Chapter 43- Return of the Army

The army of War Badgers was on the march, with Badgelor proudly leading. The rest were in parade formation, as they surveyed their territory. Apparently, their territory was all my territory.

“And he’s fine with the fact that the adults perished?” asked HarDragon, always interested in hearing about the particularities of War Badgers.

“Yes, their mission was to escape Newark,” I replied, watching my proud badger. “They thought it was a suicide run. If any of them got out, they won. Badgelor realizes they got a dozen of them out, so they won.”

“I zo not understand za Badgelor,” said Rose.

“He’s not human. He has his own ideas of what constitutes a victory,” I said with a shrug. “In his mind, this is the greatest win so far this century. In fifty years, there will be thousands of War Badgers roaming the countryside, most likely complaining that there aren’t any dragons to eat.”

HarDragon winced. His job was going to suck. Then again, maybe not. Badget was quite firm in her protection of their mascot. His same dragon would be around through multiple generations of regular War Badgers.

“Any idea where zey are going?” asked Rose.

“Seriously?” I asked. “They are going to the Golden Badger. An army fights on its stomach.”

“Oh,” she said. The crowds parted, as the first living army of War Badgers in generations marched off to lunch.

“He’s going to be impossible,” I said, causing Rose to look away from HarDragon. I made a mental note to check with Julia about that. I had a feeling that Rose making an aggressive campaign against the single, worldly, and quite well-read young man was only going to end one way.

“Do you need zomething,” asked Rose, collecting herself. It was a little thing that you’d only notice with Master Perception. Her expression became a bit less open, and her pupils got a bit smaller. Such details were glaringly obvious to me. She went from looking at someone she liked quite a bit to me.

“I have some drones, I need you to find the Dark Overlord’s army,” I said, pulling Beakatrix’s drones from my inventory. It looked like a quadcopter and was large enough that Rose could have ridden it, had she a mind to. Thankfully, she was not quite that foolish.

Rose examined them briefly and called for several of her sisters. “I vill have zees moved to a secure location. We vill begin scouting within zee day.” She dashed off, the small dragon looking over her shoulder. HarDragon followed.

“Talk about a beauty and the beast situation,” said Shart.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, one of them is gorgeous, and the other is all covered in curves and fatty objects,” said Shart, making a retching gesture. HarDragon was angular and Rose was curvy. Shart was not a fan of curves, and the sight of a woman’s bosom, even clothed, was mildly nauseating for him.

Of course, I had worse problems.

Some of the children ran after Badgelor and the army of War Badgers, but the majority of the people were just standing there. Every single person was watching me. If they were just staring, I wouldn’t have minded. Unfortunately, there was a terror inside them that was so palpable you could taste it.

They were afraid, and it was burning through them.

The worst part is that I didn’t know what they needed. I could go super badger, and swagger my way through them, brimming with confidence. However, I didn’t think any parlor trick I could muster was going to impress them.

Worse, I didn’t have the answer they needed. I needed to be able to kill the Dark Overlord once and for all, and I still had no idea how to accomplish that. I didn’t even know what the Dark Overlord’s ultimate plan was.

“Wait,” I said, thinking it through. “Charles’ plan is to get back to Earth.”

“He’s been quite vocal about it,” said Shart.

“But he’s controlled by the Dark Overlord,” I said.

“Which is supposed to be impossible,” added Shart.

“That means he’s still in there somewhere,” I said unhappily. “But more importantly, he wouldn’t have come up with something impossible on his own.”

“Do you think the Dark Overlord’s plan is to go to Earth?” asked Shart.

“I don’t think so. He’s been trying to take over the world since Beakatrix’s time,” I said.

“Why would the Dark Overlord even want to go to Earth?” asked Shart.

I considered that. “Due to the absence of magic, the only place you can teleport to from here is Earth.”

“Yeah, without help from another reality, and they won’t be helping,” said Shart. “I suppose there could be an imprint of Charles on the Dark Overlord or something, a compulsion to go back to Earth.”

“Could the Dark Overlord work on Earth?” I asked. “He is a magical construct after all. If you drained away his power, he’d just cease to exist, right?”

“He’s the god of magic. That must be it,” said Shart. “He somehow twisted the Dark Overlord into going to Earth, where he’d be defeated once and for all. The Dark Overlord is taking himself there, and he's going to kill as many people as he can along the way.”

In a way, it was a brilliant plan. It would solve the Dark Overlord problem permanently. A big issue, however, was that Shart wasn’t sure doing so wouldn’t kill everyone on Ordinal and Earth. I had no way of figuring out if that would happen or not. I didn’t even know how to begin answering that sort of question. Worse, Shart was, whether intentional or not, being very vague about the fallout from such a feat. One thing was crystal clear, though. Charles was going to destroy everything he could.

“All this, just to get home,” I said, shaking my head. “No one will even remember us. How many years have gone by on Earth since I left?”

“We only have access to one space-time coordinate on Earth,” stated Shart.

I stood there, unmoving, for ten seconds. “Wait, you mean he’s trying to go back to when I left?”

“Sure, but that’s when he left too,” said Shart. “Dum Dum, there is only one point we can get you from.”

I looked down, running that notion through my mind. I had assumed that Charles was grabbed before I was. He wasn’t. I was just not looking at it from the right direction.

“Charles is just older than I am,” I said. I was really in my forties. I’d assumed Charles was grabbed a decade or two earlier, but he was just a decade or two older than I was. “He’s going back right to where he left, right back to when I died.”

“Yeah, we only grab souls. Your body is still on Earth, and it is very dead. That’s how we got you. If you transfer your soul back, it doesn’t have anywhere to go,” said Shart.

“So, there isn’t a good reason to go back, then? I would just be using enough Mana to destroy the planet, only to reappear in a dead body,” I said.

“He must be trying to go through physically,” said Shart. I considered that. The Precursor Shadow Tap in his lab must have been part of the plan, but I didn’t have enough time to figure out what he was planning to do with it. There had to be a trick that he knew and I didn’t.

It probably didn’t matter. He was going to destroy the planet. I needed to stop that, even if it meant I could never go home. I wasn’t willing to let him destroy Ordinal.

Was I?

I could go home. I didn’t know what that would look like. What would happen to me? How would I reappear? Shart said I would just inhabit a dead body, but was he right? Still, there was a way. I could go home. It would just kill everyone here.

The needs of the many…

“Thanks, Spock,” I muttered, gathering myself up. Shart looked at me questioningly, but I pushed on. “Okay, if Charles is trying to leave, how would he do it?”

“I have no idea. He cannot access the tower, so he can’t use our teleporter to get back to Earth. We couldn’t allow it, anyway,” stated Shart.

“That seems like what Charles wants, and he’s still fighting the Dark Overlord. Maybe I’m coming at this wrong,” I said. “What is the Dark Overlord planning?”

“Not sure,” said Shart. “He is an abnormality in the system. He wants power, lots of it, and he plans on using it to open a Gateway.”

“He wants power, and he keeps coming back to Windfall Valley,” I said, looking around. “What’s here?”

“Ordinal’s strongest Leyline is located under Windfall Castle,” said Shart.

“Define strongest,” I replied. Of course, I was aware that there was a Shadow Leyline under the castle, but what did strongest mean in this context?

“Well, it is a full Shadow Leyline. All the Shadow Leylines focus down to this singular point, so it has roughly the same strength as all the Shadow Mana on Ordinal,” explained Shart.

“How much power does it take to open a Gateway to another world?” I asked.

Shart pondered that for a long time. “I’ve only ever seen an <Admin> open a portal to another world once. It was very early on, after the mishap with the dinosaurs, and we needed more beings. That was the only time I’ve ever seen a different <Admin>,” Shart stated.

“Different?” I asked.

“To prevent an imbalance, they needed to simultaneously open the Gateway on both sides,” explained Shart.

“How much power did that take?” I asked.

“An insane amount. I mean, the <Admins> can draw on power equal to that of a Leyline. If I tried, even in my full-powered form, it would fry my Mana Network,” said Shart. He exhaled loudly. “Yeah, there is enough power in the Shadow Leyline to open a dimensional gateway on Ordinal.”

“We found Charles in the dungeon below the castle, though. Why didn’t he open it right when he respawned?” I asked. That had bothered me. I’d blasted him with a Plasma Ball that had hurt him, but the spell hadn’t killed him.

“You blew him up, a lot,” said Shart. “Plus, he bled off a lot of Experience Points while he was in stasis. He wasn’t powerful enough when he awoke.”

“Now, he’s recovered enough and is coming here,” I said.

“Yup,” replied Shart.

“Why is he bringing an army?” I asked.

“Do we know he’s bringing an army?” inquired Shart.

“The Dark Overlord always brings an army. Besides, he’d already be here if he was traveling alone,” I said.

“You have a point. I don’t know. You’ve obviously blocked him from teleporting here, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t fly in,” said Shart.

“He didn’t, though. Flying would still put him here already,” I argued. “Furthermore, the Dark Overlord always brought an army in the stories. That tells me he’s trying to take and hold territory.”

“The only two places worth spit in Windfall Valley are where the Shadow Leyline is closest to the ‘surface’,” said Shart.

“Which is the castle and…?” I asked.

“The town of Windfall,” said Shart. “Dum Dum.”

I brought up my map and drew a line through the center of Windfall and the castle. Nothing struck me. I fiddled with my map for a moment, interacting with Mystical Lore. Finally, I could see only the Leyline. I had to flip through both maps a few times, but, eventually, I discovered that the leyline didn’t run through the center of Windfall. It ran just east of the town center.

It was directly under my house.

The Shadow Tap there had been installed with absolute precision, which made sense. Charles hadn’t built that room. I suspected that Windfall Manor was on top of the Precursor Site, and the town had sprung up around it. As it did, Windfall had been clearly laid out to disguise that fact. The town was generally square, except for a bulge in the northern district. That was the burned out part of the city, where something had exploded a long time ago.

That ruined area sat between my house and the castle, but it wasn’t in a straight line. I’d never thought about the implications before.

“Oh, feck,” I said, but Shart was in my head. He had already seen it, too.

The map altered slightly, as the flow of Shadow Mana was displayed. It flowed through the valley like a massive, terrible river of power. Like most rivers, the Leyline did not flow straight. Rather, it followed the contours of Ordinal’s Mana Network in a manner I didn’t fully understand. I did see one thing. Windfall Manor, the castle, and the crater were all directly connected right down the Leyline, like ports on a river.

“By the system,” hissed Shart.

“Did he stop the flow or something?” I asked.

“Something,” hissed Shart. “Someone caused a brief stoppage in the Leyline, probably only a plank or two, and the Mana backed up. That’s what caused the explosion, and that would explain the burnt out Mana Fuse.”

“Maybe,” I said. That didn’t seem to jive with everything else we knew, but it was close. Hopefully, close enough to let me complicate his plans. I didn’t need to know specifically what Charles was doing. I just needed enough to stop him. There had to be something here.

The other Shadow Tap we’d found in the lab was partially disassembled and non-functional. I’d previously thought it might have been used for parts, but now I wasn’t so sure. Charles learned something about how Mana flowed from working on that device. I just needed to figure out what.