Hector took Esther, Isabel, Macy, and Lisa along to close a few more rifts on Aes. Macy joked the whole time about being part of 'the Lord’s harem' and liked to randomly assume a seductive posture to announce ‘porno time’. It was moderately funny the first two times she did it. Each rift was located a distance away from the city and required use of his transit sphere. Piercing and Conflagration were left behind as they were too drained to fight. Riley and Darius were not allowed to join because they had strict orders to enjoy their honeymoon.
None of the rifts proved a challenge. Four days later, Hector’s earpiece, stored in a pocket of his uniform, began to make noise. He pulled it out and greeted Cruiser Erin.
Grief tainted their reunion and departure from Eden. Leaving on their vessel without Ajax or Captain Devin felt worse somehow than when they fled by transit sphere. The custom seat in the dining room sized for a giant remained conspicuously empty, a constant reminder of their fallen comrade. The regular briefings made by Captain Devin about the status of Cruiser Erin were now performed by Major Samuel. Macy and Lisa were sworn in as members of the retinue by Persuasion.
Hector gave up his private bedroom for the newlyweds, which gave him a choice of a new bunk. There was the one that had a deformed frame from attempting to hold up a Titan. Then there was the one Darius previously occupied, which would place him above Piercing. He chose the third option, taking the bed of Riley. That placed him above Esther and below Zelda.
The women made him regret his choice almost immediately.
“Now you’re surrounded,” Zelda warned him. “Esther thinks you need to sleep one night a week. I agree with her. I know I’m not part of the combat team, but I am the ritualist of your retinue.”
Hector argued his point. Zelda and Esther argued back harder and longer.
Then Piercing, until then uninvolved in the conversation happening nearby, drove the knife home. “What’s your real reason? Nightmares?”
Hector blanched. “I’m not having nightmares.”
“Cause you’re not sleeping,” Piercing countered. “Why are you afraid to sleep?”
“Who says I’m afraid?”
“Obviously the Sage of Piercing says it.”
Three sets of eyes drilled into him. “I’m not afraid. There is some discomfort when I relax.”
Esther raised a brow. “Discomfort?”
He sighed in defeat. “After the Dragon, I kept going in and out of consciousness. I never got more than half awake. When I relax too much, it feels like I’m still falling. But it is fine because I don’t need sleep.”
Piercing squinted at him. “I don’t know about Xian sleep needs. What I can tell you is you’re not getting over that anxiety by avoiding it. You got to go through it, right? Quit being a Lord for a while. Don’t separate yourself from anything that bothers you. Embrace your Sage side. Accept that you are vulnerable and afraid. Go to sleep and when you jerk awake, let yourself feel the bad things so your gut can get on the same page as your brain.”
Esther whistled. “Mark it on the calendars. Piercing said something intelligent.”
Hector opened his mouth to object and Zelda held up her hands to stop him. “You know we’re right. Isn’t trusted advice part of what you want from your retinue?”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The urge to pull rank was strong. They weren’t in the rec room where the bylaws of the retinue prevented him from doing so. He knew that wanting to do that was a sign that they had a point. There were good arguments for not wasting time that could be dedicated to training. Those weren’t the real reasons for his aversion to sleep, though. They were justifications he hid behind.
That night, he lay in tense expectation of the big fall shocking him awake. He was ready to do as Piercing suggested and live through the discomfort. To his surprise, restful sleep dragged him under within moments. He did startle awake gripping the sheets in the morning, but the sense of falling was fleeting enough to ignore. What he couldn’t ignore was how refreshed he felt. Sleep might not be a physiological need, but it definitely still held value.
They closed a couple of rifts after breakfast before moving on, traveling along the same miasma rift as before Lord Malcolm but coming at a different angle so they would encounter different worlds. Every day they saw action on at least one world.
A month passed by in the blink of an eye. Then another.
Their missions became increasingly easy to manage as Hector’s realm swelled with power. Until one day he pushed cosmic energy inside to be absorbed while he engaged in a resonant battle with a miasmic beast. A tiny sliver of the energy vanished and he was suddenly complete.
With his realm at the peak, that left only his domain and aura. And his externality, which was a strange development. At the start of his life as a Xian, his externality aperture reached the peak first. It couldn’t take advantage of the miasma, though. Nor could it adjust for the fact that chaos density in the primordial was barely higher than his soul currently. Well, it was still twice as dense, but the gradient used to be many times larger.
It didn’t help that his battle with the Dragon didn’t boost his externality aperture along with the ones directly in contact with reality. If he ever killed another Dragon, he would be sure to raise his externality before the killing blow. Of course, such a flood of cosmic energy would forcibly advance him for sure, calling down a Tribulation to end his life.
One tweak to their standard operating procedure was made for the benefit of their Arahant members. On any world technologically sophisticated enough to have television, Cruiser Erin broadcast a video of Conflagration, Piercing, Restoration, Zelda, and Persuasion telling the local population that they were leaders of the Coalition Army detachment come to save them.
The brief surges of popularity helped immensely with their energy restoration. The specific faces put forward also obfuscated the fact that they were the retinue of the Lord Dragonbane. Should enemy humans pass through, the simple deception might save them a lot of trouble.
The speed at which Hector’s domain improved gained a drastic increase once he no longer had to feed cosmic energy to a hungry realm. Though his aura lagged behind despite the fact that he dedicated the same amount of time and energy towards it.
When the end of a two month period arrived, they were only two hops away from Union Central. That was all the closer Cruiser Erin was willing to come. Nevertheless, Hector wanted to give a message to the System. Cruiser Erin agreed to imprint a recorded video onto a memory chip, which Macy and Lisa would deliver. So he sat in the conference room and put his thoughts into words.
“Hello, System. I wanted to let you know I am alive and safe and rapidly advancing. We’ve had more than a few problems, but Evelyn made sure I would be surrounded by allies. The plan is to return to Aes to begin the True Reconquest in about six months. We’re going to save the multiverse no matter who gets in our way. I look forward to meeting up with you again. Until then, I hope you are well.” It felt a touch silly leaving a message for what was essentially a self-aware computer program. It became even more surreal when he admitted to himself the reason behind his decision to send a message was that he didn’t want the System to worry.
Losing Macy and Lisa would not impact their combat effectiveness. On most missions, only Xian accompanied Hector. Not only were they the only ones with healthy energy reserves, they also gained more than they spent every time.
Watching a Slingshot Sphere depart a world was certainly something worth seeing. A ball of crackling red lightning formed around the two women, then accelerated straight forward like it was propelled by a demonic hamster before shattering through reality to vanish. A flaming trail lingered behind like a Delorean had just time traveled. Other than the visual effects, Hector felt nothing unusual from the Skill. There was plenty of informational energy, but the resonance he’d come to expect from flashy acts never happened.
They continued on with their journey then, moving in a new direction towards where a different miasma vein was predicted to form half a year past.
