After the novelty wears off and other developments become pressing we all make our way back from the castle. The instance shifts but I pay little attention to most of it driving my mental muscles to my newest endeavor for days on end. Time is precious, especially when I have the chance to get a little bit of control over it.

I want to stop the system from stealing it and pissing away while hindering me in a thousand ways. So I make whole rooms filled with runic arrays, scribbling from the coldest and most logical approach to the loosest poetry written in the runic language. I spend days trying to make runic writing live up to its namesake.

Slowly, the idea in my head shapes up.

Each time one of the others tries to help, the lack of mental grasp on time, these runes and how they interlink to each other puts a damper on efforts. Even Merlin’s grasp is tenuous at best and he can only help on a few ancillary formations.

This time I can’t even blame the system, for while it is not helping, time is a complex and nebulous field of study. Like the dark side of the moon before we had satellites.

I feel my soul, the echoes of my injury still very much present, but I pay attention to the runes carved in the outer walls. I follow the scripts, trying to recapture my fluency in that language. The moments when my world was pain and I could speak in tongues. I absorb everything in my memory palace looking for inspiration and then: I begin again.

Silver and gold enhanced roots all around me shift as I walk around a room meant for this. I guide them with Qi without Aspen’s and the other seed’s help.

Bringing to reality a little of what I have envisioned.

Create.

One step Toward Connection.

Runic Language.

I rely on these pillars to bring something forth that will accomplish what I want, or rather, give show me a path forward.

Three dimensional runes get smaller and smaller with the only clear space being a fist sized hole in the middle. Everything I do and see is relying entirely on my perception field to work and after a few more adjustments, I drop a small array of mechanical clocks inside for the next test.

You have created a runic engraving.

11,569 Exp

This is way more exp than I expected for so little time but I was growing used to those messages from better materials and greater skills. No sooner the thought crosses my mind, it is already gone. The system tries to make itself known to me, it really doesn’t like me ignoring it for days or weeks on end and not even looking at its notifications.

I have thousands of messages yet to read and they will stay that way for I do not want to waste any time unless they are of paramount importance. But the system always lets me know when something important arrives, in that it is reliable. Even if it didn’t, with my perception I often can guess what the messages say.

Stat changes were almost trivially easy to feel and even Exp caused a subtle shifting that I was starting to get a hang of.

I turn the mana tap for this particular experiment sending a smooth flow to it. Ten, a hundred, nearly a thousand mana per second before something strange with my perception field.

A difference that I wouldn’t have expected. I look at the timers. The seconds tick on both clocks, 10, 15, 20 across the board.

Something detaches.

A similar impression to observing portals or other places affected by space. Funky and wonky in my perception field. A very different flavor explodes all around but the changes aren’t unpredictable, they are buttery… smooth.

I lose track of the clocks inside as the mental Gordian Knot gets to me but seconds later, I smile at both clocks.

27 seconds outside.

29 seconds inside.

That is at least way beyond what normal errors would account for. Just a single real success and I know this is a nice path.

I keep a close watch, trying to get a feel for it. But just as I’m ready to start changing the experiment another player wants to throw the board in the air.

The system.

I feel its gaze pressing down on the runes trying to enter a small box that I isolated.

“You do not have any business here.”

I feel it battering down my will, but a hundred seeds seamlessly meld with me and push back.

Individually, they are wet tissue paper. Together, they are a steel cable. In most ways, I can’t match their raw horsepower or even come close. But we don’t compete with each other, we lean on our own strengths and form something even beyond Earth’s mundane materials.

Paying attention to the middle, I finish growing and connecting a panel to monitor everything automatically so I won’t have to keep track of one more thing.

I feel the build up, a smooth change even as time is passing slower inside finally without destroying anything.

But even if I don’t see the clocks breaking apart, the time expansion rate varies.

A simple graph over time shows me it going all the way from 1.2 to 2.5.

A minute, two, three.

The average slowly climbs, somehow building momentum. I try to feel how it is doing that before coming across two near parallel planes that l formed out of nothingness in this latest design. They bounce the effects and amplify the power steadily until it collapses. Over and over this happens, with the cause still unidentified. The lowest dips seem to be perfectly timed with the peaks in the system’s meddling but it is not the only factor.

But just as the system’s attention is a hindrance, it also shines the way forward. I have struck gold. This is a much more promising design.

A combination of several elusive factors that I was still trying to understand, now I just need to balance them. I had just achieved immense progress, all clocks inside were moving at that same rate at any given time with an expansion rate that never went below 5 percent. But even as I give it my all, as I draw my will ragged in fighting the influence of the system, even empowered and with help from so many of my companions, I’m lacking something.

If roughly doubling the time I have available already gets attention like this, I would have no chance but to find even more workarounds.

Five minutes go by, with the mana consumption steadily accumulating and the effort ever more difficult as the average climbs from 1.5 to roughly 2 times even peaking at 3 fold, but I don’t give up. Never give up.

My will is iron.

My will is eternal.

And together we can accomplish more than I ever dreamed.

A hint of pain hits me when the seeds phasing out giving room for others to join me are hit. I cut off the mana flow ending the exercise. Not just tiredness hitting a few, but the very first hints of actual damage get to them and my attention was elsewhere so I don’t even know where the danger was coming from.

I already had wrought enough damage for a lifetime, I don’t want to add my friends to that list.

The surroundings are suddenly eerily empty. The overwhelming attention of the system, that subtle nudging helping if you are working on something along expected development lines is completely gone from my vicinity.

The familiar touch that is usually very, very subtle, but had become a constant in my life had faded away.

With little else in the tank, I take a break and move off to the research center just a kilometer off. I think of running, but even if the exhaustion is not physical, I can’t go through with it so I just walk. Enough exercise to get the blood pumping and get my brain in gear again, but not enough that my mind rebels at the idea.

A little smile comes to my face as I see Merlin.

“Hi, Merlin.”

“Hi, Nash. You look like crap. Are you gonna tinker with the portal in your state?”

“No, I just fought the system off for a few minutes. My will is gone, I need to take a walk or something to recharge… You?”

“I’m heading back to the village, though in a day or two I think we will have to poke at the edges of the HLZ. There are new Beasts near the silver mines.”

I feel a stab in my heart at his news. Ohhhh. More killing.

“And here I thought you had finally accepted that we need to kill.” He says in a kind tone.

“I… I made a mistake.” I say nearly unwilling to let the words out. “I should have held on to my conviction, but I made it too wish wash. I know I can’t just stand aside as my friends die. But… killing the HLZ beasts… I can’t accept that answer. I don’t think that they asked for the system or the council’s manipulation… and one day if we fail, we will be the ones in their position.”

“They are not even sentient. Even if they were, after thousands of resurrections there is nothing left behind. Just meat puppets driven by the system.”

“Acknowledging that I may sound cliché, it is a slippery slope. If I kill one, the next is easier and I will take a little less care, I will hesitate a little less. I’m not going to judge anyone else for making a different choice, I will even do my part in the attacks at the end of the month, but anything more… I … I felt glad, I felt... powerful after defeating that Titan…” I swallow my bile as my throat is suddenly dry… completely and utterly dry.

He says something, but I wave him off, and seeing I’m not listening he moves off. Though I say one last thing to his retreating form.

“Don’t… don’t kill the HLZ beasts, I will try to figure something out.”

“As long as we get the silver. We NEED it.”

I look at the sky after listening o him.

A few seconds later I move away and get into a steam rocket. I hurtled through the air, after only a cursory glance to see if I would be scalding anyone with the steam exhaust making my way to the HLZ. I climb too high to reach the network while aiming straight for the spot that was the closest thing to a friend I had on the other side and that hadn’t turned to our side. While the others like the Arch shaman had a sliver of choice, everything I had learned about the HLZ beasts is nightmarish stuff out of an Orwell novel.

I burn right to the last minute before flipping over at full thrust. A minute later I’m gently landing near the knocked down hut that I had built over here months ago, still away from the actual mines, but I couldn’t bring myself to skip it.

After a few seconds morning the little hit, I run the last few meters, even if I’m still feeling the effects of my fight with the system having less than an hour of rest. In seconds I find the beast with my perception field nearly 2 kilometers away. The instant that I enter its territory its head turns back like a swivel.

The Black Panther runs over but I feel something wrong. No, not exactly wrong, but… different.

Its lopping gate soon turns into a sprint.

It closes the distance, as I open a few portals letting several root avatars out. A few were clad in leather, others metal, but most with only a little protection lining the inside of their skulls, though all to their own preference. The only real outlier is the last to leave. Not a near copy of my own body, but a hulking monstrosity, standing as tall as the Titan. A 6 meter tall being with thick long limbs that can run both upright and on all four limbs.

Their stats are not that impressive, but inside my domain and with the protections in place so their brains won't get splattered so fast they simply die without any chance against higher levels beings, their usefulness in high level combat just took a large step forward.

The beast gets more and more agitated, but then my eyes catch up with me, and I see its fully white fur. An albino Creature without a single dissonant colored hair to be seen, and I realize…

“No one else would even recognize you, but you are the same beast.”

I look at its deep striking emerald eyes, a near match for my own. And for the first time, I let go of my preconceptions. I absorb the being before me. I stare at its soul and I see what I had blinded myself to.

This… is a husk, a remnant of its former self. A flesh puppet that serves no other purpose than to provide experience for first class citizens… for users.

The connections I had established to it before were just echoes, screams of such intensity they reach through time. But it can’t see me. It has no malice, it simply repeats the pattern, it’s a painting of its full self, not an actual being.

I feel anger and frustration for numbing myself to this. Wrath at the system for being gullible enough to be manipulated into it, for being the instrument that wreaking such destruction. And to top it all off, absolute lividness at the council and the nebulous group of people standing above it all making it so that any other choice but to kill is very costly. Manipulating reality and our information so that further fueling the cycle of violence was the only choice most people saw. The only choice I saw every time I woke up on the wrong foot.

And it may even be the only choice that I could make, but I was too blind and stupid to see.

Still, Pando taught me a lot, not in words but in actions. I won’t let myself be compromised. I will seek another path if it’s the last thing I do. I have to create another path, a path without bloodshed for all the black panthers in the world.

I will kill no one if there is even the slightest and most distant hope. No matter how farfetched or how troublesome that would be.

That is my decision.