Collide Gamer

Working with Devos was an interesting experience. The Mite King was simultaneously human and alien. He knew nothing of the world and had many subtle differences to his world view. To begin with, he had a faith, the Way of Renewal he called it, that put his own people into the focus of reality.

Every Mite King was born in a grand, multi-decade ritual. It began with and conceived on a focus of power. Throughout the larval stage, he would then be constantly fed the richest materials the world had to offer, all while crawling on his belly to etch a gargantuan circle into the dirt. At the end of it, he pupated in the centre of it. While he had been motionless, spending years in metamorphosis, his people read to him the history of their kind. When he emerged, the circle activated to summon the seneschal. Typically, Devos said, the people summoned were flabbergasted but thankful for the opportunity to serve a reclaimer of a dead world. After all, the Throthaxen did their utmost to assure their seneschal lived in great luxury and with people of their species, often in great harems.

It altogether was a pretty good deal, from what John understood.

The circle only worked once. Typically, it summoned someone who themselves could only penetrate the veil between Kingdoms after much preparation. To that end, their current Latebloomer was beyond exceptional, but they had already known that.

Courtesy of his faith, Devos also approached the idea that Earth was the centre of everything with a great degree of scepticism. He, however, postponed testing John’s claim until they had found their ‘screaming man’ again.

To that end, Devos provided them recollections of where he had been over the past couple of days. The problem with that was, of course, that they had to take his reports of where he had been and then actually find those places. For the time being, they were half trying to find their perpetrator and half trying to find where he had originally lived. It was all but confirmed he was originally a mundane person, which meant they could find a name and some personal effects. From there, Lorelei would hopefully be able to work her magic.

So that was a lot of analytical detective work.

While that was going on, there was also the matter of Claire having lost her head. A short-lived affair, thankfully, otherwise John would have been busy asking Nahoa for proper torture methods. He was certain she had learned a couple of tricks from Xipe-Totec before their paths diverged.

The urge to ask for those still existed. The group of men that had dared to lay their hands on his Claire and molest her ears with their words could serve as a very good example. A dark impulse that John reined in. He had to show a bit of leniency to them, getting drunk on, for the weakest of them, dozens of Levels worth of power suddenly filling their veins was understandable. It wasn’t a pretty side of humanity and it deserved some punishment.

Maybe degloving their arms and whipping the skin off their backs was a bit too far though.

The leader was the only one that John was contemplating putting to the blade. He had been a bit too high on his own supply. A public execution could have been the proper administration of authority. The jury was still out on that one – literally. John had handed that case away to the jury. They would come to their own conclusion. Whatever happened, it was best for his legitimacy if he wasn’t the one who had decreed it.

The man was level 231. An impressive Stat line, certainly, and perhaps his light element had aided him in weakening Claire somewhat. That did not explain how he had splattered her head though. No, that explanation lay in a simple text file they had found on his phone, outlining a Technique that was simply called ‘Upstart’.

It wasn’t that they hadn’t heard about this Technique or the text file before, it was that they hadn’t thought it was real. There was so much misinformation about the Abyss swimming around, so many new techniques discussed among the Awakened, that differentiating between what was and wasn’t true could only be done via testing. Scarlett was not going to set up an office for testing everything that she filtered out. Even if she did, this one would have been too ludicrous to consider.

Upstart was a fundamentally simple Technique. It required minimal knowledge of Martial Arts and only minimal Ki control. It gathered energy in a joint, typically the shoulder or the base of a leg, and then sent it out to work as a force amplifier for whatever else was being done.

What was most fascinating about it was that it equalized the innate magic resistance and durability of the skin of the target with that of the attacker in that same moment. The stronger the person hit was, the greater the diminishment to their defences. Effectively, it let someone weaker land a meaningful hit on someone they, usually, wouldn’t be able to scratch.

It was such a simple thing and yet…

“I’m in some deep shit,” Maximillian said.

“I can imagine,” John said. “This changes everything.”

Since John had entered the Abyss, there had been a fundamental truth: in the Abyss, the weak could not stand up to the truly strong. Up until 5 minutes ago, if John saw some level 50 person charge at him, he was confident that he could have stood there and won the fight simply by watching his enemy exhaust himself against Particle Skin. It would have taken hundreds if not thousands of people at that level to take down just one Gamer, without any familiars by his side.

Now?

“The Technique makes more of a difference the greater the power difference between the fighters is. The strong remain stronger, but the weak can punch up now if they set it up properly,” John continued to read through the variety of testing data he had gotten over the last 12 hours. “Past a 50 level difference, the victor is still virtually guaranteed, but an increase from a 0% chance of victory to 5% chance of victory is practically infinite.”

“You don’t sound upset about this,” Maximillian pointed out.

“Ultimately, I am not. I always thought that the little guy in the Abyss could use a bit of help. The gap between them and people like me was depressing at times. It’ll make it harder to oppress the masses.” John leaned back and looked into the webcam. “In the long term, I think this will be good for the world.”

“I don’t know if I will get to see the long term,” Maximillia reported. “You have no clue, do you?”

“I just know that you called, wanting to talk about Upstart.”

“So, buddy, what I hear is that Nightfall is still the worst spy agency among the Divided Gates.” Maximillian dryly laughed at his own joke, then continued in a serious tone, “It originates here. Whoever came up with the Technique is an Austrian.”

“…That will be a problem,” John agreed. “Will you need aid immediately?”

“The sooner you can spare anything, the more I would appreciate it.” Maximillian did not plead for help, he requested it cordially and insistently.

‘As he has every right to,’ John thought. The king of Austria had been there for him in times of turmoil, physical and emotional. To this day, the Gamer had not properly repaid him for risking life and limb in the Iron Domain. “They might grumble a bit about it, but I can send you Ehtra and Metra until you come over for the wedding.”

Maximillian was genuinely surprised by him mentioning those names. “You would really do that for me?”

“I would do a whole lot more for you, buddy.” John tried to introduce a bit of levity into the talk. It was clear that his friend needed it. “You have a pregnant wife in the household. Sending you adequate protection is the least I can do. I might be able to offer a bit more after the wedding. Optimally, I would just come over and help you stomp out the problem entirely.”

“I would be in your debt.”

“No, you would not be,” John said with the utmost sincerity.

Maximillian let out a long, emotionally loaded exhale through his nose. It was a sound halfway to tearing up and as far as the king let himself be driven on that point. “I find myself thinking about the quote about interesting times from Lord of the Rings.”

“We all must decide what to do with the time we are given,” John cited.

“Indeed… how does a Technique like that get suddenly discovered right now?”

“It might be that it took an Awakened who didn’t have any preconceived notion of how Martial Arts should work. It could also be that magic itself is shifting around us, enabling something new in a changed world.” Shrugging, John swivelled left to right. “We have a lot more strong people in the world now and a lot more that are weak. The median Awakened is Level 25, from what I gather.”

Maximillian groaned again. Under better circumstances, John would have now guessed which one of his friend’s women was under the table. As it was, he simply sounded tired. “All of that makes sense and I hate it.”

“If you would rather deal with the mysterious creature from another world…” John suggested jokingly.

“No, I will deal with people, please and thank you,” Maximillian shot back immediately. “You should challenge that Devos person to a spar, if you are so uncertain how strong he is.”

“I have been thinking about it, but with all that we got going on, hooking a challenge into our conversations is difficult. He’s a pretty social bug.” John swivelled some more, his eyes glancing to the side when Scarlett updated the Upstart measurements with new data.

It really was a miracle technique. Simultaneously, once the emboldening factor of it had faded, it wouldn’t change that much. It only disabled the passive defences that every Abyssal got as they grew more powerful. Importantly, this meant that spells, such as Particle Skin, were not affected. Upstart did not offer a boost to their Stats either.

“Still thinking about Upstart?” Maximillian asked.

“It’s somehow the more fascinating matter on my mind,” the Gamer confessed. “I find myself evaluating how little it might ultimately change. Simultaneously, it’s just been invented and whoever did it decided to just spread it out into the world. It’ll develop in a myriad of ways.”

“Oh joy,” Maximillian drawled.

“It ultimately shouldn’t be capable of flipping the script.” He was theorizing out loud now. “Powers of Abyssals can be understood to be the maximization of differences in talents between humans… and human-adjacent races.” John added the second part after a short delay. All these years and his mundane habit of just thinking of sapient races as humans had not been stamped out. It probably would never be. It sat too deep in his formative years.

“I know what you mean,” Maximillian chimed in. “It’ll make masses of people more dangerous, but in the end it’s not a great equalizer.”

“Indeed. Claire was only hit because she let herself be hit. In actual combat against all thirty of them… well, Lyndell won in half a second with a gravity surge.”

“Tell her that I am suing her for copyright infringement.”

“I never have seen you use gravity surges,” John commented. “You almost always do sustained, increased pulls.”

“It’s usually more effective.”

The Gamer took that on faith. His limited exposure to using gravity magic through the Creator Puppet did not allow him to comment on the intricacies of being an actual gravity mage. The fact that the Creator Puppet used cooldowns, not mana, did not help either. “I wonder what the psychological effect of Upstart will be on Abyssal leadership.”

“It might have a beneficial chilling effect on the arrogant.” Maximillian grabbed a stack of letters from his table and waved them in front of the camera. “A lot of the weaker nobles are afraid I will replace them with the glut of newcomers and a few of the stronger ones are calling for me to outright ban the practice of Upstart.”

“Yeah, that’ll work,” John drawled sarcastically.

“Exactly, it won’t, and neither will abusing the peasantry.”

“That’s what I meant earlier when I said this will have long-term benefits.”

“Yes and I am willing to contemplate those now that I have your backing.”

“Actually, on that front, what is Romulus doing?” John wondered.

“Being one man in an enormous realm. He has a lot on his plate, and despite Upstart having been invented here, Austria is comparatively stable.” The king said that with a bit of pride. “Though I will not disclose to you the state of the realm. Loyalty, you know?”

“Well, you can fill in my knowledge on the matter of its origin then – how certain are you that it’s coming out of Austria?”

“About 80%. We traced the digital trail to an internet café. Whoever dropped it on us all either had the wherewithal to cover their tracks or just did it by accident. Impossible to say with these Awakened.” Maximillian shook his head. “Their identity hasn’t been found yet, but there’s a whole movement springing up and the people trained in it are more common here than anywhere else. Could be a string of coincidences, but we should stick to the likely explanation.”

To that, John could only nod. The excel table on his second monitor refreshed again. “Now that’s interesting…” he muttered.

“What?”

“Scarlett just sent me a note… you know about Upstart being easy to learn and apparently a cheap force multiplier?”

“You love leading with rhetorical questions, buddy… is it even stronger or did you discover a drawback?”

“Apparently, missing with it leads to bone degradation.” John read the report. Numbers in it were pure conjecture, as the whole thing had only been noticed when someone’s arm had snapped after hurling a regular punch. “The fixable kind, nothing like Hellfire damage, but still. When the Upstart swing doesn’t hit anything solid, the energy rebounds back into the user’s tissue and just… evaporates hard tissue.”

“So just dodging will incapacitate someone?” Maximillian asked.

“Eventually… if this is all correct.” Finding a willing subject to undergo this would be… not too difficult, actually. Since the damage was fixable with some standard healing and biomancy, there was doubtlessly a couple of young men willing to suffer their bones breaking for adequate compensation. “This also seems to be why it’s regeneration suppressing. The energy lingers for a few seconds in the affected tissue, preventing the healing from kicking in. Very interesting.”

“Interesting indeed,” Maximillian agreed. A voice from the off made him turn his head. “Sounds like my time is up.”

John tilted his head to the right, observing Nightingale stepping into his office. “Coincidentally, so is mine,” he said. “Ehtra and Metra are already looking for a flight. I’ll send you a text when I know when they’ll land in Vienna.”

“Much obliged,” the king spoke fluidly. “See you in ten days.”

“Can’t wait, buddy.” John smirked at the camera, then shut the call down. He rolled back and got up, circling around the table. “Time for our meeting with Esmeralda, then?”

“Her family, yes,” Nightingale softly corrected.

John tried to hold that in his head. The less he thought about the hot Latina on her own, the better. “To the test of my will, then.”