Blue core, p.60
Blue Core, page 60
part #1 of Blue Core Series
A javelin hissed over her head, and she shifted her skin to steel, feeling her Stamina and Mana melting away under the pressure of the suppression. Cheya’s shadow flashed out, doing something to the feet of the charging sword-wielders and slowing them to a crawl. The casters couldn’t reply so long as Shayma kept Blue’s weapon trained on them, even if she couldn’t take them out of the fight. Fortunately the ground was already beginning to shake from Blue’s efforts, and once the suppression was gone, they could really fight.
The pressure snapped all at once, causing frayed mana to condense streams of mist from the air, and the ground under the casters and javelineers to crumble into a pit. Keri’s magic wash outward in a palpable wave, linking with them and with the monsters both while the ranged group leapt from the pit, pale wings extending from under carapaces to guide them down. That was a mistake on their part, because Blue’s weapon burned through the wings almost instantly, sending the monsters crashing to the ground with one wave of her arm.
Annit’s darts smashed into shields, monster Skills pulling the projectiles away from their intended targets, but granting Cheya an opening to step out of her shadows and use her shade-limned daggers. Shayma didn’t dare use the LAE on any of the nearer targets with Cheya flitting around, but the stunned casters were perfect, even with the haze that surrounded them. She kept it aimed on the nearest one, the shielding flickering under the invisible barrage from Blue’s weapon while she flung out another set of illusions to hide Annit and Keri’s real positions.
Of all of them, Keri was the one least able to defend herself in a general scrum, lacking either movement or close range options other than her mana shield, so she was their defensive locus. Between the two of them, Annit and Cheya were keeping the sword- and spear-wielders from closing, Cheya’s third-tier Skills proving extremely effective at taking down the monsters. In the few seconds it took for the LAE to bore a hole through the caster’s defenses and silence it, she’d dismembered three of them.
"Going to let me up?" She muttered at Blue, still locked to the earth and now being peppered with javelins, despite the camouflage illusion she was using to erase her presence. None of them could find her exactly but they hurled enough of the weapons to saturate the area, making it inevitable when one glanced off her side with the screech of tearing steel. The tip had only made a thin groove on her reinforced skin, but the sound was worse than the sting, because while Keri could heal the damage in short order, the sound gave away her position and she wasn’t mobile.
"One second...there." The earth shuddered again, the pit he’d already made deepening and the grass under her tilting precariously as the entire battlefield turned into a slope, giving the four of them high ground and staggering the monsters that were still alive. Blue’s presence vanished from her hand, and she used [Ghost Step] to teleport far to the side of where she’d been just as javelins punched into her old hiding place. The LAE swung wildly, cutting more trees before she focused it on the last caster, catching the black gem by luck and detonating it with predictable consequences for the mantis-monster’s head.
From there she could see the javelineers targeting Keri with their weapons and Annit grimly swatting them out of the air with the invisible blade of her blowgun. The healer flinched as one tore through her mana shield, deflected but not completely repelled. Cheya was still busy sparring with the melee monsters, as they’d closed ranks to try and keep her from getting behind them, so Shayma [Ghost Stepped] behind the closest ranged group. She shifted her other hand into a hook, snagging its arm in mid-throw as she focused the LAE at it from point blank range.
The surrounding grass started to smoke, as did her clothes, in the instants before the carapace gave way and a hole opened in the monster’s body, steam rushing out along with pale green blood.
"Careful of the reflections there," Blue warned her. "Might be good to put it away for now anyhow."
Given how much collateral damage it caused, she had to agree. It was powerful, but not something she wanted to aim even vaguely near her friends. She abandoned that shift, drew her sword, and jumped to the next monster. It was waiting for her, able to parry her first thrust with its javelin, but couldn’t do anything about the illusionary needles that drove their very solid forms into its oversized eyes.
The wounds didn’t seem to bother it, but without being able to see it was completely unable to defend itself. The hook at the tip of her left arm became a point, muscles shifting to snap forward in a blurring thrust and puncturing the carapace with a tapered needle of steel that squelched deep into its body. That was enough to drop it, Keri’s power going to work and suppressing whatever regeneration or protective benefits it might have.
Their healer was also starting to slow the others down. It wasn’t much in all, but it was enough to give Annit a little breathing room. Before Shayma could jump to the next monster, its head exploded like an overripe melon, one of Annit’s darts finding its mark. The final javelineer began to retreat downslope as it hurled the last of its ammunition, but since Blue had wrecked the spell circle it wasn’t like it had anywhere to go.
With only three monsters left the insects couldn’t last much longer, and a few moments later they were all down. The only sound was the crackle of still-burning brush on the other side of the road. Shayma let her skin revert to normal flesh with a sigh, the pulse of Keri’s magic and her own [Regeneration] repairing the cuts that had managed to make it past her armor and shifted form.
"How did they know we were coming?" Keri asked, at length.
"They didn’t," Cheya said shortly. "If this trap was for us, those would have been Tor Kot’s elites, not common monsters."
"Huh, good point." Blue’s voice sounded in her ear. "Those were all level thirtyish, [Pale Mantis] monsters. Could have been a lot worse."
She relayed Blue’s information to the others, and Annit nodded. "Explains why they were so tough. They would have rolled right over us with that suppression up, or if we didn’t have Cheya along."
"Or if I didn’t have Blue’s weapon," Shayma agreed. Though given that Cheya’s level was well into the fifties, maybe even sixties, the [Spymistress] probably could have carried the day. Probably. Ultimately she didn’t know exactly what Skills Cheya had, and [Spymistress] wasn’t fully a combat Class. "So who was this trap for?"
"Rebels," suggested Cheya. "Bandits. Rabble. Even a mage-king couldn’t possibly rule the whole kingdom by force alone."
"Even if we weren’t the targets, someone is going to notice they aren’t coming back." Annit said. "They’re going to be looking for us eventually."
"You know, I can’t fix the spellwork but I can repair everything else. Make it look like nothing happened and nobody was here." Blue suggested. "Okay, well, maybe I’ll have to take down some of the damaged trees, but I can do so and make it look like they were never there."
"An excellent idea," Cheya said, once she’d conveyed Blue’s offer. "With such a mystery they will hopefully look outward rather than inward."
"Hurry, though." Annit said. "If I can feel all this disturbance spreading on the wind, so can other people."
Shayma doubted that. Annit’s [Wind Whisperer] was a very unusual Ability, more like divination than pure wind Affinity, and seemed to ignore things like [Warding] even if it wasn’t nearly as powerful as a proper scrying spell. She didn’t think it was likely that any of Tor Kot’s monsters would have such a niche Ability, but maybe it was best to not underestimate the mage-kings. It’d certainly done them no favors before.
She sat down on the grass at the top of the slope Blue had made, putting her palms on the ground so he could work through her. This time when the ground trembled, it was because it was being lifted up, the hole he’d made filling in and flattening out. Grass grew where there was bare earth, and several trees vanished in flashes of black as Blue pulled them into himself. The monster corpses vanished as well, and several of Annit’s darts appeared in a pile in front of her. Blue had gotten better at using her as a conduit, but it still tickled whenever he did it.
No more than five minutes after the battle, the landscape looked completely pristine. There wasn’t even a scent of blood so far as Shayma could tell, and even Cheya looked impressed. Annit finished repacking her darts, those that were still good at least. One of them had been squished into a flat plate by some defensive Skill, and Shayma was glad that hadn’t happened to her arm. It was another reason Ansae had cautioned her to be very careful with directly making weapons with shapeshifting. Until her mana density was far higher, she’d be terribly fragile.
"Let’s continue on. This time we’ll cut away from the roads, and hopefully avoid another one of these ambushes."
"We’ll have to a cross a road at some point," Annit sighed. "I guess we could all go over it. Or under." She regarded the place where there had once been a deep pit.
"We’ll figure it out when we get there." Shayma decided. It’d slow them down, but she didn’t want to tempt fate by giving Tor Kot’s monsters another chance at them. The next time, it might not be something they could handle.
Day 128 - Blue
I really had to wonder why nobody else seemed all that worried. Maybe it was something to do with the adventurer life, but everyone just took the ambush in stride and continued on. I was still on tenterhooks until they set up camp for the night, and even then I wasn’t particularly comfortable. Unlikely as it was, I was half expecting more of those creepy white bugs to ambush them while they slept. Sure they kept a watch, but still.
At least the combat had yielded some concrete gains. When Shayma came back, not only would she be getting another level but a new Skill: [Dungeon Weaponry]. Even without any description of what it did I was kind of excited, both to see what she could do with it and what I’d get when I transcribed it. Perhaps it’d automatically solve some of my issues.
Even though I didn’t want to spread myself too thin, I split my attention, keeping an eye out through Shayma while I attended to some of my own projects in order to stay occupied. Most of the work was already done and I’d already figured out the list of things I wanted to do, so the fact that I got a little dumber while I was splitting my focus like that didn’t matter too much. If only having two cores meant I had two minds, but it didn’t seem to work that way. Maybe I needed to specialize one first.
I still hadn’t decided on that, and considering that the available specializations seemed related to things I was doing, I wanted to continue on the path of pseudo-magitech for a while and see if I could get that kind of specialization. Mana-fueled or not I had a better handle on computers and coilguns than swords and sorcery.
To that end I’d finally accrued the stuff I needed to build the [Mana Diamond Anvil]. It was by far the largest single-unit thing I could build, needing something around thirty meters of vertical height and a ten meter diameter floor space to fit. I ended up putting it under the volcano sphere, partly because I needed a new chamber for it anyway and partly because if I needed to hook into a mana dynamo I wanted to use a different one than my crafting experiments. That one seemed more or less tapped out with all the stuff I had attached to it.
It took the form of two massive cones, one on top of the other and each some fifteen meters tall, the points facing each other. They weren’t solid, but rather a latticework of Light and Kinetic Affinity sources, supported by stonesteel frames. A storage crystal in the shape of a large disc provided a base for each cone, filigreed in gold where the Affinity materials joined it. The Affinity lattices traced their way down, tapering along with the cone until they met the actual anvil, the points of the cones composed of alchemical diamond sheathed in Adamant Stone.
The whole apparatus had a golden cast, from the colors of the Sources as well as the actual gold that seemed to cover the junctions, all except for the very center which was blue-white from the stone and diamond. It looked damned impressive to me, glowing and gleaming, and I hadn’t even put any mana into it. Surprisingly, when I charged it up, it only took a thousand mana, which compared to the amounts I was used to working in barely even registered. On the other hand, it also only generated one one-thousandth of a unit of material, so on a per-unit basis...well. It’d take a while to get anywhere. A million mana a unit was steep no matter how it was phrased.
Still, I was curious what exactly I could get from the thing. Even a tiny amount of resources could be useful in something like, oh, a ring. Considering I wouldn’t be making any weapons out of it, I decided I’d toss in something other than the usual steel. I was going to use gold, in fact, because it seemed to be important to mana somehow. My mana crystals and more advanced devices all used it, so it would probably get a heck of a boost from whatever the mana diamond anvil did, exactly.
Charged, the thing actually shone. Glimmering light dripped from the frame, falling downward or upward toward the anvil point, following the mana density. I could see my Affinityless mana filling the device, twined along the paths of the crystal and Source, a weight dragging at the world as it pressed in toward a single point. A miniscule drop of gold floated in a diamond prison at the very point the two halves touched, ready for whatever the contraption was going to do. I triggered the anvil.
A vast bell tolled.
It wasn’t exactly a sound, but a wave rippled through all my mana, expanding outward from the tiny drop of gold and tugging at every single thread in every dynamo and plant and construct I had. I could see it wash through the mana of the few people left in Refuge, making them twitch and stare about, even the lowest-level ones. Far below, the wave passed through Ansae’s incredibly dense mana with a small ripple, barely visible to me, but she leapt up as if stung.
When it rolled across my cores I didn’t feel anything myself, but it rippled out to Shayma through the Companion bond and pulled her out of sleep. "Whuzza?" She asked, muzzily.
"Nothing, don’t worry about it. You can go back to sleep."
"Mmph." She rolled over and snuggled in under her blanket, safe within the bounds of their campsite somewhere outside Duenn.
The wave rippled through Iniri’s bond too, though it was far weaker. Even so she jolted nearly as hard as Ansae, sitting bolt upright in her bed and gasping, holding her hand to her chest. I couldn’t really soothe her the same way that I could Shayma, but hopefully she would just think she had a bad dream. I’d have Shayma fill her in on things later, or maybe I’d move the [Mana Diamond Anvil] further away from my core. I’d have to eat more of the mountain first, but that was on the agenda anyway. First, though, Ansae was less than happy.
"What was that, Blue? That hurt!" She sounded aggrieved, and the fact that she said that it hurt meant it must have been pretty serious. It didn’t strike me that she’d consider anything short of nigh-disabling pain more than an annoyance. I felt a little bad for that, since it was something worse than disturbed sleep.
I didn’t want to show her the [Mana Diamond Anvil] though. Among other things, I was pretty sure that landed in the realm of things I shouldn’t tell anyone about that she’d warned me not to tell even her. Instead I showed her the output of the thing, the one-thousandth unit of gold that had become something else.
First I lifted a pedestal in front of her, to get her attention, then a tiny one atop that, and then an even smaller one atop that, the last one made of glass with a setting for the transformed material. A tiny drop of [Hyperthaumic Phase-Condensed Aurum].
I really wished I had a better description of the material because it sounded exotic as hell, reminding me of superconductors and condensed matter physics, though the terms used to describe the former gold were so much gibberish to me. Maybe Ansae would have some idea.
The dragon blinked at it, blinked again, then reached up to rub her paw along her muzzle in a clearly exasperated mannerism. "You made something that is better than perfect at conducting mana out of a mana insulator. Of course you did. That would explain…" She trailed off, thinking, and I took the opportunity to add something to it by way of apology.
I really hadn’t intended to hurt her, and frankly I’d probably need more gold from her anyway so this would act as a bit of a payment for it. The Glacial and Volcanic Sources had fruited, from my new Climate areas, and I put one of each on a separate pedestal in front of the one with my exotic Aurum.
"Oh my," Ansae said, eyes glittering with undisguised greed. "I didn’t realize you’d made new ones. High quality Affinities, too. I suppose that means that Aurum isn’t for me," she added with an insincere sigh. "Which is too bad. I’d love to have something like that in my hoard. You do realize that this is the sort of thing people kill kingdoms for, yes?"
Well, oops. I’d have to make sure nobody knew about them without putting them into Artifacts or something. Once I figured out how to suppress the mana forge I wouldn’t mind trading her some, so long as she was satisfied with one drop. A full bar would be a bit much..
"I’m sure you’re wondering what use this Aurum has," Ansae said, as if she were reading my mind. She reached out to pick up the Sources, the Volcanic Affinity a grey shot through with flickering orange and the glacial Affinity white with blue marbling. Both of them simply melted into her scales, her horns taking on a subtly deeper sheen a moment later. "Mostly, it looks like it can massively amplify Skills, but it’s very strange, because it’s still a bit of an insulator from what I can see."
Oh right, she did mention that gold was a mana insulator. That maybe explained why it was in my high-end stuff all the time. It was needed to keep the mana contained, though it seemed to me mana acted more like a fluid than electricity. A very well behaved fluid, since it didn’t seem to want to escape from the virtual channels it made through my bulk, but maybe I just didn’t know what to look for. It sounded like it had turned into some sort of mana semiconductor, or semi-superconductor, which probably meant it was capable of really weird stuff.
