Pair of representatives sent for the attack on Max’s village

“God damn it, I want that too, but can’t you see the problems?” I say to the representative from the village responsible for the leatherwork as Walter, the leader of our economic alliance, watches the whole thing without a word.

“That is exactly why attacking their village now would be the perfect time, they are dedicating all of their economic muscle to dealing with what is happening with the HLZ.”

“Haven’t you learned from Max’s mistake? Attacking was never really part of our plan, not unless we suddenly grow really stupid. Removing them from the top of the ladder in the system’s eyes will just paint a target on our own back. We should focus on growing economically.”

The representative from Max’s village narrows his eyes, always a little jumpy whenever someone mentions their part of the coalition, but I wasn’t digging at them and he keeps his mouth shut.

“We will have to be careful, but if we are, the experience gains from the regular attacks will definitely be worth it. Right now they are swimming in the stuff.”

I bunch my fist restraining my urge to pummel the idiot and rely only on my words.

“How stupid can you be? We settled on our current curse of action for a reason, now you want to go attacking them for no reason?”

Through the corner of my eye, I see Walter just watching the discussion and saying nothing for now. Already used to his behavior I continue to for another few minutes with the others, though I’m the first to fall silent when he raises his hand and soon everyone else notices and turns to him.

“We are not going to attack them… for now. We…”

“What, why?” Interrupts the representative of the Leatherworker’s village and Walter turns his gaze upon him freezing him in place. Everyone stays quiet as mice, which takes the fool a few seconds to realize. After a brief but meaningful pause, Walter continues.

“Like I was saying, we won’t be attacking them. Soon we will have to start scaling down our population. I’m not even sure if there will be enough money for the next month, let alone further ahead. It may sound good to take a more prominent position, but even with all our trade we can’t match the economic muscle from Charlie’s village, not when we include our minimum expenses. Crossing them when we are already having trouble is plain stupid.

“Now, when we come back to Earth it may be another story and economic ‘warfare’ is still fair game if we can gain anything from it. On Earth, we will have months or years to enjoy the fruits of our labor, but it is extremely short-sighted to overtly attack them without anything to gain on our way out of the instance. So we will continue to rely on subtler methods and try to grab as much of their market as we can while they are distracted.

“And I won’t even dignify this talk about potential Exp we could get with an answer. Let them blunt the system’s wrath and we will stay cozy in their shadow.”

The commander of the forces looks at everyone and at a nod from Walter starts speaking.

“That doesn’t even take into account what I mentioned and all of you seemed to have ignored. Changes in the HLZ are coming. We can’t know what is going to happen exactly, but there is a good chance nowhere will be safe soon enough. As much as it grates on me to say this, maybe we will be forced into an alliance with Charlie’s village to protect ourselves, it is a bad idea to be fighting with anyone if things get as bad as they predicted.”

The leatherworker speaks: “What, are you going to advocate we join them in setting up this detection network or something?”

“That is not a bad idea, they are devoting all their resources to this for a reason and it would be stupid not to at least think about it. Especially considering so many of their decisions were the correct ones, which put them ahead of everyone and kept them there ever since. But I doubt you will let this opportunity to grab up all their customers from them to pass by. Charlie’s village won’t have the time to attend to anything else while they focus on the detection grid.” Says the commander.

“Perhaps a hybrid approach, we send a few of the engravings and in return, we get first-hand access to their network of lifeform detectors. We can build a link to a spot outside easily enough, so Nash won’t have an excuse to grow anything under our village.” Says our head mage and I almost imperceptibly nod at someone else with sense in his head.

I stay silent, as the discussion dies off thinking of our position. Luckily Walter was smart and he managed to hold the idiots in the leatherworker’s camp back, but even then the idea won’t die so easily. I need to talk with the commander and get our strategy straight so we can both be ready to counter any moves and stop this nonsense in its tracks if it ever became a serious conversation.

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Leatherworker’s representative and Lord Max’s envoy.

“They don’t see how much there is to be gained,” I say looking out atop the wall at the clearing beyond our village.

“Oh no, they see the gains just fine, they are just afraid.” Says Lord Max’s envoy.

“I’m hoping your leader won’t be the chicken shit and have the guts to take the opportunity.”

“Walter is our leader.” He says trying to keep his face straight, but I guffaw.

“That is a good one, Lord Max may have nominally joined us, but we both know who you are really loyal to.”

“Well, what do you have in mind? You know that even with the loopholes, we can’t just march up to their village and start attacking out of nowhere.”

“I’m trying to work out the details, first see if he is open to the idea.”

“Ok, but without anything concrete, he won’t be able to commit, just give his impression.”

“I know, now go on, we don’t have a lot of time.”

He looks back at me displeased with my dismissal but doesn't say anything. With a step off the ledge, he falls from the 8 meters high stone wall and after a single roll on the ground to bleed off most of his momentum he starts running.

Now that is impressive. Lord Max knows how to train his people. Everyone around here is more comfortable with the typical political and economic maneuvering from back on Earth.

Walter talked about attacking if we get a decisive advantage or when we are back on Earth, but so far I have yet to see any indication he would actually go through with it.

In his own way, he is a very good leader, but with the right push he could become a great one and if I could line things up he would see the wisdom in following my recommendations. Now all I have to do is come up with a good plan. Max’s limitations are hard to get around, but I know I can come up with something if I try hard enough.

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Nash’s POV

A few hours before leaving, I sit in the institute with a pair of the primitive printers sitting on the replacement for the main table which is still sitting in the open as a team continues to experiment with the space runes using the much faster process of moving roots around instead of having to work with other materials.

Technically they, along with many others in our village have the Engraving skill, but only the people who were already full-time engravers and a few others not working critical jobs took the time and dedication to make more lifeform detectors.

I feel someone coming in the foggy sense of my perception field. With the resolution scaled down, I can keep it going at maximum range without even needing to pay attention to it. And that constant field comes into use when I notice a flash in the vicinity which takes me just an instant to identify.

Without turning, I greet him.

“Hi, Burges.”

“How did you k…? Never mind.” He says, moving to my side and looking at the printer with me. “Did you manage to work out the kinks?”

“Yes, yes, your assistants and Michael were of great help. Two hours a day for three days and we have something minimally functioning.”

“I don’t see why you spent so long on it.”

“Ohh, I thought it was obvious.”

“I know it will be useful, but that was a lot of time on something you could have let one of the teams take over.”

“I wanted to work on it myself, and I also want to integrate a couple of other things like being able to scan and store the information on my book from something other than data storage. Without the regular output from the storage runes, the integration would have been troublesome. My familiarity with this design should let me overcome any of that.”

“Are you finished?”

“Yeah, I will leave you guys to improve on the design and come up with some way to automate the printing, storage and retrieval of each page.”

I grin widely at his words and noticing his confusion, I explain:

“I was just imagining the way a cartoon would switch vinyl disks or CDs with a robot arm doing everything.”

“Perhaps a full arm may be exaggerated, but it will require some type of mechanical movement, and I can’t see any reason we wouldn’t want to imitate a cartoon.”

He looks at me as I try to hold a laugh in, but I fail and instead of continuing fruitlessly, I shake my head almost guffawing. “Just because on Earth a design like that wouldn’t be very reliable or even a do a good job doesn't mean we can’t figure out how to make something like that easily over here.”

“Don’t worry, I will keep a close eye on things. I will even put two teams to run different ideas on this. If we can integrate the printer into the storage system we will cut the data storage requirements dramatically. Now we just need to find a cheaper supply of ink for the printer.” Burges says.

“No, we don’t.” I say and he frowns at me, so I explain: “There is a village whose main export is pigments and ink, they must have something to use on paper. Just negotiate with them.”

“Ohh, I kept wondering where he was getting it from, it didn’t cross my mind...”

I look at him and he explains.

“We are buying ink at 4 copper a bottle from a trader in town, I didn’t know where he got it from but it must have been from this village.”

“You are wasting my money?” I ask with mock anger, though still wanting an answer.

“In the grand scheme of things, the cost is minor so I never stopped to think about it.”

“At least it saved a copper from the price the Merchant charges. Even at this price, it should be enough for 2 or three pages for every copper worth of ink. The library will be able to cover the expense to maintain the archives if we are forced to continue paying 4 copper a bottle, and with bulk pricing, it will likely be even cheaper.”

“Aren’t you angry? They are probably selling it at a copper or two per bottle?”

“I would be if we were blowing half our budget on ink, but most of the notes are with pencil’s, locally sourced pencils. Only a few notes are copied in ink. How much do you even buy?”

“About 10 bottles a week.”

“See, even if we are overpaying 3 copper a bottle, that is only a little over a silver per month. That is not too bad.”

He shrugs and moves off to get on with whatever brought him here.

I find a bottle of ink in the seat of the scribe, when he needs to transcribe something permanently and switch with one of the ones I got from the Merchant kicking myself for not thinking about it sooner, though like I said the loss was small.

After filling the printer with the different ink, I raise the mana shield one last time and send a signal to the printer.

The first formation, comprised of a data storage rune stack, pass the encoded words, to another matrix, this one to translate the words into letters just like what is required for the screens in the library, except it passes through a third and final step deconstructing each of the letters to its constituents dots and data bursts follow to the hydromancy runic formation which prints one last page.

The paper slowly rolls upward and a strip of ink moves like ferromagnetic fluid influenced by strange magnetic fields at incredible speed. Hundreds, thousands of tiny spikes hit the page every second and form the letters.

The print quality is not anything pleasant to look at, like the result from old-style dot matrix printers with tiny spikes of metal pushing a cloth tape impregnated with ink against a piece of paper, something very much akin to a mechanical typewriter, though not reliant on specific shapes for the letters.

However, I don’t push the design nearly as far as it is capable. It is a design that could be improved upon a lot, maybe even surpassing the levels of technology we expected back home and I will let others tinker with it.

I lower the mana shield that was protecting the shop and myself from an ink bath if the printer went crazy and take one of them into my inner world leaving the other and the notes so they will have something to work with.

As I walk away I recall the boxes of pigment from the ink supplier village. I have yet to really do anything with it, so I look in the inner world and connect with each of the pigments trying to learn anything I can about them.

The effort is not nearly as fruitful as I hoped, like when I absorbed the first couple hundred new samples of this instance flora, but there are a few insights to be gained here, and I am making good use of my perception and even my connection with Aspen as he moved roots and absorbed tiny amounts of the compound in him.

I absorbed them with a process similar to getting metals in my roots spread over my body, but easier given that many of them were just types of dirt. The organic nature of the compounds instead of refined metals like the gold coin makes the process much easier.

As I look through each of them, sometimes even discovering a few tidbits, the hour approaches. Even my absentminded and fuzzy perception field notices the village helping the people that will be joining me in just another couple of hours, when the sun reaches its highest point someone signals and I hear the clock’s bell.

It was time for another round trip on the HLZ and this time they would return with me.