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Published at 21st of December 2022 06:28:37 AM


Chapter 32

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[Karpus]
Orc, Male, Miner

 

Karpus narrows his eyes. The orc stands in the back atop a pile of rocks and squints as their team of wizards stands at the front of the line, facing a large segment of rock. It’s their job to carve a tunnel out through the mountain in order for trade to be able to move freely through it, instead of around it. This new route will save thousands of man-hours a year, but it’ll take just as long to make.

 

“Hit it,” he tells the man next to him, who just lifts his own fingers to his mouth and then whistles.

 

— The front line of people begins to glow as they start channeling a variety of highly explosive spells to blast away the rock. The world shakes as the impacts ring out a moment later, a colorful mixture of magic from various elements pelting away at the firm body of the mountain.

 

After a moment, the cascade fades away, leaving only a cloud of smoke and the sound of rocks falling down onto other rocks.

 

He waves to his team. “Okay. Let’s move it in.”

 

Like they do every day, he and his group of miners move forward to start breaking through the loosened face of the mountain. The casters are fine and all for exploding away massive chunks of material, but a stable, solid tunnel needs consistent, professional work. Otherwise it's at risk of collapsing in on itself.

 

It’ll take a good year or so at this pace. But they’re making good time.

 

— The rocks beneath them shake.

 

Karpus stops, grabbing the man next to him as everyone falls silent, not daring to move an inch in fear of a rockslide caused by the sudden quake.

 

The orc lifts his gaze to the sky, expecting to see a shadow falling down their way as the mountain collapses.

 

Instead, he sees a light.

 

— The man jumps to the side, throwing a wizard to the ground as the mountain is cut in half.

 

 

[Gottlieb]

 

Gottlieb whistles to himself, watching the high-precision, low intensity pulse of the heavy orbital cannon slide through the mountain like a fine, hot scalpel through flesh. Both sides of the impact site glass and become smooth as the laser cuts a canyon through the mountain, clean from one side of it to the other.

 

The man dusts his hands, nodding.

 

He’s been watching these guys work for a few days now. It looks like they’re setting up some kind of passage. He figured he’d save them the effort.

 

The station continues its movements over the continents.

 

“Kai,” begins Gottlieb. “What’s the pig-situation?” he asks.

 

[Response]

- It’s sitting in front of me.

 

Gottlieb rolls his eyes. “Don’t be a smart-ass, Kai.”

 

The camera pans, zooming in on what looks like a giant dust-cloud, traveling across the continent.

 

Every chance he gets when the station passes over them, he blasts away as many as he can. But they just seem to keep breeding — sometimes even out-pacing the kill-count of the gun, he thinks. But that’s just the optics. On careful examination, he can tell that the horde is getting smaller and smaller every time, which does little for the ravaged world they leave in their wake. But it does bode well for the direction they’re headed.

 

“This one's yours,” says Gottlieb, looking over his shoulder. He has let Grunheide shoot the gun a few times too, up until now, so that she wisens up a little more.

 

His eyes wander to Geospatial Coordinator Rotwald, who is sitting perched on a series of cables, hissing excitedly and clicking with her mouth — she often does this when she’s getting ready to try and secretly swoop down to eat him or Grunheide.

 

Office politics.

 

— The harpy screeches, lunging down towards the goblin Grunheide, who yelps and scampers beneath the desk.

 

Gottlieb reaches out, grabbing a squawking, shrieking feathery thing. Rotwald hisses at him and snaps at him before biting down on his wrist.

 

Ignoring that, he simply hoists the harpy over the center console, restraining her with one arm against himself. With the other, he grabs her hand, forcing it onto the console’s control. The trapped harpy looks over her shoulder, trying to bite him in the face.

 

Gottlieb presses the firing button with her thumb.

 

— The world down below glows alight and then smells significantly more savoury than it had done a minute ago.

 

The harpy stops in confusion, blinking as she looks around the station.

 

Gottlieb sighs in relief, pretty confident that she just got a ton of level-ups from that blast. The man loosens his grip. He can only assume that she used those free stat-points to raise her intelligence, which is going to be really great for their future workplace communicat-

 

— Geospatial Coordinator Rotwald shoots straight out of his arms, slipping from his grasp with a nimble agility to her prior movements that one might have described as belonging to a chicken with legs that are too long.

 

“Ah…”

 

Gottlieb lifts his gaze, realizing he has made a miscalculation as he stares at the angry, shrieking bird creature flying around the gunner’s bay.

 

[Remark]

- It would seem that Geospatial Coordinator Rotwald has invested her new stat-points into ‘Dexterity’.

 

“I see that, Kai,” says Gottlieb, watching the shadow nimbly fly around the tight, cable-bound area above their heads without a problem in the world. The red creature flies through loops of cables and bundles of wires without any trouble. “Well. Shit.”

 

“Can I come out now?” asks Grunheide’s voice from beneath the desk.

 

“You know, uh, maybe stay there for a while,” replies Gottlieb, scratching his head.

 

— The harpy lands on the metal beams below the ceiling, narrowing her eyes as she leans down and glares at Grunheide, hissing.

 

The goblin yelps, vanishing beneath the desk.

 

Gottlieb, not sure what else to do, grabs one of his nutri-bars and throws it up at the harpy, in what has become their usual feeding ritual.

 

The harpy catches the thing, holding it out in front of herself with awkward, gangly arms as she looks at it in displeasure.

 

“I know the feeling,” sighs Gottlieb, rolling his eyes.

 

The harpy bites into the nutri-bar, eating it with the wrapper. But she never takes her eyes off of the scampering shadow beneath the console.

 

Office drama is the worst.

 

 

“Kai, does this place look a little dry?” asks Gottlieb, narrowing his eyes as he stares at the landscape outside of a city he’s seen a few times. The grasses are all yellowing and look particularly crunchy, even from up all the way in space.

 

He points at the monitor, running a finger towards the ocean that lies several kilometers up to the north. “Can we run a new river from there to here?”

 

[Answer]

- The saltwater from the ocean would devastate the local ecosystems. They would be wet, but dead.

A mangrove forest or equivalent natural filtering system would be required, to allow the salinated ocean water to neutralize before reaching the grasslands.

 

Gottlieb rubs his scraggly beard that’s been growing for a while now. It’s not a big deal to run a channel straight from the ocean into the mainland. That would certainly bring water there, but if it’s saltwater, that’s no good.

 

[Suggestion]

- Five kilometers to the east is a significantly large source of freshwater. Consider diverging a channel from there.

 

This will likely damage the lake ecosystem, but will allow for a new river to form and stay maintained for a significant amount of time.

 

Gottlieb looks at the lake that the camera zooms over to. He traces the distance between it and the nearby human villages with his finger and then nods. “Okay. Let’s do that,” he says, pressing the trigger on the control-stick.

 

The gun above his head hums to life, the coils inside of the heavy cannon whining as the cables all around the gunner’s bay begin to shake and vibrate.

 

Geospatial Coordinator Rotwald hisses and pecks her face against the gun, the noise that it's making apparently bothering her.

 

A moment later, the view on the monitors goes white as a long, extended beam connects him to the world.

 

Gottlieb slowly drifts the stick sideways, guiding the beam out from the lake, which has begun to violently churn and swirl as if it were the sea beneath a violent storm-front. Pulling the control towards the west, he creates a relatively thin, narrow channel out from the lake and into the heartlands.

 

Steaming, hissing, superheated water rises up into the air as boiling steam, and then, a moment later, the water of the lake, suppressed back in a large wave, crashes down and through the new, smooth opening in the world.

 

He watches it fill in, contently nodding, as the station continues its orbit and the sight of the location leaves his field of view on the cameras.

 

The gun falls quiet.

 

He looks up over his shoulder at the harpy, who seems content at having pecked the heavy cannon to silence.

 

For days now, he’s been doing his best to manage little things like this — The tunnel in the mountain, little rivers and basins and ponds where they seem like they could be useful, swarms of dangerous monsters approaching civilization that need to be dealt with before they cause any harm. Essentially, anything and everything that he can do with a tool as ‘simple’ as the heavy orbital weapons platform, in order to give his people down there a break, he has been doing.

 

He doesn’t know how they’re seeing the whole thing from their own perspective. He isn’t sure if they’re terrified or happy about what’s happening. But the world doesn’t seem to be burning down just yet.

 

 

[Wood-Mother of the Goblin Tribe]
Dryad, Female, Woodmother

 

The world is burning down before her eyes.

 

The wood-mother stands at the edge of the forest, watching the light ravage another piece of the landscape, tearing it asunder. Flocks of birds fly away from the destruction as hundreds of trees are blown away, crumbling into a dust that is finer than the softest, siltiest ash.

 

They’ve greatly angered the sky-light.

 

Is this her fault?

 

She looks back over her shoulder, towards her lost tribe of goblins, who have been without a king ever since the dethronement of the old one, at the command of the skylight. He had served his purpose well, but the heavens had decided it was time for him to go.

 

But now, they don’t have a new king. The tribe she is tasked with nurturing runs without a patriarch, headless, and wild. They have their mother’s love, but not their father’s guidance.

 

— She looks back at the fires, which are spreading out over the world.

 

What does this all mean?

 

 

Razmatazz

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