I stretch on my floor, but a stinging sensation in my side stops me. Things are healing nicely, but I still need a little more time. What woke me is not some disturbance, but the sudden absence of disturbance. The carriage is no longer moving. A quick peek outside confirms my suspicions, we have stopped for the night.

As expected I feel much better away from the village. After some time resting, even my Aether thankfully seems to be almost back to normal. If it was out of commission for weeks or months, I don’t know what I would do.

As planned, I sit on the ground and connect with Pando’s seed, as I start to pump mana into growing an area around us. The scouts, take their half-depleted planting staffs and start to form concentric circles around us in a solid 500-meter radius, along with a few loosely spread further away to provide a backup warning system. I don’t go full bore, keeping my mana use at about 25 per second. That is already much more than most people could handle even at their peak, but I had been practicing.

I offload as much of the mental overhead as possible to the runes structures and Pando’s seed, even if it won’t allow me to grow my skill levels because I have something much more interesting to do.

After dreaming all night long, runes swim in my head. So many new and amazing ideas floating in my noggin. As I pump mana out of the batteries, I spin my Aether and begin the work of creating a new rune.

There will need to be some rework in the supporting systems I had in place, but that is to be expected. I can consider this practice. Inspired by my new sense, I start making a rune that can directly tap into someone’s senses.

I connect them to whatever is on the other side of the rune. This time, I use roots around me to draw what I want.

Even with how fast I can move the roots compared to a normal person having to painstakingly engrave each line all over again because of a single mistake, the endeavor is still painstaking laborious work.

Hours go by as I work on it. Many iterations after, with the slightly foggy idea from my dream coming closer and closer to reality. If it can do half of what I want, it will already be amazing, but something else excites me. My perception field is altering. I’m slowly getting a grip on what this new sense is and how it behaves. The mental picture is still not perfect, but maybe soon. It’s not in a sudden shift, but I become more intimate with it each second.

I’m certain that this is the result of working on this new rune. The concepts in my mind are tangentially related, and as I work through the mental steps of my own senses, the new one is better contrasted.

I don’t try to force progress just letting it ‘marinate’ on the back of my mind. All the best things took time, and I would not try to rush it.

Not sure if the rune is done already, I try to implement it, and after a few minutes, after greatly increasing my Aether spin and fully connecting to Pando’s seed. I begin the practical experiments. The first and second iterations fail miserably, but the third time is the charm.

Hehe.

Regardless of any bad puns running through my head, I ignore the mana consumption and any other problems and focus only on making it work. When the connection is fully established, the results are even more wonderful than I had hoped for.

My vision connects to the other side of a few hundred meters distant comm networks. I still don’t have any way to transmit through the rune anything other than someone’s senses. The blobs arriving as visual input are clearly the photoreceptors of my buddy, but I can smell the success already.

I grab a couple of volunteers as more people start to wake. The results are not perfect, but we can work out the kinks later. I even have one of the ‘volunteers’ go farther away to test the range. One of them runs several miles back following the exact path we took, but even at the increased distance, the connection doesn’t suffer any deterioration.

The roots don’t go all the way back to the village but they are reaching almost 30 miles back, and 10 forward. A few scouts planted seeds ahead, and Pando was taking full advantage of that. Luckily, no one has been killed or captured yet.

I let the idle thoughts drift away from my mind and focus on increasing the sharpness and creating a double link through which we can both see through the other’s eyes. And it is easy, though the only reliable way to use it is to have one of the pair with their eyes closed.

We can fix the sharpness of the image, slightly nauseating feeling, and tinker with the other senses later. Or rather the people in the institute can do it.

For now, the reasonable uses were limited, but it is plenty for a few applications and is a step in the right direction. I go to work on the next iteration of the design, attempting to make someone see a stored image, something abstract based only on the results of the runes, not someone else's vision. But I stop as I see Alex and I call out to him.

“Alex.” He begins to turn, but his boyish demeanor and sunny smile are evident even before he fully turns around.

“Nash,” he says springing to where I was sitting. “Man, it’s so good to see you.”

Warmth fills me at his words, and with a wide smile of my own, I reply. “It’s good to see you too. How is your Aether experimentation going?”

“Perfect.” He says, and in only moments even without having to spin his spear around he manages to draw out a tread of Aether and move it side to side. “It took a lot of practice, but I managed to learn.”

“Do you want a quick lesson now?” I ask guessing he would not refuse, and I’m not left disappointed.

“Absolutely.”

And so we spend the last hour before departing working on his fine control. Teaching him changes my perspective on Aether, especially considering my run-in with the robot. Many new training possibilities start to pop into my mind. I only mention one or two as he is just beginning to learn, but I make careful mental notes each time and file them away for later.

Beginner or not, he is picking up things rather fast. Aether is supposed to be hard to learn so his speed must have something to do with his spear dance. It puts him in a perfect state to yield Aether. Regardless of the reason, I’m happy to teach him all I know, so we keep going until departure time.

The defenses I grew under everyone’s feet were not needed this time, but it is better to be prepared than try to scramble after being surprised.

Different from my usual way of doing things, I don’t leave the grown roots in the ground. I draw most of them out and nearly fill my inner world. It will save some time in front of Max’s village and if we were attacked, it might come in handy. I’m quite vulnerable in my current state. I can’t run at half my usual speed, not without risking injuring my side again.

As the distance shrinks, the march becomes tenser. The gravity of the situation starts to sink in more deeply until even the most bloodthirsty of us can’t help but take note of what is to come.

We continuously run into their scouts, but besides a few skirmishes far away from the main army, nothing happens.

The distance to our destination Is getting smaller and smaller. Until, finally, we arrive. From within my inner world, I take the mass of roots and send it into the ground. I try to be as circumspect as possible but I prioritize speed. I need to use significant amounts of mana, to push through the earth, but it is much less than if I had to grow them from scratch. Along with Pando’s seed, at least for this first hour, we both send mana at almost the fastest speed we can manage. At around 150 mana per second is what we can effectively use without over-exhausting ourselves. Too bad the part he yields doesn’t receive any of the system’s help. That is a significant boost for myself and the other mages I have seen in the last few days.

He could draw much more than the 70 mana a second he is handling now, but it wouldn’t be very helpful. That is already the limit of what he can effectively use.

All around me, all but two scouts, start to plant the seeds. Those two wait for a minute before leaving with the precession delivering the comm device. The device is modified so that it will appear the least threatening possible. There is nothing that could actually harm Max or anyone else, should they have ways of detecting that.

That is not to say it doesn’t contain any surprises. Buried deeply within, two subtle but important information-gathering tools are placed. An amplifier on the volume of audio it can pick up, and a magical sonar that can tell where people are located, either actively or passively.

In only a few minutes everyone is organized. The outer perimeter is fully settled, stakes and other defenses are driven on the ground, the carriages are carefully arranged to provide the maximum cover. And underneath the ground, the massive amount of roots I spilled out has already spread out.

I prepare a few surprises close to me for anyone thinking they can come to attack me. Earth magic is very useful for this, and I make full use of the copious amounts of mana at my disposal. Around the perimeter, the mages are working hard to alter the terrain and will be able to diminish the effect of any attack Lord Max’s army launches. A small wall starts to form, along with a low moat. With enough time, we may build better defenses than what Lord Max’s village boasts.

As the quick part of the preparation is over, I turn my attention to growing the root network around me ‘the old-fashioned way’. It already covers a 300-meter circle around us, but I start connecting to all of the seeds spread out and accelerating the unfurling of their root tendrils to speeds visible to the naked eye.

Five minutes in, the two scouts and two shield-bearers from another village start to make their way to deliver the comm device. This other village is seeing a rise of this trend like our village is developing a heritage surrounding spears. Most villages have their own specialties, and the big shields are coming in handy right now. We just have to wait for the actual battle, if it happened. The only real weakness I can see is the lack of offensive potential if not paired with people equipped appropriately.

They drag the box and the attached copper wire, as thin as old-style solid copper wire for home electrical circuits. The painstakingly engraved and fragile line is nonetheless the tool available. It won’t further expose our capabilities, and it won’t provide anything useful for them to reverse engineer.

I raise myself to about 4 meters high and can see the village fairly clearly. We are still outside the clearing, almost a mile from the front of the village. If I thought that our village was the pinnacle, I would be sorely disappointed.

Roughly measuring, I put the enemy's walls at 12 meters high. Giant stones cemented together.

Luckily, behind it and inside the walls, we shouldn’t find magic or runes like on our walls, otherwise, it would be Max’s village being attacked every 2 or 3 weeks. We had shields, firewalls, and a few other contraptions, but even if the wall was all they have, it’s impressive nonetheless.

In the gulf to it, all the ground is very irregular except for a thin strip right in the middle. Something they did to delay anyone charging the walls, while still allowing passage most of the time.

The four envoys, though I’m unsure if that is an appropriate denomination for them, advance through the narrow, meter-wide strip of flat ground. As they get to the solid steel and wooden defenses, only 200 yards from the village, they drop the box on the ground and retreat.

It takes minutes for the enemy to send someone over, but soon the comm line is established. Taping it is easy, and so I can listen in on the advances even as I continue to work on the underground.

Though I keep an open eye and ear to everything around me. Who knows what they are thinking, they could attack at any moment. If their stealthy approach is successful, we could be in deep shit.

With care, I set up a thin and weak shield to cover just a little beyond the perimeter. Anything solid passing through it will break a small section around it. It seems the prudent thing to do, and I spend a minute on it though I hear what I assume to be Lord Max’s voice on the comm.

“So, you have come to demand my surrender?”

Charlie, the person that was chosen as the Alliance's Army answers:

“Yes, pretty much. Your attacks will not be allowed to continue, even after our confrontation you attacked another two villages.”

“Well, I had a feeling this day was coming, so I had to increase my chances by conquering as much as possible.”

I find his choice of words peculiar. He may not have noticed that he gave away more than he intended. Does he have access to some function of the system we haven’t discovered?

Through some inexplicable mechanism, his mages managed to have enough mana to compare with us. And we had absolutely enormous mana batteries in our village. Perhaps that was something he gained from the system. Maybe that is the way he conquered two more villages, or he is just bluffing.

He continues to goad Charlie:

“So, are you going to come to me already?”.

I hear as Charlie starts to work his magic, and I can just imagine as he leans back.

“We both know that we are the ones with the upper hand, and it is to our advantage to remain out here for longer, as long as we are willing to pay the price of remaining stationed. We can level, get more food, reinforcements, communicate, and a dozen other things you can’t. We can move while any move on your part throws away your biggest advantage. We brought elite fighters, while even if you surpass us in numbers, your forces are scraping the bottom of the barrel. So why would we hurry? Now, get comfortable, we have plenty to discuss.”