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Chapter 291: Fracture - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2024-09-05 07:40:07 +0000 UTCOver the next few weeks, things on the front lines settled down. The worldstriders no longer spent much time focused on regular soldiers. They had a much more important target - Project Nightsong. Every single day, they tried to remove the military's project before it ended them. They tried swarming it with numbers during the day. They tried catching it in a bonfire and turning it into charcoal. They tried shooting it to pieces using guns. They tried far more unorthodox solutions, like trying to get human ability users to friendly-fire it to death.
The closest they got was blowing up an entire camp while Project Nightsong was in it. Somehow, they timed the explosions to happen right after Nightsong walked into the camp. How they managed to set off the explosives after falling asleep was beyond me. However, the Nightsong they targeted was gravely injured. It fled quickly enough to avoid the worst of the explosions, but still lost several pieces of its stitched-together body. It was forced to flee the battlefield, leaving the soldiers to fight a camp of Worldstriders at night. After most of the soldiers fled or died, the next three days were hell. The Worldstriders tried to press their advantage and smoke out Damilius's project Nightsong. Fortunately, they failed. Three days later, it reappeared and put the Worldstriders back on the defensive.
Not all human countries fared so well. One of the other countries, Semurria, lost both of its Nightsongs when their Worldstriders dropped a building on it. On that particular warfront, all of the gains that the human forces had made started to dissipate like smoke. I had expected that other human nations would step in and help them, but I was wrong.
When things had been desperate, and it looked like humans would lose, we had been united. Human nations had actually put aside their centuries of squabbling and worked together. The situation was different now. With Project Nightsong, the war seemed sure to end in a human victory. Thus, most nations were happy to see their competitors get kicked down. It would make their position on the continent more stable once the war ended. I felt more than a little disappointed by their actions - but not surprised.
Luckily, in Damilius we didn't face a similar situation. Apart from the single time the Worldstriders injured Nightsong, our front lines remained stable. For the soldiers in the forts, as well as healers like myself, it was a surprisingly restful period. Project Nightsong was such a powerful weapon against the worldstriders that it just won most battles it was part of. After the Worldstriders were knocked unconscious, they inflicted few casualties on our forces.
Anise, Felix and I had less and less to do each day. With more free time, we started to relax more often. We spent some time playing cards and swapping stories with Markus and the other soldiers each night. With each day that passed victory for Damilius seemed more certain. It seemed that most of the soldiers shared my sentiments.
The only thing that worried me was Project Nightsong itself. As time passed, the strange abominations continued to grow ever more bizarre. When Anise and I had first seen them, they resembled stitched female dolls. They might have also looked like some unholy mixture of necromancy and mad science, but they had still resembled humans. By the end of the first week, they resembled grotesque abominations. The originally humanoid figure had been padded out with extra limbs and strips of random flesh. By the end of the second week, rather than human women, they resembled balls of flesh and tangled limbs. Instead of two legs, Damilius's Nightsong walked on seven. By the end of the third week, Our Nightsong wasthe size of a two-story house. It had more more limbs that some squads of soldiers. It was a disturbing sight.
At the end of the third week, we got together with Markus and some other soldiers to play cards and relax.
“When do you think the war will finally end?” asked Markus, as he inspected his handful of cards.
“It’s hard to say,” I said. “I mean, there are still plenty of Zelyrian creatures acting as stragglers and fighting. It’s a lot different from the days when they could mass together and wipe out squads of soldiers in an ambush. But even though things are better, I don't think they'll go down this easily. I’ve heard that some countries have offered to let the creatures surrender, but they aren’t going for it.” I frowned. “At the beginning of the war, they were more than happy to send out diplomats, but now that they’re losing, they refuse to talk. I figure that means they have something up their sleeves still. Otherwise, they would be happy to negotiate the best terms they could at the negotiation table.”
Markus grunted in acknowledgement. "That's a good point, and one I hadn't considered. If they don't want to talk, it means they think their bargaining position will improve soon. Just like a merchant trying to get the best deal." His nose wrinkled up as he said those words.
Rolf cackled at Markus's expression. He threw his hand onto the table, and I resisted the urge to groan as I realized his hand was unbeatable. He divvied up the 'gambling chips' that we had been using as a wager. In this case they were cookies. Now that the supply lines were intact, the military had made the food situation dozens of times better. Even the occasional baked treat made its way into the cafeteria.
"I figure the enemy might also be stubborn. After all, they were winning the war for so long. They've tried and failed to kill our secret projects several times. Just because they think things are about to get better for them doesn't mean it will." Rolf grinned.
I thought about it for a few seconds, before I decided not to say anything. Rolf's view was optimistic, but it could be correct.
“I cannot help but feel that there is something quite unnerving about the military’s secret project. I’m glad they’re on our side, but I cannot help but feel that there is something... grotesque about them.” said James, the other soldier Markus had invited to play cards with us.
I grimaced.
“They creep me out too,” I said. ”Their bodies make no sense. They do not seem to be sentient or sapient either, but mimic it somehow. I know that Zelyrian magic can skirt the rules of how regular alchemy works, and I'm also not that great at Alchemy. Even so, they're weird.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine. The military wouldn’t use a weapon that can backfire on us… probably,” said Felix. He didn't sound very sure of his statement.
“I’m not actually sure if the military is in a position to be choosy about their secret weapons,” said Markus. To my surprise he sounded like he was taking my suspicious rambling seriously. “With the state of the war was going before Project Nightsong, it wouldn’t surprise me if the military rushed Nightsong out of the lab. They wouldn't have had much of a choice if they wanted to turn the war around.”
“I don’t know if -” Anise’s words were cut off when I felt a sudden, strange quaking sensation ripple through the air around us. It wasn’t detectable to any of my mundane senses, but to my essence senses, something fractured in the world.
“What was that?” I asked.
“It felt like… an earthquake?” said Rolf, as he frowned. He didn’t sound like he believed his own words.
I scanned our surroundings, trying to detect any other signs of danger - and a moment later, I felt my stomach drop, almost as if I had vertigo. It felt like things were lurching and falling around us, but I couldn’t see anything moving at all.
I looked at Anise and Felix, and without a word, the three of us pulled closer together. Felix started grabbing random bits of metal from our surroundings with his shaping magic. In moments, he had a thin shield structured around us. Markus and the other soldiers looked at Felix and Anise with confused looks, and I winced. Manipulating metal like that would definitely look weird. Later on, we would need to pretend Anise had done that with her force manipulation. But now wasn't the time to worry about that. I splashed everyone with water, in case I needed to heal anyone in a hurry.
A moment later, another set of shudders and quakes tore through the world. Moments later, I saw something open in the sky well above the fort. I didn't see anything else happen for several seconds, but I finally realized what had broken.
It was space itself. Something about the overlapping layers of reality in this dimension was splintering apart. It reminded me of the spatial quake that had dragged us into the Zelyrian pocket dimension all those years ago.
But this time, the effects weren’t limited to a mere mountain range.
Author’s Note:
The week of September 23rd, 3 weeks from now, I will be moving. I anticipate missing 1-2 MaM chapters that week, depending on how much time and energy it takes to move everything, set up/rebuild furniture, and basically just get everything settled. Budding Scientist chapter for that week may also be shorter than usual, depending on how things go.
Join my Discord! (I’m much more active there than in the comments section).
Comments
Rain
TFC
Puri
I would like for some lives to not end in tragedies. Please? 🥺
distilled
Oof, I had a feeling but I'm guessing they won't have much longer in this life
