Vol. 5 Chap. 80 Living Your Path
Truth slowly opened his eyes. He was staring at the smudged interior of the luggage compartment. The packs weren’t very comfortable. How strange. When he crawled in here before, it was like falling asleep on angel feathers and lullabies. Could it have been the crippling exhaustion?
He contemplated the myriad mysteries concealed in the scrapes on the ceiling. No. No, it had to be evil wizards that cursed the packs into lumpy unpleasantness. He could recognize the efforts of his own kind. This had the exquisite level of pettiness he constantly sought in his own work. He should take this as a learning opportunity.
He... had been a sailor. A Captain of a ship of the line whatever that was. He had drinks with philosophers and pissed in the street with holy wanderers. That mystic passage recited by ‘Newton’ echoed in his brain. It seemed to want to claw its way out, to slip his memory entirely. His soul was now far, far too strong for such nonsense.
Truth didn’t really know anything about alchemy. Some of the stuff on the Emerald Tablet sounded kind of familiar, but really, it wasn’t his field. Nevertheless, based on the way it seemed to bash on the inside of his ear drums, he could sell it to any Alchemist Tower for, approximately, All The Money.
Maybe it would be worth something off-world. If he chose to go off-world. Which he probably would. He looked at the little fragment of Etenesh glowing inside of him. It looked stronger, somehow. Not happier or anything. It just felt more robust. Like she was putting back together all her broken pieces, and was stronger than ever before.
Could he fall asleep for a little bit longer? Maybe. He shut his eyes and tried to fall back asleep. It wasn’t easy. The jolting of the bus reminded him of nights in canvas hammocks, and the cold blue sea.
He woke again when the cargo door opened and soldiers started reaching in to unload the packs. He wasn’t really sure where he was, but that was fine. He was north of Harban. Good enough.
He stepped out of his temporary bedroom and onto an army base. His bus was one of a dozen, all spilling soldiers onto the concrete pad. There was a big sign saying that this was Fort Red Spear. He wracked his brain and a vague memory of an inland base roughly northeast of Gamphe came to mind. It was a little north of where he thought the battlefront would settle, so... was it good that Onis hadn’t advanced that quickly, or a bad sign that their own problems were, somehow, even worse than what Jeon was going through?
He mentally shrugged. Not his problem in any sense. Time to hit the road. He quickly changed into his officer’s uniform, neither noticing or caring that he was surrounded by thousands of people. He could feel the after effects of whatever the angel did. It was like all the scraps of magic and muscle were finally organized and integrated. His blessings had refined and integrated with his spells. It was now the law of the world in the little area around Truth- he was outside their perception.
He had become one of those invisible forces that shaped the world. Ordinary people could speak with him, touch him, be harmed by him, and never once really see who or what they were dealing with. He had long since gotten used to it. Now it seemed more than natural. It seemed right. This is how the world should be. He stretched and flexed his fingers. He found an under-employed looking second lieutenant and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Where’s the Vehicle Pool?”
The lieutenant jumped, saluted in mid-air and landed in a ninety degree bow. Truth was mildly impressed by the athleticism. Must be fresh off the bus with the rest, still green as grass. Truth looked up into the drizzling rain clouds, and back at the young shoot. The lieutenant couldn’t be more than nineteen.
“Sir! Sorry I didn’t see you, Sir! I apologize, Sir!”
“Noted. Do better. Vehicle pool?”
“Sir! I just arrived, Sir! Let me find-”
“Never mind. Report to that man over there, the sergeant with the clipboard. He will tell you where to go.” Truth pointed.
Truth scratched at his chin as the firebird flew in big, lazy loops over the water. There were a few passes by reconnaissance summons. Perhaps someone would be dispatched to find out what the Hell he was doing up here. Perhaps not. One thing he did know- soldiers sometimes just wound up in the wrong place. Lost, misunderstood orders, separated from their units, plenty of reasons it could happen. It wasn’t a big deal, usually.
He was smelling a nascent soul tier rat. The whole thing seemed phony. Just too pat. He directed the bird to fly towards the area he suspected the final base would be.
The constellation is oriented the wrong way. I don’t know why that bugs me, but it does. It’s basically upside down. God, the two off-shore bases wouldn’t even be that far off-shore. Why bother?
As expected, there were no bases in sight. Worse was what was in sight- boats. Lots and lots of boats. Traveling in convoys for protection, which meant military vessels were escorting them. Which meant that the best detection capabilities of the Jeon Navy weren’t seeing anything remotely threatening.
Now... what would he do if he were Starbrite?
Deepest trench in the deepest ocean, obviously. The Green Sea is shallow for a major body of salt water. So... maybe the base is on the ocean floor, but you have to consider that the bases were arranged in the form of the constellation. Presumably they have something to do with the arrangement of the stars over Jeon, because there was no Ursa Minor here, nor a Pole Star. Usually that would mean being somewhere high. Astrologers were always building sky-watching platforms. But if you weren’t actually looking at the stars, maybe it didn’t matter as much.
Making things worse was that the map he saw had very vague, very approximate guesses about where Internal Security thought the bases might be, and when you get right down to it, in his past life he wasn’t measuring the exact distance between stars. Sailing was a deadly game of guesses, where you could take your latitude, but little else. You navigated based on time, speed traveled, direction and your questionable maps. Once you started hitting recognizable landmarks like Africa, or Guernsey, you could work out where to aim your bow next. You would get there eventually.
Or not. Quite often not. Lots of people just died at sea. Ships lost for no known reason.
What would he do if he were Starbrite? Truth’s go-to move was local reality manipulation. Blurring the lines of the ‘real’ and making sure the resulting picture flattered him. Now, if he were a Nascent Soul Tier nightmare with access to near-enough every spell on the planet and some kind of horribly mutated soul such as would cause any reasonable person to recoil in terror, he might just do the same thing. Shift the local reality a little. Doesn’t have to be a lot. Just enough to make people avoid it without noticing or remembering it.
Something clicked inside of him. That was it. It wasn’t an illusion, or a glamour. It was something that worked because it altered the fabric of reality on a level that most countermagic simply couldn't deal with. He certainly didn’t have a tidy solution for it. Truth slowly started grinning.
“Fly up. As high as you can.”
Up they went, through the cloud layer, then higher still. Once they were high enough that the flames struggled to burn, Truth ordered the bird to start making wide loops over the sea.
Truth leaned into Incisive, and summoned the Tongue. “Now, which spot would be the worst place to power dive and attack. I think I’m going to go... here! No, here!” It took quite a few tries. He must have been thrashing around up there for forty minutes.
“Found you. At long last, I found you.”
Another triumph for the almighty power of jank. He had finally found Starbrite.