His vision cleared, Douglas thinks of the next step of the plan. He now needs to ‘carefully decalcinate’, as his previous self aptly put. Calling up the spell shape in question, Douglas looks at it. The complex circle itself is rather familiar to the armored skull, as he has spent days, weeks, possibly months in silent contemplation of the four elemental shapes. This one starts simple, as they all do, with a square in the middle. This is to represent earth, he has since figured out. The square is then surrounded by various lines, circles, patterns, and lines of runes, all of them weaving and flowing outwards to their target element, air. The outer circle is not so much a circle, as an airy weave of loose lines. The transition from blocky earth to elegantly flowing waves and swirls is a recurring theme throughout the shape. Even the runes describing the process turn from stark straightness to an elegantly flowing and swirling script the further out they are. Even the reduction of mass and the expansion of volume is represented by the much looser and roomy shape the circle takes on the further out it goes from the center.
Douglas realizes little of this, however. He might reason all of these symbols and interplayed meanings out if you give him a couple decennia, but he isn’t there yet. His bony disposition also makes him rather disinclined to bouts of creativity and ingenuity, so instead of fabricating a custom spell shape - like any sane mage or wizard would do - Douglas just uses a part of the spell instead.
He trickles mana into the center, carefully and patiently weaving the energies through the lines without spilling a drop. He fills the square easily, and slowly lets the glow seep into the next phase of the spell. Earth around him comes under the influence of the magical power, the earth directly in front of his vision becoming saturated with mana. The next phase in the spell describes setting up a containment formation and implements various safety mechanisms. This is all very useful if you don’t want to be blown up by the spell while you’re casting it, but Douglas doesn’t quite understand what they do, so he ignores them. Millenia of theoretical and practical spell studies are ignored by the skull, disregarding millions of man hours working to perfect the most simple yet safe form of a wind attack.
There is a single rune in the entire spell shape that he does fully understand, though. None of the three runes he is so intimately familiar with are present, as the spell lacks the need for increasing toughness, hardness, or strength. Like all runes, the single rune he has studied the most is made up out of two halves, the previous on the left and the next on the right.
[ New rune learned; earth - air ]
Douglas ignores all the safety measures, all the containment field checks, and all self-destruction countermeasures built into the spell and goes straight for the moneymaker. He refuses to let any of the useless runes take up any mana, bypassing them with simple-minded ignorance instead of strength of will or smarts. The mana he guides through the spell shape selectively ignores all the prevention runes in front and all the reduction measures behind the most important rune of the spell.
The results are less destructive than one might expect. The small amount of mana Douglas has been feeding the spell prevents any large scale explosions. He is merely rammed through a meter of solid rubble as a couple cubic centimetres of composite stone is expanded two thousand times, its uncontrolled transformation into air happening all at once. Trying to clack his teeth, Douglas finds that he lacks the strength to open his jaw, wedged between two largely intact plates of concrete. He instead sort of grinds his shattered chompers against each other in celebration of success.
A random visitor to the ruined town would have seen a rather odd sight that day. The dust kicked up by the collapsing building takes a while to settle, the Histaff beasts take longer to calm down. They all sense their freshly squashed brethren oozing out from under the rubble, but fail to find any traces of an enemy. One by one, the agitated Reworked settle down on and around the new pile of rubble. They never completely settle, though, as weird things keep happening. Random gusts of wind and small puffs of dust-laden air keep shooting from random places. Now and then, a section of the collapsed building rumbles as it settles into a new position. But the beasts have grown used to occasional collapses, and fail to assign any significance to the repeatedly happening events. A few of the beings investigate the appearing dust clouds and semi-regularly dull thumping sounds coming from below, but their failure to find anything interesting causes them to settle back down sooner than later.
The pale sun sets over the decaying metropolis as the sickly grey and green sky darkens slowly. The night sky is partially blocked by the large amount of dust in the air, a result of moisture contents across the globe dropping due to a certain biological superweapon having taken over. The dim and tepid stars fail to illuminate much on the barren planet, not that any of its inhabitants are dependant on light anyway. For days, the only moving things down below on the barren rock are its many dust storms and the occasional item swinging in the breeze. These lessen day by day, as the inevitable force known as entropy decays all, returning complex tools, signs, vehicles, and more back to their base components. The sun sets a few times, but the slowly changing light levels are ignored by all.
Then a shining metal skull emerges, not a single scratch on its smoothly faceted visage and somehow completely clean. A small patch of concrete blocks and sand is blown into the air, the clattering of the launched rubble stirring up some of the surrounding shapes. The faintly blue limb extending from the metal braincase flexes, lifting Douglas out of the hole he just created. The fragmented circle shining above him winks out of existence, the few runes and lines that are lit up brightly fading last.
[ Multi Casting lvl 9 ]
Ignoring the distracting blue box, he peers over the edge of the rubble heap. Douglas is actually rather happy at the moment. It took him way less time than he would have thought to master the trick of moving underground. Controlling the amount of earth and rock turning to air had been about as hard as he had expected. Imaging trying to pour water on a complex doily, making sure to only soak certain lines. That would be a decent description of the skill Douglas has developed over the last few days. The fact that there was zero system aid in this endeavor, not a single skill or nudging and hinting whisper helping him along, only made the task harder.
But the results speak for themselves, as the skull has become a low-key master of destructive underground transportation. The trick is to only partially soak the decalcinate spell shape with mana, making sure to only fill the middle square, the earth to air rune, and the field modifier. This last string of runes took him some time to figure out, but it basically controls what area of the world you want to influence with the spell. Turning the area of effect into a thin sheet - thus allowing Douglas to dig a tunnel - was the hard part, and figuring this out had taken nearly all the time he has spent down there.
Now, though, he is free once again. Douglas looks upon the half-destroyed buildings and decayed infrastructure, the black of night not hindering his vision in the least. Although, the fact that he is being stared at by at least a hundred glowing red eyes might be a hint as to why he can see this easily. His clever self had not thought this far ahead, but the many hours and days spent underground waiting for his mana to regenerate had let Douglas theorize a bit. By pure coincidence, he had theorized about this exact situation: what to do when you just emerged from underground, and you’re surrounded by enemies.
A manic grin on his metal face, Douglas manipulates his mana hand spell, drops himself to the floor, and grabs the top of his head. He starts pulling upwards with all his might, preparing to wave his surprised enemies goodbye.
The entire scene is rather comical, to be honest. The armor-clad skull emerges from the ground in a puff of smoke, suspended on a blue hand. He is then surrounded by a variegated collection of the galaxy’s best murder machines. A spectral hand emerges from the back of the skull, bends upwards, and firmly grabs the top it its cranium. Slightly trembling, it then proceeds to go nowhere fast. Douglas kee
ps flashing his pearly whites in a moronic grin as he tries to lift himself upwards. The fact that he is quickly swallowed by the nearest Reworked is as predictable as it is surprising to the skull.
Highly embarrassed at the oversight that you, in fact, can’t lift yourself by pulling on yourself, Douglas pumps a couple hundred points of mana into his dephlogistonate spell. The thunderous fireball-induced steam explosion sends another pink mushroom cloud skywards.
The savage way the Reworked dies is no deterrent for the rest of the horde, though, and another of the bone-clad beasts moves to swallow the skull at once. Douglas, by pure coincidence, had predicted this scenario also. He’d imagined what he should do if he was swallowed once again. Instead of continuously blowing up the beasts from the inside, he’d reasoned that calming their boiling tempers might just work. The fireball spell literally causes them to explode, so wouldn’t the phlogistonating ice lance spell cause them to calm down instead?
The second victim of the day swallows the skull just when the shard of ice starts to form. Where previously, the air needed to start the transformation of the element to frozen water was not present, now the small cold projectile acts like a catalyst. The long-legged Histaff monster starts freezing the moment it swallows Douglas, skull, spell shape, and spell in all. Red ice starts coating the partial skeleton the moment he goes through this new bony gullet, and the entire beast is a bone-covered popsicle within seconds, Douglas still lodged within its throat.
The surrounding monsters think it slightly weird that their comrade just freezes up after swallowing the tasty-smelling morsel, but think little of it. Douglas doesn’t notice that the Reworked surrounding him go back to their still state, all of them settling down, their bony parts perfectly fitting into each other, forming a hermetically sealed exterior. Douglas is too absorbed in the fact that he is a genius. He didn’t quite think it all this far through, but he is exactly where he wanted to be all along. He is stuck inside a non-moving bone shell, one that he undoubtedly can arcane-ize into an animated golem of some sorts.
[ Reworked Histaff chrysalis lvl 20 slain; 5,239,783 xp earned ]
The first thing he does besides firmly telling the blue boxes to sod off is to extend his mana hand. The opaque ice encapsulating him does hinder him slightly, but that isn’t about to stop him. He thinks about using the dephlogistonating fireball spell for a second, but then he remembers it took him literal days before he stopped blowing himself up with massive gusts of wind as he tried to master the earth to wind spell. He worms his mana hand through the red ice until he reaches the inner face of bone plating. The mana hand spell shape is not only useful for moving things around, but its simplistic script of runes also contains a sensory component. It is hard to see what's in your immediate surroundings in the best of circumstances, and Douglas has been buried under tons of crumbling concrete for long enough to figure out how to crudely sense his environment through magical touch.
Next, he does something that’s deemed impossible in the magical community that spawned him. He had gotten rather proficient in creating mana stones during the long trek in the spaceship and his tumble through space. He had filled his skull first, figuring out how to fill small gaps with the crude mana compression method. Now, he guides mana through his mana hand, creating five separate points of concentrated mana at the highest point Douglas can reach. He brings them together, forcing the stone to form as the system guides his ethereal hand. The stone encapsulates a part of the bone plate encasing the red ice, the other half carving a hole in the magically frozen goop. Remotely doing this task was seen an impossible on a fundamental level by all mana wielders, yet Douglas does this with ease.
Next, Douglas uses his mana hand to carve lines, using a steady flow of mana to create a main mana channel. Waiting for his mana pool and the mana stone in his cranium to fill back up again, the magical skull explores the rest of the being he has found himself once again stuck inside. He feels around the spherical hollow, sensing he managed to place the stone in the top of the small domed ceiling. His spectral hand fumbling further, he finds complex teeth and hinges the further forward he goes. He feels bulging protrusions with small holes in the back, letting Douglas to believe that these are the red eyes whose penetrating stares he is so intimately familiar with. Feeling around some more, he makes a mental map, using the same methodical patience he used to intimately map his own bony body with extreme detail.
The moment he feels his neck start to itch is the same moment his extended mana pool is filled again. Carving a channel to the front and the back, he starts the main circulation way. His Arcanist skills, Mana Stone Creation and Magical Animation, provide him with a steady flow of supernatural tips and tricks. He learns that making a broad main circulation path will make his enchantments more robust and resilient, allowing them to function at higher efficiencies and with more power. The downside is that a broader path is easier to damage and that it takes up a lot of space. Douglas mentally checks the massive stretches of blank bone he has access to, as well as the highly protected nature that comes with creating enchantments on the inside of an exoskeletal beast and discounts the downsides. He continues to carve and explore as his mana regenerates, expanding the network of power passages as he explores.
What Douglas finds is a four-legged being with the rough body shape of a chunky lizard. A stumpy head contains an array of teeth that any sane person would describe as ‘way too much - how does that thing even eat?’ Its torso widens in the middle before slimming back down to a short tail. A fin-like row of bone spikes protrudes from the thing’s back, making it look at least twice as tall. Its limbs are on the longer side, multisegmented telescoping stilts that swoop elegantly downwards from the usual four places where limbs tend to go, namely its shoulders and hips. The entire animal is made from smoothly curving bone plates, giving it an exterior that looks weirdly biological with hints of high-tech production techniques. If someone were to remove its insides, it would become the world’s most complex sliding puzzle.
The silent skull doesn’t know how long it takes him, but he has lost count of the amount of times he needed to wait for his mana pool to recharge by the time he has the entire beast mapped. The only engraving he has done - apart from a few strength, toughness and hardness runes he couldn’t resist painting with mana - is the power distribution band. It runs from the being’s spine, splitting around its tail, merging back across its belly, and splitting at its throat only to merge back into its spine. He has spent his time in a sort of daze, half of the time groggy from mana depletion, the other half too focused on his current task to really take stock of what he’s actually doing.
Now that he feels the extremely comforting hum of his very own mana circulating around him, Douglas wonders what to do next. The Magical Animation skill has taught him some basic principles, but his limited mind fails to see easy ways to use these principles in his current situation. Simple stuff, like making a wrought iron hinge lock up, making a creased sheet of parchment fold by itself, and letting two smooth surfaces slide across each other, Douglas knows how to do. Carving mana channels in certain patterns should be enough to do the trick.
The question of why his current class doesn’t have the engraving skill included in its skill set has actually occurred to Douglas, but the tips and hints he got from his other class skills told him that complex engraving isn’t needed at this stage. His level 10 Engraving skill is actually overkill for the most complex Magical Animation Douglas knows. This in combination with the fact that he can engrave material only using mana was enough for him to realize that engraving might become useful, but not at his current Associate Arcanist level.
Pondering what to do, Douglas looks the beast over once again. He has found that he can sink his mana hand into the bone plates, if at a much, much, much slower speed. The concrete he had found himself buried in a while ago gave him similar resistance, but a lot less so. Something about the way the super strong bone is put together fights his mana fueled probing.
Douglas perseveres, though, and it takes him a relatively short amount of time to get a glimpse of the beast’s interlocking plates and complex mechanical hinging mechanisms.
Then it hits him. His Magical Animation skill screaming it into his face, he realizes that he can use the surface repulsor field pattern combined with the sliding formation and the control method from the paper folding trick in order to make stuff move!
Had the same observer from before still been watching the freshly collapsed building, the sight would only have become more and more weird. The literally frozen monster that ate the metal skull starts moving after weeks of standing still. It spasms the smallest toe of its left hind limb. Then more and more parts of the beast start twitching in spasms, every single movement of a new joint accompanied by the horrid sound of cracking and pulverizing ice. It takes the long-limbed creature weeks of random flailing and accidental breakdancing before any sense of reason comes to its movements. The hibernating Histaff Reworked around their uncoordinated and awkward colleague sniff the odd fellow occasionally, but fail to see that something is very, very wrong with the being.
Chapter Four – Endings and Beginnings
She smiles at him.
“You know, this all reminds me.” His dulcet voice still sends butterflies fluttering through her chest. She briefly allows herself to wonder how after all these years, after all the things that they’ve done together, how his smile still has this effect on her.
“Reminds you of what, love?” Grinning back at him, she feels his hands slide across her back. The soft fabric of her dress has zero friction, so it’s as if his fingers caress every perfect pore and smooth stretch of alabaster skin directly. She looks ahead again, smiling as she feels him close up behind her. A new whiff of his musk enters her nose, unleashing an overwhelming kind of desire to surrender in her very core. His hands slide around her waist, never touching anything that can be classified as an erogenous zone, purposefully teasing her with where he doesn’t touch.
GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2) Page 4