Chapter 179

Chapter 179

The group’s mood was solemn as they kept moving east. Seeing a city destroyed by the cataclysm had everyone on edge. Alice also found her thoughts drifting as the group kept moving.

Would every city they found end up like this? Worse, what if the Immortal that the group was supposed to meet ended up dead? Alice had come all of this way because she needed to figure out how to make artificial class seeds. She was desperately hoping that seeing someone who knew how to make artifacts would help. If the Immortal they were going to meet was dead... Alice would have to find another way. But finding another way forward could take weeks, or months. And with the fact that cities were now collapsing, she didn’t have months to spend messing around with magic seeds. She needed a solution now.

However, Alice’s thoughts were ruined when Allira suddenly frowned.

“Ethan, stop moving,” she said.

Ethan halted the group in midair, as Allira squinted at something in the distance.

Allira started humming, as a look of intense concentration appeared on her face. Her humming grew louder and louder, until she broke off her song. She sighed.

“We need to head a little south,” she said. “There are odd monsters ahead. Normally, I wouldn’t mind giving them a bit of a tussle, but after seeing the ruined city, I am suspicious. They might have special abilities, or something that makes them hard to deal with.”

“How many are there?”

“Around four thousand. They move like a coordinated army, and I feel like they’re watching us. It makes me quite uncomfortable.”

Ethan nodded. “Too many to comfortably deal with,” he said. The group changed course, and started flying south, before they started to turn east again.

However, Allira started to frown more heavily.

“No good. They’re following us.”

Alice shivered uneasily.

A large army of monsters following them was not good news.

Immortals were incredible fighters. Even the weakest Immortal could usually fight several dozen people, and the strongest Immortals could usually fight up to a thousand soldiers and expect to win. But no matter how strong they were, every single Immortal had limits. If they fought against a large enough group of enemies and had no way to escape, they would be encircled and killed. This was a concrete rule about Immortals – they could not, and would never be able to, single-handedly overturn an entire warzone by themselves.

Alice started looking at the other members of the group and tried to imagine how well they would fare against four thousand monsters.

Ethan was a combat-focused Immortal, through and through. The trump cards he had revealed when Emilia tried to assassinate her were already impressive enough, and Alice suspected that Emilia hadn’t even forced all of his trump cards out. Allira was a bit less focused on direct combat, but as far as Alice could tell, she was still a powerful fighter. Even if her abilities leaned a bit more towards support than blasting things down, she could hold her own in an intense fight.

Jonathan was... probably not that powerful. Ethan and Allira had mentioned he could fight dozens of people on his own... but that was way different from most Immortals that could fight hundreds of people on their own. At the very least, however, Jonathan had an exceptional [Endurance] stat, so he should be quite hard to hurt. Still, being sturdy wasn’t good enough to win a battle against four thousand monsters wielding unknown abilities.

Finally, there were the other members of the group.

Alice was confident she could fight a dozen monsters or so, but her magic tendrils and awareness of her surroundings just wasn’t sufficient to handle staggering numbers of foes. Alice wasn’t a bad combatant, but she was probably on par with Jonathan, at best.

Alice knew that Cecilia had a few enchantments on her for self-defense as well. They were nothing as overpowered as Doll’s armor, which Alice was very thankful Ethan had foisted upon her, but Cecilia wasn’t useless in a fight. She wasn’t very powerful either, though.

Jonathan’s family probably couldn’t be counted on to fight anything at all. Mimi was less than ten years old, and had basically zero combat strength. Jonathan’s two sons might be able to fight a monster or two each, but their power was negligible. Alice didn’t think Jonathan’s wife had any combat Classes, so her strength was also negligible. In short, they weren’t useful in combat. Alice gritted her teeth.

She didn’t like their odds if the monster army caught up with them.

If the group was encircled, even with their three Immortal combatants, they would still probably die.

“Are the monsters gaining on us?” asked Alice.

“They are, but not very quickly,” said Allira. “The monster swarm is moving quite quickly, though. If this swarm is the one that destroyed the city we found earlier... I can see why they won. Their speed is incredible.”

Ethan frowned more deeply. “All right, I’m going to increase our flying speed. I’ve been going at a pretty comfortable pace until now, but I don’t want to get into a fight we might not be able to win. Allira, let me know if my actions interfere with any of your scouting abilities – I don’t want to fly into another horde of monsters. That would probably get us encircled until the first swarm caught up.”

“Got it.”

After that, the group’s speed started to increase. Alice saw their surroundings start to melt into an uncomfortable blur, and felt her body ripple uncomfortably as air resistance and other natural forces tried to force her to slow down.

Ethan’s magic didn’t care about what air resistance wanted.

The group started to accelerate, faster and faster, until Allira finally yelled at Ethan to slow down a bit, or her scouting would be ruined. Her voice carried bits of rainbow mana that somehow let her words carry to the rest of the group.

She felt distinctly uncomfortable now. She looked around, and saw that Mimi and the two boys were starting to look rather pale and uncomfortable. Cecilia didn’t look much better. However, at least the monsters were probably being left far behind them.

Alice’s hopes were shattered a few minutes later, when Allira swore.

“They’re still gaining on us,” she said.

“System-accursed... How? I nearly tripled our speed?” swore Ethan.

“They’re speeding up as well. Go faster,” yelled Allira. “I think they’re using some sort of magic to skip chunks of distance every few seconds. I can see their bodies turning into smoke and then jumping closer to us every so often.”

“Jumping?”

“It’s solid now, so stand upon the deck,” sang Allira, somehow managing to make a simple song with absurd lyrics sound like a work of art that would make Mozart and Beethoven weep. The group got onto the ship, and then quickly got into one of the cabins, so that they could finally avoid the awful wind resistance.

Alice felt the ship raise itself upwards, before it started flying through the air, even faster than before. This time, the trip was far less uncomfortable.

“This is much better,” said Alice.

Allira nodded. “I wish I had thought of this earlier. This really is much nicer.”

Ethan nodded noncomitally as Alice heard the sounds of battle in the far distance.

The group relaxed for several minutes, before Allira started to frown again.

“How odd,” she said.

“Something else happen?” asked Ethan.

“No matter how many of the swamp monsters my shadows kill, they reappear after a while. It is almost as if the monsters are returning to life, or...”

“Ah,” said Alice. “I wonder if the monsters are like the ravens we found earlier? They might seem to be alive, but in practice, they might be more like enchantments, or limbs of the swamp itself.” Alice frowned. If that was the case, the way to deal with the monsters was ‘destroy the swamp itself.’ However, she had no idea how to even start trying to destroy the swamp. Maybe with some mixture of [Farmers] and [Lumberjacks], the group could reshape the terrain, bringing it back to some degree of normalcy? Or maybe there was some other Class that specialized in manipulating the terrain?

But doing that would also give any workers an extra dose of ‘class mana.’ Alice didn’t currently have enough enchantments to keep the workers safe if they helped her.

“If the monsters are literal parts of the swamp, that makes them harder to deal with,” said Jonathan. “Since they will resist any attempts to directly influence them via magic.”

“We’ll just have to hope that they can’t exit the swamp,” said Ethan. “If they can, they will be a very troublesome threat.”

“If they can exit the swamp, I can try to start attacking the swamp itself,” said Jonathan. “If Fendrallia is having this much trouble keeping their western border safe, they might not mind me founding a new ‘Superbia’ in the middle of the swamp. With the land being fully mine, it would be much easier to rebuild my farm... and keep the swamp under control. I can expand my farm quite a lot if I really want to, after all.”

“We could also try to distort people’s perception of the swamp,” said Alice, after a few moments. “People’s understanding of the world directly changes it, due to the influence of mana. So if we make people believe the threat of the swamp is handled...”

Ethan grimaced. “Sounds like we need an [Orator], or some similar kind of class to really tamp down on the chaos.”

Allira grinned toothily at Ethan. “Ethan, dear. Have you forgotten who I am? I might specialize in songs that harm... but songs are also a form of storytelling. And a good way to spread information,” she said. She turned to Alice. “You’ve been getting more and more overt in your discussions of how mana and the System work behind the scenes. So if I understand your statements correctly... people’s beliefs somehow make mana itself change the world to match those beliefs, right?”

Alice hesitated, before she nodded.

Allira’s smile widened for the first time.

“Then I will compose a new song as we fly. It will be about how we destroyed something called the ‘heart of the swamp.’ We can incorporate some of your research into the song, to make it as logical and realistic as possible. We can also talk about how, now that it’s dead, the swamp will slowly begin to retreat. That should make enough sense for people to believe that the Swamp is weakened, yes? And from there, the situation should at least be controlled to some extent.”

“Will that... work?” asked Alice.

Allira giggled. “Alice. We are Immortals. An Immortal slaying a monster is a nothing new.”

Ethan actually nodded. “Allira is actually right in this case. There are... probably over a hundred stories of my father slaying some sort of powerful monster and making an Illvarian territory safe. Most of them are based on real events, though many of them have been exaggerated over the years. In the first place, my father’s strength was one of the reasons Illvaria as a country was able to be founded in the first place. To hear him talk about it, back when Illvaria was a new country, the entire place was an untamed wilderness filled with monsters and mysteries. So an Immortal fighting off a deadly threat and saving the townsfolk is nothing new. It has a certain... rhythm to it. One that people expect.” Ethan’s grin grew wider. “As long as the public hears that a group of three Immortals did something, our words will quite believable. Because that’s just what people expect to happen. Not to mention, when people actually see the swamp retreat, it will prove our words.”

Allira grinned. “It would even be a good way to get in Fendrallia’s good books, at least a little bit. Being able to help out a neighboring country would help prove Illvaria’s friendliness... and, in a twisted sort of way, might also prove that Illvaria is ‘safe’ during this crisis. After all, if Illvaria can afford to send out two of its Immortals to help its neighbors, it surely isn’t suffering from the crisis as much as other countries, no? That would benefit us as a whole.”

Alice blinked in surprise.

Now that Allira mentioned it, it made sense... and it also brought up a new aspect of the crisis that Alice hadn’t thought of in concrete terms before.

Public opinion.

With the way that mana and people’s understanding of reality interacted with each other... Alice was starting to realize that public opinion was very important.

It was still a bit hard for Alice to grasp all of the implications of mana being so... reactive to people’s beliefs. Now that Alice thought about it... on Earth, it was entirely possible for people to be mistaken about the world. For a long time, people had believed that the sun revolved around the Earth, for example. No matter what people believed, it wouldn’t change the underlying reality. It just meant those people were wrong.

But in this world, if people believed something, it would eventually become true, now that the System wasn’t filtering those beliefs.

With that in mind... people like Allira, who were capable of manipulating public opinion, suddenly became very powerful.

Alice’s heart sank as she realized that there was yet another dimension of the crisis that she needed to keep a handle on... but on the other hand, there were also some interesting possibilities, if someone tried to use public opinion to handle some parts of the crisis... Alice started running through a few new ideas she could try. A lot of them would need to be implemented by someone who was a more public figure, but Alice still had a good relationship with many members of the Church of the System. They could probably be convinced to help her spread some news...

Alice got lost in thought, before she heard Allira curse again.

“There’s another group of the monsters catching up to us. Ethan, set us down. They’re moving faster, but there are a lot less of them. We can fight these ones, but I don’t think we can outrun them. We’ll also need to find a way to contain them without killing them, so that their ability to return to the battlefield after death doesn’t become an issue.”

Ethan paused for a moment, before he nodded. “I have a few ideas for that. How long until they arrive? How many are there?”

“Ten minutes. About two hundred.”

“Should be manageable,” he said, as Ethan started to lower the ship. Within thirty seconds, the group was back on the ground, and began to prepare for battle.