Tristan couldn’t help his disappointment. The way Vulcan had described it, he would be able to use every force. He should have known an omni-force did not exist. Or if it did, Tristan would not find it in this vault.
He inspected the coin sized object, not entirely sure what he could do with it. Maybe he could put an adamant coating on a weapon. It would appear thin, and even adamance was not invincible. Tristan was inclined to think of it as a very expensive trick, however, the excitement radiating from Vulcan seemed to tell a different story.
“You must be seeing something I don’t,” Tristan said.
“Essence reservoirs, you can load essence reservoirs with force constructs,” Vulcan answered, “Imagine not having to cultivate a garden or harvest forces from beasts, no waiting, and no restrictions.”
Tristan sighed, so it was not useless. It was extremely valuable, but only to someone who knew how to craft artifacts with essence reservoirs. Tristan wanted to learn how to make them, he had collected a sizable number of reservoirs over the last few years, but currently, he was ignorant. Running from a god takes up a good amount of one’s attention.
A second issue was that assuming he could make an essence construct for a different force, he would still need the appropriate essence type to fuel it. Vulcan could charge up fire and Tristan could do anything with metal, but anything else would lack the energy to be useful.
“Why is it so expensive, I had to use most of my essence for this little construct?” Tristan complained.
“A force is a much more potent energy than essence. Why do you think people with them tend to be stronger?” Vulcan said, “You simply did an equal exchange. Forces not related to metal will be dramatically more expensive.”
That was obvious. Essence was composed of a varying mixture of forces and the eight generic essence types were simply the ones most common in nature. If he was making adamance, then it was likely he was paying a price, in essence, proportional to the amount of adamance that was naturally in metal essence. It felt unfair, but he was thinking of it in terms of value related to his goals.
“I am relegated to metal essence until my kern is a higher tier,” Tristan said, “Anything else I need to do before I leave?”
“The tier five talent, remember?” Vulcan said, “It lets you affect the state of your constructs.”
Tristan had completely forgotten about that. He focused again on creating a small construct, but this time he wanted it to be a liquid. It took three or four times the essence, but it formed quite easily. Then he realized that liquid metal tended to be hot. He yelped and jumped back waving his hand around to get the metal off.
“Blind gods! That, that actually hurts much less than I had expected,” Tristan took a look at his palm. His arm was glowing a cheerful red color. It was uncomfortably warm, the 2800 degree dob of metal was hot, but not unbearably so after the absorption force took in and dispersed the heat.
“I told you absorption was good,” Vulcan said smugly.
Tristan had emptied his kern with that stunt, which relegated his next few hours to essence recovery. He needed to be combat ready when he left. There was a good chance spriggons were infesting the place and he wanted his hammer back. At least the creatures seemed uninterested in tools or weapons.
The low humming he made in place of chanting was very relaxing and before long he slumped against the door. The sleep was blank and empty of stimuli, more akin to unconsciousness. When he woke up he decided he hated being underground. It appeared that no time had passed, despite him knowing that hours had gone by.
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“Vulcan how long did I sleep,” Tristan asked.
“I use your senses. If you’re unconscious I need to use some pretty visible abilities to see anything,” Vulcan answered.
“You could just say you don’t know,” Tristan huffed as he got up and stretched, “Is there a tier where sleep becomes irrelevant?”
“Sadly no, simply less relevant. My sleep was based on the stress I placed on my mind and body, “Vulcan smashed Tristan’s hopes.
He moved his arms and legs, sleeping on a hard floor had not been good for circulation. As feeling came back he took note of his capabilities. Despite crossing into tier five, his essence reserves weren’t much greater, there was maybe a ten percent increase. Not that he would complain about that, it was just anticlimactic compared to everything else.
Making a fist, he looked for differences in how his muscles and tendons work. Tristan sighed in relief when he noticed nothing new. If his body had been rearranged he would have to learn how to move all over again. The anima had changed surprisingly little for all the pain it had caused. It was like a spark, it needed to be fed to grow into the bonfire it could one day be.
Shouldering his backpack, he looked at the door. The vault would have been impassable if Vulcan hadn’t stripped the adamance off. Summoning Vulcan, he made a hammer construct around the lamppost’s head. It was quite a bit of essence, making him wish that he had thought to bring his other artifact in.
The rotating barrels the keys were inserted into were exposed, making it easy to hammer them off. With the three bars exposed, he wrenched them into the unlocked position and shoved the door open.
“That was easier than I had anticipated,” Tristan said, “how did you remove the adamance without destroying the door?”
Vulcan shrugged, “Nothing is a perfect container for a force, entropy will always render it into an inert state given enough time. With enough of a difference in tier difference, I can pull it out.”
Tristan wondered if he would be able to start doing the same thing with his alloys or only the alloy force.
Walking through the trap hall, he found his first spriggon. Most of the traps had been triggered, culminating in little permanent damage. Needles in the carpet were only dangerous if the victim had a bloodstream. The poisons and spikes targeted human weaknesses, doing little damage to the spriggons.
He only came across one spriggon. A wire had managed to take off its head. While the ent had no vital organs in its head, its eyes and ears were still there. The body and head were unable to communicate creating a mildly disturbing scene. Its body felt around on the floor while the head was dangling from the wire it had been caught on, glaring down at its incompetent body.
Tristan chuckled, “You stuck?” The head looked over at him while the body lacked the organs for hearing and kept feeling around. “I’m going to be asking you some questions, and if you give me answers I’ll leave you alive minus some arms and legs. You regrow those, right?”
No answer came. Tristan shook his head when he realized the head had the hearing organ, but the body had the speaking one. He reached out and pulled the head down. Tossing it to the floor, he watched in mild fascination as the spriggon placed it back on. Then it jumped in fright when it realized how close Tristan was standing.
It clawed at him, which was largely pointless. His body had gotten heavier but not larger, meaning very dense. He smiled slightly, he was a bit like tungsten in human form. Still, no need to waste essence on reinforcement. The claw was caught and crushed. It tried a second time with the other hand with similar results.
“I need some answers out of you, do you want to talk,” Tristan reiterated the offer he had made a minute ago.
The spriggon answered by trying to press its arms together. Tier five put him right about seven and a half times the strength of a tier zero man, a tier that this spriggon was sitting at. Tristan placed one boot on the spriggons chest and tore its arms off. It bounced off the wall, slightly lighter and with much lesser balance.
Tristan sank his fingers into the damaged spriggon’s lower torso, slamming it into the wall a second time, “There are thousands more of you, talk or die.”
He coated a finger in a frozen film of decay. Freezing seemed to take less effort than heating, Tristan noted, happy that his decay could be used as a solid. He placed the finger over the spriggon’s heart and pressed. The soft wood compressed around his finger. Still, the spriggon did not talk, it just thrashed around impotently. Tristan wondered if he had found a spriggon grown from a mentally deficient host.
Then the cold decay alloy started melting. The wood touching his finger darkened and softened letting him push farther in. Thrashing turned to screaming as he got closer to the heart. Tristan was about to give up and find another when the spriggon finally started talking.
“I speak, I speak,” It chanted in an oddly twitchy voice.