Chapter 34 - Do it Better

Stealth (Gray Man) is now level 9.

Spots danced in my vision as I held my breath and forced my body to slow down. Tired, oxygen starved muscles threatened to cramp thanks to the awkward position I was maintaining, laying on my side and curled up, but if they did seize, I would have to bear it in silence. The walls of the cupboard where we hid were cheap, thin wood that conducted the sound of even the slightest of movements with extreme efficiency. It was like hiding in a cardboard box where every errant twitch sounded like an alarm.

The problem with scourge-touched undead was that they were absolutely silent if they wanted to be. Apparently, their bodies didn’t run off of oxygen so they didn’t need to breathe, and when they weren’t howling at the top of their lungs, they didn’t feel the need to communicate with each other. Whether they didn’t need to or chose not to, I didn’t know.

Once they saw me, though, they were like hounds after a deer, baying and snarling up a storm.

I waited and listened. Trix was tucked in behind my head, and I could hear his tiny heartbeat, quick and light.

Detect Magnesium was giving me little hits outside of my wooden box, a wisp of movement here, a flash there. It wasn’t much to go on, but we were definitely not alone.

Detect Iron, I’d discovered, wasn't particularly useful at seeing the undead, since they didn’t have hemoglobin like living people. Sure, I would get a hit here and there, but the chances of it being something that wanted to eat me came down to a coin flip. Magnesium, though. They had that in their bones just like us, not a lot of it, but it was there. Impressions. Glints. It was like trying to see a shadow on a black wall.

*Shhs*

Something dragged over the counter above our heads. I could almost make out the shape of something humanoid running its hands over the countertop, probing with oddly jointed fingers, broken nails scratching over the grain.

*CRASH*

Glass shattered on the surface of the counter. Liquid trickled down and slapped the pavers outside. Then there was silence. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard a whisper of a footfall, far away.

We stayed there another half hour before I decided to slide the door open to check our immediate surroundings.

Nothing. No pale-fleshed legs or milky white eyes, at least not behind the counter where we were. I slowly unfolded myself, careful not to brush the fabric of my clothes over the wood any more than I needed to.

Trix was out faster than I could be, scrambling over my body and bounding to the floor. He knew the drill by now. We needed his eyes and ears. Absolutely silent, he snuck over to the side of the counter and peaked around to get a good look at the room. Then he crept back to my side as I was massaging my left calf to work out some of the soreness.

“They’re gone, Brother Ryan,” he whispered in my ear. “I’ll keep listening.”

I nodded, sitting upright and stretching my upper half, my neck especially.

The intersection where we’d set up was much bigger than the last one but oddly shaped, a sort of asymmetrical octagon that someone had bashed with a hammer until it was functionally two separate areas.

Small, single proprietor shop stalls were built against the walls, angles set to snugly match the odd geometry of the room. Whatever logic Ralqir’s Dark Lord had used to make this place, I couldn’t help but think this intersection was an oversight, a kind of slap dash solution that just needed to be there to make the rest of the more important parts of the design fit. Maybe it was like a leftover nut at the end of a big project where you just throw up your hands and hope for the best. Then again, what did I know?

‘Base camp’ or ‘the stall with the best hiding place’’ was a wooden box built a bit like I imagined a street vendor would want. It was large enough to fit a few people behind the counter but the front was solid enough to withstand some punishment, and, at one time, it had big shutters that could be locked from the inside. On the wall behind me were various bottles of cheap liquor and sweet water as well as a few local publications that I hadn’t had a chance to read. A broken bottle bled sticky red liquid that still dribbled off the countertop and down into the floor. The smell reminded me of rice pudding.

Back to work then.

It had taken us a few tries to find another hub with a magical trap door again. First, it was about finding another hub, one free of undead. Then we had to lead the scourge-touched away from said area long enough for me to conduct a search. Geddon hated that part. The guy was getting more cardio over the past few days than he probably had in years. However, it kept the guards moving and searching for those they could save, so his complaints were more in jest than annoyance.

We had the system down pretty well now.

In the early hours, it was relatively easy to avoid the Returned. They made enough noise to not be able to hear us, and they tended to clump up into little swarms. What it wasn’t easy to do was to avoid seeing what they’d done. Not everyone had made it out before the lockdown. There were signs. We’d gotten turned around in the side tunnels once and came across a market of some kind, one constructed from Mendau, the floor carpeted with mats of beige wood and string with flimsy, ramshackle booths everywhere. Unlike the quellstone, that place displayed exactly how much carnage had happened. Everything was stained with the blood of the living, the mats bloodstained and wet still.

No bodies though. There were never any bodies.

That had been a wake up call for all of us, especially Sissa. During our time in that place, she withdrew, listlessly going through the motions of searching through the market but not allowing herself to really be present. I could sympathize. She was the ranking guard down here, and she was being presented with terrible choices, given two paths to choose from where both lead to a bad end. The market was one of those ends. If she needed to put down her burden for a while and check out, I wasn’t going to judge. It was only after we found our first pair of survivors an hour later, a little boy and his grandmother, did Sissa come back.

Good for her.

For my part, I dealt with things differently. People were dead. It was my fault. I didn’t like that.

So, I worked on the problem.

I’d learned since my last bout with quellstone. The more surface area my metal made contact with, the bigger the drain on my mana pool. I’d Shaped off a piece of baptized bronze, about the size of my finger and used it as my probe. I thinned it out, elongating it until I had a hair thin bit of bronze wire which I would then use to feel around underneath the quellstone, looking for empty space. It was still a drain on my mana, but it was only enough to add a couple points to the MP/sec. It helped that I was much more practiced now, and was able to probe a spot in the floor in about thirty seconds, thanks to the baptized bronze’s willingness to accept my mana.

Well, we were done with that part. Now it was about getting in. I was not about to blow up a whole nother room to get into the tunnels this time. Less mess. Less noise. The acoustics down here were such that the sound carried for ridiculous distances. We needed something more specialized, and I had just the thing in mind.

I summoned my hybrid steel tube I’d salvaged from my stolen lamp stand. I use the term “tube’ loosely, because that implies a rounded shape. Now, this one was a sort of hollow V with a round top and pointed legs. Then I’d salvaged the rest of the baptized bronze to form the inside wall of the V. The whole thing was about as long as my arm and had enough space inside to fit my pinky.

“Brother Ryan, I don’t mean to question…” Trix didn’t finish his sentence. He was up on the counter now, ears perked up, head tilted. He took his job as the lookout very seriously.

“We’re going to get out of here,” I said, summoning the sister tube of steel from my spatial storage to begin Shaping it to fit inside the other tube’s cavity. “But we’re doing it right this time.”

We’d talked about going back to Bole’s already open tunnel and getting the civilians out that way, but we’d decided against it. If Bole was half as clever as Sissa said he was, he would have found a way to block up the exit on the other side. If we were discovered in the tunnels, we’d be sandwiched between a blocked exit and a horde of scourge-touched, and I wasn’t confident that I would be able to blow open an exit in a confined space and not kill us all in the process..

“So, you don’t have to set yourself on fire?”

“Hm,” I grunted, saturating the steel and beginning the slow process of thinning it to fit into the cavity. “And this is, theoretically, going to be quieter.”

“I had assumed self-immolation was part of your method.”

“Side effect,” I said. “Did not enjoy it.”

“How do you feel, by the way?” Trix asked. Ever since Trix had healed me, I’d not been feeling myself. I felt hollow, like I was missing something.

“Still weak. Everything feels sore.”

“I’m sorry. It’s a side effect of our… my magic.”

Trix was cagey about his magic, and I didn’t begrudge him his secrets. I had plenty of my own. I knew I wasn’t doing well back when I’d blown up the pub room. My HP was low, and I was unconscious. When I came to, however, Trix was right there, and my HP had ticked up despite being laid out on a quellstone floor. Whenever I asked him about it, all he would say was that he healed me, but there was a cost.

“Whatever you did, it worked,” I said. “No need to apologize.”

Trix didn’t seem convinced. “You need to eat. Your body needs nutrients.”

“I ate back at the market,” I lied. I used my spatial storage to stash the food I’d found there. I’d been slipping it to the civilians we’d found, especially the kid. I hadn’t had much of an appetite after seeing the market anyway.

“Yes, but you need more. It’s why you feel the way you do. I’d cook for you, but I’m afraid it might attract attention with the smell.”

He was probably right. If the others came back with food tonight, I’d have a little, but right now, we had a small window to get this done. The scourge-touched had spread out, and they patrolled constantly. Once one of them saw you, they’d do that howl thing, and the rest would swarm. Then it was a running battle to get clear.

Trix was right to say that I needed him down here. His knowledge of the undercity helped us lose pursuit multiple times when I was sure we were screwed.

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I worked in silence for a few minutes before Trix wanted to talk again.

“Are you making another… ah… what was the word you used? Firement?”

“Firearm? No. This is something else.”

“Oh,” he said, hesitating, rubbing his paws together that way he did. “Either way. I have been meaning to ask you about it. Are they common in the Order? I’ve never seen one.”

“They’re common where I’m from. They’re one of the most popular means of warfare.”

“It’s not like a crossbow. Crossbows are big and heavy and they take real strength to load.”

“Back home, a long time ago, they called guns the great equalizer. You don’t need a lot of physical might or special talent to use one.”

“You don’t need to be a Rising Sun?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Trix wracked with one of his trembling fits again.

“No. You just need to have hands, and even then, that’s negotiable. It’s a tool, one that’s been refined to make it accessible to as many people as possible.”

The Volpa paused briefly to consider the concept, only answering with an “I see.”

I finished thinning the steel out and slipped the rod all the way inside.

“Do you think they made it out, Brother Ryan?” He asked quietly.

“The people from the pub?”

“Yes.”

“I hope so.”

“I hope so too. It would be better if we managed to at least save someone.”

He was thinking about the market again, and he was about to make me think about the market again. I didn’t have time for that. “If we do this right, we’ll save at least three more.”

“I know,” Trix said. “It’s just becoming harder to imagine anything good coming of this. I keep imagining all those people coming to an evil end.”

No time for that. Do it later.

I shut my eyes and became the steel. I thinned out, molded to fit the cavity.

After another period of silence, when I’d nearly filled the center of the hollow with my next piece of steel, Trix spoke up again. “How does your technique work, Brother?”

“In general or just this?” My tone was flat. I was having to split my attention between Shaping and conversation, so something had to suffer.

“Either.”

“It’s a hollow. A V shaped pipe. Strong, thick metal on the outside edge, softer metal on the inside. The explosive force I can put out will deform the soft metal, compress it, blast it out of the bottom. With some luck, it’ll cut right through the door.”

“This is part of your dominion then?”

I felt myself shrug slightly. “It’s physics.”

“And you’ve done this before?”

I coughed, nearly losing my grip on the metal. “Uh, yeah. For sure.”

I’d seen this done to split rocks and demo old concrete… from a distance. I knew how it worked, though. Sort of.

Shape is now level 8.

You have created: Crude Shaped Charge

You have been awarded 70 experience points. [100 base, -30 quality]

Don’t you judge me, System. I’m working with what I’ve got.

“Will the infected Returned not come when you use your technique?” Trix asked.

“It’s a possibility.”

The little Volpa was doing the math though. “If we make another egress, won’t the Returned follow us? Even more will die if we let them out, Returned and the living alike.”

“I’ve been brainstorming that problem too, and I think I have something. The good part of a plan at least. That’s why I’ve been sucking up every little piece of metal we’ve come across.”

“And the alcohol.”

I grimaced, remembering my unfortunate self immolation. “Yeah. That too.”

“You want to set yourself on fire again.”

“Want is a strong word.”

—--------------------------------------------

Automate [20 MP/sec]

When you are Triggered, feed mana into the aiming arms. Bring the sight as close to the nearest intact and moving scourge-touched target as possible. Feed mana into the retention pin Trigger. Feed a small burst of mana into the firing Trigger. Wait for the bolt to come back into contact with you. Repeat.

I breathed out, keeping a hold on the concept I was trying to imbue into the thing, making sure I didn’t miss anything.

Don’t shoot friendlies. Don’t shoot through friendlies either.

Automate is now level 4.

Someone cleared their throat from elsewhere in the room. The others were watching. I knew that. I made it a point not to look at them, though.

I wiped sweat out of my eyes and Consumed another table leg to get my mana pool back into the double digits again. Then, I carefully inserted the targeting card into the brain housing of my newest creation.

This was the final piece. It had taken an entire day, but we’d finally cobbled together enough material to get up and running.

I dove in to Shape weld all the parts together and eliminate any uneven surfaces and previously unseen air pockets. There wasn’t a lot, but when I was done, everything fit together smoothly, down to the micrometer, and the welds were no longer welds. They were a singular piece, bonded at the molecular level.

I’d scaled up my bronze prototype and made some improvements starting with using harder materials like steel to make the firing chamber, barrel, and the aiming arms. Those were going to have the most heat and stress with repeated use, so having a high melting point was crucial. The legs, however, were made of whatever junk metal I had lying around, a combination of tin, brass, and aluminum, all scrounged from cookware we’d found in the now abandoned parts of the undercity. Whatever alloy I’d made when I fused them all together, I was sure would make any self respecting smith want to vomit.

I needed the new model to be reliable so I took the extra time to give the bolt and firing chamber a spring action that loaded from the magazine when the spring was depressed and fired when the bolt slammed forward on the retention pin.

The magazine was still a gravity fed hopper like my pistol, which I wasn’t happy with, but I didn’t have the time to create a feeding system that was both accommodating of large amounts of ammo and reliable enough to trust. So, instead, I relied on Newton… gravity. I made a tin, funnel shaped hopper with its own Automated stirring system near the stem that massaged the ammo down into the tube with the use of a few different Triggers.

The gun part was a bulky three inches around at the chamber, with a barrel that tapered off to be long and skinny at the end. I didn’t have any rifling on the inside of the barrel, so I wanted the length to give the shots some accuracy. The tripod had a wide stance for maximum stability but tall enough to see over moderately high obstacles. When I had the whole thing put together, it came up to my waist.

Shape [22 MP/sec]

Satisfied with all that, I dove into the tripod, focusing on the feet and “melt shaping” them into the cracks between the quellstone. This was the really expensive part, and it hurt. I was starting to really hate quellstone. The pain was necessary though. Without a solid footing, my new weapon would just knock itself over before it did us any good.

The spring I’d used to slap the bolt back into place after each shot was a relatively weak one by necessity, since I couldn’t run a lot of tests to get the exact strength needed. That meant that every time my new gun fired a round, the bolt slammed up against the rear wall of the tube hard. The one test round I’d put through the gun design had a significant and unpleasant recoil that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Therefore, my tripod had to be melded into the floor or the gun would just break-dance on the cobblestones as it tried to kill things.

You have created: Junk Auto-Turret.

You have been awarded 1,345 experience points. [1,800 base, -455 quality]

Okay, now you’re just being mean.

With a satisfied sigh, I took my hand off of the tripod leg and brushed non-existent dust off of my hands.

Despite what descriptor the System used, I was pretty proud of my work, especially considering this was all scrapped material. I turned to the others.

Sissa, Samila, Geddon, Trix, and our three survivors all looked at me and my new superweapon with some variation of confusion or concern. I’d promised them a miracle, but the miracle wasn’t in the form they’d expected with the additional drawback of taking an inordinate amount of time to make.

The silence was too much.

“Ta-da.” I said, with a wave of my hand encompassing the entirety of my handiwork.

The kid, a Miur boy no more than eight years old we’d found hiding in the market, started clapping, but his grandmother shushed him.

Sissa was the first to voice her concern. “That’s it? What is it?”

I couldn’t help but grin. “I’m glad you asked, Sergeant,” I said, rubbing my hands together. I couldn’t help it. Despite everything, I loved building stuff. Even more, I loved solving problems, especially if the solution was mechanical.

I put my hands behind my back and took in a deep breath, a primer on the Laws of Motion on the tip of my tongue. It felt, briefly, like I was back in my workshop explaining engines to Vince instead of buried alive with flesh eating monsters.

Samila interrupted before I could begin. “It solves our Geddon problem.”

“Aw, really?” Geddon deflated, his shoulders slumping, his gaze falling to the floor. He looked legitimately disappointed.

“Our Geddon problem?” Trix asked, looking to each of us in hopes we’d share.

Sissa explained. “It was a question of time. Brother Ryan’s method for getting us into the tunnels draws a lot of attention, and we’d never escape in time without a buffer. It meant that someone would need to stay behind to buy us all time to get to the surface.”

I cleared my throat uncomfortably. I could feel the wind rushing out of my sails. Someday, someone would let me crow a little bit when I’d done something cool.

“Um. I was calling it our ‘Heroic Sacrifice’ problem, but… yes. This is meant to solve it.”

“We’d already talked about it, and I was going to have that honor,” Geddon sighed wistfully.

Sissa slapped Geddon on the shoulder hard. “No. We’d talked about it, and I’d said we’d find another way.”

“But you had a look in your eye,” Geddon insisted.

Sissa glared at him. “The answer is still no, Geddon.”

“Go. All of you,” Geddon said, placing his hand over his eyes dramatically. “You may thank me by living full, meaningful lives.”

“Shut up, meatslab. Die a heroic death on your own time,” Samila chided.

“I would rather see you live through this ordeal Brother Geddon,” Trix said.

I waved them all down. “Hey! I just said no one is staying behind. This-” I slapped the hopper of the turret, feeling the tripod legs wiggle slightly. I’d need to tighten those up. “This baby will make the sacrifice for us.”

“Does it explode?” Sissa asked, tilting her head to look at the turret.

“No…Ma-” I sputtered. “Yes, but in a good way.”

“You really were making a firearm,” Trix said.

Geddon saved me by asking the right question. “How does it help us?”

“This is- Well… Okay, think of it like a crossbow or a slingshot that fires itself. I’m going to blow the door off the tunnel. Then we’re all going to hurry inside while this turret covers us,” I said.

Sissa leaned forward, interested now. “It can do that? How long can it hold them off? Won’t it run out of bolts?”

“Trix?” I called upon my assistant.

Trix blinked, confused, but then he remembered his role. “Ah, yes.”

Then he scampered behind the bar and came back dragging a heavy sack of ball bearings behind him.

“Are they all cleaned up? No debris or dirt?” I asked.

“None, Brother Ryan.”

“Okay,” I said, taking the sack from him and pouring it into the hopper… as quietly as I could. It sounded like hail on a tin roof.

He handed me another.

There was a particular type of rotating table that was popular down here, one that used the little metal balls to facilitate motion. I’d found them when I was poking around with Detect Iron in a different neighborhood. The stem of every table lit up like little beacons, and breaking one open got us fifty or so little ball bearings. Once we knew what we were looking for, it was fairly easy to find them, and I’d tasked everyone with cracking said tables open and bringing me the proceeds. They weren’t all iron, but they were roughly the same size. I’d made my barrel and chamber accommodating for them all.

“These are the ammunition,” I said. “Hopefully, I’ll have the hole all patched up before the turret runs dry.”

I’d saved a good chunk of metal just for that purpose. It was going to be another “touch all the quellstone and try not to get sucked dry” situations, but I didn’t see a way around it this time.

“He’s going to set himself on fire again,” Trix added.

“I like this plan more and more,” Sissa said dryly. I tried not to take offense.

“And if he can’t plug the hole, his burning corpse will deter pursuit for a little while at least,” said Samila. “Smart.”

I shifted uncomfortably at the thought. “Yeah. Well, that’s the backup backup plan.”

“Why does he get to go out in a blaze of glory, and I don’t?” Geddon complained. He was smiling though, like he could smell a good fight just over the horizon.