Current Happenings

Chapter 53: Current Happenings

/Wasps kinda suck tho./

Some biologist, probably.

- - - - - -

Eventually, Mercury woke up again, when the sunlight tickled his nose through the trees. The forest was waking up, and when the birds started screeching their melodies at him, our boi was forced to finally wake up again as well.

It had been a long night, and he was honestly still feeling killer tired. He was sapped of all strength, and he was still sore all over, but at the least it was more of a tiring soreness rather than a paralyzing one. I mean, what an evening that had been. He certainly had been more than a little frigging delirious.

Mercury shook his head at the thought. His brother had been... difficult, at times. He was sweet, and had been sweet the last two decades, but especially as a kid, he oftentimes had to be the more responsible one. His brother was usually very reliable, but also more than snarky, and sometimes his comments really would sting.

But he was clearly a good guy. He took great care of his kid, and was more than kind to his wife. He just had a sharp tongue, is all.

Steve smiled at the thought. It had been a long while since he last glared at his bro for dropping an "f-bomb" in front of the kid, though to be fair, Jack had grown so much more mellow as an adult. Man, he could hardly believe he had been a cat for a little over a year. What a fricking surreal experience.

Then, Mercury smiled to himself. He missed his brother, quite a bit, he now noticed. Even the snarky comments, and the little fights they had, even when they argued, they could still rely on each other. They could have ended a call screaming just hours ago, but when Steve was at the train station at night and didn't have any money for a cab, Jack was there.

He would pick him up and take him home. He would sometimes give him a ride to work, or lend him a battery or two. He would always be available for a call, at least when he wasn't busy snoring it on up. Heh.

Jack even supported him when things were looking down low, ever since they had grown out of their juvenile fights and arguments. Sure, there were ups and downs, but in the end, he was a brother to rely on. They grew closer year by year, unlike-

No, Mercury shook his head. Enough reminiscing, time to drag his tired old self back to get paid.

- - - - - -

Lucia looked at Avery with a frown on her face. How had she gotten herself into this?

It was her, Rondo, and the godseeker all in a room, looking at the captain of the enemy force, the infamous "northern gale", Norla Iceskin. Compared to normal soldiers, she excelled at almost everything. Endurance, power, speed, smarts, she had it all, but it wasn't enough to turn the tides simply as a force on the battlefield.

Instead of focusing on just training herself to hit hard enough to change a war, she instead decided to learn military strategy, diligently studying tactics on how to deal with powerful enemies, yet apparently still failing. Perhaps because of her troops lack of discipline, poor communication, or just the difference in numbers, something had made them lose.

Not like they hadn't taken enough lives with them, Lucia thought.

"Good people have died, Norla," she spoke out loud, eyeing the northerner with a fiery gaze.

"I know. As is nature of war, we lose people. And when we lose, we grieve. Yet, instead of grieving, I am in cell." The woman spoke calmly, a hint of ice underneath her tone, yet still politely enough, somewhat.

Avery once more took a bite out of his bread as he leaned forwards and onto his hands. He chewed, then swallowed, and finally spoke.

"Yeah, it sucks. I lost some good seekers out there, too. So let's get this behind us quickly, and I'll see about arranging funerals."

"We do not seek to be buried in this lands," Norla snapped back. "A warrior's burial must be in snow and smoke, as is good."

"Well, seems a little troubling to me. I'll try my best to get some help on it, alright? Don't want to disrespect you, promise," Avery said, just seeking to get on a level with her.

"Well, that's why we're here after all. To negotiate," general Rondo said, stroking his beard. "Why'd ya move away from the frontline and attack our city?"

"Strike the heart!" Norla half hissed, smashing her fist against her chest. "Fast way to end war."

"It seems like that went rather poorly for you," Lucia said, watching as the other woman ground her teeth. "Can you explain more?"

"No."

"That wasn't quite a question," Lucia hissed, the fire in her stomach flaring up, only to be stopped as Rondo held out one of his massive paws in front of her.

"Calm, lass. This is a negotiation, not an inquisition. Important distinction. Norla, what are ya willin' to trade for your freedom?"

"Freedom? After the men you took?"

"You took an equal amount. This is a war, no individual is at fault here," Avery said, leaning back and crossing his arms. "I'm mad, yes, but I know I can't put the blame on you. Nor on your soldiers. So, what do you want?"

Norla spit on the floor when Avery was done speaking, then wiped her mouth. "Filthy southerners. Think you better than us ah?!"

Rondo sighed as Norla went about her rant, and Avery closed his eyes for just a moment, only to reopen them when he heard a resounding crash.

"AH!! LESPUTJE!!" Norla screamed, clenching her, now bloody nose in front of a smiling Lucia.

Apparently, the priestess had used the moment both of her partners were looking away to grab the northerner's head and smash it into the table.

"What the-?!"

"Were you just going to let her ramble?" Lucia hissed at the two guys. "State your fucking demands, bitch, before I decide you're not worth listening to and burn you down with everyone who came along."

Then, the woman opposite her smiled. Norla grabbed her nose, and put it back into place with another crack, then plugged one nostril, blowing blood out the other. She quickly also blew blood out her second nostril, then spat again, this time blowing a bloody tooth onto the floor.

Her grin looked terrifying, with her lips ripped open and her teeth stained red.

"We want to burn you down," she said with a sinister smile. "And we do so now."

"NO!!!!"

And the room went white.

- - - - - -

Nikola Tesla had always been a brilliant inventor. He had made so many discoveries, only to have many of them stolen away from himself. He had discovered alternating current and made many experiments with electromagnetic waves, and perhaps yes, he had blown up some horses.

But they were just horses. Simple, four legged beasts. Not something truly gorgeous, like a pigeon. Ah, pigeons, they were such incredible creatures. So beautiful, and smart... truly elegant.

Ah, but that was off topic now. Tesla was a man of pure focus, he had always managed to perfectly zone into his creations, and in doing so, he sought to truly unravel the truths of the universe. And bit by bit, he had done so.

Yet, his achievements had been stolen. His science was taken from him, and not even after his death did he truly get the attention he deserved. No, Tesla deserved better, and thus, the world gave him second chance. A perfect second chance. A second chance in a different world from earth altogether, yet one with his mind and memories fully intact.

Yes, Nikola Tesla, perhaps the most brilliant mind to ever walk the planet, had been reincarnated. He had been reshapen, and his mind had been given a new body, stored in what he liked to consider his astral self. He had been inserted into a new body, and he was ready to once again conquer the laws of the universe!

Once he was done with being a baby that is.

He had to learn a whole new language first, after all, and figure out how far science had gotten in this new world he had gotten himself into. He needed to figure out if the underlying laws here were different from those on the Earth he had been from, or if they were still the same. Certainly, at least some things were different.

This world still seemed to have many of the things that made up his old planet, but it had yet more things that made it so different. One of those was the system, with a few very immediate differences.

Hp, Sp, and Mp, to be precise. And of course Skills, and stats, and the incredible difference between his Intelligence and his intelligence, and how Strength could also influence weight, and how the combination of Vitality, Strength, and Dexterity can make ones skin more resistant to many forms of damage, not to mention abilities, or-

In short, there were many things he still needed to discover. By now, he had grown up a little more. He was in the body of a 20-year-old man, barely out of puberty and growing what some might consider the first stubbles of a beard. Nikola, or his new name, that he had given himself, Nicolai, shaved regularly, as he disliked looking ungroomed.

Unless he was deep into his scientific methods, but that was another story in and of itself.

He was easily hailed as a genius at just the age of 1, which is when he began to be able to form small sentences. By the time he was 4, he was able to read somewhat fluently, and when he was 8 years old, he introduced new words into the language of that world. He had taught himself <Language>, according to the system, and as such, every word he said was perfectly, or largely perfectly translated.

By the time he reached the age of 10, he had used mana sense to discover tiny particles, which he dubbed atoms, just like he had known them himself. He named the particles that constructed them protons, neutrons and electrons, and by inspecting them even further with mana, he discovered the existence of particles even smaller than those, which he called teslons.

Then, he introduced the world he lived in to the correlation between hygiene and disease, saving many hundreds of thousands of lives, and later on, he even introduced the theory of a parallel dimension existing, in which the system might be able to store muscle mass, and only transfer the kinetic power over to our world. With changing dimensional interference, depending which slice of that dimension overlapped with ours, it would also explain how Strength could allow a user to manipulate their weight!

In short, he was brilliant, even in his new world. All of these achievements had been done by the time he became twelve, and at this point, he was being hailed as a genius beyond geniuses, as the greatest scholar of his time, as a mage beyond all others, and as the brightest mind to have ever graced Chronagen.

He was even being compared to legends such as Leonard of Vince, a man of the third book who had made many discoveries that made living as people were today possible, such as a way to use mana cores to keep water flowing using kinetic conversion runes, which made the creation of sewers possible.

But yet, Nicolai was yet unsatisfied with himself. He dove deep into alchemy after his thirteenth birthday, and refused to call it anything other than chemistry. He discovered new ways to make potions using something he liked to call catalysts, substances that wouldn't necessarily be used up, but could provoke a step in potionmaking to happen earlier.

He also invented the further crystallization of liquids by adding absorbent powder, allowing for potion size to be congealed down much further at the cost of consistency, and he found more ways of purifying potions by invention vacuum filtration.

Yet, his greatest invention were what he liked to call tesla coils. Short sticks that would charge up with great amounts of "electrical energy", or, for our menial minds, lightning, once exposed to a subset of energy. He even created varieties that used mana, created by carving runes into mana cores, as well as ones that exclusively used up stamina, by incorporating living plantmatter into them, creating a sort of symbiotic relationship.

Nicolai Tesla had shocked the world once more, going from a genius beyond geniuses, to a monster, and then even further beyond that. He was the smartest man of the act, perhaps the saga. Some even said he was the greatest mastermind of this whole book!

And Nicolai himself simply says, that he does what he does because he loves it. There is nothing he enjoys more than finding out about the secrets of the universe and trying his best to make the lives of the people better.

The potion distilling method he found out was focused largely on the creation of healing potions, and even his coils were never much of a lethal option, more commonly used to disarm or defend against someone.

Of course his inventions weren't perfectly foolproof, and he knew that they could always be misused, but Tesla had never given up the faith that those using his creations for good would outweigh those using them for evil. And even more, he hoped that he was making a difference with that.

In case he wasn't, well, it's not like he had revealed all of his weapons to the public. Some of them were too powerful to be properly utilized for the good of others. They were killing machines.

A particle accelerator packed into the back of a gun, using spatial mana to create an extremely long tube, where induction would be used to speed up elementally loaded bullets to speeds never before seen on this world. Fast enough to break past the speed of sound multiple times, and hard enough to carve holes into many, many trees.

It was a bit of an experiment, and there was only one such weapon in existence. Of course, there were other magical guns, but none came even close to being as powerful as his version, especially after he found the extremely magnetically impacted element that was dubbed magnum.

He had essentially created a supergun that went beyond the performance of anything we could ever find on earth, and he was more than happy keeping it on just his person, because if he was honest, he didn't feel quite comfortable in this world without some protection. After all, not only the metals and system were spectacular, but the monsters as well.

Those breeding in nests were already enough of a problem, oftentimes corrupting the land around them, but those growing in arches or tears were a much, much different beast. Their speed, power, durability, magic, and strategy went far beyond that of regular monsters, and quite frankly, if he went into a top tier arch, he wasn't confident in clearing it out, even with all of the weaponry he had discovered.

He was still but one man, but he was a man with passion, drive, and more than enough time to grow. Nicolai Tesla was a man with drive, more than anything else. And as of right now, his drive was focused on bringing back the pigeon that had died before him, when a servant fell and crushed it.

Tesla was going to invent a way to resurrect the dead, because there was nothing that would separate him from Anna, his pigeon.

Maybe he'd resurrect her three times, just for good measure.