He got no further than his skull. Even that was only around ninety percent infused to the peak of the eighth level. For some reason, Volithur expected his progress to be simir to when he’d first used the cold forged method. That obviously could not be the case. Body enhancement to level eight required eight times the cosmic energy as level seven, which in turn required seven times more than the previous level.
The math was quite unforgiving. Upgrading from level six to level eight required fifty-six times more energy than getting to six. Or, to continue the calcution to its ultimate conclusion… almost forty thousand times more energy than getting a body to the peak of the first level. Meanwhile, all that investment only doubled the strength of the body with each level. The costs so rapidly outpaced the benefits.
Not that the benefits were minor in any way. They just seemed that way in comparison to the insane investment of resources, time, and effort. Biological immortality and superhuman physical attributes were hardly something to dismiss out of hand.
Volithur was escorted from the estate gates shortly after dawn to a buffet hall where Perry met him. The short, pin-looking man had only a single feature to distinguish him: his flinty eyes saw everything. Well, being level nine also made him stand out, but most of those in the Lord General’s retinue were the same level.
He quickly concluded that Perry was the most significant threat to his ongoing existence. Not only was the man sharp and observant, he possessed a suspicious air. “Why did you change the destination on this second trip?”
“Master Perry?”
“This is a different warehouse than five hours hence. Why?”
“I don’t have a reason, Master Perry.”
“Of course you do. People aren’t random creatures.”
The subtly hostile silence pressured Volithur to an answer. “I guess I was bored looking at the other warehouse? This one has a window.” He pointed at the pastoral scene barely visible from their position.
“Are you a whimsical person, Harridan?”
“I don’t think so?”
“You should bor to become more predictable in your actions. The Lord General’s retinue operates as a team and you will throw off our colboration if you prove hard to anticipate.”
“Oh. I will try to be more predictable, Master Perry.”
They spent the entire day in testing. Perry recorded the time it took Volithur to recharge between transits. They only managed three round trips, starting as they had with zero energy reserves at dawn. During the subsequent report to their master, the Lord General smmed a fist into a table in his excitement, shattering the wood and unching dinner ptes as if from a catapult. No one reacted to the outburst, they simply filled new ptes and ate standing, continuing their conversations as if nothing had happened.
“Extreme mobility will see the Jinn defeated. If we can separate their fleet, I will finally take down Kevin.” The Lord General rubbed his hands together in glee. “Perry, do the test again tomorrow with uncut spirits.”
So the following day proved more of the same. Only this time Volithur got drunk.
“What do you think of the Lord General?”
The question was obviously a trap. “Scary,” Volithur slurred.
Perry raised a brow. “Other than that?”
Volithur’s inebriated mind raced to come up with something complimentary. “Generous.”
The brow, already high on the man’s forehead, found a way to rise further. “That sounds like a remarkably opportunistic viewpoint.”
“Uh… what?” While Volithur could follow the insinuations well enough, he thought it best to py dumb.
“Don’t py dumb with me.”
Or not. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Master Perry.”
“My purpose is quite simple, Harridan. I want to know the mind of the man so much of our success will depend upon. Our very lives may be in the bance. So I want to know your thoughts on the Lord General. Will you faithfully execute his orders? Or, motivated only by fear and greed, will you falter if you are commanded to pce yourself in danger?”
“I won’t do that to you, Perry. I’m cool.”
The man scowled at the foreign sng. Years among the Amaratti Xian had yet to purge such colloquialisms from his drunken speech. Khana thought his exotic phrasings amusing. Though if he was using her tastes as a rubric for the appropriateness of his own behavior, he’d entirely lost the plot.
They only gained one more round trip from the uncut spirits.
The Lord General thought that acceptable during their dinner. “Pack your soul with energy, Harridan. We’ll summon you in a few days to begin discussing tactics.”
Volithur returned home and sealed himself into the garden shed for some closed door cultivation. His mind, only partially occupied by his task, wandered along dangerous paths.
A week passed before he received a summons to return. The Lord General and Perry scrutinized his progress and quizzed him on how long he spent every day restoring his energy levels. They were disappointed when he cimed he couldn’t cultivate any faster due to exhaustion in his externality aperture – an exhaustion which also made it impossible for him to transit without taking some time to rest.
They had him continue his chaos cultivation while briefing their battle pns. Any doubts Volithur held about the Lord General’s monstrous nature disappeared in the course of that presentation. Perry used carved wooden figures to demonstrate on a sand table.
The Lord General would bring an army to staging point A. His transit sphere, being so conspicuous, would draw an attack. Simultaneously, an elite group would arrive at staging point B, carried by Volithur. At that location, the elite group would sughter the unempowered civilians involved in whatever construction project the Jinn and Arahant oversaw.
Volithur would leave the elites at that location to create mayhem and travel to staging point A to collect the Lord General and his retinue. They would then move to staging point C, abandoning the weaker forces as a sacrifice to the enemy. With confusion injected into the Jinn fleet, they would locate war barge Kevin by his distinctive crenetions and attack with extreme aggression.
Volithur would be responsible for their rapid escape. For all the benefits of the Lord General’s massive transit sphere, the thing took a long time to form. It wasn’t suitable for the rapid mobility they needed in the middle of a battle.
He learned in the meeting that Zara refused to participate in the military operation. No one else in the family could get away with such blunt denial of the lord’s commands, but the Lord General openly remarked that the commercial efforts of his daughter was the main reason he’d been able to become a lord. She had earned a free pass of sorts.
That free pass, it seemed, did not extend to her loved ones.
In a passive aggressive gesture, the Lord General drafted her youngest son Corey into the elite group being sent to staging point B. Among the other names he recognized were Aramar and Dorian. Perry estimated the odds of fatalities among the elite group as low, but Volithur knew things would not go so smoothly as the others hoped.
Out came bottles of uncut spirits and ptters of high grade meat. Their feast proved equal parts celebratory and calcuted. They needed to be at their best when the battle began in a few weeks, so that pretty much required them to get drunk. The only holdout to the festivities was Stowaway, the man who could summon things to his hands even though he possessed not a single drop of cosmic energy. That in itself should be impossible on Tian. The food, water, and air itself contained abundant energy.
“What are you?” The rude question came out as Volithur sat down next to the dour man.
Stowaway’s serious face barely changed, just a slight tightening of the lips. “I’m from Aes.”
“That’s the true world the monsters took out.”
“How impressive to know such a common fact,” Stowaway muttered.
“So what is the thing that you are called? Like an Aes person?”
“Dear Ancestors,” Stowaway gasped. “I’m an Orisha. I deal in spatial energy.”
“That’s how you summon things into your hands?”
“I’m not ‘summoning’ anything. I’m removing items stored in my heart space.”
“Could everyone on Aes do that?”
“What? No. Are you truly so ignorant of the greater multiverse? You may be from an unempowered world, but you received an education, did you not? The people of Aes are of two distinct tribes. The Orisha, masters of spatial energy. And the Titans, wielders of substantial energy.”
“How big is your heart space?”
“Please bother someone else, Master Harridan. I do not care for frivolity.”
“But why are you working for the Lord General if you’re not a Xian?”
Stowaway clenched his hands. “What else would I do? My world may exist yet. That doesn’t mean I can ever return. Not unless I want to be torn apart by roving packs of monsters. As payment for my service here, I have several wives and even some children. I will leave a legacy when I die.”
The dour man looked like he might cry, so Volithur moved along. He avoided Perry out of fear of the man’s suspicious nature. He avoided Radish because the man kept challenging people to drinking contests. There were a few other background presences in the retinue, but Volithur chose to approach the muscur, bald-headed fellow named Yowl.
“Hey there, Harridan. Are you finding your pce in the retinue?”
“I think so, Master Yowl.”
“Don’t feel that you must become a warrior. Your particur talents make you useful in a different way than most of us. You’re more akin to Stowaway like that.”
“Hopefully I’m not so grumpy.”
“That would be a sad thing if you were,” Yowl admitted. “Now drink up, Harridan. You may not enjoy these harsh beverages, but we need you ready for action very soon.”
He didn’t make it home that night. Volithur woke in the banquet hall, snoozing face down in a corner of the room. The sharp-eyed Perry arrived at the same time the servants began to y out breakfast. “The mandatory fun will continue until forty-eight hours prior to our attack,” Perry informed him. “You should go home today and expin to your wife and child that you will be gone for a few weeks. Come back in time for dinner. Be sure to hydrate before then.”
Volithur agreed to the pn and stumbled back home.
On the way, he snagged a bottle of uncut spirits from the warehouse. It felt heavy in his hands and he almost changed his pns on the spot.
Sadly, he had to see things through.
Khana accepted his expnation with a mix of sadness and excitement. She would miss him but anticipated money to rain down upon them at his return. After a time, Volithur went to the garden shed without letting anyone see him. He broke open the bottle of uncut spirits and chugged it down as fast as he could.
Woozy from the experience, he formed a transit sphere and went home.
The Jinn met him at the entrance to the mine located outside of the city he grew up in. The man with the artificial eye was still there, but had been joined by several others. One was fully mechanical, taking the form of a metal oval with spider legs and sensors dotting its surface. Two others seemed entirely human in shape but contained the strange energy of their kind, all straight lines and jagged edges.
He nded before them. “Did my information help with the st attack?”
The mechanical Jinn answered with a synthesized voice he found entirely too natural in sound. The ‘Space Adventures’ show he watched as a kid led him to expect something tinny and artificial from such a creature. “Your intel proved quite useful. We ultimately could not exterminate a lord intent on escaping, but there have been no further attacks on our interests.”
“Well, there’s going to be another one,” Volithur announced.
“The presence of scouts makes that obvious. Before we speak further on these matters, I want to know who you are. You’ve cimed to be a local of this world. How is that possible given your current achievements? The Xian have obviously been generous to you. We know how resource intense their method of advancement is.”
Volithur did not care to reveal his secrets to these Jinn. They were no more his friends than the Xian. Indeed, had they not come to his world first, there would have been no invasion. “I have as much talent in deception as I do in cultivation.”
“Are we to trust a man who prides himself on his lies?”
“You can trust that our interests align. I might not give a shit about your battles against the monsters, but I have personal reasons to want the Lord General dead just as badly as you.”
“Because he killed your parents.”
Volithur spat at the spider feet of the metal creature. “Don’t you dare say it like that. I might have to bow to the Lord General and py nice, but don’t you dare mock my parents. I watched their heads explode. They were good people.”
The vitriol, usually hidden in the depths of his psyche, rose to the surface like it had not since his incarceration in the cell of the fifth household, during his first – and non-consensual – experience with closed door cultivation. The lubrication of alcohol helped his anger slip its leash just as much as distance from the people he feared.
“What is your name, Xian?”
Volithur’s nostrils fred. Xian. The bel could not be denied. He had cultivated to the eighth level. He was one of them in truth now. “Volithur. Son of Darius.”
“What is your intel, Volithur?”
As quickly as he could, Volithur outlined the pn.
