“The point is it’s not safe,” Lief said. “Of course, you need to figure out how to not be in the area when it goes off, and be confident in replicating what you just did on a larger scale… but how many quints did that take?”
“One or two,” Thorn admitted. It had been little more than a firecracker, but if he’d put in more quints…
“My Imbue skill takes hundreds. Thousands, if the duration is a significant amount of time and the object is longer than a pencil. We discussed this before; sure, my skill is a good trump card, but first getting me into position will be difficult, and more importantly, it’s just not cost-effective. For the small-fry, at least.”
This had been one of the main things they’d argued about last night when discussing traps. But since Thorn had stumbled his way into a different option, Lief was taking a harder line on saving up his quints for the big one: the one that had gotten away with an arm and a leg. The fincroc.
Shoot, with as much as it had taken from Lief, that beast might as well be on the same level as an ex-wife.
“It’s not about the size of the skill, Lief, but how you use it.”
“Hilarious. Now shut up and listen to the plan.”
Thorn shut his mouth and listened. It was a good plan, he had to admit. Simple but clever. It hinged on a few assumptions, and a few things he needed to work out.
The first thing he needed to do was level up, see if he got anything useful, then after that, practice with his Skills while Lief scouted out the groundwork for his part of the plan.
Thorn took each of the small snake cores in his hand, willing his System to absorb each one. The quints flowed up through his hand and arm, the cool rush a similar feeling to his Concentrate Skill, except in reverse, and much more intense.
After absorbing all of the cores, he cleaned his hands of the leftover dust and settled into a comfortable position. He checked his status, and sure enough, he had just enough for his next level up. His nerves tingled in anticipation.
He passed out, just like the last time, and when he woke up, he had his next Skill.
Analyze was a strange one. Thorn knew immediately that it wouldn’t provide any kind of direct force multiplier. It also felt less like a Skill of his, and more a Skill of his System’s. He had questions.
Analyze seemed like a souped-up version of the models and timed directives that Thorn had used in the past to reasonable effect. Without testing it out, he wasn’t sure how it could be better. Sure, there were things he wanted to adjust in his HUD, but at this point, years into using the System, he was used to it.
It just seemed like a waste of a Skill, at least at this point in time, but Thorn suspected that was only because he didn’t know how to use it well yet.
Thorn couldn’t leave Lief in the pill room, where he’d be safe while he continued scouting with his drone, because his effective range while inside the pill room was significantly diminished. Whatever shielded the contents of that room from the senses of beasts, it also impacted Lief’s Skills as well.
All three of them trooped out into the base’s common area. The crow took a perch next to Lief, and began watching him with interest.
Analyze wasn’t an offensive Skill he could easily use to kill beasts, so the plan stayed the same: focusing on Concentrate and making that into a weapon.
He held a pattern in mind, stuck out his finger, and painted that pattern onto the top of a broken table. When he finished the pattern, a simple cross-hatch of threads in a vaguely octagonal shape, he stopped the flow of quintessence, and a short moment later, a sharp crack filled the room along with a bit of wood smoke.
There were a few burned spots on the top of the table. The tip of his finger smarted a bit. Overall a success, at the cost of a quint or two. Now came the fun part: trying to figure out why it was exploding.
As far as he could tell, it was the same pattern as the shield, except that pattern was repeated and woven together. This time, Thorn created two of the weaves, the second intersecting with the first. Both of the patterns cracked and smoked about one second after he finished and stopped his skill.
The third time, he didn’t cut his Skill right away, but waited for another five seconds before doing so. This time the explosion was louder, and the flames stronger, singeing the hair on the back of his hand.
So it didn’t blow up until he stopped applying energy, and the longer he fed quintessence into it, the greater the explosion. Well, maybe it wasn't the length of time, but the amount of quintessence instead. His next test confirmed what was intuitive: a pattern with “thicker” threads of quintessence produced a larger explosion.
He was still too close, though, and only a careless moment away from losing a finger or more. He experimented with laying a pattern, then walking backwards while extruding a thin thread of quintessence from where he’d left the pattern. It didn’t explode until several seconds after he cut off the flow of quintessence.
He was pulled away from his experiments by the crow, who was cawing and trying to catch his attention, jerking its head and pecking in the general direction of one of the corners of the room. He had placed the last core they had and an open bottle of glitter pills there (away from his bomb experiments). He pulled his sidearm from its holster. When the snakes exploded out of the walls, he was ready.
Three shots, three hits. He had also waited until their bodies were fully out of the stone wall, not wanting a repeat of the snake stuck in the table upstairs.
Lief gave him a brief thumbs up, then closed his eyes and went back to focusing on his drone.
The crow squawked in frustration, mutilating one of the bodies with a vicious peck. Thorn holstered his weapon and checked the bodies, but none of the corpses held cores that he could find. He got back to work.
He started to experiment with different patterns of quintessence. Circles (poorly drawn), hexagons, scribbles. All of his attempts created either explosions (a quick release of energy) or heat (a slower release of energy). While explosions could certainly be useful, he was getting frustrated that he couldn’t recreate the pumpkin’s seemingly simple pattern.
Something in how he did it was incorrect, and he wasn’t sure what. It could, of course, be that in order to create the shielding effect, the entire formation, an entire sphere of interlocking grids, needed to be created, but that didn’t make sense to Thorn.
<21 free-form quintessence patterns created. 12 resulted in catastrophic failure, 9 ended in structural failure.>
<0 patterns persisted past the initial application of quintessence.>
That was interesting… The possibility of customizing an Agent to help him with his space magic? He hadn’t known that was possible.
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Thorn felt the Skill activate as his System got to work. He knew that it would take a few minutes, maybe even an hour, before the Agent came online.
Before he could continue his experiments, the crow flew over and landed on his shoulder, pecking him in the neck and pulling him out of the conversation with his System. Another attack seemed likely, and he prepared himself accordingly.
Another four snakes appeared, but this time it took five shots to take them out. He was holstering his weapon again when a cool, scaley weight fell on shoulder, then slapped onto the floor.
Thorn jumped backwards. The snake on the floor was dead, blood pooling out of a hole precisely pecked through its eye and into its brain.
Thorn looked up and saw the tell-tale discoloration on the ceiling. The sneaky snake had gotten the drop on him, and only the crow had saved him from a bite to the neck or head.
Lief had a point about his situational awareness. Apparently even Assess couldn’t always compensate for it.
“Thanks,” Thorn said with not a little bit of chagrin.
“Hrrrzzrrkk…” the crow said, elongating its harsh syllables. It gave him a harsh peck on his head before it hopped down and inspected each of the snake corpses. There were two tiny cores out of this lot, one of which it gobbled down. The other it brought over to Thorn.
“I believe you earned yourself this one,” Thorn said, tossing it back to the crow.
It snatched it out of the air and tilted a blue-tinged eye up at him. “Crrrrk,” it crowed softly.
“Let’s not tell Lief.”
“Hrrrzk.” The crow’s head bobbed, as if in agreement.
“Tell Lief what?” The grizzled Warden had one eye open.
“Nothing.”
Thorn went back to reviewing the summary his System had put together while it was busy building his custom Agent. The other insight that was helpful and that Thorn hadn’t noticed himself was that the intensity of the explosions scaled on the intersections of threads, or where the invisible strings of quintessence he drew touched each other.
Working with this new Agent was fascinating. It wasn’t like his regular System interactions; it could send him its own comms, but more than that, it was also integrated into his perceptions. So instead of a series of comm exchanges, it could give active, directed impressions in his HUD to utilize Concentrate to achieve maximum damage.
It also had another feature: simulated audio.
The voice of the agent had a strange accent Thorn was unfamiliar with. At first he thought the agent was actually speaking outloud, but he quickly realized the voice was just in his head.
Thorn wasn’t sure what to think at first, but he had bigger concerns and decided to just roll with it. With inputs from Agent Boom, he set off another round of experiments, leading to a deeper understanding of how to make his catastrophic failures… which led to more experiments that were even more more catastrophic.
Eventually he received an update from his System.
Even though a part of him felt like he had wasted quints experimenting with his Skill, he realized the custom Agent had real value. If he set a general idea, such as “blow up this chair,” he would immediately receive intuitive feedback on the size, shape and amount of quints to put into a pattern.
Agent Boom could easily provide him with an estimate on explosion strength, amount of quints required, time until the pattern unraveled after he stopped applying additional quintessence, and so forth, based on all of the experiments he had conducted.
His bomb-making experiments happily concluded for now, the last piece of preparation was picking up the splinters and bits of metal off the floor and packing them into small bags along with nails, screws, and spare parts he’d found in the pantry, fashioning a crude crutch out of a bed frame, and then grabbing a quick bite to eat. Highly processed mystery meat jerky and dry-freeze oatmeal: the breakfast of champions.
“We’re all good,” Thorn said to Lief. “I can’t set and forget, but we weren’t counting on that. I can detonate at a safe distance, at least safe from the explosion. The only thing I don’t know is how big they can get, but my new Skill actually gives me really good, instantaneous guidance on how to achieve what I want.”
He didn’t tell Lief that he was calling it Agent Boom.
“Excellent,” Lief replied. “All’s quiet on the northern shore, so now’s as good a time as any.”
“Let’s do it.”
Thorn refilled his magazines and shouldered a rifle before handing Lief the crutch he’d made. Lief wasn’t going to be staying behind this time. Pill bottles and the small sacks of shrapnel that Thorn had gathered went to the pack on Thorn’s back. Lief pulled on the poncho that Thorn had gotten modified by Beatrice, which seemed like a lifetime ago.
They walked out of the base slowly and quietly, Lief’s drone meeting them at the entrance to the observation platform.
Thorn was half expecting the catfish to still be there, its funny mouth opening and closing in the air. Or if it wasn’t hanging around, for it to have gone back into the deep parts of the lake.
He was not expecting to find its guts and tail lying in the sand on the edge of the water, a faint fishy smell spread through the air.
Thorn pointed at the remains of the catfish and poked Lief.
“Sorry,” Lief said. “Forgot to tell you. Fincroc got it.”
One less monster to worry about, Thorn supposed, and one monster to worry about even more. How big was this thing? Thorn was having a hard time visualizing how large that beast might have gotten.
For the first part of the plan, Lief would stay on the observation platform. Thorn shimmied down the rope, first tossing a Q-Stix down the stairs and confirming that the hidden spider was still there at the bottom. It was. He then ran north, back towards the greenhouse. The crow flew close beside him.
He made good time through the tunnel and was in and out of the greenhouse in a minute, grabbing a few shovels and a wheel barrow. Tools in hand, he and the crow hurried back.
The lake was eerily quiet. Thorn’s footfalls felt loud and discordant in the cavern. After making it back to the observation platform, Thorn stopped briefly to pick up Lief, then kept running.
There was a rough road that ran close to the platform. Its right fork passed into what Lief was confident was the entrance tunnel. The tunnel was long and narrow, and Lief’s drone hadn’t been able to fly to the end of it. It was full of snakes.
The snakes weren’t visible; that’s how Lief had missed them the first time he’d flown his drone through there. But he was confident they were there, because after the snakes had attacked them in the control room, he had retraced his flight paths and on closer inspection, found that the walls of the narrow cavern had a significant number of pockmarks and discolorations on the otherwise smoothly machined walls.
The snakes were likely hiding inside of the walls, waiting to ambush anything that made the mistake of running down that corridor.
The fork to the left kept close to the side of the cavern and away from the surface of the lake, which Thorn was thankful for. More fields of ravaged imperial plums stretched out in between the road and the lake. Large holes, perfectly concentric and sloping inwards, pocked the surface of the ground at regular intervals. Thorn wondered what those were for. Whoever had built this facility had gone to significant trouble to cart in soil, set up irrigation equipment, and develop the special grow lamps with giant fiber optic cables.
The light in the cavern grew brighter as Thorn approached the end where one of those grow lamps was still glowing. He kept to the hard packed road, looking for the right place to set up.
There, where the road curved inwards towards the lake and the cavern wall had a slight wrinkle to it. It was directly underneath the glaring lamp, and there was a boulder that had fallen loose from the cavern wall; he could use that. Thorn set Lief on the boulder, and the crow landed next to him.
Thorn began to dig. The road itself was hard-packed dirt with a surface layer of gravel, but the soil off of the road was a rich, silty loam that made for easy digging. Still, with only a shovel and a wheelbarrow, it was long and difficult work.
The crow kept watch close by, and Lief’s drone passed by occasionally on its soundless patrols. The only sounds were the dry chuff of his shovel hitting dirt and Thorn’s labored breathing. The work was meditative… not in the same sense as his skill, but peaceful and relaxing. It gave him an opportunity to really luxuriate in the bodily improvements he’d received from his handful of levels.
He was no stranger to this type of work. Despite the Skills his father, a Farmer, and his mother, a Yeoman, had received from their Systems, both of them had firmly believed in the value of hard work, and put an emphasis on the “labor” part of child labor. Every year, he’d had his own plot of land to plow, plant, and till using nothing but primitive hand tools. The work was backbreaking, but that had been the point; he was supposed to have developed an appreciation for his future System, by understanding what it took to grow a squash or a potato or an ear of corn by hand. Thorn may not have developed that sense of appreciation, or a Skill for farming, but he did have experience with a shovel.
Sweat poured down his back as the soil flew. He piled the loose soil on the sides of the large, sloping pit that was forming, making the walls on the sides higher. He was angling down and away from the road, towards the cavern wall. The only issue he had was misjudging his strength, digging too deep, and then breaking the handle of the shovel when he attempted to leverage too much dirt out of the ground. It was a good thing he’d grabbed a few extra shovels.
So far, they had not been interrupted by any beasts; that was by design. In addition to his regular patrols, Lief was dropping off pills here and there throughout the cavernous complex, attempting to keep the beasts away and occupied while Thorn was busy.
The digging took several hours, but Thorn was satisfied when the pit was finally done. This level of effort would have taken him several days before, but his body was stronger, faster, and had significantly more endurance.
A pit stretched from the road to the edge of the cliff, approximately ten meters long and five meters wide. At the bottom, it reached a depth of almost five meters. And about twenty meters further down the cavern wall was a second, man-sized hole that Thorn had quickly added.
The first part of their preparations was complete, and ditching the shovels and wheelbarrow, Thorn hustled back up the road to collect Lief and bring him back to the pit. The next part was going to be delicate.
He climbed on top of the boulder at the far end of the pit, where the crow had settled for the last few hours, and took the rope out of his pack. After tying Lief in place on his back, Thorn took the other end of the rope in his hand and looked up, squinting through the glare of the enormous grow lamp shining down on them with the heat of a mid-day sun.
This was going to be difficult. Thorn blinked the spots out of his eyes, and looked around for the crow.
It was circling above them, casting a long shadow on the ground below.
“Hey,” Thorn said quietly, holding up the end of the rope and wiggling it at the crow. “Loop this around that hook up there.” He pointed.
The crow ignored him and continued circling. Lief muffled a snort.
“It was worth a try,” Thorn muttered. He hadn’t been counting on the crow reading his mind and helping with this part, but it would have been nice.
Instead, he pulled out a pylon and tied it to the end of the rope, giving it some weight. Glancing upwards, he could see the series of eye hooks that secured the cables against the wall.
The light itself was at the very top of the cavern, at least fifty meters high. The cables came out of the entrance tunnel (presumably from the outside) and ran along the wall of the cavern at a height of about twenty meters. The cables turned upwards where the massive lights were situated, and that elbow bend where the cables turned upwards was where Thorn was aiming.
He swung his rope and threw. It smacked against the side of the cable with a clang and fell to the ground. Even with his level ups, this was difficult; it wasn’t about strength or control or endurance, but finesse. A very fine degree of precision was needed to swing a redneck grapple hook through a hook twenty meters away, more so than shooting a few snakes at close range.
Maybe if his proprioception was higher… or he had a special Skill…
On his fourth try there was a faint “crrrk” and the crow swooped down, catching the end of the rope and looping it over the eye hook.
“See,” Thorn said to Lief. “I knew he could do it.”