AA-89

  “Hey?” Mia spoke up, catching the group’s attention as she and Lina joined the circle.

  “Ah, I was just about to send someone over to fetch you,” Helene said, then glanced over at Carmilla, who ambled over from the nearby wall she’d been leaning on. “Now that all of us are here, I think we should discuss what we’re going to do. Brent?”

  “The Colonel has managed to convince the majority of … freelance fighters here to back him up throughout the negotiations,” Brent said, his voice and expressions not betraying how he felt about that. “Supposedly, fighting is not included in what we are supposed to do, but we are going to be grandstanding against a bunch of beastkin aching for a fight. If they pounce, we won’t really have the option to back down. We have until he starts to march to decide whether to bail out or not so make it quick. Who wants to leave?”

  Mia just shrugged, sending a glance towards Carmilla and Helene. Only when she saw both giving affirmative nods, did she also nod.

  “We just have to look menacing, right?” Mark asked, being the last person who was still locked in an inner debate with himself. When he got an affirmative answer, he set his shoulders and said, “Alright, fuck it. I can be menacing.”

  Clive just went with the flow as he had been doing ever since he’d attached himself to the group. Mia guessed having a big shield to hide behind and magic aimed solely at protecting himself from harm made the man less respecting of danger, but he was a grown ass man, so she wasn’t going to speak up about that. Especially with him proving to be a surprisingly good wall to hide behind when arrows and spells start flying.

  Mark went down on one knee and plunged both of his hands into the cobblestone paving of the square. Rocks and hardened earth flowed up his arms like a heavy sludge, then spread and connected with the few pieces of earthen armour he had on him.

  Instead of stopping at the size he usually did, Mark kept the earth flowing for a while more. His form bulked up, his shoulders widening, his chest thickening, and when he stood up, he was almost as tall as Clive. Covered from head to toe in armour dotted with rugged spikes for show, Mia had to admit that he did look quite menacing.

  Comparatively, her most threatening magical armour was a near-invisible Lesser Ward, it would at best make her sparkle a faint pink if she pushed the spell’s mana capacity to the limit, which wouldn’t be all that threatening.

  Oh well. The boys can do the threatening, and I can do the beating if the fight starts. Mia decided with a mental shrug. She wouldn’t start flicking off any spells other than blunted Bolt variants until the enemy did, but she’d be ready.

  With the trick Carmilla had shown her, she spun up her runic model and checked it over. A smile spread over her lips as she noted that the blunted Bolt variant and Shield didn’t have any runic overlap. Having both spells’ circles active was straining her a bit in a way she couldn’t quite put a finger on, but not enough to be a problem if this stare-down didn’t last more than an hour or two.

  Only a minute later came the order — or rather, request — to march, and they did just that. Big melee fighters like Mark and Clive went first, standing shoulder to shoulder, while mages like Mia and the rest stood a bit further back. Brent stayed on the rear, his attentive gaze sweeping across the resting monsters on the rooftops and jumping between closed windows, looking out for any ambush or an attack on their back-line.

  The beastkin roused in response, ambling forward in a disorderly mob, sticking to smaller factions and cliques by the looks of it but all coalescing around the towering anthropomorphic lion standing at their front.

  Mia listened, being a few heads too short to actually see what was going on, and tried to keep track of what was happening. She could already feel a headache promising her pain at the sheer amount of sounds she was trying to take in and make sense of, but it would be worth it if she could suss out the beastkin starting to move in advance.

  “So you want to fight for it then?” A deep, growling voice said, and based on the direction, Mia assumed it was the lion-man.

  “If we can’t come to a mutually beneficial agreement,” Zeigler responded, unflappable as ever. “I’m afraid we’ll have to insist that you vacate the vicinity of the rift.”

  “And if we don’t?” the lion-man asked, and Mia could hear a hint of amusement in his tone. That’s not good … I think?

  “Must I say it?” Zeigler asked after a moment. “We did not form up for a parade. Still, I’d be loath to lose any of the people behind me to a fight with your people. The city is still far from void of monsters, and we’ll need every able-bodied fighter if we ever want to reclaim it in its entirety. So tell me, what would it take for you to step aside and allow us to destroy that rift?”

  “An assurance,” the lion-man said far too quickly for the answer not to have been prepared for that exact question. “An assurance that if an Obelisk appears in Graz, we will all have equal access to its services.”

  That sounds reasonable. Mia thought, but she could also see why Zeigler would be opposed to that idea. The beastkin were, at the moment, an illegal gang at best and terrorists at worst from a strictly old-Earth viewpoint. Granting them access to the one thing that’d allow them to keep up in power with the people endorsed by the army would be like giving away military grade weaponry to a violent gang. It’s still better than fighting them for the rift here and now.

  “That sounds reasonable,” Zeigler said after a moment. “I can agree to that. On a few conditions.”

  “Do you think you are in a position to dictate terms and conditions?” The lion-man asked, and Mia positioned herself just so she saw his face in the gap between people. The snarl he wore on his animalistic face was ferocious enough to make children cry, but Mia just sent a trickle of mana into her left hand and readied to cast a Shield. “You are few and weak. Half the people behind you’d run away if I glared at them hard enough, and the other half we outnumber three to one.”

  “With your pet monsters included, maybe.” Zeigler gave a shrug that looked nonchalant. “But how many of your underlings fought before? Fought enemies that fought back, I mean, and not weak old grandmothers they could easily relieve of their reserves of food. One or two, I’d wager. Maybe ten in that whole mob? Because everyone behind me has faced down a horde of monsters and come out stronger for it.”

  The tension built in the air, pressing down on everyone present like a physical weight as the silence dragged on for seconds.

  Mia watched, her eyes peeled as her gaze stuck to the crack of a view she had of the beastkin leader’s furry mug. Mia tensed as his lips pulled back into a ferocious grin. Now teeth and fangs meant for tearing through meat and cracking bone shown to the world, the lion-man raised a hand.

  The tension spiked, and Mia almost cast a Bolt at the beastkin’s face at the sudden movement, but Carmilla’s hand clamped down on her wrist.

  “Easy there,” the vampire whispered. “Let the kitty grandstand a bit. He won’t do a thing.”

  Someone else wasn’t so lucky as to have a protective vampire looking over their shoulder, though, and in a moment, a … glob of mud splattered across an invisible wall mere centimetres from the still grinning lion-man’s face.

  Mia felt people flare up with magic around her, their mana practically vibrating with eagerness.

  “STOP!” Zeigler said, his voice somehow managing to sound calm and measured despite it being a shout. Mia felt no less than a dozen magical presences close to erupting, and a glance told her Lina was one of them, though she was the hardest to feel. Not because her power was any lesser than the random middle-aged man vibrating with fire mana on the other side of Mia, but because the blonde had a much firmer grasp on her airy mana. When Zeigler spoke up again, there was a cold edge in his voice, “You done?”

  “I do think I am,” the lion-man answered, his hand still up in a fist above his head, now falling down with a shrug. He waved his other hand, and Mia could see some of the larger beastkin coiled up like strings, loosening up with huffs and grunts of annoyance. “What ‘conditions’ do you have?”

  Mia took a quick look around, seeing the situation calm down and was glad to see all of her friends and family still in place. Only Lina looked a moment away from erupting, but even she was tempered and merely ready to react should the need arise instead of a moment away from flying off the handle.

  “Our collective goal should be getting rid of all remaining rifts within the city as fast as possible,” Zeigler said calmly. “My bottom line is that rift you’re protecting is getting destroyed.”

  “Why?” The lion-man asked, tilting his head in an overly feline manner. “I’ve been told the things stabilise or some shit if we clear them enough. Why not keep a nice little level 10 Rift for ourselves? You wouldn’t even have to worry about who knows who the fuck teleporting to the fancy new obelisk that’s about to pop up?”

  “That idea would have merit if we were isolated from the rest of the world,” Zeigler said, unperturbed by the straightfaced bullshit the beastkin was throwing his way. “We stagnate without the Obelisk while the world marches on. Anyone with a functioning brain and a pair of barely working eyes can see that. Let’s not play games. I want that rift gone before the last rift, other than it, falls.”

  “And we want some assurance that we won’t be herded into camps like animals once you have the obelisk to make you all Rank 1,” the lion-man said, a snarl once again marring his face. “You understand that we won’t be taking your word for it on that one, not after how your dead ex-boss acted, so I believe we’ll be keeping this rift going up until the last possible moment.”

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  The dead asshole is still causing trouble? Mia frowned, then gave a mental shrug. If anything at all stuck to her from watching political dramas and such, it was that the lion-man was likely just throwing that reason out there as an excuse to pull his bottom line higher in the ensuing negotiation.

  But if they let the beastkin keep the rift for themselves while the army went and threw themselves against the wolf rift and its horde of monsters, one group would keep getting stronger as they delved a lower-level rift while the other would be ground down. Maybe the beastkin didn’t have the manpower and overall power to take over the city now, but afterwards?

  That’s a worrying thought. Mia glanced at Zeigler’s back, hoping the man would prove to be a good enough negotiator to somehow make sure that situation never came to pass.

  “Hey,” Carmilla whispered, tugging at Mia’s arm as she motioned towards the buildings lining the left side of the square. “That teal building with the bookshop, do you hear anything inside it?”

  Mia took a moment to make sure, but she shook her head after a moment. “Nothing. Why? Do you hear something?”

  “No,” Carmilla said, a grin tugging at her lips. “No, I don’t hear anything, not a single sound.”

  “And that’s strange because … ?” Mia trailed off leadingly, still paying half-attention to the two leaders going back and forth about their agreement. Things seemed to be going well for the moment on that front, at least.

  “Because I can hear noises from every other building on the square,” Carmilla said, her head swivelling around to look at Mia with a predatory glee in her eyes. “Think someone’s trying to be sneaky? It could be another sniper-“

  “It could be Zeigler’s,” Brent cut in from behind the two, making Mia jump in fright at his sudden appearance. Well, as sudden as always having been there, just forgotten about, can be. “Popping the lion’s head would be a good opening move if a fight breaks out.”

  “Or it could be someone nosy wanting to kill someone.” Carmilla cut back. “Why don’t we check it out? If it's an army sniper, it’s fine, but I’d much rather make sure.”

  “The beastkin could take that as a form of attack,” Brent countered, and Mia could see the warring emotions practically paint themselves across the vampire’s face.

  “I could send the cat,” Mia said, reaching up to scratch the Familiar under the chin. “Quick in and out. If it finds anything, we can bust it or tell on it to Zeigler. I’m not interested in getting shot at again.”

  Saying so, Mia positioned herself to have Mark’s bulky form between herself and the suspiciously silent house. She regretted not placing a Ward on herself right about now, but she couldn’t risk it.

  Who knew which beastkin had a sense similar to hers and could tell when a spell was being cast?

  I’ll just have to rely on Mark again. Mia thought, a small, prideful part of her rebelling against the idea of not just handling stuff on her own. She had all the magic in the world, and she still had to hide behind her friend?

  Don’t be an idiot. She chastised herself at the damned near suicidal thoughts. What was wrong with letting the dwarf who specialised in standing in the way of dangerous stuff and coming out whole do what he was good at? Nothing. It was just her silly pride flaring up again.

  “Okay,” Brent whispered, nodding faintly as his narrow-eyed gaze kept the silent building under heavy scrutiny. “Send the cat.”

  “Check out that teal house,” Mia whispered to the cat. “We think someone’s being sneaky inside. Check if you find anyone skulking about. Alright?”

  At the cat’s nod, Mia gave it the mental ‘Go’ order, and it hopped off of her shoulder. It skittered around between the feet of people for a bit before disappearing from Mia’s line of sight.

  The cat came scampering back less than half a minute later and sat down before Mia with its tail swishing back and forth. It gave the vague impression of attempting to stand at attention like a trained soldier.

  “So?” Mia asked, squatting down next to the familiar as some nearby people looked over at the weird girl talking with her glowing cat. “Did you find anything?”

  The cat nodded, and Mia waited an embarrassing few seconds after waiting for it to elaborate before she realised that was not happening. Intelligent as this specific elemental might have been, it couldn’t talk.

  “Was someone sneaking about?” Another nod answered her question.

  “Did they have a weapon?” Mia asked, then pointed at the nearest soldier she saw. “A weapon like that one?”

  When the cat shook its head, Mia let out a slight sigh of relief.

  “Was the person a beastkin, like the guys over there?” She asked, pointing covertly at the opposing crowd, but only got a vague sense of a shrug through her Bond with the Familiar as it tilted its head.

  “Ask it whether it got noticed,” Carmilla said, her predatory gaze locked on the building in question.

  Mia asked and got a nod in response. Which prompted her next question. “Did they leave once they noticed you?”

  At the cat’s nod, everyone let some of the tension drain out of them.

  “I’ll see whether I can figure something out once this is over,” Carmilla said. “They clearly had a silencing Ward, but maybe they forgot to mask their scent. I might be able to track them down, and if not, I might get a hint of who they were.”

  “I’d say we should first ask the Colonel whether it was one of his people,” Brent said thoughtfully, then shrugged. He added a last bit before going back to his position on the rear of the haphazard formation. “Wouldn’t want to chase around one of his soldiers without cause if a simple question could have settled our worries.”

  Mia split part of her mind to listen in on the negotiation in case they needed some magical backup when the beastkin started acting up again, but after the first ten minutes, almost all the tension seemed to have evaporated as both sides realised the two leaders were just negotiating in a mostly calm manner.

  With the possibility of a fight breaking out falling to an all-time low, people just started forming little groups and chatted about mundane things.

  Using Multitasking to the limits of its capability, though, she started thinking and devising a way to make that prototype ‘arcane nail’ spell she’d made a while ago less explosive.

  Lina started working on her mana-shaping exercises, the Elementalist determined to cast ‘real’ spells with runes and spell circles even if she didn’t have a runic-model to help her and had to do it all manually with Air Mana Manipulation.

  Carmilla was like a bloodhound, watching out for any danger, while Helene just settled in to talk with a nearby woman about … flying?

  Looking over, Mia saw the other woman had sky blue line-art styled tattoos running down her arms and bare calf. With how she could practically taste the Air mana in them, Mia wagered those were what allowed the woman some magical flight.

  The three men stood around stoically, but Mia knew even they were just fiddling their thumbs.

  She went through a few prototypes and designs but ended up with one she was reasonably certain wouldn’t blow up in her face. It wasn’t the best; the balance and symmetry were still far from the genius-level perfection the System-given circles had, but she got it down to a level where it would only cause the spell to be inefficient and not explosive.

  With the now much more casual but still somewhat tense stand-off going on, she couldn’t just start casting the spell to check whether it’d work as intended, so after making a few more iterations in case the first one failed, Mia switched gears.

  This means she started playing around with Arcane Mana Manipulation. Just like how the Earth equivalent of the skill could fiddle with much more than just dirt, the arcane version of it could also do more than projecting globs of angry energy.

  She had already experimented with it some, having both boiled and near-frozen water with the skill, but according to her training manual, ‘thermomancy’ was a more … advanced use of the skill.

  Regular baby arcane mages supposedly went for the simplest form of energy they had at hand: kinetic.

  Motion existed everywhere and was mostly harmless to experiment with unless pushed too far — meaning, if you didn’t throw too much mana into it — which made it an ideal first choice for most trainees.

  Well, most trainees didn’t have Superior Affinity for Arcane according to the Training Manual — which didn’t make much sense, considering Mia thought that was sort of the thing of her bloodline — but that just meant she had to be a bit more careful than the instructions would have her be.

  Like with thermal energy, she relied on her Assimilation Skill associated with her chosen energy as the foundation of it all. Making Arcane mana turn into a non-magical energy was like trying to twitch your ears while never having done so before. The feeling of the Skills converting that energy, in this case kinetic energy, was what gave her that initial direction she’d latched onto.

  After that, it was just an exercise of trying to twist and bend her thoughts and visualisation to actually do something with that direction. First, she tried imagining vectors and the mana turning into force according to their direction and length. It worked … barely. It felt like instead of simply bending down to pick up a pebble, she was trying to use chopsticks to do so. Lubed up the chopsticks while she was drunk and couldn’t even see the pebble.

  Imagining an invisible wind blowing out of her fingertips and into her other palm held above them proved even less fruitless. It made Mia think, how did turning mana into kinetic energy work? Kinetic energy wasn’t exactly something you could just store in a battery and load it into whatever object you wanted after all, so how was mana doing what it did?

  So she started experimenting, just squatting down and pointing a finger at the dusty cobblestone before shooting little bursts of what she hoped was kinetic energy — not just invisible arcane mana — at the ground. She used the vector image in her mind and just watched how the dust got kicked up, not really by her magic, but by the small gale she had made. The kinetic energy struck the air and made it move, which in return blew away the gathered dust.

  Trying it out next on her palm, she determined that with the amount of mana she was using, the only thing she felt beyond about ten centimetres from her fingertip was a small breeze, like someone was blowing air at her palm through a straw.

  So it’s like I’m blowing energy out of my fingertips, and it gets absorbed by whatever it comes into contact with first, giving that ‘whatever’ momentum. Mia mused, tilting her head as she repeated the exercise from much closer to the ground and watched a small pebble dance away at the sudden infusion of momentum. The problem is that the damned air is eating up the kinetic energy I’m making before it can do much.

  Maybe she could just … throw more mana at the problem, but she’d have to wait till she wasn’t in the middle of a crowd to test that idea. It might just work if her logic of how arcane mana to kinetic energy conversion worked was actually sound.

  She was just starting to experiment with other variations of mental images when the negotiation had concluded in the background without much fanfare.

  The cheering on both sides, likely from finally being able to stop standing around and actually go off to do something more productive, was what broke Mia out of her thoughts.

  Looking up at the two leaders, Mia noted a few things. The lion-man had what went for a smile for his kind, but his posture was much more subdued and almost reluctant, while Zeigler had his carefully carved diplomatic smile on that was as fake as smiles could be without being too offensive.

  “To our fruitful cooperation going forward,” Zeigler said, his tone only hiding a slight lilt of sarcasm as he shook the much larger, furry paw of the lion-man.

  “Indeed.” The beastkin shook his hand with visibly more force than would have been strictly polite, but Zeigler refused to show even a twitch on his face. “To a fruitful cooperation.”

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