Chương 365: AF Chapter 364 – Scales of Activity

I cast three separate Mass Phantasmal Servants to help with the brute labor aspect of things, the Servants able to move around with little regard for gravity and just contribute to pushing, pulling, and cutting as they needed to. The knives that Briggs pounded out with his Forge were helping a great deal with the tough flesh and connective tissue, even half-liquefied as it was, and I was basically Energizing up tungsten right now to replace the adamantine expended on this task.

Kris or the Mick would have had to do basically all the cutting if Briggs hadn't done that, so eh, good use of my time. I could just Cast a few Widened Energizes to Earth, do about 300 cubic inches of material each time, regain the mana back in Aurora Stance, and watch this monstrosity getting stripped with great speed and Burned down to dust. The bastard thing had thousands of scales, and they were stacking up with great speed.

I Shaped the Assembly areas for them, and containment shells for the stacks, with a layer of linen underneath all of them. Tapestry spells fed from Mana reached up, shrank them down to a woven image, and were bundled up for transport elsewhere. We didn't know what these things were going to be used for yet, but it was going to be something impressive. I was sure Kris and Briggs had ideas, and I was sure I was going to be part of them. Huh. Could a modified Marrowmeld spell Raised to VII+1 work on these scales?

I was going to have to check. Couldn't be that much different from modifiying Dragonscale, right? If I could mold and meld them, these things could easily become a hull, wall, fuselage, main body, or the like. As for the fangs… they were evolved to prey on Aetheric beings. That specifically would include the virindi. We were going to have to give a couple to Martine to play with to that purpose. And… he might want me to make him a Staff out of those, or something.

Something nice and mortal using aetheric virindi magic against them. Sounded like a good deal to me. Lots of work to do, it never went away. I looked at my schedule for Resurrections for tomorrow, shook my head to myself with a half-smile, and kept at my tasks. We all had things to do, and they weren't going to complete themselves. My eyes turned further out to sea.

Our stealth infiltration there had been pretty much exposed, even without the relayed intel to Briggs and shutting down the spies within our researchers. No deaths of anyone, but people playing both ends were thrown out on their ear.

When the things Kris and the Mick had relieved of them were made available by anonymous donations, sure, we could say some independent adventurers did the job, and nobody was going to say otherwise, although finding said guilty adventurers was going to be rather difficult by the injured parties. Regardless, this was just too big, and it was plain that Kris and I had been on the island.

Nuhmudira had doubtless felt Aerbax awaken, although whether she knew the Corrupted virindi was present on the Caul was a different issue. There were enough loose lips available among those working the Withered population for Karma that they couldn't fail to mention the Ravager was chasing us. The Mick's team and the Knights arriving on the scene just as the volcano blew up might be coincidence, but who was going to believe that?

More importantly, we'd been seen fleeing the Caul, but not going to it, although everyone knew we could run over the waters now. Perhaps she'd been thinking that we still didn't dare visit the Caul, what with the high walls around it and all? Also, it meant that we might and probably were going to visit the little islands nearby, one of which was probably her lair, and she had to know it. It meant they might be moving their base of operations.

The fact they'd been cleaned out meant someone had located it, so would they dare to stay there? They were probably still unaware we'd found the mines under the two Keeps they'd thrown up. We'd… been a little occupied getting a few small amounts of pyreal from other sources, but I could totally show up at those places now and start extracting volumes from both of them.

Furthermore, with the Summons points shut down and vivus Burning the Blight away, the other forces now clearing off Freebooter Island were making the Keep there an actual base of operations, as well as the Pyramids down below. The damn thing wasn't stupidly changing hands every couple of days anymore, and idiotic things like, oh, GATES, were being added to the entryways to stop random things from wandering in to attack.

Random adventurers, lower Scouts and Knights, and a few others were moving onto Freebooters to a) make damn sure all the Phyntos Wasp nests were cleared and b) try their skills against some of the most skilled, if not toughest, creatures that we'd run into. Certainly Withered opponents were far tougher and had a ton more Health, but the Moarsmen and Sclavi of Freebooter Island were much harder to hit and hurt, and much more skilled in overall fighting…

with Karmic rewards on the upside for doing so, including whatever kind of energy Luminance actually was. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. It all required time to come to fruition.

"Magos," a voice sounded in my ear.

"Elder Oswald," I replied, eyes not moving from the tungsten slowly turning blue-black under my fingers. The silver-blond Green Hunter watched the process in fascination as worldbone became adamantine under a Widened Energize III.

"What brings you down out of the north to nice, safe territories like this?" He smiled slightly at my utter lack of surprise.

"Tales of a unique treasure, magnificent god-beasts fighting it out, and interesting events on the Singularity Caul," he replied lightly, and then his bright green eyes narrowed to a predator's slits.

"Briggs said Nuhmudira was likely there, with her daughter."

"We did not actually see her, only felt the Aura of her Blood Magic and the weight of her presence. Oddly enough, we didn't feel like directly engaging her in her stronghold surrounded by her servants, surprise or no."

"The Caul is a hard place to scout. I've done some cursory investigations in the place, but I admit I didn't go into all the Dungeons and caves there. I didn't see any sign of remnants, except some pitiful survivors of the Raven Hand. I perhaps should have investigated how they hadn't starved to death there," he murmured, as much to himself for missing an obvious sign as to me.

"From the outside, the cave is nondescript, with four magma golums at the entryway, standing around guarding a whole lot of nothing of an empty cave behind them."

"Ah!" His face lit up.

"That place, on the southern rim wall?" he recalled precisely.

"That's the one. Your associates among the Freebooters expanded the cave all the way to the back of the rim and used it as their smeltery, breaking down their haul from the mines under their two Keeps using the volcanic mana of the island, and then dumping the slag out a tunnel to the back and into the sea."

"Mines under the Keeps," he repeated, staring at me.

"Why, that was very clever of them," he added after a moment, in a rather dangerously level voice.

"I had no idea that they had such a profitable enterprise underway."

"Did they perchance happen to hire the greatest scout in Dereth to map this island for them and point out possible sites for a base in the past?" I asked him lightly.

"They may have had the wisdom to do that long ago..."

"And then not say if they managed to build their base of operations anywhere, keeping it secret or non-existent to the Green Hunter, believing such information might be sold to the right party… especially if they were known to be associating with Nuhmudira?"

"That is also a wise and reasonable course of actions they might well have taken," he agreed evenly.

"Commander Briggs has mentioned in the past that there's some active and enthusiastic miners among the community you built up at Stonehold. What do you think of perhaps clearing out Northwatch Keep and laying claim to the mines below? Platinum, and, if their records are correct, the major source of Platinum Scarab materials before the Fall." His expression was thoughtful at the idea.

"I'm no mine manager, and Briggs has made it abundantly clear that the amount of pyreal we have to Burn for magic isn't going to end for years, and pointedly for me for decades."

"Those MMD's you gathered have made sure of that, Elder. Our only constraint now is how fast they are being converted to goldweight ingots, which is increasing incrementally every day as we enhance the foundry making them."

"Briggs has been handing out enough ingots to keep everyone who wants to Infuse magic occupied, which is just about every idiot with any sense at all," Oswald informed me with an odd look in his eye.

"He admitted it didn't leave him much of a reserve to give me to hide away in case of catastrophe as yet, however."

"You've done the math?" I asked him calmly. His green eyes flickered as he nodded sharply.

"I have. How many stacks did you end up with?"

"Eighty-three and change." His laugh was slow and ironic.

"I knew people who personally owned thousands of stacks of those notes. To think eighty-three stacks of those could be so unbelievably valuable now…"

"It explains how the original makers were able to afford the massive magical fields and effects that are part and parcel of all of these islands. Do the math on what it cost to replicate the magic of the Summons, the Shorewards, and the Dungeons alone on these islands, elder." He straightened up fractionally, looking around slowly, his thoughts racing through a bunch of zeroes that were only going up and up.

"I think," he said at the last, "that we could have paid for everything done to this island ten times over with the amount of loot that poured through the hands of the adventurers back then," he stated after a long moment.

"The Mick pretty much agreed with you." His eyes drifted over to where the unarmored and shirtless Warden Lord was slicing through Ravager hide holding massive scales in place with Bunita in long knife form.

"Might I have samples for study of my own?" he asked quickly.

"I'm sure Briggs has already anticipated that and set some aside for you," I replied confidently.

"That is true," he had to agree.

"A dangerously thoughtful and forward-thinking young man."

"Nobody complains about his being the Warlord now, that is for certain," I confirmed.

"What prompted this confrontation of sea titans?" he asked shortly, studying the size of the creature.

"That thing is far larger than any creatures I knew of back on Ispar or had heard of here, and it was killed by Leviathans that were even larger yet?"

"Princess Kristie Identified it as an Aetheric Tide Ravager. It was Summoned in by Aerbax from the Singularity Caul." He stiffened slightly.

"So, that mutant thing survived. Under the Caulcano?" he asked quickly, yet unsurprised.

"Yes. And he's more powerful than ever, or at least has broken some restraints on his power." He was obviously weighing that for a moment.

"Can you replay your confrontation with him for me?"

"At Elder's command," I replied whimsically, and a smile ghosted past his lips before his gaze focused on the Holo that came up and began to replay through the sequence of events on the island from my perspective. I could remember it all, I just had problems thinking during the course of it, until I shook off the psychic attack.

His green eyes remained dangerously focused the whole time as he saw the eruption, the chase, the pyroclasm, the shooting, the barrage, and the meteor strike, and then even the Portal bringing in the Ravager from outside.