Chapter 66 - Exceed my Grasp

I was hunched over my workbench and Shaping what was going to be my tenth collector test by the time Samila finally woke up. The little blue woman seemed to stretch languidly like a cat, pushing the blankets down and away with one long outstretched leg. The bright blue of her exposed skin against her bunched and loosely fastened robes tried to draw my eye, but I studiously kept my vision fixed upon my Shaping.

I was a gentleman. I was above that kind of thing because I was a gentleman. I was going to stay a gentleman and not think about just how much blue I’d seen and the shape-

Oh look! We’re in the middle of science! Careful now!

Shaking my head, I went back to work. This experiment was going to be interesting. I’d found gold in my precious metals pile in the form of coins, and, for some reason, I found it endlessly amusing to turn money into something actually useful. Would people’s love for gold give it some kind of boost in the supernatural department? I was about to find out.

Frustratingly, the softer metals like gold weren’t easier to Shape, despite all conventional wisdom saying they should be. Maybe it was because I was moving atoms around instead of using a hammer.

“You’re quiet when you want to be, Monk,” Samila yawned, rolling her neck to get some of the stiffness out as she readjusted the tie on the front of her robes to preserve her modesty. “You would probably make a good game hunter if you could keep from lighting yourself on fire from time to time.”

Seeing only a moderate amount of blue out of the corner of my eye, I determined it was safe to turn around now. As I did, I flashed her a little smile but had to blink rapidly as my eyes adjusted to focusing on something farther away than my workbench. I reached up to rub some of the blur out. How long had I been at this? I looked around at the room, at the bits and bobs scattered around my work area and the line of glowing collectors way across the room as far from me as possible.

“Maybe I should specialize in moth hunting,” I replied hoarsely. “Would be good at that. Do you guys have giant moths?” I asked, turning back toward my little piece of gold and checking the surface area. I’d stretched this out thin, not quite gold leaf levels of thin but close.

“Yes, but they would be more interested in your clothes and sometimes your hair,” she said as the slap of her footsteps approached from behind.

“Defacing currency now are we?” She mused.

I shrugged. “Doing some research. Figured I had some time to myself, not running for my life or getting my ass kicked. If not now, not sure when I’ll get to do it.”

She went quiet for a moment, the obvious reply being:“You mean, after you leave.”

We both knew. We just didn’t want to acknowledge it.

“Is that what this is? Another experiment?” She asked lightly and setting her hand on a steel construct that looked like a metal kebab with bites already taken out of it. She picked it up in her hand experimentally and tested the heft like it was a weapon, which it kind of was… one that would kill pre-industrial society for good if someone ever got the hang of making them.

“Oh, no. That’s a crank shaft. It’s uh- it converts vertical motion to rotational. I made that while I was thinking.”

“And these?” She pointed over at an odd collection of vaguely cylindrical bits of metal.

“Different piston designs. The first one was a failure, so I kind of had to start from zero.”

Making my first overtures toward a magic powered engine turned out to be a daunting prospect. Most of what I knew other than the basic concept of force transfer didn’t apply. Electricity based designs were pretty much a bust unless I had an abundance of time on my hands to make a whole magic powered generator first to power said electric engine. Mana didn’t work like electricity, though I was kind of forcing it to sometimes. No electricity meant no magnetic field meant no rotation to work with. Another Future Ryan problem.

Right now, I was leaning more toward the piston design. Triggers could be used to change the shape of a piston, having it press down on the crankshaft just through magic power alone. When a Trigger went off, it was a powerful thing, almost irresistible if the material was strong enough. With the proper application of mana it could happen at high speeds too. Then we’d be off to the races.

I was also kicking around an air pressure design where a compression bulb Trigger like the ones on my flamethrower turret could use super compressed air to force the pistons down. Again, more drawbacks, more frustration. Theoretically, zero heat issues though.

“I slept through all of this?” Samila asked with disbelief.

“You looked like you needed some rest,” I replied honestly. It was… surprisingly nice to have her there while I was working. Nobody other than Vince ever hung around while I fixed things, and even he hit his ‘watch a guy hit things with a wrench while cursing’ limit eventually. I didn’t want to think about how this was probably the first and last time this was going to happen.

I didn’t mention that I got a level in Stealth out of the deal either, bringing my point value up to 14. I silently wondered if I had Gray Man to thank for that. I’d certainly made mistakes over the course of the night, banging bits of metal around when I hadn’t meant to or dropping tools. Samila slept like a baby, though.

Was that the mind altering aspect of my Stealth keeping Samila from noticing or caring what I was doing? If someone that went a different direction with their Stealth skill did what I did, would they have roused their hypothetical dragonkin lady?

Gray Man was weird. Scary too. Maybe I’d mention that part of my powers later. Or maybe never. Never was probably better.

“Me?” She scoffed. “You’re the one we found face down in a puddle of his own blood.”

I shrugged again, grabbing a brass button from the bits cup and beginning to Shape it into a cube. “It was pretty restful, actually. Surprised more people don’t do it.”

“They do,” Samila replied acidly. “They just end up sleeping forever. Not all of them have a Bishop on hand to repair their brain.”

I spun around, mouth open, feeling my eyebrows climb up and up my forehead of their own volition, maybe all the way to my hairline and beyond. “Kolash healed me?” I gaped.

She still had my crank shaft in her hand, twirling it absently as she thought back. “ We all rushed into the room after the last of the noise had died down, and we saw you there. His Holiness hesitated maybe a heartbeat, but then he was there healing you. It surprised all of us, the Headmaster especially.”

“Uh. Yeah,” I said as I grappled with the full implications. ”He could have- I mean, how many problems would be solved just by letting me bleed out or tossing me off the top of the Spire? Sure, you’d still have the scourge out there, but they wouldn’t have power from the System to feed off of. They’d become a finite sort of threat, one that could be handled by conventional means.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

She rolled her eyes and slapped me on the back of the head with her free hand. “Are you seriously advocating for your own murder? What’s the human word for suicidally selfless?”

I raised my hands placatingly. “Hey! Hey! I’m not complaining. I just- I don’t know.”

“Now you have to live through your plan, and you don’t know how?”

Holy hell, she’d nailed it. I mean, that wasn’t all of it, but that was a big part that could be extrapolated to encompass the rest. I hadn’t counted on living through the challenge, and now I had to really go the distance if the plan was going to work.

Samila seemed to sense that she’d struck a nerve, and she pivoted quickly so as not to dwell on it. “Anyway. After we found you, we brought you up here to recuperate. I dozed off sometime during my shift I guess. You made a good effort to become a martyr, Monk, but it looks like you’re just not cut out for it.”

“No, I’m really not,” I said, turning back toward the table and peering at the gold petal I’d just made. “But living is turning out to be a lot more work.”

“Truth. I, for one, am glad you’re still with us,” Samila replied as she sidled up close to me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her on my skin.

I swallowed hard, not sure how to proceed. The subject was right there. All it would take was one or two words. “Did you want to talk ab-”

“No,” she cut me off, solid conviction in her tone.

“No?” I asked.

“No,” she repeated. “Don’t get me wrong, Ryan. I want you to stay. But I’m not stupid. As of right now, this is the only plan we have, and I would be a fool to pick a fight with you now over some stupid- ah- whatever.”

The two of us stood there in silence, Samila angrily biting her lip and tightening the ties on her robe, me trying and failing to get another Shape going on the gold ‘petal’ I’d just made.

I heard her sigh then lean on my shoulder to get a closer look at the stuff on the workbench.

“So what aspect of warfare are you changing today?” She asked.

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye and smiled just enough so she could see it. “Making batteries,” I answered.

Samila tilted her head. “Like those?” She asked, pointing toward the back of the room where nine other petal formations sat in various states of operational. They all had a sort of flower-shaped design, four petals arranged in a cross pattern with a singular purple cube of Volatile metal stuck in the center. Every flower was made of different metals, labeled in chalk underneath to indicate what order I’d set them and what elemental composition they were.

“Yeah. Like those,” I agreed. “They’re meant to solve my longevity problem.”

I heard her suppress a snicker behind me “Oh, I hadn’t realized,” she said, biting her lip again.

I chose to be the bigger man and ignore her.

“Now that I have to live through the next few weeks, I figured I needed to plan for the long haul,” I went on. “The way I figured it, I have several problems that need addressing before I go. Longevity is one of them. My turrets just can’t operate forever. They run out of power, they run out of ammo, and they run hot. Our batteries here are meant to alleviate the power problem, and once I solve that, I’ll have solved the ammo one too.”

“Out of curiosity, what are the rest of the items on your list?”

“Flexibility-” I began.

Samila snorted but said nothing.

I cleared my throat and went on, already dreading the direction this was going.

“Mobility.”

She cleared her throat, looking away and obviously holding in a laugh.

“And scale,” I grumbled under my breath.

A guffaw tore its way out of her loud enough to make my ear start ringing before she got herself back under control. I glared at her over my shoulder as she tried and failed to school her features. She alternated between looking away to collect herself then looking back to me and losing her shit again. It took a full minute.

“I’m sorry,” she giggled. “Scale. Are- haha- are there more?”

I shook my head and scowled.

“Okay. Ah. Sorry. Hehe. Scale problems. So about the battery things. Some of them look, ah- angry,” she observed. She was right too. All of them had started out as mundane metal with a Volatility charged cube in the middle, but not all of them stayed that way. Now, some had a distinct purple sheen, intense near the center of the flower and fading to the edges. At least two of them glowed a very angry shade of purple.

“True. I probably should have built in some kind of cut-off for the power collection, but I didn’t really know that was going to happen. Thought they’d just get full then stop.”

“But you can already make things explode on cue.”

“Well, it’s not just explosions that I’m after,” I explained. “The basic concept is, I use my new Collect ability to suck up all the mana in the surrounding area and store it for use later. The only problem was that this room has almost zero ambient mana. Had to fix that. I’ve long theorized that when I make something all “volatile” it has a certain shelf life before it loses its charge. It uses this wild mana that comes from the System. Super efficient and energetic, right? Anyway, when I use Volatility and let it fade, that mana has to go somewhere, so I figured: ‘why not try and catch those little mana motes before they get away.’”

“I’m with you so far.”

I shrugged sheepishly. “It worked pretty well, actually. I put a trigger on a prototype and had it curl in on itself once its Trigger was full. It happened pretty quickly, like in about ten minutes. So, naturally, I wanted to see how far it could go.”

“Naturally,” she echoed.

“Once I was working on it, I started to think: ‘I have all this mana sitting there in the Trigger. What if I used it for something else? So, I Automated it to transfer that mana back to the center of the flower and recast the Volatility spell through another Automated Trigger. The battery would get its power from my initial kick start, then it would keep itself powered. I- uh- miscalculated.”

Actually, I hadn’t calculated at all. Hadn’t bothered. I accidentally created a feedback loop that would charge my new batteries pretty much forever, and that was going to become a problem in a matter of hours. Whatever juice Volatility used to do its thing was way more potent that the stuff I could produce, maybe because it was a combat ability. Plus, it was pulled or summoned from somewhere else, not the surrounding environment.

I swallowed uncomfortably and looked around the room for fragile bits I’d need to clean up before we took care of it.

Samila caught on right away. “The glowing petals are very pretty in a deadly sort of way. I imagine when they explode, we won’t want to be here.”

“Yeah,” I said, drawing the word out significantly. “Volatility’s energy is… sticky… now. Hard to describe it otherwise.”

“Should we leave?” Samila asked.

“Nah,” I said, shrugging my shoulders as I looked on at the ever brightening leaves of the deep lead battery. “Probably not yet. They might not blow at all unless we touch them.”

She raised a brow.“And you want to use these?”

“Well, not exactly these,” I insisted, spreading my arms to encompass the entire row of ten. “Better ones. I’m starting to see more use for Triggers other than changing shapes and locomotion. The problem with them before was that I just saw them in terms of mana cost. With Collect, it seems they’re not so mana hungry. The thing is, once there’s mana in the Trigger, it’s just sitting there waiting to be used until told to do so. The retention… like how efficient the walls are in the tank… is perfect. Actually perfect. That’s unheard of in energy storage back home. There’s always bleed, slow maybe, but always. Not here though. Magic is crazy stuff, and I’m still learning. The mana that’s stored in the Trigger also isn’t the same kind of mana that went into the Trigger. The Collector bits take it in, and what’s kept slowly becomes a different flavor. I’m wondering if keeping certain types of mana next to others converts it, or if it’s the material. Or maybe both. See that?” I asked, pointing to my most ‘successful’ battery.

“The glowing purple death flower?”

“Yeah. Well, it started as a deep lead flower with a glowing cube stuck in the middle. Now the whole thing is a glowing Volatility bomb with nowhere to spend all that energy.”

“It looks like you’re gardening but with explosives.”

I looked down at the crank shaft in Samila’s hand, imagining it powering the new type of turrets I was in the middle of designing. If the Collect/Volatility loop could be harnessed, the power budget of a constantly moving machine would suddenly be less of an issue. Spinning fan blades, piston powered spear turrets, drones, robots. Assuming the physics I knew worked similarly on Ralqir, I could probably generate electricity this way too. Screw using Storm mana… I’d harness raw electrons and stick with what I knew.

I blinked, coming back to the now. “Now I have the budget for… lots of stuff. Smart ammo. Self-charging casting bowls. All automated and mass produced. If I get a hold of this. It’s gonna change everything. Might have a shot at going the distance.”

“When we leave,” she finished for me.

“Yeah,” I replied gloomily, the weight of it all settling down on my shoulders once more. There was so much to do before then.

There was a pause, the brakes being put on my train of thought before I could go back to battery making.

“Wait. What do you mean ‘we?’”