Chapter 454: Day 890 (2) – Pressure, Tremendous Pressure

Chapter 454: Day 890 (2) – Pressure, Tremendous Pressure

“When was this?” I asked Clarissa.

“Yesterday. By tomorrow word will have spread. Any ideas how it could be done?” Clarissa asked me.

“Everyone? Even the Divine Empress didn’t get everyone,” I replied, while thinking as hard as I could about what the Astrologer could have done to wipe out a city secretly.

“That’s the issue. Esperanza is a key city. The lynchpin from the East to the West. I don’t have anyone I can put in as governor either. Everyone is busy getting their own cities and zones under control. A full wipe like this? If the Imperial Government can’t protect the cities from threats, then they might look elsewhere.” I immediately sat up straight and stared at Clarissa.Witness the debut of this chapter, unveiled through Ñôv€l--B1n.

“Is that likely to happen?” I asked.

“In time, if this keeps occurring. If it happened once, it could happen again. The Astrologer knows of our bunker down strategy and is moving to counter us and force action.” This wasn’t a situation of just option A or just option B. Whatever response I picked required a lot of nuance and careful consideration.

Clarissa was coming to me because this was something that required me to respond or sign off on whatever response we did give. If it a bad response, then things would only get worse. How had he wiped out an entire city? “Was there damage, gate guards?” I asked.

“No damage and there were guards at the gate,” Clarissa answered.

“Property ownership?” I asked since that would let us know if they were still alive.

“This message is all I have. So, you know as much as I do right now.” That wasn’t good. “We can keep bunking down, but long term, it will put us in a tricky position. What if people start paying for protection crystals to the Astrologer. We will get hemmed in.”

I could see it now. A direct fight would be risky, and he probably still wanted to replace me. “What about the Protector? Where is he? Isn’t he supposed to be looking for the Astrologer with all the bombings?” I asked.

“Yes, he is.” I nodded at this.

“Put him on the case, with the expectation he is to report back to us in twenty days on his progress. I will speak with him myself and most likely kill him if he doesn’t kill the Astrologer by then,” I told Clarissa. Her eyes went a bit wide.

“Really? That would destabilize the Free City of Hong Kong when they learn of it.”

Clarissa slid a makeup mirror across her desk towards me. There was an enchantment on it. I carefully picked the mirror up and it was enchanted with a low-level active glass-reflection type enchantment. “There is some wiggle room in the enchanting process, based on the Spirit stat. Same with store purchases.” I nodded at that but was focused on the information I was getting from the mirror.

I pushed in energy and the enchantment activated. I held it up in front of me and I saw the reflection of energy, not just the visible light spectrum. This was beyond priceless for me. I had brought up my requests and forwarded them on to Clarissa and then the good doctor.

There hadn’t been much hope at the start, but this invention was further proof Doctor Katz was on my side. The energy draw was a bit high, at 10 energy per second. It was a level 2 enchantment. I could easily maintain this and keep my energy level consistent. Another problem solved by this one tiny piece of equipment.

“This small and only one?” I asked.

“To focus the enchantment. There is some relation between size and power. That is why you can’t just enchant one very large thing and have it work the same way compared to a small item. This was in one of the books you recovered from Normandy. The effect is tied to the volume and surface area of the object. It was a factor for the super weapon,” Clarissa explained, and I nodded. I had probably heard this before but had forgotten.

That was why I wanted to start up a journal again. Little details like this that I would forget but were important. The problem was such a thing falling into the wrong hands or the Avatar spying on what I wrote.

It was hard to keep track of everything. That was why a notebook of key information was critical. Something to think about. This place didn’t have internet or textbooks and trying to remember it all was a good way to forget.

Carefully holding up the mirror close to my face, I could see a reflection of energy. It was a bit blurry, but it was a vast improvement over sensing things. I held up my right hand and carefully looked at with my eyes and then in the mirror.

There was a blur, much greater than what a person would normally see from the ambient energy in the air. The enchantment wasn’t capturing the full reflection. Energy wasn’t light. It was thought. That had been talked about by enough people and used in that way I was sure of it.

I had no good guess as to why it worked, just that it was working. If I had to guess, energy let out traces, which spread out. That was interpreted by the Sense stat into human senses, the key one being sight. I guess how the mirror truly worked with the enchantment was something at the molecular or atomic level. Both were things that were completely unknowns in relation to energy.

But this was useful, and I could use the mirror to carefully look for issues. While it wasn’t perfect and the blur it gave off was annoying, it was better than anything I had before. “What about getting a better one?” I asked.

“I can put in the request, but everything is stretched quite thin at the moment. It might take a few days,” Clarissa said, and I nodded at that.

“Thanks. Pass on my thanks to Director Katz,” I said.

“I will do so. Now I have to set up a pipeline to get more people ready to be governors. This is going to be rough, for a bit,” Clarissa said, but I knew she wasn’t really complaining. Just annoyed at having to set up another aspect of the government. I had come to realize she enjoyed this sort of thing. Delegating, having power, and deciding things.

While I could be an annoying boss, I was fairly hands off and we had a good working relationship. That was the thing that was most surprising, but she appeared to truly be content as the power behind the throne making sure everything ran. She was being paid an insane amount as well, which was kind of hilarious. The old me would have had a heart attack at 100,000 points per day. Now I didn’t even blink at that number.