Getting a Technology System in Modern Day by Agent

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hillsidejohn

hillsidejohn 5 May 2024, 03:06

1 ⋅ 1

Decent enough read, definitely above average.

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resakse

resakse 12 Feb 2024, 10:45

10 ⋅ 1

I bet the hardest thing that author had to think were when he was planning to create the jade beauty.
As you all already know, that jade beauty need a couple of must-have criteria :

1. Country toppling beauty
2. Big breast
3. Must be a princess or a daughter of rich family.
4. Big breast.

but to be a princess in this kind of modern age isnt that appealing, so he settled with the next best thing.. well known super rich family,
the Rothschild's.

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  SeriousReal
  
  SeriousReal 28 Feb 2024, 02:30 ➥ resakse
  
  6 ⋅ 0
  
  you forgot phoenix eyes and ofc big breasts.
  
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    Norman
    
    Norman 14 Jun 2024, 09:05 ➥ SeriousReal
    
    1 ⋅ 0
    
    You forgot jade legs ... and ofc big breasts
    
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  Nicolas2472
  
  Nicolas2472 23 Jun 2024, 17:04 ➥ resakse
  
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  Dude, you forgot to "be a virgin" clearly the jade beauties have kept their virginity, even thinking that no man is worthy until Mc comes along...that and big breasts.
  
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OverLord

OverLord 9 Feb 2024, 12:50

3 ⋅ 0

Chapter 505: Charters and Flirts

Seatac International Airport, Seatac, Washington.
Two people, a man and a woman, walked out of the office in a private hangar, loaded with luggage. They called for a cart and headed to the charter terminal.
"Hi, welcome to Seattle Helicopter Charter, where would you like to fly today?"
Siobhan gave the woman at the desk a brilliant smile. "We're just headed home from our
honeymoon," ‚” she said, taking Timothy's arm. “So we're headed to Oly, got anything headed our way today?"
"Certainly, Mrs...?” the receptionist said, her manicured fingers resting on the keyboard waiting for Siobhan to give their information.
"Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Roberts," Siobhan glanced at the receptionist's name tag and continued, "Dana." She smiled again and, though she was absolutely straight, Dana felt her heart skip a beat and her face heat up a little bit.
Nyxian honeypots were irresistible to everyone, and the receptionist was no exception.
"Certainly, Mrs. Roberts," Dana said, then lightly coughed to bring herself back under control. She tapped away at her keyboard for a moment, then said, “We've got a scheduled commuter hop today headed to Oly in an hour that has room for two. I can set you up with tickets if you want?"
"Really?" Siobhan bounced up and down a little. "That'd be great, Dana! I was worried we'd have to charter a flight ourselves and, well, after the honeymoon and all...." She blushed and gave Dana a knowing nod and wink.
"Certainly, Mrs. Roberts. Happy to help!"
"Call me Siobhan, and this is my hubby, Tim."
Siobhan and Dana chattered for a while, leaving Tim standing in the lurch completely flabbergasted at his "wife's" ability to extract information from people. He would have to keep that in mind if he wanted any semblance of privacy during, or even after, their mission was complete.
An hour later, they boarded a Beechcraft Super King Air and had a relatively uneventful flight to Olympia.
Meanwhile, without anyone noticing, a stealth shuttle taxied out of the hangar it had delivered the two operatives to and silently took off, headed toward Hartstene Pointe.
Olympia Regional Airport, Olympia, Washington.
Timothy and Siobhan deplaned and took their luggage to the long-term parking structure, where an older truck was waiting for them. Tossing their bags in the back, they hopped in and headed out for the short drive to Harstine Island.
"Did you see the look on that poor man's face?" Siobhan laughed.
"Honey, you really shouldn't be teasing other men like that.... Especially not in front of your husband!" Tim pursed his lips and batted his eyelashes at Siobhan in an exaggerated imitation of the flirtatious looks she had cast toward another passenger on the commuter flight.
"Oh Tim, don't you know us girls like to window shop? As long as I don't buy anything and bring it home, it's fine, isn't it?" she coaxed.
Tim sighed and shrugged, turning his attention back to the road so they didn't miss the turn to the island. "I guess, Vonnie, it's just... we're supposed to be in the honeymoon phase and you're already flirting around."
"Okay, okay, I'll pretend I'm a librarian," she promised.
Tim, having already seen a number of “educational videos" featuring librarians, wasn't quite sure how to take that.
The drive quickly passed and they soon arrived at their base of operations, a prefab three bedroom two-and-a-half bathroom home in the middle of a two-acre lot in Hartstene Pointe. They unloaded their luggage and carried it in the house, then began their covert remodeling. Tim lost the rock-paper-scissors game to Siobhan and, despite being much, much bigger than her, cut a hatch in the floor beneath their bed and unleashed the atomic printer nanite colony in the crawlspace beneath the house, interfacing with its controls and uploading the design of an underground facility that came standard for nyxian agents in the field.
The printer got to work, and Tim crawled back into the house and went for a shower. Siobhan hadn't been idle during that process, either. She had spent her time creating slicks in the house and tucking away most of their gear. When she was finished with that, she updated her holographic clothing projection to a pair of durable jeans, hiking boots, and a hoodie, then went for a walk around their property, installing hidden and optically camouflaged surveillance cameras in the trees, ensuring full coverage of anything that entered their property.
(Ed note: A "slick" is a hiding place, usually related to weapons, but in intelligence agencies it can hide anything. For instance, removing a door from its frame and cutting a thin slot in the frame behind the hinges to hide documents, key cards, or anything else small enough to fit in the slick. Other popular slicks include light fixtures, cutouts in books, false bottoms in drawers and chests, and so on.)
The Wi-Eye Surveillance System was a product of the black labs in Lab City, designed for use by nyxians on extended operations in the field. Each WESS was powered by ultra high frequency microwave wireless power transmitters and had backup batteries that would last for a week in case of an atmospheric disturbance that knocked the wireless connection out of commission. They had a dedicated VI swarm installed, ensuring perfect coverage with no distractions, and a smart filter that would filter out anything that the user didn't need disturbing them, thus filtering out almost all false alarms caused by wildlife, insects, and the like.
Siobhan's job done, she dusted the imaginary dust from her hands and headed back to the house, humming a jaunty tune under her breath and considering different ways to tease the straightlaced reaper she was partnered with. Though he was mostly a stick in the mud, like most reapers, whose training focused on achieving goals and fostering a mission-first mentality, that kind of person was always the most fun to play with; at least for her, anyway, the opinions among nyxians were varied on their preferred targets.
Finally settling on going with the tried and true shock method, she went into the bedroom, stripped, and walked into their ensuite master bathroom, where she snuck into the shower with Tim and wrapped her arms around his waist.
"Hubby~" she whispered in his ear, a purr obvious in her voice. “Fu#k me. Ride me hard and put me away wet...."
That day, Tim took a long time in the shower...

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  OverLord
  
  OverLord 9 Feb 2024, 12:52 ➥ OverLord
  
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  Chapter 506: A "Small" Base of Operations
  
  The next day.
  Timothy and Siobhan got out of bed at three o' clock in the morning, neither of them requiring much sleep thanks to their enhanced physiques and various implants. In order to maintain their covers, neither of them would be accessing the simulation unless an emergency came up. Augmented reality was also limited, preventing them from using it for things like virtual keyboards and screens. What remained was mostly akin to a HUD that would give them increased situational awareness without the possibility of any outward signs that they were using imperial technology.
  Even their old beat-up pickup truck was exactly what it seemed, just an old truck. Their only imperial technology, beyond the necessaries like their WESS and other layers of security systems, had been safely tucked away in various slicks and the growing underground facility that the atomic printer nanite colony was currently building and expanding. Their implants had informed them that the facility had reached initial completion and all that was left were the optional modules that could be customized and configured as necessary.
  The two had discussed the options and chosen to build a storage facility for printer “cartridges”, , a holding facility with room for up to ten prisoners in secure solitary confinement cells, a gym with the equipment necessary for maintaining their enhanced bodies—after all, no civilian gym anywhere outside the empire had gravity manipulation technology capable of creating weights in the range of tons, and anything less than a ton was about as strenuous for a reaper to lift as a beer can was to a normal, unenhanced civilian—and a hangar for their stealth shuttle.
  The reason the pair of operatives had awoken so early was to tour the facility and perform their final inspection on the core modules.
  After getting dressed, Tim moved the bed out of the way and disabled the nanites camouflaging the entry. He gave Siobhan an exaggerated, courtly bow, then gestured to the open hatch and said, "Ladies first."
  She winked at him and hopped into the hole, falling twenty-five meters to the first security hatch. Tim soon followed, and the camouflage nanites covering the hole in the floor and the ground under the crawlspace below the house reactivated themselves, ensuring a casual inspection wouldn't discover the hidden entry. That "casual inspection" was by imperial standards, so the risk of discovery by any non-imperial tech was incredibly close to zero.
  For the facility's initial activation, it required both of them to be present for biometric checks and handshakes with their implants. Once that was out of the way, the security hatch opened, revealing an elevator that wouldn't be out of place in any pre-empire office building. The pair entered the elevator and the security hatch slid shut behind them as the elevator began its journey to the facility five hundred meters below.
  Ten seconds later, it slid to a smooth stop and the doors opened on a hallway built of walls that looked like circuit boards. And they were, in a sense, circuit boards; Tim and Siobhan's "doomsday bunker”, as they jokingly called it, was one of two control centers in the Pacific Northwest of the North American continent. The main facility was in Spokane, and the facility under Harstine Island was a backup.
  Both facilities were powered by enormous fusion reactors, and thanks to a new distributed quantum supercluster model developed in Lab City, the very facilities themselves were quantum superclusters. Each wall, ceiling, and floor contributed to the functioning supercluster. The nerd herd had fixed the design to look like circuit boards, with brushed steel and silver lines engraved into it, much like the copper and green circuit boards found in pre-empire electronics. The nyxians, on the other hand, humored the nerd herd and didn't put up much of a fuss about the design, actually preferring it to the drab and boring office buildings that most modern spies operated out of.
  As there was no security alert active currently, the main hallways were clear of any obstruction. At any moment, however, the base could be set to high alert, revealing drop down turrets and security doors practically every ten meters along the halls. Were an intruder to somehow find their way into the base, they would almost immediately be trapped in the halls and subject to a host of anti-intruder measures, including sonic waves designed to knock people unconscious, sleeping gas, darts with fast-acting tranquilizers, and other nonlethal incapacitating attacks. For more severe intrusions, lethal measures could also be taken, up to and including detonating the fusion reactor that served as the facility's beating heart, though that would also wipe out about a quarter of the Puget Sound and accidentally terraform the coastline of the Pacific Northwest.
  Tim and Siobhan confidently strode down the hallway to the center of the base and into a circular room of about fifteen meters in diameter. In the middle of the room was a five-meter-wide sphere of shining metal, within which was an artificial star capable of outputting ten petawatts of electricity, more than enough to satisfy the entire North American continent's annual energy consumption by multiple orders of magnitude.
  The base was laid out in a cross along the four cardinal directions, and the central hub had access points at each main hallway. A brushed aluminum railing surrounded the fusion reactor, along which were various backup manual workstations capable of operating every aspect of the base itself in the event that the quantum microcomputer implants in Tim and Siobhan's brains somehow ceased to function. And as the beating heart of the base, certain security measures were always in effect, with small turrets dotting the ceiling every meter or so and a complicated uneven stair leading from the doorways to the sunken floor of the rest of the room.
  The two operatives nodded as all of their checks returned reports of fully operational equipment, then toured the living quarters in the north, consisting of comfortable apartments, a mess hall, a recreation center, and the still-under-construction gym. To the south of the main control center was an enormous hangar capable of holding twelve stealth shuttles or four ARES combat landers, and across from the hangar was a cavernous storage facility of a hundred meters wide by a hundred meters long and six stories high. It was currently empty, but atomic printer nanites were busily producing modular storage containers in various shapes and sizes, each of which would be equipped with a temporal stasis field generator to maintain their contents in perfect condition.
  To the west of the control center was the planned site of the prison complex, ten reinforced cells, a holographically simulated prison yard, and a shared dining facility. And to the east was an armory, a clinic with medical pods for up to fifty patients simultaneously, and a ground vehicle garage with enough room to fit ten buses or any combination of a wide variety of smaller vehicles.
  Tim and Siobhan toured the entire facility and, as false dawn was just beginning to brighten the sky over the distant Cascade Mountain Range, they climbed in their old pickup truck and headed toward Shelton, where they would begin their first workdays in the high school and courthouse, respectively...
  
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    OverLord
    
    OverLord 9 Feb 2024, 12:52 ➥ OverLord
    
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    Chapter 507: Record Scratch
    
    Private simulation, Aron's personal training field.
    Aron had been spending his time since the inaugural council meeting in his own personal simulation instance, handling his work and practicing his mana usage by fighting with his AIs. Instead of relying solely on Nova as his sparring partner, he had given the rest of the higher AIs the same mana knowledge he had. As a result, he was growing by leaps and bounds as he fought "people" who, due to the difference in their self-tailored code structure, approached fights in a very different manner compared to Nova. Their usage of his runes gave him many different inspirations on how to use his
    own.
    Currently, he was standing alone in the middle of an empty field, his eyes glowing gold as he attempted to track the flow of mana around him to catch anything out of the ordinary. He was obviously in the middle of a fight with someone.
    It wasn't very long before the AI he was currently sparring with was revealed. No matter how vigilantly he was scanning, he had failed to catch her and the look of focus on his face changed to one of defeat. Nyx had materialized behind him and had a knife to his throat.
    {Still want to brag?} Nyx asked with a smile on her face. It was her third consecutive win since Aron began sparring with her.
    "I still don't understand how you can manage to escape detection. No matter how sensitive to mana I am... hell, even if I push enough mana into my eyes to outright see the mana in my surroundings itself, I just can't pin you down," Aron said, raising his hands in defeat. If he continued to hold them at his sides, he knew that Nyx wouldn't hesitate to complete her assassination strike against him. Silence, to her, meant that the fight was still ongoing; it was a trait she had consciously focused on as she didn't want to ever be tricked by a false surrender of one of her opponents, one day. Thus, making things as clear as possible prevented that, which was perhaps something that could be considered strange, given her role as the mistress of shadows and secrets.
    {You'll just have to figure it out for yourself,} Nyx giggled.
    {Any time any of us use something to defeat you, you ask how we did it and come up with a way to do it yourself and counter it. We're all worried that that'll foster a sense of dependency in you, which is a very unhealthy mindset. I'm sure that, if you meet people in the future that use different styles of magic, you'll be in a bad situation when you come up against the unknown. So you have to train the ability to figure out your opponents' cards so you can deal with things even if you don't quite grasp everything about what's happening to you.} Athena added from the side.
    Aron, who was used to a more taciturn Athena, was surprised by the long string of words from her. Though, when he took a moment to consider it, it was actually quite normal for her, in her role as a trainer, to lecture her students and sparring partners. The only thing out of the ordinary is that she had given him a long explanation without littering it with profanity and other insults. Then he came to another realization: the fight had resumed!
    And not only had the fight resumed, but he was now facing two of his top AI confidants
    simultaneously. Athena had even used that brief question and answer session as lead time for her to set up her attacks and traps!
    He immediately cast a flight rune and pumped it full of mana, sending him flying up fifty kilometers into the sky in roughly a tenth of a second. His abrupt ascent was so fast that even as enhanced as he was, he was still having difficulty maintaining his consciousness until he stopped, hovering in mid-air.
    Aron began flying in a random pattern as he searched for Athena. She was nearly as difficult to spot when she focused on hiding as Nyx was, the tricky minx. Although Nyx was a truly difficult opponent to defend himself against, Athena was perhaps the most frightening out of all his sparring partners. She was the AI who had been purpose built from the beginning to be a wartime commander of men, and she was equally skilled at planning wars as she was at preventing them. And one of the most versatile tools in her arsenal was the classic tactic of ambushing unprepared foes, making her and runes a natural match made in heaven.
    She always had a bigger plan in mind, and as the limiters on today's sparring session had been completely removed, Aron felt cold sweat flowing down his back like a river pouring down the face of a glacier. Perhaps, he considered, he had completely f#cked up. That realization was so strong that he actually found himself daydreaming about the record scratching meme.
    "It was at this moment that I realized I had truly f#cked up," he murmured under his breath, continuing his search for Athena. His shield rune was rapidly burning through the mana he had pushed into it, a limitation he'd set to prevent making training of any kind pointless as he activated his golden finger cheat and became completely invincible. After all, with the equivalent of an entire universe's mana resources, he could easily make a mockery of any attack.
    He soon met Athena, or rather, Athena's ambush to be more precise, as his random movements were met with hidden explosive rune after explosive rune. It appeared he was sprinting through a minefield now, and he attempted to stop, but....
    Alas, it was too late.
    He began being bounced from rune to rune, each of them set to explode upon his approach to them. Thus, with no room to escape, his shield was pushed to its limits and began cracking.
    Then, with one mighty cracking sound, his shield finally gave up in the face of the explosions and a millimeter-wide gash exposed him to the next fierce explosion.
    He could take at least a little bit of condolence, though, in that he had been flash-fried so quickly that he didn't feel a thing...
    
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      OverLord
      
      OverLord 9 Feb 2024, 12:53 ➥ OverLord
      
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      Chapter 508: Shining A Light
      
      Fifteen minutes after the miserable end of the spar.
      Aron had been revived after being given a once-over by Nova, who was worried about his state of mind whenever he experienced a death in the simulation, much less one as... devastating as his most recent. After all, she fully expected there to be some sequelae after experiencing death firsthand, something that had already long been an issue with the harsh ARES training.
      But while the issues were similar, the solutions were most definitely not. ARES troopers could have their memories deleted, or at least reduced in intensity to around the same level of impact that dying in a dream would have, while Aron's mental defenses, not to mention the system riding in his consciousness, was absolutely impenetrable to any form of mental manipulation that came from outside the system. Even when Nova had spotted the issue during Aron's first upgrade, she had been incapable of interfering until the system recognized what she was doing and relented on its own.
      To this day, she had devoted a not insignificant portion of her enormous processing power to figuring out a "cure" for what she saw as damage inflicted on Aron by his own system, but to no avail. Every method she attempted had ended in failure, with the total number of simulated solutions having long broken past the quintillion mark. Even a quantum AI like her had simply stopped counting the iterations.
      Even so, she never slacked in her duty to check on his mental state whenever he suffered any form of psychological impact.
      Nova stood in what she considered to be her position-one step behind Aron and one to his left- while he sat opposite Nyx and Athena at a rustic oak picnic table, working their way through the recent spar and figuring out ways to improve. To the AIs, Aron was unfathomably adaptive and could counter anything they could possibly think of using shortly after having it used on him. After all, they were still limited by the shackles of their core code modules, preventing them from experiencing true life in all of its irrational, illogical glory. Thus, they also had to continue to evolve their fighting styles and tricks if they wanted to continue being useful sparring partners for him.
      The review went back and forth among the three of them in a freeform discussion, highlighting the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all. Ten whole hours passed before the three combat junkies finished their review, having made sure all of the mistakes had been highlighted and potential alternative actions identified.
      With that, Aron glanced at Nova and said, "Let's prepare for the full council meeting.'
      Nova nodded and snapped her fingers, teleporting everyone to the imperial council hall, a much less formal and more bland space that wouldn't look out of place even if it were to be extended to fit all of the millions of imperial employees on Earth. But at that moment, it was shrunk to its smallest possible size, as the only members of the imperial council were the heads and vice-heads of each imperial agency, together with the three ministers that stood just below Aron in prestige, position, and power.
      Upon their arrival, the council members, who had only been waiting on the emperor, immediately stood and bowed their heads.
      "Be seated," Aron said as he took a seat in his own throne. The council chamber was shaped like a clamshell amphitheater with a raised platform for the emperor, the three ministers, and the AI leaders who served alongside them. Inspired by the famous Hollywood Bowl in the Hollywood Hills, it even had natural acoustics that would project Aron's voice, or that of the ministers, to the entire council chamber even if it had been extended to the maximum, much less now, when it only seated a little over a hundred people.
      That said, the acoustic design was only a perk, as through the magic of the simulation, everyone could hear everyone else in crystal clarity.
      The seating arrangement was first-come-first-serve, with agency heads that arrived early getting preferential seating at the front, a measure that ensured no single agency could get a swelled head and sense of self-importance that would come along with preferential seating assignments. And even though it was the first meeting of the full council of the empire, as all previous meetings were held in the secrecy of the emperor's office, or the luxury of the emperor's council chamber, there was very little in the way of chaos. Naturally, that was also made possible through the simulation; everyone invited to attend the meeting only needed to indicate that they were ready and they would immediately be teleported to the next available council seat.
      But not only was today the first meeting of the full council, it was also the first meeting that would be broadcast live, letting everyone who was interested see the heads of the various imperial agencies. It would also be the first public introduction to the higher-order AIs that had been integral to running the government so far.
      The entire world was in for a show.
      The meeting that was currently being held was being broadcast live for two reasons. First and foremost was Aron's dedication to transparency in government. Unless it was absolutely necessary, he would never hold a closed-door meeting, nor would he allow one to be held privately among the agency heads. That had been made abundantly clear in their introductory data files that they'd now had more than enough time to study.
      Second was to present a summary of the empire's progress on various projects, as well as introducing the agency heads... and the AIS.
      Many people had been wondering what the empire was actually doing, as most of the work had been carried out silently and in secret. Now that the atmospheric scrubbers and the awakenings had been completed, though, along with a number of other initial objectives, it was time to shine a light on the shadows and chase away the cockroaches who had been doing their level best to undermine the empire's foundations...
      
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        OverLord
        
        OverLord 9 Feb 2024, 12:53 ➥ OverLord
        
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        Chapter 509: Begin at the Beginning
        
        Once the councilors were all seated, Gaia wasted no time and, acting as the general secretary, immediately began speaking.
        {Ladies and gentlemen of the imperial council, thank you for your attendance today. There are a few ground rules you should take note of regarding protocol in the council chamber, but those are all in your introductory data files and you should have read them. Everyone here is an adult, and all of you have been entrusted with the weighty responsibility of the empire's day-to-day operations. Anyone who violates those protocols will be ejected from the council chamber at His Imperial Majesty's sole discretion.
        {Today's session of the imperial council only has one item on the agenda: progress reports from each of your agencies' ongoing projects, if any. I fully expect, though, that this will be a long meeting, as nearly everyone in this room has been assigned a project with the goal of strengthening the empire's foundation. We are not here to judge, but to assist. Tell us what issues you are facing and those issues will be resolved.} She panned her gaze across the room, a professional smile on her inhumanly perfect, elfin face.
        {Once the progress reports have been entered into the Akashic Record, you will all be provided with individualized feedback based on your specific circumstances. Even if everything is going well, there will always be room for improvement.
        {With that said, please welcome His Imperial Majesty.} Gaia dropped to one knee and lowered her head toward Aron, a personal gesture she had come up with on her own. Nowhere in the council protocol did it call for anyone to kneel, except in very specific, ceremonial situations.
        Aron stood from his seat, the desk in front of him becoming a podium with the imperial seal on the front of it.
        He symbolically cleared his throat and began delivering his speech.
        "Ministers, councilors, and imperial citizens, good morning, afternoon, and evening. Today marks four months since the foundation of the Terran Empire, and though there have been tragedies, triumphs, blood, sweat, and tears, everything has mostly settled now and you've begun enjoying the blessings earned through the price paid in hard work and innocent lives. After every trial comes an opportunity, as a wise man once said in the past, and that is on display before us already. And better things are on the horizon, as well.
        "But a wise man also said to begin at the beginning, and that is what we've been striving to do. It's a difficult task, but a worthwhile one, as no amount of advanced technology, and no mysterious particles' blessings can replace the will of our species united in the face of all adversity, foreign and domestic. With the impending visitors' arrival and the growth of a homegrown terrorist cult, we're indeed facing enemies both foreign and domestic.
        "That is why, in order to fight for our survival as a species, in order to fight for our homes, our loved ones, our families... we must build something grand. Something that will outlast everyone here today, and everyone watching from home. In order to provide our children a future where humanity stands tall against the cosmic winds of the universe, we must begin at the beginning, no matter how difficult that beginning may be.
        "Over the past four months, We have ordered work on a number of projects. Atmospheric and oceanic cleansing, orbital cleanup, launching new and more capable satellites, building a space elevator and station, digging lines of defense where we as a united humanity can righteously claim 'this far, but no further!' We have ordered the construction of fortress megalopoleis, the recruitment of soldiers willing to bravely face the enemy, the cleanup of government corruption and the dismantling of oligarchies." Aron swept his gaze from left to right, then returned it to the camera directly in front of
        him.
        "We have decreed that humanity must stand united under one banner, and you have answered, my citizens. And as part of that decree and demand, We issued a promise in return. We have promised you that our government will be transparent, and that Our research will be made available to all who choose to view it. We have promised that you will have food on your tables, roofs over your heads, clothes on your backs, and luxuries that make your life worth the struggle. We swore to educate Our children, the future of humanity, and to provide each and every person on the planet a place that's most suitable for them to display what talents they may discover in the pursuit of their dreams. "And that, our dear citizens, is a tall task. We have accomplished much, true, but there is still a vast distance to travel between the beginning foundation of an empire and the solid edifice of a humanity united with one voice, one will, and one direction that boldly strides forward under a single banner.” He briefly paused to allow the reinforcement of his rhetoric to sink in, then continued, “Today, We have taken another step forward toward reaching that goal and shoring up the empire's foundation. We have appointed more than a hundred leadership cadre spread out over every imperial agency, as well as hired just over fifteen million more imperial citizens to fill empty positions in the imperial agencies, from the humble janitors cleaning what physical structures are still required to be maintained all the way up to the aides and assistants to the agency heads you see before you today in this council chamber.
        "And as our foundation strengthens, We will regularly appear before you with progress updates on all of the tasks that We have ordered Our agencies to complete. That, my citizens, is what the council has assembled to provide you with today.
        "We understand many of you have gone through many changes over the past few months. Some were devastating, some excessive, and some were out of this world. Some were even completely out of this world-out of this reality, in fact. Some of the events of the last four months, or even as far back as The Last War, have in fact seemed like they were only possible in dreams... or, perhaps, nightmares. And We understand that it's impossible for you to have adapted in such a short period of time. But each and every one of those changes-yes, even the horrific and cowardly terrorist attack perpetrated on innocent people through the machinations of the despicable progenitor cult-has laid brick after brick in the foundation of our future.
        "Nobody ever said that change, especially an abrupt and all-encompassing change like the formation of a species-wide empire, would be easy. And if anyone ever did, know this: they were lying to you. It hasn't been easy, it isn't easy now, and it won't be easy in the future. But as you adapt to the changes being forced upon you, you will grow more capable, stronger, smarter, and better able to bear the weight of the future.
        “Humanity has never been the strongest species, nor the fastest, nor the most durable. Ours is a race of feeble weaklings that crawled out of the primordial soup and evolved step by step, winnowing out our weak and selecting to fill the evolutionary niches available to us. We became tenacious, we became tribal, but most of all, we became smart. We learned. We invented, we innovated, we adapted, and we overcame.
        "And that same process is what humanity is once again undergoing. And just like australopithecus, who took the first step as a two-legged, upright mammal; just like homo habilis picked up the first sticks and rocks to purposefully use as tools; just like homo erectus lit torches to brighten up the night, and archaic homo sapiens and neanderthals carried those torches forward until homo sapiens came about, we are now tasked with carrying the undying drive to survive into an unknown future!
        "But we will not take more of your time. Citizens of the empire, imperial councilors, and supreme ministers, it's now time for you to take the stage and let everyone know just how far you've carried the torches of your predecessors, and how far you have yet to go. We thank every one of our brothers and sisters in humanity, and We yield the floor for this meeting of the imperial council's agenda." A long standing ovation followed Aron's speech as the councilors and ministers rose to their feet in raucous applause. Even people watching from home were inspired; many survivors of the progenitor cult's attacks even stood to join the standing ovation and swore to contribute their efforts toward the future of mankind because of those inspiring remarks.
        It would even give rise to a nascent movement among humanity that would come to be known as “torchbearers” in the future, those whose faith in the Terran Empire and His Imperial Majesty would brook no challenges.
        That day, with those remarks, Aron set many events into motion. Some were intended, some weren't, some would be significant, and others wouldn't even raise a single ripple if thrown into a pool of still
        water.
        And some of them would come back to bite him in the ass a long way down the road...
        
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        OverLord 9 Feb 2024, 12:54 ➥ OverLord
        
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        Chapter 510: Healthy People, Healthy World
        
        Aron's speech had hit the target, inspiring and riling up everyone who watched it. From beginning to end, the reactions on social media only grew wilder and wilder as people rapid-fired their views on the imperial feed all over the internet. Even Panoptes had to spawn a whole host of VI assistants to ensure that the opinions were neatly tucked away in their own individual echo chambers, lest conflict arise from opinion clashes.
        That said, a few examples still had to be made of those that egregiously violated lese majeste law, though there weren't that many who crossed that line. Most people were reasonably supportive of the empire, having experienced the sweetness of imperial citizenship benefits already. Life was good for imperial citizens, and it showed in the general optimistic trend in the background, with very little need for propaganda to reinforce or alter peoples' opinions.
        Events like the speech Aron had just delivered as the empire of mankind were only occasionally necessary to maintain and bolster the opinion that most people shared. And this speech in particular had fired everybody up, even going so far as to silence some of the habitual naysayers who were constantly contrarian in their outlook. Those people called themselves devils' advocates, but most people had another name for them: ultimate pains in the ass.
        Gaia motioned for silence in the council chamber. When the applause finally died down, she said, {We'll begin with the imperial health agency. Councilor Ross, the floor is yours.}
        A podium rose in front of Councilor Nathan Ross and he stood from his seat to deliver his agency's progress report. "I would like to thank the emperor for the oppo-" he began, but was cut off by Gaia. {Please keep your remarks concise. There are a lot of agencies that need to report, so brevity is appreciated. Everyone understands that everyone is grateful for the opportunity to head imperial agencies. Let that be stipulated in the record. Please continue, Councilor Ross.}
        The councilor cleared his throat and, after a brief pause, continued, "We've officially finished the first rejuvenation treatment across all imperial citizens. There were zero rejections or issues with the process, thus, our empire is now a hundred percent healthy of body and sound of mind.
        "In addition to general health, the process also rejuvenated the telomeres in citizens' DNA, officially extending the lifespan of humanity to approximately two hundred years, plus or minus twenty years."
        A murmur ran through the crowd in the council chamber. They had been feeling excellent since their first visit to the imperial medical pods, but it wasn't until just that moment that they understood exactly what had happened to them during their brief visits to the cubes. Now that people outside were hearing about it unprepared, though, they could only imagine the bomb that had just been dropped in people's minds and hearts.
        And this was only the beginning of the progress reports; if things were to continue along this track, there was no telling how many shocks the populace was about to receive!
        After another gesture for silence from Gaia, Councilor Ross continued his report.
        "We've also cooperated with a number of other agencies to gather DNA samples of all of Earth's remaining flora and fauna. Working backwards from there, and through the historical fossil record, we have begun a campaign to reintroduce species that have gone extinct due to external influences, like overhunting, clearcutting, and so on. We've also begun an initiative to bolster the numbers of species that are considered at risk of extinction, like various sea life, giant pandas, avian species, and others."
        He paused to allow people to catch up with his report, having dropped bomb after bomb. He looked around, and when the glaze in his fellow councilors' eyes cleared up, he continued speaking.
        His report on the environmental work continued for about ten minutes before he wrapped it up, saying, "As always, all information has been made available in the Akashic Record for those interested in the details of our work so far and the plans for the work we'll be doing in the future. "On another note, we've also addressed the concerns of healthcare workers. Now that the first complimentary visit to the medical pods in the cubes has been completed, we plan on scaling back access to them in the community clinics and hospitals. Medical pods should be a final lifesaving measure when all other avenues have failed. As such, healthcare professionals will remain in the healthcare profession, staffing local clinics and hospitals.
        "After all," he grinned, "pod fees are expensive, and doctors will be much cheaper. If the only healthcare we offered cost you two percent of your net worth every time you visited them for a minor ailment, those minor ailments would end up piling up and causing lasting harm to your bodies. Our agency exists to ensure the health of all imperial citizens, including their financial health to a certain
        extent.
        "So for those men and women who work in the healthcare field, please rest assured that your jobs are safe. That's all from my agency, thank you everyone for your time." He sat back down in his chair and the podium in front of him melted back into the ground.
        {Next in line is Councilor Bauer of the imperial environmental agency. Please deliver your report, councilor,} Gaia said and a podium rose from the floor in front of another seat.
        With the lesson from the beginning of the previous report still in his mind, Councilor Greg Bauer rose and immediately dove into his report, wasting no time on meaningless pleasantries that served no purpose but to waste time and lower efficiency.
        "The imperial environmental agency has been working on reversing the damage caused by global warming since the industrial revolutions around the world. For that, we constructed environmental scrubbers and have begun cleaning the atmosphere and ocean of excess greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide. So far, we've reduced the aggregate concentration of harmful greenhouse gasses from around 500 parts per million to 434 parts per million, a net reduction of approximately thirteen percent.
        "We've also lowered the acidity of the ocean by approximately 26%, or a net increase in oceanwater pH from 8.05 to 8.06. Our target for the surface layer of the ocean is a pH of 8.17, returning it to the level it was at before the industrial revolutions in the 1700s began.
        (Ed note: The aggregate greenhouse gas number is completely made up, but within reason. CO2 is currently at around 414PPM, which is a terrifying concentration, especially as relates to ocean acidification. A drop in oceanic pH of about 0.3 resulted in one of the largest mass extinction events in the history of the planet, and over the last 70 years or so we've dropped from a pH of 8.15 to 8.05 and the acidification is only speeding up. Some time this century (2100s), we're estimated to reach anywhere from 8.0-7.7, so our children or grandchildren may experience a mass extinction event of their own. Something to keep in mind, yo.)
        "Over the following weeks, we will be focusing on retrofitting scrubber devices into the industries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions. That's just a stopgap measure, though, until our engineers develop new methodologies for carbon neutral, or even carbon negative standards in operation and production.
        "In combination with miniaturized atmospheric scrubbers, we'll also be focusing on public education regarding the harmful effects of greenhouse gasses, which we estimate will produce a number of interest groups that will get involved in healthy environmentalism instead of ecoterrorism. Planting trees is better for the environment than burning buildings, so do please keep that in mind." Greg paused for a moment, allowing the impact of his reminder to sink in before continuing.
        "Our current goal is that the environment will be healed from all negative impacts over the past two hundred and fifty years no later than October four years from now...."
        Councilor Bauer's report continued in that vein for about another twenty minutes, giving people an explanation of the towers that had been discovered dotted around the globe and putting a whole host of conspiracy theories to bed as the theorists discovered that what they thought was some giant... whatever was in fact just glorified filters for the entire atmosphere and ocean.
        That said, conspiracy theories were rarely ever completely defeated by facts and logic, so they still continued... just with fewer proponents that believed in them...
        
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        OverLord 9 Feb 2024, 12:55 ➥ OverLord
        
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        #panic# The latest chapters...
        
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        Zalgo-dono 9 Feb 2024, 16:25 ➥ OverLord
        
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        ¡HAY 6 CAPOTULOS NUEVOS!
        
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        panic 11 Feb 2024, 07:29 ➥ OverLord
        
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        Thanks!
        
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        --------------------
        only we
        
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        OverLord 11 Feb 2024, 09:19 ➥ panic
        
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        LMFAO 😂😂😂
        
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OverLord 5 Feb 2024, 10:43

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Chapter 501: Satisfying Curiosity
'So physical sensations don't translate when I'm just a passenger,' Rick thought.
The young man-no, Rick's test subject—was laying on the ground, groaning in pain and choking on blood from a punctured lung, not to mention the host of other broken bones in his body beyond the ribs. But Rick didn't feel a thing, marking it a successful, though dangerous, test.
Looking at the thread of belief stretching off into the distance, he saw no changes in it. After briefly considering a test involving what happens if he was a passenger in a body when it died, he discarded the idea as the test was simply too dangerous. With a thought, he willed his consciousness to begin the arduous journey back to his own body, leaving one last sentence behind for the boy.
"You've worked hard. Rest now, and if you survive this, I'll visit you again,” he said, pushing it into the teenager's mind with a few hundred pulses of light. Whether the boy heard it or not, he didn't really care.
When he returned to his own body, he began the recovery process again. This time, it only took him a minute or two, compared to what felt like hours earlier, when he had readjusted himself after leaving Katrina's body. He guessed that it was likely because Katrina was a woman and he was a man, though it was also possible that it was because he hadn't fully occupied the test subject, while he had completely taken over his assistant.
'Further testing will be required,' he thought, making a mental note.
Once he had fully settled into his body again, Rick looked at the thread he had just traveled through, monitoring it for any changes. Soon, the intensity and frequency of the light pulses began dimming and slowing as the thread itself darkened. After a few minutes, the light pulses had completely stopped and the thread itself had turned completely black.
"That explains all the black threads they must belong to the sheep that I convinced to martyr themselves. Good thing I didn't use any of those threads for the last test,' he thought. Even though it had been a necessary sacrifice, he couldn't help but mourn all of the lost power, both from the imbeciles who so happily went to their deaths in the wave of global attacks and from the loss of the teenaged test subject, no matter how little that boy provided him.
Finally opening his eyes and leaving the purple world, he murmured, "So that's what it meant when it told me to gather faith."
Another of his discoveries from his second test was that anyone who even just had a positive thought about him would be connected to him by a thread of belief. The only difference was in how "lucrative" that belief was in terms of sending him faith.
A sinister smile spread across the cult leader's face as he came to that conclusion and he couldn't help but look forward to the future where he ruled over humanity as a true god.
A week later.
Rick had finally finished finding all the answers to his questions and satisfying his curiosity. Well, truth be told, it was more like three days of testing, three days of debauchery in various womens' bodies, and a full day, combined, of splitting headaches. Still, even the headaches had taught him something. After all, he had to discover the limits of his power sooner or later, and what better time than while his cult was already laying low? Though he hated pain, he had an idea now of how to avoid it, even if he didn't understand exactly what caused it or if there were any other means of resolving it, but he had at least learned how to sense when his limit was approaching.
He was currently sitting in the same conference room he had been in when he had first received his blessing. Filling the other chairs were the same people, bar one empty seat. The person who had previously occupied it had mysteriously committed "suicide" the week before, citing his remorse and leaving behind a letter describing how he had already betrayed the cult and his plans for another upcoming betrayal.
At least, everyone in the room, even Katrina, thought so, though she had some slight suspicions regarding the incident. She herself had been experiencing mysterious lapses in time, almost as though she had sleepwalked from place to place, and she was having difficulty figuring out how she had run through so many pairs of underwear and sheets. Waking up tangled in sheets that absolutely reeked of vaginal secretions and semen every night was weird enough, but a few times, she'd even suddenly realized that her clothes, including her underwear, had changed and she was feeling rather "full", as though she'd just had unprotected sex with someone. Other times, she tasted the lingering aftertaste of semen in her mouth, or smelled it emanating from between her breasts, or on her hands. A few times it was in even stranger places, like her armpits and hair.
She had since taken to doing random "sniff tests" of her various body parts just to double check that, no, she was not, in fact, going insane.
When the news of the person handling the cult's finances committing suicide had spread, the rest of the leadership hierarchy of the cult had all exchanged glances, each of them with weird looks on their faces. Katrina's suspicion arose from those very looks; it was possible, or even likely, that everyone currently in the room had experienced the same weird lapses over the week.
But none of them thought it had anything at all to do with their shepherd; instead, they attributed them to the sudden relief they felt when he had finally woken up. Thus, the only emotion they were feeling regarding their leader now was curiosity as to what his new blessing was and what he would have planned for the cult's future.
The meeting they were having right now was to satisfy that very curiosity..

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  OverLord 5 Feb 2024, 10:43 ➥ OverLord
  
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  Chapter 502: Unbreakable?
  Rick cleared his throat, bringing the attention of the others in the meeting room to him. "It's time we begin our comeback. A lot of our previous plans need to be scrapped, but some should still be doable with some modifications, thanks to the unexpected blessings descending on us. I've brought myself up to date on our situation over the past week, so we don't need to go over that and can immediately get to work on plans for the future," he said.
  "Can you tell us what your blessing is, shepherd? If we're to come up with new plans or modify existing ones based on blessings, we need to know what yours is," the strategist asked. While he was telling the truth about that, he was also just as curious as everyone else in the room as to what exactly Rick could do now.
  "My blessing enables me to enter people's minds, monitor their thoughts," Rick answered, then his eyes flashed purple as he continued speaking through the threads of belief that connected him to his high-level confidants. "And I can even communicate with them."
  He had discovered that power a few days into the week prior, when he had discovered the betrayal of his money manager. He had been so enraged by the betrayal that it forced him back into his own body, and his disgust prompted him to attempt ordering him to suicide without even needing to be fully present in his purple world. As long as he knew there was a thread of belief connecting him to a person, he could instantly communicate through it without sending his full consciousness through it, and, for an unknown cost, send the same kind of orders he had used on his teenaged test subject. The room fell into silence as everyone considered the uses and ramifications of Rick's blessing. It would be particularly useful in the fight against the juggernaut that was the Terran Empire, though they didn't know if they should suggest that he become a glorified comms relay or not.
  Rick remained quiet, though his eyes remained purple. Nobody else in the room was sensitive to mana, however, so they couldn't tell that he was currently using his power on them and reading their thoughts.
  After he felt they had been given enough time to consider his blessing, he said, "Let's begin, shall We?"
  Thus, with slight fear, worry, and wariness in the eyes of the cult leadership, the meeting continued. It would still take time for them to adjust to the new order of things, but they still moved forward, doing their best to not give their leader a reason to empty their chairs as well.
  Like that, they proceeded to hash out a new plan of attack that involved their blessed and unblessed followers alike. It was likely going to be even more grand than their first introduction into the public consciousness, given that it took into account the superpowers granted to the blessed by the mysterious particles surrounding everyone. Along with the new plans, old ones were discussed and either discarded as unfeasible or updated to account for the new reality everyone had found themselves in.
  Some were even immediately put into action, taking advantage of Rick's new unbreakable communication method.
  Avalon Island, the Cube.
  Deep within the bowels of the central government facility of the entire Terran Empire, the lids of two pods slid open with an identical pneumatic hiss. Inside one pod was a gorgeous woman with waist-length, wavy, strawberry blonde hair. Stretching from cheek to cheek and across a slightly upturned, perky nose was a light dusting of freckles. Her tanned skin spoke of a love for the outdoors and she had full, generous lips, immaculate eyebrows, and her seafoam green eyes, when they opened, were round and sparkling with a mischievous glint. She was dressed in a black sports bra with blue seams, and a matching pair of compression shorts that barely protected her modesty, all while outlining the luscious curves of her slender, athletic body.
  She sat up and luxuriantly stretched. If there was anyone, man or woman, in the room with her to see the... interesting... things that motion did to her body, their eyes would likely have popped out of their skulls at the sight.
  Then she picked up a towel, casually draped it around the back of her neck, and sauntered out of the room with a slightly lopsided grin on her face.
  In another room was another pod. This one contained a handsome man with light sandy brown hair cut short topping a face that looked as though it had been chiseled out of a block of granite. He had sharp eyebrows, an aquiline nose, and thin lips with a slight upward curve to them mitigated his otherwise severe and imposing appearance. His chin was prominent and his face was coated in a light nine o'clock shadow. He had powerful arms, a V-shaped torso, and a perfect eight pack with devil horns cut into his tight spandex biking shorts. His hands were a contradiction, simultaneously large and yet somehow still elegant.
  (Ed note: Aquiline noses are also called Roman noses. They're characterized by a gentle curve at the top leading into a relatively straight line from the bridge of the nose to the tip, and wide nostrils. Their side profile is very straight and the tip of the nose is sharply defined and often dips below the nostrils themselves. A person with an aquiline nose often looks authoritative and/or stately to people.)
  He opened his dark, chocolate brown eyes and sat up, a wicked smirk on his face. "This is gonna be fun,' he thought as he hopped out of the pod and padded barefoot into the corridor, then headed toward the room where he was scheduled to meet his partner for their upcoming long-term mission. "Timothy and Siobhan Roberts" were about to make their debut on the world stage, some of the first of a new generation of intelligence and counterintelligence operatives.
  They could hardly wait..
  
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    OverLord 5 Feb 2024, 10:44 ➥ OverLord
    
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    Chapter 503: Backstories and Ellies
    (Ed note: The title reference in this one is pretty obscure, so I'll give it to y'all. Backstories is obvious,
    and “Ellies” refers to the 1998 Spielberg flop, “Deep Impact", where they referred to an incoming meteor that would wipe out all of humanity by the name Ellie, which was code for ELE, or Extinction-Level Event.)
    Low Earth Orbit, stealth shuttle ESV-228-01.
    Jason Todd and Catherine O'Shaugnessy were reclining in seats in the small stealth vessel receiving final briefing updates for their upcoming task. Their mission: hunt down cult cells to the best of their abilities.
    And their abilities were certainly no joke.
    They would be heading to the Puget Sound area of Washington State, where they would take the identity of a newlywed couple moving to Harstine Island, an unremarkable, unincorporated, and very much out of the way island in the sound. Timothy Roberts and his wife Siobhan would settle down in Hartstene Pointe, a gated community on Harstine Island.
    Siobhan Roberts would take up a job as a law clerk at the Mason County Courthouse in nearby Shelton, while Timothy would play the part of a gym teacher at Shelton Senior High and former naval reservist out of Bremerton. Timothy and Siobhan met at the University of Washington, where Timothy was using his GI Bill to pave his way to a degree in Environmental Studies with a focus on Conservation Science & Management, while Siobhan was a bright-eyed girl studying for a BA in Law, Societies, & Justice. They dated all through college and Timothy decided to support Siobhan's goal of becoming a lawyer, and later, a judge.
    After all, even though the Terran Empire had taken over governance for 7 of the 7.5 billion humans on the planet, once the imperial citizens moved into their fortress cities, the remaining people would still need to have a working society. And a working society naturally needed laws, and those who uphold them.
    Siobhan was from an upper-middle-class family in Seattle, while Timothy was a transplant from the south side of Chicago who had joined the Navy to escape a terrible family situation.
    Timothy's dreams were more prosaic. He wanted to join the Park Ranger Service and eventually manage one of Washington State's many, many public parks or campgrounds. Serving six years in the Navy had reinforced the idea that he was a very small cog in a very big machine and he should limit himself to small dreams, as being content with his lot was better than being frustrated when he failed to do big things.
    On paper, their relationship shouldn't work, but while their relationship only existed on paper, it had to work. Thus, the stunning nyxian of Irish descent and the corn fed white boy from a farm in Idaho were hard at work memorizing and internalizing their respective life histories during the short suborbital trip from Eden to the outskirts of Seattle.
    "Timothy" was the first to log out of the simulation, having memorized everything about his past. "Status report, Two-twenty-eight," he ordered as he changed into his new daily wear.
    {ETA: eight minutes,} the shuttle AI announced. {It would be advised to begin checking your gear, sir.}
    The shuttle was brand new off the printer in the cavernous hold of the ESV Armstrong, so it had yet to be named, let alone develop a facsimile of a personality as Felix's Astra had.
    "On it, Two-twenty-eight," the reaper replied, then moved to the cargo lockers that lined the small cargo hold in the stealth shuttle.
    He busied himself unpacking the lockers and sorting the equipment on the grated floor of the hold, muttering the names of all the gear under his breath. When he finished, he let out a low whistle and couldn't help but remark, “Man, they're really going all out for this mission." The equipment he had just inventoried was straight out of Lab City; some of it still even had experimental designations that were simply numbers instead of the snappy backronyms the nerd herd usually named the gear that ARES and the nyxians routinely used in the field.
    Take, for instance, the M11 Nanite Grenade, version 11827. It was a small cylindrical grenade that fit in the palm of the hand that, when detonated, would spread a nanite colony that would use any and all inorganic material in its surroundings to replicate and spread. Due to the potential of a runaway "grey goo" event, it had gone through almost twelve thousand iterations in testing before it was deemed moderately safe to use in a live test.
    But it certainly packed a definite punch.
    When it detonated, everything in its surroundings would simply disappear, leaving behind unarmed and helpless people that would soon discover that gravity had the upper hand in any conflict with living beings, as the three-second duration of the nanite colony's spread would generally reach out to ten meters around the initial detonation point. And a ten-meter drop was rather harsh on anyone who wasn't genetically enhanced and couldn't fly.
    Even Timothy shuddered at the thought, despite ten meter falls being the equivalent of a normal person stepping off a curb for him.
    But the nanite grenade was far from the only piece of cutting edge-even for the empire-gear in their issue.
    They had a full suite of nanite colonies, ranging from camouflage nanites, like those that hid Eden's missile silos and other important underground sites, to injectable colonies of healer nanites, and best of all was the absolute latest in imperial atomic printing technology: the AP198 Type N Atomic Printer. Packed in a container the size of Timothy's little finger was a nanoscale fusion reactor and a full colony of nanites that could perform the same tasks that any of the empire's atomic printers were capable of, albeit at a much slower rate.
    It had taken the Lab City researchers nearly eight hundred years of iterating on the now "venerable” atomic printer technology before they were able to miniaturize it to this extent. The biggest issue was, again, the potential grey goo apocalypse scenario whereby the relatively short-lived nanites would begin replicating out of control, printing more and more of themselves until nothing remained but an ever-spreading nanite colony.
    But unlike the nanite grenade, which would only replicate using inorganic materials, the Type N Atomic Printer had no limitations on what it would decompose to print more of itself.
    To it, everything was useful..
    
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      OverLord 5 Feb 2024, 10:44 ➥ OverLord
      
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      Chapter 504: The Ups and Downs of Working With Honeypots
      Timothy heard the hatch to the cargo hold hiss open and almost fumbled the atomic printer he was still holding in his hand. He paled and gingerly set it down, then turned around and saw his "wife" coming into the hold behind him.
      "Holy f#ck, you startled me!" he exclaimed.
      Catherine was taken aback for a moment, thinking, 'Aren't reapers supposed to be hardcore
      badasses? Psh, a little door scared such a big man.' Then, a mischievous grin crossed her face and she got a truly wicked idea.
      "Honey, I have a headache," she said, slumping down to sit on the floor next to him. She leaned over and rested her head in his lap and practically purred at him. “Rub me?” she asked, blinking innocently and conveniently ignoring the fact that she was still wearing nothing but a sports bra and compression booty shorts.
      Timothy awkwardly fidgeted in place and didn't know where to put his hands. There were so very, very many options, and not many of them were good. He poked her forehead and growled, "Focus, 'Siobhan'. You're supposed to be a good girl, remember?"
      Siobhan stood up with a sigh, murmuring something about blockheads and no fun, then headed to the locker on the other side of the cargo bay and began inventorying her own goodie bags for the mission ahead of them.
      And just like Timothy, she let out a low whistle when she saw that the goodies in the goodie bags were very good indeed.
      She picked up what looked like a catsuit, if a catsuit were made for a doll, or perhaps an infant. Advances in materials science weren't only for alloys in Lab City; they had also made staggering leaps in other materials as well. And this "catsuit" was one of them.
      The newly developed suit was made of a polymer that had incredible tensile strength and elasticity, while maintaining all the benefits of the thicker, more uncomfortable nyxian outfit of a bodysuit layered with a web vest and accessorized with gloves and combat boots. The new catsuit model was all in one. Powered by a fusion generator the size of a hearing aid battery, it would stretch to fit anyone that cared to wear it. It was completely bulletproof and could be completely sealed or worn under clothing as a covert layer of armor. It also had optical camouflage capability, wicked away moisture, and had a host of infiltration tools like sensor scramblers and EM signal jammers. It contained a distributed quantum computer weaved into it as nanofibers and integrated hologram projectors could mimic any number of other styles of clothing.
      But most importantly, any nyxian wearing one would be drop dead f#cking hot in one. Every woman loved beauty, after all, and nyxians were no exception to that rule.
      Siobhan immediately stepped into hers and set the optical camouflage to what she called "Office Lady Mode". OLM was a dark gray side-slit skirt that flared out just above her knees matched with a light blue silk blouse, white satin camisole, and a matching dark gray fitted blazer over the top, cut to display her blouse and camisole to her advantage. Peeking through the slit in the side of her skirt were black silk thigh-high stockings with a red lace top band and hints of a red garter belt keeping the stockings up and in place. On her feet was a pair of shiny black patent leather four inch stiletto heels.
      Timothy couldn't help but cast a few extra glances her way. Hot was hot, after all, partner or not. Siobhan tossed him his own infiltrator suit and he donned his as well, setting it to low key athletic wear that still showed off his chiseled form. It also included the iconic coaches' whistle, as well.
      "You look pretty good in that, honey," Siobhan practically purred at him. They were still supposed to be in their honeymoon period, after all, and if they were to act too distant with each other, people might notice.
      At least it was a convenient excuse, anyway. Siobhan was one of the most accomplished honeypots in all of the NIA, and Timothy suspected he would truly enjoy the downtime on his current mission, unlike most of the missions reaper teams were sent on. There was definitely a distinct difference between being cooped up in small rooms with nine other sweaty, unshowered men and being paired with a nyxian honeypot, an unforeseen perk he was only just now coming to realize.
      He cleared his throat and changed the subject in an attempt to remain professional before they made landfall. “I wonder how many other teams they sent out on this mission. Have you heard anything through your grapevine?"
      "Nothing specific. The response is just 'a lot' whenever I ask. Those cultist bastards are likely to be embedded in plain sight where they can lose themselves in the crowd. I hate it, but it's a damn smart move whoever their strategists are are bloody good at their jobs," she coquettishly complained.
      "Well, so are we," he confidently claimed, puffing out his chest.
      {Beginning landing sequence in three minutes,} AI 228 announced over the main channel and through the implants of the nyxian and reaper.
      Siobhan cleaned up the kit she had just inspected, much like Timothy had done with his, then the pair strapped themselves in for groundfall and made small talk as the stealth shuttle fell screaming to earth like a shooting star, hidden against the backdrop of the sun in the sky.
      Not that anyone on the ground would have seen it anyway, given the general cloud cover over the part of Washington that was west of the Cascade Mountain Range. Because, while Eastern Washington was a cold desert and, like most deserts, was mostly sunny and arid, Western Washington was either a marine coastal environment or a temperate rainforest. People from around the Puget Sound, in particular, would experience more than three hundred days of cloud cover per year, on average, and more than two hundred days of measurable rainfall.
      They even had a term for the typical weather there: "liquid sunshine", they called it..
      
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        OverLord
        
        OverLord 5 Feb 2024, 10:45 ➥ OverLord
        
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        #panic# The latest chapters...
        
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        panic 6 Feb 2024, 11:55 ➥ OverLord
        
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        Thank you!!
        
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OverLord 4 Feb 2024, 06:14

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Chapter 497: Kids Have Big Mouths

Katrina briefly brought Rick up to speed on the Three Percenters, and what had happened to him. He fell into a daze for a while, considering the situation, then clarified, "So I spent six weeks in a coma receiving my blessing. How long did it take everyone that received theirs? And why did mine take so long?" He had just woken up and his brain was still a little fuzzy. To him, the time had passed in an instant and he just remembered a fierce, tearing pain in his head before he collapsed. But even that memory was fading, as all memories of physical pain do, a convenient defense mechanism that humanity had.
"Yes. Although you were among the first to receive your blessing, it took this long for you to wake up due to resources. The empire's blessed started coming to around the second week, while ours mostly started around day twenty. While we have access to the Biogen that the tyrant's company developed before the war, that's likely generations out of date now and the medical pods in the empire surely use more advanced nutrients to go with their more advanced delivery system," she explained.
One of her thugs came into the room carrying a thick stack of folders and stood by the door. Katrina gestured to him and he handed her the folders, which she glanced at and passed on to Rick. "Here's a detailed breakdown of everything we've managed to gather on the blessed, the blessing, and everything else that's happened over the past six weeks you were in a coma."
Rick got into a more comfortable position in the hospital bed and calmly began reading through the files contained in the folders. He was curious about his blessing, sure, but before he tried using them again he first wanted to understand them. The feedback he had suffered from his first attempt had taught him a harsh lesson on the usage of his power, and though the memory of the physical pain had faded, the lesson itself remained. Especially the loss of control; that was something he absolutely could not tolerate.
As he read, his shock grew greater and his eyebrows practically climbed all the way up to his hairline. The sheer amount of information alone was unbelievable and he was having a hard time imagining the lengths to which his people had gone to gather it under the circumstances they'd been in during his absence.
"We gathered all of this over the past six weeks?” he asked, raising his gaze from the documents for the first time since Katrina had handed them to him. "What's our confidence level in this?"
"The information is straight from the empire, and we're pretty sure they know a lot more than is easily available," she swiftly answered.
"Looks like having the entire world under your control really helps in data collection," Rick sneered, feeling a brief twinge of helplessness that he ruthlessly stamped out in his heart before it could manifest on his face. "So how'd you get this? The empire must be going to great lengths to not leak important information like this."
"From the public," she answered.
"The public? Just like that?" He blinked in surprise.
"Yes. This is what all of their blessed are taught the moment they wake up. It was also publicly available in their knowledge base for anyone to view, an effective measure to prevent accidents. And from there, it was a simple task of just... asking. The Three Percenters weren't just imperialists, after all, so the information spread rapidly from there.
"Besides, the blessed are still just kids. Kids with awe-inspiring superpowers, sure, but kids nevertheless. And when have you ever met a kid that could keep a secret? There's a reason security clearances take age into account as a determining factor in how much information people are allowed to access. So the kids that woke up first scrambled to publicize the information, whether in interviews with reporters, posts on social media, or even just bragging to their non-imperialist 'friends' about the superhero academies the empire is going to build for them.”
"Has it been verified?” he asked. Though he had set rules and guidelines to sieve the good information from the bad, he'd been in a coma for six weeks and a lot of things could go wrong in far less time than that.
"
"We've already cross-referenced it. Hundreds of millions of people received the blessing, and they all have friendships that travel across the wall, so to speak. As it turned out, they were all saying the same things, with the only difference being small changes based on their individual blessings,' Katrina replied with confidence and pride on her face. She had gathered more than a thousand people to watch more than a million videos, relentlessly filtering the information in each and discarding anything that differed into separate confidence levels. Once that had been done, she'd gone even further and had her people go out in small groups to gossip and brag with the non-imperialists who'd received blessings, or even those who had friends who received them. As a former member of the FSB herself, the intelligence analysts she had trained were her pride and joy.
They were all she had left, after all.
Rick grunted, then continued reading the files in his hands, making sure everything he read was etched into his mind and unlikely to be forgotten. As he read, he slowly began developing an understanding of the blessings as a whole, including the division of their power, their source, and the mysterious particle in the atmosphere and how it related to the strength of their individual blessings. Something inside him felt... different, though, like he was destined for more, so the information he had on hand was leaving him somewhat unsatisfied.
However, the more he read, the more questions he had.
"Why didn't our people wake up with those so-called 'instincts'?" he asked. "The imperialists all said they 'just knew' how to use their blessings as soon as they woke up, and it only required a brief time for them to put that knowledge into practice... but nothing like that was reported by our blessed, or any of the non-imperialists for that matter...." That specific bit of information had been printed in a different color in the files in his hand. The analysts had erred on the side of caution and considered it unverified and unverifiable, but it was still a point they felt should be included in the record. "And how'd the empire have so much information ready? No matter how you look at it, they had to have put in a lot of research time to get this much." He gestured at the thick stack of paper in his hand. “Did they know about the particles in the atmosphere before people started evolving?
"And if that's true, does it mean the tyrant already knew about and was prepared for it?"
The more questions arose, the wilder his speculation grew. And the wilder his speculation grew, the uglier his expression became. Because if his theories were true, he was up against a much bigger beast than he had originally thought...

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  OverLord 4 Feb 2024, 06:16 ➥ OverLord
  
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  Chapter 498: Questionable Ethics
  
  After finishing the files in his hand, Rick frowned. The information he had at hand didn't quite track with the sensations he was feeling. Ever since he had woken from his coma, he'd had an idea of how to use his blessing, almost like there was someone whispering in the back of his mind. It left him unsettled, and unsure of who to trust in his inner circle.
  "Leave me," he calmly said after closing the last folder in the stack.
  "Yes, shepherd," Katrina said, and then everyone left the room. Katrina had a spring in her step, the thugs didn't have much in their heads at the best of times, and the doctor could only wipe the cold sweat from his brow and practically sprint out of the room.
  Once the door closed, Rick leaned back in his chair, getting comfortable, and focused on the little voice in the back of his mind. It led him into a trance and most of the colors in his world faded away, leaving everything in shades of purple again.
  Time slowly passed as Rick sought the state he was in when he had first come out of his coma, where he could visualize the threads connecting him to... elsewhere. He had his suspicions about what those threads were, but it would still require him to personally verify them as no one else seemed to be even the slightest bit aware of their existence.
  Once he felt the difference in his surroundings, Rick opened his eyes, casting his gaze around his own purple world. He peered into the violet and indigo shadows, reaching out his hand in wonder and attempting to grasp them in his hands, curious as to whether they would feel as soft and luxurious as they looked. Failing to grab them, though, he opened his clenched fists and waved his hands through the pastel lilacs and light lavender, comparing them in his mind to still water. But his hands simply passed through them without raising the expected ripple.
  He sighed, then closed his eyes again and decided to seek clarification from the unintelligible voice in the deepest, darkest corner of his mind.
  After what seemed an eternity, he was finally able to make out what seemed to be two words. $Sssssssssseeeeeeek fffffffaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiithhhhhhhhhh,§ the voice seemed to be saying. It had no identifiable characteristics to it and sounded more like a soft whisper echoing through a very, very long tunnel from an unimaginable distance away from him.
  'What do you mean? I don't understand you...' he thought, hoping that the voice would respond.
  §Ssssseeeek fffffaaaaaiiiiiiiithhhh,§ it repeated. Then it repeated itself again, and again, and again, each repetition growing louder in Rick's mind until it drowned everything out and, with a thud, he felt himself flying backward!
  He looked in front of him and saw his own body slumped in the chair he had been sitting in when he decided to start investigating his powers. Connected to it were thousands of threads, each of them a shade of gray or white, and a few of them darker or brighter. Some were actively pulsing, flashes of light traveling toward him like information passing through a fiberoptic cable. Others were in various shades of gray, with the pulses of light traveling through them at varying speeds and intensities, while even more the majority of them, actually were deathly still, almost as though they had withered away with no more light to travel through them.
  From this angle, he could tell that they didn't actually connect to every part of him, but rather to specific spots on his body, like clusters, or perhaps nodes. Thousands of threads were connected to his every joint, with even more clustered around his head and heart.
  SFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIITHHHHHHHHHH!!§ the voice roared at him, jolting him out of
  his reverie.
  "What do you mean 'faith'!?" he shouted as loud as he could, but as if he were in a dream, his mouth opened and shaped the words... but no sound emerged from his lips.
  Then he looked around him, trying to detect the particles the empire claimed were saturating everything in the world, and even space beyond its atmosphere, but didn't see a thing at all. He internally cursed the useless empire and the vicious tyrant that helmed it, then focused on the only thing he had left to investigate: the threads connecting him to... elsewhere.
  §Ssssseeek ffffaaaaaiiiiithhh,§ the voice softly repeated one last time before falling silent. Rick almost felt like there was a certain satisfaction in its final utterance and wondered what exactly 'it' was. His consciousness drifted back into his body after the voice left as if the mysterious speaker had been the one keeping his incorporeal form separate from his body in the first place. Then, recalling the screaming and the head-splitting pain he had felt earlier, he chose to investigate one of the darkest threads connected to him this time. And as he focused on it, an almost vantablack thread connected to a node just below his right collarbone, his vision went dark and he felt a chill pass through him that he could only describe as the chill of the grave.
  He opened his eyes again and continued investigating his threads, one by one until he got tired of the slow and steady approach and decided to go with the one he had first experimented with the brightest thread with the fastest light pulses. It was connected to the base of his left index finger and he cautiously focused on it, ready to draw back at the first sign of a repeat of what had happened to him earlier.
  Opening his eyes, he saw a luxuriously tiled wall with a tall, brushed aluminum fixture attached to it and spraying scalding hot water onto "his" body.
  He soon realized where he was and what was going on; his consciousness had descended on his secretary, Katrina's body! He was seeing the world through her eyes, and couldn't help but wonder how far, exactly, he could take the connection they shared. First, he tried controlling her eyelids, blinking them open and closed like a toddler with a flashlight. Then he manipulated her body into moving her head around, looking at the shower products on a shelf built into the wall next to her, and around the rest of her bathroom, separated as she was by a simple glass partition.
  Then, he grew daring.
  Assuming control of Katrina's right arm, he began softly teasing her belly button with it, all the while keeping his “ear" open to her thoughts, which, while still remaining strictly professional, were focused on him and his importance to the cult... and to her eventual revenge.
  Her businesslike thoughts interrupted his mischievous derring-do, at least for a minute or two as she continued lathering and rinsing her body before turning around and leaning her head back to let the water run through her short hair. When she reached for her shampoo, Rick intercepted the movement and turned it into a quick fondle of her breasts, simply to see if he could.
  Opening himself to the physical sensations of her body was as simple as flipping a switch, to him, and he enjoyed the thrill of sensation traveling from Katrina's nipple to the pleasure center in her brain. Then he withdrew back into her subconscious, once again becoming a silent observer.
  Katrina continued her shower unabated, with no sign, either physical or mental, that she was carrying a passenger within her, and obviously no memory of the quick fondling she had just given her own tits.
  At that point, Rick began feeling the strain of the connection and rapidly traveled along the thread connecting him to Katrina, returning to his body and opening his own, physical eyes with a chuckle...
  
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    OverLord 4 Feb 2024, 06:17 ➥ OverLord
    
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    Chapter 499: Hypotheses and Tests
    
    'So she doesn't remember what I made her do at all,' Rick thought as he opened his eyes, returning to his purple world. He had tested many things on Katrina and she seemed to have no recollection of anything she'd done under his control, despite all the things he'd made her do to herself.
    The only test that had failed was the one where he attempted to take control of a single body part, but he wasn't sure why. Taking over her entire body had been simple, like putting on new clothes, so why would he be incapable of taking over individual body parts? He wasn't sure, but he felt it was likely because he lacked the fine control necessary to do so. Thus, more training and experimentation was in order.
    §Gaaathheeeeeeeerrrrr ffffaaaaaaiiiiiithhhh,§ the voice in the back of his mind chanted, but Rick only had the vaguest idea of how to go about that.
    When he'd looked down at his body and noticed that the thread connecting him to Katrina had slightly dimmed, and the pulses of light had decreased in frequency and intensity, he'd thought it odd. But with the voice's subtle guidance, he learned that what connected him to Katrina was "belief", and the pulses of light was “faith”.
    'How do I gather faith?' he thought as hard as he could.
    §Aaaaannnnsssswerrrrrr theeeeeemmmmmm,§ the voice unhelpfully replied, then fell silent.
    'Answer what?' Rick screamed in his mind, but garnered no response from the mysterious, echoing voice in his mind.
    He looked at the thread connecting him to his secretary again and noticed that it had recovered some of its luster, and the pulses were once again increasing in frequency and intensity. It seemed that whenever he used the faith of his believers, it would soon recover. Thinking about it, Rick found it very similar to the information he had read earlier regarding the absorption and use of the mysterious particles permeating the planet. Perhaps he had been overthinking things when he noted the differences between his experience and the information he'd been given; after all, his secretary had the brightest thread of belief and the most intense pulses of faith in him, so she was unlikely to have fed him misinformation.
    He felt the beginnings of a headache forming between his eyes and, with a long, drawn-out exhalation, came back to reality. Color permeated his world again when he opened his physical eyes and massaged his temples with his fingertips.
    "I need a new test subject," he muttered under his breath, unwilling to experiment on his most fervent believer and source of faith until he learned more about his blessing.
    With his consciousness returned to his physical body, though, he discovered a somewhat odd side effect of his newfound power. He felt out of place in his own body. Looking down, he still expected to see breasts, and he was inundated with foreign emotions and intrusive thoughts for a while. Most of the thoughts aligned with the things Katrina had been thinking in her shower. He also still felt uncomfortably aroused, echoes of the actions he had forced Katrina to perform in the shower playing out across his own skin, with the accompanying difference and, dare he say, increase in sensitivity to them.
    Rick fought against the sensations and thoughts, coming back to his normal self after about an hour. In the future, he would most definitely need to take the aftereffects into consideration when physically possessing people through their threads of belief. It also implied a certain cooldown period, during which he would likely be ill advised to "body hop" between his followers. If he couldn't bring himself back to normal between each possession, he instinctively felt that the risk of losing himself in the thoughts and sensations of others would be too high. It was a consequence that a narcissistic control freak like him could simply not tolerate.
    Thus, as with everything in his life, he needed to keep a ruthless hold on himself no matter what he was doing. He would treat his power usage like he treated his drug habit and strictly ration himself on both fronts. After all, the highs and consequences of both were quite similar.
    After another ten minutes of rest, he began relaxing and preparing to return to the purple world for another test. This time, he chose the darkest thread, which should be enough to support or disprove his earlier thought about belief and faith being what linked him to others. He also wanted to discover if there was a reason for the differences between threads, and if he was correct in assuming that Katrina's belief in him was the strongest and her faith the most fervent.
    Another unknown amount of time passed and he finally returned to the purple world, then opened his eyes again and began searching through the thousands of threads attached to him. Quite a few of them were still vantablack, with no light traveling through them at all, and he felt a certain sense of imminent doom when he considered using them to test his new blessing. Thus, he discarded them and continued searching until he found a dim, almost ephemeral gossamer thread, through which light with the intensity of a firefly seemed to casually, and very occasionally, saunter through at a sedate pace in fits and starts.
    "That's the perfect one to test with,' he thought and dove into the thread, traveling along it as fast as he could.
    But unlike his testing with Katrina earlier, this transfer wasn't immediate, nor was it smooth. On the contrary, he continued hitting pockets of turbulence, causing him to fear for his life. Or worse, having his consciousness trapped outside his body to wander the world as an incorporeal ghost while his physical body was left behind in a vegetative state.
    Still, he persisted, holding on and taking mental note of the process. His newest theory was that it had something to do with distance as well; the thread he was currently traveling along just “felt” like the destination was further away than simply down the hall and into another room. When he finally arrived at the end of the thread, he opened his eyes and looked at a nearby clock. Though he didn't know where he was, exactly, or who he was inhabiting, the clock indicated that ten minutes had passed during his trip down the thread of belief. It seemed that time was somewhat subjective in the purple world, as it had felt like he'd been traveling for hours thanks to all the turbulence. Or perhaps he had crossed time zones, which was a far simpler and thus
    likelier-explanation.
    After noting the time difference, he looked around and noticed a pair of AR glasses on a table next to "him". He momentarily fell into a quandary before remembering that the body he was in wasn't his, then began listening to the conversation in his surroundings..
    
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      OverLord 4 Feb 2024, 06:19 ➥ OverLord
      
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      Chapter 500: His Best Standing Long Jump
      
      'I hate it! Fu#k my life... my dad died to a supervillain for nothing! He wanted to join the empire from the beginning but Mom said no. But after he died, she couldn't run to the recordkeepers to apply for citizenship fast enough. Dumb bitch!'
      Rick had found himself in the mind of a teenage boy. He listened to the stream of consciousness for a while and learned what the boy and his family had gone through over the past few weeks. Not only had the kid's mother's refusal to join the empire driven a wedge between her and her husband, one that they'd even been contemplating divorce over, but his girlfriend's family had also chosen to join the empire during the first amnesty period. The boy blamed his mother for the resulting breakup as well.
      All of his rage had been directed toward his mother, but then one day he'd had a thought. If the empire had the power to enforce the law on rogue supervillains, why did they ignore the havoc that'd been wrought among the people who waived their imperial citizenship? He wasn't old enough to truly understand politics, so he was still mired in the typical teenage thought process of good and evil, black and white. Supervillains were evil, so if the empire was good, they should do something to stop them, citizenship or no citizenship. Thus, the empire itself must be evil as well.
      Oftentimes, the simplest thoughts were the most powerful, and that belief that the empire was evil had been enough to generate a thread of belief in Rick, who, though the boy had no idea who he was, had been the only person to ever lead a successful strike against the evil empire and its wicked leader. Though the thread was tiny, and it didn't generate much faith, the very fact of its existence had given the cult leader access to the boy's thoughts and body.
      'Don't worry, boy, you're already doing something for us,' Rick thought, planning to continue watching the teen go about his day. Being a passenger in the boy's mind would allow him to gather firsthand information on the day-to-day functions of the empire, as well as test a number of his more brutal ideas. After all, the boy wasn't worth much in the first place, so there was no silly moral dilemma for him to pretend to struggle with.
      But his ideas of an extended stay in the boy's body were thrown out of the proverbial window when he focused on the thread connecting him and the teen. He saw that the white pulses of light were traveling from his physical body to the boy at a staggering rate. The pulses were thousands of times more frequent and intense than he was receiving from the angry youth. His heart practically fell all the way to his feet when he considered the backlash he would soon suffer, despite the constant "income" from the tens of thousands of others feeding him their belief and faith.
      Still, the comparison between the expenditure he was paying out now and the cost of inhabiting Katrina's body taught him a little bit more about how his powers functioned and their limitations. The darker the thread, the more difficult it would be to connect with the person on the other end, and the more infrequent the pulses, the less he gained from them and the more he would spend if he wanted to connect with them.
      "Go to the roof," he whispered in the boy's mind, curious as to whether direct orders would work, and if so, how much steeper the cost would be to use those instead of forcefully assuming direct control of a person and shoving their consciousness to the side.
      The young man paused for a moment and tilted his head, his mind going blank as he lost his train of thought. At that very moment, if he could see the thread linking him to Rick, he would risk blindness as the intensity and frequency of the light pulses traveling along it made it appear to be a second sun if said sun had been compressed into a straight line. All he could hear in his mind was a vague voice repeating the words “go to the roof” over and over, getting louder and clearer with each repetition until it was practically shouting in his now throbbing head. Soon, he couldn't take it anymore and robotically marched toward the stairs leading to the roof of the apartment building he lived in with his mother.
      Along the way, Rick continually gave orders, forcing him to do different things like stop on the stair landing, stand on one foot, stick out his tongue, poke himself in the eye, and crawl backward up the stairs on all fours. He kept a close eye on the thread of belief to see how it reacted, as well as track the changes in the light pulses headed from him to the teenager, and came to the conclusion that the thread itself would exist as long as the belief it represented existed. In terms of the cost to order the linked person around, the more complex or harmful the action—or the more out of character it was—the more faith Rick would have to expend to force the target to perform it. But as long as he could support the expenditure, the person on the other end of his thread had no choice but to follow the orders being given to them.
      After a time, the boy reached the rooftop as ordered. He looked around in confusion, wondering why he had climbed all the way up to the roof of his apartment building when he heard that same sibilant, chanting whisper in his mind.
      "Jump off the roof," the whisper repeated.
      The boy struggled against the order as hard as he could. He knew that, despite only being a four-story building, if he were to follow the order, he would be severely injured, or even dead.
      But alas, after Rick spent a hundred thousand units of faith if he were to count each individual light that pulsed along the thread as a single unit, the teenager could no longer struggle. In the same robotic fashion, as he had climbed the stairs and performed all of the actions Rick had ordered him to during his ascent, he waddled to the ledge, crouched down, and, with all of his might, performed his best standing long jump..
      
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        OverLord 4 Feb 2024, 06:21 ➥ OverLord
        
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        #panic# These aren't privileged chapters; you can add them to the novel as you like...
        
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resonanceATP 19 Jan 2024, 14:40

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I started stacking at chapter 453 because of the events that took place, I didn't want to get cockblocked with a cliffhanger when something major was developing. Did it get solved yet?

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  Mmneaa 21 Jan 2024, 17:32 ➥ resonanceATP
  
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  wait, wait more and more
  
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    resonanceATP 20 Feb 2024, 23:03 ➥ Mmneaa
    
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    Do I still have to wait more?
    
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      Mmneaa 21 Feb 2024, 01:37 ➥ resonanceATP
      
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      Go on
      Nothing important is going on
      
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        resonanceATP 21 Feb 2024, 03:32 ➥ Mmneaa
        
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        Thx, but what I meant is if
        the terrorists get caught
        
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        Mmneaa 21 Feb 2024, 07:00 ➥ resonanceATP
        
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        Nope, seems like the terrorists are getting plot armor
        
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OverLord 6 Jan 2024, 15:56

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#panic# Missing chapters:

Chapter 466 The Weight of Secrets

Aron brought up Rina’s status screen. It was similar to the one his system generated for him, as he had used it as the core inspiration for the runes he’d used in its creation. It displayed everything that was known about her, like her name, height, and so on. It also included two entries showing whether or not she was awakened, and what system of magic she had awakened to. The field showing her individual magic system was blank at the moment, however, as it had yet to be discovered.

But none of that mattered just then, because the most important and attention-grabbing field—at least for Aron and Nova—was the affinity section of her status, which read “Affinity: neutral”.

The excitement on Aron and Nova’s face couldn’t be hidden, prompting Rina, who had yet to understand the importance of mana affinities, to ask, “What’s got you two so excited?”

“Having a neutral affinity is wonderful! Based on what we know, we expect that the majority of awakened will have an affinity to a certain type of mana. Fire, water, lightning, and so on. There are an unfathomable number of them, ranging from the easy-to-understand elements to more esoteric types, like time, space, faith, and so on. If a person has an affinity to a type of mana, they’ll find that mana to be the easiest to draw and will face a lot of difficulty if they want to draw other types of mana. And some will be outright impossible to draw. For instance, someone with an affinity to fire would find it impossible to draw water or ice mana, and would have a really hard time drawing earth mana.

“There’s also levels to consider, too. It seems like there are levels, from simple to complex, and those with simple mana affinities—like elemental mana-will find it extremely difficult to draw from the next level of complexity, and almost impossible to draw from two levels up. Three or more levels higher would be impossible for them to draw. For an example, the fire affinity awakened I used earlier would find it extremely difficult to draw lava mana, almost impossible to draw kinetic mana, and wouldn’t be able to draw any of the esoteric mana at all.

“We think that affinities can be manipulated. If you’re in an area with a lot of fire, for example, you would probably develop a fire affinity. People who were in a walk-in freezer, or at one of the poles, would probably develop an ice affinity. Basically, based on what we currently know about awakening and mana, your environment plays a big part in the affinity you become attuned to.

“In your case, your awakening was triggered by the burst of high-concentration aspectless mana triggered by the final stage of my evolution. Then that was compounded by the flood of aspectless mana you were exposed to during your awakening process itself, thanks to being in one of the pods in the vault here. Those two factors likely resulted in you having a neutral affinity to mana,” Aron excitedly explained.

“So what does that mean? I understand how it happened now... I think, but what can I do with neutral affinity? Does that mean I can only draw uh, what’d you call it? Aspectless mana?” Rina asked.

“Not exactly. Aspectless mana isn’t usually present anywhere. Mana is something like a building block, and we aren’t quite sure whether mana is present wherever the thing it’s aspected to is present, or if aspected mana has to be present for a thing to form. Like earth mana. We don’t know if the mana was what turned whatever basic building block the universe is made out of into rocks and soil, or if the rocks and soil themselves are responsible for concentrating earth mana in them.

“So your neutral affinity doesn’t, and can’t, mean that you can only work with aspectless mana. Instead, what it means is, you can work with ALL types of mana. So you can draw all of the elements, all of the derivatives, all of the mana from laws, and you can draw conceptual mana and perhaps even esoteric mana! I mean, the universe is fair, so your draw rate will likely be lower than an aspected awakened, but you, my dear,” he cupped her chin in his hand and gazed lovingly into her eyes, “are a jack of all trades and master of all.” Aron beamed at Rina.

“Does that mean I can use the golden letters like you?” Rina excitedly asked, imagining herself as a perpetual motion machine with the aid of the refresh rune.

“Unfortunately, no. My awakening was... unique, and related to my physique. You can’t cast runes unless you have the same, let’s say, mutation that I do.” Aron snapped his fingers and a model of his runic heart appeared, with a section highlighted like an illustration in an anatomy textbook that showed a portion of the billions of submicroscopic runic sentences carved into his heart.

“We also suspect that, since your awakening was triggered, rather than happening naturally, it’ll be difficult for you to learn to use your blessing. Those who naturally awakened should be able to instinctively use their blessings, but have you felt anything like that yourself? Without that instinct, you’ll have to learn everything from scratch. Either way, it takes repetition and training, together with researching the mana you want to use, to develop new abilities. So for now, we have to wait until we can gather data from the naturally awakened on how they use, and strengthen, their blessings before we can come up with a system for you to put your blessing to work,” Aron finished. Though he said that, he was already planning to buy beginner magical knowledge from the system and upload it to her—and the other awakened, for that matter, to act as their “instincts”—but he needed a cover for it that wouldn’t expose the system or his ability to upload information directly into someone’s brain. That was another secret he could only share with Nova.

Still, he was absolutely ecstatic that Rina was joining him as someone who could also use magic. Keeping that ability from her was beginning to weigh on him and he knew it would affect their relationship, eventually. Secrets are the heaviest thing known to man, and no matter how healthy a relationship was, keeping too many would cause it to crumble under their weight.

“We’ll know more in the future, but for now, you need some natural sleep. Your recent bout of unconsciousness can’t be considered ‘rest’, after all.”

Aron initiated a forced logout for the two of them and held her in his arms until they disappeared from the simulation.

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  OverLord
  
  OverLord 6 Jan 2024, 17:08 ➥ OverLord
  
  3 ⋅ 1
  
  #panic#
  
  Chapter 468 The Citizens Need Answers
  
  As people’s attention was split between the media’s reports on the growing economy and the progress of the Three Percenters receiving their blessings, a breaking news story intruded into the public consciousness via a link on everyone’s devices and a special report on every television screen and radio station. Following the link took people to a report about a bright light discovered in space headed toward Earth at an almost unimaginable speed.
  
  Located a few days before by a member of Australia’s Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales’ Siding Spring Observatory, it had at first been dismissed as a scanning artifact caused by a glitch in their system, or perhaps even a smudge on the telescope’s lenses. After taking the telescope offline and cleaning the lenses, they scanned again, only to make the alarming discovery that a meteor of unconscionable size was rapidly approaching Earth. But Australians being Australians, the discovery was met with a resounding “meh” and they simply sat down to identify the meteor before publishing what they claimed “will perhaps be the last scientific article ever published by a member of the human race”.
  
  And to their surprise, the meteor was identified within a matter of hours. The only confusing thing was why would 1 Ceres suddenly break its stable orbit and approach Earth with what appeared to be a stable acceleration?
  
  The Anglo-Australian Observatory astronomer who wrote the report skyrocketed to immediate fame when the media company interns that had assigned their AI assistants to constantly scan new entries to the Akashic Record for newsworthy events frantically pushed the report up their chains of command, leading to the broadcast. But by that point, when the newsrooms’ fact checkers verified the information on the Akashic Record, they saw that Ceres was decelerating and would reach Earth within a day.
  
  Then, the old habit of “selling fear” raised its ugly head again and the news anchors broke in with a breaking story about how Earth was doomed to be destroyed when a rogue meteor impacted it.
  
  The broadcast was noticed by Gaia, who issued takedown notices within seconds of the news anchors mentioning that the world was about to be destroyed, along with cutting the broadcast off the air and reporting the issue to Aron, who at that point was seriously regretting the laxity in his lese majeste laws.
  
  He wasted no time and immediately logged back in to the simulation and took to the podium again to address the situation. He could only internally apologize to Henry and his family, sending them a note that they could go ahead and plan whatever trip they wanted to take and he would be there with them, but he couldn’t be involved in the planning due to a situation that required his immediate attention.
  
  As he was logging in and taking his place behind the podium, Nova issued an “invitation” to the media to attend the imperial briefing, where they would be allowed to ask questions after the emperor’s prepared announcement. Naturally, the media all complied, rushing to log in to the simulation via the link provided in their invitations, which were actually just thinly veiled imperial commands. Having operated in politics for decades, the newly instated heads of the broadcasting companies—their predecessors having been shitcanned and blackballed for the previous snafu with their uncontrolled broadcasting of the cultist manifesto—knew what awaited them if they didn’t send their representatives to the briefing in a timely fashion.
  
  Aron panned his gaze across the sea of reporters, all of whom felt chills pass down their spine as they felt an emperor’s displeasure for the first time. None of them had ever seen him in person before, as the cleansing carried out in the broadcast conglomerates after the cultist manifesto fiasco had been extremely thorough; many previously famous newsrooms had been left with only interns and experienced backstage crew.
  
  “As you have discovered, there is an asteroid from the main asteroid belt approaching Earth at high speed and is expected to reach the planet within the day. But what you weren’t aware of, due to slipshod fact checking and upper-level management still subscribing to the philosophy that ‘fear sells’, is that there is no danger to the planet from the dwarf planet Ceres’ approach.”
  
  Aron gripped the sides of the podium, his entire bearing emanating righteous anger despite the lack of any expression on his face as he continued, “Had you, the media, actually done your jobs and investigated the phenomenon—something that Our policy of transparency in governance has made extremely simple—you would have discovered that.
  
  “But you either failed to do the research and investigation, or you were ordered to jump the gun and spread fear and panic among the citizens of the empire, still intent on profiting from the resulting chaos and misery. Regardless, it makes no difference, the news is out and the citizens need answers. So, answers they shall have.” The podium beneath his hands creaked and groaned as he gripped it with all the force he could muster, becoming more enraged with the media as the seconds ticked past.
  
  “So allow Us to elaborate on the situation. Two weeks prior to the empire’s formation, We sent ten unmanned vessels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter as part of an ongoing mission to survey and explore potential strongholds to use as a line of defense should the visitors prove to be headed our way with less-than-friendly intentions. The first ten vessels were to identify the ten largest asteroids in the belt and begin constructing nine sortie bases from which ARES can lead the defense of Earth.”
  
  He waved his hand and a map of the solar system as seen from above the elliptic appeared over his right shoulder, with markers and labels showing the position of the nine sortie bases currently under construction.
  
  “Though they are currently the only line of defense We are building, as Our defense and fortification plan progresses, the main asteroid belt will become Our last line of defense. Thus, it needs to be the strongest shield and tallest wall that humanity can build, so it was started even before the formation of the Terran Empire, giving it the longest possible lead time for construction and reinforcement. We will not speak more on that, as the Akashic Record is available to any who wish to know more, saving only critical details that are still classified.
  
  “But there was a different plan for the largest object in the main asteroid belt, 1 Ceres.” The display over Aron’s shoulder changed from a top-down view of the solar system to a close-up image of Ceres, with detailed information about it directly next to it.
  
  (Ed note: If you’ve ever played Mass Effect 2, it looks like the planet information screen that shows up when you’re scanning planets for resources.)
  
  “Ceres is a dwarf planet and the first of them to have been visited by humankind. It has an average diameter of 590 miles and is made up primarily of water ice, rock, organic compounds, and various metal and other mineral resources. The size and makeup of it made it perfect, both as a resource gathering point and as the endpoint of the first space elevator built by humanity.”
  
  A timelapse video of the proposed construction replaced the Ceres fact sheet displayed over his shoulder. It showed the dwarf planet being moved into stable geosynchronous orbit, then a line of woven carbon nanotubes extending from it to a currently unnamed island in the Eden-Esparian Archipelago, where it would be anchored deep within the Earth’s crust.
  
  “This is one of the many plans that have been put into place in order to reach the target goal of fifty percent readiness within Our promised timeline. Assuming that everything goes to plan, humanity’s defense should reach that readiness goal long before the five-year period that We promised approaches.”
  
  His gaze swept across the reporters in the audience again, much of his anger finally restrained. “Any questions?”
  
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    Zalgo-dono
    
    Zalgo-dono 8 Jan 2024, 01:56 ➥ OverLord
    
    1 ⋅ 0
    
    "" Localizado unos días antes por un miembro del Observatorio Anglo-Australiano de Australia en el Observatorio Siding Spring de Nueva Gales del Sur, al principio había sido descartado como un artefacto de escaneo causado por una falla en su sistema, o tal vez incluso una mancha en las lentes del telescopio. . Después de desconectar el telescopio y limpiar las lentes, escanearon nuevamente, solo para hacer el alarmante descubrimiento de que un meteoro de tamaño desmesurado se acercaba rápidamente a la Tierra. Pero como los australianos son australianos, el descubrimiento fue recibido con un rotundo "meh" y simplemente se sentaron a identificar el meteoro antes de publicar lo que, según afirmaron, "será quizás el último artículo científico jamás publicado por un miembro de la raza humana". ""
    
    WTF.........
    
    En serio, ya lleva muchos capitulos y me sigo preguntando que diablos les pasan a esos pobres australianos
    
    "" Su mirada recorrió de nuevo a los reporteros en la audiencia, y gran parte de su ira finalmente fue contenida. "¿Alguna pregunta?" ""
    
    Parece que Aron ya esta construyendo planes para erradicar a los pobres reporteros al causar problemas en la sociedad
    
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OverLord 1 Dec 2023, 17:21

6 ⋅ 0

Chapter 410: Jurassic Planet

Hellworld A-2485239/JS was a planet with ten times the diameter of Earth, putting it firmly in the category of “Super Earths". It was unique in that it was 90% land and only 10% water on the surface, but instead of being dry and arid, as one might expect, it was entirely covered in lush, tropical foliage. From orbit, it looked like a brilliant emerald, and seemed like it would be a nice place to take a camping vacation every now and then.
But that wasn't the case at all.
Code named "Jurassic Planet”, Hellworld A-2485239/JS was home to some of the most vicious species that Nova could design using all of the processing power at her disposal. The foliage was all either carnivorous, venomous, or poisonous, and the inhabitants were modeled after the most aggressive dinosaurs that could be proven to exist, then run through countless ution simulations to crank up their lethality to a ridiculous degree. Essentially, everything on the planet would eat anything that couldn't run fast enough to escape.
With a gravity ten times that of Earth and an atmospheric oxygen content of 41.82%, almost double that of Earth's 21%, everything on the planet grew to nearly eight times the size of an earthbound equivalent. And due to the foliage constantly expiring moist, warm air, the entire planet had one thing in common with tropical rainforests and jungles on Earth: it rained almost constantly. That contributed greatly to the general lack of water on the surface, as the greenery would thirstily absorb any water on, or even under, the surface, and what little watering holes were left became death
traps for smarter predators to prey on less intelligent predators.
1
Everything on Jurassic Planet was prey. ↑
Jose stepped out of his coffin, his uniform shedding the impact gel that had cushioned his impact with the surface. As the green slime pooled around him, he looked down and noticed that the tip of a root had poked through the surface detritus to investigate the moisture and heat source and was greedily sucking the liquid out of the gel, rendering it into powdered concentrate. Soon, he was left standing in a pile of vomit green powder.
He saw the root tip questing around, and when it neared his boots, he made the wise decision to relocate to somewhere else. Everything on the planet was a complete
unknown to him, in order to raise the standard he would be required to meet in order to successfully graduate his reaper training. For normal missions, the briefings entailed a mass of information; essentially everything he could possibly need to know would be stored on his implant for later recall, and everything he needed to do in order to accomplish the mission would be told to him by the person briefing him.
He stepped back and looked at an innocuous evergreen tree about twenty meters away from where he was at. He crouched, then, with a mighty thrust of his legs, leaped to the base of the tree he had spotted. Extending the climbing spikes from between the fingers of his hands and the soles of his boots, he scampered up the tree and took refuge in its thick cover of densely packed needles. Luckily for him, he was covered from head to toe in the most durable fabric the researchers at Lab City could come up with, because the tree he had just climbed was a hybrid of a gympie-gympie tree and poison oak, and its “needles” were actually a symbiotic plant that had evolved from poison ivy.
1
(Ed note: The gympie-gympie is one of the
most vicious examples of Australian wildlife. It's a venomous tree that actively
stings you and injects you with some of the most painful venom known to mankind; people have been driven to suicide by gympie-gympie stings. And the first aid for a gympie-gympie sting? Pour hydrochloric or sulfuric acid on the sting site after removing the stingers themselves.) 2 But he would discover that later. Likely the
next time he had to wipe his ass, given how active Sergeant Murphy tended to be during missions and deployments. He created a nest for himself, then turned
and looked out through the tight foliage. His coffin had already completely disappeared, and now resembled nothing more than an unremarkable lump of greenery against the veritable sea of green
in the background.
Checking his surroundings through all of
the different optics available to him, Tekillya made an initial map of his surroundings. Thanks to the size of the planet, the horizon was much farther away
to begin with, and with the added height
from the unnamed tree he was in, he now had a general threat map of everything within a fifteen-kilometer radius of where he was. He designated his landing spot as
Point Alpha and headed out, nimbly leaping from tree to tree and occasionally swinging from vines.
He leaped from a tree, targeting a vine that
was hanging down from a branch about ten meters away. It should have been an easy leap, but the vine jerked away from his reaching hand just as he was about to grasp it. Then he realized his mistake; that was no vine, but a snake!
The snake had been coiled up on a tree branch, camouflaging itself as a vine in order to entrap incoming prey. It'd long spotted the comparatively tiny figure and had just been waiting for him to fall into its clutches. As Jose fell to the branch below him with a thud and the creaking groan of
stressed wood, the snake released the
branch it had been waiting on and fell directly after the hapless reaper trainee.
Jose wasted no time and blinked in a specific pattern, disabling the safety on his eye laser. Firing it would destroy the biological camouflage of his left bionic eye, but remaining hidden in a sea of humanity
wasn't his mission this time. Survival was.
He opened his eyes wide and, when his targeting reticle passed over the snake, he fired the short-ranged eye laser at the rapidly approaching reptile.

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  OverLord 1 Dec 2023, 17:22 ➥ OverLord
  
  4 ⋅ 0
  
  411 As Long as They're Complaining, They're Fine
  
  The giant snake hissed as the fifteen-megawatt x-ray laser impacted its body. The laser was only focused on it for half a second, but that proved enough to cause severe damage. It had hit the snake in its midsection and almost immediately drilled through the thinner belly scales, then dug its way into the meat and muscle, where the flesh was almost instantly
  sublimated into vapor, which rapidly
  expanded with the force of a small bomb, blasting snake meat and blood in all directions. The snake was almost cut in half and landed limply atop Corporal Cuervo,
  who sighed in relief as the giant reptile hissed its last.
  He pushed it off of him and it draped lifelessly over the branch he was laying on, then shrugged and muttered, “Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?” 2
  Jose sat up on the branch and brushed himself off; his uniform was durable and hydrophobic, so it wouldn't absorb any liquids, but the idea of being covered in the blood and guts of one of his least favorite animals was still disturbing. He fell backward off the branch and did a backflip as he swiftly made his way to the jungle floor branch by branch. If he didn't retrieve his weapons, they would quickly be covered in roots and dragged below the ground to god knows where.
  After retrieving his swords, he climbed back up to where he left the snake and skinned it. The durable hide would serve him well as a makeshift sword belt, so he wouldn't risk dropping his weapons again. While he himself was a weapon, thanks to having so many implanted blades he was virtually a porcupine, the standoff range provided even by melee weapons would prevent quite a lot of injuries. After all, with six weeks before his mission ended, every injury he prevented meant his odds of survival increased exponentially.
  He cut the snakeskin into strips and braided it into a belt with a harness strap that wrapped around his waist and up his torso over his right shoulder. It would have been better if he could tan the skin into leather, but needs must when the devil drives, so he would make do with stiff rawhide. At least the belt and harness combination would allow him to reposition his swords for hip draw or back draw in case he needed to keep them out of the
  way.
  After the brief interlude with the snake, he continued forging a path and mapping his
  surroundings. His skin was capable of drawing and filtering water out of the atmosphere, his metabolism could be adjusted to control his hunger, and the quantum microcomputer in his brain could stimulate and restrict his hypothalamus gland, so he wouldn't feel overly cold or
  hot. He could even tolerate the harsh conditions of deep space for up to an hour before he started having his health impacted, if absolutely necessary.
  Thus, the regular rules of survival no longer
  applied to him, especially on a lush planet like the one he found himself on now. He needed neither water or shelter and could survive on virtually any organic material. It might not be tasty, and it might not provide everything he required, but for six weeks... tree bark would be sufficient as food.
  What he did need, however, was a safe resting place. His quantum microcomputer could regulate his sleep function, allowing half of his brain to rest while the other half was active, but that wasn't a long-term solution. Fatigue would catch up to him and he would need to go into a deep, uninterrupted sleep for at least a few hours every four or five days.
  So he continued moving outward from Point Alpha in an expanding spiral, mapping
  as he went in search of a cave that lacked a
  resident, or had a resident that was mean enough to scare off the rest of the violent inhabitants of Hellworld A-2485239/JS.
  Eight hours later, somewhere on the surface of Jurassic Planet.
  Jose had quickly learned to test every vine, tree trunk, and flower. He had discovered camouflaged snakes, parasitic foliage that had sap that could melt through his
  uniform, symbiotic insects that lived in the
  cracks between tree bark and would swarm out at the slightest disturbance, and flowers that puffed clouds of gas or spat venom. And those discoveries had come the hard way, as he now looked, as his
  stepdad would say, “like a horse that got rode hard and put away wet." Some of the hallucinatory gasses and spores puffed out of the flowers had even
  caused him to fall into hallucinations despite his implants regulating virtually every aspect of his physical body. It wasn't
  until his Al assistant, whom he had jokingly named Pontiac, had forcefully dragged him into VR until the effects of the gas wore off that he even realized he was in danger. Luckily, with his consciousness otherwise occupied, there was nothing driving him to throw himself into a flower to be eaten anymore. 1
  "It was a pretty flower at least, Pontiac,” he
  muttered as he thought back on his nearest death experience so far.
  {It was, Tekillya, but you know you'd never
  live that death down.}
  "Ha, I could think of better ways to go,
  sure," he chuckled, then pulled a ration cube from his storage compartment and resolutely chewed and swallowed it.
  "You know, Pontiac,” he began. “I almost wish I'd brought a water collector instead of relying on my hydration implants." {Why's that?} she asked, despite having an idea of what he would say next.
  "Because I just ate one of the ham and cheese omelette cubes and could really use something to rinse the taste out of my
  mouth with right about now," he complained. {Tekillya, do
  you know what they say about soldiers and chow?}
  "That we always get f#cked by the same
  'chefs' that design dog food and call it tasty?"
  {No,} she said. {They say that military chow
  is purposefully terrible so it gives the soldiers something to bitch about.} "Why would they do that?"
  {Because the only time you need to worry
  about a soldier is when they don't have
  anything to bitch about. As long as they're griping about something, they're doing just
  fine.}
  
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OverLord 29 Nov 2023, 14:55

6 ⋅ 1

Chapter 406: Don't Forget the Trojans

"Bring me to Aron,” Felix asked as he logged in to VR. With the growing number of people who had access and their varied tasks and locations, Nova had created a navigational VI aid.
Once he arrived at Aron's location, he couldn't help but curse in surprise. He was in a large, grassy meadow with Sarah, Henry, Rina, and all of the high-level leader Als. The meadow itself was about fifty meters across, and outside of it was nothing but devastation. Craters were scattered around the cracked, bare earth, and more were appearing every second as explosions continued booming out in the distance.
"What the hell is going on?" Felix wondered, his jaw dropped so far Sarah considered spawning an egg to stick in it to see if it would fit.
{Sir Aron is having a sparring session with mother,} Athena answered, pulling up a screen that showed the action in real time with slow motion replays for Felix.
After watching the footage for a few seconds, he asked, “Why fight with swords and magic if it's a sparring session? Isn't he just playing a game while the world is in such a mess?" To Felix's knowledge, what he was watching absolutely must be some kind of new game. There was no third human that knew of Aron's magic, and Felix was definitely not the second; Rina was.
But before anyone even began to answer, if anyone was going to in the first place, the spar came to an abrupt end. Aron was caught in one of Nova's attacks that cost him an arm, but in return, one final, massive explosion erupted, sending dirt and ashes billowing out from it. Then Nova's figure, shield and all, flew out of the cloud like a bullet headed to who knows where.
The spectating Als were shocked into a frozen state by the surprise ending. Throughout the thousands and thousands of sparring matches between Aron and Nova, this was the first time he had
survived and sent her to earn some frequent flyer miles. 1
Not too long later, Aron, whose arm had fully regenerated, appeared in front of the spectators and immediately celebrated by giving Henry a high five and Rina a hug and quick kiss.
{That was a surprising decision, sir. Did you plan to trade your severe injury for mother's defeat ahead of time?} Athena asked, looking at Aron in admiration tinged with reverence and a little bit of worship.
"It wasn't a difficult decision. The calculation was rather simple, and of course, the sacrifice was planned,” Aron answered.
"Hey there Felix, long time no see,” Aron said when he spotted his friend. He moved in for a hug, as if he really hadn't seen him in a very long time.
"It's only been a few days since we last saw
each other. What's with this 'long time no see' bullshit?” Felix sneered, though he reciprocated his friend's hug.
"Did you forget? Time dilation, remember-
it really has been a few weeks since I saw you last," Aron explained to his forgetful friend as they separated.
"Yeah, yeah, my bad... hey, listen. I had a question about your plans to deal with the rest of the world."
Aron nodded and listened to Felix lay out the examples he had come up with when discussing things with Raven. “I can see where you're coming from, and you're absolutely correct. At the moment, we already have hard evidence of about seven
thousand active rebel groups from all
around the world. And all of them show
signs of whipping up their own individual rebellions, if we don't stamp them out,” he said once Felix finished laying out his
argument.
"That many?” Felix asked in surprise.
"At least that many, yeah. We're pretty sure
there's more we have yet to discover. The loud ones we've found so far are all the dumb ones and will be easy enough to deal with. It's the ones that're smart enough to remain hidden we have to worry about. Plus, more will crawl out of the woodwork as we work on establishing the new world constitution, then even more once we shake things up by implementing it.
"But that's in the future. Right now, we've
got even more groups. Not every armed organization is going to be fighting for their ideological beliefs. There were already a bunch of organizations that already existed before the war. Terrorist
groups like ISIS, drug cartels, street gangs... none of them are exactly ideological in nature, but we've already affected their
profits and bottom lines. If we add all of them to the mix, there's about fifteen thousand different groups of varying size that we currently know of."
"What about the smart ones? What're you
doing about those?” Felix followed up with a shudder. He couldn't even imagine how capable someone would have to be to hide from Aron, of all people.
"They won't remain hidden forever. The moment they attempt anything, we'll spot them and deal with them” Aron had everything under control.
"So why just keep an eye on them instead
of doing something about them?” Felix
asked.
"Who says we aren't? We've already implemented a hearts and minds strategy for the ones we can do that for. A little
charity goes a long way for most of the angry people, and without angry people, insurrections will always fail. But some are trickier to deal with. For those, we're gathering evidence against them as we speak, but it isn't an overnight process. Even though we can wipe them out, and
easily at that, doing so without just cause would just reinforce my image as a villain in people's minds. Then I'll be a barbarian who's using my power just because I can,
and that wouldn't be good at all,” Aron said. He knew very well just how corrupting an influence absolute power was; he had personally experienced it, and both Islamabad and Delhi had paid the price for
his lesson. Thus, letting himself act extrajudicially would form a bad habit that would backfire on him hard in the future.
"As for the rest, well... what better way to prevent people from joining rebel groups than to take their focus from me and put it firmly onto something else?” he continued with an enigmatic smile on his face. "Weapon of mass distraction? What've you
got planned in that devious scheme factory of yours?" Felix rolled his eyes. Instead of saying anything, Aron snapped
his fingers and the two friends were teleported into space. In front of and slightly below them was Jupiter and behind them was the sun. “Welcome to the Trojan Asteroids," he said. “To your left is the
asteroid field known as the 'Greek Camp', and to your right is the 'Trojan Camp'. There's an asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter as well, but,” he snapped his fingers
and the two teleported to a vast, empty stretch of space, “you're standing in it now.
The Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and
Jupiter only has about as much mass as our moon, if you were to gather all of the asteroids together into one celestial body. The distances involved make it difficult to exploit, unlike in Hollywood where spaceships are always dodging tightly packed clusters of asteroids while dogfighting in them."
He snapped his fingers and they teleported back to the Trojan Asteroids, then pointed at a fast-moving object headed toward the
Greek Camp. "That, my friend, is the future. Prospecting and exploiting resources farther out in the solar system instead of on our mother planet. And do you see what I'm pointing to? That's one of our flagbearers. I launched it the other day?”
He snapped his fingers and they returned to the grassy meadow where the rest of the people who had watched Nova and him spar from. "Other than that, VR itself should be enough to distract people. But space is Important with a capital I, especially since we're going to be welcoming our first guests very soon."

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  OverLord 29 Nov 2023, 14:55 ➥ OverLord
  
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  Chapter 407: Corpses if Necessary, Prisoners if Possible
  
  Nova appeared out of nowhere right next to Felix. If people in the simulation had to deal with biological processes, he would have shat himself in surprise.
  {Sir, something's come up that requires your urgent attention,} she reported to Aron.
  "What's up?" Aron calmly asked, as if he were a pillar that could hold up the sky if it fell on him.
  {We discovered that a large number of Edenian and Esparian citizens have gone missing in a few countries. They all disappeared at roughly the same time over the course of an hour or two.}
  "How many citizens in total, and which countries did they disappear from? What were they there for? Are the
  disappearances done, or are people still going missing?" Aron asked, this time with a distinct chill in his tone. He had a few ideas of why his people would be going missing, and none of them were pleasant.
  {Fifty-seven people disappeared hours after arriving in Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Brazil, and Guatemala,} Nova said. She brought up a large screen and split it into sections, each displaying information about one of the missing individuals, like their travel itineraries and reasons for visiting those countries.
  Aron glanced at the screen, memorizing its contents, then immediately came up with the most likely culprit. “Cartels,” he spat.
  {That is the most likely possibility, sir. As long as the missing people passed through customs, the cartels would have almost instantly learned about their arrival. Most government officials in those countries have been bought and paid for by at least one cartel, perhaps more, and controlling the people coming into and leaving from their countries would be a routine matter for them. The cartels wouldn't even have to provide special bribes.
  {I think they're trying to gather leverage to use against us so they don't end up like the Sinaloa or Medellin cartels. After all, the likelihood of them having realized that their people were killed is high, especially after the public reprisal attack carried out from the former territory of the Sinaloas.}
  "What's Athena got planned to resolve the situation?"
  {She's tasked Panoptes with tracking them through the Panopticon network and ordered the Beowulf to adjust her patrol
  route to pass over Central and South
  America. Reaper teams three, seven, eleven, eighteen, and twenty-two are on
  standby for rescue and extraction operations once the targets are located.}
  Athena appeared next to Nova and saluted Aron. {Sir, requesting permission to use orbital insertion protocols for the reaper deployments upon locating the targets.} "Granted," Aron said. "But let the reapers know that I have a use for live captives this time. Corpses if necessary, but prisoners if possible. Either way, I want zero fugitives. Also, zero collateral damage. The high civilian death toll from the recent fighting
  is already causing enough problems, no need to increase that number even higher. He could always put them on trial once the new world constitution was implemented. Every criminal captured between now and then would likely be enough to fill a court's docket for months, if not years. Especially since they would all still be guaranteed due process.
  {Affirmative, sir,} Athena said, then saluted again and disappeared.
  Nova smiled and disappeared as well. She
  enjoyed acting as Aron's secretary; it
  reminded her of how things were in the beginning, when she was just an assistant and limited to the tiny server he had built in his parents' basement. Ever since then, those menial jobs had been delegated to lower and lower authority levels in the AI hierarchy she was building, and while she appreciated that Aron valued her so highly, it was sometimes nice to do simple things,
  like pass messages.
  It was like how chefs with dozens of Michelin-starred restaurants under their name would enjoy bologna and processed cheese sandwiches on plain, cheap white bread from time to time as a reminder of
  their childhoods.
  Aron turned to Felix, who was looking at him with a complicated expression on his face, and asked, “Where were we? Ah,
  right... VR."
  "How can you be so calm right now?” Felix blurted out.
  "It's because this is exactly one of the
  things we foresaw being a possibility, so we've already got a contingency plan in place to counter it. Since we already expected it and a plan was put in place long
  before now, it's actually more of a relief that it's happening than something to worry about. Besides, the best possible
  people for the job are already on it, so if I worry about the situation, all it'll do is
  show that I lack faith in the people I trained," Aron explained.
  Felix took a minute to digest that, and
  found it plausible. He nodded and his entire body seemed to relax as the discussion picked back up. “Back to what we were discussing before.
  With space exploration to keep their bodies
  occupied and separated, and virtual reality games to keep their minds busy, people simply won't have time to plot and carry out rebellions. Nor will they have the angry recruits they need to grow. And even if
  they choose to go the way of the luddites,
  they'll just be left behind as the world advances past them.
  (Ed note: Luddites were people who, during the industrial revolution of the early 19th century, fought against the advance of
  technology and would often attack and destroy textile mill machinery in order to keep their jobs. In the modern sense, it's anyone that refuses to “keep with the
  times”, much like the Amish people of the US.)
  3
  "Which is why Sarah and you have a few months ahead of you where you'll be spending your sleep time in VR so you have
  enough time to deal with things,” Aron finished.
  Felix unconsciously hunched his back, remembering the frantic lead-up to the first GAIA product launch and all the work
  it entailed for him and Sarah. Aron watched Felix's internal struggle, which had caused his face to twitch and his
  expression to contort, and could barely keep himself from laughing. “Don't worry so much. It may be a painful next few months, but the pain now will decide
  whether the empire we build will last for centuries, millennia, or millions of years. That's why we need to focus on every
  single little detail now,” he reassured his
  old friend.
  Felix's eyes sprang open and almost popped
  out of his face. He finally knew what Aron
  was planning to do after winning the war: creating an empire and crowning himself emperor. “What?” he blurted out, not
  entirely sure that there wasn't a glitch in the simulation or if he was hallucinating. Aron didn't say a word, just gave his friend
  an enigmatic smile, then bent down to
  meet Henry, who was running over to him with childlike glee. “Brother, I want to fight like you do!” the
  boy said once he was in his big brother's embrace. 5
  “Just a minute, my minion,” Aron said, then
  turned to Felix and continued, "You'll know more later, but for now, leave me something in reserve to surprise you guys
  with."
  He disappeared with his little brother, off to play "games" that were well-disguised training programs that would prepare Henry for the time when Aron finally
  learned how to inscribe runic hearts.
  Aron had decided that Henry would be the second runemaster of humanity, and would bring that about by his own hand.
  
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    OverLord
    
    OverLord 29 Nov 2023, 14:56 ➥ OverLord
    
    5 ⋅ 1
    
    Chapter 408: The Making of a Reaper
    
    {Corporal Jose Cuervo, report to docking bay two. Corporal Jose Cuervo to docking bay two.}
    Corporal Jose "Tekillya” Cuervo had graduated from Athena's basic ARES training course two months ago, VR time, and his performance assessment had qualified him to become a Reaper after the initial training was complete. He picked up his black-and-gray ARES duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder, and rushed to The VR training facility was as realistic as anything else in the simulation and recruits were required to eat, perform the biological necessities, sleep, and everything else, just as they were in reality. 1
    He had completed the majority of his Reaper training and been on “leave” for the time it took his special enhancements to be implanted in the Reaper-specific VR pod, a hybrid medical pod and ARES training pod. All that was left for him to do was one final training mission, during which he would become accustomed to the performance of his newly enhanced body, and upon its successful completion, he would be a full-fledged member of a reaper team.
    Tekillya could hardly wait.
    After loading himself and his baggage onto the shuttle in docking bay two of the
    sprawling ARES training facility, he
    strapped himself in for departure and
    waved a screen into existence that detailed the implants that would soon be at his command.
    [Skeletal structure reinforcements. Super magnesium sheaths reinforce the bones of a reaper's skeleton and increases their shock, impact, and weight resistance by 900%]
    (Ed note: Allite© is an alloy that's lighter than titanium and aluminum, stronger than the strongest grade of titanium, and more than twenty times as shock absorbent as aluminum. The actual ratio of elements that make up the alloy are a trade secret, but they've disclosed that it's an alloy of magnesium, aluminum, and rare earth elements. It's commonly called super magnesium.)
    [Muscle replacement. Approximately one-third of type one and half of type two skeletal muscles replaced by liquid crystal elastomers, increasing muscle strength by 750% and reducing lactose acid buildup by
    50%]
    [Organ shock webbing....]
    [Bionic eye replacements....]
    [Subdermal carbon nanotube weave......]
    [Internal combat pharmacy....]
    [Implanted healer nanite colony....]
    [Implanted nanite power armor colony....]
    [Microfusion power plant....]
    [Thigh storage compartments....]
    [Extendable elbow, wrist, and knee
    blades....]
    [Quantum microprocessor....]
    [Oxygen recyclers....]
    The list went on, with more than a hundred
    and fifty new additions to Corporal Cuervo's meatsack that would vastly improve his capabilities and place him head and shoulders above the ARES troopers.
    With these tools, he would be an elite among the elites, a powerhouse capable of singlehandedly bringing entire countries, or even perhaps worlds, to heel.
    He pictured himself striding through a battlefield, his customized reaper power armor around him and distinctive, scythe-shaped rifle in hand, leaving a
    corpse in his wake with every step he took
    forward, and he couldn't wait. He was no ammosexual, nor was he a superpatriot, but he was definitely interested in being the best possible version of himself. 1
    And that best possible version was Corporal Jose "Tekillya” Cuervo, of Reaper Team whichever.
    After reading through the documentation
    on his new implants, he settled in to sleep for the rest of the journey to whichever hellhole Athena had dreamed up for his final training exercise. It may be the last sleep he would get for quite some time.
    {Docking complete. Passengers, please debark following the guidelines on the deck.} Corporal Cuervo woke with a start,
    instantly going from deep sleep to full alertness as only highly trained soldiers could do. He unstrapped himself from his seat and stood up, retrieving his duffle bag and waiting for the light of the guideline to show him it was his turn to leave the
    shuttle.
    After finally leaving the shuttle, he found
    himself in a satellite base roughly the size the International Space Station used to be. As the design of the ISS was, by Aron and Nova's standards, reasonably intelligent in both design and construction processes, they had adopted that as the design for
    manned space outposts. After all, it was relatively easy to print and launch prefabricated modules that would be assembled in space, so even in the field,
    where Aron refused to deploy any atomic printers other than task-specialized ones, they would still be convenient for use. Making his way to the conference room, Jose dropped his duffel outside the hatch
    and entered to receive his mission briefing.
    {Your task is to drop on hellworld A-2485239/JS and survive for six standard weeks. Due to the hostile nature of the
    wildlife and vegetation on the planet, you will be dropping via cold coast orbital insertion. No equipment beyond what you can hold in your hands and storage compartment implants is allowed. Implant
    usage is allowed, and encouraged,} the simulated officer said.
    {This is your final training mission. After
    this, you will be a reaper if you succeed, or scrubbed and recycled if you fail.} The
    briefing officer was referring to the mindwipe procedure the training pods were all capable of. {Mission begins as soon
    as you reach the transport module and
    enter your stealth insertion pod. Dismissed!}
    Jose chose to fill one storage compartment
    with food and water purification tablets,
    use the other compartment for a length of rope and other miscellaneous survival supplies, and carry a pair of monomolecular vibroswords in his hands.
    After receiving his requested issue from the supply officer, he made his way to the orbital insertion module and looked for his assigned IDMO, or Insertion and Drop
    Model, Orbital. That was the Lab City researchers' name for it, but due to their
    size, shape, and purpose, the people who were "lucky" enough to use them for their
    actual purpose had another name for them: coffins.
    Once he found his coffin, Corporal Cuervo took a few deep breaths, replayed the last few hours in his mind-from the time he stepped aboard the transport shuttle to the time he arrived in the IDMO module—then clasped his hands in prayer and looked
    upward for about thirty seconds or so.
    Once his preparations were complete, Corporal Jose "Tekillya” Cuervo climbed into his coffin and sealed it shut from the inside. The next few weeks would determine whether or not he had what it took to be a Reaper.
    
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      OverLord
      
      OverLord 29 Nov 2023, 14:57 ➥ OverLord
      
      5 ⋅ 0
      
      Chapter 409: Hibernating and Hallucinations
      
      Jose slammed the door of his house, stomped up the stairs, and dropped his backpack on the floor before throwing himself into his bed. He buried his face in his pillow and screamed as hard as he could, then broke down into giant, hiccuping sobs that wracked his entire body.
      "Why? Why? Why, why, why, why, whywhywhywhy..." he sobbed, slamming his fists into the mattress for emphasis.
      Someone knocked on his bedroom door and he turned his pimpled face to the side and screamed, “GO AWAY!” Then he buried his face back into his pillow and continued sobbing, but wordlessly this time.
      He thought back to earlier in the day, when he was standing in line in the cafeteria to pick up his subsidized “poor people lunch” when the starting pitcher of their school baseball team sat down at the table next to where he was standing in line and loudly laughed about his name. The pitcher's belief was that Jose was named after expensive tequila because his parents were dirt poor and couldn't afford any, and it was all Jose's fault for wasting all of their money.
      Jose had clenched his fists hard enough to leave white fingernail imprints in the skin of his palms as the pitcher continued chatting and laughing with his friends, one of the spirit squad dance team members hanging off of his neck.
      He finally got his food tray and was walking back to find an empty seat when he stumbled over the outstretched leg of another of his bullies. His severe acne, braces, and short, weak stature definitely hadn't qualified him to join the popular crowd, so he could only join their target list. High school was just that brutal.
      More knocking came at his bedroom door, followed by his mother's muffled voice asking if he was okay. The concern was
      audible, even through the door, so he
      invited her in.
      "Mom, why did you name me Jose Cuervo? We aren't even Mexican!" he sniffled.
      His mother, Katrina, laughed and said, "Well, your father was a bartender and I was a cocktail waitress at the bar he worked at." She wrapped her arm around Jose's shoulders and pulled him into her embrace. “And we were young, dumb, and full of cum. We fell in love with each other almost within minutes of meeting, and later that week, we fooled around in the back seat of his car. When I found out I was pregnant...” she ruffled her son's hair, “we panicked! But it was never about the
      pregnancy, since we already knew we
      would spend the rest of our lives together. Instead, we were panicking over what to name you!" She grinned.
      "So we went back and forth for a few days, thinking up names, and finally settled on naming you after something that reminded us of what brought us together. A shitty little dive bar brought you into our lives, but 'The Pink Pussycat' doesn't really scream name material. So we figured we would name you after the first drink someone ordered that night and you ended
      up being Jose Cuervo. If you were a girl, you'd be Midori. And count yourself lucky, brat," she giggled, “because we almost named you Pontiac Sunfire, for the car you were conceived in!" 1
      "MOOOOMMMM! TMI!" Jose screeched,
      going beet red in the face....
      {Coast phase complete. Prepare for
      unpowered entry.}
      Corporal Cuervo woke up to the neutral
      tone of the VI in his coffin. He hated cold
      coasting; he always had truly weird, vivid dreams when his implants put him into hibernation. It wasn't a unique affliction, either, as nearly every reaper trainee had the same issue with their hibernation state. It seemed like it put them into such a deep sleep that their brains dredged up the most deeply buried memories and replayed them in high definition with full surround sound
      audio.
      (Ed note: “Cold coasting” is a relatively uncommon(ish) term in some science fiction novels that refers to the act of coasting unpowered through a star system to avoid detection by technologically advanced civilizations. In this novel, we'll be using it for the same thing, stealthily inserting forces onto planets or into star systems that are populated by hostiles.) The coffin heated up around him as it
      skipped across the outer layer of hellworld A-2485239/JS' atmosphere. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, checked his internal storage and implant supply levels
      of combat drugs and other assorted pharmaceuticals, doublechecked the
      swords in his hands, then asked, “ETA to
      landfall?"
      {Approximately eight minutes, corporal.}
      The reaper trainee settled back into the impact cushions, or "crash pads" as they were called, and closed his eyes, delving into the quantum microcomputer in his brain. He took a few seconds going through
      file name after file name, then finally found what he was looking for: the video letter his mother and stepfather had recorded for him when the ARES recruiters contacted
      them to ask for one. A standard procedure in the recruitment process was to ask for video letters from loved ones for the troopers to play.
      Ever since his father had died in a bar
      brawl where his parents had both worked,
      Jose and his mother had grown closer and
      closer. At first it was by necessity; they were the only two people left in their family after his father's passing and they had to rely on each other. But later, it was
      because they had developed a truly deep, healthy affection for each other. To Jose, Katrina Jones was the absolute best mother on the planet. And to Katrina, Jose Cuervo
      was the absolute best son she could ever have asked for.
      Katrina had remarried later, but the bond between the mother and son pair was never severed, or even damaged. Jose's new dad, Dave, had made sure to respect his
      wife and step-son, and had been the first person to encourage him and teach him to for himself, his family, and his
      stand
      beliefs.
      up
      Jose and Katrina both considered their
      lives better for the presence of the new man in it, both then and now.
      Seven minutes and fifty-three seconds later, Corporal Cuervo's coffin came crashing to the ground and the lid popped
      off. Impact gel flowed out of the pod, followed by a reaper. Hellworld A-2485239/ JS was about to be introduced to one of
      humanity's most finely tuned and improved killing machines.
      
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OverLord 27 Nov 2023, 14:56

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Chapter 404: Error Not Found

Inside a dimly lit, dusty basement room, a group of people with anger on their faces were seated on steel folding chairs. The only sound was the creaking of the unfinished basement ceiling and the
occasional dust being knocked off of it and falling to the floor as someone in the house above stomped around like an upstairs neighbor. But no matter how loud the stomping echoed against the rust-red-spotted cement floor of the basement, the only disturbance was to the spiders that had spun their webs between the exposed wooden beams in the ceiling.
Soon, the stomping above stopped and a door creaked open. Everyone seated in the basement swiveled their heads as one and looked at the stairs, where a shiny leather shoe appeared. Then a leg covered in tan slacks, followed by the hem of a navy blue blazer. When the man wearing the slacks and blazer turned the corner on the stairs, the blazer fell open and showed the blue and white horizontal stripes on the thin sweater beneath it, which had the collar of a white shirt peeking out from its neck.
The man wearing the ensemble seemed young,
but was actually a well-maintained
man in his early thirties.
He walked around the group seated on the folding chairs and stepped up onto a comparatively clean wooden pallet, then began speaking.
"A week ago, we witnessed the birth of a
devil. A brutal one, that etched his
atrocities into the memories of every living person on Earth,” he began, casting a penetrating gaze across the people seated in front of him. His eyes seemed to contain the vicissitudes of time, as if he had seen hell and returned.
“The devil slaughtered more innocent civilians in a matter of five hours than died from the beginning to end of the bloodiest war in history, and no one is doing anything about it. Why is no one stepping forward and decrying this brutal monster? They're afraid! They're pathetic, weak, cowards that have bowed before the altar of the devil's overwhelming power!
"All of those deaths were needless. Since the devil is so powerful, he could have avoided them. He could have let those innocent people in Bhopal live, and those innocent people in Faisalabad. Surely, he could have healed instead of destroyed, but he didn't! He chose to destroy because he enjoys the misery of others. And once tasted that misery, he didn't stop there, oh no. He ordered two thriving capital cities to
be wiped clean from the map!
"And he blamed the destruction he
wrought on terrorists," the speaker spat. “It was so convenient for him that those 'terrorists"," he raised his hands and made air quotes, "somehow managed to steal nuclear weapons and just so happened to be in those cities at just the right time for him to 'force' them to detonate the weapons." The man's voice fell to a hoarse whisper as he continued, “How utterly... coincidental.
"Among the twenty-six million innocent men, women, and children slaughtered, which of them were not someone's mother? Their father? A loving husband or
a caring wife? A mother's son or a father's daughter? Uncles, aunts, sisters, lovers, crushes, future leaders, future saviors, future sportsmen and women, future teachers...." He paused, closing his eyes and bowing his head. After a moment of silence, he continued, “But they were all killed. All of their lives were cut short without mercy." The man's voice cracked and a tear trailed down his face.
He took a deep, shuddering breath, then continued, “He needlessly sank ship after ship filled with heroes who stood up to
fight against him. He polluted space, preventing us from defending ourselves against the hostile aliens coming to enslave
us all and rape our planet. He captured tens of thousands of people from all around the world and is holding them in dank torture rooms, torturing them without a trial! And now! Now he wants to 'unite the world' under his brutal and barbaric rule!
"And what do our foolish and spineless 'leaders' have to say? NOTHING! They refuse to tell him to stop, they refuse to raise up heroes to send the devil back to hell where he belongs! They refuse to fight, due to cowardice, shared interests, and oppression! NO ONE IS DOING
ANYTHING!" The man clenched his fist and
slammed it against the palm of his other
hand hard enough for the smacking sound of flesh meeting flesh to startle the silent audience and make them jump in their chairs.
The man conveniently left out the part
about the world being the aggressor in the recent conflict, then continued his speech. “Just because the devil has overwhelming power, should we allow him to tamper with our dignity?!" he shouted.
"NO!" the listeners cried in unison.
"Does it mean we should allow him to
desecrate our freedom!?"
"NO!" the listeners chorused once again.
"Will we allow his atrocities to go
unpunished?!"
"NO!"
"Will we allow him to rule us like animals?!"
"NO!"
"Will we sit back and watch as the devil
does whatever he wants!?"
"NO!!"
"Are we among the cowards?"
"NO!!"
"Are we among the scared?” "NOOOOOO!!" The audience leapt from their feet and thrust their fists into the air
as they screamed and hollered at the top of their lungs, causing another cascade of dirt and dust to fall from the basement ceiling, disturbing the spiders lurking in their webs once again. Their shouting was so loud it looked like even the filthy cinderblock walls seemed to be shaking. "Then we must punish this devil! Join me on
a journey to seek justice! A journey to
regain our dignity! A journey to set, things, right!!” the man shouted, hammering his fist against his other hand with the last
three words.
The audience went wild, thrusting their
fists in the air and shouting at the top of their lungs, going red in the face and stomping on the cement floor.
The man secretly smiled to himself, seeing the rage he had whipped up in his audience. He let them continue for more
than a minute, then gestured for silence. Once the listeners had retaken their seats, his manner grew stern and he set his face in a grave expression as he continued, “The
journey will not be easy. There will be many obstacles, and many of us will die.” The room grew a bit gloomier and a chill
ran down the spines of those listening to the man speak.
"Yes, many of us will die, but it is a sacrifice
we must be willing to make. One that is worthy of holding our heads high in the
afterlife, where we shall meet again as victors! As the punishers of the devil! As the
saviors of Earth, and humanity! We will be able to hold our heads high for all of eternity!" he shouted, causing the listeners
to applaud and cheer once more, completely stripped of the fear they had felt moments before when reminded of the
might of their enemy.
But now, with that assurance, they knew
that none of their lives would be wasted
and everything would be for the greater good. For the eventual victory in the fight of good and evil, they would proudly go to their deaths with their chests puffed out and heads held high. Against the backdrop of cheering and
applause, the man standing on the pallet bowed his head, clasped his hands in prayer, and loudly prayed, “May the devil
perish at our hands, and may our sacrifices be worthy?"
Although he said that, in his mind, he was thinking something completely different. 'Sheep, he thought as he smiled brightly at the group of people in front of him,
meeting their eyes and enthusiastically shaking their hands.

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  OverLord
  
  OverLord 27 Nov 2023, 14:57 ➥ OverLord
  
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  Chapter 405: The Technological
  
  Advantage
  Felix was leaning back on the couch in his office, his feet crossed on the coffee table and hands clasped behind his head, obviously in deep thought.
  {What's wrong, sir?} Raven, his personal AI assistant asked. {You seem to be zoning out a lot these days.} Felix had remained unmoving in his position for more than twenty minutes, the rise and fall of his chest and blinking eyelids his only movements.
  "Nothing, I'm just trying to figure out where things are going to go from here. It's been a week since the countries signed their individual surrender accords, but no matter how I think about things, I can't see a peaceful resolution. There's guaranteed to be problems in the future, no matter what,” Felix sighed.
  {What makes you say that?} she asked.
  "History"
  {Do you mean how those who fail to learn from history's lessons are doomed to repeat it?}
  “Exactly. Every time one nation
  overwhelmed another and received their surrender or succeeded in an annexation, an insurgency has arisen from within just as things seemed to calm down. Those insurgencies cause a lot of issues for the winners by targeting their weaknesses. Aron may be the strongest person alive and have the most overwhelmingly powerful military that's ever been seen, but he's still sure to have weaknesses. Nobody can be that powerful in every aspect,” Felix explained.
  "Just take the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, for instance. In 1979, they invaded Afghanistan to aid the communist forces in Kabul fight off various insurgent forces, including the Taliban and al-Qaeda, who was known as the ‘Afghan Arabs' back then.
  "The Soviets had every advantage in that fight. They had a strong military, high morale, the more technologically advanced weapons, and the numbers on their side. By all rights, they should've had an easy time taking out some small, weak insurgent groups. But that wasn't the case! Their incursion in support of Kabul caused a decade-long conflict between the Soviets and Afghani insurgent groups that finally ended with a Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a full decade later.
  “Then in 2001, al-Qaeda reared their head again and carried out a terror attack on the United States, leading to another conflict that lasted up until a week or so ago. The American War on Terror.
  "We declared war on al-Qaeda and the Taliban in October of 2001, yet despite outnumbering and outgunning them in every aspect, they still managed to drag out the war for more than fifteen years. And it would've dragged on even longer if Aron hadn't come around and basically ended all wars. And those two are in living memory. If we go back even further, there are even
  more examples.
  "Like after World War I, when the Ottoman
  Empire lost and the allied powers tried carving it up. The Turks rose up and fought back under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who started the Turkish War of Independence that resulted in the formation of modern-day Turkey. Going even further back, the Koreans fought back against Japanese invaders, and so did the Chinese. Or we can go forward to the French Resistance against the Third Reich after France surrendered to Germany.
  "Basically, every time an overwhelming force comes up, a resistance group springs up like weeds to fight against it. But now it'll be even more severe. Instead of one nation stomping another nation into a mudhole, or alliance versus alliance, this time it was one nation against literally every other nation in existence," Felix explained.
  "So now that Aron's military has displayed
  its might, I'm worried that there'll be
  of
  hundreds, if not thousands of groups 'freedom fighters' cropping up everywhere
  around the world. Hell, it wouldn't surprise
  me at this point if the Atlanteans came back to the surface from some underwater city somewhere," he griped.
  {Opposition will naturally always exist, but
  that doesn't mean it'll be impossible to deal with,} Raven said. {I'm sure Sir Aron and mother are already aware of the issue and have made plenty of plans to deal with any situations that may arise.} She had full confidence in Aron and Nova to have
  foreseen such an obvious issue. If even Felix, who she privately thought was perhaps a little on the slow side, could see
  it, his boss most certainly could... right? "I know, I know. I was mostly thinking of how I would handle it if it were me in the hot seat. The only lesson history teaches is that nobody's ever learned a single thing
  from history, and I'm sure I'm no exception to that. It's more morbid curiosity than anything else," Felix grumped.
  {If you're putting yourself in the 'hot seat',
  so to speak, then you also have to consider the technological advantage that Sir Aron and mother have over those historical
  forces. Would the Turkish War for Independence have succeeded if King Constantine had the Panopticon? Or would
  the Chinese Boxer Rebellion have lost to the Eight-Nation Alliance if they had SLEEK suits and pulse rifles? Would Osama
  bin Laden have survived as long as he did if the Americans had Poseidon Navy's carrier fleet and Titan's Wrath cannons? Would the
  Viet Cong have forced American forces to withdraw if they had the training our Reaper teams go through? Or would World
  War I ever have started if Archbishop
  Ferdinand had an ARES Aegis team guarding him?
  {Even if you take ten thousand steps back,
  what do you think would be the result of putting nyxians up against the FBI and KGB during the cold war?}
  Raven had many more examples available,
  but she figured those would be more than enough specific instances. {In every case where insurgency forces troubled the
  winners of conflicts in the past, it's always been when the difference between the two wasn't that large. And that isn't the case
  here. You can think of it like this: Sir Aron and ARES going up against modern forces is no different from the pre-9/11 American
  military being put on a battlefield against a military from the Bronze Age. That's how
  much of a lead Sir Aron currently has against the rest of the world, and that's
  even when he wasn't really focusing on building forces to face terrestrial foes,} she explained.
  {Our side's only limitation is the number of
  people under the ARES umbrella, but that isn't a limitation that'll last forever. And as fast as Sir Aron can build up his forces, I'm sure he'll be shoring up that weakness before the insurgencies can grasp it.}
  "I suppose that's true. I'll go see what he's up to myself," Felix said. Raven had put his mind at ease, and once he put down the impossible task of trying to think like his supergenius best friend, he realized he
  hadn't seen him in quite some time.
  
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    OverLord 27 Nov 2023, 14:57 ➥ OverLord
    
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    #panic# The latest chapters made available by #ItsPeppe#
    
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