Chapter 46: Chapter 46 Correspondence from Afar

The next several days passed in an atmosphere of suspense, as more trainee adventurers went out on their blooding patrols. One adventurer died when their team got charged by a Siegeboar and he tried to block it instead of getting the hell out of the way. They’d been in a built-up section of the ruins to the South, and the rest of his team had killed the boar properly. They’d spent half an hour baiting it from multiple directions, forcing it to turn in tight streets and exhaust itself chasing people around corners of the few buildings it couldn’t simply knock down.

Eventually, the boar had been exhausted and bled dry by dozens of wounds. It wasn’t the sort of threat that should be killing Adventurers, which Jolba made respectfully clear. That team was still a functional unit, though they lacked a heavy frontline fighter now.

The other teams were sympathetic, though Nathan saw some hidden derisiveness. At least they weren’t mocking the dead trainee or his team, but it showed a level of competitive viciousness that Nathan wasn’t entirely pleased to see.

The Heirs made no overt comments, showing sympathy from a distance. Nathan was glad they weren’t dismissive or critical despite being in the best position for it. Instead, they privately discussed how they’d deal with a Siegeboar. Basically, Khachi would have very little role other than being on hand to distract the boar if it cornered anybody. Stella would try to deal gross damage from afar with fireballs and force blades, while Sarah would focus on blinding it and striking critical areas when Stella made openings in its tough hide. Nathan and Aarl, with their faster movement, would primarily be responsible for harassment to keep the monster from fixating on either of the ranged people.

I wonder if one of those big rifle bullets, enhanced by Sarah’s skills, could break that toughened skull. Assuming her skills do work with a gun. She seems to be ‘all ranged weapons’ so I hope so.

Nathan saw the schedule for the rest of the training course. It was only going to run another month or so before they all became official Adventurers of Gemore. They were supposed to go on another set of missions out in the villages before a graduation event on the summer solstice at the end of the course.

Their classes proceeded - including Nathan’s general knowledge test with Velek. With some explanations of notation he proceeded to crush every test on mathematics and the physical world that Velek had. Unsurprisingly he had problems with the sections on monsters, history and geography of Gemore, and so Nathan was taught more on those topics, as well as general knowledge on the important wildlife that existed around Gemore. Eat these mushrooms, not those ones.

Hopefully I’m past such petty concerns once I Develop [Regeneration].

The background of Gemore was interesting - it had started as a colony of Giantsrest a few hundred years ago, focused on delving into the dangerous and rich ruins of old Gemore. They’d had a legion of slave soldiers to do the delving - and the dying. The Mages wanted the secrets and wealth of old Gemore, but didn’t want the danger that came with it.

It had been an unpopular post for the mages of the Ascendent Academy, and there’d been a point where several assigned mages had refused to come to the town. There hadn’t been enough mages to keep the slaves in check and they’d risen up to butcher the remaining mages and fortify the town against easy reprisal.

The state of war had existed since then. Nathan asked how Gemore had managed to survive against the might of Giantsrest in the early years. Velek gave a few overlapping explanations.

The first was that the freed slaves had managed to prevent a [Message] being sent, then managed to keep secret what had actually occurred for some time. That seemed unlikely to Nathan, but maybe.

Another idea - the one that struck Nathan as the most likely - was focused on the fractious nature of the Giantsrest Ascendent Academy - any archmage could have probably crushed Gemore in the early days. However, it had become a political issue where no archmage wanted another to get the political credit for such an action. It eventually became clear that all of the archmages feared being ‘tragically killed fighting to retake our lost Colony' and had settled on compromises where lesser members of the academy were sent in their stead. Velek had sneered at the small-minded competition of Giantsrest as he explained.

The last suggestion of how Gemore had survived was that the distance from Giantsrest and the difficult terrain made it difficult for a larger army to approach Gemore, and that Giantsrest was more capable of managing slave raids than conquering armies.

Some or all of those things had bought early Gemore time. The early Adventurers had been quick to reap the rewards of the numerous dungeons and monsters of Gemore. They’d earned a lot of levels and ancient magical loot, at the cost of a catastrophic casualty rate. Even when Giantsrest did march armies against Gemore, they faced not the newly-freed slaves they’d been expecting, without class or Talent to fight back, but the precursors to the modern Gemore Adventurers.

As soon as Gemore was able to produce Adventurers capable of slaying an archmage and demonstrated that fact, they’d settled into the current simmering cold war that was underway to this day.

Nathan continued to teach Stella calculus and physics. It was going slower than Nathan had expected, but it wasn’t Stella’s fault. There was just so much to explain. Nathan had forgotten what the underlying mathematics of differentiation were, and was having some trouble properly explaining it. He tried explaining details of limits and epsilon-delta proofs, but they got stuck in that confusing rabbit hole for a few days before Stella got frustrated and asked for examples.

What really got them through was Nathan drawing side-by-side graphs of position-velocity-acceleration-jerk with tangent lines as an example of differentiation. They backtracked a bit until she understood what limits were, and then they moved on. The whole process was pretty good for skill ranks, especially when Stella started seeing how conjured bits of rock followed calculated trajectories. She could carefully control how much mana she used to propel them, then link that to how fast and far the projectile went in order to include mana costs in her calculations.

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