[CYA] Chapter 188: Repair and Renewal (Patreon)

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qYErJUzroKu-gIT-1A_kbZpZRKfdq3CbYO6pnp36CEc/edit?usp=sharing

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<Alex, Real - Dorgon Calls for Aid, Innominate Staging Bay>

Alex swallowed some water and shrugged before repeating himself for Fan. “I’m dropping in the first wave.”

The man was incredulous. “You’re going down to Dorgon’s surface? Are you insane?”

Alex blinked in surprise, his smile fading. “Yes I am going down… No, I’m not insane?”

Fan groaned. “This is an insectile incursion, Alex. They’ve established a worldqueen, and she’s churning out millions of warriors. This will be a clash of attrition, and those on the ground will be the grinding wheel.” He patted his suit where it lay beside him. “Even with these, I’m not sure how many of us will make it through. It’s going to be a bloodbath in an experience-starved wasteland.”

Alex grimaced. “Well… yeah. I know that it’s rather unideal, but it’s war. I’d rather have my own fate in my hands rather than hope that my ship isn’t targeted by something we can’t deal with as a matter of chance.”

Fan threw up his hands, and Imotih sighed. “Are you saying such a thing can’t happen on the surface?”

Alex shrugged. “At least on the surface I’ll have a better understanding of what’s going on.”

She shook her head but didn’t seem inclined to argue. “You do understand what a clash between a worldspirit and worldqueen means, right?”

He nodded to that. He had done some research and investigation. “Both beings will be pulling hard on all life energy on the surface. That won’t affect the living—at least not the initiated—but any energy released upon death will be gobbled up. Experience gains will be halved, if not reduced even further. It’s inefficient, but in a world-level conflict, those beings won’t be concerned about long-term efficiency.”

She gave a nod. “Mostly correct. It will be inefficient for the worldspirit. For the worldqueen? It is her nature. All of her spawn feed her that which they earn as a matter of course. They are extensions of her, so there is no loss. Moreover, because of that same fact, even when they are destroyed, most of the released energy goes back to her as well. There is a reason the worldqueens are seen as equivalent threats to full abyssal tears, seen as all but unrivaled priorities in this tier of existence.”

Alex sighed. “And I’ll be going all the same.” He gave a smile. He knew that if this were real, staying on the ship would be a wiser course, but when he got back to Earth, he wouldn’t have a ship. He’d be boots on the ground, and so those were the skills he needed to focus on if he was going to have the best chance when all of this was over. “So, since we’ll both be down there, let’s get your suits fixed up, and me trained up to be of most use, yeah?”

Fan turned back, still clearly conflicted, but also seeming to realize that Alex was set on this course. “Very well.” He seemed to be considering something. “I assume that the heavy blade on your back is your weapon of choice?”

Alex nodded. “It is. Why do you ask?”

The man’s smile returned. “Then, my good Helmsman, I think we can help you in other ways as well.”

Alex suspected he knew what the man was implying. “I would greatly appreciate more sparring partners and training.” After a moment’s consideration, he realized something else. “Oh! I would also really appreciate it if I could look at the footing magics on your suit? But, let’s finish the troubleshooting on this armor first.”

That was agreed, and Fan began going through the list of issues he’d noticed in his last fight. Alex was then able to hunt down the specific point of damage or disruption which Fan or Imotih then fixed with their various tools.

Some of that was repairing the physical pieces, but much more was reimpressing the underlying magics that had been misaligned or disrupted.

It was an interesting project, the greatest singular revelation of which was that the suits were effectively incredibly advanced ‘add-ons’ to the coveralls, at least in their integration and dependencies for magic and the like.

Throughout, Alex worked diligently to push his use of his skills, especially Speed Reading.

He genuinely felt like he was right on the edge of a breakthrough, even as it drained his stamina at a prodigious rate.

If he was correct, he even thought that he knew how to push that skill over the edge and improve the rarity of his comprehension and usage of it, but if his idea worked, he’d be done until he got a long sleep.

As such, he held off.

It took them another two hours to finish with Fan’s suit, and as Fan announced it complete, Alex got an unexpected System Notice:

Repair Executed:Imperium Mechanus Minora ArmorCondition: Hampered to Functional

Experience Earned

Alex felt his experience pool swell with power more than actually seeing a change, and he moved closer to the next level in his second class.

It was a not insignificant amount, and he was immediately excited by the upcoming work on the other suits. They were nice piles of experience just waiting for him to harvest them.

But that was for later. They were done with Fan’s armor, and before they returned it to its place with the others, Fan asked it to allow Alex to investigate the magics on the boots.

To his great pleasure, Alex found that the spellwork on the soles was very similar to that on his own minimalist shoes of the traveler, though the armor focused more on manipulating itself than attempting to act on that which it trod upon.

There. He grinned. His new skill had granted him the knowledge to create what he wanted, and he even knew that he could modify his shoes conceptually, but the means of merging the existing spellwork with what he wanted to add in had eluded him. “Wow… That’s really, elegantly simple.”

And it was. The instructions and language were all there, packaged and available like a subfunction in the program. The real key had been how to cleanly incorporate the interrupt for his own mental command without breaking or disrupting the ‘always active’ magics in the shoes.

Now? He knew how, and he had all the broad strokes worked out. With the time that Natasha had given him to study her force-hexes, he’d likely only need another few minutes to get the specifics perfected when it was time…

He just didn’t have a means of adding the words to the magic in his shoes.

Fan sat down next to Alex. “What’s wrong, my friend? You looked rather excited.”

“I finally figured out how I could modify my shoes in a way I’ve been hoping to. I even know how to split the power-source so that I don’t take from the System-supported, inbuilt functions, but I don’t have the finesse to do the work. It’ll be weeks of work before I’m anywhere close, and that’s only if I dedicate a large amount of my time toward that singular end.”

Fan shrugged and held out a hand. “Let me see one of the shoes.”

Alex complied, and Fan put it on the same device they’d been using to fix the armor pieces.

Imotih pulled in a breath. “My Prime. That is not free.”

Fan gave her a look. “And Alex, here, has offered us his expertise. Helping him with two shifts won’t break our account.”

Alex frowned. “What does it cost? I’d thought that most of what it did was simply moving material?”

“It is, in effect, but it also uses a mix of aspects to lock in the changes on the metaphysical level as well.” The man smiled. “Nothing is free, but it is hardly a great cost. Let me see.”

The magics for the shoe appeared on the display, and Fan walked Alex through the means of shifting the model in the ways that he wanted, effectively teaching Alex this device’s mouse and keyboard.

Alex, as he knew the language of power, took very little time to input the changes. “I’d need a few minutes of help from a crewmate to ensure I have this part correct, but otherwise? This is it.”

Fan looked at it and nodded. “That is doable. I wish I could say I understood it. I’d love to tell you whether or not it would work.”

Alex waved that off. “The bulk of the magic is right. I’ll just need to ensure I have that one section matching the output I want.”

Fan gave him a curious look but shrugged all the same. “If you’re sure. You didn’t choose a fill-material for the anchor-points though. We have some that are excellent mana conductors, and it’s the least we can do in exchange for your help on fixing all these armor sets.”

Alex laughed. “I’m going to help you either way, Fan. No need to tie down my assistance.”

The other man shrugged. “I prefer to lock down a good thing when I can.”

Alex smiled. “Fair enough. I won’t argue. But, yeah, I didn’t select a material because I don’t want one. The medium I designed the spellform for will come from me.”

“Oh? We can add it to the device and combine the process. Without that, we can’t really instantiate the magics.”

Alex shook his head. He’d actually checked, and there was no way that he could find to feed his Life through the device. He wasn’t about to ask. “Wouldn’t work, but thank you.”

Fan waited a long moment for Alex to say more, but when he didn’t, the man simply sighed. “Very well. I won’t press, and you’re the expert here. You’ll have to form the inner layers yourself then, though. Without a medium to connect to, the device can’t lock the mana into the spellform you’re working.”

Alex almost contradicted him but realized that would be quite counterproductive. “Understood. Then…?”

Fan nodded. “Get your colleague down here, and confirm the work. Let’s get this done for you.”

Alex grinned, using his command bracers to call for Natasha.

She said she was on her way, and that left Alex a moment to consider.

He’d designed the intent-activation portion to trigger when he tried to step on something but nothing was there. While the shoes naturally pulled from the environmental mana—backed by the System to ensure uninterrupted functionality—this added feature would draw on his HP.

It was exactly what Runia had told him not to do, and it was exactly what he’d stubbornly decided to pursue anyway. As such, the fact that he was going to be forming the spellform with his Life was hardly surprising.

At a basic level, there were two types of magical enchanting. One was physical representations of the language of power, and those were stable on their own, so long as the physical form wasn’t disrupted. The other was shaping the spellforms with power, and that took energy to maintain.

The System generated items maintained their magics through drawing in ambient magic and drawing from the System directly when there wasn’t sufficient power elsewise.

What Alex had designed would use the HP of the Life he was building the spell out of. It would cost just less than one HP per second to maintain, so one hundred Life would generate sufficient HP to maintain the language indefinitely.

He probably could have made the magics through physical representations, but that would make the shoes more vulnerable to physical damage, and the flexing and motion of the material would have had to be factored in, greatly increasing the complexity of that avenue.

The analogy that came to mind—as imperfect as it was—is that of writing on a wall. If he physically wrote on the wall, it was there until something destroyed or erased it. On the other side, he could ‘project’ the words on the wall, and they’d stay there until the power was cut off to the projector, even if the wall was resurfaced, changed, damaged, etc.

In the case of enchanting it was more a projecting ‘into’ the material rather than onto it, giving more space than just the surface. It wasn’t infinite, but it did add flexibility. The anchors were effectively ensuring the projection was applied correctly to the right thing.

Of course this was all only obliquely correct, but thinking of it in this way helped, and helped him make the choice not to use mana for these critical items.

Besides, using his Life for both the anchors and spellforms would give him bonuses to the process when he went to empower it and solidify the item creation.

The fact that Life wasn’t really a material didn’t concern him either. He’d been able to fill the ‘strength’ rune with mana, and the quirks of magic, the System, or whatever had allowed it to function just fine.

None of the materials available in the device would be good HP conductors, and he didn’t want the spellforms made out of mana, so his Life was the best thing available for the time being. In truth, it would have been more efficient for Alex to use living steel wire as an anchor, or something like it, but he didn’t have any, but he could probably switch it out later when he was able. 

As to his Life specifically, he’d fully recovered from turning his dadao into living steel, and he’d even been putting his excess Life generation into the weapon once he found out he could. The excess didn’t actually want to come out again, but that was fine. It felt like the Life was building up to something, and he was excited to see what that was.

But that was beside the point.

Natasha arrived and after a bit of small-talk, she was willing to create a hexagonal force shield for him to examine.

Last confirmation, then we can do this!

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