Saga of Slime and Devil (Remake)

Vol 3 | Prologue | Life in Tempestia

{ Gabiru }

Had someone told me months ago that I would be serving under a demon and a slime while living in the Storm Dragon's cave with a bunch of researchers creating tech beyond my understanding I would've laughed them off, probably thrown them into a cell for their own sanity at that. Yet that's exactly where I was.

After my mistaken judgment on Gelmud, I was lucky to even be allowed anywhere within the forest, let alone in such a prestigious position. While that position had been quickly sidelined once Weiss arrived, I could easily understand why. Weiss had far more experience than just about any other mage here, aside from Tanya herself.

When you take in the knowledge that he had apparently served under her before she came to Tempest, it all made sense. However, it does beg the question of where Tanya actually came from. There were a few speculative rumors amongst the residents of Veldoria, the 'Fortress City in the Great Cave' as it had become known.

The main theory was that she was summoned long ago to help a nation in a war, and rather than using sheer force used her strategic mind to minimize the direct help she needed. Most believed that the mage gear that Tanya had begun to integrate after the Orc Lord originated from her time in whatever nation she formerly served under, likely someone's invention made so that the human mages could keep up with her.

When she came to Tempest she lacked this technology to the same degree she had before, but apparently with Weiss' arrival, this tech had once more come into her hands and it took the TRI less than a week to reverse engineer it. Of course, it certainly helped that they had been already striving to make such technology for months at that point.

The result of all that meant that the Mage Corps had gone from just a unit of elite Dragonewts under my direct command to several full-sized battalions of numerous races under the general command of Weiss himself. I was eventually restored as the head of the '203rd' as it was reorganized a few weeks after Charybdis to comprise all the elites in Tempest's mage corps. Despite that, for a while at least, it was almost entirely Dragonewts.

With time, more elites began to show as the boot-based flight tech allowed Tempest's mages to fly with the same agility and flexibility as a Dragonewt. Of course as Dragonewts flying came much more naturally to us, and while we now had our own boots for the sake of acceleration, in the event that our tech was damaged our flight would not be. As such, despite new elites comprising the now renamed '203rd Aerial Mage Battalion', it was still roughly 60% Dragonewts.

I am, however, proud to say that the 203rd is the most elite in the Federation! There are some who would disagree, but I believe that my excellent leadership and the brilliant teachings of Tanya and Weiss have refined us into an elite fighting force to be reckoned with!

If what Tanya says comes to pass, then soon enough Mages would be the main fighting force with ground units mostly delegated to seizing and holding land while us mages do much of the main fighting. With how quick and powerful mages are, it's no wonder that such might be an inevitability.

Apparently where Tanya and Weiss came from, mages were rare among humanity, thus limiting their numbers and restricting them to a mostly supportive role. With the sheer number of mages Tempest is able to recruit, they could easily match the amount of units on the ground.

Speaking of units on the ground, I had heard of a new potential ground unit being designed by the TRI utilizing mage tech as a basis. The project was mostly headed and accelerated by Tanya, using her own supposed 'experiment' as a base for the design.

The idea was, rather than a unit that was lightweight and could fly in the air and provide assistance in powerful spells and formulas, the unit would be on the ground, heavily armored and with powerful shields. Apparently the magi-tech and computation jewel would be built into the armor itself with weapons attached in some way to it.