.
I surveyed the field from a dozen paces up, while reflecting on the last several days. Meanwhile, Ryuu’s team launched their attack.
The teamwork had become pretty legit, to be frank. Ryuu would come riding in on Ka first, jumping off her once he got to the deployment point they had selected. He could defend himself and cause trouble while Ka forced the enemy to spread their defenses, as Orho rolled in like a battleship, to take over the tanking role as Ryuu switched to pure offense. It wasn’t exactly an overwhelming attack at first, but whatever spot they chose, they would own.
To be more accurate, though, rather than moving horizontally, Orho descended like a flying battleship.
The opponents were Curator’s ‘Ball Defense Team’. Ryuu’s goal was to influence where the ball rolled.
Orho had rather rudely dismissed Ryuu’s efforts under Kanon, when they first sat down to discuss strategy. In her opinion, Ryuu never stood a chance of destroying the ball through direct attacks.
I don’t know if that was actually true. She might have underestimated his growth potential. He might have eventually leveled his attack up that far. But she was right that blasting away at the ball had never been the correct solution to this puzzle.
It is obviously self-repairing. It appears to be self-repairing even if you gouge significant chunks out of it, she had declared during that strategy session.
The stately skymaid, after solemnly stating this as if it were a heavenly principle, then flicked her tail, and a vision appeared, displaying a replay of Ryuu’s previous attempts to attack the ball.
I was actually quite impressed as I watched with his success in evading Kanon’s defenses and landing attacks. And I was astonished (although I didn’t show it) at the level he had raised his attacks to. In the few days that I left him with Kanon, he had upped his game again.
Yes, as I wrote the account previously, it sounded as if I only left him alone with Kanon for a few hours. The truth is, after I decided I was going to take over, I actually spent a few days in the Garden Pavilion with Dilorè, meditating and planning. I needed to do it right, and make preparations, so I had let Kanon continue with her training until I knew what I wanted to do.
Orho’s replay showed Ryuu ripping out chunks constituting nearly ten percent of the sphere. The craters would then roll out of view and vanish. No damage ever came back into view as the ball rolled further, or if he circled the sphere to catch the damaged section. Once he lost sight of it, the damage would never be seen again.
How much of the ball do you suppose you need to destroy before it cannot regenerate, Mr. Kowa? Orho asked.
“I have no way of knowing, and Kanon wouldn’t tell me,” Ryuu answered with a sour expression.
I do not know either, but my guess would be, you needed to eliminate enough that the damage could no longer roll out of sight, she replied. I consider it likely that your eyes were the only thing preventing the surface from resetting. Items within this simulation do not follow ordinary physics.
Ryuu frowned at that, recognizing that, if what the skymaid was saying was true, he would have to deal perhaps three or four times the damage he was inflicting on it. And from that point forward, his strategy began changing.
Their first strategy had been to try to come at the ball from three directions, preventing it from rolling out of sight. But the abilities of the three fighters, versus the enemy they faced, did not let them split up for long. Ka could quickly escape, but couldn’t stay in one place watching the ball. Ryuu could only keep fighting separately until the majority of defenders ganged up on him. If Orho tried to stay in one place without anyone to provide offensive fire for her, she would eventually face the classic problem of being nibbled to death by ducks.
And they couldn’t team up in one spot and simply blast away at the ball. Even with Orho and Ka adding their firepower to Ryuu’s, it wasn’t enough. So they looked at what he had done in the past and recognized that the ball did flee from damage, to avoid him landing multiple hits on the same spot. With that, they had the power to influence its direction, and it became possible to herd it.
They spent the next two days scouting. Orho is not a fast swimmer, but she can fly as high as needed. She can spot possibilities in the distance, which Ka and Ryuu can ride out to scout.
That is how they learned that the seemingly infinite plane was in fact the top face of a cube. A cube the size of a county, but a cube nonetheless. The distant mountains were in fact the tops of other titanic polyhedrons. And a fall from the top of this cube to the plane below (or was it the top face of an even bigger polyhedron?) would surely destroy the sphere all at once.
Since then, they had been learning how to work around the ‘defense team’, to make the ball roll toward the precipice.
As I watched now, I smiled at how well they had melded together as a party already. Ryuu actually is a skilled leader. At the moment, Ka had penetrated behind the defenders and was leveling blows on the sphere to get it moving in the right direction again. Her blows were not strong, and the effect wouldn’t last long on its own, but every little bit counted.
While several defenders fell back to drive Ka away, Ryuu began driving those that remained facing him backwards. With Orho’s steady shields, he could outright ignore most of the incoming fire and close on whomever he chose for melee combat.
One versus a half-dozen would normally be foolhardy, but the foot soldiers, a pack of dog men or something resembling them, quickly became overwhelmed and had to retreat. Ryuu actually killed two of them with single swings.
They were ‘dead’, but they would be back tomorrow. Lost members of the team respawned every morning. I should mention, this place temporarily had a day-night cycle, for the duration of this simulation.
As he moved forward, Orho was able to as well. If she were the battleship, Ryuu was the naval artillery mounted upon that battleship.
They soon made it close enough for Ryuu to deal direct damage on the sphere. She kept moving around, trying to attack the sphere from a second direction. If she died, she too would not regenerate until tomorrow, so she couldn’t stick around once the defenders closed on her.
Bird girls came flying in now, intending to pull some of Orho’s efforts away from defending Ryuu. Like the dog soldiers, these were not the beast kindred of Huade, but rather another species of Spirit Beasts. They possessed attacks significant enough that Orho could not ignore them. But Ryuu had [Earth Bullet] and other attacks that worked well as anti-aircraft fire.
I wondered if he was using what I had taught him these past several days, yet. He had not progressed enough for me to be able to tell it from here, but he should be making the attempt. I would have to discuss it with him during his evening lecture.
I sighed a bit as the aerial attacks began driving Orho upward. She was capable of much greater altitude than them, so her final defense against them was to simply head upward. She could no longer defend Ryuu from up there, though.
This was the reason the bird girls weren’t there at the beginning. When Ryuu’s team wasn’t attacking, the birds were out scouting for Orho.
Ryuu continued sniping at them as Ka returned to help defend Orho. They were in the exit phase now. Ka would carry Ryuu to safety while Orho ascended to safe altitudes.
That first conversation with Ryuu came back to me now as I watched. The one that I had with him when I first explained my objective.
I have a stretch goal now, to give you an unmatchable advantage. One nobody on Huade is able to teach you.
He had looked at me with distrust. After all, he was feeling pretty tired of promises. He had been pulled around from one place to another. And, although he had made a lot of progress, he wasn’t perceiving it.
“You can teach me, but nobody else can? Why?”
Because I learned it in an entirely different world, I explained. It’s a power that Immortals and Spirit Beasts use by instinct, so they can’t teach you. And nobody on Huade is aware of it, unless there’s another reincarnator who learned it in another world.
“What is it? Some kind of new magic?”
In a sense, you could call it that, I agreed. But it doesn’t count as magic by Huade standards, since it doesn’t use mana.
“So it’s the spiritual power stuff that Kanon uses sometimes,” he guessed.
It relates to that, but it is different, I said. Or to be more accurate, it is the underlying principle that allows Kanon to use spiritual energy as a means to influence her surroundings.
“Then what is it?”
It is the principle called Will.
“Will?” he echoed, puzzled.
What I wish to teach you is the means with which immortals, spirits and spirit beasts use spiritual energy and suffuse it in things around them to alter their states. They use their immortal will, which is as much a part of their substance as breath is part of yours. Elders, Fairies, and to a lesser extent, various other creatures of Huade also use it without feeling or understanding it. Mortals are the creatures who possess the ability to understand and cultivate Will as a deliberate act, Mr. Kowa.
“Then why haven’t the mortals of Huade done it?”
For the same reason the mortals of Earth haven’t. Only those mortals living in the very few worlds with spiritual energy at the highest levels in the Mortal Realm are aware of its true abilities. Thus, only someone who not only lives in one of those worlds, but has mastered the ability to deliberately wield their will can teach you this ability. But once you master it, somebody with your great quantity of pneuma could wield it even in a spiritually thin environment like Huade.
“And you’re saying you’re one of those people, and you can teach me?”
Not me, precisely, I admitted. But one of my previous selves mastered this ability, and can teach you. I must, for a time, become her in order to teach.
I had breathed deep at that point, then used the simulation system to execute an adjustment I had worked on for several days. As I exhaled, the little pixie faded out in front of him, and a woman in ancient Imperial dress, so similar to the clothing of the Song Dynasty on Earth, faded into existence.
She appeared as she had after her return to the Imperial Court, following her foster son’s rise to the Dragon Emperor Throne. She exuded the calm presence of a half-spirit woman who had persisted for over a thousand years. Despite her extreme age, her skin was like white jade, her hair as black and lustrous as obsidian, and her eyes gentle as a child’s. Her long tresses were partly bundled into buns on the sides of her head, with the remainder falling past her belt. Her silken coat resembled a short kimono, its hem at her thighs, with long sleeves and cuffs that hung like drapes. Its pattern, in shades ranging from baby blue to ultramarine on a background of white, depicted cranes among lotuses. Her skirt, of a gauzy white cloth, reached to the ground.
I bowed and stated, “Greetings, Mr. Kowa. My name is Fan Li.”
