Ozzy sat in his shack watching the two creatures in their standoff. The imp flapping above well out of reach gazing down at the boar with disdain. The boar still trying to shake off the pain of the whip crack and the blood still dribbling down its snout. As he watched Ozzy realized he’d been making another mistake this whole time. His approach to nearly every single thing he’d done so far had been entirely two dimensional. Some of his experiments had completely ignored even the possibility of a third dimension of attack. Speaking of, he looked up and sure enough directly above where his shack was there was the edge of the haven. He hadn’t attempted to leave or enter a square from that avenue before. He’d only tested the edges front, back, left, and right. That wasn’t super helpful at the moment, but there was another possibility more directly related to what the imp had done that was.
Using his domain he pushed himself off of the floor of his shack and held himself suspended between the recliner and the ceiling. It wasn’t even difficult when just using the initial particles. The Trips were even easier. He couldn’t fly, well not yet. He had to push against the floor and in turn push against himself to achieve the effect but, with a column of domain he could put himself well out of reach of the boar. The same would go for any of the rats. He’d still need to deal with the imps more cautiously but anything that was grounded was effectively not a concern for him anymore. Lowering himself back to the recliner, he returned his attention to the standoff outside.
The boar had stopped shaking its head and was now glaring up at the imp with hatred in its eyes. What happened next realigned Ozzy’s expectations with his new reality. That and it threw his assumption of safety at a distance out the window. The boar suddenly moved as fast as Cederick had killing the rats. Ozzy couldn’t even see exactly how it accomplished it. Only that it arched its back and shot into the air directly at the imp. Impacting with the imp square on its snout it crunched down on the little winged body. Ozzy sat stunned as the boar came crashing back down. A few chomps were quickly followed by a wave of energy exploding from the boar's mouth.
The boar spent a few moments chewing his enemy and swallowing the chunks. Each movement making Ozzy more sick to his stomach than the last. Not to mention the mounting fear of what a beast of such strength could do to him. As far as he’d come he wasn’t prepared for how overwhelmingly strong this opponent was. He may as well go pick a fight with Cederick or Vonder. Which got him wondering what sent this monster his way. The grass tiles in the boars home weren’t from the rats, and none were from the imps. None of the few odd tiles it had were from any of his own oddities either. Did it have some similar skill to Cederick that brought his haven to its attention? Knowing whatever brought it here wasn’t going to help him at the moment but it would be nice to know eventually, if only to stave off any future incursions. The boar seemed satisfied with its small victory and returned to its pile of fruit to slowly munch on them once more. While it would be better if it returned to its own haven this was at least a better option than the one where it came to munch on him instead.
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Ozzy emptied the last of the stockpiled cores energy into his newly constructed reservoir. He was now holding something like ten thousand of the base cores worth of energy in his domain and it didn’t feel like the reservoir was even half full. Emptying the cores and filling the reservoir hadn’t been all that demanding of a process, just a slow repetitive one. So he’d also been continuing his slow conversion of his domain over to the new and improved version. He'd made a realization while working on it that his initial calculations had been wrong. Only by a factor of three though, since he’d been counting the time to convert his domain based on the number of ops he had not the resulting trips.
That still put his current completion at something like several months if he continued to convert at his current rate. Which he was quite sure would be longer than it would take for the boar to eventually find and crunch him as easily as it had the imp. Even if he somehow shortened the process by an additional factor of 100 he’d still need a day to complete it. Which meant he needed to get out of dodge without alerting the boar. Turning his attention to the back wall of his shack he thought through how he could most easily and quietly remove enough boards to get out. It was only after he’d planned out half the process that he realized this was a waste. There was a much quieter and quicker way to add an exit to the side opposite the boar. Though he needed a distraction.
Waiting until the thirteenth imp haven captured another denizen felt like it was far longer than he’d ever seen one take. When it did finally show up and crossed the barrier into his own haven is when he made his move. Reaching out to the nine tiles under his shack he visualized as clearly as he could what he wanted and impressed it upon the haven. His eyes saw no changes but from his domain outside he could see that there was no longer a door on the side facing the boar. Inside the shack he turned and instead of moving the door with his hands he did so with his domain. Making sure to hold it perfectly vertical as he did so to keep any scraping or creaking to a minimum. Outside he could now only see sky, and from his domain he saw the new imp fluttering up to one of the fruit laden trees while the boar watched it warily. Taking a desperate step he appeared in the offspring haven of the first and second rat’s haven. Which is when he began choking.
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Ozzy flailed about trying to figure out what was going on, but his mind was reeling. He felt like his eyes were popping from his head and he couldn’t breath in. The sensations weren’t adding up yet as to what might be the problem. Despite not knowing what was going on he had enough presence of mind to take another step into the first rat haven. Falling to his knees he coughed and gasped deeply. Unfortunately the rat occupying the haven didn’t like this one bit so attacked his face which was hanging right over it. Retaliating with just a tad more force than he needed to Ozzy flattened the rat into the dirt. He didn’t feel much of anything for the rat, with being too busy restoring his lungs and body to their normal pressure. Which only after leaving the other square was he able to discern as the problem. The infant haven hadn’t bothered to procure an atmosphere, or hold it in. Why would it if it didn’t have anything to keep alive.
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The Coughing and gasping continued for more than a few minutes though slowly subsided over that period. Eventually replaced with a raspy wheeze. Flopping back onto his butt he sat there for another few minutes just letting his nerves settle back down. At some point he decided he should check on his haven and peeled back the veil. He saw the boar standing in the middle of the haven munching on something. At first he was thinking it was more fruit but after not finding the imp anywhere in the haven he understood it was a different type of snack. Ozzy supposed the boar had no interest in a repeat of the pain the other imp had subjected him to and immediately removed the possibility.
Ozzy sat for a few moments going over the quickfire set of events he’d just been through. He felt a bit like he had on that first day. In a word, overwhelmed. That didn’t mean he was as lost or helpless as he was then. He had learned so much. Even this very situation was still teaching him things at every turn. Most importantly he felt was that brute strength wasn’t the end of the discussion. An imp, the thirteenth of its line, was able to injure this beast that had killed one at the twenty fifth. The imp had done it with a domain that Ozzy knew he would soon match and surpass. He wasn’t helpless, but he wasn’t brainless either. He wasn’t going to throw himself at the enemy and just hope some magical savior was going to show up at just the right time. Whether in the form of unlocking some as of yet unknown ability or other similar nonsense. He would triumph, but with ingenuity not dumb luck. If it came down to blows he’d fight like hell just like he did with the intelligent rat, but he wasn’t going to force the situation.
The boar was back at yet another pile of fruit although this time he wasn’t munching on it. He was lazed about half on the grass, half on the pathway just staring off in the direction the two imps had come from. As long as it was occupied with either eating or fighting Ozzy wasn’t going to worry about it for now. With his physical eyes on the boar he let his metaphysical versions turn back to the progress he’d been making. Now that he had a vast reservoir of energy readily available in his domain he was going to finish engineering his domain upgrade into oblivion.
Recreating a cell just like he had with the last contraption he tested a single one. A few minor adjustments were necessary though. The cell still sported an opening on top to pull in ops. As well as a pore on the bottom to pull in energy. Though he had to move the ejector to the side. Where he added an additional cylinder membrane, which matched the length of the reservoir but was only a centimeter in diameter. The purpose of which was for the trip to be temporarily stored once bonded. Once restoring the same intent on the pores as he had previously he thankfully only found one easy to fix issue. The opening for the energy did open to allow energy in but the effect of the stasis wasn’t allowing it to exit the reservoir. Adjusting the intent slightly had the pore pulling in energy instead of simply opening.
Once the cell had energy and three ops inside he triggered the bonding and watched as the resulting trip was ejected into the smaller cylinder. Using this cell as the new prototype he created copies all along the two cylinders on either side of the smaller one. The process to convert an op into membranous material was a much smoother one than upgrading into trips. He could easily duplicate the cell a hundred times over all in one go despite each one being made up by sixty ops. He wasn’t entirely sure if this was due to him having more experience with that process. If that was true it had to be only partially the case. As something told him the two processes were fundamentally different on multiple levels.
With a thousand cells ready to go he initiated the bonding. The result was a surprise as the strain barely changed from when he had been using his previous construct to bind a hundred at the same time. While that was progress it was only an order of magnitude greater and he needed to make that jump once more before he could complete the domain upgrade in something approaching a reasonable time frame. First he needed to handle the trips building up, and added an additional reservoir at one end of his current one. This one remained empty and he added an opening at the end of the smaller cylinders to eject the trips into it.
Recreating another dual line of cells and cylinder only took another couple minutes. Doubling to two thousand did cause an increased strain but it was still nowhere near what he had experienced working with just a few dozen without adding energy and all his other adjustments. Adding two more constructs doubled the total once more and again the strain increased though he was still able to accomplish it without any pain. One more doubling brought the total to eight thousand and he could feel a twinge again. Finally adding another two copies he had now reached the ten thousand he needed if he hoped to complete this within a day. Executing the next step did bring pain to his head but it wasn’t anywhere near too much. Repeating the process again, and again, and again did slowly increase the pain he felt. He kept on though.
Converting his whole domain was going to be excruciating if he kept up at this rate, but the effort was going to be worth it. This boar wasn’t the only threat out there. The next intruder may not be as interested in snacking. Whatever he ran into next may also have some capabilities he’d not seen yet. Even if they used abilities he had seen it may be in ways he hadn’t expected. The possibilities and dangers were unknown. All he did know was that finishing this process was going to prepare him for more of it than he was capable of handling right now.