Evolving My Mythic Legion With A Legendary Skill

"Dozens of people per day now, the strength of them is escalating, the newer groups are not the kind of hired hands you can dismiss without serious effort." He looked at Neil. "Even I have been finding them more than just annoying, and that is not a category of problem I encounter often."

Neil was quiet for a moment.

He thought about the escalating pattern of it, the direction it was pointing in terms of what would arrive next if nothing changed.

"Hold on for a little longer." Neil said. "Once the evolution is complete I will deal with them personally."

Randy looked at him with the expression he had when he was deciding how seriously to take something that should have been implausible.

Neil was at the 3rd Origin.

The people sending the attacks were operating at tiers that Randy himself, at 5th Origin Diamond Class, found genuinely tiresome to manage, the combination of their numbers and their method making the problem more difficult than any single powerful opponent would have been.

A 3rd Origin telling him he would deal with it personally was a statement that should have produced immediate pushback.

Randy was quiet for a long moment.

He thought about Neil’s father, about the particular reputation that Jackal carried among people who knew what Jackal was and what Jackal’s children tended to produce, the terrifying quality of the lineage that had never once been properly defeated on the Zoratian planet in any generation.

He thought about the Diamond class kills in the Wooden Poisoned Realm.

"Alright." Randy said. "I will hold on for a little longer."

He leaned back in the seating and looked at the domain around them with the easy manner returning to the surface, and something in his expression settled into the version of itself that was simply comfortable rather than performing comfort.

"On another topic entirely." He said, his voice shifting into the lighter register that meant he was about to say something that would produce an interesting reaction. "Several people have been asking me to introduce you to their daughters. Very respectable families, good pedigree, excellent connections." He paused. "Are you open to the idea of marriage?"

He felt it before he looked.

A quality in the air to his left that was the very specific quality of a gaze that had sharpened past the point of casual attention into something considerably more focused, and when Randy’s own eyes moved in that direction Ileana was standing near the edge of the courtyard with the expression of someone whose patience with a specific line of conversation had just reached its natural conclusion.

Randy looked at her.

His expression did something quick and specific, the calculation of someone looking at a person and reading something that had not been present the last time he had encountered that person, and what he was reading was a tier and a presence that were substantially different from what he had filed under Ileana in his internal records.

He looked back at Neil and then back at Ileana and then made a brief and private calculation that apparently resolved itself quickly.

He made a sound that was a dry and compressed version of a laugh, straightened slightly, and cleared his throat.

"Well." He said. "Perhaps another time."

He stood from the campfire seating and adjusted his collar and looked at the domain once more with the deep perception still processing what it had found.

His eyes moved through the energy signatures of the domain’s population with the speed of someone who had very good instincts and was putting them to use, and something moved in his expression at what he was reading.

"How are they getting stronger this fast." He said, less to Neil than to himself, the question of someone genuinely puzzled by an arithmetic that was not adding up in the way arithmetic was supposed to add up.

He looked at Neil.

"Either the most impressive thing I have seen in years or the most terrifying." He paused. "Possibly both."

He walked out through the gate and the gate closed behind him.

Neil looked at Ileana.

She walked toward him with the composed expression of someone who had said nothing and did not need to, which was in many ways more effective than saying anything would have been.

He stood up and she reached him and he put his arm around her.

"I am not interested." He said.

She looked at him with the expression she had when she believed something completely and was not going to perform doubt about it.

"I know you are not." She said. "There are already two other women." A pause that carried the weight of the acceptance she had made and the limits of that acceptance in the same breath. "Any more would genuinely make me feel terrible."

He held her properly and she leaned into him and the domain was quiet around them for a moment.

"No more." He said.

She was quiet for a moment.

"Good." She said simply, and the tension that the conversation had placed in the air around them released.

The Nest was in the core building and Neil went to it alone.

He stood in front of the Nest door for a moment, working through a sequence in his mind.

He took the vial out of his inventory, the 4th Origin Diamond class blood he had collected from the realm’s kills, and looked at it.

Dense and dark, carrying the particular quality of blood from a creature at that tier, the properties of it clear in his Aquamorph awareness, the information it would give the Nest substantial.

He pushed open the Nest door.

The space inside was the same large white area it had always been, empty and clean in the specific way of a space whose purpose was creation rather than occupation.

He walked to the centre, uncapped the vial, and let a precise amount of the blood drop to the floor.

The drop hit the white surface.

[Blood of a 4th Origin Diamond Class creature detected.]

[Would you like to start the process of creation of a 4th Origin Mythic Class beast?]

"Yes."

The blood disappeared immediately, the white floor absorbing it without leaving any mark, and the thick fog began to fill the space at the edges, rolling in from the walls in the slow and deliberate way he had seen before.

[Generation in progress.]

[Time remaining: 167:59:59]

Seven days.

He looked at the timer for a moment and then walked out.

The door closed behind him with the soft automatic click.

Seven days meant it would be ready roughly when his evolution was complete, assuming the evolution took its expected duration, and the alignment was close enough to work with.

The rest of the day was the kind of day that did not happen often enough.

The kind where the immediate pressures had paused and nothing was actively on fire and the domain was functioning and the only thing required was to be in it with the people who mattered.

He and Ileana sat in the expanded courtyard in the late afternoon with the warm quality of the lower light, her arm through his, and the domain around them settled and running.

Bob was still working somewhere in the background at his usual volume, and Rob was doing something with quiet focused attention near the workshop section, and Mob was near the storage building in his habitual position.

The elven archers changed rotation with the quiet efficiency they had always had, better armored now and carrying themselves with the settled quality of people whose tier had stepped up.

Leon was doing what Leon did during the hours between rotations, something useful and precise and not particularly visible, his presence in the domain a constant and reliable one.

Neil told her about the Wood Snakes.

Not all of it, not the full detail of the Diamond class encounters or the three deaths that had required continuing, but enough of it, the way the environment had worked and how he had adapted to it and what the black-green territory had looked like with its red luminescent growth and the enormous root systems moving under everything.

She listened with the complete attention she gave to things about him specifically, asking two or three questions at the right moments that showed she had been tracking everything.

The afternoon moved at the pace it moved when nothing was pressing from behind.

Night came with it the sound of Magnar before the sight of him, the familiar energy of the large lava-element familiar registering through the domain’s perimeter sensing well before the gate opened.

Then the gate opened and Magnar came through at the full size he had been running at outside, considerably larger than when he had left, the 4th Origin carrying itself in his frame in the comprehensive way that tier shifts carried themselves, and behind him Jane came through the gate with the tired and injury-marked quality of someone who had been working very hard in a difficult environment for a significant period of time.

She had minor injuries visible on her arms and one across her cheek, the kind that had clearly been addressed but had not fully healed, and her clothes were travel-worn in the specific way of someone who had been in the field rather than the settlement for most of the past two weeks.

She saw Neil standing in the courtyard and her expression did the thing it did when something she had been holding at a distance suddenly resolved into immediate reality.

She looked at him for a half second.

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Thanks for reading... adios