Literature / A Hero's War

"So you mean to say you summoned me in order for me to save your world. You're saying I'm a Hero mentioned in your legends?"
The queen nodded, together with the other three wizards listening in.
Morey frowned, "Are you sure?"

With the world of Firma threatened by zombie hordes, Queen Amarante commands her mages to summon the Hero who will seek out the Legendary Sword and save them all.

It doesn't quite go as planned.

Morey, who turns up in their summoning circle, is just a regular citizen of modern-day Earth, with no knowledge of combat or magic. Still, he can learn, and he does prove to be creative and clever. If he needs guidance to manage his role, the queen can certainly arrange that...

But the Summoning went further awry than they realised. Far away from the capital, a materials engineer named Cato suddenly finds himself lost in the backwoods of a strange new world. He has no resources but a ballpoint pen, no friends, and no magic. But he knows the scientific method, and this world is ripe for an industrial revolution — with a difference. Even if he has to start from scratch.

A Hero's War is a story by jseah, published on FictionPress (here) and Royal Road (here).

---

This story provides examples of:

A-M

• Adorable Fluffy Tail: Demihuman fukas have big eyes and fluffy tails large enough that a mildly derogatory nickname for their species is "tails". Tail behaviour shows their mood, like dogs, and its appearance is tied into their ideas of attractiveness. The fluffiness is generally off limits, though, except to romantic partners.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Magic is everywhere, most prominently in living things, but also in the ground and the air, and can be tapped to produce a variety of useful effects; heating, cooling, movement, shedding light, even altering weight. It can pass through solid objects, too, but with the right barriers, it can be made to behave like a gas.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Landar's robot suit may indeed have been "too cool not to get built," but it's so ridiculously power-hungry that even her unusually large magic reserves aren't able to supply it for more than a few steps — and that's from pouring in all the magic she could spare for weeks.
  • The university successfully launches a hot-air balloon, using magic-imbued steel as the power source for the heat. It's the first man-made flying vehicle in thousands of years, ever since the precursor civilisations (the First and the Tsarians) fell, but even a short test flight consumes a tremendous amount of power, making it infeasible for any longer trips. They eventually develop a more feasible design based on a lighter-than-air foam.
• Bounty Hunter: The Order of Knights runs primarily on this, with bounties posted for whatever work needs doing instead of having a central commander — and sometimes there are even bounties posted on "anyone who takes up the other side's hunts". It's no surprise, then, that knights are individually strong but not disciplined or cohesive as a group.
• Childish Pillow Fight: Cato's apartment showcases the advancement of commoditised magic, with appliances that wouldn't look too far out of place on Earth. Lamps with wall switches, stovetop cooking elements, a fridge-freezer combination, heated running water...when he starts whinging about how far it has to go, though, like how hard the toilet paper is, Landar picks up one of the oversized toilet paper rolls and goes on the offensive. He's quick to take up his own paper sword and defend himself. (Landar wins, because she can use magic to strengthen the paper.)
  Landar: The problem is that you expect far too much! <block>
  Cato: See, it's way too stiff to use as toilet paper. Also a bit too long. Half a meter wide rolls are a terribly large size and make the toilets clog.
  Landar: Just be glad we aren't using the leaves like in Wendy's Fort. <clash> These are an improvement already.
  Cato: Ah! So you do admit that the paper is better than leaves! <jab> Further improvements are always possible!
• Coup de Grâce: The first zombie boneworm kill is achieved by pinning it down and shooting a massively oversized force-bolt into its mouth.
• Culture Clash: Firma has different norms from Earth.
  • Landar is quite unbothered by the idea that the ancient Tsarians experimented with genetically modifying humans; she doesn't treat it any differently from modifying cattle. Cato is more perturbed.
  • Cato really struggles when he comes across Landar and Kupo studying the nature and behaviour of life force by slowly taking apart a body and studying how it responds. Specifically, the body of a criminal, who was still alive when they started. Since he was an enemy of the state anyway, Landar doesn't see any problem.
    Landar: Kupo, give me a hand.
    The healer simply grabbed a large cleaver and chopped the hand off the body. There was surprisingly little blood, easily explained by the buckets placed below the body and the splatter over the floor.
  • In the other direction, Cato largely shrugs at the idea that it's possible to walk up to someone and kill them with a forcebolt; on Earth, it's normal for guns to be capable of that, and only social norms and law enforcement prevent it. To people like Landar, who are accustomed to being able to shield themselves from anything that a random person on the street could try, it's quite alarming.
  • Cato discovers that it's normal for engaged couples to share a bed, but they're still expected to remain chaste (or at least discreet). Pregnancy means the wedding happens immediately, but there's nothing particularly significant about the wedding night. That has him scratching his head a bit, but his own expectations seem weird to Landar.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: The first engagement by Minmay's "Special Effects" experimental weapons testing team kills thirty times as many zombies as their own casualties, but the losses on the humans' side, and the expenditure of magic and unique ammunition, are perhaps felt more strongly than the loss of a single zombie army. Still, testing out said unique ammunition was the point of Special Effects, and the casualties were far lower than could have been expected in a regular engagement (where the defenders might even have lost).
• Cutting the Knot: After months of Nal anguishing over Morey's distrust and them dancing around each other, she resolves to prove her loyalty to him by leading the final assault to crush the siege and complete his revolution. He doesn't want her to put herself in danger and doesn't feel like she needs to do that. Ereli is totally fed up with them and impulsively channels their entire magic stockpile into a single huge attack that crushes the fort before the defenders can react. To everyone's surprise, it works, and even gets Morey and Nal talking again.
• Disability Immunity: Cato's life force is odd, making him poor at sensing magic and completely unable to manipulate it. All the medical experts he meets are baffled. However, it does mean that life-force-disrupting attacks generally don't affect him.
• Enemy Mine: Queen Amarante mediates peace between King Ektal, who fears the power of the Minmay Guard, and Chancellor Minmay, who fears conquest by jealous neighbours, by arranging for most of the Guard and most of Ektal's army to go north and fight the zombies.
  Amarante: I trust that the Guards being used to fight monsters is not an issue you have, King Ektal.
• Everyone Can See It: Downplayed, Cato and Landar aren't completely oblivious to their closeness, but they're slower to recognise it than everyone else is. To them, Landar visiting him in his apartment for the afternoon and returning to her lab later in her bathrobe is just testing out the latest advances in magical appliances (his shower, in this case). Cato doesn't even pick up on Bashal's innuendo straight away.
• Fantastic Firearms:
  • The first collaboration between Cato and "Mad Alchemist" Landar results in the bowgun (distinct from a real-life "bowgun," which is just a pistol-sized crossbow), which standardizes and simplifies the use of magical arrows by providing an easy, safe and reliable way to activate their enchantments. The arrows carry an enchantment that makes them fly forward at great speed, but in a disabled state; the gun stock contains an enchantment, linked to the trigger, that touches an arrow and activates it. Visually the first edition is closer to a crossbow, but its simplicity of use and penetrating power are more like a pistol, and later versions become even more gun-like.
    A magic gun! He had been in this world barely three weeks and he already helped invent a gun. With magic!
  • Landar's research into standardizing and automating enchantments later leads to the "spell cannon". Operators can simply fuel it with magical crystals and select the firing mode: fire bolts, force bolts, even ice. Not only is it more powerful than a human caster can manage, it doesn't require any magical skill to use. It quickly becomes a mainstay of the Minmay Guards, not only allowing them to fight armies of professional knights, but also useful for mundane tasks like firefighting.
• Fantastic Racism: It's not entirely clear why the human population generally mistrusts the demihuman Fukas and Elkas, but it might stem from their origins in the First-Tsarian conflict, especially since the Iris clans have less issues with them. With no preconceived ideas about them, Cato finds both species to be intriguing, with valuable innate magical talents.
• Fantastic Slurs: A mild example when humans typically refer to Fukas as "tails". It's not duel-to-the-death material, but it's not how the Fukas would refer to themselves, either, nor is it used by those who are actually friendly to them, like Cato.
• Flight:
  • Elkas have wings and the ability to magically reduce their weight, enabling them to fly like birds. They're somewhat more fragile than humans, though.
  • A powered airplane is one of the University's goals, but difficult to reach at their Technology Level. An experimental hot air balloon works, but consumes tremendous amounts of magic to run.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Children of nobles often laugh when their history tutors mention the name of Emperor Muppy. However, the people who lived through his roaming death squads, made up of hundreds of battle mages, didn't find them at all funny.
• Forced Transformation: When Cato first sees Landar's workshop, he doesn't dare touch anything in case it turns them all into chickens. Subverted, though, when it turns out that magic on Firma doesn't do anything like that. Messing around with the laws of kinetics and thermodynamics, yes. Transforming someone into a different species, definitely not.
• Fragile Flyer:
  • The Elkas have wings and can magically reduce their weight, allowing them to fly like birds. They're somewhat more fragile than humans, though, and, in combination with their low numbers, they are generally isolationist for fear of being entirely wiped out.
  • Land-bound zombie hordes are notable for being very hard to put down, since they don't care about losing body parts, and, even after being entirely dismembered, they can pull themselves back together given time. The bat-like zombie nightcryers, however, are Glass Cannons. Their sonic attacks are dangerous, and they're quite nimble, but if they can be hit, then their wings or bodies are easily broken or burned. Even the Elkas, who are fragile themselves, can easily take them in melee in even numbers.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Spellstorms specialize in launching barrages of spells at once. Their damage output can be extreme, and they can be very good at properly allocating their spells to support the other party members, but the intense concentration needed leaves them very vulnerable to counterattack.
  • Zombie nightcryers have a damaging scream that makes them quite dangerous, especially to the airborne Elkas, but in melee combat they're fragile and easily downed.
• Hates Their Parent: Landar resents her father's attempts to manage her life, insists that he hates her, and can't stand the sight of him. Cato thinks that he does love her, just has different values and priorities from hers.
• Hollywood Acid: One of the known natural magical materials, Elemental Water (not to be confused with regular water), will dissolve any nonmagical material, and quite a few magical ones. It can only be properly contained in Elemental Crystal. When the Water is dispelled, the materials precipitate out, though.
• Honey Trap: In a fairly benign example, Queen Amarante arranges for Morey's companions to be an assortment of young, attractive and competent women, in hopes that by the time he finds the Legendary Sword, he'll have fallen for one of them and be happy to retire with her rather than throw his political and military weight around. Morey sees through what she's doing fairly quickly, and keeps them at arm's length, leading Amarante to wonder briefly whether she ought to have tried sending a young man instead.
• Human Sacrifice: The civilisation to the north appears to have a form of magic powered by ritual sacrifices. The practitioners are not exactly popular, but their effectiveness against the zombies means they have a lot of political weight.
• I Choose to Stay: Cato and Landar discuss what they'll do if Morey succeeds in finding a way back to Earth. Cato mentions that he'd like to establish a permanent two-way bridge of some sort, but ultimately, he wouldn't want to move back; he has a lot more to contribute in this world than he ever did on Earth.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Cato and the chancellor do not see eye to eye on the latter's handling of the staged peasant riot, especially the body count, but the chancellor does not apologize to him. (He does privately apologize to himself and his wife, but remains resolved.)
• Infernal Retaliation: Fire will eventually destroy zombies, whose dead flesh is quite flammable, but in the meantime, it doesn't faze them at all, it just means that you're fighting an endless horde of flaming undead — as Banage discovers to his cost. Cato later has more success with intense fires like napalm and firestorms, which can kill the zombies fast enough to be worth it.
• Lightning Bruiser: Zombie boneworms are fast and strong enough to run down and crush a human, extremely resilient as well as being able to regenerate their armour, and have ranged attacks — fortunately with only a fairly limited range and taking some time to recharge. And they have a degree of intelligence, too.
• Mad Scientist: "Mad Alchemist", in this case, where alchemy is essentially making magical items. Landar is undeniably brilliant, but her inventions have a tendency to explode, and she can often become lost in her work, forgetting to sleep or eat. Since Cato can't use magic himself, and since she has the vision to actually grasp some of what he describes from Earth, he relies on her heavily for the magical side of the revolution.
  Cato: Landar? Why did you feel the need to turn the engagement bracelet into a weapon?
  Landar: ...It felt like a good idea at the time?
• The Madness Place: Landar occasionally slips into a mindset where she can hold impossibly complex ideas in her head but spend days without noticing the need for food and sleep. She gets terribly upset when Cato bursts in and disrupts her work, literally feeling her mental state crashing down and ideas fading away — not having noticed that the populace is in full revolt all around her workshop and people needed somewhere secure to hide.
• Magitek: Turns out that magic in this world is Turing-complete. Commoditised magic plays a big role in the industrial revolution, allowing them to essentially skip steam power entirely, and even largely replacing electricity.
• Make an Example of Them:
  • Played straight by Minmay when implementing a centralized legal code and cracking down on crime. A weekly rotation of hanged offenders are placed on public display. In fairness, he enforces the law against nobles too.
  • Defied by Morey when a captured foe is about to be burned alive by a cheering crowd. He intervenes as soon as he hears about it, to castigate them and insist on a more humane execution with less celebration. (There is still cheering.)
• Mundane Utility:
  • The "spell cannons" that enable non-mages to truly compete with magic knights, and even beat them, also turn out to be pretty useful for fire-fighting. Magic is just as good at making things cold as making them warm. (Cato is rather taken aback to discover just how easily magic can chill things; it doesn't interact with thermodynamics the way he's used to.)
  • When the first test-firing of "Landar's Trumpets" (rocket artillery) includes live warheads, Cato assumes at first that it's just Landar being Landar. From her nervous remarks afterward, however, he realizes that she was trying to let them watch a fireworks display together. (It's not all that close to Earth fireworks, but he's touched.)
  • On a long-distance flight that leads them through cold weather, several Elkas crack open the napalm shells they were given and use them to keep warm while recharging their magic.

N-Z

• Named Weapons: The Iris' summoning stones all have names, more or less related to their effects. The one Landar "borrowed" is Tempest Bolt, and her father is later granted Frostfire.
• Non-Action Protagonist: Cato has no combat-relevant skills, not even leadership, and for some reason he physically can't use magic. However, his insights from Earth about engineering and science lead to a Magitek revolution that resulted in the territory of Minmay developing the most dangerous military force in the world. Cato himself, meanwhile, is mostly just running the new university and collaborating with specialists to come up with new ideas.
• Nuke 'em: Morey finds records of the war between the Tsarians and the First, and is disturbed by how freely and casually they used weapons of mass destruction on each other, apparently unconcerned about the collateral damage if it meant winning the fight. Pacifist Queen Amarante agrees with him that if they find any leftovers, they should either destroy them or lock them away as securely as possible, lest they be misused by modern day rulers who don't truly understand what they're dealing with and are just desperate for an advantage over the zombies.
• One-Man Industrial Revolution: Cato certainly starts as this, but really wants others to take up the torch and change how they think about the world. To an extent, he's successful, with business partners learning to experiment and test and standardize. Still, Cato has the advantage of frequently knowing what's possible before starting to investigate. He insists that his work could continue without him, and he's not wrong, but it would certainly slow down noticeably.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Cato puts a fair bit of time and effort into studying just how the zombies work, but there are plenty of unanswered questions. What is known is that they sense and attack any living human or animal nearby; they can animate nearby dead bodies, but they don't convert living ones; and their abilities become stronger in groups — including a magical disruption aura, potent laser beams, and worst of all, they become more strategic. However, they are dependent on ambient magic, and will go into hibernation if there isn't enough.
• Pardon My Klingon: Inverted when Cato's expletives aren't recognized in Inath.
  Landar: What's hell?
• Parental Marriage Veto: Or in this case, extended family. Landar's parents are actually quite favourably disposed toward Cato, especially after the spread of his ideas, plus his direct sponsorship, leads to the development of a more effective magical exercise regimen, but the other clans are not fully convinced that Cato, who cannot use magic, is a suitable match for Landar, and defying them would severely damage her father's political position. Landar could just leave the Iris, and she wouldn't even mind that much, but Cato is willing to take steps to win their favour if reasonably practical, since they have a lot of political influence.
• Poor Communication Kills: Discussed and defied by Cato and Landar, who recognise that most of the challenges faced by storybook couples could have been solved with some clear communication.
• La Résistance:
  • Played straight when Morey starts a revolution to end slavery in Illastein. Queen Amarante is alarmed and wonders where she went wrong, but Morey is smart enough to learn from Earth's past mistakes and keep it somewhat cleaner than it might have otherwise been.
  • Inverted when Minmay is invaded by its neighbor. The people are actually rather loyal to the government, which has recently given them farming technology that ensures no one will starve, and is teaching them to use magic. The knights who walk into villages and declare that they now answer to Duport frequently find themselves facing a loyalist uprising.
  • Played straight again when a disaffected group of Ironworkers and other craftsmen, along with Mayor Corbin, stage a revolt. Chancellor Minmay nips it in the bud, but with many casualties.
• Roof Hopping: Used extensively by the Em-wielding Fukas, for reconnaissance and for mobility in their battle against Corbin's gangs. Some of Corbin's residents put up fencing to stop them, which Danine internally notes would be completely ineffective, but she voluntarily avoids those roofs to let them think it's worked.
• Sawn-Off Shotgun: Minmay's mark 2 guns can fire pellets in a shotgun-like spray, with a wider spread than Earth shotguns. It's eventually determined to be unnecessary complexity, though, in a gun that already has modes for fire-bolts, force-bolts, shield-penetrating bolts, bullets with magically increased momentum, grenade launching, and a bayonet.
• Shotgun Wedding: Downplayed; Cato and Landar aren't intimate, and her father isn't forcing them to marry, but because there are rumours about them, he's a bit upset that Cato hasn't asked her (in order to protect her reputation, if nothing else). Cato isn't altogether opposed to marrying her, but wants to keep more to Earth culture and take things in their own time.
• Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace: Happens with a formal engagement announcement, rather than a wedding, but is otherwise played straight. And of course someone actually does object.
  "If there are any objections to the engagement, speak now." Yan said the ritual words. It was mostly a formality, no one would interrupt-
  "There are."
• Summon Everyman Hero: Not only is the summoned Hero (Morey) an ordinary Earth citizen, but they get a second ordinary citizen (Cato) as well. However, since Earth is considerably more technologically advanced than Firma, the two newcomers still have a lot to share.
• Super-Senses:
  • Demihumans, especially Elkas, have much better sight and hearing than humans, and some improvement in other senses too.
  • Perhaps most interesting, where humans can abstractly feel the structure of magic, demihumans instead see it as patterns of colour. This is quite helpful for things like spotting leaks in magic storage units, which a human might miss but would be obvious to a Fuka.
• Super-Strength: Fukas are naturally stronger but more fragile than humans. Then it turns out that they can enhance their bodies with magic, a skill that is rare and difficult among humans but comes very easily to demihumans. Cue leaping onto rooftops, using bows with draw strength that make them competitive with guns, and pre-teen girls able to smack full-grown men around in melee.
• Super-Toughness: Enhancement magic doesn't just make the Fukas stronger; they can also harden their skin like armour on a moment's notice, shrugging off arrows and swords with barely a scratch.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Bringing technological advancement to Firma definitely comes with growing pains.
  • A revolutionary method of producing steel? Oh, hello, monopolistic Ironworkers Guild...
  • Farms with new machinery can produce several times as much food as they used to? You've just put a large percentage of your population out of work. Which was actually intended, it's a necessary step to free up manpower for non-farming careers, but doing it all at once sends shockwaves through the economy and makes quite a lot of people unhappy. And the abundance of food goes a long way toward mollifying people's objections, but even the cheapest food is too expensive to someone with no income at all.
  • Manufacturing capacity is skyrocketing? That's great, but since fiat currency isn't a thing here, and supplies of precious metal are much more modest, there literally aren't enough coins to grease the machinery of exchange and keep up.
  • You've struck oil, useful for all kinds of plastics, not to mention as a fuel source! Oh, but it also leads to a pretty decent napalm substitute, decently effective against zombies but horribly effective against humans. And since the napalm experimentation was put out to subcontractors (which were undoubtedly full of spies), every other nation now knows how to produce it — and it's one of the few inventions that doesn't require a high Technology Level.
• Take No Prisoners: This is the order given when assaulting Mayor Corbin's mansion to execute her for treason. Cato is upset by the whole business, and Chancellor Minmay is resigned rather than pleased.
• Technology Levels:
  • Arguably Cato's biggest obstacle. He knows quite a bit about concepts that Inath just isn't able to build yet. After all the changes he makes to their manufacturing processes, they still can't even recreate the perfectly round, tiny steel ball in the pen that he arrived with. Nonetheless, they've come a long way, churning out magical and mundane items that previous generations didn't dream of.
  • Even when they spot a possibly artificial object on a nearby planet, Cato comes to the conclusion that it's beyond them for now.
    Cato: There's nothing we can do about it. We can't even fly, let's not talk about a space program, yeah? I'll buy you a bigger telescope when we work out the lens shape equations, but... I'm sorry.
• Technology Uplift: While Cato's focus is on changing processes and patterns of thinking, it doesn't hurt that he also knows quite a bit of chemistry to give them a head start. The Bessemer process, the steam engine, germ theory, fractional distillation, the list goes on. At first, those who only hear rumours about him assume that he's found a cache of lost technology, rather than being from another world.
• Unskilled, but Strong: The Iris clans value the size of one's magical reserves above all else, and produce ridiculously powerful individuals — but they lack the structured spellcasting abilities of regular knights. Instead, they use "summoning stones" that allow them to shape magical effects just by pouring magic into the stone. The stones are actually inefficient compared to regular spells, but the Iris have so much brute force to put behind them that they are still highly effective, making the clans greatly feared and influential. Taken even further when Cato and the Pastora perform a study of how individual magic works, discovering principles that lead to a new training regimen and greatly accelerate individual magic growth. Landar's father is very impressed with Cato afterward, and pushes for the clans to accept Cato as a suitor for her.
• Unwanted Harem: It's not that Morey dislikes any of the all-female party that the queen has given him. They're all highly competent mages, in various disciplines, and he does find some of them attractive. It's just that he knows she's done it in hopes of cementing his loyalty and keeping him in check. (He's still not immune to the appeal of a pretty girl wanting to talk with him about his problems and hear about his life.)
• The Virus: Zombies don't directly infect people, but groups of zombies will gradually animate nearby dead bodies, so anyone they kill is apt to be "converted". This is part of what prompts Inath and Ektal to push northward; they want to cut down the zombies' numbers before they can finish killing and "recruiting" whoever lives there and become an overwhelming force.
• Weak, but Skilled: Actually, compared to most people, Landar is immensely strong, as is typical for an Iris. But she is far weaker than her father. Nonetheless, when they duel, her Cato-inspired research into the fundamental nature of magic and spells results in her understanding how to make a fast-moving spell punch straight through his shields.
• We Have Reserves: Commander Erin submits her resignation after ordering the creation of a firestorm that would hit both her own army and the zombies. It was the only strategy that would reliably win the fight and prevent worse losses, but she's aware that the surviving soldiers will be uncomfortable serving under her after that. She's not thrilled with herself, either.
• What Have I Done:
  • A downplayed example when Landar and Cato devise a magic bolt that will punch through regular shields, and then turns out to also go straight through the special adaptive shields that they try to design as a countermeasure. Cato is less concerned, because he's used to living in a world where it's normal for weapons to exist that will kill anyone they're pointed at without military-grade armour. Landar is not used to that, though.
    Landar: What in the world did we build?
  • A more straightforward example when Erin deliberately triggers a firestorm over the zombies, at the cost of letting it catch part of her own army, killing a hundred thousand zombies with four hundred casualties. Militarily, she absolutely did the right thing and her superiors agree. She's still not happy with herself for doing that to her own people on purpose.
• Zerg Rush: This has always been how the zombies are dangerous; they aren't stronger or faster than when they were alive, somewhat less actually, but every individual they kill is a new recruit, until they have overwhelming numbers, allowing them to kill even more... Unfortunately, by the time of the story, they're also developing some more advanced tactics.

---

I was a scholar on Earth and I cannot use magic unlike Morey. If you want a warrior, I'm not it. And for all of Morey's developing leadership skill, his companions are better fighters than he is. But if you are satisfied with destroying the zombies through sufficient applied tropes then I suppose I can be your Hero.