That Time an American was Reincarnated into Another World

Chapter 240: Unstoppable

December 31st, 625

After placing a relatively inexpensive custom order, I left Rupert’s Gems and made my way to a fancy restaurant in the city. 

I hadn’t intended to go here tonight but I was invited by Luna, who had apparently dragged Umara with her. 

I was told to come as I were so I went straight there. The sun had already set as I walked down the street yet all the lights strung between buildings and floating over streets with magic were making it ambiently bright. It was Christmas Eve, the eve of the new year. There were parties on every street and outside every restaurant, children and parents bundled up in sweaters and mittens that protected them from the light snow. 

It was beautiful, and I was only sad that I was incapable of getting in the Christmas spirit at the moment. 

“Sir, would you like a cookie?”

I heard a call, felt the gaze directed at me from the side, turning my head slightly to find a small girl with a basket of fresh warm cookies covered in fabric. 

She held out a cookie shaped like a gingerbread man with some powdered sugar on it. It seemed like she was simply handing them out, no beckons to sell or labeled prices. Just simple generosity. 

I smiled, “Can I have two? I have a lady who would love one at home.”

“Of course, sir!”

She took out another and put them in my hand. I slipped two Gold Bullion in hers in exchange. She was surprised, as if she didn’t realize I put them there.

“Thank you. It smells delicious.”

“T-Thank you too mister! Merry Christmas! Mama!”@@novelbin@@

The little girl ran back to the building with the coins clenched. 

I continued on my way, munching on my cookie and making myself invisible so no more generous individuals came up to give me gifts. 

The place I arrived at was one of the taller buildings in the city, and the restaurant portion of the building was at the top. It had a direct view of not just the Walk of Saints around the 8 Peerage Towers, but a view of the city outskirts and beyond. 

The booth I was taken to had an easy view of the Walk. The statue of Christ was illuminated in the night, properly displaying its majesty with magical spotlights. 

I wonder if they had ever considered making laser magic. I’d have to teach Umara. 

The booth was given privacy by some tall dividers. Luna and Anderson were both there. Umara was sitting semi-uncomfortably at the end of the wrap around booth with a spot reserved for me. 

She eagerly stood when I showed up, very little of the depression I had previously seen still in her Aura. Seems like she had made her decision, and judging by Luna’s broad smile, it was what I expected. 

I accepted Umara’s hug and kiss, smiling to the others before sitting down. There was already some food served, nothing more than appetizers but still more than enough to be a full meal for me. It was probably for the gluttonous knight, and all of it was filled to the brim with Vigor. Whatever animal they got these meats from had to have been raised on a farm manned by powerful Magi. 

Luna filled the glass in front of me with wine, which I took with thanks. A sip later and it burned, but the Magika within it made my body react with desire, the very act of ingesting trace magical energy rejuvenating my system. 

Did they make it with magic grapes?

Once I set the glass down Umara took my now free hand and squeezed it. 

“I’m going to get the Crown.”

I looked at her, stamping down the desire to glance at Luna’s growing smile, looking into Umara’s purple eyes. 

“Is that what you really want?”

“Yes, it is.”

She gave her firm answer, so I just nodded. 

“Then I will support you with everything I have.”

“And I you.”

We exchanged another kiss before Anderson started laughing. 

“Ah, young love! Remember when we were like that?”

Luna rolled her eyes when Anderson nudged her. 

“Are we not still like that?”

“Well I’ve been so busy slaughtering heathens that I seem to have forgotten! You should give me a few reminders tonight of what it used to be like.”

“Now now, dear. There are children at the table.”

“Ah, like they haven’t done anything taboo.”

His emphasis made Umara flush a little. She glared at him slightly and he laughed even louder. 

I cheered her up with the cookie I brought for her, Anderson complaining about me not getting him one too.

Soon after that some food was brought. Seems like Umara had ordered for me, a large meat platter being set in front of me. 

My favorite.  

The table was quiet as we ate. The food was that good. The meat was perfectly cooked, juicy and flavorful. The others were engorging themselves just as I was. 

Through the lens of my Aura I could feel the festive atmosphere permeating the entire city. It was bright, cheery, loving, infectious. 

And for some reason it started to piss me off. 

Then I heard some sudden shouts in the background. A pistol instinctively appeared in my hand, as did Umara’s Foci in hers. Both of our heads snapped to hear the sudden cheers, realizing they were cheers only after we confirmed they weren’t cries or screams. 

“Calm yourself, you two. We aren’t on the battlefield.”

Anderson was smiling at me, the smile not as big as before. Luna also threw up a barrier to isolate the sound, everything turning muted. 

My gun went away almost as fast as it appeared. I knew we weren’t on a battlefield, but my reflexes were still wired. 

We had been fighting for our lives just 4 days ago. Not that I liked excuses. 

“Apologies.”

“Don’t apologize. Lord knows you’ve been through enough in the last few weeks.”

Luna gave her comfort. I just finished off the last of my meal and looked out the window, mostly ignoring it. 

I wasn’t sure how to feel about everything. I just knew that I had no interest in celebrating Christmas. There was still plenty of work to do but nobody would be working for the next day or so. I’d have to wait a bit. 

Though it wasn’t like I couldn’t do anything. I had already gotten a notification on my Aerial, and it wasn’t a message from someone. 

It was a notification that my seed program had been activated. Some enchanters had accessed the terminal and then transferred the data to another device, an obvious and predictable course of action. 

They didn’t know they were planting more seeds for me. 

Cybersecurity was still a new and unused concept in this world, but unlike everything else I had improved or restructured, I had no intentions of letting go of this advantage. 

It was something I’d check later though, outside of the Holy See. I hadn’t modified this Aerial to keep things secret so I’d have to handle things away from possible prying eyes. I wouldn’t take chances with anybody. 

Dinner gradually ended with Umara and I separating from Luna and Anderson. They went to go do their thing while Umara and I retreated to a new room. 

She had apparently destroyed the other, which Luna paid for. I don’t know what happened but obviously Umara’s decision was not easily made. 

The two of us stayed up until midnight, and when the new year arrived Umara and I felt a Sovereign go active. We saw a massive spell formation light up above the city and then launch magic fireworks into the sky. 

They were so bright that I had to squint, filling the entire sky for dozens of miles around with colored lights and literally turning night into day. 

The Holy See really went all out for their holidays. 

Umara and I just sat on a couch moved in front of the window, watching silently in each other’s arms while covered in a large blanket. We were quiet, neither of us particularly joyful and neither of us caring to fake it. 

At some point she muttered. 

“If only we got one of those spells while retreating.”

I stared, thinking about her rhetorical statement and wondering about how many different points a spell as powerful as that one could’ve turned the tide in our favor and saved important lives. 

It took me 4.668 seconds to think up 34 points at which that spell could’ve done something to save Nonnen’s life. 

And here it was. Putting on a fucking fireworks show. 

I felt Umara’s Aura with my own, feeling her latent power and knowing the kind of transformation she would be undertaking soon. 

I was alone in my fight. I couldn’t trust that others could stay alive as long as I could. I couldn’t trust that they were as skilled as me, as evasive as me. I understood the power of those around me perfectly, and there were only two times during my military career that I felt I couldn’t get out of a situation with my power alone. Both times had ended with people I trusted dying. 

But I also knew that I had only allowed myself to enter those situations because there was someone who had the power to get me out, whether by their own power or at the cost of their life. 

I was too smart to be ignorant or pretend to be naive. I had always taken calculated risks and I had always kept myself around the people I needed to in order to preserve my life. There was not a single person exempt from that equation. 

Not even Umara. 

I was glad that she made the decision. I was even happier that Luna had managed to convince her to make the decision herself. It was better for Umara to figure it out without my direct intervention. 

I was glad, because now she wouldn’t be someone I could lose. She would finally be someone who could be my equal, especially since her family no longer provided the security or oversight that I once thought it could. 

I had risen in the world and the advantages I could receive from others were now accordingly limited, simply because it wasn’t anything I couldn’t get myself. Talexia was nearly out of my picture and once my plans started to kickstart, she’d be all but useless. 

I had worried that Umara would become just one of the many other people around me that did nothing more than fulfill their role. Special operators were nice but as I’d seen, they were only well above average. My plans meant that they wouldn’t be so special once my tech was implemented. 

But it seemed like she’d escape that fate, the cost being the life of an incredibly important ally, and potentially her fertility. 

I held her a bit tighter. In the long term it would be worth it. I would come out of all this with net gains. I might not like it now but that’s what the reality was. 

But I had a lot of work to do. In time, as he had said. 

……

…

Christmas day came. The first of a new year. 

For me it felt like the start of a very long road I had to tread. I could see how long it was and I knew exactly what I had to do, but the hard part was still doing it. 

Umara and I made one last visit to Terrace to give him the green light to proceed. He told us it would take about four days to prepare everything, including the personnel who would be operating on Umara with him. Apparently there would be an Authority 11 warlock in attendance as well as a Sovereign healer. That was basically a guarantee that even if things didn’t go right, they wouldn’t go wrong. 

With that plan made Umara and I flew back to the Whetted City to spend Christmas with her family and the Ravens. 

And once there, I finally went through the data that my seed program managed to grab and sort into a custom database I had devised. 

Excluding my own blueprints, the database was now filled with enchantment designs up the ass. There were thousands of them and while most of them were simply evolutions and upgrades of a fewer number of parent designs, even just counting those there were still hundreds. 

They had their own vehicles, though they were closer to the Steeds than my own designs. They didn’t have anything like the Mana Engine but their geared systems were still much better than the Kingdom’s. 

Despite that though, their efficiencies were about the same. 

Because the Church had access to about as many White Crystals as they could ever want, they didn’t hesitate to load their tools with them, efficiency be damned. Basically, they were disgustingly rich, and with my designs they’d be able to surpass the Kingdom within months at the worst. 

But that wasn’t counting all their other designs too. They had enchanted tools for all kinds of industries, from paper printing to mining. I decided to pull many of the designs for the industries that I planned on revolutionizing for Sawn’s vertical integration and expansion. They would be good inspiration, good templates so I didn’t have to start completely from scratch. 

Other than that, the only other things that caught my eye were their weapons tech. I saw three dozen different designs for armor and weapons, which naturally included improved reinforcement enchantments that surpassed the ones Sawn had by 160%. That wasn’t counting other supplemental enchantments for the armor that did things like augment physical abilities, albeit lightly and only good enough for warlocks and summoners. Knights hardly needed something like that and it seemed they had failed to make any enchantments that could give proportional improvements to them. 

All of it was good knowledge to have, and I’d be using most of it. 

What I didn’t find was anything highly confidential, however. Things like the methods to purify and create White Crystals was one of the first things I looked for and absolutely nothing came up. They did a good job of controlling the important information, and it seemed like they weren’t naive enough to put sensitive data within reach of an Aerial network. 

However, I did get other details besides information relating to enchantments. I got intel, lots of  intel, on all kinds of facets of the Church as a whole. 

Like military operations. 

My seed program spread to and infected everything that it was connected to. It would hop from one device to the next and plant more transmission programs that would allow me to simply drop in and access the data within their Orbs. It was easy to create and there was nearly no security to speak of, at least none that could pose any difficulty to my program. 

This world’s primitive internet couldn’t compare to the sheer depth of corruptive viruses and trojan programs that Earth had developed. Sure, there may be things like passwords, but it seemed they hadn’t yet conceived of true encryption yet. 

And so the seed program bounced from terminal to Aerial to the Node for the city and everything connected to it. The growth rate was exponential but luckily I had prepared automatic information sorters so my database wasn’t overloaded with inconsequential stuff. 

I must’ve gained access to a General’s Aerial because I found maps of military operations across the Church’s theater, and the reality was striking. 

They were forcing back the Scourge across every northeastern coastline of the continent. They had details of travel routes that the Scourge used to access the continent from the Pillars of Creation. There were millions flooding in from the north and they were trying to cut them off. 

They were failing, but unlike the Kingdom they weren’t falling. If the figures were accurate then their military surpassed the Kingdom’s in sheer number, and if the designs were anything to go off of, then it was a rich military armed to the teeth. They were multiple times more combat effective and they had fortifications that had been facing down the Scourge in unending warfare for over a century. 

100 years of constant war. It was difficult to imagine how many people had died, how many monsters had been slaughtered. They had been fighting even before the Pillars had fallen, and from Aki’s stories it seemed like they had been involved in the war over there too.  

There were maps of the areas they had been to. There seemed to be a small landmass that acted as a land bridge to travel from the northern portion of the Pillars to the northern portion of our continent. From there they dispersed across the continent to hit from multiple angles, the Kingdom handling the western and median theaters, the Church handling the Eastern theaters. 

I also learned about the Paladin’s Order. There were few mentions of it but that only meant it was their SOF group, what Vetsmon was a part of now. They were no doubt dotted all over the place but they certainly did a good job of keeping their information isolated so I didn’t immediately pick up on anything. 

Yet what I got was more than enough. Superficially the Church was an open book for me. I just needed to go through the information personally, get a better image. 

Another task on an ever growing list. 

It was one of the few things on my mind as Christmas passed. Still, I decided I would wait to truly start anything until after Umara’s surgery had been handled. Once that was over, it would be time to begin. 

And Sawn would have a few more days to prepare things for my intervention. There were many moving parts and yet I could see them all clearly. With my new mind, it was too easy. 

In time, I would be unstoppable.