^ Almost simultaneously, Gregor released two bullets from his cannons, quickly rushing over to the third to shoot a follow-up.
They shot toward the moss sheep in a straight line. One of them hit the side of the moss sheep's head but didn't seem capable of breaking through its skull, while the second bullet got lost somewhere in the moss sheep's fur. If it managed to pierce through, then it must have at least damaged the sheep's neck to some degree.
The third bullet, being shot just a moment later, was lost in its fur completely at an angle where it wouldn't hit anything. In that short moment between the first two and the third bullet, the moss sheep had turned its entire body toward Ryan and Gregor. Just in case, Ryan immediately held his shield in front of him to protect himself and the automaton. The shield was infused with some mana and could now provide some level of stronger protection.
"Maximus!" Ryan exclaimed, glancing to the left. And just as he thought, the moss sheep was much smarter than some of the other petting zoo animals so far. It was able to understand Ryan to some degree. That was something that he guessed after carefully observing the area boss whenever it came close; it didn't really act like an animal in a lot of ways, but moved with a sort of intention and used its environment in ways that he knew for a fact a moss sheep wouldn't usually be able to do.
The moss sheep glanced to the side where Ryan had looked, but of course, Maximus was coming from the whole other direction. While this area boss seemed smarter than other animals, it definitely wasn't smart enough to see through these tricks.
Coming in from the moss sheep's blind spot, Maximus swung the elemental greatsword straight at the moss sheep's head. The blade, cloaked in flames, dug into the boss' eye, blinding it. The sheep bellowed out in pain as it swung its body at Maximus to throw him back.
The area boss' skull now had a large, deep crack in it created by Maximus' attack, and it was blind in one of its eyes. Just then, another bullet was shot at the boss, shot through its mouth into its throat as it let out its pain.
Its mouth was filled with chunks of gore sticking to its weirdly sharp teeth, though some of those teeth were completely shattered apart by the bullets. Its throat was now filling with its own blood, distracting it just long enough for one more bullet to hit the sheep's face, striking straight into its eye. Clearly, Gregor's stats influenced the accuracy of the cannons considerably.
Ryan watched as Maximus now cut the front legs of the absolutely massive moss sheep, making it fall down forward, unable to defend against these attacks. With his regular, swift motions, Maximus was able to position himself underneath the monster's head as it descended, letting the moss sheep's own weight help him pierce through its incredibly thick skull. The water elemental infusion of the blade made sure that the attack would spread throughout the inside of the boss' skull even if just a small gap was opened. And just like that, the area boss' brain was turned into mush, and it went completely limp.
As Maximus carried the weight of the moss sheep on him, the area boss' body started disappearing and some messages appeared in front of Ryan's eyes.
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[You have killed the Level 15 -Giant Beast Boss-]
[Maximus has levelled up!]
[The -Knight's Nemesis- Skill has levelled up]
[The -Knight's Attack- Skill has levelled up]
[Gregor has levelled up!]
[Gregor has levelled up!]
[The -Spirit Seal Recovery- Skill has levelled up]
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Ryan saw the system windows and broadly grinned, "Well, this was pretty effective, huh?"
"You can say that again, that was almost... too fast," Runar once more appeared from the place where he was hiding out, so that he wouldn't influence everyone's levelling speed with his mere presence. It seemed like he managed to calm himself down a bit after the shock of realizing some truths behind the spirits' existence.
"I was already going to try and go after the moss sheep once we got into a proper rhythm with Gregor, so with their stats doubled, it feels kind of obvious that it would be easy. Right?" Ryan pointed out. Runar sighed lightly, nodding.
"Let's just hope this doesn't influence their levelling speed too much. Otherwise you're going to have to face some much stronger, and far more dangerous enemies soon..."
Ryan scratched the back of his head, "I mean, we can take it slow and think about things properly for now. We don't have the stress of having to level up for now. Oh, that doesn't mean that I don't want to help them. Clearly, Gregor and Maximus like to fight and battle here in the dungeon, and I don't want to take the opportunity to level up from them either. But we don't need to worry about the level-up speed as much anymore. Right?"
Runar looked at his nephew with a raised brow, "Uhm... yeah, I guess so. Your speed is already pretty fast anyway."
"Right? Plus, I don't even think we need to worry too much. Gregor and Maximus both levelled up just now," Ryan explained, squatting down in front of the last few remains of the area boss.
"Really. Huh."
Ryan glanced back at his uncle with a smirk as he grabbed the small statue that was left behind by the area boss. However, there wasn't just the statue. As the moss sheep's stomach fell apart, though, a large amount of coins flowed out.
"... Do all the area bosses kill the monsters in their own areas?"
"No, not all of them. A lot of them, though. I guess it's kind of a theme here. Don't ask me why," Runar replied, watching as Gaia's sub-golems quickly helped out with picking up the hard plastic coins, "But hey, don't complain too much. I'm sure you've gotten, what, a thousand points in this area?"
Ryan thought about it for a moment, "That sounds about right? With this I should be around 1100 or maybe even 1200. Oh, by the way, what exactly happens when you collect all statues?"
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
"Nothing, actually. It's just a sort of useless gimmick," Runar pointed out, "But it's a decent way to figure out what you still need to get to."
"Hm, alright. Anyway, let's get to the gift shop and buy some new parts."
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Modak connected a speaker to a power source. The speaker had exposed plates and wires sticking out from basically every side. Crystal filters were attached to the side, and even all the speaker plates were made of thin crystal sheets. It was properly fine-tuned with the help of the researcher Jack Field, who had helped Modak employ methods of aura manipulation in ways that supplemented the methods the orc was already making use of.
Carefully, he took a step back and turned on the speaker. A basic signal was input into it, and it slowly started releasing audible sound. It was scratchy and not perfect in any way whatsoever, but it worked at least. Looking at the screen displaying the sensor's results, the mana output seemed to be a pretty good match for what it was supposed to do.
So, Modak slowly turned the speaker off again. He took the somewhat oversized mana tape that him and Marge had prepared for this beforehand, and carefully placed it into the tape reader. Different to a normal tape reader, though, this one interacted with the mana on the tape a little differently to allow the mana signature to be copied better.
Taking a deep breath to prepare himself for what he assumed would be another failure, Modak turned on the tape reader. The 'chant' currently recorded on the tape was a very simple spell that only relied on vocal components. Basically, it created an magical phenomenon in the air. Specifically, it should create the sound of a piano being played.
And as the chant was output through the speaker, nothing happened. Just as Modak thought, it was a failure. He let out a long groan, realizing that nothing happened again, and marked this test as another failure.
Marge had already long gone home, so he was alone in his lab trying to test it out, and he really felt like he could get some kind of breakthrough tonight. He just felt like that had to be it.
"Fuck, what the hell is wrong here?" Modak sighed, biting down on the pencil he was holding. Frustrated, he got up, and pulled the tape out of the player without turning the speaker off. A loud screech echoed through the room, but that wasn't what Modak noticed first. Instead, he focused on the three notes that were just played. They were random and a well-tuned piano would probably not be able to create these sounds, but nonetheless; this was indeed a breakthrough.
Modak stared at the tape confused, not sure what just happened, when he glanced down at the tape. There was a large scratch on an exposed part of the crystal tape.
"Wait, was the... was the mana released?" Modak wondered, when his heart almost skipped a beat, "That's it! I can't just let the mana be duplicated, I need to have the tape act as the original vessel; the mana frequency will be released from the tape, and then while being processed will be imbued with the properties that it needs to create a magical effect!"
Instantly, Modak practically tore open the tape player, changing around wires and pulling out small parts on the baseboard to change the way that the player worked. He pushed the tape back inside of the player, and started it back up.
And then... music played. Though, that was probably wrong. It was just a random assortment of notes that vaguely sounded like they could have been created by a broken piano. But even so, to Modak, it sounded beautiful.
A broad grin formed on his face as he looked at the tape player. The mana that was placed onto the crystal tape was now completely gone from it. Basically, each tape would be a one-time use item, but even so, this proved it. It was possible to mechanically recreate magic!
There were instances where spells were placed onto crystal receptacles and were then mechanically triggered, but this was completely different. Here, all the processing and formation of the spell was done through this machine.
With adrenaline rushing through his veins, Modak tried out something else. The tape that was playing right now was recorded by a mage that was assisting them. After all, the initial idea was to allow mages to temporarily save the chant and then replay it later, but from Modak's understanding, that really wasn't what was happening here.
He grabbed a version of the tape that he himself had recorded, swapping it out with the one currently playing. Modak was a little anxious for some reason, but even so, he played the tape. And just like before, the notes were quiet and completely wrong, but still; a spell was enacted. A spell created through Modak's voice.
This was practically his dream come true!
"I need to fine-tune this immediately," Modak muttered quietly. First things first, he had to fix the speaker. Luckily, it really just worked like a regular speaker, so physically there shouldn't be anything wrong, and Modak should be able to adjust all the values to produce a proper, clean sound with the use of a number of test signals as well as a secondary regular speaker as a reference.
It took an hour to get just this perfectly down to a point Modak was happy with, when he started working on something else.
Modak opened his laptop and opened an audio-editing software. Him and Silvia played around with this together a bit in the past, because they were both really into music. Ryan was as well, but he was less interested in making music himself. But even so, Modak knew some basics of editing audio tracks properly.
He got his microphone and re-recorded the chant. Using that, he created a few different versions that he played onto different mana-tapes. For one, he tried to filter out any possible background noise from the track, levelled out the volume, reduced any audio interferences, and then did a number of tests. For one, he wanted to see how the decibel level of the recorded base track affected the resulting spell, or how certain voice modifications would mess things up, if at all.
He created about a dozen different tracks of the same exact chant and recorded it onto different tapes.
The first tape that he played was the one with the unedited chant. It already sounded a lot better, so clearly a lot of the interference came from the speaker itself. Even so, the notes were still random and quite out of tune, just not as jarring to listen to as before.
The second tape, with the background noise removed and the volume levelled out, you could already notice something that was more like a proper 'melody'. It was still pretty random, but each note played into the next a lot better, and the specific notes weren't out of tune anymore.
And then, with each tape, Modak's understanding of how this entire setup worked grew more and more. He made changes to his pronunciation and specifically edited parts of the audio track to get the right changes. Usually, the actual music that was played once the spell was activated was affected by the caster's mentality and what they were thinking about, but in this case, it seemed as though Modak was able to affect minute details by changing the pitch of particular waves along the audio track.
Bit by bit, Modak came closer to his goal. And then, before he knew it, the door opened up.
"Modak? You're here already? Don't tell me you've been here all night!" Marge came rushing into the room, "And please, turn down the music! This is way too loud!"
Almost startled, Modak turned around toward Marge, "Huh?" he asked, taking off his headphones. Realizing who it was that was talking to him, Modak jumped up, "Perfect! You're here! Marge, it works! I got it to work!"
"What do you... What do you mean?" Marge asked, looking at Modak confused, as she slowly but surely realized, "This music, is it... created through the spell we had someone record? Did you manage to re-play a mage's chant properly?"
A massive grin formed on Modak's face, "No, even better. Listen closely."
Marge, whose excitement was growing more and more, did as Modak said and listened closely. The spell's secondary effect was to hide the voice of the one who was chanting, since the chant needed to be spoken constantly throughout the spell. So, since it was distracting otherwise, this was the best solution.
But if you focused properly, the voice of whoever chanted did push through a bit. And soon, Marge realized whose voice it was.
"Hold on, now, this is your voice, isn't it? How..?"
"Marge, we didn't create a way to replay a spell someone chanted before, we created a new way to cast magic. This isn't duplicating a chant; it's turning speech into magic."