Scientific Sorcery : Beware of Kittens!

I expected the fairly basic black gunpowder barrel to explode and to maybe expand the cavern a bit after making a bunch of noise, but the resulting detonation went way above what would have happened back on Earth.

Seeing Cali’s bewildered face made it all the more worth it, assuring that she would not take me to the corvids. Gunpowder definitely made a hefty argument against being disassembled.

And surprised she definitely was, standing next to me and gaping at the expanded cavern. The explosion had certainly exceeded my own expectations, but I wasn't about to let the Arcanicx know that.

While she had slept over the past few nights, I had been busy preparing for this little demonstration. I had spent hours carefully extracting charcoal from the interiors of trees that had been exposed to dragonfire. The process was tedious but fascinating - whatever the White Blight and dragonfire had done to trees produced perfectly carbonised wood inside them.

The charcoal resulting from the combo of Gygr-created blight and dragonfire was unlike anything I'd seen before. It was incredibly lightweight, almost seeming to float in my hand, yet it retained an unexpected strength. When I crushed a piece between my fingers, it crumbled into an impossibly fine, velvety powder.

I decided to call it Blightcoal.

Due to its dryness, high porosity, low ash content and uniform particle size Blightcoal combined with potassium nitrate made an incredibly effective gunpowder ingredient.

It took me around ten days to figure out how to get potassium nitrate using leaching, filtering and crystallisation, much of which was aided by the fact that the bat guano also became modified by my domain and could be liquefied with a mere press of a button. Basically, bat guano is a complex mixture of various substances, primarily composed of nitrogenous waste from bats, but also including remains of digested insects, phosphates, and other organic and inorganic components. Saltpeter aka potassium nitrate inorganic salt crystals succumbed to the effects of my domain way faster than the organic bits, glowing purple in the view of my Astralscope, allowing me to filter it out much faster.

It was a pity that I had a finite amount of Blightcoal, on the account that dragon flames only torched so many dead trees in Svalbard, so I had to be conservative with my explosives.

The blasted cavern was now big enough to fit in several Sleighs, so I had the horses pull the Sleigh inside, securing them from the cold. The cliff and river made my position quite well fortified compared to the pub, yet I knew that I couldn’t simply rest, so I spent the rest of the day with Cali cutting down more trees and bushes to conceal the entrance to the cavern.

As the final touch to the fortification, I secured ropes around Glinka’s megalith and dragged it a bit closer to the cavern using the strength of six horses empowered by witch-grass combined with that of one witch-man.

Any ruffians would have to deal with the wrath of the river if they wanted to antagonize my new domain location.

At that point, Cali simply stopped asking questions. She simply quietly assisted me whenever I asked for it with Stormy sitting on her shoulder. Judging by her expression, the Arcanicx probably had a mild case of gunpowder-related PTSD.

Over the next few days, I improved on the design of the witchy-gunpowder, chopping down more dragon-burned trees, optimising its explosive potency. I tirelessly worked night and day, not allowing myself a single moment of rest.

During the last few days before the arrival of the warband from Bernt, I used the Arcanoelastic Resonator on all of the witch-metal at my disposal, using a mundane, carved birch log to produce a fairly straight metal tube and handle.

I decided to call the metal Ferronite, on the account that by being kept next to Gem 62 the metal became sprinkled with star-like violet constellations which somehow massively reinforced its strength.

As Stormy had predicted, fourteen days since our conversation, the warband from Bernt arrived in Svalbard. I watched from my hidden vantage point with backpack on my back and an arbalest in hand as sixty-six men, led by Jarl Bobliss, entered the ruined village.

Bobliss was easy to spot–he was a giant of a man with a thick red beard and piercing eyes. He carried himself with the confidence of a seasoned warrior and leader. The men behind him were a mix of grizzled veterans and younger fighters, all armed to the teeth and looking wary.

They jumped off their horses and spread out, searching the ruins of Svalbard.

Their confusion was evident as they found the pub destroyed. Bobliss barked orders, sending groups to search different areas.

Their somewhat orderly movement lasted only until the moment when one of the men cried out “Gold! The gold of Svalbard!”

The men of Bernt converged on the pub, drawn by the promise of gold.

Before their arrival, I had carefully staged the scene to appear as though we had just departed in haste. A few personal items were scattered about, and in the cold room at the back of the pub, I had placed several heavy cases.

These cases were my own special creation - iron boxes filled with rocks, with a layer of gold coins fused to the top and some very special stuff below the rocks. They were impossibly heavy, requiring multiple men to even budge them.

All sixty-six men crammed into the pub, jostling and shoving as they tried to reach the cold room. Their excited shouts echoed across the ruins as they discovered the cases.

"Heave, lads!" I heard one of them cry. "The gold of Svalbard is ours!"

For several minutes, they struggled with the cases, unable to lift them. Finally, after much effort and cursing, they managed to raise one slightly off the ground.

That was when my trap was sprung.

The slight movement released a hidden plate, triggering the barrel of gunpowder I had concealed beneath the floorboards.

As I watched over the distant ruins, a wave of nostalgia washed over me. The pub of Svalbard, the last intact building in the village, had been my home for two months. It was where I'd first awakened in this strange new world, where I'd begun my journey of discovery and experimentation.

I reminisced about the quiet nights spent poring over my notes, the breakthroughs I'd made within those wooden walls, and even the tense encounters with Cali. It was where I met Stormy. The pub had been my sanctuary, my first local laboratory, and my fortress all rolled into one.

"Goodbye, old friend," I murmured, raising my hand in a solemn salute. "You've served me well."

As if responding to my farewell, the pub suddenly erupted in a catastrophic explosion. The blast was even more powerful than I had anticipated, likely due to the concentrated nature of the gunpowder in the cases and beneath the floorboards detonating inside a confined space.

The roof of the pub was blown clean off, soaring into the air like a monstrous bird taking flight. The walls bulged outward for a split second before disintegrating into a cloud of flying rocks, splinters and debris. A massive fireball bloomed at the heart of the explosion, its orange glow briefly turning the evening into day.

The shockwave hit me a moment later, a wall of air that made my clothes flap violently. The roar of the explosion was deafening, drowning out all other sounds and leaving a ringing in my ears.

As the initial blast subsided, I watched as burning timbers and fragments of the pub rained down across the ruins of Svalbard. Where the sturdy building had once stood, there was now only a smoking crater, filled with the twisted remains of my clever trap and, undoubtedly, the men of Bernt who sought to murder the pub-inhabiting witch.

“Is… is it over?” Cali stepped to my side, trembling ever so slightly and looking at the smoke pouring from the remnants of the pub.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s over. Greed had done them in. No marauder can resist an unliftable chest full of gold.”

Cali relaxed ever so slightly. Now that the warband no longer hung over my head like the sword of Damocles, I could focus on the problem of her Jotunification curse.

Suddenly, the rubble of the destroyed pub shifted. I squinted at it. Was the rubble simply settling after the blast or…

The rubble shifted again.

Nothing should have survived that explosion, yet there was unmistakable movement among the smoking debris.

Suddenly, a muscular hand burst forth from the wreckage, then another. The hands worked in tandem, throwing aside bricks and wooden beams as if they were made of cardboard.

A naked man, scorched and covered in blood, emerged from the center of the explosion that should have killed absolutely everything.

As I stared, transfixed as the man inhaled deeply, his jaw opening wider than what was humanly possible, sucking an ungodly amount of air-filled sparks and smoke inside him.

A red, spiral shaped aurora spiral began to radiate from his body in the Astralscope’s view, his muscles pulsing with an otherworldly energy.

The blood coating his skin and spreading all across the ruins, seemed to flow back into his body of its own accord, like rivers of shimmering fluid, glowing in my view. The man’s muscles rippled and rearranged themselves, healing his injuries, bones snapping back into place.

I swallowed.

My gaze became drawn to the man’s chest, where a hexagrammic tattoo pulsated with an eerie red light. Trailing voids emanated from the design, folding into themselves in impossible ways that hurt my eyes to look at directly.

Blood magic. Bobliss was a fallen hero, a slayer of witches, doomed to turn into a Jotun upon his death!

With a gesture, Jarl Bobliss extended his arm.

Blood poured from fresh cuts that opened along his skin, gradually coalescing into the shape of a sword. Within moments, he held a blade of solid blood, its surface rippling with eerie, red shimmers.

I swallowed hard.

"Cali," I whispered, not daring to take my eyes off the blood-wielding Nordstaii Champion, "I think we might have a bit of a problem."