Free Tier - Accidental Champion (Book 9) - Chapter 34 - We Know You’re Here

Xavier couldn’t feel the spells activate. He couldn’t feel anything.

He had trapped himself—and hopefully every other person in the shielded-off area—inside a Time Prison. A Time Prison that meant they were connected to another universe’s time stream and couldn’t be affected by anything happening in this universe.

It was far more powerful than simply shifting out of phase.

He’d done the same thing to countless enemies over the years. He’d contemplated using it as a protective spell in the past, but he’d never imagined using it on himself, and he’d also never imagined using it on such a grand scale.

For him, it felt as though no time has passed at all when the spell ended. The explosion had ceased. The force field around the area was gone, but every building that had sat inside that force field was completely levelled—and that wasn’t all.

The ground was cratered beneath him.

When the force field had been active, Xavier had seen it as a dome over the area. But that wasn’t the case. It had actually been a sphere that travelled through the ground, because what good would a dome do if the explosion could push through the ground to the core of the planet?

Xavier tried to gain his bearings as swiftly as he could manage.

He pushed his awareness outward and…

They’re all gone.

Not a single soul was left within the area. The spell he’d cast to try and save the innocent men, women, and children here—

Had he failed? The spell had clearly worked on himself. If it hadn’t, he would be dead right now. Why wouldn’t it have worked on the others?

He pushed his awareness even farther outward, around the entire planet. At the same time, he noticed notifications were trying to push into his awareness. He let them.

The 2,001st wave of the Empire of Servitude’s army has arrived.

The 2,002nd wave of the Empire of Servitude’s army has arrived.

…

The 2,050th wave of the Empire of Servitude’s army has arrived.

He stumbled backward slightly.

How… how long was I out?

Other notifications were interspersed with the wave notifications. More Portal and Teleportation Blocks.

I was only supposed to lock myself in Time Prison for a minute…

It had been over eight hours.

Xavier had worried that the worst thing that could happen to him was that the System timer might revert. He still thought that was the worst eventuality. That would mean he would have to abandon this floor completely or allow far too long to pass back in his sectors.

But he hadn’t anticipated this much time to pass. He curled his fingers into fists, wanted to curse out Roln for giving him this plan in the first place. But if not for this plan, he’d be dead, so it wasn’t as though it had been a complete mistake.

As his awareness, using both his spiritual sense and The All-Seeing Eye, stretched over the planet, he saw the aftermath of what the waves had done. This wasn’t the only part of the planet that had been damaged. There were bodies everywhere—Denizens from this world, innocents, even children. And there were enemy soldiers everywhere too.

The Empire of Servitude was winning this war.

Waves and waves of the enemy were still alive. Not a single Wave Reward notification, or Wave Defeated notification, had popped up since the last wave had been destroyed.

They were terrorising the entire planet.

Xavier: [Queen Aecia—what the hell is going on?]

Queen Aecia: [Xavier? Holy hell. You’re back? We thought you’d be trapped in that time distortion forever!]

Xavier tried to pinpoint the woman’s location, but the chaos around the planet was making that difficult. Not only that, countless shields had been activated around the different areas. Most of those shields had an ability to block out The All-Seeing Eye, though the Immortal Soul lens could still break through. That seemed like something new, as the planetary force field had been active when he’d first arrived on this floor and he’d been able to “see” through it just fine.

“They’re adapting,” Roln said, hovering not far from Xavier.

The dragonkin glanced up at the sky—looking toward the armada. “Trying to hide themselves from the ships’ eyes.”

He pinpointed Queen Aecia’s location. She was fighting somewhere on the other side of the planet. There were still waves of enemies between where she was and where he was.

Xavier: [I’m coming to you. You need my protection.]

Queen Aecia: [No! No. It’ll take too long for you to reach me. My entourage—what’s left of them—are keeping me safe. You need to deal with the active waves between our locations. They’re spreading, Xavier. There’s too many. We’re…] She cut herself off, leaving the rest unsaid.

Losing, Xavier thought.

Xavier gritted his teeth. He wasn’t sure if that was the right play. There was a part of him that thought he should ignore her. It would be easy enough to do as he pleased. But this was her planet. She wanted him to take care of the other waves because she was more worried about her citizens than she was about herself.

He respected that enough to listen to her.

Besides, maybe she was right. If the waves only ever showed up in one place—like they did back on the fifth floor—concentrating their power in one, highly defensible position would have been the right play.

That wasn’t what was happening here at all.

If Xavier went to the queen, the waves would continue to wreak havoc all over the planet. And with the Teleportation and Portal Blocks in place, he was the fastest out of all of them.

He needed to be able to move around the planet freely. He couldn’t be locked to the queen’s location.

Besides, he didn’t need her alive to clear this floor. None of the System notifications had said so.

As he made his way toward the nearest enemies, Queen Aecia filled him in on what had happened while he’d been trapped inside his own Time Prison.

The altered Time Prison spell he’d cast on the innocents in the area had worked, but it hadn’t lasted as long as his own. That spell had lasted just over three minutes. Then, the innocents had fled the area, trying to get somewhere safe.

And Xavier had remained locked in place, visible but untouchable and unreachable in every way.

He’d hidden inside his mind, spent an eternity searching through Roln’s memories, finally brought the mental construct back, and successfully saved the innocents around him—and himself—only to wake up to more people having been killed than he’d managed to save.

“You can’t blame yourself,” Roln said. “If you hadn’t done that, you would be dead right now.”

I don’t blame myself, Xavier responded to the mental construct with a direct thought. Though he knew a part of himself did, that part was irrational. I blame the Empire of Servitude. And the System. This conflict never should have happened in the first time. And yet, as a floor of the Tower of Champions, it’s happened…

“An uncountable number of times,” Roln replied.

Xavier created two bones swords, growing them straight from his arms. As the weapons shaped, he flew as fast as he could through the air. Even while he flew, spell patterns materialised inside him and activated, soul apparitions shooting off in every direction, taking out the many pockets of B Grade enemies that were on the planet. While the soul apparitions didn’t move much faster than himself, they did move faster, and there were millions of enemies he needed to deal with.

The B Grades were the easy part. It was a group of A Grade captains that he was after right now.

Five of them had banded together a few hundred miles from where he’d been locked in the Time Prison. Honestly, after what had just happened to him, he wasn’t even sure if he could take on that many A Grades at once.

What if they all self-destructed in the same way as the last A Grade?

Roln, I need you to—

“Working on it,” Roln responded, cutting him off before he’d even finished the thought.

While Xavier flew, the mental construct was looking for what had gone wrong with the spell pattern they’d created.

They couldn’t let something like that happen twice. If he needed to use the altered Time Prison spell on himself again, it would work for the time he alotted.

He couldn’t help but appreciate how much the relationship between them had shifted. Less than a minute had passed since the Time Prison had lifted and he already felt such a significant shift in the dynamic between him and Roln.

“Problem found. Initiating changes pending permission.”

Permission granted.

Several notifications popped up in Xavier’s vision. Notifications that weren’t from the System but were instead from the mental construct. The Combat Assistance Overlay that Xavier hadn’t seen for some time.

The notifications announced that the neural pathways involved with manifesting the altered Time Prison spell pattern were being edited, fixing the issues that had happened with it the first time it had activated. Though Xavier was curious about what had gone wrong, he didn’t split his mind to have a part of him investigate.

It was enough that Roln knew what had gone wrong. He trusted the mental construct enough to know that it would be fixed to the best of his ability.

Xavier was only ten miles out from his targets. The five A Grade captains looked to be of various different classes. They’d been locked down inside one of the force fielded areas, but it was only a matter of time before they would be able to escape that force field.

Every one of the innocent civilians within that entire area had been killed.

Millions dead. Slaughtered by the A Grade captains.

Queen Aecia had altered the force field so that it would allow him to slip through it, but he knew it was going to drop at any time now. On the way, Queen Aecia had explained that the A Grade captains were getting more and more efficient at cracking through them—this band of captains in particular had already done it a dozen times before.

Which means they’ve killed this many people a dozen times over.

And he’d already seen proof of that when he’d flown to the area.

With how large the planet was, the affected areas were still only a small fraction of the whole. Even so, that small fraction amounted to tens of millions of people.

So many people dead—so many people that he’d been unable to save.

Part of him was wondering how the queen hadn’t already surrendered. There was even a small part of him that was angry at the queen for not surrendering.

How many lives would have been spared if she had?

But at the same time, he couldn’t ever see himself surrendering to a force like this. He could have made a deal with the Old Man, what felt like long ago now, to have Earth be protected by the most powerful being in his own universe, and yet he’d turned that down because he didn’t want to be controlled in even a small way.

None of this was the queen’s fault.

Anger burned within him as he closed the distance toward the five A Grade captains.

Battle plan? Suggestions?

“You know what you’re doing, Xavier.”

The mental construct was right.

Xavier already had a battle plan in mind.

Currently, Xavier was cloaked under a concealment, preventing the enemies from detecting his arrival. Before he’d made it this close, Xavier had materialised as many drones as he could manage in a short time, bringing roughly three hundred of them into the fold. He’d had to slow his rate of approach in order for them all to arrive at the same time—each of the drones was under their own cloak of concealment.

Even concealed as they were, the A Grades appeared aware of their imminent arrival.

The ships in orbit must have gotten a read on his approach, even if he was invisible to their eyes now. The A Grades looked incredibly wary. They’d bunched up, each facing outward, gazes scanning the surroundings. One of them, a large man in full-plate armour carrying a seven-foot tall tower shield, summoned a defensive force field around the five of them. Another summoned some sort of golem, a massive warrior about twenty-feet tall made entirely of ice.

“We know you’re here,” one of them announced. “Xavier Collins.”