17

After going through the fascinating machines of the workshop, Charles thought he had seen it all or at the very least that he had gotten a good idea of what the Metalmancer was capable of. He would have never guessed that, behind the open door, such a treasure would be hiding in plain sight. It was not a treasure of gold and jewels, nor was it a mighty weapon capable of killing a dragon. No, it was much more than that, at least to Charles’ eyes.

There was a long table against the far wall of the room, covering the whole length of the room and bending at a right angle following the edge of the room, before continuing along the wall to the left. On the table, an assortment of things and tools was just there apparently without rhyme or reason, but he knew that actually each and every one of them was remarkable beyond belief.

He approached the table almost reverently, careful not to upset the previous arrangement of things in this room. He would not touch anything until he was sure that he knew everything about what he was looking at. The table in front of him was full of little pieces of metal scattered across its considerable length, shining a pearly silver against the darker steel of the table itself. They were disks as small as a coin, thin and dotted along their edge with microscopic indentations. They were gears, he realized with great surprise.

They looked slightly more advanced and smaller than the gears in the calculators outside. These, he could tell already, were improved versions of the already remarkably impossible frictionless ones he saw before.

In the middle of the sea of gears there were larger pieces, made of many small components and in various stages of completion. There were no finished machines, and while he could only guess at their purpose, he could see what was inside the otherwise sealed boxes. They were very similar to the mechanical computers and calculators he saw outside, reinforcing the idea that the man was researching possible upgrades upon that technology, but each piece had its differences and variations to the original design.

Charles took off one glove, and extended his hand towards one of the smaller gears on the table. He wanted to feel the metal on his fingers, to experience the smooth texture and the icy coldness of the impossible steel. And indeed, the milky white metal that was at the same time shiny and cloudy as if oxidized, was very cool to the touch and the small indentations along its edge were barely visible in the low light. Eereen was watching him as he brought the gear to his eyes and looked at it while squinting and muttering to himself.

“Fascinating! This stuff is just too complex to have been made with the machines outside.” He said to himself.

She kept listening but did not interrupt the otherworlder as he looked at the mechanical pieces with interest. He could tell that she could not see what interested him so much, but that at the same time she was aware of the fact that he knew more than her about what the Metalmancer did, for some reason she did not know.

“Microscopic, no, molecular! Were there lasers out there that I did not see?” The suited man asked her.

She looked at him for a moment, deep emerald eyes reflecting his image in the faint light. She was quite beautiful, he thought for a moment, despite her young appearance. Elves in this world seemed to share some characteristics with the elves of his world’s fantasy stories.

“Lay-seers?” She asked, cocking her head to one side.

“Ah, right, it’s actually an acronym. Never mind.” He said, visibly frustrated.

The elf made a thoughtful face for a moment, then opened her mouth to ask something. She caught herself soon after, as she must have realized that those Lay-seers, as she called them, must have been some sort of very powerful tools. She was not very far from the truth, Charles thought with a smile.

She was probably thinking that if she was to follow this man around, she needed to understand him better. And to do that, she figured, she had to study the things that interested him greatly.

Charles shook himself out of his musings. This Metalmancer was proving to be quite the mysterious person, and not only that. Even if he was an otherworlder like Charles, even if he had a LAI with him, what he did here was nothing short of amazing. The kind of detail that went into making the gears, the level of intricacy with which they were assembled into mechanical calculators was not something that should have been possible to make with the tools he saw.

And Charles also knew that there were no other cases of people missing from the Empire, other than his own, ever since the LAI technology was invented. If the Metalmancer was from the Empire as well, then he must have disappeared after Charles did. It was very unlikely, by his estimations.

There were two possible answers that came to his mind, working with the assumption that the Metalmancer was instead a man from this world. The first thing he thought was magic, and the second was that the Metalmancer had to be a fucking genius. At least at his own level of intelligence, if he had a LAI which Charles already guessed was unlikely, or much more than that if he did not have an AI companion. And the latter was much more probable, or he would have seen proof of the presence of an artificial mind, which he did not see.

Charles was about to shift his attention to the closed door on his right, when a loud clang of metallic items falling captured his attention. Seeing that the LAI did not force him into the hyperfocused state that usually meant combat mode, he concluded that there was only one presence in the room that could have caused the noise without being a threat.

“God dammit, girl! Do not touch what you do not know! Isn’t that like common sense everywhere?” He asked while still turning around, his tone of voice patronizing and quite annoyed.

The girl was illuminated by the three light blue balls that followed Charles everywhere, and which he had managed to rudimentarily control after modifying the spell slightly. It turned out that it lacked a control function, and that its coordinate system was universally centered on its caster without a way to modify it. It was smart but at the same time very limited, like all system related things seemed to be.

Eereen looked genuinely sorry for what she did, and her ears were drooping down the sides of her head while a small but cute pout could be seen on her face. Charles was unmoved, but decided not to chastise her too much.

What he did instead, was noticing that there was a slightly darker circle in the metal of the wall right where the crescent hammer that fell to the ground was barely a moment ago. He walked closer, going past a very scared looking elfin girl and approaching the wall with menacing purpose.

“You little shit!” He exclaimed, after eyeing the wall for a few moments. “You really were an idiot, weren’t ya?”

“I’m sorry!” The girl yelled in a high pitch. “I didn’t break anything, did I?” 

Charles looked at her up and down. “What does this have to do with you?”

“I accidentally bumped into it.”

While her statement didn’t feel very honest, he decided not to call her out on that. If she really was this clumsy, then perhaps it was a good thing that he was here watching over her.

“Yeah, no, you egocentric little thing. I was talking about the Metalmancer. That son of a bitch actually had magnets, it turns out. He just used them to hang his tools, instead of… you know, discovering electricity? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Who knows what he could have done, with his mind and the knowledge of electricity?”

Eereen remained silent. It was understandable, as she could not understand what doors the knowledge of electricity could have opened for the Metalmancer. That much was still visible on her face, but Charles decided that teaching her about electrons and the marvels of what comes with the knowledge of their existence and properties was not a smart use of his time. Perhaps he could give her a few books on the subject, as soon as he had a way to print them either by magic or by technological means. The LAI had all the knowledge that was available to the Empire, and easy to understand books were available in great numbers in its repository.

There was another matter at hand. It was clear now that the Metalmancer was not an otherworlder, but rather he was a citizen of this wretched land. To think that such a backwards place could produce a mind capable of all this, he realized that perhaps he was underestimating the potential of humanity. Even here, even without the tools and methods of the modern era, some genius minds could thrive and prosper.

And, maybe one day he could even meet them. He looked forward to that day, to the day when he would finally be able to speak face to face with a man of the same caliber as himself. But it also meant that there were many potentially hostile people roaming around, and that they were not just the unthreatening rubble he saw so far but much, much more dangerous.

The magnets were embedded in the wall of the room. Not only that, but it looked like they were actually the same thing as the rest of the wall and not added there after the wall was built. It was as if someone just decided that inside the circle the metal had to be different and most importantly magnetic, and that the process happened after the wall was already there. There were no signs of welding, gluing or anything else that could suggest an actual installation of the magnetic material. 

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The magnetic field was rather strong for a natural magnet, capable of keeping several kilograms of material attached to itself without issue. The field was then dampened by the metal outside so that it could only affect the items placed directly on top of it, although Charles doubted that this result was intended by the Metalmancer. It just happened naturally because of the conductive nature of the metal of the wall, and the man was probably not even aware of it.

He sighed. Looking at this made him almost want to strangle the guy, because he knew just how much he was missing out without the discovery of electricity. On Earth, it was the knowledge of electricity that brought forth the real technological revolutions, it was the manipulation of fields that led to the discovery of the atoms and of their structure and, ultimately, to the quantum theory of light.

Without them, the Metalmancer was basically crippled in what he could do. His science, if he even had one, would not progress beyond the phenomenological and into the real theoretical. He would never be able to make models of reality that could explain some of the phenomena he saw, because he would lack the necessary building blocks to formulate meaningful hypotheses.

There was sweat on Charles’ face now, and he noticed it as one little bead of salty water rolled into his right eye and stung a little. He realized that he was getting all heated up over this, for some reason.

What he needed right now, was a way to forget all this depressing train of thought and distract himself.

“I suppose you don’t have magic to cut a chunk of wall, do you?” He asked the elf.

“I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“As expected. Then, take this and see if any one of the items here pulls on it as you get them close.” Charles said, and handed her the crescent hammer. “Just like the wall mounted magnet. See if there’s another that’s not embedded in the wall.”

And with that out of the way, he could finally turn his attention to the real jackpot. He had come here in search of magnets, true, but right now all that seemed so insignificant compared to what he actually found. Even if this Metalmancer had never found out about electrons and their wonderfully frustrating behavior, he still was a genius beyond what he could even conceive.

That a peasant from a medieval world like this, because the Metalmancer had to be one to justify his lack of knowledge, would be able to progress so far? In a world like this?

Madness. A madness that stemmed from genius and a madness that he could, would, and will always respect.

“Found them!” A small, happy elf said while approaching Charles.

He wondered for a moment just how old she was, considering what she said about her age earlier and the way she was acting. Then he decided that he was already spending too much brain power thinking about her and that even a tidbit more would make the whole thing not worth it.

And again, he caught himself trying to rationalize his behavior when it came to her. It irritated him to no end.

He took the magnets from her hands. “Thank you, good job.”

He looked around the room and sighed softly, while a smirk appeared on his face.

“Well, better make some good use of all the mana I have sitting somewhere inside me.”

Soon after, his mana pool shrank considerably as all the loose items in the room were vacuumed inside his storage ring with methodical precision.

Eereen looked dejected. “You made me look specifically for the magnets!”

“Of course!” Charles replied, trying to think up something to say. “It’s not like I thought about taking everything in bulk only after you found them or anything.”

She rolled her eyes, a gesture that went unseen in the dark. Unseen to all but the LAI, who silently added it to the ever-growing list of small quirks and actions that together were beginning to paint a picture of the elf’s inner workings.

Charles looked ahead; at the only closed door he saw so far. It was closed shut, sealed hermetically and without any visible way of opening it except for what was at its center. 

There were shapes in the middle of the door, each one slightly smaller than the last and of a slightly different shade of copper. The shapes were all inside a bigger circle, which contained then a hexagon, then a pentagon, a square and a small triangle at the center.

There were numbers at the vertices of each shape, and also the smaller pieces were placed on top of the bigger ones and connected to a complex assortment of tiny gears all around them. The gears were of the same kind as the ones Charles saw on the table, and they connected and intersected all along the whole door’s length. They disappeared behind some hidden holes, probably to activate some sort of mechanism.

It was clear that the door in front of him was presenting him with a challenge. It was a riddle asking to be solved, waiting just for the right person to come and finally open the door.

He touched the central piece, and tried to turn it clockwise. He was met with resistance, as the mechanisms that usually would just turn together with the pieces were without power and therefore stuck. He tried again, but in the end he concluded that he could not move the piece without damaging the gears. He grunted, both because of his exertion and because he was getting annoyed already.

The Metalmancer was smart in his decision to defend his stuff behind a locked door, but Charles was not the Metalmancer and this lock was nothing more than an obstacle to remove, in his eyes. He could respect the choice, but it didn’t mean that he was not wishing the lock never existed in the first place.

“You know what?” He said, opting for the violent approach.

There was no metal in this world able to withstand a direct hit from his gun, at point blank range and at max power. He aimed the barrel of the gun at the door, slightly above where it touched the metal floor so that any kind of damage would be contained to the minimum area possible.

He was about to squeeze the trigger, when he hesitated for a moment.

“Girl, get back.” He said, then watched the elf move away from the door.

His face took a somber expression. He looked at the gun solemnly and whispered.

"Technology is but a tool. A means to an end. The gun, the brush and the bullets, the paint with which I will make my masterpiece."

He too took a step back, and after calculating the optimal trajectory and aiming angle so that the shockwave would not damage him or the rest of the stuff in the room, he finally squeezed the trigger.

The rod of metal inside the gun hissed and shook, heating up as the increasing electromagnetic fields started to excite its electrons. It traveled through the barrel, accelerating along its length before leaving it at a speed much faster than the speed of sound. A loud boom followed in its wake.

At the same time, while the rod was still not moving, inside the four, bigger rods that made the barrel of the gun a complex assortment of mechanisms, electromagnets and circuits powered up to sustain the shifting magnetic fields that they were about to generate. Electricity flooded the electromagnets, and their mana enhanced structure allowed them to create fields that had never been made before by a weapon as small as this one.

Like an orchestra, all the components acted in sync. The mana they had absorbed ever since entering this world, the levels they gained as parts of the gun, the masterful craftsmanship that went into building them in the Imperial factories all contributed to the final terrifying shot that left the barrel in this very moment.

The boom shook the room and the eardrums of anyone inside it. Items were displaced and thrown everywhere, but Charles paid them no mind as he had already taken all that piqued his interest. 

Eereen gasped after witnessing the true power of the seemingly unassuming weapon that Charles was wielding with such nonchalance, and then her eyes widened even more after she saw what was left of the door under the faint blue light.

Charles opened his eyes, which were still watering after the wave front of the compression wave slammed into them like a slap from a bodybuilder. He looked at the door.

“That’s… disappointing.” He finally said, after looking at it for a few moments.

The still smoking rod of metal alloy, one of the new ones he made that were not made of crappy iron and thus were capable of being fired at full power, was halfway embedded in the metal of the door. Not only that, but it was twisted and distorted beyond belief, as all the force that was still inside it when it was forcefully stopped by the door dissipated into thermal and kinetic energy. That very kinetic energy was the reason why the rod now looked like a twisted and dead tree branch, darkened by the heat and oxidation and corrupted by the immense strain.

“It's unbelievable… that shot… that shot had enough energy to shred a tank to ribbons!” 

The elf looked at him with the look of someone who had no idea what a tank was. Despite that, she seemed very aware of the fact that this was no simple door.

She watched Charles get close to the impact site and attempt to extract the projectile from its new home. He cursed, because in his fascination at the event he forgot that he still had his glove off, and because the metal was hot enough to hurt like hell. Even with his enhanced physique due to all his levels, he was sure that he was going to get a blister.

He redid the same action with the glove on this time, but could not get the rod out without employing the suit’s servo mechanisms, which had no power at the moment. He could use the railgun’s batteries to recharge the suit just enough, but it was not worth it.

“You don’t happen to know a healing spell, do you?” Charles asked distractedly.

“I-”

“I have never seen something like this.” He said, face close to the place where the rod was embedded inside the metal.

“Is it odd?”

“Odd? This should not have happened. Just what is this metal?”

The LAI too was giving inconclusive answers. Apparently there were no matches in its database, which meant that in all its history the Empire had never come across this kind of metal before. To be entirely sure he would have to use the suit’s sensors, but he was still without power.

The only things he could conclude were based on his observations. The metal was incredibly dense but malleable, able to deform and disperse the kinetic energy along its volume. 

“I want this. I want this door. Can we take it out?”

“I don’t think we can…” The look on her face was one of sadness, even though she was also visibly puzzled by his behavior. She probably did not understand why he wanted it, but she could feel his disappointment at being unable to study it.

“Too bad. Actually, we can just leave it here and come back with better equipment later!”

In any case, he now knew that brute forcing this door was impossible. For the first time, he could see that there was something that his gun could not overpower, and it made him think that maybe he was not the strongest man around even if he had a weapon and armor, that could level up, from the far future with him.

He had to gain more power, apparently. And now he was quite sure that this place could be a really good starting point in his quest, filled as it was with useful things and materials on top of very interesting potential discoveries. The door, the gears and even the floors screamed of magic. And if he could, somehow, get his hands on a magic capable of producing things such as this door… 

“Well, then. Time to get going.” He said, his mood much better despite the momentary setback. “The door won’t open without power, so we need to go and see where the power even comes from, right? Now, I saw steam coming from the chimney outside, then all those pipes in the other room that are obviously steampunk technology coming from the floor…” He paused for a moment, smirking as he saw the confused look on his companion’s face. “I think I know where we need to go.”

“Down?” The girl asked tentatively.

“Yeah, we have to go down!”