Chương 256: Chapter 255 - Farming

Clouds dotted the pale blue sky above him. Alexander hung in the air above the fortress, the wind pulling at the OACS armor in steady gusts. Droney floated beside him, hovertech working now that they were free of the anti-flight ward. Below, the fortress occupied the highest point of a rocky outcrop that jutted from the surrounding terrain like a broken tooth. From inside, the place had felt large. From above, it was a compact rectangle of dark metal walls and flat rooftops, built with a singular defensive purpose.

Around it, the land told a different story. The ruins of a village spread outward from the fortress's base. Stone foundations. Collapsed timber frames. The remnants of walls that had once been homes, now reduced to rubble and scorch marks. Craters pocked the ground between the structures, some large enough to swallow a car. Bones lay among the debris. Bleached by sun and rain, but not yet crumbling. A month of exposure. Two at most. The fortress had been built on top of what was left.

One end of the village had been cleared, foundations laid directly over the rubble, the metal walls rising where stone cottages had stood. Whoever won the fight for this gateway hadn't waited long to fortify their claim. Alexander turned slowly in the air, taking in the wider landscape. The gateway's illusory mask hadn't been entirely fake. The view it projected was real, just stripped of the fortress and the destruction around it.

A wide dirt path led away from the outcrop, winding down toward a treeline that stretched across the horizon to the west. To the east, open grassland rolled toward distant mountains, their peaks catching the light. Between the trees and the mountains, the land was inhabited. Dirt roads threaded across the terrain. He could make out the shapes of distant structures. Farms, maybe. Settlements. Despite being another reality, it was just a normal world with normal people going about normal lives.

Except he knew the Empire of Stars built ships that crossed the void of space and possessed complex magic that rivaled the technology of his own universe. The structures below were wood and stone. The roads were dirt. The countryside stretched between villages the way it had on Earth before industrialization. And sitting in the middle of it, a fortress of advanced alloys built on the bones of one of those villages. Something didn't add up. Gateways attracted conflict.

On Earth 1, permanent gateways were becoming strategic defensive assets or potential access to resources. Here, the result had been a village reduced to rubble, and a fortress raised over its corpse. Perhaps a local village wizard had accepted the quest during the 6th invasion and won. The gateway then drew more powerful attention, the result being what he now saw. The 7th invasion had come and gone over a month ago. Uneventful for Grimnir. No mandatory defense. No complications. He frowned.

The 8th should have arrived by now. The System had kept to its monthly cadence since the beginning. It was mechanical, in a way. Predictable. Every invasion landing within the same window, month after month, like a clock that had never needed winding. The clock had stopped. He didn't know what that meant. But the System didn't do things without reason, even if he had no clue what its vision was. Alexander shook his head. It was a problem for another day.

Bloody footprints led out of the fortress, then stopped at a patch of scorched earth. Flashpoint had taken off, heading in the direction of the winding dirt path. Alexander followed the trail from the air, accelerating over the treeline. The forest canopy was dense, old-growth. A woodland that had never been managed or cut back. His powers swept ahead of him, scanning for metal and bioelectric signatures. There was life everywhere. Hundreds of signatures pulsing throughout the forest. Animals. Large ones.

Things he couldn't identify. None of them human-shaped. The forest thinned ahead. The path emerged from the trees into open ground, and Alexander spotted the smoke before he saw what was burning. He descended. The crater sat in the middle of the road. Still smoldering. Heat rippled the air above it, and the smell hit the OACS sensors, translated into reports immediately. Charred wood. Cooked grain. Something worse underneath. Alexander landed at the crater's edge and carefully swept the area with his senses.

Nothing living within three hundred meters. The surrounding forest pulsed with animal signatures, but whatever had been nearby had fled. The wagon had been reduced to a blackened frame. One wheel, warped by heat, was embedded in a nearby tree. The rest was debris. Barrel staves scattered across the road, split and scorched. The contents had been mundane. Apples, burst and blackened, littered the grass on both sides. Flour had caught fire and burned everywhere. Two horses lay in the traces.

The nearer one was dead, burned so thoroughly its legs had drawn up beneath it. The farther one was still breathing. Its back half and right flank were charred black, the skin cracked and weeping. Each breath came with a shallow wheeze. He extended Metallokinesis, found a sliver of iron in the wagon debris, and drove it through the animal's brainstem. The breathing stopped. The human remains were near the center of the wreckage.

A man and a woman, both burned beyond recognition, their bodies contorted by heat into positions that bore no resemblance to how they'd fallen. Beside them, two smaller shapes lay curled in on themselves. Small enough that there was no mistaking what they were. Alexander looked at them for a long time. A metal wand lay in the road ditch, three meters from the wagon. Melted along its length, the handle fused into a shapeless lump, the tip bent at an angle where the metal had softened and folded.

One of the adults had been a wizard. Armed, presumably capable, and traveling with children and trade goods along an established road. No parents with children in the wagon would have attacked a flaming man flying overhead. The power difference would have been obvious. Fear would have told them to yield, to flee, to do anything except fight. Which meant Flashpoint engaged them. Rained fire down on a family. For what? To what end? They were no threat to him. No threat to Earth 1.

Alexander crouched beside the wand and turned it over with Metallokinesis. The metal was an alloy he didn't recognize, similar to the fortress walls but lighter. The runes that would have lined its surface were gone, erased by the heat that had killed its owner. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. He stood.

Annie had told him so long ago, before he understood anything about the new world he found himself in, that superhumans had implants that could track everything. Like a game. Then the System had descended on reality, or perhaps had always been secretly there working in the background. Now everything the System touched grew stronger through conflict. Superhumans. Wizards. Cultivators. Cultists. Every category of Dreamer, killing and growing more powerful with each life taken.

Flashpoint wasn't on some secret mission. He wasn't fighting in defense of Earth 1 or for a cause. He was fighting his way through this world. Farming it. Throwing himself into combat against people he could overwhelm, collecting the attribute gains the System rewarded for killing enemies. The same increasing returns Alexander had identified months ago. The same incentive structure that made the System's design so insidious.

The same reason he had captured a gateway to give his own people a place to train and grow stronger. A world with Beasts. Dangerous enough to justify his own hypocrisy. Just not intelligent enough for him to lose sleep over. Flashpoint had done exactly the same thing. He'd found a world full of targets. People who, to someone like Flashpoint, might not register as people at all. He'd probably traded the rights to do so with a pair of wizards who intended to do the same to his own world. Alexander rose into the air.

Higher than before. Past the altitude he'd held over the fortress, up through the thin winds until the landscape flattened beneath him and the horizon pulled away in every direction. Higher than the clouds. He twisted the helmet, releasing the seal, and pulled it off. He could have tapped into Droney's optics. They outperformed his biological eyes. Even the OACS sensor suite might do. But he wanted to see with his own eyes. Wanted to know where his limits were. Wanted to move them. Alexander reached into his Core.

Electrokinesis cycled, built, and pushed outward. But this time, he caught all of the power and concentrated it upward, focusing it into his optic nerves. His vision sharpened. Distant details resolved. He pushed harder, past the comfortable range, into territory that made his eyes ache and the blood vessels behind them throb. Pain threaded through his skull. Then lightning erupted from his eyes. The world below snapped into focus with a clarity that felt like it was being burned into his retinas.

The curve of the horizon became visible. Roads and rivers resolved from blurred lines into distinct paths. Two cities appeared in opposite directions, large enough to dominate valleys, their layouts dense and organized. Villages dotted the landscape between them, connected by the same dirt roads, surrounded by farmland. And there. On the other side of the forest, closer than the cities, visible now that he was high enough. A village. Flashes of light erupted from its center. Dozens of them, rapid and chaotic.

Combat. Spells firing. Buildings collapsing. A red ball of light tore through the sky above the village, banked, and dove back toward the ground. Flashpoint. He'd found him. Alexander let the Electrokinesis taper back. Lightning died. The pain behind his eyes faded to a dull pressure. He blinked, and the world returned to its normal resolution. Technopathy caught the signal before he could move. Faint, using a frequency he recognized. His own encryption. Coming from behind him, from the direction of the fortress.

His drone had returned through the gateway, carrying a message. Alexander pulled the data stream from the air using Technopathy and fed it directly into his visual cortex. The recording played inside his mind. Augustus filled his vision. His flat cap was gone. A gash ran from his hairline to his left eyebrow, held together by small pins of magic. His jacket was torn at the shoulder, the armor beneath it cracked. But he was standing. His eyes were clear.

"Alex. I don't have a lot of time. I'm just outside the gateway." Augustus paused. Gathered himself.

"One of the wizards is dead. But killing him activated a magical failsafe that took out the entire building, along with half of the members of the Haze guild." He took a breath.

"The other one doubled in strength after that. Instantly. I suspect it has something to do with them being twins. Some kind of soul magic." He looked away from the camera for a moment.

"Talia was hurt badly in the explosion." Alexander's fists clenched. The recording continued.

"Don't worry. She's alive. Everyone is safe here. Annie's already taken her and the surviving Haze members to Astra Omnia. I'm heading there myself once I send the drone through to find you." Augustus turned back to the camera.

"We wounded him, but he's coming for the gateway. I'm too hurt to stop him alone. I thought about joining you on the other side, even though you said not to." His jaw clenched.

"I won't. Be careful, Alex. I estimate he'll pass through roughly forty-five seconds after the drone's arrival. Auggy out." The recording ended, but the data kept streaming on repeat. Alexander hung in the air. The wind filled the silence. His heart beat. Leaving them to face two unknown threats had been a mistake. Talia injured. Augustus hurt. All because of his priorities, his poor decision-making— He exhaled. His heart beat. No. They were strong. The outcome didn't change that.

Grimnir had formed around the four of them. Every one of them had known the risks from the start. Helping Frank. Eliminating Mercy and Pandora. Challenging Santiago. The Nexus. The conference. They shared an understanding, had since the beginning. That some things were worth risking everything for. That there was always a chance someone might not come home. He believed that. His heart beat. He also knew, in the quiet place beneath the justification, that part of him was here because he wanted to be.

Not just to stop Flashpoint from becoming something the world couldn't survive. But because he wanted to fight him. Defeat him. Stand above him. Ambition dressed as duty. The oldest lie powerful people told themselves. His heart beat. Fine. Alexander put his helmet back on. The seal hissed closed. His heart beat. Annie knew that about him. Augustus knew it. Talia, too. They understood. Whatever the injections had awakened in them wasn't power without purpose. Each of them carried their own aspect.

Embodied something at their core. They just didn't talk about it. Alexander inhaled. Ahead of him, Flashpoint. Someone he wanted to kill. Flames still circling above the village. Flashes still erupting from the ground. People still dying. Behind him, the woman who'd asked for his help. Who he'd carried. Whose blood was still on his gauntlets. Unconscious in a healing pod. Two directions. One of him. So be it. Alexander turned back toward the fortress. Metallokinesis pulsed.

The waves seized Droney and every part of the OACS. Both mental threads layered separate oscillations, one after the other, building speed. The landscape blurred as he accelerated. Unlike Julia's dedicated Flight power, flying had always come with a speed limit for Alexander. Without protection, the air tore at clothes, eyes, and skin. It burned. He'd learned that the hard way. Alexander pushed harder. Metallokinesis cycled faster in overlapping waves that never fully discharged before the next pulse hit.

The trees became a green smear. The grassland streaked beneath him as the air compressed ahead of the armor, pressure building against the faceplate. The OACS took the friction, heat dispersing across the thermal coating the way it was designed to. The air split. Thunder cracked behind him and rolled across the sky, echoing off the distant mountains. The shockwave flattened grass in a widening cone beneath his trajectory. The fortress grew from a speck on the horizon. Became a shape. Then a structure.

Alexander descended. The sonic boom chased him down. He killed his momentum as he dropped through the torn roof, Metallokinesis reversing hard. The landing still hit the metal floor with enough force to send a shockwave rippling outward. Bodies slid across the floor. Robes and debris scraped against the courtyard walls. Dust erupted in a cloud that rolled to every corner. At the far end, the black-robed wizard turned toward him. One arm rose to shield his face, hair and robes snapping in the dying blast.

His other arm hung at his side, bent at an angle that said it wasn't working. Didn't matter. His staff floated beside him regardless, hovering at shoulder height, runes crawling with light along its length. A spellbook hung open in the air before him, pages turning in the settling wind. Behind the wizard, the gateway stood dark and silent. Sealed. At least that answered the question of who he had to kill to claim it.