Country of Champions 38

Irritated, the man said, "I'm just about fed up with hearing your opinions. It's entitled sh*ts like you-"

Eyes narrowed, the young mage cut him off. "Who came from a UTF dormitory about a month ago, spent about three years being passed around as property in an alternate future I returned from around two weeks ago and I've been running non-stop since my feet hit the ground in Avalon.

"The only thing I've been entitled to is misery. You can take the merits and medals and shove them up your *ss because I don't do it for you, Core or the whole f***ing League. I do for the close people I care about and for myself. If I strike you as a suicidal idealist, you've been assigned to the wrong job. Being a proctor requires decent observational skills at a bare minimum."

Revving up to getting his say after the strange hold that kept him from speaking stopped, the proctor heard Gan say, "Three o' clock, thirty meters up and fifty-four meters out. If you had taken aim when you drew your caster gun, you wouldn't be standing here."

"Why'd you have to tell him that for? You think I pretended that I couldn't tell where he was actually at all the time for fun? He was bribed by Firebrand to make sure I had an accident. I wanted to see if he would try." Orison said, hamming it up.

The Summit instructor's anger evaporated. "You were winding me up to see if I would do it?"

"Maybe a little but I changed my mind because I don't have the time to play those kind of games," the young mage said.

The older man took a moment to laugh at himself before picking up his pace. "Cocky brat."

When the last ridge flattened out into a broken and furrowed plain, the young mage called a halt for a moment while he summoned an impression of wind and water elementals. The ghostly fish and bird circled each other like playful children but it was on orders.

He barked out, "Take a deep breath, remove your helmet and cover your face with the activated charcoal wipes. Put your helmets back on. Use the air in you to blow out the unclean air in your helmet and then change the filter to the one with charcoal in it."

Looking over to the proctor, he said, "I've got a spare."

"For all I knew, the corundum mine WAS your destination. My filter already has activated charcoal in it. Why doesn't yours?" the man said smugly.

Orison said, "I don't do showy unless it's useful but it's about to get real showy around here."

Once everyone was ready, he opened a box filled with dusty red powder, laid it down quickly and backed up to let his impressions pull it all up. Gan had already started walking and telling Roy where to lay travel markers down. Once everyone was on the move, the young mage followed behind, letting the ball of dirty mist float like a tethered balloon several feet behind him.

Curios what was going on, the proctor cycled between the front of the group and the back. He noted that the scout would take turns and sometimes even double back to go around an area that he looked like he was going to walk through. Considering it was almost a flat nothing for miles, it didn't seem to make sense.

It started to once he returned to see what Orison was up to. To either side of the trail Gan had Roy mark and sometimes had one of the brothers draw hazard symbols onto the ground with spray paint, the dirty mist would occasionally stick to needle like objects in the air. The objects moved slowly but fast enough that if one stood still, they could notice.

The man gawked in amazement until Orison pulled on him. "That's powdered corundum from the mine. Do you want to get radioactive dust actually caught in your respirator filter?"

Rushing to put distance between himself and the floating dirty cloud, the man asked, "How in the world does that work?"

The young mage replied, "Planes with radiation in its walls produce some of the more interesting things. If one of those interesting things is a mineral that can retain that radiation it can be added to a spray mix. That mix will stick to the stress cracks. If you want to find out more about it, the person responsible for discovering it will publish their results sometime next week.

"Take this stack of rough maps. On them is the ingredients used to reproduce this effect on some of the other planes and the teams who found the resources reachable. A couple of them haven't formed yet. I don't know how that works but I'll leave it to your discretion. Jacques will have a copy of them sometime tomorrow on his desk. I'm making you my checks and balances on that."

"Why didn't you tell your mentor right away?... Never mind. You belong in Core with the rest of the mental cases, not out here with us honest folk," the instructor said.

Orison sneered. "Honest folk... Say that when retrieval teams stop devaluing Irregular crew finds by anywhere up to ninety percent by the time they trickle down to the captain's cut. If there was accurate accounting of how little of the found resources actually make it to the commonwealth vault, there would be riots."

The old man snorted. "I thought you weren't a suicidal idealist?"

"Do you see me rushing to Core record keeping with a calculator and scratch paper? I've got better things to do than be a target for assassination by UTF infiltrators and being the most hated 'treasure troll' in Rowdies history," the young mage shot.

The older man laughed. "Are you b*tching at me to ease your guilty conscience?"

With a completely straight face, Orison looked at the Summit instructor and said, "Pretty much, Sergeant."

"Boy, I know I'll never have to ability to make you but would it kill you to call me Master Sergeant if you want to use military rank?" the man growled in irritation.

Orison chuckled. "Wow. I honestly thought you were a First Sergeant at best. And by the way, you probably did p*ss someone off to get nominated to be my proctor... Hey, the Summit instructor I have from school gave me some good advice. Get a stick of your favorite lip balm-"

The older man made a swipe for the back of Orison's head which he barely avoided. Laughing, Orison jogged ahead with the Master Sergeant hot on his heals. It was more to stay away from the floating mist ball than for a second chance to box the young mage's ears.

A couple of hours later, right after daybreak, Gurrut barely managed to catch Roy from headbutting an air splinter when the exhausted equipment specialist stumbled. Neither of them knew how close it had been but Gan broke out in a cold sweat and informed Orison of their situation. Not that he needed it, the young mage could see the slivers of fractured space just fine in daylight.

Where they walked was a narrow land bridge just far enough away from both walls of the plane to be safe. That strip of land was generously peppered with air splinters to the point, that in the light of day, they looked like a collection of exploding black tree stumps frozen in mid shrapnel spray to Orison's spatially sensitive vision. He wondered what it looked like on Gan's mental map but was disappointed to find out that they were just blotches of red zones.

Soon, it was time for Orison to step up because 'air splinters' weren't actually only present in the air. They were only more abundant there and more than capable of causing structural weakness in terrain. It was the one kind of 'natural' trap that didn't reliably get recorded by his map. Most likely because it was too complex a set of possible dangers that would turn the whole thing red.

There were a few times that Julia's ride was heavy enough to cause cracks and a couple of times it had started sink holes but they got it through safe enough. Luckily, their proctor consented to bringing her back and with a relatively safe course plotted, the 'gerbil ball' would have relatively few problems making it back on its own when that time came. The spare suit inside the ball was quite a bit too big for her but considering that she'd only have to wear it to get back to base through a jump and a short ride, that wasn't a big concern.

Having finally made it to their destination, everyone except Gan and the young mage were speechless. For miles, a marshy series of glens meandered between rolling hills. It was what the rest of the Plague barrens had somewhat looked like at some point in the plane's history. A huge underwater reserve that sat within the bowels of the place had slowly trapped most of the moisture underground allowing the top to dry out. Due to it's low setting and isolation, the area had maintained its original quality.

It had also maintained the natural environment that contained a huge preserve of pretty much every type of desirable plant life the rest of the Barrens had been scoured clean of. There were even a few that hadn't been discovered before that Orison was keen on collecting. While he ordered his team to demarcate the safe collection radius, mainly by collecting some things themselves, he carefully and covertly had his water elemental impression pick out a few of the rarer ones. No one was the wiser and even the proctor's eyes twinkled with some opportunistic glee, engaged in some covert snatching of his own.

Since she was already aware of what she was looking for, it didn't take long for her to piece together why Avalon hadn't had much success in domesticating the spade flower or the triple seven mushroom. Not that anyone would care much about the mushroom when they had living versions of the dead wood it grew on. Affectionately renamed the Collier Bush, making Roy blush, it's berries contained a much higher amount of what made the triple seven mushroom so desirable and lent itself to fermentation directly, preserving more of its effect.

There was also a couple fauna that not only were generally useful but were key factors for two breakthrough treatments. None of that had much to do with the young mage but he made sure to capture a few for personal alchemical use. By the time that the team Captain Rogers sent caught up, Orison and his team had gathered as much as they reasonably could make use of and it was time to part ways with their proctor.

The looks of tearful gratitude and idolization on the group of Irregular's faces made the young mage uneasy and he was ready to be gone but there were some things to deal with first. Roy took some pictures and collected a few samples for Julia to study back at home. That would be important for her work and make sure that no one could screw over the collecting crew.

While Roy made a sappy parting with Julia, Orison finalized his trial with the proctor. He took a moment to warn the Rowdies in charge about the time deadline and what he would do if they pushed things too far out of greed and caused needless death. There was a chance they wouldn't listen but there wasn't much he could do about it beyond providing evidence for criminal charges after the fact.

"Once this event is done, that woman over there needs to see Triumvir LeStrange. She isn't a schizophrenic triggered by drugs. She has a condition caused by a mutation that hasn't been categorized properly and the artifact he carries can fix it with a love tap to her head." Orison said to his proctor while pointing at a relatively young woman who was muttering to herself.

The Summit instructor said, "Be prepared to be grilled on coals when you get back. There's no way you're going to escape full debriefing and questions after popping off this big of a haul."

Orison sighed and said, "I know but the Barrens is the only place I personally know well."

In a whisper, the man asked, "So, what got you posted as an Irregular here?"

Darkly, the young mage responded, "A false charge by a devil marked adjunct who better already be dead. I was slotted for death march duty through Echo Mire but was pulled here by Captain Rogers. He saved my life."

"And here I thought you were a unicorn who was making doe eyes for him," the older man said with a nasty smirk.

With a wooden face, Orison said, "Go f*** yourself, old man."

Snickering, the proctor said, "Since you made me a happy man, I'll let you get away with that but if I see you in Summit, I'm going to rip you a new a**hole and there ain't going to be nothing romantic about it."

As he stomped away, Orison muttered, "Have Julia re-teach you High School English, you double negative using jerk."

Freed from the trial, equipment bans were lifted. Within a few minutes, they were out of the planar peninsula and headed for another. Due to the compound hazards of unstable ground and air splinters mixed with the plane's suppression of combustion and inability to externally sustain magic over a certain output, mountain bikes with a minor mobility assistance were the best they could safely use. There were better but that 'better' was far outside of civilian access or affordability.

They were making good time but it would be quite awhile before rest was an option. At first, he wanted to hold off on alertness aids because of prejudice against them and concern over their possible interactions with other medicines. But after Roy crashed his bike and Stag almost did, he had everyone chew a ginseng and hoped it would be enough.

It occurred to Orison belatedly that he had underestimated fatigue levels when factoring in all the 'exercise' that they were doing along with pushing a day and a half without a proper rest. Stag and Roy might be better off than the average human but Stag was slightly lazy and self indulgent whereas Roy wasn't that 'advanced'. He decided that after their main goal for coming here was achieved, he'd spare the expense of his cabin one more time for the return trip.

Forced to walk due to the sheer amount of air splinters and weak ground the last bit of their journey, Orison said, "Good lawd, Gan. What caused you to risk this?"

Looking at Orison confused, he said, "I could feel the spot calling to me. Can't you? Your pull should be a lot stronger than mine."

"All the miasma I took in was completely naturalized. I also took in another source... er, make that two... three maybe? A lot more than that indirectly for sure," Orison said.

Garret spoke up. "Not to sound like the ignorant one here but what are you talking about? Um... if it's alright to ask."

Orison pointed at Gurrut. "The Barrens are connected to your brother's ancestor's home reality. It's a place called Amoril. Gan and I are from there too but a lot more recently... There are-were special places there I had a personal connection to due to a poorly thought out use of a certain, lets call it, essence.

"When it ascended to the mid-dimension, much like this world is trying to do but in a much less dramatic way, it shook pieces off and this was one of those pieces. This piece also happens to have a part of that certain essence, creating a special place for me to go and loot but... It's not as useful as it once was for me and is actually a big problem for everyone if left alone.

"Now don't get me wrong. I said not AS useful. It's still pretty damn useful and it's practically the answer to prayers you guys didn't even know you could make. It'll be a lot clearer once we're there.

"But hear me on this. Don't touch anything I don't tell you to and do as I say. If not, the lightest consequence is getting really sick and the worst consequence is... death is far more preferable. This isn't a joke or me trying to make sure I have dibs on stuff. Even standing somewhere other than where I tell you to stand could cause you to be erased from existence at one point.

"You too, Roy. Dimensional erasure phenomenon isn't a myth. Both you and Garret have light and fluffy souls primed for collapse. To put it in a simple but confusing way, you're not real enough to withstand the exposure... yet. You will be."

Roy said, "Our souls... are marshmallows?"

Orison shook his head. "Yours is more like a doughy dinner roll with a piece of rock grit baked into it. Garret's is like a seeded grape."

"What's mine look like?" Gurrut asked, trying but failing to look barely interested.

Orison chuckled in exasperation. "You guys are basically asking me to do simple math while I'm counting a stack of money. You do realize if I miss something-"

Gan cut in, "I'll catch it? Come on. I want to know what my soul looks like too."

Sighing, he relented. "Gurrut, yours looks kind of like a piece of honeycomb with a petrified bee inside. Gan's is kind of like a spun sugar egg filled with pieces of frozen gum candy and a BB. I can only see the surface layers of Stag's soul and it's like looking into a mirror with a mirror behind me except the copies of myself stretching out infinitely, all look fuzzy but definitely different. A reflective jawbreaker?"

Stag said, "And your own? It's only fair."

Orison thought about it and said, "A band with grooves and bumps I'm not spiritually strong enough to survive examining, inside an iceberg, inside a sea, inside a clear rubber teething ring."

"Why are everybody's souls except yours compared to food? Also, should I be concerned that mine sounds tasty?" Gurrut said.