In a single step, Alex is surrounded by several enemies. Each of his moves is graceful and purposeful without a single joule of energy going to waste. Every single one of his blows is enough to end most of the charging enemies.

I concentrate most of my attention on him and with all my capabilities form a moving circle of roots around him. I do my absolute best to not let the enemy crowd him, not that he is making it easy on them. He moves through the battlefield at unbelievable speeds, something my roots cannot hope to match, but I manage to keep up as anywhere he moves there is already a tightly knit network underground which I can mobilize to help him.

Each of his actions flows into the next in a continuous cycle. In only a few seconds I see Greg and a couple of other level 50 people jump into the fray.

None stick near each other, spreading throughout the enemy army which forces the turrets shooting fireballs to halt. There are still plenty of enemies trying to climb the walls, but the numbers are much smaller as they focus their efforts on the 8 people amongst them.

Atop the walls, not a single goblin manages to get a foothold and Merlin spends most of his efforts controlling the roots there so I don’t even have to spend another second concerned with it. The frantic fight we come to expect when the enemy arrives at the walls doesn’t come. Even if he wasn’t helping on the walls the people atop the walls could have steamrolled the few stragglers making atop the walls through the defenses and people fighting below.

I have a few roots in place to help hold the wall should they be needed, but I continue focusing on Alex. I do my best to guide the enemies into more vulnerable positions, not able to reinforce each other and therefore allowing Alex to be ganged up upon. The leftover of my attention helps one of the others down there, but they manage to hold pretty well.

I grow more thin branches with poison and numbing agents like sparse wheat fields. After continuous exposure and the time for it to seep into their bloodstream, they are beginning to slow down. The ones most affected even start stumbling, not fully able to control their limbs.

I would even hazard a guess their ‘health meter’ is going down though we can’t confirm that with the limitation placed by the system.

Seeing his forces being quickly massacred, the Goblin chief sends most of his stronger troops into the fray trying halt the momentum we are building.

Shamans start to chant, archers start to concentrate their arrows on Alex and the others, and the much stronger Orcs make their way through to surround all of the people amidst their army.

The results bring a smile to my face.

With hundreds of people not engaged in the fight, with unprecedented idleness, the perfect conditions for a chant to start are in place, and with no planning, just the sound of battle on everyone’s hearts and the common purpose it starts.

“Yeah” or “kick their asses” is what I hear though soon that gives way to a rhythmically thumping on the ground consuming all the voices as the people atop the walls hit their feet on the ground. The vibrations coming through the ground may be weaker than much of what some of the fights bring us, but the energy in the air and the understanding of what is happening send my heart racing.

Eventually, even those few that had been yelling something randomly stop and they only continue to rhythmically march in place.

What they can’t see or feel, is the barest trace of Aether cycling above their heads. They wouldn’t see real benefits for years under normal circumstances, but help speed it up by sending another very thin thread and allowing the cycling Aether to absorb mine like a river meeting a stream.

I’m tempted to directly manipulate the cycle, but I resist the impulse.

Even Alex, with much greater control of his own Aether, starts being drawn into this cycle. I stopped all conscious use of Aether and let things take their course.

Looking at the natural cycle of Aether, however, or rather feeling it, makes it all click. I had an inkling before, but now there is no doubt. This is what I had been doing wrong.

In this aspect, Alex is ahead of me. I need to let go of my incessant need to control what I couldn’t affect and let things flow. Sure, occasionally I will run into something dangerous like Max’s Attack, but otherwise Aether is just fuel for my story which needed to happen on its own. Something to let naturally develop, not force into the shape. Even as I mostly cycle my Aether around, in the back of my mind, I had specific goals, goals that are always changing.

Level this skill, increase my stats, create a rune, then come back to increase stats, then get a new skill. I need a single cohesive story, something that would tie it all together and make the disparate parts greater than the whole.

The smooth and continuous stream the village is beginning to form shows that even if I succeed in my short-term goals, eventually I would reach a bottleneck. I realize can’t use Aether like a crutch, it should just enhance what was already there. I finally found had a concrete direction to use in my experimentation.

Alex begins to add a little fuel to the Aether around everyone in the village, and I continue to feed it a little more. Too bad I won’t benefit from it as I feel my Aether faintly repels this natural cycle. I really cannot consider myself part of the village anymore.

Wait…. never before managed to feel my natural cycle of Aether. Not without ‘augmenting it’, I just imagined it was there, but the contrast now makes it obvious. Before letting the wandering thoughts consume my attention, I split the thin stream of Aether I’m sending outward.

One continues to go into the natural Aether cycle above me, the other into my natural cycle. I think about spending a few minutes analyzing it but reject the idea. Now is not the time.

I see an opportunity. The shamans stop their efforts and all start to chant together. I have a feeling they won’t be able to divert any of their attention so I prepare to disrupt their work.

I start to channel mana, more than even during the attack on Max’s village. Rivers of leaves my inner world batteries through a foot-wide channel and spreads all around the formations underground fueling them. Dozens of formations hidden in place just waiting for me to activate. A minute later when everything in place and the Shamans are almost ready, I activate a new rune configuration.

It lasts only for a moment, but every single goblin touching the ground is frozen in place for an instant including the Goblin Chief. I had an entire formation focused only on him.

Nearly a hundred thousand mana is spent in a few moments, a good portion focusing only on the chief as a beachball-sized fireball shoots straight up from the ground at him emptying the mana of the second formation I prepared for him.

He tries to fight the immobilization with all his might, but he fails.

In an instant, he is burnt and only half alive, with the freezing formation managing to hold him still for another instant, long enough for two more fireballs from the turrets to finish him off.

I continue to channel more mana, this time directly wielding it on the mana disrupting formation to get in the way of the Shamans. The other mages, even without Merlin’s help, are doing a decent job at combating them, but without having to worry about the big attack, the stalemate breaks in their favor.

The Shamans try to hold the mana in their control, instead of allowing it to dissipate but nothing they can do is of any use.

They turn to me with a vengeance but I’m simply too far away for them to effectively fight me and the mages nearby force them to turn back their attention. The attack, fairly organized until this point turns into a free for all as a couple of the smallest goblins and about a hundred wolves start running away when they see the Chief fall.

Not that there is much left of him to fall. The fireballs left nearly nothing behind.

No more of the enemy army tries to make their escape as I wonder what that could mean, but there are too many possibilities.

When the last of the Orcs is downed, with the help of the fireball turrets that finished off the goblin chief, the 3000 enemies left start being cut down like chaff. They can do nothing to resist and even the people atop the walls start to jump down and join the fray. Soon, it becomes a free-for-all, though with the strength and experience of the ones joining in, it’s clear which direction the battle is heading in.

My help is less needed as the goblins left can’t mass against a single person, so I continue to help Alex and start to ignore everything else.

Merlin however is having a blast. Having practiced a lot since the last time, he is an immense help to everyone else, and will likely receive the reward at the end as he deserves. In the thick fray, the goblins don’t have the time to dodge his attacks with the occasionally the tell-tale signs of his meta magic, but his familiarity with Pando’s seed and the roots rose so high he doesn’t even need to rely on it to connect and move the roots. Truly a genius.

The seconds and minutes meld into each other until not a single Goblin stands in front of us. Something in my gut revolts against what has taken place here, but what else could we have done?

I get up and start making my way down, in Alex’s direction. All around him, hundreds of corpses cut by his very spear in a display I never thought I would see from him, not so soon anyway. He could probably give Lord Max a run for his money with a significantly lower level to boot.

He should have had the opportunity to explore Aether, and a hundred other things before becoming this killing machine. So young.

I rail against the system and its rules. I can do little to change it, for now. But one day….one day….

I wait a few meters from him in silence as he simply stands there. He feeds into the space above a thread of his own Aether, helping the future identity of the village to form. I jerk in surprise as he begins to speak without turning back.

“Nash.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Out with it, you must have something to say.”

“Not particularly. Nothing that will change anything for the moment.”

“I know that you are not fond of the necessary task to stand against these creatures.”

“Ohh, absolutely, but the alternative is even worse. Still… I hope to come up with a solution eventually.”

“If anyone can it will be you.” He says.

“Don’t count yourself short. You have progressed more in wielding your Aether even with the system's interference in a week than I did over years with nothing standing in my way.”

“You know it’s not the same, not when your life wasn’t on the line.”

“Nothing is ever the same, there are always differences. So we simplify things in our head to make sense of them, we distill what we consider to be important. And your speed of progress is very important.”

“It feels almost unfair. I can just cut down thousands of them if they don’t overwhelm me, and they stand no chance. It’s not even like I’m putting my life on the line against them.” He says.

“Don’t ever take this concept too far, if you get sloppy and miss the signs, even the weakest of them could get you off guard.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t. Still, they are playing the lottery and the price of the ticket is their life.”

“There is still much unexplained. Why do they come? Are they mindless machines, are they crazy? Do they hate us? Does the system interfere? … You get the drift. Until we can figure all that out, it will be a moot point.”

We both let the silence grow around us. There is plenty of noise from the people already starting to drag the corpses away, but something akin to a bubble forms around both of us for a while. The silence starts growing uncomfortable but neither of us breaks it right away, it seems wrong to do so.

However, eventually it ends, as all things do.

“Well, let me see what my reward from the system is. I should have gotten quite a few levels.”

“So you finally chose your class?”

“What?” He asks at the nonsequitur I throw his way. “Ohh, yeah. How did you know?... Never mind. It’s something good and I had enough Exp to hit level 50 straight away, Now I’m just waiting to unlock a good class upgrade, maybe even a subclass to pass level 50.”

“You should definitely wait for a subclass.”

“That was what I was thinking, but so far only Greg and Merlin managed to unlock one.”

“You will do so in time. And come on… you have to know what you just did... I don’t think there is a single person in the instance who can match you in skill, not even Greg. He is higher in levels and sheer power, but you showed both dexterity, agility, and skill he will never be able to match. He gave you that spear for a reason.”

He looks down but doesn't say anything further. I see the telltale signs of him opening his prompt and I repeat the action.

Let me see what rewards the system has for us. Wait, did I check the prompt for the last couple of attacks? I think not. Chuckling I open the prompt and I’m greeted by two messages

You have attacked a village on your own.

Bonus Exp. 4x

Enemies:

Humans Avg. Lv. 33 x135

Your contribution awards you: 2.78 M Exp. (100%)

You have participated in a regular trial of your village.

Bonus Exp. 8x

+150% No medium injuries.

+50% Made the enemy flee.

+25% Finished in less than 10 min.

+25% Completely countered the enemy’s strategy.

+25% Overwhelming victory.

+25% No damage to the village's defenses.

Enemies:

Goblins Avg. Lv. 36 x3496

Wolves Avg. Lv. 28 x2135

Archers Avg. Lv. 37 x197

Orcs Avg. Lv. 41 x201

Goblin Shaman Avg. Lv. 52 x40

Goblin Chief Avg. Lv. 71 x1

Your contribution awards you: 58.49 M Exp. (6.10%)

If I was already thinking these numbers were looking pretty stupid before, now there was no denying it. Even the attack on Max’s village gave me a nice bonus.

The formula after level 50 changed and became exponential instead of linear, but it didn’t change much for the levels below 100. Now, what about the exp gain, will the base multiplier increase as long as we continue to receive attacks? Each time, it has increased by one. If this continues, soon we will be swimming in Exp. Could we figure out a way to cheese it even more?