-matter, to be broken down and recycled. Of all the materials dropped by the extra-dimensional invaders the nano-matter was the easiest to work with, reportedly all that remained of a technological civilisation that was already a casualty of a grey goo scenario. After two extremely strict protocols were put into place to prevent a second Grey Goo the Nano-matter became safe for large scale use, the first?
The nano matter cannot directly interface with organic matter, thus preventing the emergence of more 'Homunculi.' And the Second? Once assigned a task Nano-matter cannot be reprogrammed with a different task, only deactivated or destroyed, thus preventing corruption by demonic or angelic influence. The armour material was rapidly broken down, useless material was discarded, material better used elsewhere was put into storage, other materials were mixed in and fed into hundreds of molds for individual components, then reassembled. Another of the Arroganz Model armour stood up from the assembly platform a few moments later before its rudimentary AI activated and walked over to join the 36 other armours like it on the joint simulation platform.
Each AI was inside of a joint simulated environment designed to slowly develop their personalities, each armour was engineered using a combination of old world technology and new world magic, the latter a reluctant compromise stemming from the materials used. Halo's and Red Orbs were tricky materials to work with, doubly so when you take in the laws hard programmed into the Seeds to prevent a second Grey Goo Scenario. Instead Luxion had to build machines to build machines, something he had intended to do from the start, because while the Nano-matter was a great all rounder tool it lacked the specific precision and efficiency that he could only get from specialised tools.
Still his secondary factory was up and running, that left his mobile main body the freedom it needed to start expanding his influence, setting up relays to daisy chain his communications together while he worked on laying the ground work to infiltrate Alzer, Rochelle and Repard. A time consuming process he knew but he had years, or so he had thought, but then the schedule was all messed up.
"Anything interesting happen when I was gone?" Luxion looked to face his captain.
From head to two she was covered in a techno-organic-mystic symbiote of Luxion's own design, a predominantly red and gold suit the exterior of which had hardened insect like chitin over relatively soft lizard like scales, all the technological components needed to keep the suit alive, functioning and interacting with the Captain's body had been buried deep both into the suit proper and into the Captain's body. It meant that the two could never be separated, but given the toxicity of the Atmosphere that the suit was designed specifically to protect her from that was a compromise she was willing to make, since she likely wouldn't be able to remove the suit in her life time anyway.
The Captain threw a sack full of Halo's and Red Orbs to the ground as she walked on.
"Your Brother is an idiot. I prepared a full report in your dressing room." Luxion replied bluntly.
Erica entered the small changing stall as she activated her suit's active camo system. Normally such technology is designed to render the wearer completely invisible to the naked eye, Erica Rapha Holfort on the other hand uses it to make it look like she's wearing nothing at all when in fact she's wearing the most heavily armed high tech life support unit to ever exist, Luckily she had her entire wardrobe tailor made to fit over the damned thing.
"Play all reports." As Erica spoke the tablet hanging on the wall voiced the various happenings of the Academy.
How Marie 'The Saintess' Fou Lafan seduced the five heirs, their unceremonious and unglamourous defeat at the hands of Baron Blackmore which now resulted in the heirs disownment and stint in the training camps under baron Patton, events that according to her timeline were supposed to take place in another two years. In other less than stellar news the Starfighter program had only managed to recruit fifteen candidates of the intended forty, as a result Luxion was now preparing to deploy the additional 'Hexennacht' and 'Roter Baron' simulators to fill in the gaps of their elite unit. Also all the simulators that were in the Offrey's territory have been shipped over the border into Fanoss, giving Luxion valuable intelligence before the machines were unceremoniously dismantled, presumably the Fanossians looking for ways to upgrade their own machines.
"So it's a worst case scenario then."
Erica served in the military during the shattering war, she played all the 'New Age Lovers' dating sims, and as Princess of Holfort she was up to date on the national and international political structure. To her knowledge She had the most complete knowledge of events for the next several years and the ancient cheat items that they would rely on, but there were two wild cards that even she wouldn't be able to deal with, one was that another reincarnated sticking their nose where it don't belong and the second was the game's developers had altered sections of the plot for the sake of making things more 'interesting.' Instead Erica produced her checklist. Among the biggest threats that they would have to deal with was Olivia, who would go on to become one of the major antagonists of the third game, and was unfortunately the only one who could deal with Fanoss before the scenario turned apocalyptic.
The less than ideal compromise Erica had reached was that Olivia would get together with one of the capture targets, Brad, and from there they'd only have one capture target from the first game that they'd have to kill while all the theoretically functional relationships would still work. Instead not only had the other reincarnated snatched all five of the base capture targets, but she also drove the most absurdly powerful one of them all directly into Olivia's hands, Erica's own efforts to try and fix their relationships and redirect them away from Olivia be damned. The good news was that they were not completely beyond damage control at this point in time, provided that Erica puts her hand to the scale, so to speak.
"Have you been able to find the saint's bracelet yet?" Erica asked as she emerged from the changing room in her formal wear. The report also mentioned that the Baron Blackmore would be getting formally promoted to Viscount at the end of the summer break, which it would be in the coming days.
"No, which leads me to believe that your theory that the bracelet itself is obscuring it's presence so that nobody but the Saint's descendants can use it bears weight." Luxion stated bluntly as he reviewed the information on hand.
In Theory, if his captain's intelligence holds weight? The Saintess picked a good spot to put her bracelet, all the students of the royal academy were required to clear the bottom floor of the dungeon before their schooling here was done, according to the maps Erica was able to draft with the help of the royal family it should be a relatively well treadled path, even with the Short cut Olivia found dropping her several floors out of her depth, hell by the sounds of things she found it while she was lost. Which only means that it makes even less sense that no one has been able to find the damned thing by now. Well it's not like Erica can complain, she wasn't having any luck finding the bracelet either.
"Keep sending probes into the dungeon anyway." Erica stated as she let out a sigh. "Depending on how my chat with Lafan turns out we may have to organise an expedition down there."
Through my extensive research into Newman biology I've discovered several points of divergence from Old Humanity, most notably in the presence of Catalyst jewels located throughout the organs and major muscle groups.
Constant exposure to angelic and demonic energies are released into the surrounding area from the dungeons and seeping into those who live near them. Even if you never step foot inside of a dungeon these catalyst crystals gradually grow in size and complexity, or to borrow the Old Human term 'levels.'
Those who do actively enter the dungeons will find that these crystals grow at a faster rate, faster still if the individual actively takes part in killing the monsters inside. These crystals enable the use of magical power, their form and the magic that they can use ultimately being hereditary, as the crystals grow in power so too does the power the individual can wield. What is most important however is that the individuals in question measure their exposure to angelic and demonic energies, as too much of either can overwhelm the native human biology and enable the transformation into a monster.
I voice all of these concerns as they relate specifically to the body of my captain, who for reasons I simply cannot fathom does not naturally have these catalyst crystals occurring inside of her body forcing me to develop substitutes that I've surgically implanted inside of her body and have created the Fusion suit to counteract the negative effects of Dungeon mana that is occurring to her body. Be they DNA, biometrics or her knowledge of her past life I can only conclude that Erica Rapha Holfort is my Captain Lieutenant Commander Erica Aoki, and I will not lose her again!
Excerpt from Luxion's medical notes.
Review Section:
RonaldM40196867: Lots of weapons.
KadoyaOkami: Thank you for your praise and criticism. For the most part I plan to show how the presence of the Umbran clan affects the other countries as we get to them, maybe a hint or two of foreshadowing along the way.
Guest: No, as I explained in the Na No Wri Mo page this Leon is explicitly not reincarnated.
hnh05813: Thank you for saying so.
RedRat8: I have more plans for Leon's circle of people he's sleeping with beyond just the two, it just doesn't involve these three latching onto the first person to be nice to them in a while.
guest09: You're reading it right, after everything they've been through the main trio deserves friends they aren't sleeping with.
Dakota Bruder: Apology accepted. See note above.