“You didn’t have it easy,” I commented while Tomar told me what had happened to them when they left Cerus. He didn’t go too much into the bloody details, presumably to not relive the experience, but finding himself in a situation where he had to kill a dozen people must have been very difficult for him. The way he waved me off, however, made it seem like it hadn’t been a big deal at all.

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad. We weren’t even injured,” he said.

I watched him closely as he continued on, and something seemed off. It was great that they hadn’t been injured, but I was referring to the killing, which he brushed over completely. I would’ve expected him to still be devastated, even two weeks later. Based on how he told the story, however, it seemed like he had been completely fine after just one day. Then again, if he was fine, that was all that mattered.

While he was telling me about their everyday life during their travels, my mind wandered a little, back to their fight. It had been four against thirteen, with two Fighters and two Sourcerers on their side. They had made it out with minimal injuries, but that had probably worked only because Berla and Reurig acted as shields. If we ever got surrounded alone, we would be done for. This had occurred to me before, but I never had the time to come up with a way to fight against multiple opponents at once.

Ideally, we would have some kind of shield of our own that protects our blindspots, but creating something like that from water seemed unrealistic. We’d either need to use multiple streams to create a kind of web, which would leave holes to poke spears through, or we’d need a whole bunch of water that we moved back and forth at high speed, which would destroy anything that touched it. This would also block our view, however, and shooting through it would be difficult. Neither of these solutions was great, and a far cry from the “magic shield” I was envisioning. Not to mention that they would be pretty complex to script.

Instead, I figured a kind of shockwave that would be sent in all directions might do the trick, similar to the discharge that happens when you use too much force on a vessel. If we could do something like that reliably, and without fainting, it would be easy to keep enemies at bay, while you dealt with them one by one. Maybe it could be triggered by a snap, for quick and easy usage... Hm~

Tomar reached the point in the story where they arrived at our old campsite, and how they had decided to leave the note I found, just in case. They hadn’t planned to wait for me out here, but evidently they hadn’t been able to go back inside town yet.

“So, what did Gean say?” I asked.

“Well, nothing. Reurig couldn’t find him,” Tomar said.

“Huh? What kind of scout are you?” I said jokingly while looking at Reurig with a raised eyebrow.

“A good one, which makes this so weird,” he retorted. “When I couldn’t find him, I started asking around carefully, but it almost seems like he and his wife just disappeared one day. Nobody knows where they are. Their house looks like they might return any moment, however. It’s not cleared out whatsoever.”

“Huh. That’s really unfortunate, my plan would have included him as well,” I said. Rallying the ordinary citizens behind the citizen’s direct leaders would be a good way to get started, similar to how the first mayor of Cerus had done it. Without that, we would inevitably have to deal with the king and the High Priest directly. “What was the next plan?”

“Honestly, we didn’t have one,” Tomar said, looking a little dejected. “We stayed out here, while thinking about what to do next. There’s another problem though. The temple has a ‘divine messenger.’ Some girl that’s either a god or a Sourcerer. Many people apparently became much more devoted to the gods after her appearance.”

“Right... ‘Hope,’ also known as Aelean. She is almost certainly like us. The priest that tested us back in jail had mana as well. I’m guessing he figured out how to blow up a water source. Based on what Lilana tells me, all she displayed were basic water source scripts.”

While we kept sharing information, Lilana was almost eerily quiet. I had expected her to get mad when she heard about the others’ actions, but there had been nothing. She didn’t even comment on how much she disliked Aelene again. I hadn’t told her the exact details of our plans yet, but by this point, she was probably able to piece together that we were trying to take over town. And yet, she kept quiet. Did you fall asleep? If so, you have to teach me how to do that!

Tomar and the others had spent about a week camping out here, going over their options and trying to come up with new plans, while Reurig regularly went into town to investigate. Gean had been gone for over a week, and the idea of convincing the people of Alarna of following criminals seemed more difficult than ever, now that even non-believers were discovering religion for themselves.

What was even worse, the temple and the High Priest were more or less intentionally going a similar route to what we had planned already. He had apparently proudly proclaimed that Hope just being there kept the beasts at bay, because there hadn’t been a single sighting anywhere near Alarna in two weeks. He might think it a lucky coincidence and used it to his advantage, and the town was a large area to cover, but if Aelene’s aura was as powerful as people said, I could absolutely imagine that beasts would stay away from Alarna because of her. Then there had been the missing water source, which he apparently fixed somehow as well. He was gaining the goodwill of the people, one “miracle” at a time.

The final nail in the coffin was that the soldiers had yet to return, and the town was short on guards. Even more so than usual. Not only did people start to think that they needed Hope to protect them, the High Priest apparently also ordered the temple’s agents and priests to help guard the town, which explained the higher number of priests I had seen in the main square. Though this was almost certainly just for show, because I hadn’t seen any of them anywhere else in town, and they wouldn’t be able to do anything against a beast either.

“Looks like we’ll have to shake the belief in the temple and the gods first,” I said. Once more, I had expected Lilana to pipe up, but she didn’t say anything. This is getting weird...

“Sounds good, but how?” Berla asked.

“I’ll have to think about it a little, this changes the plan. Instead of convincing the people of what we can do, we’ll have to educate them on what the temple is and isn’t doing first. Just coming out and saying that we can do everything they can, but better, will never work. People generally stick to what they are used to when they’re given another option that’s only marginally better.”

We finally finished catching up and Reurig eventually left, to do his daily round in town. Tomar accompanied him part of the way, so that he would be safe from beasts. Berla, Riala, and I were left behind and kept talking. However, Riala looked a little disappointed.

“What’s up, unhappy that I’m back?” I said jokingly.

“No!” she said, shaking her head vigorously, before lowering it slightly. “But I wanted to get snapping to work before you got back.”

“Heh, want to look into it together?”

“Okay!” she said, beaming at me.

While Riala gathered her notes, Berla leaned over, to whisper in my ear. “I need to talk to you later, alone.”

‘Me too,’ Lilana added

I was a little confused by this request, and even more that Lilana broke her silence as well, but I nodded and said “Okay.”

The “alone” part that Berla had emphasized would be a little difficult to realize, because of Lilana, but I wanted to try to get her to take sleeping duty anyway, and then I would be on my own for a few hours.

Riala came back and showed me her notes. Although she hadn’t actually learned to write yet, so it was essentially just a list of script combinations she had tried so far. I took my first real look at the snap activation now, looking at the god’s script that Riala had copied.

While stone and pressure activation used simple input definitions, the snap activation used a formula and a sub-script, which was a considerable departure from our other scripts. It looked like the snap script would essentially run endlessly, in a kind of “stand-by” state, and resume once it registered the snap. However, that alone couldn’t be enough. Even if scripts weren’t supposed to be used by people, it would be incredibly inconvenient if someone else activated your script with a snap, especially if you might not have been done writing it yet. The snap activation also didn’t actually include any words or abbreviations that sounded like “snap.”

“You did a good job,” I said as I patted Riala’s head. Looking at the scripts she had tried up to this point, I saw that she really had given it her all. She had tried absolutely everything she had learned so far, to make it work. But if I was right, and there was more to this, her current knowledge wouldn’t have been enough. I had some theories about how this new activation method worked, but we probably wouldn’t figure this out right here and now. Instead, I started explaining to Riala what I believed the script was doing, and we discussed her previous attempts. Some of them looked like they could’ve worked after all.

Sitting around a campfire in the Wildlands with the others, talking and doing research, was as if I had returned home. I didn’t understand why, but I felt like it had been much longer than two weeks since I had last seen them. For some reason, I actually felt as if I hadn’t even thought much about them over a long period of time. Even if I had been somewhere else between disappearing in Cerus and returning to Alarna... why would that feel like a long time, when it’s only been two weeks at the most...?