An Unbound Soul

A thundering boom resounded in the field, echoing off the institute walls behind us to produce a second, distorted clap. Cluma winced. She was doing her best to press her ears down into her head, but since we were both still wearing our armour for safety reasons, there was a limit to what she could do. I'd lent her some corpusclite, but it wasn't helping as much as I'd hoped.

"..." she said, so I took my own ears back out of [Item Box], removed my own helmet and undid [Detach].

"Pardon?"

"I said, you want me to set something like that off inside a dungeon?! I'll deafen myself!"

"The boss chamber is a large space, and it's no worse than its sonic breath."

"I dodge its sonic breath, not walk into it deliberately!"

"Well, it was just an idea. If it turns out not to be feasible, we'll just have to come up with another."

The effect wasn't anywhere close to as great as I'd hoped. Since it wasn't a chemical explosive, there was no heat involved. I'd had second thoughts about mixing in projectiles, too, given that Cluma would be nearby. She could throw it then race around to position the hydra between her and the grenade, and her armour would likely block metal shards anyway, but it was still dodgy. Without that, all we had was a shock-wave. Great for deafening, but anything with a decent endurance stat wasn't going to die outright, and the hydra had insane regeneration.

Detonate one of those right up against a head and it would probably do some nice damage, but it couldn't be right up against all four heads at once. Maybe she could toss them into its mouths? Could they continue to gather mana inside the hydra?

What else could I do? Grover had implied having multiple ideas and hadn't said anything about this not working, so he must have thought it was feasible. I could go and ask him, but half of the point of this was to level my [Artisan] class, and if I didn't do it myself, I wouldn't get the rewards.

He had [Master Runecrafting] and a resulting massive knowledge advantage over me. I'd likely need to come up with something on my own, rather than rely on the memories and experience granted by the skill. That wasn't quite as onerous as it sounded, but was still a problem along the same lines as Grover trying to build an internal combustion engine with only the knowledge of the physics and chemistry behind it, but no functional blueprints.

I pulled out my lightning glove in the hopes it would serve as inspiration. A mana gatherer, collecting ambient mana and forcing it into a battery. A set of gated outlets that could be opened or closed via a mana control skill. A pressure release, to stop the battery overcharging. The outlets ran to lightning crystals, that were almost perfectly shielded. I needed to trace the path from crystal to target before opening the gates, which meant the crystals needed to be producing a trickle of lightning affinity even when the glove wasn't active.

The design there was an improvement over my prototype, which leaked a small amount of ambient mana into the crystal. This one used a throttled pathway from the battery. It added some protection from overloading in dense mana. The limit now came from the charging rate of the battery. Forcing mana into it too quickly would overwhelm its pathways and cripple its storage capacity.

The entire construction was picked out with fulgurlite, and my downloaded knowledge wasn't extensive enough to know what effect that had. I ran some mana through it and let off some small sparks, but all I could see with [Mana Sight] was that the lightning crystals seemed to be producing more lightning affinity mana from the raw mana than they should have been.

Affinity mana... Perhaps that was the answer? Rather than letting the mana-battery explode, what if I attached a fire crystal via an outlet blocked by some thin mana insulation? Weak enough that once the battery had sufficiently charged, it broke down, letting the battery dump its entire mana supply into the crystal at once. Higher quality crystals performed a more efficient mana conversion, but even a weak fire crystal would produce plentiful heat given a large enough mana supply.

It would likely also explode, but I was trying to build a grenade. Exploding wasn't a downside.

"Right, time to try the next model," I declared.

"You're still not giving up?"

"Of course not! This time I'll try for more fire and less deafening bang."

"Fire?" sighed Cluma. "Fine, as long as you're enjoying yourself, and the fire is a long way from us both."

It took ten minutes to knock up the next device, using a spare fire crystal I had in my [Item Box]. I was loving my new [Advanced Smithing] skill, which let me shape metal far more quickly than in the past, despite the lack of support skills meaning I had to do everything properly.

Once again, I produced an inlet without an automatic feeder, supplying a mana battery, which fed into the fire crystal. A small break in the silver wire prevented an easy flow of mana, but once the battery was sufficiently charged, it should arc across the gap like a spark.

Back out in the field, I placed the thing on a stone platform, then retreated to my maximum [Expert Mana Control] range.

"Explosion in ten!" I yelled as I started to charge the device, because this place had safety rules. I could see there was no-one around with [Mana Sight], but shouting the warning regardless was a good habit to get into.

Cluma slammed her hands over her ears, doing her best to crush them into her scalp through her helmet, and braced.

A dull thud sounded. It was followed half a second later by a wave of dry heat. Enough to feel, but it wouldn't have been damaging even without our protective rings. My [Mana Sight] showed a cloud of mostly raw mana dispersing from my device. There was some fire affinity mixed in, but the conversion obviously hadn't gone well.

Cluma slowly released her ears, staring at the platform suspiciously. "It didn't explode?"

"It certainly wasn't as spectacular as I'd hoped," I admitted, inspecting the platform. Yes, there were some new scorch marks, but nothing that would have posed a threat to the hydra.

My makeshift barrier on the outlet hadn't been good enough. Even though mana arced through, it must have throttled the flow by enough that the crystal shattered before a significant amount of mana had flowed into it. The rest of the battery's contents had leaked harmlessly back out into the air.

I could take the [Advanced Alchemy] skill and make a better crystal, or just buy one. I could use some flame-touched steel in the construction, in the hopes it would somehow make things better. What I really needed, though, was a way to dump the entire battery's worth of mana into the crystal within a fraction of a second.

Maybe some sort of two-phase detonator? Use the broken wire to do something that opened a proper path to the fire crystal? Silver had a lower melting point than steel, but not that much lower. A second fire crystal to melt a wire into place probably wouldn't work, and would be a nightmare to tune even if it did.

Wait, how did I know the melting points of various metals? That must have come from [Advanced Smithing]. Regardless, it was no help here.

How did the pressure release valve in my glove work? No, that wasn't helpful either—it used the same principle of a broken pathway to cause resistance, with a carefully tuned gap that mana would arc through once the battery was close to full.

Could I let the battery explode and capture the resulting cloud of mana? Probably not; I wouldn't trust the explosion not to destroy the crystal before it had a chance to absorb anything.

My glove had gates that could be manually wrenched open with a mana control skill. How did they work? Some sort of complicated pattern in the silver, just like the mana-battery itself. They weren't part of [Advanced Runecrafting], alas, but I'd bet I could copy one.

For the next attempt, I did so, letting the battery charge almost to the point of destruction and then opening the floodgate. We were once again treated to a dull thud, but this time the heatwave that followed was far more pronounced, and the stone was left glowing red-hot. Still not perfect, though; despite the improvement, the detonation left a lot to be desired, and Cluma's [Mana Control] and [Mana Finesse] wouldn't be good enough to wrench the gate open so quickly while the grenade was moving.

Meh, I was enjoying this. It wasn't time to stop yet. A quick trip back to the village netted me a healthy supply of flame-touched steel, and a few soul points netted me better crystals. Yes, I could have bought them, but I was too invested in doing this myself.

ding

New skill acquired: [Advanced Alchemy]

Meanwhile, Cluma watched on in bemusement.

The next attempt went rather differently. The thud came, but it was followed by an echoey crackling. The heat rolled over us, and this time, we did need our protective rings. We certainly would have taken some burns without them.

And then the rain of burning metal fragments started. A couple pinged off my armour, and the grass started smouldering where they landed. The centre of the platform had turned into a puddle of molten... lava? It started off as stone, and molten stone was lava, wasn't it?

"Well, that's certainly effective enough to be useful," I commented.

"Mmm," agreed Cluma. "For you. I can't detonate it!"

"It's still a work in progress!"

The grass was still charring where the fragments had fallen. Shouldn't it have cooled down by now? The flame-touched steel didn't get hot enough to burn things.

Ignitite Fragment (Rank 4)

Weight: 2 grams

I blinked. I hadn't just made an explosive; I'd managed to produce a higher tier metal. In very small fragments, admittedly, but still. That was an interesting side effect. Darren had already produced ignitite, back before I'd conducted a rapid unplanned disassembly of the mana concentration chamber, so it wasn't new, but now I had the desire to sprinkle a few bits of platinum in one of the devices to see what happened. Shame I didn't have any.

Something to try later. For now, I needed to turn this new weapon into something Cluma could use. That meant not requiring mana control skills, or at minimum, functioning with only the rank one version. She could do something like open a gate before throwing it, so that would be the best way to prime it; gate off the intake. It would save needing to remove any sort of shell or physical casing.

I still needed to replace the gate on the outlet, though... Or perhaps I could get the gate to open itself? I was hamstrung by my lack of knowledge of how the gates worked, but mana control skills only moved mana around, which meant that mana moving around within the device should be equally capable of opening them. None of my gates ever needed to be re-closed, so perhaps that would let me simplify things.

An entire computer had been built from this stuff, so it must be possible. Computers... I had a rough understanding of how transistors worked; a voltage applied to a gate switched the gate between insulating and conductive. That was exactly what I wanted here.

Another couple of hours of non-destructive experiments, and I'd made what I was after. Two outlets from the battery, one with a mana gate, the other with a broken wire. The broken wire would arc once the battery charge reached a certain level, flooding the gate with mana and destroying it in turn. The full charge of the battery would then rush through into the fire crystal. All Cluma needed to do was employ her [Mana Control] to open the first gate, with the grenade still in her hands, then she could throw it and it would explode once the battery filled up.

On the surface, that took a few minutes, but I'd tuned it for floor twenty. It would explode in a few seconds, enough for her to time her throw.

Flame-grenade (Quality 24)

Weight: 200 grams

ding

Skill [Advanced Smithing] advanced to level 2

Skill [Advanced Runecrafting] advanced to level 2

Skill [Advanced Runecrafting] advanced to level 3

Skill [Advanced Alchemy] advanced to level 2

Class [Artisan] advanced to level 2

Actually, the results from [Eye of Judgement] reminded me of one more thing; my glove had a lightning affinity enhancement enchantment. Would a fire affinity version boost improve this grenade further? There was nothing in my skill-derived knowledge that said so, but if it worked for the glove...

Another quick shopping trip in Synklisi for some enchanting ingredients, and, as the resulting fireball mushroomed into the air over the institute, I discovered the answer was an emphatic yes.