NOVEL NEXT Chapter 100.5: OMAKEs Vol 1
Anza Black did not like where her life had gone in the past couple of months.
Everything at Cliffwatch had been a huge thrill. Discovering, struggling against and ultimately destroying an infestation among their own? What a rush! It had felt good, in a way that eclipsed the pleasure of saving people from Kaijus. She'd returned to Topwater expecting a hero's welcome, merit and promotion rained down on her by her adoring colleagues.
And found none of that.
The prevailing opinion among the Goliath Guard was that Lahlee had been one of their own. A lot of the details about the Regressors and what exactly had been happening in Cliffwatch were confidential, and it seemed that a lot of her fellow Guardsmen believed that, regardless of what had actually happened, Anza should not have 'betrayed' Lahlee and made it so public. Her good-natured boasts about her heroic feat had been interpreted as shameless and spiteful self-aggrandisement.
"Honestly," she complained over a mug of beer to one of her more sympathetic colleagues, "they're all just mad that it was me of all people, who doesn't care about power games and promotions and seeds of chaos like that, and not them. I did a good thing! Y'know, what our
job
is? I'm not saying I want parades in my honour or anything but a bit of respect would be nice,"
Vernal Taifu, a hefty cow beastkin Guardswoman who dwarfed even Anza's own Amazonian stature, patted her on the back. Anza knew her from school; Vernal had been one of the regular 'guest teachers' who were tapped to help trainees get a wider range of experience. "Yeah, it sucks. You'd never think that having a good reputation can be a bad thing, but here we are,"
"Ugh. I feel like an outsider in my own home," Because . . that was what the Goliath Guard meant to Anza. It wasn't just her job, it was her calling. Her dream. Going out there to be a hero, tearing up the monsters and hearing the cheers of the people she saved . . it had all somehow gone rancid. "Maybe I should just leave. Transfer to a different branch and start over,"
"You could do that," Vernal nodded with a slight hum. "I'm sure I could find you an opening somewhere back east," Vernal wasn't a Topwater native, after all. She was returning from a rotation on the Cityvore monitoring division, and had stopped in Topwater to resupply and catch up.
"Ahhh, more tempting than it should be," Anza confessed, and then drained her mug.
"You might be looking at it the wrong way," Vernal cautioned her.
Anza quirked an eyebrow. "Whaddya mean?"
"I reckon that your colleagues are distancing themselves from you because they're afraid. Lots of Guardsmen have side hustles that border on illegality. Now they're all thinking that if they let you get a whiff, you'll rat them out,"
"Like what? Protection rackets?" Anza's nostrils flared dangerously. "Slave trades?"
"Eh, most people don't go for the big stuff. Material theft is the most common. Some friends of mine busted up a group who were skimming off the raw Core production lines not so long ago,"
Anza whistled. "Oh, seed of chaos. Did they piss off the dwarves?"
"They would have if that lot had caught them, not us," Vernal snorted.
Anza raised an eyebrow. ". . And who exactly is 'us'?"
Vernal blinked a bit. "Ahhhhh, stars. Pretend you didn't hear that?"
"Seriously? You can't just pass that off. Are you with the Giant's Fingers now or something?"
Vernal winced, and Anza did a spit take. "No way. You of all people, working in internal affairs?"
"Hey, you don't know everything about me," the cowgirl elbowed her with enough force that Anza was nearly knocked out of her chair.
"Oh, yeah, right. And next you'll say the real reason you're in town is because you heard about my new reputation and want to scout me for reassignment,"
Vernal was very quiet, and Anza twisted to look at her. ". . You're starring joking,"
"I mean, all things considered you just proved you'd be really good at it,"
"No, no go feed those stars to the Boundless Chimera. That's not me. I like punching things really hard, not sorting through evidence and spying on people,"
Vernal chuckled. "Ah, fair enough. Well, I can't force you. But if you change your mind, you can give me a call any time,"
"I won't!" Anza hotly insisted, jabbing her in the chest. "I won't and you can't make me!"
<=====}—o
"Alright," Nya looked uncomfortable. It was time for one of her sessions of 'general knowledge that Mikayla lacked.'
"Today we're covering an awkward topic. But it's my duty as your tutor to bring you up to speed because literally everyone else knows this,"
"Don't underestimate my ignorance," Keldryn drawled from the windowsill.
Nya ignored him as dancing lights sprung from her fingers for diagrams. "Today, we're discussing the bloody history of my own kind, the yaoguai,"
"Ooh,"
What followed was a confusing soup of names and places that all blended together. Halfway through, Mikayla started wondering if the whole nation of Guili was
actually
reminiscent of China or if the System was just translating their names that way.
What she gathered was that around fifteen hundred years ago, the yaoguai had emigrated from the south, from the continent of Keodudai. Which was shortly before that place was rechristened the 'Monster Nation'.
Hard to imagine why they'd left.
After fleeing the Monster Nation, they'd colonised all the way up the eastern coast of Guili, eventually reaching well into the Kaiju Coast. Going north, they had been unopposed, spreading into what was now the southern part of the Kaiju Coast, but when they explored to the west they encountered the now-defunct beastfolk nation of Kuna. There had been a couple of generations of testy peace, until the yaoguai king had taken a tigerkin princess as his wife in a political marriage that unified the two nations.
This had resulted in an era of peace and prosperity that lasted centuries under the resultant royal line of mixed-blood yaoguai. But that came to an end when several generations of marrying exclusively yaoguai nobility led the king of nine centuries ago to decide that he was sick of ruling both the upstanding yaoguai folk and the filthy jumped-up rodents infesting their streets.
Or so Keldryn had sarcastically summarised.
This led to an era of slowly reducing beastkin to second-class citizens, stripping away their rights. A failed revolutionary movement had been the spark that enabled the yaoguai nobility to drive their beastkin neighbours out wholesale, leaving Guili as a sovereign nation exclusively for the yaoguai.
Then, in the absence of a common enemy, the yaoguai had turned to factionalism, and after another couple of centuries of escalating tensions, there'd been about two hundred years of what sounded like
the Japanese Warring States period with magic
. At least sixteen unsuccessful campaigns by various factions to 'unify the country' had been chronicled. This state of bedlam had been brought to an abrupt end by the Kaiju Collapse, and the country had reluctantly rallied behind the Emperor to present a united front against the First Monster King. The most recent two centuries had been a period of cautious peace, cemented by the Emperor of the time declaring that pureblood yaoguai were better than mixed-blood yaoguai and uniting the nobility through the ideology of blood purity.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
"Everyone knows it's a sham," Nya concluded. "You aren't better than someone else because they have a human grandparent and you don't, thar's not how superiority works. In the past fifty years, only the most deluded or desperate have genuinely believed that. And the current emperor's already dismantled the last few discrimination laws. The rumour mill says he's been looking for excuses to strip the old money of their titles and induct mixed-bloods or even non-yaoguai as new nobility. These days, the blood purity thing is all a charade, but it's a charade that all the most important people in the country have put too much effort into for their entire lives to just drop. Give it a few more decades, and no one will care about it at all,"
". . I honestly half expected 'things have been the same as they are now for the past thousand years," Mikayla idly mused as she went back over the timeline.
"What? Why? That's not how society works,"
"Clearly I used to read too many fantasy books with crappy worldbuilding,"
Nya cast her an askance glance, then visibly decided she didn't care enough to ask.
"By the way, you didn't at any point mention black powder," Mikayla realised. "What's up with that?"
"What is this black powder?"
It was now Mikayla's turn to give a brief lecture on the discovery and properties of gunpowder and the firearms of her world.
"Intriguing. But no, I've never heard of anything of the sort. Metal weapons that ape Gun and Cannon Cores, as destructive as the most potent Techniques, more difficult to use but with the trade-off of costing no Mana. That does sound like quite a useful technology," Nya mused.
"Yeah, well, I guess gunpowder just doesn't exist in this world," Mikayla noted that down. "That explains a lot about the development of your tech tree," She paused. "Now I'm curious about how Armour Cores would hold up against
my
world's firearms, if the guns around here are so much weaker,"
"I'm sure we'll find out someday," Keldryn assured her.
<=====}—o
"Hey, Shao," Mikayla made sure that Nya wasn't in the room, then returned her focus to the little orange firebrand who, with increasing regularity, was hanging out in her room.
"Yeah?"
"You see that plaque up there?" She gestured at the carving in Nya's half of the room that the System told her translated to SUPERIORITY. It was a miniature replica of the window in Nya's bedroom at the Han Estate, the brand that had loomed over her all her life. "If you can find a way to destroy it and make it look like an accident, I'll get you some special candy,"
"Okay!" Shao offered a toothy grin, then hesitated. "Wait. Fuchsia says it's bad to break other people's things,"
Of all the times for Shao to learn that destroying things wasn't okay. "No, it's fine just this once," Mikayla scrambled for a story. "You see, that plaque is cursed, it makes Nya say and do weird things,"
Shao frowned thoughtfully. "She does say weird things sometimes,"
"And part of the curse is that she won't let anyone try to get rid of it. So we need to make it look like an accident. She won't believe me if I do something to it, but you're cute enough to get away with murder,"
"Fuchsia says that's bad too and I shouldn't ever do it again," Shao automatically answered.
Mikayla hid a grimace. It was way too easy to forget that the adorable little pyromaniac had a body count higher than most adult warriors. "Which is why I'm not asking you to kill anyone, just break a cursed plaque,"
"Okay!"
Mikayla nodded, turning back to her book as Shao wandered over to the pile of stuffed animals that Mikayla had populated her bed with.
There was a thunk, and then a crash.
She looked up to see that Shao had thrown a stuffed rabbit with perfect aim, knocking the plaque from the shelf and sending it crashing to the ground. "There! I got it on my first try!"
Mikayla frowned. "I told you to make it look like an accident,"
"I didn't do it," Shao immediately declared.
"We need a better story than 'you didn't do it', though,"
"What do we need a story for? Accident just means doing something and then telling people you didn't,"
". . Where did you get that idea?"
"The meanies in the city,"
Mikayla paused, and groaned. She hadn't factored Shao's upbringing into this plan. "I see,"
Shao's face fell. ". . did I screw up?"
"Don't worry. Let's, um, start by cleaning that up, then figure out what we're going to tell Nya,"
<=====}—o
Geri missed his home.
He hailed from the very southern tip of Guili, a place called Ogsus that was only a stone's throw away from the Great Ravine, the one which separated Guili from the Monster Nation. It was a very different place in that it was almost diametrically opposed to the hostile north that was the Kaiju Coast.
In Ogsus, the monsters were insects. Small but dangerous things that tended to specialise towards poison and rapid replication, building up mighty swarms that overwhelmed their foes. Back at home, Geri had been a rising star, a once-in-a-century talent whose skill at sniffing out nests and carefully directing his Swarm Cores to hunt down and execute the Hive Queens were unparalleled. It was an entire combat style unto itself, known as Swarm Command.
He'd been so successful that the elders of Ogsus had all agreed that his potential was wasted, and that they would pool their funds so that they could send Geri to Cloudscraper, the best school on the continent, the one that would surely bring out his full potential.
And thus Geri had learned how big the world really was . . how small a single bee truly was, when surrounded by giants.
Swarm Command just . .
didn't work
against Kaijus. There was no room for the complex interplay of trading the lives of his bees for enemy drones. No way to target the queen. His vaunted strategic acumen was useless - he couldn't even make himself heard over all the loud personalities in his class, and he'd wasted his opportunity to earn respect with his skills - because his bees just couldn't deal enough damage to matter, not to a Kaiju.
He'd sent a letter explaining his concerns and his regrets to the elders of Ogsus, asking their advice. Even outright admitting that he was on the verge of giving up his studies, even though it had been barely a month.
It had taken a week, but the response from his mentor, Elder Toma, had arrived.
Dear young master Geri,
I am saddened to hear of the struggles you have faced at Cloudscraper Academy. I knew that it would be a challenge for you to adapt to the outside world, but I remain confident in your abilities.
With that said, it seems to me like you might be too rigorously sticking to your existing skillset. Life must evolve to fit its environment, this is as true of you as it is of the insects we battle. Do not be afraid to discard that which you know, or better yet adapt it. You have the potential. Let Cloudscraper be the whetstone that brings out your true strength, in a way that we of Ogsus never could.
I look forward to seeing your answer.
The letter rambled on a bit more after that, which was entirely as expected of the elders, but Geri didn't need to read the rest. He smiled, nodding to himself. It was too soon to call it quits. He needed to evolve his style.
There had to be a solution. He knew it. He just had to find it.