Crusher and his dwarves had taken over a corner of the square where they’d been told House Walker would arrive. Leaning against one of the make-shift war wagons they’d built the night before, he thought about what his king had told him.

  Neither he nor anyone else liked how the local ‘nobility’ had handled House Walker. Interfering with clan politics was considered extremely rude in dwarven culture, and demanding a newly founded clan to give up its rightful position during a negotiation was grounds for a clan war. Lord Walker was well within his rights to tell them to shove their agreements up their asses and take a walk. It was his mountain they were arguing over after all.

  While the humans had ‘fixed’ the paperwork, and made everything legal, King Mithrilstrike and the clan understood what had really happened. The local nobility had strongarmed the lad into giving his mountain away. Nobody but the local nobility was happy about the outcome.

  The young lord stomping off after kicking everyone out was practically proof of their suspicions. These human nobles were not to be trusted.

  After returning to their rooms, Crusher himself had spoken up for the young lord. He seemed like one of the rare humans that they could get along with, and Crusher recommended that the king keep up the relationship. Luckily enough, the king had agreed.

  He’d ordered Crusher and a few warriors to tag along with the lad and see how he handled himself in a fight. If he proved half as worthy with a blade as he did with a mug, then he was a human worth knowing.

  Besides, this way, the clan would get to see how the humans were in a fight. Most of them had never seen a human before they’d come to their lands, let alone seen him fight. They were all curious as to how true the tales were.

  Rolling his shoulders to relieve some of the boredom, he glanced at his assembled force, happy to see them handling being above ground well. None of them seemed put off by the open air, or worried about the crowds of human soldiers around them. He’d picked them all personally from the clan’s limited forces, and it was good to see that his judgment had been proven correct.

  He wasn’t sure how long it would take to form his opinion of the lad, but he intended to stick close to him until he could be confident in his report. The king wanted him to learn about these humans and especially this House Walker, and Crusher intended to learn everything he could.

  —--

  Nero hadn’t read all that many books on any subject yet, but he’d read several ‘comprehensive’ texts on essence and magic in general. He knew a bit about a bit, and between what he’d learned from Nick and Jennings, he believed he knew enough to understand what he was reading.

  And what he was reading was beginning to piss him off.

  One thing that had been central to all video games, fantasy novels, gamelit, litrpg, and tabletop worlds he’d played back on Earth was that the rules were simple. Even complicated magic systems inherently had core aspects that were easy to understand and follow. In many ways, the worlds these authors and creators imagined were much easier to comprehend than real life.

  Unfortunately, Nero didn’t find this world’s magic system anything close to simple. Every chapter, every rule… they all had exceptions or qualifiers. According to what he was reading, if he wanted to understand the core principles of magic, he’d have to delve into ethereal physics and planar dynamics among numerous other subjects.

  The more he read, the more he realized that this world was just built on different principles than the one he was used to. Of course, that realization also forced him to confront the fact that he hadn’t understood his old world all that well to begin with.

  He understood the basic concepts of things like gravity and light… he had gone to high school. But, he’d never wrapped his head around the application of any of those concepts. Hell, no one had. Humans didn’t have the ability to interact with those forces without machines acting as a go-between. And no one had built anything that could affect primal forces like gravity or mass… or at least he didn’t think they had.

  But here, in Oglivarch, magic was all about affecting reality directly. Technically, you didn’t have to understand what you were doing when you created a fireball spellform. You just carved it into the ether with your center, powered it, and then waited for it to do its thing.

  According to the author of the book he was reading, that was as far as most mages bothered to study. Memorization of hundreds of spell forms and their constituent parts was more than enough for a mage to become ‘skilled’ in magic. The author made it quite clear how much respect they had for the researchers and spell developers who did the actual work required to build the knowledge base mages used to construct their spells.

  Opening his eyes a bit to sneak a peek at Nick who was enthusiastically explaining the history behind the mountain city they were on their way to liberate from the kobalds, Nero tried to imagine an army of people like him hiding away in Towers studying the fundamental forces of creation so that spell developers could find new and inventive ways to kill each other.

  Shaking off the pessimistic thought, Nero chided himself for being unfair to his friend. He needed to remember that this was its own wholly realized world, and was not some fantasy game that worked on a simple system that he would ever understand… or at least not one he’d understand any time soon.

  And his old world wasn’t any different. People at universities were given grants to study any number of completely bonkers concepts that eventually were turned into things he used every day. Studying wave dynamics and energy projection led to the creation of the household microwave. He hadn’t needed to understand any of what it took to make it, and he could still use it to make Baggle-Bites.

  ‘Man… I miss Baggle-Bites,’ he thought to himself with a sigh.

  Returning to his thoughts, he tried to wrap his head around how convoluted this world was. Nothing was simple, while at the same time, everything was. He could use his abilities to interact and influence the building blocks of reality, but that didn’t make it any easier to understand anything.

  It was like everyone in the world was born with the natural ability to become a car, while not being gifted with the inherent understanding of how an engine worked. It was more than a little disconcerting.

  He’d grown up in a society based around the simplification of grander concepts into small discrete analogies that would fit on a Wikipedia page. The fact that summaries wouldn’t be enough here was both hard to comprehend and disheartening.

  “Just take it one step at a time,” he muttered to himself.

  That was all he could do. Forces of nature were probably just as confusing back home as they were here, but back home he hadn’t needed to understand them. Here, if he wanted to be more than just some guy slinging spells other people developed, he’d have to put in the study hours. He’d have to learn the local equivalent of quantum physics to have a chance in hell of comprehending this world’s version of the grand unified theory.

  All those times Nick had been lecturing him with detailed explanations that he’d glossed over, Nero should have been listening. It simply wasn’t enough to ‘get the gist’ if he wanted to be the kind of mage who could rewrite reality to his whims… and he definitely wanted to be the kind of mage who could rewrite reality to his whims.

  Temporarily setting his book aside, mentally speaking of course, as it was nothing more than a projection in his head from his link, Nero opened his eyes to see how the rest of the people in the wagon were doing.

  He wasn’t surprised to see that a few were busy either meditating or sleeping, while others were quietly conversing about the upcoming battle and what they were expecting to see. Traveling in a covered wagon wasn’t all that enjoyable from a sightseeing perspective.

  Spreading out his senses, he noticed that they were no longer in a forest, and were now barrelling down a wide four-lane road that resembled a highway. It was weird to see horse-covered wagons speeding along like cars.

  Nero had grown used to using his essence field to see what was going on around him and he took a moment to think about how the locals defined the power.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Essence fields were what they called the interaction of a person with the world around them. Whether it was their soul, mind, or body… all of it came together to create their essence fields. Different aspects of it allowed for different things, and they had numerous names for each one of them.

  When a person was using them to look at stuff, they creatively referred to it as a ‘perception field’. Nero had found that it was kind of like a giant invisible eyeball that floated around and saw everything within its domain. Unfortunately, he could only ‘focus’ on one particular area at a time. Whatever he wasn’t looking at directly became sort of fuzzy and unfocused. It was like having a 360-degree view of the world that was separate from his eyesight, with a layered ability to perceive the ether and the material plane all mashed together.

  Like every subject he’d come across, there were scores of studies done that explained how it worked. It was a combination of his soul’s ability to interact with the ether, along with his mind's ability to interpret what it was seeing, and his body’s ability to project his influence.

  Every aspect of a person worked together to form the field and trying to define which part did what in any particular circumstance was confusing as all hell. Like everything else in the world, it was a combination of factors that all worked together to create a technique. Honestly, he wondered whether it was even worth it to study how it worked.

  ‘And we’re back to thinking about how complicated everything is here,’ he complained to himself.

  Being not completely delusional, he had to admit to himself that his tendency to try and simplify things was making things difficult… not to mention making his head hurt.

  Trying to clear his mind, Nero mentally closed the book he’d been reading. Attempting not to think about anything, he listened to the sound of the wagon wheels flying over the road. It was an odd combination of a car and what he thought a wagon back home probably sounded like.

  Hours passed as he played with his perception field, learning to ‘see’ everything while not focusing on anything in particular. It was like trying to learn how to remember what you were seeing out of the corner of your eye… but not really at all.

  Eventually, the wagon train exited the local version of a highway and he started seeing people again. The sheer scale of the city was still mind-boggling to him. It was hard for him to keep in mind that everything he was looking at was inside a giant wall that surrounded millions of people while keeping enough space for entire forests where the rich and powerful could hide their mansions.

  He wasn’t sure which of the gates they were in, but the architecture he was seeing made it clear it wasn’t like any of the ones he was used to. The buildings seemed simpler, and more uniform. Instead of wood and paint, everything was made of stone. He remembered Nick saying that the areas on the surface had spread out from the mountain city, which had been the first place where the city had begun.

  Some of these buildings had probably been around for hundreds of years… some of the people probably were too now that he thought about it.

  All too quickly, the people he was seeing changed from average citizens in commoner-type clothes to robed fancy assholes interspersed among people in armor and tabards. He saw multiple businesses temporarily closed or repurposed for use during the war. Wagons and supplies were being stacked all over the place, and everyone he could see looked busy. Their intensity was even affecting the ether. He could feel it.

  As the wagon train made its way through the congested streets, Nero noted that more and more soldiers were moving in groups… all in the same direction. Since his perception field didn’t really show him anything outside his essence field, he couldn’t tell where everyone was going. Although, he couldn’t help but assume they were all headed toward the mountain city’s entrance.

  Nero got to see entire areas being filled with essence cannons and shield generators among other things that he couldn’t identify but that he recognized from his time fighting the kobalds near their tunnel. Engineers and nerdy-looking people swarmed over them, fidgeting and adjusting things in preparation for sending the tools of war into battle.

  Market squares that most likely normally held farmer's markets had been turned into mustering fields for soldiers. Rows upon rows of men and women were standing in ranks, listening to their superiors giving last-minute orders from wooden podiums that had been hastily set up. Nero had lost count of how many soldiers he’d seen in the last few minutes.

  He couldn’t help but wonder what percentage of the local population made up the army. He recalled Nick and Vera saying that there were millions of people living in the city, and that was before half the villages and towns in the surrounding area took refuge behind the walls.

  How many people were they sending into the mountain to fight? 100,000? 200,000? A million?

  He had like 300 people. Would his forces even matter? Would he?

  Shaking off the feeling of insignificance, Nero focused instead on what he was seeing. It was a sight he would hopefully never forget. Hundreds and hundreds of armored fantasy warriors preparing to storm a mountain full of evil plane-invading lizards bent on killing and eating everyone. It was epic. It was awesome.

  When they’d finally gotten where they were going, the wagons all came to a halt in a line. The horses were almost immediately detached from their harnesses and led away, while he and the rest of House Walker poured out of the back of the wagons like a pimple popping all over the courtyard they’d been assigned.

  Back under the sun, Nero took a moment to let his eyes adjust as he began looking around.

  Dropping his jaw, he stared up at the mountain hanging over the city in awe. It was massive, like proper massive. The damn thing took up half the horizon and made him feel tinier than he ever had by comparison.

  He could see the top of the door to the mountain city over the buildings, and it alone was enough to make him feel inadequate. Never in his life had he seen something so ridiculously massive, and that was including the completely unnecessarily tall walls that surrounded the city. He couldn’t understand what the point was of building doors that big. What could they have possibly been trying to allow for entry? Godzilla?

  “Lad! Are ya and your clan ready? We’ve been waiting here for hours for ye all to show up!” a voice shouted loud enough to overcome the ambient noise going on all around him.

  Nero turned around to see one of the dwarves he’d met the day before walking up to him, along with two other bearded and armored warriors.

  Smiling in greeting, Nero replied loudly, “We stopped for breakfast first. Can’t go killing kobalds on an empty stomach, now can we?”

  Walking up to Nero, the dwarf ignored everyone around him to pat him on the back with a laugh. “No, ye can’t. The king’s a dwarf of his word, and he sent us to fight alongside ye. For the duration of this jaunt into the mountain, our axes our yours. So, where will ye have us?”

  Turning his head, Nero located Cathleen who was talking to a group of soldiers who he assumed were army based on their tabards. Gesturing with his hand toward her, he said, “That’s Cathleen Averett, our battle leader. She’s the one who’s going to be running the show, and she’s the one who’s going to give you your orders.”

  Seeing the grimace beginning to form on the dwarf’s face, Nero added, “She knows more about war and killing than I do, and I’m not too proud to follow someone better than me at something. If you’re to fight with us, then you best get used to it too.”

  Nodding his head, the dwarf replied, “Fair enough. But the king told me that we’re to follow you, so where you’re going, we’re going.”

  Nero didn’t bother to argue. Instead, he asked, “How many of you are coming along?”

  The dwarf replied, “Not too many. Most of us have already left for our mountain. Once the rune mages get the tunnel open, the clan will be coming through. Then the king and the warriors will push the kobalds from their end. There are only 50 of us here to fight with ya, and we’ll be staying until our king calls for us to come back. Don’t ya worry though, a dwarf underground is worth ten or twenty humans in a fight. We’ll do our part.”

  Chuckling at the obvious brag, Nero patted the dwarf’s armored shoulder and said, “If you say so. Come on… I’ll introduce you.”

  As he led the dwarf toward Cathleen through the crowd, he asked offhandedly, “By the way, what was your name again? You’re not that guy Phillip or Collin or whatever his name was… are you?”

  The dwarf, seemingly both offended and amused replied, “Crusher, boy. Me name’s Crusher. And you best remember it.”

  Nero nodded with a smile. “Right… Crusher. You look like a Crusher, so remembering that will be easy. Although, if I end up calling you Wesley… don’t be offended. Wesley Crusher was a storied hero from one of my people’s legends back home, and you remind me of him. He didn’t have a beard like yours… but he was just as socially adept and warm as you are.”

  Crusher looked over Nero, his bushy brows furrowed in thought. He couldn’t tell if the young human lad was insulting him or not, and he wasn’t sure if he should be offended. While being compared to a hero sounded good… something about the way the human phrased what he’d said sounded wrong.

  “Cathleen! Allow me to introduce the great dwarf Crusher. He and his dwarves will be joining us in our kobald hunt. His king has asked him to aid us in our fight,” Nero shouted loudly upon arriving near Cathleen and the army folks.

  Turning around, Cathleen looked down at Nero with some annoyance at being interrupted. “Fine. He and his dwarves will be with you and your team. Find Nick and he’ll show you where to go.”

  Looking around at the congested courtyard they’d taken over, Nero asked, “OK. But can you help me out here and point me in a direction?”

  Cathleen, who’d already returned to her conversation, paused with a sigh. Turning back to Nero she said, “Use your link Nero. You’re still inside Dorchester’s Though Hub’s range. Get with your team… I’m too busy to deal with you right now.”

  Shrugging the cold woman’s dismissal off, Nero turned to Crusher and said, “Well, let’s go find our teammates. Then we can collect your dwarfs and get this party started.”

  Whispering in a tone that sounded like gravel falling through a blender, Crusher asked, “I thought ye humans made your lessers speak with respect? She sounded like a dwarf.”

  Chuckling, Nero replied, “That’s Cathleen in a nutshell. I’m told she’s from the North… whatever that means. Everyone seems to take that as an explanation.”

  Glancing over at the dwarf while Nero led him and his two followers through the crowd, Nero added, “I honestly can’t wait to introduce you to Nick. He’s the most human human you’re probably ever going to meet. I think you’re going to love him… or hate him… either way, it will be funny.”