Chapter 254

Chapter 254

When Matt woke up a few hours after his nap, he stealthily slipped out of Liz and Asters embrace, quietly padding into the kitchen, where he spent almost ten minutes looking out of their living room window at the world beyond.

It was far too reminiscent of Lilly for his liking, with still-smoking craters and ruined buildings waiting for demolition, but that was a sentiment he was sure would be present until they left this planet. This was just far too close to his own past trauma for him to ever feel comfortable, but seeing it, he was determined to do what he could.

After running through some calculations, he settled on two, possibly three weeks before they needed to move on. He wanted to stay and protect Ventillyria and its people, but as much as he hated to admit it, the three of them werent really needed here. Matt, Liz, and Aster weren't construction crews, nor were they therapists They were soldiers. Just soldiers who had been too weak to actually change things.

That was why they needed to leave.

Matt was conflicted. He knew that he should be happy as he had deliberately contributed to making the disaster just a tiny bit better, something he had always wanted to be able to do from his time as a kid on Lilly. But when he thought of Luna and her slaughtering a planet of monsters in minutes, even with a still crippled Domain, he wanted that kind of power. That level of power seemed like a distant dream, but looking up to the place where the moon had been shattered by Dao Child Maven showed him a far more possible goal.

Tier 25. He could do that.

Matt corrected himself with a shake; they could do that.

He wasnt alone.

Looking up at the predawn sky, Matt reaffirmed his vow to himself. He was going to kill Dao Child Maven with his bare hands. The selfish part of him hoped Light and Shadow never caught up to her, as he wanted to wring her neck himself, but he would be happy as long as she died. Preferably slowly, but that was something for the movies that rarely happened in real life. An immortal of her caliber could easily escape given even half a chance, meaning any fight would either end with her dead or fleeing. And the second wasn't an option he could accept.

As much as he hated to admit it, this was a reminder of the truth of the world. Those who were weak were at the mercy of the strong. Civilization was a veneer allowed to exist because those at the top of the pyramid wanted it, and the only way to free yourself from the game was to become strong enough to stand on top as well. But Matt wasnt really sure that was freeing yourself. That just seemed like another way to shackle yourself to the power structure of the world, but he also didnt care. He needed to get stronger because in the end, only being able to kill a few dozen monsters and save a few hundred civilians, maybe a few thousand, wasnt enough.

If he was a Tier 25, he could have saved far more people, lessening the burden Luna had dealt with. And more importantly, he could have chased after Dao Child Maven.

Sensing he was starting to spiral, Matt wrenched himself away from the window and went to start making breakfast for everyone.

If Luna didnt show up, he intended to go and help with the reconstruction any way he could. He wasnt a construction worker, but he also didnt need to be; entire city blocks would need to be demolished, and the materials carted off to rifts to make way for new construction. They would need people to throw up temporary accommodations to house everyone, they would need social services and people to help distribute food, and they would need people to help watch the orphans.

Matt clenched his fist and crushed his stirring spoon into splinters at the thought. He knew how scared they would be, left to sleep in an unfamiliar place, the adults not willing to tell them anything. The lucky ones would find at least one parent alive, just receiving medical attention. The others would concoct dozens of increasingly implausible scenarios to explain their parents absence, despite knowing that with each minute that passed the likelihood of them being found alive diminished.

He couldnt fix it; no one could, but he could be there. They wouldnt see it as helpful, but he knew that in the coming years, the presence of an adult who had been through it could help. Or at least, he hoped it would.

Tossing the eggs littered with splinters in the trash, Matt restarted breakfast just in time for Liz and Aster to crawl out of bed at the smells.

They didnt say anything for a few long moments before Liz asked, Was it this bad for you?The original appearance of this chapter can be found at Ñøv€lß1n.

Matt wanted to speak, but the words got caught in his throat. Aster, thankfully, had a connection to his spirit. It was worse for him. Or rather, it felt that way as a kid.

Matt nodded in agreement. I'm on the other side now, but there is a level of destruction where things are just awful. This is on a larger scale, but if you isolate a single city, this is exactly what happened to Lilly and me. It's still the same pain, same trauma, same tragedy, just on a much larger scale. For the individuals who lived through it, it's the same thing. I get what they are going through, and worst of all, I know no matter what we do, it's a drop in the bucket. I just wish we could have prevented this. I Stopping himself, Matt shook his head. It's all awful, but its not a competition.

Liz didnt say anything until breakfast was served, but she did hold his hand the moment he sat down. Talk to us if you need to. Dont hold it in.

Matt nodded even as he shoved a large piece of French toast into his mouth, chewing silently, letting his mind race.

The moment Matt put down his fork, Luna appeared. She was back to looking human, and her body was in one piece, but she still looked utterly exhausted. How are you?

She looked at all of them but focused on Matt. He knew she was worried about his mental state.

Matt shook his head to answer her silent question. Im not going to fall apart. Im just angry; I want to kill Maven, I want to scream at my weakness, I want to help however I can. That earned him a nod from his manager, but before she could speak, Matt asked his own question. How are you? You looked like shit yesterday.

Luna just blinked at him, and he thought she wasnt going to answer him, but eventually, she did. If I am lucky, my Domain will be fully recovered by the time you finish the Path, but that is more than acceptable. I know you have questions, and I must assure you I did all that I could within my confines.

Legally speaking, I could not act until the attack was underway. I had no legal proof of any attack beforehand without the spy in hand, and mere suspicions are insufficient for a warrant for additional investigation. Youre, of course, already aware of the basics, but the Empire has stringent laws to protect the privacy of those who could never detect, let alone block, the gaze of anyone sufficiently stronger than them. I also did not realize the full scale of the attack until then, as portions of it must have been set up for months, if not years, before our arrival. Spying into an active rift instance is far from trivial, even at this Tier difference, and forcing my way inside of one to remove one of the mana bombs would be quite challenging, even if I was at my best. They are also both highly illegal, and I would risk execution had I attempted it. Eliminating the terrorist leaders would have accomplished precisely nothing and guaranteed execution for me without the spy to link them to the Sects directly.

So, I waited for the attack to occur. I did not know precisely when it would be, nor technically even that there would be one. I had alerted my superiors to my suspicions of a potential internal terrorist attack, but they are still approximately a week out from arriving. So, I acted in the ways I could best. In the end there were far more rifts than I had feared, and I could only hold back a little more than half of them from spewing their monsters out. I simply was not strong enough to stop the entire attack, as I had hoped.

Matt felt himself blanch at the fact Luna had prevented even more rifts from extruding their monsters into the world. The thought that there could have been twice the amount of monsters was horrifying.

With that in mind, Matt looked at his manager with redoubled appreciation. She had stemmed the tide of monsters across a vast swath of territory, then obliterated millions of monsters worldwide in mere minutes. And on top of all that, shed done it with a heavily strained Domain. A Domain she had stressed so he could drink a mana concentration potion. If he could turn back the clock, he would rip the potion out of his younger selfs hands and pour it down his own throat, but knew that was impossible.

Who would have guessed the Sects would stage a terrorist attack to help them raid a supply depot? Luna should have never been forced to act in a real war, but this sneaky attack bypassed logic and planning.

How was this not against the rules? I thought the whole point of the war rules was to prevent exactly all of this, Matt vented. It just doesnt I dont understand.

The Sects were very careful, Luna replied, her voice perfectly level. Not once did they stray over what can be easily proven as an overstep. The decision for when the attack would occur, as well as the nature of the attack, was all orchestrated by Empire citizens. The Sects likely influenced that decision, but no Sect members directly made any relevant decisions. At least, not that I could prove. I'm sure there is a spy running around here, but they are careful, and even I haven't been able to catch them. Perhaps with a full inquisition we might be able to track down some level of undue influence from a Sect member, but even that is relatively unlikely. Sowing dissent is allowable within the war, though the Sects likely pushed decorum as much as possible in that regard. From what I can gather, all that any inquisitions would likely find would be that the Sects were sowing dissent among the populace to find and recruit Empire-born informants that they could pay for information. It is, legally, not the Sects fault that those who they bought information from utilized the mana crystals they paid them with to bankroll a massive terrorist strike. Nor is it their fault that they attacked at a time when a terrorist strike occurred. Explicitly so.

Explicitly? Oh wait, that was the Catial Resolution, wasnt it? Liz asked.

Caiatal Resolution, but yes. Once upon a time, there was a law within the war rules that should a disaster befall a civilized world, any ongoing battles within the system must be paused and both sides of the army ought to mitigate the disaster. It was promptly repealed after the Empire, in the days of the previous dynasty, arranged for terrorist attacks and natural disasters to occur any time they began to lose a defensive battle, to give reinforcements time to arrive.

Matt was taken aback. How could one do that to their own citizens? That was awful.

But there was one thing that stood out in Lunas explanation. You said the law was repealed? Does that mean the war rules can be changed? Could we make it so that this isnt allowed again?

Perhaps, Luna nodded. Theres not a single clear rule which could be changed to ensure nothing like this ever happens again, but it is entirely possible that there could be rules regarding influence and planning around known internal strife that could be established. But such things would only be created at the end of the war. Theres never modifications mid-war, that always leads to trouble. Now, there is one thing you can do to make it more likely that rule is made.

What? Matt asked. He would do whatever it took to stop this from happening again, even if he needed to bring the entire Realm to heel.

Win. The Great Powers respect strength, and the victor always has the most influence in the post-war councils. If the Empire wins, if you win, they will listen to you. If you cant get it changed after this war, then try after the next, or the one after that. Earn enough favor and fame and anything is possible.

Seeing that, he knew he needed to scrap that particular sample and start anew. It was a risk of enchanting in an open area like this, and to stop that from happening a second time, he set up an isolation field around his workstation. Not exactly ideal conditions for fixing medical equipment, but he had worked with worse.

The two days he took getting the first healing array running gave him a newfound appreciation for the work required to keep a hospital running. The healing array didnt provide undirected healing, as he would have initially assumed, but instead used a sort of indiscriminate-directed healing pulse. Within its enchantments was a truly dizzying array of checks and balances to ensure that the energy would find any wounds and focus on them, while also having an actual runic reference to how the human body was supposed to work. There were even overrides to detect when a non-human, or an immortal human with extensive body modifications, entered the array to exclude them from the human-specific optimizations.

It was absolutely dizzying and Quill still didnt understand at best half of it. But his AI had gotten him there in the end. He wasnt able to test everything himself, as his personal body modifications made him an invalid test subject, but the basic functionality absolutely was a go. Quill watched as mana was drawn from a crystal, fed through the arches and runes, slowly turning a pleasing shade of green-gold, and permeated the arrays entire volume. When he intentionally cut his finger, Quill was able to watch as mana gathered around the fingertip, sent out a pulse to the grander structure, and was sealed up by several pulsating strands of gentle healing mana.

One of the healers he didnt know that well, Healer Iris, ran through her own sets of tests once she arrived, utilizing a combination of enchanted items, skills, and even a few Concept pulses. She turned to him and said, Thank you Quill. This will help quite a bit. Itll need a bit of calibration once its on-site, but everything is working as Id expect for this old model.

Quill nodded. Im happy to be of assistance however I can be. Hopefully, I can get the others running a bit faster, now that I know what Im doing more.

Every bit helps, she thanked him, flagging down a passing warrior to help her carry the bulky array off, while Quill got back to work.

The second array, Quill was happy to report, only took him one day, most of which was spent getting the array running smoothly, rather than the sporadic and halting pulses hed initially gotten. The third array took him another two days, as it was a different model, but the final three were all the same Tier 10 model, which, thanks to a combination of personal practice and his [AI] having more than enough time to preemptively diagnose the repairs needed, only took him ten hours to get two of the three up and running.

The final array was damaged beyond repair, unfortunately, at least at his skill level. It wasnt a matter of Tier, all of the individual runes were absolutely within his grasp, but he simply didnt have the skill or skills needed to create a brand new runic core from scratch. He could broadly see how it might be done, but he would need a few more centuries of enchanting experience before he could match the dense, interwoven runic structure, even with the best tools.

With the repaired arrays deployed, Quill was suddenly left in the same situation as Torch and Snowflake. Most of their skill sets were destructive in nature, and their usefulness was limited once the healers didnt need an endless stream of [Bandage]s.

Quill ended up joining the other two demolition crews, who took apart the fallen buildings and shoved the chunks of concrete into rifts after stripping the metal from the buildings. The metal would be reforged and used to rebuild when the construction crews came through. Those crews were already on the planet, and Quill was thoroughly impressed at their skills.

He watched as a six-man team threw up a twelve-story building in two hours. If it had just been the physical structure, that wouldn't have been that impressive, but they also managed to get the building ready for enchanters to come through and add all the little features people expected in their homes. Even without those features, all the building needed was furniture, and they were fully livable and had people moving in the moment the building was inspected.

It was almost cathartic to see the empty plots of land when they were finished cleaning them up and knowing that in a few weeks or months at most, there would be buildings there.

But that was the only glimmer of hope Quill, Torch, and Snowflake had. With the deconstruction in hand, they moved to other jobs. Harder jobs.

Helping the survivors.

Snowflake spent a large portion of her time as a small dog and spent time with the youngest of the orphans acting as an unjudging pet they could swarm. A lot of them previously had pets of various types, and seeing her, they turned to her as a safe harbor in the storm. There was just something healing about something fluffy to hug that drew the kids.

Matt knew it was taking an incredible toll on her psyche, but Aster pushed through, always playing the cheerful animal for the kids. They never knew she cried herself to sleep in Matts arms each time they were forced to take a break, having acted as a rock for the kids to pour out their emotions during the day.

He suggested she take a break, but she refused, saying that she could handle it but just needed to get the pent-up emotions out of her.

Liz wasnt any better. Torch was a silent protector, but the woman underneath was an incredibly caring woman and took the sight of the orphans hard. Between serving meals at the food banks, one of the uses of her flames she could get away with, Torch spent time with the orphans doing what she could, but in private, Liz broke down asking if things were this bad for Matt when he was a kid.

He wanted to lie and tell her that things hadnt been this bad but, knew that wouldnt help her, so he admitted it had been just as bad, if not worse. For all that Ventillyria had a larger attack and tragedy, the local nobles were at least actively working to make things better and getting help from the surrounding worlds. His city had had no such help, and it had been weeks before his group of kids had even moved out of the ballroom they had sheltered in.

That information seemed to break something inside of both Liz and Aster, who wept through seeing what he had been through, but Matt felt nothing. He was numb to it all. Objectively, he knew that wasnt healthy, but he just didnt have the emotional capacity left over to feel anything. He knew they meant well, but seeing the thousands of orphans, he had clammed up, wanting to just get through this for the kids. When he was on the other side, he could process things, and he only had a month to make things better.

And it was hard.

Probably the hardest thing he had ever done.

Quill spent most of his time in the final two weeks with various groups of kids. He didnt tell anyone, but he couldn't help seeing the faces of those kids he had been in the orphanage with, layering over the faces of these kids. He wasnt sure if the faces were even correct with it being so long, but they were the faces that haunted his quiet moments, which was close enough to the same thing to not make a difference.

Still, he did his part. Quill, like all celebrity Pathers, was popular with the kids thanks to the Empires propaganda, and he leveraged every bit of charisma and charm he had to interact with them. He toned down the more ragged edges of Quills personality, but kept things cheery for them despite the pain it caused him.

Some kids just wanted to be close to him, some used him as an adult to vent to, and others used him as a punching bag. All of them cut him to ribbons, but he did his best to push through and be the rock they so desperately needed. Soon, the repeated emotional injuries left him sore and angry. He wasnt angry at the kids, who did exactly as he did and lashed out, but angry at Maven.

He tried to avoid it, but Matt still found himself growing attached to a small group of kids. A young girl, only seven, reminded him of himself at that age. She was angry but kept it bottled up. She put on a polite, even cheerful front to the others, but she couldnt hide from his spiritual perception. He watched as she punched the wall of the bathroom, screaming into her balled up shirt until her knuckles cracked, her skin split open, and she was out of energy.

He took her aside and gave her a few words of wisdom that had helped him in the aftermath of his own orphaning. Pain is a constant, suffering is optional. It wasnt some magical cure to her anger and pain, but it seemed to help her contextualize the situation a little. At least from what he could see when she got alone time, she stopped the self harm, which was at least a step in the right direction.

As much as he didnt want to spy on the kids, it was very necessary; suicide attempts were far too commonplace despite the healers and therapists making their best efforts. Matt just hoped that in the coming weeks and months, the kids could push through those dark thoughts. Even high Tiers couldnt be perfectly vigilant, and if the kids tried enough, it was possible they would succeed.

Though the kids he watched werent in the high risk category. While the odds were astronomical, almost fifty thousand kids under the normal age of majority had awakened. Without the awakening chamber, the kid needed to be within a foot, possibly two at the outer limit, of a monster being killed, which could earn them a portion of the slain monster's essence. Those newly awakened children were dangerous not just to others, but to themselves. A three year old throwing innate [Fireball]s when having a tantrum was dangerous to their lower Tier handlers, but especially themselves, so immortal caretakers had to be allocated for the highest risk groups.

Despite all the horror, Ventillyria came together. Those families who managed to escape unscathed opened their doors to get people off the streets, and the helpfulness from strangers was at an all-time high while the crime was at an all-time low. There were bad actors, of course, but even the criminal population seemed to have no stomach for petty crime, and anyone who tried to steal from the relief centers found themselves turned in by the fences they tried to sell their goods to.

On the other hand, crime still happened, just a type of crime that was different than what Matt had considered likely.

A week after the initial attacks, when he was deep in his enchanting work, there was a run of murders. Those former sect sympathizers hadnt been ignored or forgotten by the general populace just because they took off their robes. Matt was sure most were innocent civilians who had simply been caught up in the new fad, but after the first attacks, any surviving members of the local sects quickly realized they were prime targets for being murdered in retribution by angry survivors.

That led the sect members turning themselves in to the marchioness, who put them under watch. Matt was sure most would be released in the coming weeks or months, as there was no way that many people had much to do with the attacks, but it was still safer for them to remain in custody rather than at the mercy of angry civilians who wanted to strike back at anyone they could reach.

Thankfully, by the end of the month, the orphanages were established, but Matt didnt expect them to last long. Families were opening their doors, fostering kids as they could, and adults who had lost their own families were acting as foster parents and caretakers, watching over as many kids as they could.

That even included the immortals. Beverly, Shane, and Yosef were among them, which made Matt proud to have befriended them. They had been in the underwater city when the attacks happened, and after defending that location, they had rushed to the land and done what they could, but the fighting had been over at that point. Afterwards, they, like Matt, Liz, and Aster, had helped the rebuilding efforts before volunteering to take care of as many kids as they could.

In any other situation, it would have been amusing as they called the three of them out for being Quill, Torch, and Snowflake, but they weren't trying to out their identities. Instead, they just gave their thanks for their efforts. Shane, in particular, begged them to get retribution for the loss, which they easily agreed to. The man had hated the Sects before this incident, and now just wanted to see them destroyed, a sentiment Matt wholeheartedly agreed with.

They didnt talk long, but the three of them made their intentions to join the army reserves after the kids they were looking after grew up clear, and hoped to see Quill, Torch, and Snowflake in the army by then.

Matt wished he could say things were all the better after just one month, but Ventillyria needed a lot longer to heal; he was at least sure it would heal, but their part in that healing was over.

Now, they needed to get strong enough to ensure that it couldnt happen again.