The Fusionist

Letting out a sigh of satisfaction, Larek moved the last of the Fusions he’d just created to the side, Kevara having left a while ago to get some sleep. The Fusionist supposed that he should be doing the same, as he was aware that he’d been going at the Fusion-creation process for a while now, but he didn’t feel tired at all; instead, he somehow felt energized from all the work he’d done.

Looking around the room, the stacks of materials that had seemed so impressive before he started were largely gone, though there were some of each left in case they were needed for some reason. Groups of Volunteers had periodically shown up during the day – and night – to pick up what Kevara organized after Larek was done with them, and it was all she could do to keep up with his production.

Not only was he able to snap the formations together with a thought thanks to his practice with patterns and his new Specialization, but the Pattern Cohesion costs were 25% less, which also affected when he created multiple Fusions simultaneously through Focused Division. When he added in his Pool of Pattern Cohesion, which was now over 100,000, there was a point where, with some of the less expensive Fusions, he was able to make 150 of them at a time. His focus was barely enough to keep so many together, which was why he didn’t push past that, even though he was fairly sure he could do even more if he needed to.

He hadn’t kept count, but if he had to estimate how many Fusions in total he’d just spent the last day and night creating, he wouldn’t be surprised if he had reached nearly a million.

The number of Fusions that actually added up to boggled his mind, as it would’ve seemed like an impossibility even a few months ago, but he had one thing in particular to thank for his speed: Pattern Restoration. He already knew that his Specialization had made snapping together Fusion formations almost instantaneous, to the point where all he had to wait for was adding Mana to the Fusion to complete it, but that was only half the secret. His new Skill was the other half, as in addition to maintaining his internal pattern despite using it so much to make so many Fusions, it also increased the regeneration of his Pattern Cohesion. His regeneration had always been fast compared to anyone else, but with the new Skill, it was so much faster; it wasn’t on the same Level as his Mana regeneration, but even at 10% to 15% of that speed, that meant that his 103,000 pool of Pattern Cohesion could be refilled completely within 10 seconds or less. In essence, there was very little downtime in between Fusions, as it took slightly longer than that for Kevara to take the finished products and bring in new materials.

Peering at his internal pattern after all that work, he was more than happy to see that it appeared just as strong and healthy as it had been when he started. Even after a million Fusions made in large batches one after another, no lasting damage or even potential damage could be seen throughout the entire thing. It had held up better than ever before, and he couldn’t be happier.

Standing up to stretch a little, as he’d largely been in the same spot for many hours – other than a few brief breaks to eat and use the bathroom – he estimated that it was the really early morning hours of the next day, which was probably why he saw Nedira and Norde still sleeping. Truth be told, he couldn’t actually remember when they came back, nor when they had actually gone to bed, as he had been so focused on getting the Fusions done that everything else hadn’t been able to catch his attention.

Larek was too full of energy at the moment to head to bed himself, so after grabbing a small snack that he took back to his comfortable throne of pillows, he ate it while he pulled up the notifications he’d been ignoring while he was working.

Fusion has reached Level 94!

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Fusion has reached Level 97!

Pattern Formation has reached Level 94!

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Pattern Formation has reached Level 97!

Pattern Restoration has reached Level 56!

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Pattern Restoration has reached Level 58!

Multi-effect Fusion Focus has reached Level 94!

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Multi-effect Fusion Focus has reached Level 97!

Focused Division has reached Level 96!

Focused Division has reached Level 97!

Spellcasting Focus has reached Level 77!

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Spellcasting Focus has reached Level 79!

Energetic Transmission has reached Level 6!

For all that he’d created, his Skills hadn’t gone up dramatically like he was hoping, though they did improve. Even his Energetic Transmission Skill, which he was fairly sure was responsible for being able to transfer Mana into the formations so smoothly, had gone up a Level, which he now knew was difficult to accomplish with his Guardian Skills.

And yet, he still hadn’t been able to push anything up to Level 100, which was what he was semi-hoping would happen, but he was left disappointed. Then again, he’d been creating Fusions that he’d already created many times before, not something new and challenging, so he thought he was lucky to get what Level increases that he did.

Perhaps with the new Fusions I’m going to create?

Skill Levels aside, what was more important to him was designing the Fusions so that they performed exactly how he needed them to. Theoretically, he was supposed to start teaching potential Fusionists either later today at the earliest or even the next day, so he didn’t have a lot of time; he’d rather spend this relative “downtime” thinking about what he wanted to accomplish – and how to do it with a Fusion.

The first Fusion he needed was one where it could be used to capture and then transport monsters somewhere else. With the SIC and the nearby Factions gearing up to attack them, the plan was to make the area around their towns and cities a bit more dangerous by introducing these monsters, causing the Mages and Martials that would otherwise attack the Volunteers to stay close to home and help protect their people instead. It would be a bit complicated in execution, as there were a lot of moving parts associated with the plan, but it was the only one that anyone could think of short of preemptively attacking these same people. That, as they had discussed, would be a poor idea, as they didn’t want to kill the people whose duty it was to protect the normal citizens of the Kingdom, and who had gone astray because of what the SIC was telling them about the Volunteers.

Besides, it was only supposed to be a temporary measure until Larek could handle the SIC leadership, so it wasn’t something that would be needed forever.

With this in mind, he turned his focus on how this monster transportation could be accomplished. His first thought was designing some sort of cage made of hardened air that could be dangled underneath the Volunteers’ Transports, where they would simply drop the monsters off where they wanted them by deactivating the Fusion. But even if that worked, that didn’t help with the most important detail: Capturing the monsters in the first place.

There was a reason why many of the Volunteers still used the staves they were given to kill monsters, even as many of them were branching off into different attack methods as they developed their Mage and Martial Skills. Attacking from range was safe, preventing the need to get up close and personal with something that could kill them if they weren’t prepared for it. But capturing a monster rather than killing it would likely require the Volunteers to be a bit closer, as capturing one from afar seemed more difficult.

Or would it be?

He’d originally been picturing a group of Volunteers throwing ropes around some sort of dangerous monster, wrestling it to the ground while tying it up, and then throwing it in some sort of cage made of hardened air walls. But that seemed unnecessarily complicated, as there was no real need for that kind of process when there were much better alternatives.

Thinking about the staves that the Volunteers already used, as well as his idea about a cage made of hardened air, he considered the possibility that he could create a Fusion that would form a simple air cube around a distant target. He already used a proximity detector that could determine distances well enough in his Variable Elemental Destruction Fusion, which caused explosions near the object it was pointed at, so why not a portable cage instead of an explosion? It could then be turned on and off with mental phrasing, and it would follow the tip of the staff as it was moved around, allowing whoever was using it to direct the monster toward a larger cage of air designed to hold more of these monsters for transport.

The idea behind it seemed simple enough in theory; a group of Volunteers could fly into an Aperture’s territory on a Transport, aim their staves down at the monsters below, capture a few dozen of them and deposit them in a holding cage, fly the Transport to where they needed to release the monsters, and then repeat this with all the towns and cities that were threatening to march toward Thanesh for an attack.

As he really dug into the plan, already designing in his mind some Fusions that could make this happen, he stopped when he realized that this plan wouldn’t necessarily work – though the reason wouldn’t have anything to do with his Fusions. He was fairly confident that what Fusions he made could accomplish what he designed them to do, but the logistics of using them could be a problem. Sure, they could transport monsters into an area where the Factions would have to eliminate them; the problem with that was two-fold, however.

First, there was the danger of killing innocent people with the sudden appearance of those monsters, as none of them would be expecting them. He thought about what might happen if a bunch of monsters suddenly showed up in one of the nearby farm fields near Thanesh; sure, the farmers could easily kill the monsters, but how quickly would they be able to do that? And would it be before someone got hurt or killed? If some people were killed, then how did that make them any better than the SIC who came inside the city not so long ago and killed Volunteers while making it only look like monsters had attacked them?

Secondly, even if no one got hurt, what if someone saw what they were doing? The Transports could camouflage their presence by doing such movements at night, or he could make a modified version of the Camouflage Dome to work better while moving, but there was every chance that they would still be spotted shipping in monsters. Again, thinking about it from the perspective of the Volunteers and Thanesh, if he saw the SIC shipping in monsters to attack them, he would be understandably angry and would want to get back at those responsible for this act. That would defeat the purpose of going to the SIC leadership and getting them to call off the attacks, one way or another.

While this plan had seemed like it could work while they had been discussing different strategies, upon further reflection, Larek didn’t think it would work the way they wanted it to. That being said, the objective of keeping the Factions too busy to attack the Volunteers was still a valid one, and there wasn’t any better way to do that than with monsters endangering their charges.

Or at least the threat of monsters attacking. But what would that look like?

Thinking about threats toward a town or a city had him reflecting upon the past as he tried to recall what had worked in the past. Roaming monsters were still present nowadays, but were very rare; they were typically remnants of when Apertures hadn’t been seen yet, as the randomness of the Scissions’ appearances plagued the land—

Wait. That’s it. Scissions.

For a thousand years, Scissions had been the main threat to the Kingdom, causing the towns and cities throughout the land to huddle behind their walls, protecting them from the hordes of monsters that would flow out of the Scissions that seemingly appeared at random. It was when the Scission Interception Corps had been a driving force of protection, rather than whatever it was today, and every Mage and Martial belonging to the organization would have been willing to give their lives toward protecting the citizens they were responsible for.

Larek had seen the heroism and selflessness that they displayed on the walls multiple times, after all.

While not all of that heroism and selflessness was gone, the motivations of the Factions – and the SIC – were different now. Though Apertures technically presented just as much of a threat, if not more, than Scissions ever did, that danger was contained in the Aperture’s territory; it didn’t directly assault the walls of nearby towns, unless it was allowed to expand uncontrollably. This had given the ones doing the defending of when and how they would handle their defense, and if culling was kept up at a sustainable rate, it was actually much safer than before. It was this safety that would allow the Factions to spare a good portion of their forces to send against the Volunteers.

But if a Scission were to appear again somewhere outside their walls, I can only imagine that they would be much more reluctant to leave their people defenseless.

Of course, such a thing was impossible, as there weren’t any more Scissions popping up anywhere in the Kingdom, nor in the entirety of the world, as far as he knew. Larek knew that he couldn’t just hope that a Scission might appear and threaten the Factions; what he had to do was make it happen…

…with a Fusion.

He almost immediately dismissed the thought of artificially creating a Scission, as the last thing the world needed was another hole leading into the world of Corruption. But as the notion took hold in his head, he couldn’t get rid of it entirely. Over the next hour or so, as the morning sun appeared in the sky and peeked through the skylights overhead, causing Nedira and her brother to stir, his idea of a Scission morphed from a hole leading to the world of Corruption to one that was only based in this world. It would be less a tear in the fabric of reality and more of a hole that connected two specific points in space together, allowing the transfer of things from one point to another.

“You didn’t go to bed last night, did you?” Nedira asked, coming up next to him and flopping down next to him in his pillow throne. Laying her head on his lap, she yawned as she continued to wake up, even as he absently ran his fingers through her hair, his mind on his project.

Pulling himself away from his intense focus for a moment, he smiled down at her and shook his head. “No. Been too wound up from all the Fusions.” Nodding to himself as he came to a conclusion, he continued. “I need to see an Aperture.”

She didn’t even look surprised anymore at this sudden change in subject. “Which one?”

The Fusionist shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Though, preferably one that is still ‘open’.”

Groaning as she stood up, she looked toward Norde, who was already looking better than he did the day before. “Give us a few minutes to wake up, and we’ll be on our way.”

Larek nodded absently again, mentally preparing himself for what was to come. While he knew what he wanted to do now, he by no means knew how to accomplish such a thing. He had a few inklings of ideas, but he was fairly certain he would know more when he saw an Aperture in action.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen plenty of Apertures before, of course, but he’d never really looked at them closely enough to figure out how they worked. He wasn’t sure if he ever would, really, but with an understanding of patterns better than ever before and a heightened Magical Detection Skill, he was convinced that at least some of the answers he needed would lie within an active Aperture.

“You coming?”

Time seemed to fly as the two siblings got ready to go, so much so that he didn’t even realize they were already at the door waiting for him. He quickly extracted himself from the pillow throne and followed them outside and into the city, where they led him toward where The Hopper, their reliable Transport, was docked.