Chapter 18: Mission Start

Chapter 18: Mission Start

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryugii. This has been pulled from his Spacebattle publishment. Anyway on with the show...errr read.

Mission Start

Luck's a funny thing.

So is poker.

And my life, I guess, considering how the former led me to the latter.

A few hours after I started gambling, I'd found myself at a table being dealt cards. All around the table were older men in suits that made me feel young and underdressed. And, given how they all seemed aware of those facts as well, outnumbered.

I didn't start the night at the poker table, of course. I didn't even intend to go there at first. I didn't know precisely how Luck was trained in the beginning, so I started with the options that depended solelyor almost solelyon luck. I played some baccarat, craps, and took a few turns on the roulette wheel. I won some, I lost a few more, but I kept the individual bets small and in the end I didn't lose too much money. Better yet, my Luck began leveling up gradually, improving as I won, which I did a lot more often than I thought I would, though that wasn't saying much.

But then, that's why I'd put five points into it, wasn't it? What had held true before held true again; if I needed to get lucky to improve Luck, I'd need some luck to build off of, first.

With that confirmation of how Luck improved, however, I started experimenting. I began with higher bets, going from a hundred lien to a thousand where I could and making the highest legal bet when the limit was lower. As I still lost the same number of times, that quickly dropped my cash from near sixty thousand to below forty in about an hourmore money than I had ever personally spent in my life before today, down the drain like nothing. And yet, in that same time, I earned several levels of Luck, which itself began to show in my favor, though it wasn't enough to make me win more then I lost or even breakeven.

Until I started playing blackjack and counting the cards. That was the next thing I wanted to check, after allif there were things other than luck involved, could it still be improved? The answer turned out to be 'it depends.' It was possible so long as luck still played a major role; that is, being good and lucky was fine, but there came a point where it wasn't really luck anymore. I could use Observe to see the cards I was about to be dealt or even those inside of the deck. I could also use it to read the dealer's emotions and many other things, to a point where I knew exactly what to expect and could plan around it.

But at that point, it wasn't really a question of Luck anymore and the stat didn't seem to improve.

There was, however, a balance. If I simply kept a running count of all the cards that had been played, thus giving me a fair idea on whether the remaining deck leaned towards high or low value cardsthat was something else, sort of. I was shifting the odds in my favor, but I didn't know the specifics of each card, of each move. As long as I restrained myself, I couldn't be certain of winning or losing, and luck had its place.

However, the degree that Luck improved variedI figured it depended on how much a specific win had to do with knowledge and skill compared to how lucky I wasand it made luck slow to improve, even if I could win far more often that way. I found it worked better if I played high-stakes games around the rest of the casino until I had been chiseled down to about half my funds and then winning them back with blackjack, again and again. Though the dealers had gotten suspicious and had seemed ready to complain or ban me from the games after a while, Junior had stepped in and that had ended that, leaving me to buckle-down and grind tediously.

At least until Junior himself had interrupted me with an offer to try my luck at what he referred to as 'the big boy's table.' I was understandably suspicious and about a hundred percent certain he was pulling something over on someone, whether by trying to use me against the table or draw me in to get creamed.

I accepted anyway, simply because it had seemed like it might be a good opportunity and I was curious which, in time, had led me to the side room, Adam following at my back. My first hour at the table had been

Have you ever heard the saying that if you can't spot the sucker within the first half-hour, you are the sucker? Yeah, well, I was the sucker. In that time, I'd dropped from near seventy thousand to barely hanging onto the edge of twenty. It had been pretty brutalbut also a learning experience, in several very literal senses. I'd learned that Poker was great when it came to improving Luck, as well as several different skillsincluding, unsurprisingly, the Poker skill I developed while doing it.

I also learned that, though I had no real attachment to the money I was spending, being made a fool of brought out the competitive side of me and all pretenses of fairness and mercy had spontaneously evaporated. I Observed their emotions, I counted the cardswhich wasn't as effective as in Blackjack but still usefuland Intimidated them as best I could, and all around was an unabashed cheating cheater, allowing me to make a comeback and improve my skills.

But even if I could read people easily and was scarier then I should have been, Poker was just weird sometimes, which was probably why it was so good for Luckalongside, I suspected, the nature of human competition, how it was a zero-sum game, and the probabilities involved due to the higher number of variables. It wasn't the merely game itself that was weird, though it had its fair share of oddness, it was just

I'd climbed my way up to ninety thousand over the course of another hour, was dropped down to thirty half an hour later, went on a winning streak back up to seventy, got dragged down to forty, rose to over a hundred in a fairly amazing section of the game if I do say so myself, and fought every step of the way when they pulled be back to seventy again. It was just all over the place and in strange ways. It sounded really exciting when I spread it all out like that and it was, in a way, but there were a lot of silences, a lot of waiting, holding, and folding, and a lot of watching and staring. Parts of the game were twist after twist and other were empty and tense.

I'd gotten pretty good at it. I think it's because most of that had grown a lot more applicable to my life lately; preparations and patience and numbers leading up to an attack, no way of knowing if you were about to be struck down, and getting by on masks and lies. Getting by on wits and sheer dumb luck, that was my new life in a nutshell. And slowly, as the night dragged on, the odds seemed to shift in my favor as my luck gradually improved.

And then it was over. People had spent the evening sliding in and out of the game, whether because they were cutting their losses or wanted to quit while they were ahead, but I hadn't truly noticed how much time had passed until Junior returned to close up. I waited for the others to leave, Adam leaning against the wall behind me.

"Pleasure doing business with you," I said to Junior, voice polite as I held out his due. I still wasn't certain if he'd seen some skill in me or just wanted to bring in a sucker, but he seemed pleased whatever the case.

The larger man snorted as he palmed the money.

"You're a weird kid, Jian," He said. "But if this is your idea of gambling, you're welcome back any time. And if you want a more permanent arrangementcome by again and we'll talk."

"I'll do that," I said, bowing my head slightly. "Have a nice day, Mr. Xiong. Adam?"

My higher-leveled friend pushed off the wall, adjusting the glasses that had slowly slipped down his nose as we left.

"You get what you needed?" He murmured as we walked out into the darkness.

"Hard to tell with Luck," I replied. "But I think so; I was doing better there, at the end. We'll have to test what it actually does, though. But"

I was feeling lucky, I didn't say.

He nodded as if he understood anyway and then, somewhere between that step and the next, Blake was walking beside us, dropping down silently from above. Adam didn't react and, thanks to the Gamer's Mind, neither did I. She didn't question why we had been inside a casino or a club, though, so I assumed Adam had told her what we were doing when he informed her of our location. She passed me a pair of small booklets that I held onto until we were inside the car, at which point I promptly devoured it, closing my eyes as the knowledge flowed into me.

And then I flashed back to some superstitions about black cats as I suddenly stopped feeling lucky.

I felt my face twitch down into a frown as I stewed in the new information for a time. I glanced at Adam and then back at Blake, exhaling slowly. I think both of them noticed the sudden change in me and though they didn't visibly react, there was a sudden tension in the air.

One of the books had been the schematics for the airship, if relatively brief, but I didn't need obvious details when my power gave me full understanding of everything written within something. The other had, of course, been the driver's manual. We'd found the former in one of the email account Blake had gotten, emailed there by an employee that wanted to go some work at home, and she'd gotten the latter from the computer of one of the pilots, once we'd had their names. There was some overlap between the two, but to give ourselves the best chance, I'd asked she get and print off bothand between both of them, I knew everything I needed. And it was

"Give me a minute to think," I said, putting the car in gear and leaving the parking lot. Even this later, there were a fair number of people mulling about, but that's not why I was movingas safe places to talk about stuff went, inside a locked car in a parking lot was actually fairly good. I just wanted to move and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have helped Adam and Blake's nerves if I spent a few minutes in brooding silence. I turned on the radio for the same reasons, shifting it absently until I found something tolerable.

I drove aimlessly for a little bit, though it may not have seemed that way since I'd memorized the streets, and simply mulled over the new information. Some of it was good, some of it was bad, but

In time, I pulled over and finally sighed.

"It could be worse," I admitted, most because I didn't think they'd fall for a lie. "We can still do this, it'll just take a bit more work."

Reaching into my Inventory I drew out the schedule for the event and I took another glance over it to be sure I remembered it, filling in the blanks with the knowledge I now had. I pulled out my scroll next and placed it in my lap for the moment.

"Okay," I said, drawing out a pen and notepad as well and flipping the latter open to a blank page to start doodling. "The good news is, I can definitely fly the thing. I know everything it can do; I can put it through its paces. The bad news is that we're going to have a few things to deal with first, if we want to get it in the air."

I finished the drawing, sketching out a rough illustration of the airship's sleek design and marking out bits I thought were important, scrawling brief notes beside them.

"The first issue we'd anticipated; there are several security measures on the airship itself. Most of them won't be an issue, because they'll need to be taken off for the presentation, but there are several that" I shook my head. "There's software on the ship specifically for this presentation, to make sure nothing goes wrong, and it's both inside and outside the ship. The stuff inside won't be a problem since most of it was explained in the books, butthat outside controls will be a bit tougher."

I added another drawing off to the side, this one of a man in a room.

"This is the control station," I said, tapping the new picture. "It's mainly in case of emergencies and to avoid any incidents in the demonstration. Among other things, it can remotely lock and unlock the weapons systems on the Airship, largely to make sure no accidents happen within city limits, and if something happens, it can activate the emergency landing protocols even if the controls within the ship suffer damage, causing the ship to lower safely to the ground. Actually flying the ship requires both a confirmation from within the ship and one from outside it to unlock everything."

"So they can shut us down any time?" Adam asked, tilting his head to the side. "That's what you're saying?"

"Yesand no," I said, raising a hand to forestall them. "There's a few ways around it. It's all password or scroll activated, but if things are unlocked from both sides, I think I might be able to change which passwords and scrolls. They've had to go through a number of pilots and technicians, so I know it's possible, we just need to figure out a few things first. This is primarily an issue of timing, since it'll be hard to do beforehand, but we can do it."

"How?" Blake asked, surprisingly calm. I guess she wasn't surprised that things had gotten a bit more difficult.

"I'll get inside the ship," I said. "You'll need to handle the control center, because it'll need to be done quickly and quietly. I'll need to know the specifics about the system they're using to be sure of anything, but I can sneak in and wait until at least the flight portion of the system is activated. You get into the control tower, we disable whoever we need to, we change everything we have to, and we're fine."

"Once Blake does her thing, you two are gonna have ten, fifteen minutes to get to the ship before I finish reprograming everything. If you can't make it by then, I might have to leave without you," I said before pausing and looking at them both. "But seriously, make it there by then. I really, really don't want to have to do this alone. There's a little room for error, but if anything happens"

"Prioritize the mission," Adam nodded. "Whatever happens, it'll be okay."

I shrugged at him, pretty sure that was a lie. If Adam and Blake didn't make it there in time, the only options I'd have were to abort the mission or go without them, at which point I'd bewell. I'd be flying solo. Which would be really bad, because a not insignificant part of the mission relied on them crushing anything that got in the way. If I didn't have my massively higher leveled friends along for the ride

Well, I'd just have to hope it didn't come to that. We had a plan, we'd prepared for everything we couldhell, I'd leveled my luck up massively. I'd done everything in my power to make this plan go well, now all I could do was hope it would be enough.

And, of course, back hope up with everything I possibly could.

"Yeah," I said, nodding firmly as the Gamer's Mind kept me calm. "I'll wake you up when its time, okay? And hey, jokes aside, I'm thinking about catching a little sleep, too."

Adam gave me a slight frown but I saw understanding gleam in Blake's eyes as I sent the former a cryptic glance.

An hour and a half later, I stood in the woods by my house once more, black cloak around me, hood and mask covering my face. Dreary Midnight shifted slightly as a breeze rustled the branches and it felt fitting.

"I, Jaune Arc, call upon the ancient contract of ages past to summon thee," I said. In my disguise, my voice shifted to something calmly, firmer, assisted further by the confidence and power I'd found and clad myself in. "I hope that you heed my call. Come, Air Elemental!"

In Crocea Mores, there had been only a shift in my reflection and a slight rattle, so I wasn't certain what to expect from my second summon every. Not what I got, certainly. For a moment, the forest continued to rustle in the wind before the sound grew suddenly louder as the air rushed forth to spin within the circle as a miniature cyclone that sent my cloak flapping back in the wind. The air spun faster and faster until I had to brace myself against it and

And then it was gone, leaving behind a pretty little girl with white hair and a light green dress, almost visible currents of air writing around her.

By the way, when I said 'little girl,' I meant she was maybe fifteen centimeters tall, tops. Yeah.

Still, as someone who'd spent so much time disguising myself, I knew that appearances could be deceivingmeaningless, really. As such, I knelt smoothly by the edge of the circle and saw her smile up at me.

I am here. She said and it actually took me a moment to realize she hadn't actually spoke, he voice seemed so real. More than that, she spoke easily and normally, more so then Crocea Mors had been able to before we'd made our contract. I figured the shift had had something to do with the rest of the ritual and had suspected something similar from other Elementals, but

Then again, she was an Air Elemental and sound was a vibration through a medium such as, well, air, so perhaps it made sense.

I took a deep breath and felt something in that same moment, like something touching my lungs. It wasn't a physical sensation, thankfully, but it was still strange. I held the breath for a moment despite that and spoke.

"I'll begin in accordance to the ancient rituals. My real name is Jaune Arc. You have heard my true name; please tell me yours."

I came apart at the seams. I flew apart into a billion piecesmaybe a trillion pieceseach shifting and shaking wildly as I moved quickly. I rebound off of myself countless times in a dance that should have been, was, chaotic and yet came together as something else. I was gliding over mountains and hills, through the forests and across the seas, and it was

It was amazing.

For a moment, I was flying and it was almost indescribable. Like anyone born on Remnant, I knew there were limits to where I could go, what I could do. So much of the world was hostile and cruel and so little of it was safe. Before my first trip beyond the limits with Adam, I'd never left the safety of Vale before and I knew plenty of people who hadn't left it in their entire lives. That was just how the world worked. The Grimm were a constant threat, an ever present danger, and if you wandered too far from the kingdomswell, there were worse things than Nevermore and Deathstalkers. What would you do if you ran into a Nemean or a Leviathan?

Die, in all likelihood. Especially if you ran into a group of them.

We didn't let that stop us from living our lives. In the Great War, we had carved out civilization with Dust and Hunters and even now we could live in safety. With the trade routes and communication towers, we could reach out to other kingdoms, stand together against the darkness. Slowly but surely, we were growing, pushing the boundaries.

Butfor now, we still had to stay within the kingdoms.

The wind, though, was free. Across skies beaten by massive dark wings, through fields stalked by beast like mountains that walked, and even in the Darklands to the North, the wind flew without a care for man or beast or the titans of Grimm. It feared nothing and went anywhere, everywhere.

For a moment, I was jealous but the feeling passed, because that freedomit shared it with me.

I saw the circle, my body absent from its side. The trillion pieces of me began to drag slowly together, pulled back in by some terrifying gravity, and it hurt. Not so much the feeling of returning to freedom, though that was far from comfortable, but the loss that came with it was hard to describe. I felt like I'd been standing on top of the work and someone had decided to throw me off and see how far I'd fall. I fought against that pull, tried to resist it

And then, there she was, standing on the back of my hand, forehead leaned against my arm. I was whole again, just like that, shrouded in the mask and hide of a Nevermore.

It's okay. She murmured and the feeling of simple, honest joy returned. I gasped for breath then, before my heart suddenly slowed. I am here. My name is Levant. You are Jaune Arc?

"Yes," I said, opening my eyes.

Let us fly together someday, Jaune Arc.

"Yeah. I'd like that." I told her. "Maybe even someday soon. You and me and Crocea Mors."

She looked up at me.

We are one, as the ancient contract dictates.

"Our souls are one."

I am Levant.

"I am Jaune Arc."

Until our souls meet their ends

"We will be forever one," I swore for the second time.

Call me and I will fly for you. She said. Even if

I don't remember what else she said, because I was already falling. I slept in the grass that night and dreamt of storms washing across the world. It stirred the seas in its passing and left forests uprooted in its wake. Mountains were ground downnot all at once, but by time, by a hundred years or a thousand or more, each storm fading only to be reborn. I felt power there in the heavens, power I'd never even dreamt of before, and marveled at it whilst I flew on dark wings.

But when I woke up a short while later, I was ready.

XxXXxX

"Just one?" The woman at the front desk asked.

"Yup, just me," I said, adjusting my cap. I was in disguise which I think, technically speaking, meant I was disguising the disguise that disguised the disguise that was disguising me, which I found amusing. I slide the woman some lien over the counter and took the ticket she offered me, as well as the currently empty name tag and printed schedule. "My friends are just gonna watch the flight."

She nodded absently, probably tired and bored and trying to pretend not to be. I felt a little bad for her, both for the tedious job and what was going to happen soon.

"Can I help you with anything else, sir?" She asked as I glanced over the schedule and the map on its back. She glanced at the map pinned to her desk. "If you'd like, I can direct you towards wherever you'd like to go. There are several presentations scheduled to start soon."

I pretended to think about it for a moment before shaking my head slowly.

"Nah, that won't be necessary. To be honest" I said, tilting my head to the side. "I'm only interested in the ship."