The group’s mood was solemn as they kept moving east. Seeing a city destroyed by the cataclysm had everyone on edge. Alice also found her thoughts drifting as the group kept moving. Would every city they found end up ? Worse, what if the Immortal that the group was supposed to meet ended up dead? Alice had come all of this way because she needed to figure out how to make artificial class seeds. She was desperately hoping that seeing someone who knew how to make artifacts would help. If the Immortal they were going to meet was dead… Alice would have to find another way. But finding another way forward could take weeks, or months. And with the fact that cities were now collapsing, she didn’t have months to spend messing around with magic seeds. She needed a solution now. However, Alice’s thoughts were ruined when Allira suddenly frowned. “Ethan, stop moving,” she said. Ethan halted the group in midair, as Allira squinted at something in the distance. Allira started humming, as a look of intense concentration appeared on her face. Her humming grew louder and louder, until she broke off her song. She sighed. “We need to head a little south,” she said. “There are odd monsters ahead. Normally, I wouldn’t mind giving them a bit of a tussle, but after seeing the ruined city, I am suspicious. They might have special abilities, or something that makes them hard to deal with.” “How many are there?” “Around four thousand. They move like a coordinated army, and I feel like they’re watching us. It makes me quite uncomfortable.” Jonathan also heaved a sigh of relief, and then leaned closer to Mimi, the little girl, and managed to reach out and cradle her head. The little girl looked very uneasy, and kept touching her stomach, which Ethan was probably manipulating via Kinetic Magic. Ethan frowned. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep this up for more than a few hours. Punching through the magic resistance of seven people, two of which are Immortals, is incredibly hard.” “Now that I think about it, I could try singing a ship or something into existence. It would probably keep the wind resistance off of us, and I can make it solid enough for your kinetic magic to interfere with it. As long as we stay in one of the cabins, it should keep air resistance to a minimum as well. And since it’s still an illusion, it won’t weigh much.” Ethan looked thoughtful. “That… would work well, actually. And it would be much easier on me. But can you make a ship quickly? The monster swarm is catching up, and I know most of your illusions take a while before you can convert them into real objects.” “Let me try something to buy some time,” said Jonathan, before he started reaching through one of his pockets. A moment later, he pulled out a handful of seeds. The man grinned as he took the seeds, and then threw them into the marsh, almost as if he were working on the fields on a normal day. Many of the seeds bounced off of a tree as the group rushed past the scenery… but Alice also saw a few seeds bury themselves into the soil, as if they had minds of their own. The seeds suddenly burst into clouds of rainbow mana… and then they began to grow. Despite the group rapidly flying away from the area, Alice still saw a massive pile of green shoots start to rip their way out of the ground and towards the heavens, as if they were skyscrapers made of plants. At the same time, Alice realized that the top of each green shot was golden-yellow. It looked like… corn? “I can spruce it up more, before I get started on the ship,” said Allira. “Ethan, set us down.” The group alighted on the ground, before Allira started to hum. Alice saw another cloud of rainbow mana start to form around Allira as she transitioned from humming to singing. The song itself was beautiful – but the impact on the surrounding marsh was horrifying. All of the shadows in the marsh started to tremble, almost as though they were the organs and limbs of some unseen, long-forgotten creature made of shadows. Alice saw little strands of flesh and blood start to sprout from some of those shadows, almost as if they were coming to life. It resembled some eldritch nightmare straight out of lovecraftian horror. Even though Alice knew Allira was an ally, for a brief moment, she felt deeply disturbed by what she was witnessing. All while Allira’s eerily, inhumanly beautiful voice made its way through the swamp. Then, the little meaty tendrils of shadows and eyes swarmed towards the giant stalks of corn in the distance. Then, Alice heard enraged shrieks and bellows in the distance. “They’re fighting,” said Allira. “That should buy us some time.” She started humming, and a large, illusory ship started to appear before Alice’s eyes. It only took her a moment to recognize it. It was the ship Ethan’s mother had given them when they travelled back to Cyra. “It’s solid now, so stand upon the deck,” sang Allira, somehow managing to make a simple song with absurd lyrics sound like a work of art that would make Mozart and Beethoven weep. The group got onto the ship, and then quickly got into one of the cabins, so that they could finally avoid the awful wind resistance. Alice felt the ship raise itself upwards, before it started flying through the air, even faster than before. This time, the trip was far less uncomfortable. “This is much better,” said Alice. Allira nodded. “I wish I had thought of this earlier. This really is much nicer.” Ethan nodded noncomitally as Alice heard the sounds of battle in the far distance. The group relaxed for several minutes, before Allira started to frown again. “Something else happen?” asked Ethan. “No matter how many of the swamp monsters my shadows kill, they reappear after a while. It is almost as if the monsters are returning to life, or…” “Ah,” said Alice. “I wonder if the monsters are like the ravens we found earlier? They might seem to be alive, but in practice, they might be more like enchantments, or limbs of the swamp itself.” Alice frowned. If that was the case, the way to deal with the monsters was ‘destroy the swamp itself.’ However, she had no idea how to even start trying to destroy the swamp. Maybe with some mixture of [Farmers] and [Lumberjacks], the group could reshape the terrain, bringing it back to some degree of normalcy? Or maybe there was some other Class that specialized in manipulating the terrain? But doing that would also give any workers an extra dose of ‘class mana.’ Alice didn’t currently have enough enchantments to keep the workers safe if they helped her. “If the monsters are literal parts of the swamp, that makes them harder to deal with,” said Jonathan. “Since they will resist any attempts to directly influence them via magic.” “We’ll just have to hope that they can’t exit the swamp,” said Ethan. “If they can, they will be a very troublesome threat.” “If they can exit the swamp, I can try to start attacking the swamp itself,” said Jonathan. “If Fendrallia is having this much trouble keeping their western border safe, they might not mind me founding a new ‘Superbia’ in the middle of the swamp. With the land being fully mine, it would be much easier to rebuild my farm… and keep the swamp under control. I can expand my farm quite a lot if I really want to, after all.” “We could also try to distort people’s perception of the swamp,” said Alice, after a few moments. “People’s understanding of the world directly changes it, due to the influence of mana. So if we make people believe the threat of the swamp is handled…” Ethan grimaced. “Sounds like we need an [Orator], or some similar kind of class to really tamp down on the chaos.” Allira grinned toothily at Ethan. “Ethan, dear. Have you forgotten who I am? I might specialize in songs that harm… but songs are also a form of storytelling. And a good way to spread information,” she said. She turned to Alice. “You’ve been getting more and more overt in your discussions of how mana and the System work behind the scenes. So if I understand your statements correctly… people’s beliefs somehow make mana itself change the world to match those beliefs, right?” Alice hesitated, before she nodded. Allira’s smile widened for the first time. “Then I will compose a new song as we fly. It will be about how we destroyed something called the ‘heart of the swamp.’ We can incorporate some of your research into the song, to make it as logical and realistic as possible. We can also talk about how, now that it’s dead, the swamp will slowly begin to retreat. That should make enough sense for people to believe that the Swamp is weakened, yes? And from there, the situation should at least be controlled to some extent.” “Will that… work?” asked Alice. Allira giggled. “Alice. We are Immortals. An Immortal slaying a monster is a nothing new.” Ethan actually nodded. “Allira is actually right in this case. There are… probably over a hundred stories of my father slaying some sort of powerful monster and making an Illvarian territory safe. Most of them are based on real events, though many of them have been exaggerated over the years. In the first place, my father’s strength was one of the reasons Illvaria as a country was able to be founded in the first place. To hear him talk about it, back when Illvaria was a new country, the entire place was an untamed wilderness filled with monsters and mysteries. So an Immortal fighting off a deadly threat and saving the townsfolk is nothing new. It has a certain… rhythm to it. One that people expect.” Ethan’s grin grew wider. “As long as the public hears that a group of three Immortals did something, our words will quite believable. Because that’s just what people expect to happen. Not to mention, when people actually see the swamp retreat, it will prove our words.” Allira grinned. “It would even be a good way to get in Fendrallia’s good books, at least a little bit. Being able to help out a neighboring country would help prove Illvaria’s friendliness… and, in a twisted sort of way, might also prove that Illvaria is ‘safe’ during this crisis. After all, if Illvaria can afford to send out two of its Immortals to help its neighbors, it surely isn’t suffering from the crisis as much as other countries, no? That would benefit us as a whole.” Alice blinked in surprise. Now that Allira mentioned it, it made sense… and it also brought up a new aspect of the crisis that Alice hadn’t thought of in concrete terms before. With the way that mana and people’s understanding of reality interacted with each other… Alice was starting to realize that public opinion was very important. It was still a bit hard for Alice to grasp all of the implications of mana being so… reactive to people’s beliefs. Now that Alice thought about it… on Earth, it was entirely possible for people to be mistaken about the world. For a long time, people had believed that the sun revolved around the Earth, for example. No matter what people believed, it wouldn’t change the underlying reality. It just meant those people were wrong. But in this world, if people believed something, it would eventually become true, now that the System wasn’t filtering those beliefs. With that in mind… people like Allira, who were capable of manipulating public opinion, suddenly became very powerful. Alice’s heart sank as she realized that there was yet another dimension of the crisis that she needed to keep a handle on… but on the other hand, there were also some interesting possibilities, if someone tried to use public opinion to handle some parts of the crisis… Alice started running through a few new ideas she could try. A lot of them would need to be implemented by someone who was a more public figure, but Alice still had a good relationship with many members of the Church of the System. They could probably be convinced to help her spread some news…