The real sun was starting to set by the time Tristan saw the ramparts. He had never visited it before and had assumed the wall that surrounded the Caldera was similar to the ones around the cities within. It followed the same rules as any other wall, a barrier resistant to scaling meant to keep things out. However, instead of mud, this one was made of stone.
Large brick like rocks were stacked, each row staggered to let the bricks lock together. Brick was visually the correct word, but they were six feet long and two feet tall. Tristan could not tell how thick they were, but the shape alone made him believe warriors had made brick constructs and stacked them.
He looked up, the wall was twenty feet tall. The whole Caldera was around one hundred miles from edge to edge. Vulcan had mentioned that this made it a basin, not a caldera, even if it was on a mountain. Tristan did some quick math, there were around three hundred and twenty miles of wall like this. Sure the Grand Ancestor had multiple tier fours working with him and two or three tier fives, but it was impressive that he got this all done in a single lifetime.
Tristan only had one issue. He needed to find a way up, or he would need to wait for his leg to heal. In the day he had been limping along, Tristan had pushed every bit of healing alloy that he could into his leg. The bone would no longer flop around if he removed the splint, but he couldn’t walk with it.
Not for the first time he wished the growth alloy would scale with his tier, a tier four healing alloy would have already finished putting him together. Tristan frowned at that. He had often thought that he was underutilizing his alloys. Injuries did not cost more healing alloy because he was a higher tier, but he was left with a large surplus of architect alloy.
He started fusing his essence with the architect force. Previously, this had sealed away half his essence, and in exchange, it had kept the shape of his kern when his heart was torn out. It was odd that something like a force would be limited to all or nothing. When he used infusion, he did not have to infuse the entire target, so why did architect have to work that way?
Tristan collected architect alloy until he felt the strain that signified it would copy his kern. It took the same amount of essence to reach this point, but his kern healed more. Last time it took half, this time it took a fifth. He paused when he felt the tipping point and moved the essence away from his heart and towards his leg.
Now he had a decent amount of essence congealed around the break. It did not bind the broken limb, it did not reinforce it. He tried adding infusion to get it to work, but the essence was in the blood, blood was made in the bones. The most essence infused location was his bones, making his attempt redundant.
Tristan tried to make a cast out of the essence and when that failed he nearly threw his crutch at the wall. He thought he could fight gods one day and was stopped by a stupid wall. Cursing at his bad fortune, Tristan started along the wall. There should not be any stairs nearby. He had never been to the ramparts, so he was not sure if they had steps or a ladder. He hoped for the former but expected the latter.
He kept fiddling with architect, hoping that he could find some configuration that would work. Keeping it just below the threshold that would cause it to seal away his essence was getting harder as time went on. It took mental energy to manipulate essence, just as with anything else. He hadn’t rested well in the last two days, making his reserve of mental energy smaller than normal.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Several hours later, the sun had well and truly set. The bright light in the north let Tristan know that Viral was still in the Caldera. In a twisted sort of irony, Viral dawdling around was the reason Tristan could escape.
It was in the middle of winter, and without Viral the temperature would quickly drop below zero. Lacking a shirt and possessing no innate resistance to temperature made Tristan particularly vulnerable without survival gear. If Viral left, Tristan would need to resort to burning through Vulcan’s fire essence to stay warm. It regenerated so slowly that it was not a long term solution.
Something Tristan did find a solution to was how to get to the top of the wall. Pushed up against the wall was a cylindrical structure. It was made of a smaller brick in more standard proportions. Standing like a grain silo, it ran from the ground to about ten feet above the crenellations.
Tristan assumed from the construction that it was a more recent addition. An outward swinging door was set in on the ground level. There was a bar on the inside, which could be undone by reaching through a small window.
Between the outward hinges and accessible lock, Tristan assumed this structure was designed to keep beasts out as their main method of opening doors was to ram them.
Being more sophisticated than an animal, Tristan utilized the power of opposable thumbs to remove the bar and pop the door open. Inside was a spiral staircase spinning to the right. This was probably a place to retreat if a mythical beast proved to be greater than the defenders.
However, if a single mythical beast could overcome a team of tier threes, a wood door should do little to stop it.
Climbing the stairs proved to be more difficult than Tristan had assumed it to be. Its spiral nature made his right side swing more than his left, and that was problematic with a backpack and crutch. He also could not risk falling and exacerbating his injuries.
There was still one thing he had not tried yet. He gave one last look at the wad of frustration that was his architect alloy. Then he created a speck more of architect alloy and pushed it over the edge.
Just like the first time, he felt an odd tightening feeling. He waited for the feeling to pass, but it kept tightening.
“Forsaken gods!” Tristan yelled as the bones in his fingers and arm were jerked back into place.
Every injury in his kern was sealed over by metal essence. After the initial pain and he caught his breath, Tristan was grateful to find that only the breaks in his kern were sealed in metal essence. He had been worried that he would be turning his entire circulatory system into wires that resisted him again.
Tristan suspected the difference this time was simple. Last time, the physical space his kern normally occupied was torn out, rendering the whole system defunct. The whole system needed support.
Now, he had a few breaks and cuts that needed to be sealed up. Tristan picked at a scab on his hand. The crusted blood peeled away to find dull metal below. It extended beyond the edges of the cut, reminding Tristan of the patches that many of the miners would use after wearing holes through their clothes.
Tentatively, Tristan tapped his arm near the break. It still hurt. Just because it was wrapped in metal, did not mean he couldn’t feel it jostle. However, he had not been pushing all his healing alloy towards it. Tristan had been pumping his entire supply into his leg.
Putting weight on the leg was still painful, but it was a dull pain. He could ignore dull pains all day. Pulling off his backpack, he removed his knife and cut his crutch into a makeshift cane.
Saying the steps were now easy would have been an exaggeration. They were doable now. The spiral nature of the steps took a twenty-foot trip and extended it. He hoped that there was something similar on the other side of the wall. The last thing he wanted to do was survive the assault of an angry god, only to get killed by some roaming beast.
After reaching the top, Tristan removed the bar and stepped onto the walkway atop the wall. What he saw was foreign. Hills undulated as far as he could see. They were uncommon inside the Caldera, a side effect of how it was created.
Pine trees covered these hills, however they were unlike the ones inside the Caldera. If Tristan had not spent so much time hiking and running through the pine forests of the Caldera, he might have missed that these trees were much larger. Some reached nearly six stories high, much taller than the ones within the walls.
Tristan could only think that these trees were much older than the ones within the Caldera. The grand ancestor had to make a flat mountaintop habitable without trees. Once they did start growing again, the loggers would have harvested the best specimens, keeping the overall height down.
It made Tristan feel small. Vulcan had warned him that the world was vast, just the parts that he could see right now made it clear that the world he knew was a very small piece.