Chapter 1988: – Redefining the Frontline

“I can report a string of victories. We, aided by Rex Germaniae, have retaken the territories of the Fusion Heartlands, the Hidden Tradition and the Lake Alliance in full. Our allies have worked fast and efficiently. While the Sons of Rome have reclaimed the south, the Illuminati have swept across the Great Plains and wrestled the Gobbo Nation back from Lorylim control. From Atlantic to the Pacific, the territories of Fusion have been liberated.”

That was the Gamer’s announcement that played on every news station at least once an hour since that morning. It was always accompanied by another announcement.

“Inhabitants of the Guild Hall, you are advised to either follow protocol to move to Boston in search of shelter or prepare yourself for danger. The Guild Hall will be moved to the frontlines at 20 o’clock.”

19:58.

John looked at the display with nervous anticipation. He sat by the swirling rings of the Heartkiln, because that seemed like the place to be. He had asked to do this alone and his women respected that, staying upstairs. Not that there would be anything too hard about what he was going to do, physically speaking.

19:59.

The seconds ticked by, each longer than the last. The vibrations of the air moved by the concentric rings circling around the core of blue mana. The Heartkiln, the evolution of the Guild Heart, brought about by the Starforger Class, had several esoteric tools and additions sticking out of what had previously been a perfect sphere. It all looked quite impressive.

20:00.

John turned his attention to the window before him. ‘I do wonder what it will feel like,’ he thought and pressed the button to confirm the relocation of the Guild Hall.

The answer was a prolonged and heavy tug on his everything. It started small and swelled in intensity. The rings around the Heartkiln ramped up in their rotations, until even the outermost one, ten metres across, was just a blur.

John’s curiosity drove him to hasten for the stairs, his pondering isolation ended in favour of another desire for knowledge. The crowd of twenty haremettes that had waited above were already in motion, the few that had waited for him following him as they headed outside.

The sky was covered in shifting rainbows. Colours shifted, consolidating further, while that tugging sensation grew more intense. The entire island was buzzing, as if something was using it as a massive cord. The sound gradually rose in intensity, a low hum that dominated everything, and then they teleported.

Space stretched, then stopped. It was like a hard stop on a rollercoaster. All momentum was suddenly gone, but John only felt like his soul was getting forced forwards, while his body experienced no inertia whatsoever. The duality of sensation was as dizzying as everything else about the experience.

The Guild Hall was several hundred metres in the air.

It boggled the mind. The sheer scale of the island flying was only made more ludicrous by the fact that the entirety of the water on it stayed put. It reached the edge of the cylindrical Protected Space and then simply stopped flowing. If any of the ships had been left in the Harbours, they could have sailed a circle just fine.he capital of the Gobbo Nation was once again Owned Territory.

They touched down on a half-cleared plaza. A glorious copper statue stood atop a fountain. It had been deliberately left to rust, forming the green patina typical of that metal. An appropriate colour for the smug shortstack on her pedestal. Even dirtied by dust, the sassy expression was evident.

‘Goblins have a pretty extreme sense of aesthetics,’ John found. What remained of the houses was visibly gorgeous. They liked their rounded shapes and domes, to the point that John would have called their houses borderline suggestive. The fortresses were brutalist structures of concrete, chitin, steel and glass, with every angle precisely calculated to maximize space usage. There was not a single decoration on them.

One such fortress was their destination. Illuminati flags fluttered high above it, marking it as the temporary base of operations for the army that had retaken this space. The vast industrial gate was wide open for them. A courtyard designed for truck deliveries housed the majority of the war council.

The arrival of the Guild Hall had put a hundred people into motion. Supply officers were making arrangements with their peers atop the floating island to get food and other aid down to the city.

John and his women approached the two figures by the massive planning table. The Horned Rat was one, a female goblin with white hair and an almost comically oversized crown on her head another. Ankleshanker stood behind her, arms crossed, a grim bodyguard in dire time.

“It’s an honour to meet you in person, Queen Anastasia,” John greeted the female goblin first.

“Yeah, yeah, save it for the peacetime,” the shortstack responded immediately. For as inefficient as the crown was, the armour on her was anything but. Artifice powered muscle reinforcements in what was both incredibly expensive and advanced enough that he could hear Hailey whistle.

They had primarily interacted with the lewd side of goblin culture so far, because that was the side the species preferred to exhibit. For as much as goblins were highly effective bait for those that liked their women short and stacked, they also had a vicious streak to them. John remembered more than one game where goblins were small, green, crazy war criminals with the morality of a loose shoelace.

“And thank you for doing so much more than anticipated,” John turned his attention to the Horned Rat.

“They retreated, we just kept on pushing, pushing until we had reinforced this area,” the Horned Rat responded plainly. “We have more urgent matters to discuss.”

“That we do. It’ll have to wait for a moment.” John returned his attention to Anastasia. “I take it you heard the news?”

“That you went with the same idea as we did?” Anastasia gave her crown a flippant tap. “Yeah.”

Goblins were scarcely organized. Generally, the various consortiums were in competition with each other, operating from the alchemical fortresses around the country. Because alchemy was generally seen as an inferior craft to enchantment, they had pretty low importance on the global stage, but locally they had power and having a lot of influence on a medium-sized market still kept the Gobbo Nation rich. That getting an entire society of goblins to cooperate was near impossible was what had kept them from becoming more than a local power.

They did have their ways to subvert this. In times of crisis, they elected a monarch who would rule until death. A peculiar arrangement, John found, but it was not really different from what he had ended up doing. ‘Well, it remains to be seen how similar it is,’ he thought. “It is remarkable that you held out this long.”

“Turns out that using personalized mana absorbents is really effective,” Anastasia responded.

John frowned at that revelation. He knew the substance from the Five Days War. Many of the enemy combatants, especially the weaker ones, had carried a capsule of it within a tooth or other hidden compartments on themselves. Once cracked, it rapidly absorbed the mana remaining inside a person, then exploded, turning the person into a living bomb.

It was not popular among most soldiers for several reasons. It was the kind of horrid way to die that only the ideologically possessed would agree to. First it sucked the mana out of every part of the body, which was painful enough, and then it left nothing of the person behind. It also was fairly expensive, as it had to be created individually for everyone. Lastly, it wasn’t that practical. Because it had to be taken orally, it also had to be carried in a way that could be ingested on short notice and the options for that were limited. The ultimate effect was also not that impressive in general. Most people did not have that much mana, especially at the end of the line. The people that did would have needed so much of the substance that they would have needed to fill their entire mouths.

Against the Lorylim, however, John saw the usefulness. To begin with, having the suicide option against those creatures was certainly preferable to the alternative. There was also a short window between infestation and integration during which the mana of the still mostly independent person spiked. Using one of those capsules in that moment would blow a lot of the area to smithereens for basically no cost. The person was lost already at that point.

“Dark times,” John muttered, then straightened up. “I will not demand more than you have already given, but I do need to integrate you into the war effort.”

“Fuck that, we’ll partake in the final assault – we are blowing every last one of those creatures to bits,” the goblin queen responded.

A refreshing simplicity.