Re: Tales of the Rune-Tech Sage

Chapter 906: Reality of Vacation

CH906 Reality of Vacation I

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Around the same time, Alex’s retainers had reached their homes—or at least, what served as a semblance of one.

In this era of Interplanar travel, the purchase and sale of Outer beings by denizens of Pangea had created a rich Outer being presence within Pangea.

True to its role as a Primary Plane, Pangea served as a meeting spot—albeit largely unwanted—not only for various intelligent races, but also for beings from across the planes.

Perhaps one of the most well-known Outer being groups now residing on Pangea was the Dravo Barbarians.

Originally merely a clan of barbarians who offered their services as mercenaries to different Pangean noble houses, the Dravo Barbarians had grown into a household name on the Plane.

This was so much so that the Barbarian Clan had managed to secure a fiefdom within the Virellian Empire, which served as one of their important centres where Virellian nobles sought Dravo Barbarians who had just come of age.

Although the mercenary life was fickle and dangerous, it had become the way of the Dravo Clan, creating a norm where scions of the Clan sought to enter the employ of the nobility.

A wyvern carriage landed on Dravo territory, dropping off the hulking figure of Mogal.

Immediately after arriving, Mogal made his way to the tent of his teacher, who taught him the way of the Beast Totem and the Dravo Clan’s Pugilist tempering manual.

However, unlike most long-lost reunions, Mogal didn’t meet a worrying elder at home. Instead, he met a drill instructor who questioned his strength and immediately dragged Mogal off to the Dravo Clan’s colosseum, built within the territory.

Mogal was pitted against a powerful Class 3 magical beast, and after a gruelling battle that saw him release the Chains of Unyielding, Mogal narrowly won the fight.

However, in victory, Mogal earned the approval of the Dravo Clan.

Not only did he receive a round of applause from his fellow clansmen as he exited the arena floor, but he was also met with appreciative looks from the Clan warriors whom he and his teacher passed on their return to his tent house.

And with that, Mogal earned recognition for his master—recognition that would allow said master to take more Dravo clansmen under his wing.

Though this was good news, Mogal, however, didn’t rush to call and inform Alex. After all, the number of worthy Dravo clansmen he could bring with him on his return to Alex’s side was still up for review.

In the two weeks of vacation given by Alex, Mogal vowed to win more recognition from his fellow clansmen and bring more Dravo warriors under Alex’s banner.

However, only Mogal knew that he wasn’t doing this for Alex, but rather for the Dravo Clan.

Mogal firmly believed his Dravo Clan had more to gain from a relationship with Alex than the other way around.

As a major Plane even in the grand scheme of the cosmos, Pangea not only brought Outer beings to the Plane, there were also large organisations that offered essentially tourist travel to exotic Planes for those who could pay the price—most of whom tended to be nobles or rich merchants.

These tourist Planes often tended to be Planes believed to have been fully extracted of valuable resources by their noble ‘owners’, or whose planar coordinates had been sold off to more mercantile organisations for one transactional reason or another.

Whatever the reason for the sale, the fact remained that unlike noble households, which tended to keep their Planes—or planar coordinates—well-guarded secrets, these large organisations, or perhaps a few powerful houses for a few less worthwhile Planes, tended to be open to the public.

There were large interplanar gates constructed both for tourists and for Outer beings wishing to return to their home Plane.

Amongst the surprisingly many tourism Planes was Westeria, a Plane primarily occupied by lycanthropic Beastkin-type races.

After a long, arduous war with an alliance of three noble scions led by the illegitimate scion of a Margrave House, peace was finally achieved on Westeria when the Lycan Lord of Westeria reached a peace agreement with the alliance.

Westeria would become a Plane open to the alliance and its allies, where trade would flow between both sides.

The alliance accepted the arrangement because its members were locked in fierce inheritance battles at home and could no longer spare the resources to pacify Westeria, much to their chagrin, since the entire point of the alliance had been to bring down the Plane.

Alas, by a stroke of luck, all three scions had their own battles at home and so couldn’t be bothered with the Class 4 Plane.

A peace deal was actually a good result for them, as it served as a stopgap for the three scions’ resource haemorrhaging.

Wisteria’s denizens sold valuable resources to the alliance at ridiculously cheap prices in the eyes of the alliance. In exchange, the alliance paid with mid-tier technology that enlightened the savage Lycans of Westeria.

Trade flourished to the extent that the three scions could no longer digest the Plane’s wealth themselves, and primarily due to the failing situation of their inheritance, were forced to open the Plane to more external parties.

This eventually turned the city that hosted the Westeria Interplanar Gate into a massive economic hub, as merchants from all over the Empire flocked over.

In the process, many Pangeans began to take notice of the Lycan Beastkins’ combat prowess.

A bit similar to the Dravos, the Lycans of Westeria were employed en masse for their martial prowess, serving as guards and soldiers to merchants and nobles of Pangea.

However, unlike the Dravos, the Lycans of Westeria didn’t really settle within Pangea, choosing to return to their home Plane after the end of their service.

Kavakan was no different.

During the vacation time, he too returned to Westeria through the Interplanar Gate, eager to test his mettle against others of his age amongst the Lycans.

Not every Outer being found in Pangea had as relatively pleasant a backstory as those of the Dravos and Westeria Lycans.

For the vast majority of Outer beings, they arrived in Pangea as slaves—spoils of war—from a conquered Plane, one still at war, or one lost to spacetime.

Contrary to how the nobility made it seem, not every planar conquest attempt ended in victory.

Across the millennium which marked the Era of Interplanar Expedition, the nobilities of Pangea had faced adversarial Planes they could not defeat—in fact, these might just be as many as the Planes they had defeated.

Interestingly, though not advertised, many noble houses had been trapped in ongoing conflicts against a Plane spanning generations.

Many sons had inherited the Planes, and planar wars, of their fathers—just as their fathers had received them from their own fathers, and so on—yet victory over the Plane was far from sight, if not impossible.

Some noble houses that could no longer continue the generational war had to cut their losses outright by shutting down Interplanar Gates to specific Planes, as they could no longer bear the losses.

This resulted in many Outer being slaves from these tough-to-chew Planes being stranded on Pangea, with no way in sight to return home.

This was the reality of Havel Landomas.

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