72 – Adaptive armor

“Oy, any progress on the door?” Sir Westys’ voice came from the far end of the tunnel, where his team had been relegated to wait. It was for their own safety, but not for the reason the young men thought.

It was to protect them from Lisette, most of all.

“Tell them that, should they ask again, I will personally disembowel them.” Said the woman in question as she listened for clicks and interactions of the gears in the door’s mechanism, and she spoke softly enough that only Melina, who had been standing next to her, heard her words.

“On it,” the fox-woman said, obviously planning to amend the message while retaining the meaning of the threat.

To the side, Ishrin and a floating cube were working, making the best use of the time they would otherwise be wasting. Ishrin had given a lot of thought to the problem of raw power lately, and he came up with an idea for a ritual that would boost his power quite significantly without having to force his way up the Tiers just yet.

He had spent a few hours designing it with Liù’s help while Lisette worked on the door, filling a whole book with scribbles and diagrams. But having access to a pixie-turned-AI soon showed its perks, as Liù was able to perform calculations and process ideas much faster than a person ever could. Even though she didn’t know anything about magic, her help with the calculations alone cut the time it took to come up with the ritual in half.

In the end, the ritual that they came up with was something that got more expensive the higher in tier the target was, and already at Tier 3 it would consume many precious materials Ishrin got from raiding the mansion’s stash in Obscuria.

“Alright,” He said, talking to Liù while he prepared the ground for the ritual. It was one of the most complex ones he performed so far, at least after his reincarnation, made easy only by his telekinesis and inventory.

Despite having helped with the calculations, Liù had no idea what the ritual did. “This is a little thingy that should help me down the path. It’s an adaptive shield.”

Oooh. Adaptive!

“Yup. What it does is that it diverts all of my mana generation whenever I am at full capacity and converts it into a sort of battery that can power either the armor itself to absorb hits, or spells. And the amazing thing is, it’s a passive bonus that’s tied to my aura. Even if it breaks, it will just come back when I start feeding it mana again, and it will grow with me as I climb the Tiers.”

That sounds very handy. The cube chirped, if one such thing was even possible.

“It definitely is!”

He took out some crystals from his dwindling stash, and set them upon the ground. Of all the ingredients for the rituals, the crystals were among the rarest, a resource he never thought he would see on this planet. Liù helped out with the next phase of the preparations, flying to the ceiling of the cave and projecting holograms and geometrical lines according to the diagrams they came up with together. She pointed out where Ishrin deviated from the script, and how he should fix his mistakes.

When her part was done, she flew to his shoulder to sit where she always used to sit, balancing her cubical body so that she didn’t fall. Being this close, Ishrin could feel the tendril of power extending from his core to her growing more powerful. Idly, he wondered how far she could go before the connection became too faint to sustain her, and hoped that it would grow in strength and power as he grew in power. He also wondered what having this connection would mean in the future. He had not told the others, but since Liù did not have internal power generation, he was keeping her functional with his own cultivation, effectively locking away more than a quarter of his power permanently.

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Fortunately the cost did not change over time, no matter what Liù did. She simply had access to a quarter of Ishrin’s total power no matter how powerful he was, or what she did with it. So far, nothing she had done had required the full use of this power, and she had not been able to access her old light-based power either, effectively making the team weaker in raw power than they were before. Even with the adaptive shield she had helped create, the team was weaker than it was before she came back.

Obviously none of the three thought it was a bad thing, as having Liù back was worth more than any amount of power. However, it made Ishrin wonder if perhaps she could one day use all the power she was not using to attack or defend. It did not look like the mana was going to waste in the air either, meaning that it was being stored somewhere. Did she have an internal battery neither he nor she could feel or sense or otherwise knew about?

It was possible.

A little light caught his attention. Liù had conjured a little holographic avatar around her neutral form, and was dangling her little legs just like she used to do in the past. She was pouting because her legs were not corporeal, and just disappeared inside Ishrin’s flesh when she swung them back.

“There might be something in your data banks to fix that issue,” Ishrin said as he finished setting the materials down, “I’m no programmer, but I think it should be possible.”

Mayyybe, or maybe I like that I can just phase into things. Is the ritual ready?

It was. The whole room lit to day as the many expensive materials melted and dissolves into motes of mana, flowing along complex patterns in the air. This ritual had also required a stronger word of power than usual, strong enough to shake even ishrin’s massive willpower and leaving him sweating and pale. But the push had been enough, and the particles that like glitter shone in the air above slowly coalesced around ishrin’s swaying body in little patches of solid light.

The more lights joined, the more they took the shape of ornate armor. It shone gold, ethereal and translucent, gradually feeling more and more solid and protective. Then it was over, and the whole manifestation faded until the armor was completely gone.

Thinking that the ritual had failed, Liù was about to speak up, but then she noticed that there was a very faint glow around Ishrin. She didn’t know, but she was looking at him with a mix of normal vision and magical vision, the spectra of light and magic mixing together in a single cohesive image she could only process thanks to her mutated nature. No man, not even Ishrin, could have made sense of the way she saw the world.

Soon even he could see it though. Gradually, the armor was changing. Now it glowed faintly, but clearly present. It was so faint as to be barely noticeable, but the glow was increasing as it absorbed more mana from ishrin’s core. Instead of the ornate armor they saw during the ritual, it was plain and bland, functional yet boring. But there was no disappointment, as already the mana charging the armor was changing not only it’s glow but also its looks, and patterns were emerging as if chiseled in stone instead of etched in manifest metal made of light and magic. The more it charged, the more ornate it would become.

Little grooves and decorations were still appearing on the armor when Ishrin, with a mental command, made it stop glowing before the light got too bright. Now there was no indication that it was magical, save for the fact that it was changing visibly as it charged. It was slow enough to be overlooked, but it was bound to look completely different even after just a mere hour, leaving both Ishrin and Liù to wonder whether it would keep changing forever—there was no upper limit to how much charge it could hold, at least it was so high that it would take years to reach, and the capacity would grow as the armor grew in Tier—or if it would settle on a design once it ran out of space for the decorations.

Ishrin cast a spell, noticed that the armor stopped changing, waited until he was back at full mana, and nodded with satisfaction when the etchings started increasing in complexity once again.

“Working as intended!” He said smugly, “did you like the fireworks?”

Yes! I want more!

“Not now, little one. We have a door to open, and bracers to steal from the tomb of a dead sorcerer while making sure our ‘guests’ don’t perish due to their own incompetence, hubris, ego or ineptitude.”

Sounds tough.

“Oh yeah, the young noble in particular. He triggers some primal anger in my.”

No, I was talking about the door! I took a look at it with Lisette, and I can’t figure out how to open it :s

“Ah well, we could cheat a little bit. They don’t know I know Master Unlock. If you add your power to it, I think we can cast it at Tier 6. See if the door won’t open to that.”

Isshi! You evil, you tricked Lisette!

“Nah, she had fun trying to figure it out, and I needed time for the ritual.”

Right at that moment, a very haggard looking Lisette burst into their corner of the cave system. Her hair was dishevelled, her breath frantic, and her eyes manic. For a moment they thought she was fleeing from a monster, forgetting that it would be totally unlike her to do so, until they saw the big grin on her face.