Swarming Sovereignty

Lia looked up at the beast in front of her. It was coiled around the statue of the moon like it had been when it was a boss, and it had retained most if not all of its size. That was about where the similarities to its old self ended, however; as opposed to its previous mottled green color, it had taken on a deep black hue, interspersed with streaks of purple and dots of white. It was like someone had taken the night sky and cloaked the snake in it, and it was breathtaking.

It shifted, opening eyes the color of the night sky during a full moon. Even though she knew that the snake was her subordinate, Lia couldn’t help but feel a little intimidated at the sheer…presence it had.

It blinked, readjusting its head slightly in a way that Lia somehow felt was questioning. Deep in the back of her mind, in a place she had unconsciously filtered from her awareness, she could feel its thoughts, simple and animalistic as they were, wondering if she finally had a task for it.

“Um, sorry about that.” Lia mumbled lamely. “I…got busy.”

Rose gave her a surprised look. “It can talk?”

Lia shook her head. “No, I’m like…connected to all of the swarm in a way, but I usually try to ignore that unless I’m specifically looking for it, since it’s kind of distracting. I must have unintentionally gone looking for this guy when it opened its eyes. So, I can kinda sorta feel what it’s thinking, and it’s wondering why we hadn’t come to see it yet.”

Rose frowned. “Has it just been here this whole time? What has it been eating?”

There was another brief flash of emotions. “The…air, I think?” Lia said. “The race description did say it could eat “base elements”, whatever that means, so it’s sort of been…filter feeding? I guess if you were traveling through the stars you would need to be able to store food for a while, so that…kind of makes sense, I think?”

“I suppose so.” Rose said. “But the real question here is…how do we get it out of this room? It’s much too big for the doors.”

“I think we just have to bust down the walls.” Lia replied. “Though, the walls of all the buildings on this campus are reinforced, so…I’m not sure we can do that, come to think of it.”

The snake uncoiled itself from around the moon, shooting a questioning glance at the doorway from which Lia and Rose came.

“Go ahead and try.” Lia said. “If you can, then great, problem solved.”

Lia and Rose got out of the way of the snake as it slithered up to the doors. Contrary to Lia’s expectations, it didn’t attempt to slam itself into the walls, instead opting to carefully open its mouth and place its fangs against the wall.

To Lia’s shock, there was a rush of air and a bright flash of light as the wards on the building’s walls flickered, then powered off. The moment they were down, the area next to the snake’s mouth sort of…stretched, elongating as it rushed into the snake. And then the snake shut its mouth and it was done, a hole in the wall just big enough to fit the snake left in place of the parts of the building that had been there before.

“Oh.” Lia said. “That…works. Go ahead and do the same to the outer wall and wait outside, we’ll take you back to our base when we finish here.”

The snake dutifully slithered through the hall and began to make a hole to the outside.

“Alright, while it’s doing that, let’s go look for those star charts.” Lia said. “Speaking of…do you know how to read them and figure out our position from them?”

“No, sorry.” Rose replied. “But I’m sure Dahlia or Camellia will. They might need tools, though, perhaps there’s a sextant or something around here?”

“Probably.” Lia said. “We’ll have to look through one of the storage closets and see what they have.”

The two ended up sort of meandering through the building, Lia showing Rose some of the advancements in astronomy that had been made since Rose was alive. Which, yes, there weren’t exactly a lot of, but they had discovered a few new planets and received a few clearer pictures of the surrounding galaxies, so there were a few things, at least.

But they both knew that it was really just a pretense to spend more time together doing something that wasn’t “work”. It wasn’t the most relaxing time, sure, since they did need to keep an eye out for monsters just in case, but it was better than nothing.

As it turned out, they were being a bit more cautious than necessary, only encountering one monster the entire time they were looking through the place, and one that was easily dispatched at that, but it was better to err on the side of caution.

All too soon, they had gathered a huge number of star charts, as well as a sextant and a few stacks of paper and pens. The paper and pens had been something of a whim, they had been stored next to a series of charts, and Lia figured she’d pick them up to keep supplies back at their base topped up. They probably didn’t need them, but thanks to Dimensional Storage they weren’t annoying to carry around, so Lia grabbed them anyway.

So, all that was left was to bring the snake back to the base, figure out where they were going to keep it, then sit back and wait for the scout teams to do their work. Still…Lia had had enough of sitting around doing nothing. She wanted to be active, and she was getting close to being done with her…study material.

“Rose, do you think I could join in on your lessons to my siblings?”

“Huh?” Rose asked. “Of course you can. Why the sudden interest, though?”

Lia shrugged. “Well, I’m running out of study material, I want to be moving my body, and to be completely honest with you, I’m not as confident in my skills as I’d like to be. I’d prefer to be able to win fights on my own merits rather than solely relying on some of my unfair advantages. Then, when it comes time to actually fight, I’ll be that much more effective.”

“An admirable mindset.” Rose said. “Very well, then, I’ll add you to our little curriculum.”

“Thanks, Rose.”

Owen carefully circled the monster, shield raised. He hated going anywhere close to the Spine for exactly this reason, but it had been a direct order from the king, so what could he do about it?

The monster snarled, its baleful eyes tracking Owen’s every movement. It was a nasty-looking thing, short, squat, and seemingly built entirely out of muscle. It was some sort of…bear with two large pseudopods, which it was waving about threateningly.

It reared back up on its hind legs, showing the spiked bottoms of the pseudopods to Owen. After a brief pause the spikes slid out slightly, then launched themselves at Owen, who calmly blocked each of them with either his shield or a dismissive slash of his spear.

Seeing his opportunity, Owen activated his Skills, then lunged in for what he hoped would be a killing blow.

You have dealt a critical 826 damage to Pseudo-Bear!
You have killed Pseudo-Bear! You gain 250 EXP!

 Owen grimaced, placing a boot on the monster and pulling the spear out. Of all the times for the Hero to vanish, now was…well, honestly about as good as it got for the world at large, but it was incredibly inconvenient for Owen. His eldest son was getting married, his other children were heading back to school, and his wife had been struggling through a particularly nasty flare-up of…whatever her disease was. The doctors never had been able to figure out it, and magic was notoriously ineffectual against disease unless it was very high-level stuff, so there was nothing to do but try and tough it out.

And, in the middle of all of that, the Hero had decided to go on some journey of self-discovery, breaking every single one of the myriad rules that had been given to her. It had been two weeks since she vanished, and the search had gone extraordinarily poorly in that time. He and the rest of the search team had been given these odd…orblike magic items that he had been told were supposed to be able to flash when in the vicinity of Heroes, but he had yet to see it do anything other than weigh down his pack.

And, judging by the fact that he had yet to be recalled, he assumed no one else had gotten any results, either. They had been told that, given the current Hero’s enormous power, they should have been able to pick up faint signals anywhere up to one thousand miles away, but Owen doubted that claim.

Even if the Hero didn’t have some way to mask her presence, and Owen was sure she did, his experience had been that he was never given the best gear. The only thing that would make him reconsider that was the fact that this mission was vitally important to the continued safety of the nation, but, in reality, things never went that well for him.

He sighed, taking out the orb to once again verify that there were indeed no signs of the Hero’s existence. And, to his shock, the orb was pulsing ever so slightly. He gingerly set it down on the ground, pulling out a map of the patrols that had been set up throughout the kingdom, and began to mentally cross off potential places the Hero could be.

Anything that overlapped with any of the locations the other patrols had been were out, and if you were pessimistic and gave the detection orbs a two hundred mile range, most of the towns in the Glens were out as well. If you were optimistic and assumed a full thousand miles, the entirety of the Glens was out, and much of the land in the surrounding countries were as well.

Which really left him with two possibilities; the first was that the orbs weren’t as good as had been claimed and that the Hero was hiding in some random village that was barely big enough to make the map. But…if the orbs were even half what were claimed to be and if no one else had picked up a signal yet…then the Hero was deep in the Spine, and even just heading there to find her was going to be a monumental task.

Owen really wanted to believe that it was more likely that the Hero was indeed laying low in a village, as that was the sane course of action, but a gnawing worry in his gut told him that she was indeed in the Spine. After all, this was reality, and it wouldn’t be reality if things didn’t go the worst way possible for him.

Heaving another sigh, he picked the orb back up and stowed it away in his pack before retrieving his long-distance messaging book. Hopefully he’d get a few weeks of downtime before he was inevitably sent out to the Spine. It would, at the least, give him time to say his final goodbyes and write up a will. Or, rather, revise his will, for the third time. He had been lucky and lived before, but…something told him this time was going to be different.

Brom, King of the Glens, set the report he had received from Owen, his best scout, down on the table. While his attitude was as pessimistic as ever, there was no denying his skill, and it was for that reason Owen had been given the riskiest route.

He’d make sure to give Owen an extra-large bonus and a few weeks off. The man had worked hard, and he would shortly be tasked with leading the expedition into the Spine. Or, at least, leading the expedition that would come from the Glens. Brom was going to attempt to pitch the idea of a unified expedition, composed of the best from each nation, but he doubted he would be able to get it.

Unfair though it may have been, his standing in the other leaders’ eyes had been lowered by the Hero’s disappearance, and the other countries weren’t exactly the harmonious type. Brom was confident they would see the Hero’s disappearance as an opportunity to take her for themselves, foolish an idea as it was. They weren’t as keenly aware of her overwhelming power as Brom was, and they were likely to see severe losses because of it.

He decided to put off penning an official missive until later. It was too late in the day for it to make a significant difference in the time of arrival, and it was the sort of thing he had to work himself up to. Instead, he began working on adjusting the patrol routes to account for the new information Owen had given him.

The Glens contained a small chunk of the Spine, about a thousand miles of it, and while that was only a fraction of the Spine’s size, it was still a huge tract of land to patrol. Fortunately, not all of it needed to be patrolled; given Owen’s position in combination with the absence of a signal elsewhere, only a small portion of that area would have a chance at giving useful information. Once they had found other signals, a suitable starting point for their expedition into the Spine could be decided, and then they could, hopefully, take their first steps towards ending this crisis.

Fighterman481 This will be made explicitly clear next chapter, but, yes, there is a two to three week timeskip between the first and second parts of this chapter, it's not that the Lia portion of the story and the "human" portion of the story are taking place slightly out of sync.

Speaking of, Owen was a fun character to write. His attitude is quite a bit different from the other PoV characters I've written, the relentless pessimist. We'll probably be seeing more of him in the future, as people start venturing into the Spine in search of Amelia.

Some behind-the-scenes slightly spoilery-type things if you're not fully aware of the cosmology of this setting (IE: haven't read either of my other stories): those tracking orbs do indeed react to the presence of abnormal concentrations of Worship, or...rather, the sort of processed Worship that comes with Heroes. Though, it would likely work...oddly for Heroes other than Amelia, given these ones were designed to find her in case she pulled a stunt like this, and she's a bit of an exception when it comes to Worship.

Anyway, that's all I really have to say, next time we're going to jump into how things are after this little timeskip, so look forward to it!

And, as always, thanks for reading!