MarvinKnight
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Amazon Apocalypse 5: Chapter 11
🕑 Added 2025-01-22 16:00:13 +0000 UTCI soon learned I had two weeks before Prince Herius expected each of his legions to muster. At that point, we would gather, he would give a speech, and we would march through a large-scale teleportation array to our destination planet.
No one knew how deadly the situation on Ladwick was, but an advanced force that included Grandma Luthrin was already on the way to our destination by spaceship. There, she and two other Samhain Ancestors would establish a beachhead and teleportation array to ensure the army arrived safely.
That was all we’d be able to count on them for help, though. Doing more risked putting themselves under the leadership of the local noble house, the leader of whom was supposedly something of a tyrant and part of the reason why Ladwick and its surrounding border worlds were in such dire straits.
The more I read, the more confident I was that there were elaborate political waters to navigate for this mission. Battling our way across an invaded world would only be half the conflict we were in for. We could only hope Prince Herius proved shrewd as both a general and a courtier.
But at the moment, those were problems I couldn’t do anything about. So, instead, I focused on the things I could do. I debated going back home to check in on Reluna and see if she had started scouting out the golems. I hoped her magical knowledge would let her find some weakness or something.
When we are done with this campaign, I might recruit some of these wizards into coming back home with me. An army even a third the size of what was currently under my command, would make short work of the golems. And probably whatever the System threw at us afterward, too.
In the end, though, I decided my talents were of more use here in Mucaria. My Aethersmith job had lagged behind my race and class thanks to all the levels I’d gotten, and I figured that if I really pushed it I might be able to get it to the peak of B-Grade.
If I did that before actually reaching B-Grade, I should be able to get another level up quest, just like I had when reaching C-Grade. Those rewards from System quests were nothing to scoff at, and trying to get a chance at a second one was worth the extra time and work. The fact that I could mass-produce additional sets of weapons and armor for the upcoming campaign was a bonus.
Most of that work happened in my new mystic realm. I still felt a little bad about swiping it from the Samhain Clan when they needed it so much more than I did, but maybe by studying this one I could figure out how to make another from scratch for them.
To that end, I set up my temporary workshop in the mystic realm. Originally, it had just been a pile of tools. I hadn’t thought it possible for it to rain in the little mystic realm, but a few days in, it happened. I was forced to pull a few contractors off the job of building the barracks and mess hall to build a shelter for my tools. And since they were building something, they might as well build something nice.
In the end, I wound up with a short and squat round structure for my workshop that was buried partially underground. It wasn't much now, but it was clearly the start of something pretty large. When I told them about the job, the contractors looked me up and down, realized I was a wizard of the Dragon Lodge, and started building a wizard’s tower for me without any further questions. Apparently, any wizard rich enough to afford their own mystic realm would naturally have a wizard’s tower constructed inside it.
I went with the flow of things, and the mystic realm's infastructure slowly expanded around me while I ground out job levels and new sets of weapons and armor. Occasionally, the mystic realm prompted me with new events and indicators, and I tired of seeing the label of the 'unnamed mystic realm', so I eventually consulted Myrina on picking a name.
“What about... the Legendary Hall of Supreme Champions?” Myrina suggested.
“Not bad...” I nodded along. “I’m worried that the name will already be taken though. We need something more unique.”
“Ferocious Fief of Fearsome Fighters!” Myrina said excitedly.
“I don’t know about that. We’re going to have a lot of magic users here.”
“The Realm of the Supreme Patriarch?”
I grinned. “I like the sound of that. Maybe that’s what we’ll name our bedchambers. But the mystic realm will be housing goods, materials, and maybe even people from our legion. Word is certain to get around. Prince Herius and the other legion commanders might get jealous of me flashing around my huge patriarchy near them.”
“You’re right. Something more innocent. Let me think. You’re doing a lot of crafting here, and this is your mystic realm, so something aethersmith-related. Besides, we don’t want people thinking it’s property of the legion. It should be something persona."
In the end, the two of us settled on ‘The Sanctum of Carter and Myrina, Supreme Aethersmith of Wondrous Creations and Almighty Warrior of Unstoppable Ferocity!’
Unfortunately, the System automatically shortened the title to ‘Sanctum,’ much to our consternation. As was everyone we mentioned the name to.
“Back from Sanctum?” Sakura asked me.
“Yeah...” I grumbled as I plopped down a fresh load of weapons and armor on the table at Doomblade’s Armory.
“How exciting! The shelves will be full again. Try as I might, I just can’t find a source for things as good as what you and Gobgob make. I swear, the quality of enchanters is lacking here...” Sakura eagerly took the new load of goods off my hands.
Half would go into our equipment reserves, and the other half would be sold on the open market to fill out our supplies with everything we couldn’t make ourselves.
Plus, since we were going to war with our own mystic realm at our disposal, we might as well stock up on supplies and people far beyond what we initially intended. Medical supplies and additional logistical and support staff would be sorely needed.
One nice thing about leading wizards who’d received conventional training from the Dragon Lodge was that we had no shortage of healing spells. In fact, while officially we would be present as artillery, I had little doubt that healing would be just as vital a role for us, if not more so. Technically, the squads on Glacia had their own medics, but comparing them to a Dragon Lodge academy graduate with a healing specialty was like comparing a field medic to a resident doctor. Which led to my latest project with Sakura.
“So...” she lowered her voice. “I did like you said and had somebody buy examples of medical tools and enchantments from all the shops in town. Just don’t make our stuff look too similar.”
I grinned and slid the items straight from Sakura’s bag of holding to mine, along with a substantial amount of crafting supplies.
From there, I went back to The Sanctum of Carter and Myrina, Supreme Aethersmith of Wondrous Creations and Almighty Warrior of Unstoppable Ferocity. I let in a few more local contractors who were continuing the construction work.
Now that I saw them underway, I was impressed by the scale of the project. Only the foundations were done now, but it looked like a small city was appearing in the forest grove, complete with cobblestone streets and signposts. My own workshop was also a story taller than I remembered, and now it was looking more like a short tower than like a peculiar round building.
Then, I promptly put it all out of my mind as I got back to work aethersmithing. This time, I was reverse engineering the tools and medical equipment Sakura had discretely obtained for me. A lot of it seemed familiar, like someone had built an MRI machine with magic. It used the same principles, but the way of getting there was entirely different.
Another was a sterilizer wand. When supplied with the right aspects of magic, it would purge all non-intelligent lifeforms in its radius. The way it functioned relied on a rather clever interaction with souls, which took me some time to wrap my head around. Once I understood it, it opened the doors to all sorts of enchantments that required secure identification. Combining that with my recent study of cursed equipment could lead to greatly tightened security on high-value creations like my Doomblade armor.
Finally, there was a magical painkiller wand that put nerves to sleep. It did this in a roundabout way that baffled me for a while. It was almost like the creator of the device was convinced perception of pain was an effect that came from the soul instead of from nerves and had gone about the project in completely the wrong way. Did the local enchanters not know what cells were?
I ended up reverse engineering all the equipment Sakura gave me, and the new inventions provided me far more experience than just mass-producing more of the same designs I was already familiar with. I ended up getting so involved with the project, I didn’t even notice as the levels ticked by and eventually landed me the quest I’d been looking for.
New Quest available:
Transcendent Craftsmanship
Your ability to create surpasses all modern peers. You possess skill, talent, and understanding not seen since the creators of the System. Prove your worthiness by manually constructing trans-dimensional System infrastructure based on the provided blueprints.
Reward:
Greatly increased favor with the System and bio-magical upgrades to your body-soul interface that will massively improve affinity for mana manipulation.
Soon after the quest arrived, I received the recommended blueprint. Truthfully, it didn’t look too hard to work with. The most difficult aspect of putting it together would be finding somewhere without System infrastructure already in place to interfere with it.
Thankfully, I had such a place right on hand. Sanctum, my new mystic realm.
But like my other quest, the reward seemed too good to be true. Cyra had shared with me that her B-Grade quest rewarded her with mild enhancements to her Amazonian bloodline. I’d enhanced my bloodline a few times, but between the two, I thought massively improved affinity for mana manipulation was a far grander prize.
I shrugged. Perhaps I was reading too much into things. The System really liked me, so it was giving me good rewards. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was steering me in a certain direction.
Despite my worries, I certainly wouldn’t turn down the reward. So, like an electrician working with invisible wires, I started constructing System infrastructure in the realm of the Kindling, the dimension of raw creation from which the ancient creators of the System drew their power.
It felt a bit like grasping hold of clouds. This dimension, just beyond reach, was one of pure thought and chaos. Only by pulling it toward me, closer to reality, and forcing my will upon the mysterious substance, could I turn it into something tangible. A large part of the blueprint required the use of the ancient symbols I’d been studying with Reluna, and visualizing specific ones while working was included in the blueprint.
There were parts of the process where I felt like little more than an amateur cook following along with a recipe they didn’t understand. But the more I worked, the more pieces started fitting together. I figured if I did this again, I could design a few subcomponents, even without a blueprint. I might do just that, since some of this technology would dramatically improve my automated construction crew controlled by my gaming computer back home.
Building System infrastructure was simply visualizing components and assembling them correctly until I had created an orderly row of wires leading to a central terminal. This last part required some unique resources from the physical world. The System had to think, in some respects, and that meant a computer processor of sorts. The blueprint I was following called for computational engines, so that was what I used. I had plenty of extremely high-grade in Morgathor’s Satchel in case I ran into any more obelisks I wanted to repair.
All that was left was to connect the wires I’d made to the rest of the System, so I threw the switch.
In the physical world, the sky flashed with the light of an aurora borealis. The colors cut lines in the sky, and tracing them with my aethersmith senses, they extended far beyond the world to the System’s infrastructure in the Mucaria mystic realm this one was inside.
The hairs on my arm lifted as I sensed power flowing into the computational engine I installed, and soon, the lights on the circuit board I’d included flashed with activity. The System was loading whatever passed for its software onto this little slice of territory I’d given it. I was pretty sure the LED lights on the board could only ever flash red, but soon they transitioned to green.
The board itself warped and twisted, and the circuit board took on a more flowing organic shape, like the whole thing had puffed out and expanded. It was like someone squeezing into a suit that had the wrong cut in a few places.
Immediately, I felt myself standing before an immense presence. It was like an eye had opened wide in the sky and was staring down at me. Grandma Luthrin was nothing but a candle before this powerful entity. I almost had the urge to kneel, but I fought the instinct and remained on my feet. The contractors working on the nearby buildings couldn’t quite manage that though.
“Gah! What in the System?” a bricklayer gasped as he collapsed to the ground.
“The heavens are descending on this place! System have mercy!” another yelled.
Before I could calm any of them down, bright blue light flashed through the sky, washing out the light of the aurora borealis and returning the sky to its normal blue. The pressure on us all lifted, and if I hadn’t seen the System infrastructure I had just crafted squirming like a nest of live snakes, I would have thought it had vanished.
I stood transfixed awhile as the System worked. Time passed, and eventually the contractors managed to climb to their feet.
"False alarm, the world's not ending, back to work everyone!" the construction crew supervisor yelled as he ordered his workers to stand up and get back to putting down bricks.
When things finally calmed down, my quest for reward flashed across my vision.
Quest Completed: Transcendent Craftsmanship
Your favor has greatly increased, and your capabilities have been confirmed to be sufficient for advanced and highly sensitive tasks pertaining to the continued existence of the Arcadia Multiverse.
Your bio-soul upgrades are pending. Please find somewhere comfortable to lie down.
“Huh. Well, that was easy. Now...” I looked around and saw the cot I normally kept in my tent. I’d pulled it out for somewhere to lie down and let my eyes rest between crafting sessions. I lay down in it, and the moment the back of my head hit the pillow, I felt the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced since the integration.
Within moments, it proved too much for me, and I blacked out.
<Note>
Finally, a chance for some extra worldbuilding. But that's next chapter.
Anyway, it's cold as fuck where I am, and the only things I do in this weather is write or play video games. My steam deck got stolen a whiel back, so I ended up getting a lot of writing done this weekend.
I've got about a 4 chapter lead on you guys, and hope to turn that into a 5 chapter lead by tomorrow. If I can do that and also manage 4 chapters this week, we'll transition to the old mon-wed-fri-sat schedule.
Comments
NovaZero
Why integrate with system when you can make system integrate with you?
NovaZero
In short the warp is a neutral plane of thought. But then chaotic elements taint the water and kind of foul it up. Oh fuck it, it's the internet. It's all data, but idiots flood it with furries.
Bharath
I do get confused with all the inter-dimensional talk though. Had me thinking of watching Interstellar for the first time - esp with all the time dilation stuff
jmundt33a
He has one quest he seems to be delaying. He needs those elite units.
jmundt33a
Should be advance force (like advance party). Not advanced. That was as much help as we’d be able to count on from them, though. Should be when we were done No comma after command. Should be peak of C-Grade
jmundt33a
Demonstrate without shortcuts or cheat codes. Carter basically gave the System the finger on that one.
NovaZero
System is tired. Do it yourself.
NovaZero
Or gave it to him as a quest to cockblock him from ever using it as a name or title in any form
Adam M.
Great chapter. Shame about your Steam deck. Keep warm!
Bharath
manually constructing trans-dimensional System infrastructure based on the provided blueprints. Didn't understand a word of what that meant!
Vorsayo
Don’t know ANYTHING about Warhammer lol.
Marvin
Yeah. It is a mix between the aether in a lot of series and maybe the warp from Warhammer. A metaphysical dimension of those guts and dreams that underpins magic.
Vorsayo
Can you explain the Kindling more. It seemed in this chapter that Cater was pulling physical materials out of The Kindling? If he gets proficient enough with this would he be able to start just pulling the raw materials he needs for crafting out of The Kindling?
Vorsayo
So yeah… the system is 100% trying to get out from under the thumb of that Vayly bitch. From how you described the room where she interacted with the system it also seems system infrastructure is breaking down. So I think the system is also pointing him towards being able to repair broken and/or missing components. Doesn’t seem like it’s running at full capacity. Also it is definitely restricted at the moment as it should be able to issue a quest to kill Vayly or anyone else trying to abuse its powers.
Vorsayo
So does entering Sanctum from Mucaria mean that Sanctum’s time flows at the same time dilated speed as Mucaria?
Marvin
Thank you for reading!
Marvin
Thanks for reading!
Mistweaver
Love the chapter and the series!
Gennydoll Weber
Loving the story so far!
Adam
It’d be funny if the system gave Carter the title “Supreme Aethersmith of Wondrous Creations” for completing that quest.
Marvin
He hasn't leveled it up high enough to have access to that feature yet.
Marvin
Just over 200. Probably like 203 or something.
Marvin
Vayly could use her own quest system to make the Samhain ancestors report to her, probably by assigning large penalties for quest failure. They're trying to slip in and out without her noticing so that can't happen. As for the crusade, that's basically just how Carter's translation ability is converting what, in Prince Herius' language, means 'a war on behalf of the System and the Arcadia Multiverse.' If Carter was from the middle east, his translation ability would have called it a jihad.
Marvin
Yes, thanks
Marcell Palmer
Loved this chapter. Sorry about your steam deck. I've been looking for a used one but everyone is over charging for them. It was 38° here yesterday. The only thing I noticed is off hand was that you used persona when I think you meant personal. I want to try helping as much as I can with typos if it helps with your process.
Jon Erwin
So I don’t normally do corrections but you have peak of B grade and it should be peak of C grade
Detectivetrap23
After the end of the book 4 and the revelation that the system and the people currently running it don’t necessarily get along, I pay a bit more attention to things like this and the idea of the systems favor. I feel like the system wants to get free from the people currently controlling it, and it’s building up Carter to do that. Learning to build all these important, lost system infrastructure would surely help with that. The
WhiteRabbit
Not sure if adding the system to his pocket dimension is going to turn out good or bad.
Corac
I think he might be able to control it somewhat but hasn't?
ArbabSB
I'm still a bit unclear on the relationship between Glacia and the Samhain Clan and this "local noble house" of Ladwick, which I assume is the Architect lady's house. You've stated that Glacia is independant of the Architect and Prince Herius is liberating Ladwick (placing it back under the Architect's control?) as a crusade as the world has religious significance? But the Samhain Ancestors would fall under the command of the Architect if they help Herius' forces too much? I'm don't understand how that works.
James coe
I was going for the transhuman more than robot part and could only think of admech while listening to a 40k podcast.....but still think a tech marine style outfit would fit
ArbabSB
I think Carter's ascended beyond relatively crude robotic limbs/prosthetics, at least for himself.
ArbabSB
Love it. I like how you described the crafting process. This is definitely the start of something big. It appears the System is prepping Carter to free the node controlled by the Architect lady (don't remember her name). Maybe said node will escape to this Sanctum using this infrastructure or set up shop here once Carter frees it (her?). What is Carter's Aethersmith level now?
Swordcollector45
Nicely done
James coe
Sounds like someone needs to be decked with steam
James coe
Welp when in doubt just build your own engineer - system POV. Add in the bloodline stuff and oh look a new race of system engineers.......also biomagical upgrades just remind me of admech/iron hands. Maybe some weapon ideas for future - weapon/tool combo like cog axes
Swordcollector45
Damn sucks about your steam deck.
Adam
Glad to see Carter focusing a bit on crafting, even if it was just for a chapter. However, it’s still unclear what the time dilation ratio is in the Sanctum.
