Checking on the complex object Serenity and Amani designed to stop the strange leak in A’Atla’s artificial ley line nexus only took a few hours. Serenity couldn’t even tell if there was any effect from it. All he could do was have patience; it would be several more days before he expected to see results and probably at least a week before A’Atla finished.
Instead, he spent the time over the next two, almost three, days where he wasn’t showing off the greenstone weapons or briefing people on what little he knew about A’Atla’s powerplant preparing for the trip. In order to escape, he did end up unlocking some more rights for Samantha. If he hadn’t, she’d have kept calling him with questions every fifteen minutes.
Literally. He timed it.
He was pretty sure she was being deliberately annoying just to get the result. He couldn’t quite bring himself to blame her; it was effective. Just as importantly, once she had the information he could give her, she stopped continually bothering him.
He needed an entire collection of curse-blocking shields. Blaze was confident he could manage himself; since he wasn’t supposed to be in sight of the basilisks until they were dead, Serenity was willing to skip the shield at his request. Everyone else, other than Serenity himself, needed one. He couldn’t infuse them in something to be quickly evoked later, either, since they needed to be as strong as possible and infused spells slowly degraded.
The most common solution was to individually cast the spell for each person. Serenity didn’t like that option since it would take about twenty minutes per person and there were eight people he needed to cover, even without himself or Blaze. It would work but it definitely wasn’t ideal. He could reduce the number of people by not taking all of Team Two, or simply by not protecting everyone from curses, but he wasn’t willing to bet that there weren’t any basilisks elsewhere in the complex.
A mass spell was the normal option to reduce the time. Unfortunately, while he could cast a spell to cover everyone at once, it wouldn’t be significantly stronger than the spell on an individual. Worse, when it failed it would fail on everyone at the same time as the underlying spellform became too damaged to support the effect. It wasn’t a good choice.
The option he’d prefer would be a shielding charm. They were fairly common on low-Tier planets, but Serenity didn’t have any. With his resistances, they weren’t terribly useful so he tended to ignore them. Serenity couldn’t make them and he didn’t have time to order any from Katya’s family, but he could do something similar: a one-use runic inscription. They were fairly expensive but it was the best solution he had. The day of the expedition, he’d prepare a couple more shields in miniature wands to use if necessary.
A number of other spells were shoved into miniature wands; after all, simple utility magic like telekinesis didn’t have to be full strength to be useful. His slowness spell and a stronger version of his weight spell, on the other hand, both had to be made the day of the trip. It was going to be hard on his supply of miniature wands, since they tended to break after one or two uses, but they were simple to replace.
When he thought about it, Serenity was pretty sure that his miniature wand supply was where Rissa had gotten the materials for Ita’s altered projectiles. Who else had a collection of conveniently-sized dowel rods on A’Atla? Sure, there were probably some, but his were convenient.
The one other thing he did to prepare was use a Skill he usually forgot about: Quickrune.
Quickrune
As an Evoker, you can store a spell to be cast later. As a creature of Magitech and (former) Runemaster, you can now build a rune of your own flesh to be triggered when needed.
It had three advantages over normal runecrafting. The first was speed; he couldn’t make the rune at the speed of thought, but it was faster than a spellform instead of slower like properly drawing out a rune. That wasn’t relevant here. The second advantage was in many ways the least important here, though it would have been very important to the Final Reaper: the only way to take it away from him was to literally cut it out of his body.
The third advantage, however, was very relevant. It required no outside materials because it used his own flesh, blood, and bone. Dragonhide was an excellent material for runes; as it turned out, his bones were even better. For a human, it would have been a horribly painful way to avoid the cost of materials of their Tier. For Serenity, it was a distinctly uncomfortable way to craft something he couldn’t have made with materials significantly better than any he had available, even with everything he’d bought on Tzintkra.
He definitely didn’t want anyone to get ahold of some of his scales now. They were far too good a material; he’d have people literally hunt him down for it. Yes, if any dragon caught them with the material they’d be dead, but there were people who would take that risk for material this good.
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Fortunately, it wasn’t likely to be a problem on Earth. Not only could he deal with almost anyone other than the gods, people wouldn’t know what to look for in materials for a while. For now, they wouldn’t recognize the difference.
It hurt in more than one way to inscribe an old runic inscription that he’d thought he’d never use again. It was one the Final Reaper had refined until it could kill people at his own Tier in a single activation, one he’d once used to extinguish a star. Anything could die. The Final Reaper could prove that.
Serenity didn’t have that much mana available and he was pretty certain he wasn’t actually using good enough materials as well, but he had enough and his body was good enough that anything he could conceivably run into here would die, including the basilisks. He hoped he’d never use any of the six he managed to create during those two days, but it was better to have them and not use them than to watch someone die because he wasn’t willing to use the tools he could have had.
He also hoped six would be enough. There were more basilisks than that, but he couldn’t bring himself to make more. If he needed more than six, they were so far past “something went wrong” that he’d just have to deal with it at the time.
Getting everyone through the melted-closed stone “gate” was a little more complex than Serenity’s first trip with Ita, but it wasn’t significantly harder. Ita simply dropped half of one of her tokens, waited for Serenity to teleport her past the gate, then opened a portal for everyone else. After that, it was the same long walk to the cold yet fiery river. This time Serenity knew what to expect, even though he took a slightly different route to look for basilisks. He didn’t find any, but he wasn’t yet completely confident there weren’t any.
The two protective wraps were still on the hooks where Serenity and Ita had left them. Serenity took one and made his way through the river; it was cold but not nearly as bad as with a damaged wrap.
On the other side of the stream, the basilisks were curled up again, though they were arranged in a line along the edge of the stream. The injured one was still against the wall and the oddly-shaped smaller lumps were still there as well. A quick comparison showed that they were in almost the positions he’d last seen them in, with only inches of movement. That meant that there were basilisks directly between him and the protective wraps he wanted to retrieve.
Serenity wanted to avoid waking them, so he stayed as far back in the flowing mana as he could and still free his hand to use one of the telekinesis mini-wands. Evoking the spell seemed to work normally, but he’d barely even picked the first wrap off its hook when the spell failed. Fortunately, the wrap fell right back onto the hook; unfortunately, Serenity had to figure out what was wrong. He hadn’t expected it to fail that quickly.
A few minutes of watching his surroundings with manasight active told him the reason was the flowing mana itself. It seemed constant, but it wasn’t. Even worse, a little was thrown around in a spray when it hit the wrap’s protective shield. Serenity suspected the problem was as simple as a little of that spray being thrown through the telekinesis spellform; it was fragile and would fall apart easily. He’d never tried casting while in a stream of mana strong enough to affect the physical world before but the theory made sense.
The only solution was to move into a “shallower” section of the stream. That would set the spellform farther from the raging mana and make a similar failure less likely. It would also increase the chance he’d wake the basilisks, but that couldn’t be helped at this point. Serenity stepped forward and pulled out another mini-wand infused with a telekinesis spell, glad he’d prepared.
This time, there was no difficulty. All three of the wraps floated over to his hand. Serenity tried not to relax too much; the basilisks hadn’t moved, but sound might wake them. They were probably not as asleep as the last time. He didn’t know if they had any other way to detect people when they were curled up, but vibration through the ground also seemed like a possible method, so he kept his steps as light as he could.
The next deviation from the plan Serenity had sketched out with Rissa came when he handed four wraps, including the one he was wearing, off to members of Team Two. They’d pointed out that his presence on the other side wasn’t actually necessary. They liked the inclusion of Ita’s spell, since it could actually restrain the basilisks, but suggested that one more rifle might be more useful than slowing the basilisks down when they were already restrained. Serenity knew he could do more than that, but they did have a point; the greenstone rifles ought to handle the basilisks without his help. If they didn’t, they’d retreat and try again.
Having a secure line to retreat behind was always useful. The fact that this one wasn’t solid but would badly damage any basilisk that tried to cross it was still enough to make it secure, especially with Serenity and the other two from Team Two watching.
The mana didn’t stop sound but it did distort it. That surprised Serenity; he’d only seen that in really, really high mana environments. This was even denser than he’d expected; it made him glad he had protective gear. It was probably not any good against a shaped spell, but the shield had to be sturdy.
The greenstone rifles didn’t make much noise, but they made enough that Serenity could tell what was happening. Everything went well for the first dozen shots, then the basilisks started to scream. A human shout came quickly after that; it seemed like the basilisks hadn’t just allowed themselves to be shot. Serenity couldn’t tell from the noise if someone was partially petrified or if a basilisk had repeated the injured one’s dive into the manastream.
Serenity set a hand on Blaze’s shoulder when the other man made an abortive half movement towards the fiery river. He knew how much he wanted to go in there and help; Blaze had to feel it more than he did. Yet neither of them could do anything from here.