Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 566
🕑 Added 2024-02-22 20:31:47 +0000 UTCOnce we got the enchantments down, Camden hired us a bunch of enchanters to start work. With a whole team we made serious progress day to day, but we started running into problems pretty much immediately. Twenty blocks of Darkstone (got sick of not having a name for it so I started calling it that and it caught on) wasn’t going to get the walls done anywhere close to fast enough.
Because of that, Camden ended up having to let me front load some of my extra wishes. He wanted to give some of his to Benny, but since he’d already paid I wouldn’t have been able to charge him the density shifted attacks I needed to complete construction.
In order to make it work, we had to calculate how many wishes he had left (we were about ten days in after that last week so we had a hundred and ten days left) and give me my two a day all up front. He had five hundred and fifty wishes and I had two hundred twenty, and he let me knock those out all at once.
Two hundred and twenty wishes at seven a day was basically a month straight at seventy points a day. The entire next week I was able to crank out seventy blocks daily, for a total of four hundred and ninety blocks, and four hundred and ninety stats for Benny (he put them all in Might) bringing him up to eight thousand one hundred twenty three total.
I had to do twenty blocks, then do more wishes, and repeat, because I couldn’t hold a full seventy charges of even F-ranked density shifting, but we got it done, and it was more than enough for the enchanters to work with.
Now we were a hundred and three days out with five hundred blocks and counting. At about ten blocks wide that wasn’t as much as we’d hoped, but once Benny hit E-rank he could spam the damned attacks FOR me and we could really start production. I stood in front of the massive black stone wall, whistling at what the current segment looked like.
Because of the cost of the foundation wishes, Camden had done them in segments. Both to maximize power and because his enchanters said it would help them set up the connections between the larger segments later.
We had more than a hundred extra blocks already on the next segment but the four hundred hundred we already had enchanted were officially ready to be joined together, once we finished one last bit of addition. We’d used four hundred for this section to keep things even though.
The first segment of wall would be proof of concept for my plan. Not only did it have the Belial enchantments, but Sonia and Adam had come up with some secondary linkage enchantments designed to let them connect more smoothly AND allow my Dust Construction to function better. I’d even gotten the Skill to Beginner from the week of non stop work.
Before I could join the blocks into one huge massively enchanted wall segment and test them out though, we had to add the spikes for the palisade. Those would stop the stone lions from trying to scale them before we could mount a proper offense (Camden was planning a wish that would limit the air maneuverability over the walls). Sonia had helped design some specially made anti lion spikes that we needed to slot into the base of the wall before I made it one solid piece.
We had a hundred of them, which was only possible because she’d stripped out a lot of materials needed for things like shafts and designed them just to be slotted into the walls.
“Ok, you know what to avoid, right?” Said Benny as he handed me the first spike. “Because if you accidentally dissolve any of the enchantments in the stone bad things will happen. Not that we’d be alive to worry about it after this four hundred brick pile of explosives goes up and vaporizes us down to the atomic level.”
I glared at him. “Has anyone ever told you you should write children's books? You’re so inspiring and hopeful.”
“I’m just being realistic.” He said indignantly. “There is a decent chance that you’re going to fuck up and kill all of us by accident. Besides, silver lining, if we’re all dead we don’t need to worry about the invasion.”
Snickering, I shook my head. “Well, I guess it helps knowing that if I screw up you won’t be around to say you told me so. Now shut it so I can concentrate.”
Eye of Revelation active, I used Piece of Mind twice, splitting a second parallel so I could trigger Song of the Soil, and a third so I could trigger Pit of Despair. I’d had a LOT of practice with Pit of Despair, and I needed every bit of that as I slowly and carefully dissolved a small section of wall between the loops of engraved enchantment where I could slot in the spike.
Once it was dissolved, I used Dust Construction to funnel out the stone dust before slotting in the spike at an angle and then packing the dust back in and hardening it again. Making sure the density shift didn’t fade when I dissolved it was tough, but I managed by not completely shifting it to grains, keeping it in a semi-liquid state that I was still able to work with. Once it was done and set I shook the spike to confirm it wouldn’t move.
Then I did the next one, then the next. I did two rows at the base of the wall, and then once I was done I stepped back to admire my work. “So?” I asked Benny. “What do you think?”
My best friend knelt down to try to wiggle the spikes, then nodded slowly. “That should do it. You ready for the big show? This is proof of concept, and it’s going to be the hardest part. You remember what the enchanters said?”
I nodded, exhaling loudly. “I remember. I can’t let the spells overbalance. If I merge two blocks, I need to merge the result with another two merged blocks. If I try to combine a large and a small amalgam the enchantment will overload the smaller one and blow the whole wall. Start with one and one, then two and two, then four and four. Keep scaling up until I finish.” I was pretty terrified because I was going to have to use a BUNCH of parallels to keep track. They got exponentially harder to handle as I went on. Even with Beginner Dust Construction, this was going to be the first REAL strain on my soul in terms of raw strength since my rank up. The other strain had been mostly detail oriented and was more a lack of polishing.
To my surprise, I felt a hand slide into mine, and I turned to see Callie grinning at me. “I might not have a Sapphire Soul Body, but my soul is still blue. I can offset some of the load. Plus this’ll be good for my own soul training. Who knows maybe I’ll finish my sublimation and catch up to you.” She winked at me and I laughed, nodding in relief.
With her to take up some of the slack I was way less worried. I triggered piece of mind, and then began the process.
First up Callie and I each did a pair of blocks, one and one into a single whole. With Eye of Revelation peeled I was able to see the pattern of Belial latch onto the second pattern and tie itself in, smoothing out into one larger enchantment. Callie did the same. Then we started using the parallels. To make sure we didn’t overbalance we split our attention as much as possible, creating two-hundred two block amalgams one by one.
Two of us and multiple parallels of each made short work of that, then we started combining the pairs of blocks into chunks of four. One hundred. Then again into fifty, and then twenty five. That was when things got tricky, because we couldn’t combine them evenly anymore, we had to speed up and smash them all together before the enchantments had time to overload.
More and more combos, faster and faster, merging the stones together as the enchantments chased us through the wall, merging and mutating and growing. My head was on fire, I could barely breathe, and all I could feel was POWER running through me as I forged the four hundred block wall into one huge piece of reinforced spellworked darkstone set with spikes at the bottom.
Callie dropped out about eighty percent of the way through, her blue soul unable to keep up, but despite the pain and disorientation I still managed to finish.
When I was done, I let the Eye of Revelation fade, looking on the huge solid chunk of stone directly. It was…amazing. Fifty feet long, ten feet wide, and twenty feet high. The first layer had been the same width and length, but we’d needed twenty layers of blocks the same size to get the kind of height we wanted.
I exhaled in relief. The massive block of stone was one huge chunk of E-ranked acidic danger rock. It was black and glossy, and I could feel the heat coming off it in waves as the toxic green poison crackled inside. I’d debated trying to incorporporate the wolfhornigator venom I still hadn’t used yet into the design, but I was worried it would melt the foundations.
This was also why we’d had to split the thing into segments. We had to merge equal sized sections to prevent overload, which meant when we eventually did combine the section with the next one it would need to be already complete, and then we’d need to combine two more to combine with THAT combined section and so on. Still, it was a monument to danger and violence and I couldn’t help but grin up at it.
“Give me a minute before testing.” I wheezed. “Need to let my head clear.” We had plans beyond just burning for this wall, that was why we’d made it like this. This whole thing was basically one massive enchanted weapon.Even with the size it wouldn’t be enough to take out a Master, not with my stats backing it up, but it would let me crowd control whole packs of the stone lions, or so we hoped.
Like Benny had said, proof of concept. Once my head stopped pounding, I got up and triggered Belial, using the amethyst to offset the strain as I jumped the full twenty feet onto the wall. Closing my eyes, I knelt down, resonating Belial with the wall.
It took a second to get used to, but I could FEEL the power. All that Impact. None of it higher than mine but spread so far across the stone. I could also feel the linking enchantments they’d designed, and the stone itself, so thoroughly steeped in the power of my soul. Made by my hand, imbued with my Skills, enhanced with attacks I’d traded for.
Standing up there, I WAS the wall, and it was me. All one big chunk of Belial. I focused on the stone, using Dust Construction and the linked spells to will it to change, to move. The wall dropped about two feet as the stone shifted, all the enchantments already locked in place just flexed instead of breaking, and all that extra stone jabbed out as a fucking FOREST of razor sharp block stone spikes bristled out of the front of the wall, stabbing out and then retracting as the stone rose back up to its full height.
I opened my eyes, woozy and falling over, and Callie caught me, hopping off the wall with me and laying me on the ground as I came out of Belial. I stared up at the stone wall with a shit eating grin. It worked. With this much soul strain I could only do one attack, but that was with Beginner level Dust Construction. With a sound soul and Intermediate or Expert in the Skill? I should be able to wield the entire palisade as a weapon against the hordes. My plan was going to work.
Comments
Kevin McGuire
And just like that we have a stone mecha
Roaring waters
Awesome!
Captdeth
17s
