Museum Core Chapter 94: Onwards …

Just because the world was supposed to work a certain way didn’t mean it wouldn’t “randomly” work the exact opposite way on occasion.

Such as the time a light cruiser wound being the ship actually being exported, and its escort being a pair of aircraft carriers.

Or rather, the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, along with most of the United Kingdom’s other high seas fleet, waiting outside the place where the river Thames fed into the ocean, while the Belfast was still not even out of the original pool, technically speaking. Because while he’d expanded it pretty far, there was still a couple of hundred meters of dirt separating his ship from the “open” water.

In other words, this was the perfect time to test out the latest shell design, built specifically to clear the way through the Pacific transformation zone later.

Mangrove’s Bane (D-Rank, rare)

A 6-inch shell for the main armament of a Town-class cruiser, designed to blast a channel through roots and soil as safely and non-disruptively as possible.

It has been enchanted to prioritize the creation of a pressure wave over heat as well as exuding a sound-dampening aura to minimize the potential for sonic damage for nearby creatures in the water. It will also disrupt the structure of soil and wither plant roots within fifty meters of the point of detonation.

Energy-draw: low

This particular weapon was of the “use magic to solve everything” school of design that might have been easy to implement, but was hard to optimize. It would have been so much easier if magic alone had been enough.

As it was, he needed actual engineers to help, because as it turned out, he was truly terrible without said help.

The comments on the changes he’d made to the Belfast had been truly withering. Overall, he’d had to revert most of his “upgrades,” and then, well, change a lot of other things.

Several extremely basic adjustments and alterations to the big guns made them marginally better, the dedicated AA weapons were upgraded to the most modern, non-automated, version that would be controlled by a dedicated machine spirit, and the secondaries got redistributed slightly to make more way for a new gun deck which had taken the place of the now-redundant and therefore removed bridge tower and held a trio of turrets with dual 4-inch guns.

Theoretically, there’d been even more space, but at that point, you ran into weight concerns, even with the mass savings achieved by chopping off the bridge.

And apparently, all the stuff he could create at will negating the requirement to take it with him hadn’t been nearly as beneficial as he’d hoped, since that also took away a lot of the mass the ship was meant to have, and also needed for the purpose of stabilization in any kind of weather. Which had forced Thomas to line the ship’s keel with magical iridium, its gravity-warping properties making it much more effective.

And so on, and so forth. He’d been so damn proud of his ideas … only for the whole affair to turn out largely pointless.

A ship design that maximized the new Belfast’s advantages was possible, but would also require it to be created from the ground up. Which was already happening, granted, but would take too long to be finished to be in any way productive for the current issue.

On and on it went.

At the end of the day, the Belfast that was getting ready to blast her way through was largely similar to the original.

“Alright, fire!” Thomas declared, his voice, his true, original, human voice ringing out of every loudspeaker on the ship and all six forward heavy guns roared to life, their shells flashing from them so quickly the impact into the soil seemed to be near-simultaneous with their firing, carving a massive trench through the jungle and causing the ship to lurch forward as the water rushed to fill the craters, only for it to shake even harder as it ran straight into the flood coming from the other direction, from the sea.

He projected himself into Jan and grinned while he gunned the engines, launching the half-century-old warship forward at speeds normally only seen in high-end speedboats. Only to realize that he was flooding the banks on either side of the river from all the waves he was unleashing, forcing him to slow down once again. After all, there were some structures in the line of fire.

Surprisingly enough, a couple of kilometers downstream, he saw several large crowds on the riverbank as he steamed past, both reporters and simple looky-loos. Probably old warship enthusiasts or something. He pulled the horn a couple of times, and going by the cheers, that had been the correct thing to do.

And soon afterwards, the riverbanks fell away, replaced by the vast expanse of the open ocean, and the majority of the British navy.

But he couldn’t join them, not yet. Because there was still one more thing that had to be done …

***

Initially, the inspection had been supposed to be just to make sure he wouldn’t wreck any electronics on his escorts by proximity alone. Which, granted, had been a concern, since the Belfast was, in essence, a mobile transformation zone.

So they’d sent a whole lot of guys in lab coats over, with a whole lot of clipboards and notepads and devices that seemed to be sacrifices to check whether or not complex electronics actually broke.

Which they did, as was proven within a couple of minutes.

And then confirming that the effect only occurred within a meter of the hull, an area saturated with mana and the limits of the places he could conjure stuff in, thereby proving the theory that it was mana that wrecked technology, didn’t take too much longer.

That had been two freaking hours ago. And the tests were continuously getting further and further away from the fundamental idea behind this affair.

“Alright, how about this:” Thomas began to speak through the loudspeakers. “You  gentlemen pass along the results you’ve had for hours now to the relevant authorities, we can get underway, and assuming you’re in a position to go along for the ride, you get to keep access.”

He paused for a long moment, allowing the excited whispering to start.

“Assuming, of course, I receive a copy of the results.”

After all, he really wanted to regain access to modern media and the internet.

It didn’t take long for the deal to be soon agreed with, and he quickly managed to arrange for proper housing for his new guests, by harranguing an engineer who’d come along into helping him design a structure on stilts he could set up above the deck, raised high enough to be able to safely contain electronics. And since it would merely be constructed from dungeon-forged materials, rather than being a true part of the champion-ship, the mana field did not emanate from it.

The whole affair was a further draw on his time, but wound up paying almost immediate dividends when it was pointed out to him that A. radios without microchips absolutely existed, and B. he should be able to easily create living radios out of pigeons, which were naturally sensitive to magnetic fields.

Even if no one knew how exactly his monster creation process worked, they still had great ideas.

In this case, he used his gratuitous supply of livestock to level up his regular pigeon pattern to F-Rank, twice, to create one that could detect and decode radio signals, and a second one that could emit them, though the “send” function would have an exceedingly short range and the “receive” would almost certainly fail against modern encryption while also lacking the ability to input the decryption key even if he had it. They were, after all, F-Rank powers.

Still, it was trans-zone communication that didn’t require a runner.

Now, what else had he stupidly missed? What other great ideas should he have had way earlier?

***

Jaclyn eyed the barrel of one of the Belfast’s massive guns, the muzzle a mere meter above her head. Those were huge. Though there were a couple of gargantuan barrels for 15-inch in front of the Imperial War Museum, previously having belonged to battleships, she believed.

If Daedalus could transform this ship into something like that … well, in the past, the number of battleships in one’s navy used to be the greatest yardstick of a nation’s military might. And with enough magic, he might even be able to negate the fact that battleships were, usually, sitting ducks against attacks from modern aircraft.

But she wasn’t here to stoke her own paranoia, she was here because she, along with the others who’d be fighting the Hunger, had been promised magical gear.

Well, her, Granger, Henderson, and Gula had. There were others, but the four of them would be carrying the greatest weight, being C-ranked.

Henderson had also earned the Mythical Bond and chosen the Phoenix. It had given him access to a vital form of mobility in the form of flight, as well as pyrokinesis he could barely use since he had a mana pool just as pathetic as hers, and, of course, regeneration. Which had come in the form of a once-a-day recovery power that allowed him to fully repair a part of him self equal to around a quarter of his mass by first reducing it to ash and then having it automatically regrow.

This also worked with his brain, incidentally, so he could repair a fairly massive chunk of his body as long as only the wounds weren’t too spread out. And the volume of stuff he could repair only grew as his Spirit stat increased, to the point where, once he could regenerate his body in its entirety, he’d start to gain a second charge for the day. And so on, and so forth.

It wasn’t the same kind of constant, ceaseless recovery she had, but it gave him a second life and/or wind at the drop of a hat, which was even more powerful in several situations.

Actually, things had worked out great despite the uncertainty. Jaclyn’s permanent passive regeneration was perfect for the endless parade of small hits she was constantly taking, while Henderson could get himself back into the fight at the drop of a hat, but only once.

In the meanwhile, Gula had selected a kind of “avatar” power that allowed her to form an ectoplasmic shell, or “magic mecha,” as Granger had called it.

As for their young mage, he’d gotten something truly ridiculous as always.

It was called Arcane Stasis, and let him put magic into a stasis bubble of sorts, inside of which he could then manipulate it, allowing him to cast grand spells while keeping them perfectly stable, endlessly iterating complicated stunts until he found something that worked, and so on. But the fact that it was a fantastic research and casting tool wasn’t why that was so ridiculous.

No, that was because it didn’t say anywhere that it was limited to his magic. In other words, he was functionally immune to any hostile magic that he noticed in time, and once he blocked a spell, he could dissect it to then add it to his own arsenal.

The power had apparently been gated behind some utterly ridiculous unlock conditions, something like “create a brand new spell and beat a C-Rank mage with it,” but that had been negated for him as the Class creator.

“So, seeing as you’re going to be fighting another anchor beast, I figured you guys deserved the proper gear,” Daedalus announced from the PA speaker in the corner of the room.

It was the clearest she’d ever heard his voice. It was surprisingly human, to the point where, if she hadn’t known who was speaking, she’d have assumed that was who he was.

“Behold …”

And if he had actually been human, he’d likely have been just like Granger. Though as useful and helpful as the man was, Jaclyn doubted that she’d have survived two of him.

Either way, they were each getting a soulbound item that could be fed mana until it ranked up if it ever became useless to them.

And while the others were more than happy with theirs, namely, Granger’s mummy bracers, Henderson and his healing vest, and Gula with her new holdout automatic summoning necklace, Jaclyn felt she’d gotten the best one.

A bracelet that could teleport onto any limb and then warp gravity around it to increase the force of her impact. In other words, it was like her long-lost mass-boost boots, but better in every conceivable way, and this time around, she wouldn’t be breaking her new shiny toy the first time she hit a powerful enemy.

Being able to actually hit hard against an enemy without clear weak points would only be the least of the options newly afforded to her.

Though the four of them weren’t the only ones who’d be going into the belly of the beast. They were also taking along several more BPA D-Ranks, as well as a couple of EU guys of the same rank.

One was a German Major by the name of Müller using the jungle’s system, allowing him the ability to turn invisible while supercharging his next attack against a specific enemy, while the ability gained at D-Rank allowed him to tell the consequences of a given action across the next five seconds, as often as he had the mana, effectively letting him “take the shot” dozens of times and practically guaranteeing the charged attack would not just land but hit like damn battleship shell.

The other was French, one Capitaine Genet, who’d taken the orcish Primal Warrior Class. In other words, any branch he got his hands on was a sword, any stone he threw either a bullet or frag grenade, depending on whether or not it would shatter on impact, and even splashing water on someone could create an impromptu water cutter that could rip through, well, quite a lot of things.

He’d be heavily limited in civilization, but out in the wild, such as a transformation zone? That was where this class turned its wielders into absolute monsters.

Overall, jumping rank where they were currently at would be difficult as hell, and dangerous to boot, but at the same time … if Jaclyn and the rest of the frontline died due to a lack of support, a large chunk of the world would be screwed. As dangerous as this would all be, they were at least trying to be safe about this.

“Try” being the operative word.

While she’d been thinking about all this, she’d found her way back onto the Belfast’s deck, all the way to the front of the bow, and looked down onto the water as it was ploughed under by the ship.

Then, her gaze moved down, onto the innocent little bracelet sitting on her wrist, looking to all the world like any kind of standard “primitive jewelry” that could have been purchased at the Camden Market or the Renaisance Faire, instead of being a magical artifact that would likely be valued the same as a warship, had it been possible to sell.

Her eyes traced over her forearms, smooth and free of scars once again. They looked like they had decades ago, all scars, all signs of the life she’d lived bleached away by countless healing potions even before her regeneration had fully erased them, and belying the strength they held. The power. The ability to tear apart the entire fleet around them with her bare hands, excluding the magical Belfast.

What kind of world was she living in? What kind of world would Eve grow up in? And would she ever be able to go back to doing regular police things, arresting drunkards and mediating domestic disturbances, instead of fighting cultivators and killing monsters capable of devastating entire regions?

Although to be honest, she knew the answers.

An insane one, one of dangers and possibilities in equally infinite measure, and never.

***

It had taken a little over two weeks, and the scientists had slowly driven him insane with constant questions and requests for him to assist their experiments, to the point where Thomas had been forced to withdraw his consciousness from the Belfast to get some peace and quiet.

But now the vast mangrove swamp had appeared in the distance, slowly swallowing the horizon as though it were some malignant mass that was devouring the ocean as it rose up from the depths. Granted, much of that was likely just the fact that it was almost nighttime, and the entire area was pitch-black and setting off all sorts of alarm bells in a lizard brain that Thomas no longer had, yet still had a say, for some reason.

Even after all this time, Thomas was still a child of the modern age, in many ways, expecting light everywhere, a lack of proper illumination was foreign, alien, scary.

He lit up the lamps on the outside of the ship, the floodlights sweeping across the treeline, sending snakes lurching away through the woods while giant mosquitoes swirled around, confused.

“Belfast, you have a clear shot straight into the center, according to the current intel. We’ll stick around until you’re too far within to support, then, we will proceed to join up with the American fleet up north.”

“Roger,” Thomas sent back.

They were actually approaching directly east of the dead center of the transformation zone, to make navigation easier, they could just follow the compass. In addition, the local inhabitants, who were just as intelligent as humans and orcs despite being physically identical to Earth’s manatees, had said that there were no villages or other things that should not be destroyed along that axis, as far as they knew.

According to Elias, at least, that was pretty unusual; most of the multiverse’s sapients were overall humanoid, though that definition covered a lot more ground than one might think.

Anyway, the goal here was to start blasting his way in using his ship’s guns. Because this would all be so much easier if he could just throw a dungeon champion at this anchor beast and pulverize it.

But they all knew it likely wouldn’t be that easy …

Still, they’d created an excellent plan for how to make that happen in the least amount of time possible, taking advantage of the fact that the bridge had been removed to allow the rear guns to also get in on the action. Granted, their shells would have to arc over the warship and impact a fair distance from the Belfast’s bow, but that had been taken into account. They’d created a firing solution meant to maximize the speed of the trench-blasting while using every single heavy gun the ship had, which basically boiled down to “everything except the AA guns.”

It would take a while, but nowhere near as long as one might have expected. Between twelve “heavy” guns, each with a five-second loading cycle, eighteen secondaries that could fire up to twenty rounds per second, an infinite amount of munitions, and an utterly tireless workforce … let’s just say that things moved at a surprisingly good clip.

Shells struck and tore through roots and soil with casual ease, leaving a long trail of various-sized craters all the way through the mangrove swamp.

Surprisingly enough, with the sheer power of his customized shells, Thomas turned out to be able to clear the way with relative alacrity. Even though it would still take a week at the very least.

***

Jaclyn all but jumped to her feet when she realized that the sound of the ship’s artillery had stopped, leaving behind a silence as deafening as the gunfire had been.

It had even gotten to the point where several of the others had been looking forward to going out there in the cramped, smelly, noisy amphibious tanks used to scout ahead. She’d never been more glad to be able to fly above it all.

Almost a week of non-stop noise had been downright painful. But now it was finally over … replaced by the big fight itself.

“We’re here,” Daedalus announced over the loudspeakers. “Everyone who’s here to fight, time to disembark. Everyone who decided to use this military vessel as their vehicle for a research expedition … the bunkers have been ready for days. Please go there now.”

And yes, the boffins had tagged along. Not all of them, but enough that Jaclyn had been forced to seriously consider whether they had bollokcs of steel, or were just plain unaware of the true risks of going into the transformation zones.

All she knew was that Daedalus had thrown up his hands and told her that if she wanted them off the ship, then she would have to be the one to make that happen. A ball that she’d happily kicked upstairs to the admiral in charge of the escorting fleet, who had, in turn, decided to leave them aboard on their own recognizance.

Which had left them with the current compromise, where Daedalus had created a series of heavily armored, waterproof, magically impact-compensating bunkers to keep them safe in the bowels of the ship.

“Everyone ready?” Jaclyn asked when she reached the deck, and was met with a series of nods.

“Alright, let’s go,” she said and snapped open her wings to fly ahead, while Henderson partially shifted and flew lower, in front of the others, ready to drop down in his largest form the instant it became necessary.

One small issue Henderson had with his phoenix bond was the fact that it was small, smaller than Jaclyn’s own bird bond, and since he had to transform if he wanted to use it to fly, he actually shrank. Tiny, really, compared to how massive he normally was.

But no one had the temerity to laugh. Because a massive, on fire, bird with a golden beak and ivory claws that looked like they could rip a tank apart was terrifying at any size.

In an ideal world, someone other than her would be doing the scouting. normally, the leader should be with the main group … but that wasn’t how things shook out. Her power necessitated that it was her who played the scout, which was more important than her being with the others.

This time, though, scouting wouldn’t be necessary, as the large, low, flat, surprisingly uniform “mountain” in the center of the transformation zone had been visible since several hours ago. They’d known this had to be the Hunger’s lair, or at the very least, the place it had been when the merge had occurred.

She wasn’t here to look for the anchor beast, not really. No, her job was to smack its nose and insult its mother, then run like hell when Daedalus engaged.

“HEY!” she yelled as she was floating above the mountain.

No response, as expected. But it had been the safest option to lure it out, so she’d had to try.

Jaclyn reached into a pocket and pulled out a simple enchanted steel ball that would make vastly more noise when it hit something. A brief burst of mana later, it was primed, and a simple flick of her wrist sent it hurtling down to the ground like a meteor. And she meant that literally.

Dust and rock fragments exploded from the site of the impact, fountaining into the sky as though a bunker buster had hit, rather than stone thrown by a person.

But perhaps, she should have held back. A little. Because the noise enhancement was loud.

Jaclyn grimaced, rubbing her ears. At least there was very little risk of their enemy having managed to miss all the noise.

But where was it? There were no obvious entrances, no nest, no burrow, no nothing. Where was it supposed to come from?

Jaclyn nervously flew a couple of hundred meters higher. Was the monster just not home, or, perhaps, was the whole mountain the monster and she’d already killed it by the impact of the ball bearing?

Wishful thinking, sadly. Checking her character sheet showed none of the changes she’d have expected from being able to kill a monster as powerful as an anchor beast.

So where … Jaclyn was in the process of reaching into her pocket to pull out a second ball when the top of the mountain simply vanished. Poof, gone, dissolved into nothingness, granting her a perfect view of the titanic Komodo Dragon the size of the Belfast that had apparently been sitting in the hollow core of the mountain, glaring up at her as half a dozen smaller variants appeared around it, manifesting from nowhere.

Oh … bollocks.