Chapter 722: Leap of Faith

Jason and his companions were sitting at a large round table, nibbling at refreshments.

“There’s no escaping the fact that Clive’s actions will cause us trouble,” Humphrey said. “That being said, we are under no obligation to hand over the fruits of our labour to the Adventure Society just because they assume they can take them. But it does complicate our interactions with them when we’re meant to be part of a major expedition soon. One with significant political ramifications.”

“Will that even be going forward now?” Neil asked. “We were working with the messengers because they’re sitting on the hole leading down to the natural array, but it looks like these messed-up new messengers just dug an extra hole for us.”

“If the Adventure Society wants to try and go around the messengers,” Clive said, “I strongly suggest we stay out of it. As much as I detest working with this Jes Fin Kaal woman, she’s not wrong about our knowledge of natural arrays being lacking. I know that I’m somewhat biased when it comes to the Magic Society, but their best researchers know less about natural arrays than Farrah does.”

“You think it’s better to trust this device the messengers are providing?” Belinda asked.

“It’s not a good choice,” Clive said, “but yes. We can at least examine that device and learn what we can from it while it’s still up here on the surface. That’s preferable to heading underground and trying to invent the field of natural array theory while neck-deep in whatever bizarre magic has been cooked up between the array itself and whatever the messengers did to it. All while dodging whatever elementally-tainted messengers are left, the local residents, whatever has happened to them, and an astral space full of leftover Builder cultists.”

“I’m halfway tempted to give it a go,” Farrah said. “I’m an array specialist, and I spent years studying the grid on Earth. I even led the project to repair it after some idiots sabotaged it. That grid is the endgame for natural array research. It uses the principles of natural arrays to create an artificial array according to an entirely different paradigm, using the natural landscape of the planet to create an array so large it boggles the mind, yet doesn’t interfere with any other arrays set up in that massive area. It’s at a level of sophistication that goes through complexity and back to simplicity. The elegance of it is like no magic I’ve ever encountered. These are the building blocks of what Travis and I are doing in terms of building a communication system. Right now we’re building towers and using crude magical resonance, but give us ten or twenty years and we’ll be using mountains and oceans and no one will even notice. Thirty years, tops.”

"So long as the Magic Society doesn't realise what you're working with and interrogate you for your knowledge," Clive pointed out.

“Which is why I’ve been quiet about this natural array business when I’m not exclusively around friends,” Farrah said.

“Maybe you should return to adventuring,” Jason said. “Come back to this research when you’re diamond-rank and don’t have to worry about that.”

“It’s what a lot of diamond-rankers do,” Rufus said. “Look at that lady who builds cloud houses and has been chasing Jason around.”

“No,” Clive said, shaking his head. “That’s the smart thing, yes, but that’s not how it works. When you find something you need — and I mean need to research, you're not going to wait. Not to reach diamond, which is itself an extremely uncertain proposition. When that knowledge is waiting just out of reach, all you can do is take the step forward to reach it. Nothing else matters."

Farrah and Clive nodded a shared understanding.

"The grid on Earth is like the astral magic the messengers developed for the Builder cult. It’s way beyond any local equivalent and was imported in. I suspect that it was the messengers who developed the magic that the person who built the grid on Earth used. That's what makes me suspect that the messengers aren't lying when they say they know what they're doing with this natural array."

“Do you think you understand this magic enough to figure out what to do with this natural array?” Humphrey asked Farrah. “Enough that you’d be willing to go down there without examining the device the messengers have promised us?”

“No,” Farrah said without any hint of uncertainty. “I said I was halfway tempted, but that is the half that encourages Jason to do things. The other half is the part of me that tells him to not do things.”

“We should listen to that half,” Jason said. “Trust me on that one.”

“I’ll probably learn more from the messenger device than a messed-up natural array anyway,” Farrah said. “But why not check out the device first and then the array? A little bit of patience and we get the best of both worlds. Well, best for my research. I've been to both worlds and fiddling with them magically has been fairly catastrophic, historically speaking."

“So, that’s a no to going down this new hole then,” Neil said. “Good, because not only is dropping down the big spooky hole something I don’t want to do, but it also sounds like a euphemism for something I don’t want to do.”

“Then we carry on as we were?” Rufus asked. “It seems a little anti-climactic to just go back to the contracts we were on.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jason said. “There will be no shortage of adventurers looking to be part of whatever the response to this giant hole ends up being. I say we leave them to it.”

***

Around the massive hole in the ground, dozens of adventurers and hundreds of adventure society functionaries were building an encampment that would beggar most towns. Flattened trees and underbrush were cleared away and magically recycled into building materials. Stone shapers smoothed out the ground and laid foundations.

Charist stormed into a large tent where Allayeth was in a folding camp chair, looking out.

“Have you seen what they’re doing out there?” he asked angrily.

“I have,” she said. Her gaze didn’t waver from the portal arch Jason and his team had vanished into. It still sat next to where Clive and Farrah’s ritual cages had been. She had been sitting as well, watching it through the open tent flap for the hours it took Charist to hunt down the orbital messengers.

"They're out here building an outpost to go delving into the ground. How many of these people did they pull away from rebuilding the city for this? Look at how fast they're going. Those could have been people's homes."

“They could,” Allayeth agreed.

“Do you know what the Adventure Society executives said when I asked?”

“The same thing they told me, I imagine.”

“That while diamond-rankers don’t answer to the society, neither does the society answer to them.”

"Yes. That's what they told me as well."

“What is happening lately? What happened to the respect people used to hold for us?”

“I’m not sure that was respect, Charist. It was power and mystery, and our prominence since the monster surge began has stripped much of that mystery away. We still have the power, yes, but it’s quantifiable for them now. They’ve seen us hit our limits against Mah Go Schaat. And against Jason Asano, who turned out to be the limit for Mah Go Schaat.”

“Asano didn’t kill a diamond-rank messenger.”

"No. But a diamond-rank messenger tried to kill him and what happened? The messenger dropped dead and Asano ate his life force. When it comes to reputation, the story matters more than the details, and the stories about Jason are the stuff of legends, however accurate they may or may not be."

Charist let out his frustration in a grumbling growl.

“I’m going to escort the messengers that were captured back to the city for proper containment at the Adventure Society campus.”

He strode back out, leaving Allayeth still contemplating the portal arch. The loosed messengers had been dealt with, but setting them loose had caused a rift between the Adventure Society and Jason's team. Normally, annoying one team, even a prominent one, was of no matter to the society. Things always became complicated when such a team had leverage.

The expedition to the natural array was important to the Adventure Society. It meant saving Yaresh instead of having to move the entire population and start over. Claiming the natural array would be a massive boon to the Magic Society, so the Adventure Society securing it would gain them a lot of influence with their sister organisation. The success of that expedition was largely contingent on Jason Asano, however, who was much less invested in it. That gave him an advantage over the Adventure Society that most adventurers didn’t have.

Their stunt of releasing dozens of enemies in the middle of a bunch of adventurers could only have been worse if it hadn't been in the middle of a bunch of adventurers. Allayeth still wondered what Asano wanted them for, trying to take them through his mysterious portal. If releasing the messengers had produced casualties it would have been an untenable situation, and even with everything safely contained, the society wasn’t happy.

The director might have been an advocate for Jason in the past, but the other upper executives were done indulging him. Allayeth knew that they had reached out to the continental council to step in, which was not what Allayeth considered a good solution. The society executives wanted to ramp up the pressure on Jason’s team until they fell in line, but she was quite certain they would not, whatever pressure was brought to bear. All it would accomplish was driving Jason and his team to act with further independence.

Jason had threatened to surrender his Adventure Society membership and Allayeth wondered if that might not be best. If they would only ever use the society for their own needs and never serve its needs, then what was the point? That was the privilege of diamond-rankers, earned through service and power.

One of the issues that the Adventure Society had in reining in Jason was his activities for the society. The society’s stated purpose was protecting the populace from monsters and other threats, and Jason’s record of self-sacrifice for that very purpose was beyond reproach.

His team were respected. Celebrated, even. They had a record of taking the jobs others didn't want, be that in Greenstone, Rimaros or now in Yaresh. When they weren't doing the scutwork they were doing the exact opposite: fighting with the fate of thousands hanging in the balance. Their record made it all but impossible to reproach them for not acting in service of the society's political needs.

They had saved Greenstone from being invaded by the Builder’s world engineers. Not only would the diamond-ranked constructs have annihilated the city and everyone in it but the Builder invasion would have come three years early. In Rimaros he convinced the immensely powerful Dawn to wipe out one of the Builder’s fortress cities. Another was felled by a weapon designed by one of Jason’s companions. Then his team was critical to breaking the Order of Redemption.

In Yaresh, they continued to hold a prominence that was outsized relative to their rank. They had been on the front lines of the world-taker worm discovery, and Jason's cloud palace had allowed them to set up a processing point for handling the refugees. It would have otherwise taken far longer to get the logistics into place.

Jason’s ostentatious aura display in the Battle of Yaresh had sent the enemy into a frenzy, exposing them to a costly counterattack. He had captured a contingent of messengers, including an important commander, and the enemy diamond-ranker had fallen dead at his feet for reasons still unknown.

And now he was a critical element in the expedition underground because the messengers refused to deal with anyone else. Combined with Jason’s increasingly obvious messenger-like tendencies, from floating around on his own aura to his general sense of smug superiority, it made people nervous. But those were people in power. By reputation, Jason Asano was unimpeachable, and that reputation was spreading now that he had abandoned his false persona. His name had literally resonated over the battlefield in the battle of Yaresh. The messengers had targeted him personally, and they had fallen extremely short.

The Adventure Society branch in Rimaros had understood the difficulty in handling them. Jason had even undergone a few theatrics to demonstrate he was still subject to society control, but his tolerance for such games had clearly come to an end.

As events currently stood, the Adventure Society needed Jason more than he needed them. He wasn’t invested in saving Yaresh when there were real, practical reasons to just relocate the city. As one of the few people that could read his emotions, Allayeth knew his position on that to be his true opinion. He would rather relocate the whole city than work with the messengers but, at least in that, he has acceded to the Adventure Society.

Allayeth also knew that if the society kept pushing, Jason would be willing to reverse that decision, abandon his society membership and walk away, albeit with reluctance. Contracts and the information that came with them were convenient, but if he and his team wanted to go killing monsters freelance, they could. With two loot powers on the team, they could easily get by without the contract rewards.

Still staring at the portal, Allayeth let out a sigh. She knew that something had to change if Jason and the Adventure Society were going to stay connected, and that it was the best thing for both in the long run. The problem was that both needed to compromise when they both felt they had compromised enough.

If Jason walked away, it was likely the messengers would refuse to work with the ‘servant races’ at all and the natural array would inexorably destroy what remained of Yaresh. But once Jason no longer had that leverage over the Adventure Society, it would seek to redress the grievances it had previously put aside. That might come from the pride of gold-rankers or society executives, or it might be to shield the society’s reputation so it didn’t look like a silver-ranker was pushing it around.

Allayeth knew she had to be the adult in the room, take the squabbling children aside and force them to reluctantly shake hands, even as they sneered at one another. She had to be the glue that held them together, but she wasn’t sure how to do that. The Adventure Society would back her because she wasn’t some silver-ranker; when she or Charist treated them with the disregard that Jason did, that fell within their expectation. It was the privilege of power.

Was the solution to show them Jason’s power? She was convinced that his rank was not a true reflection of his abilities, but how, why and what they were remained a mystery. Jason was beginning to trust her, but not enough to let her in. Who was the backer who gave him whatever vast power lay beyond that portal? Why was he convinced that the truth had at least a chance of making her want to kill him?

Her gaze had not left the portal in all the time she had been sitting in the tent. She stood up, eyes still locked on it.

“It’s going to take a leap of faith,” she murmured. She steeled herself for a moment and then strode over to the portal and stepped through.

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