12 Miles Below

"Only Urs had the fractal at that time, so they had no idea about that limit. When he tried it out and saw just how utterly powerful his abilities had become, they all thought it would remain constant with everyone it was given to. Why wouldn't they? First person in line to be granted that fractal was the person that would best wield it in the entire world: That time period’s greatest occult master, a brilliant tactician, current leader of a budding empire, and royal pain in my ass that personally squashed me twenty seven times at my peak: Talen, now turned into occult-god Talen, first true emperor of the Imperials." Aztu gave me a thumbs up, “The man was insane, or rather way too sane. Even went through old history books to dredge up old human history, something poetic about bringing back the greatest empire humanity had. But, you know how the history goes in the end. He almost beat Relinquished with half the power he could have used. If it had been the full fractal of Resolve, he'd have done it.”

"Why didn’t Urs didn’t pitch into the fight?” If Talen was one half, it only made sense to pull in the other half. Urs was a warrior too, he’d lived a life exploring and fighting machines at that point.

“You’re forgetting, Urs wasn’t a warrior.” Aztu shook her head, hand then pointing at me. “You are maybe seven or eight times more of a warrior than he was. And that time period required people who could both fight and build. He could do the building, but if his weapons didn’t immediately outright kill his enemy, he wasn’t winning that fight. You spent your life learning to fight, he spent his life hiding away and focusing on building things.”

I could follow that, “Different skillsets.” I said, setting the bottle down again. This one I’d tried to pulse the occult out while thinking of all drunk shenanigans and trying to have it flow through the occult pulse into the bottle. Occult whisps flowed away from the bottle, rapidly dissipating out into the digital sea.

She brought my bottle up to her nose, and sniffed the top of it. Then shook her head and put it back down. Another failure.

“If they could go back in time, I think Urs would have ended his life early, so that the full power of Resolve would imbue Talen instead of being split between them. Unfortunately, Tsuya and him were hard at work to modify the fractal into something they could imbue the regular soldiers without the drawback, thinking that was the direction they needed to go. And Talen was winning at the time even at half power. The human empire spread across almost all of the world for a reason. They never thought things were doomed enough for one of them to die.”

“But after the first Feathers came out?”

Things would have taken a turn for the worst at that point.

“No, even with us out in the field we were still slowly losing ground. Once A57 came out, his investigation uncovered what Resolve was and its limits, his priority was to lean into that instead. Intentionally done so that nobody would ever think Urs had to die. His second priority was making sure that neither Talen or Urs ever truly died either, else he might have to deal with a fully powered human emperor in the future.”