Keron
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Chapter 143 - Rolling the Dice
🕑 Added 2025-01-03 18:00:07 +0000 UTCEmily once again leaves the engine room and heads to her workshop to prepare her potions and ammunition alone. This time, she pays extra attention to the powder blend filling the hollow shells of her ice bullets.
First, she adds some white iron filings to the bottom of her mixing beaker, before grabbing a handful of five lesser ice crystals and wrapping them in a thin film of mana. She pulverises the crystals within the thin barrier, pouring the powdered crystals into the beaker while she grabs two normal ice crystals to do the same with.
After adding the two, she carefully pulls out a greater ice crystal the size of two fists, placing it in the jaws of an adjustable mechanical arm mounted to her workbench. She slides a metal tray beneath the large crystal and moves her open mixing beaker across the surface to keep it away.
I may not be able to control the complete decomposition of a greater crystal yet, but they’re the first crystals large enough for me to try proper crystal refining!
Emily lifts a delicate chisel formed from a blend of black iron, white iron, and a touch of mythril to balance them, placing it to the side of the crystal. She shuts her eyes and pours a small stream of mana into the chisel, focusing on her image of ice and circulating her mana through the tool and into the crystal.
She slowly slides the chisel across the smooth surface of the magical oddity, silently searching for a response. After a few minutes of nothing happening, Emily suddenly feels a deep sense of resonance and her hand guiding the chisel freezes in place. She lifts her free hand to the back of the chisel and curls her fingers, charging them with a whisp of frosty mana before releasing them and flicking the tool’s metal butt.
A clear sound rings out as a web of cracks spreads across the surface of the icy-white crystal, dropping a fine dusting of powder into the tray below. A few seconds after forming, the cracks all release a thin, frigid mist that bathes the layer of powder, brightening its frosty glow.
Emily watches the process closely, inspecting the cracks and tracing the uniform pattern spreading out from the impact point.
Good. That was a stable burst. The fragmentation wasn’t the best though. This crystal could probably take two times this crack density and stay just about stable by the end, but that hit covered thirty per cent of the surface. This technique needs some work.
She turns the crystal a bit and shuts her eyes again, returning to the process of feeling out the correct point to attack. She delivers two more blows to the crystal, spreading the cracks across the whole surface. The moment the cracks connect from the last hit to the first, the crystal lets out a wave of frost.
Emily wraps it in a dense bubble of attributed ice mana, holding the crystal together as the cracks glow intensely for a few moments. The moment the light vanishes, and the crystal stops pushing raw mana outwards against her barrier, Emily releases her control and the surface of the pale blue crystal crumbles, dropping everything into the tray below.
Sitting on top of a small mound of powder is a crystal half its original size. It’s opaque, nearly solid, and a soft mix of white and pale blue. An ice-cold mist is constantly pouring from the refined gem’s surface, and a feeling of power emanates from it, slightly weaker than the pressure released by a fourth circle mage.
“This is pretty good,” Emily mutters, lifting up the crystal as she inspects it closely. “It’s still slightly rough. Some impurities are still bound to the core. It’s also far too strong for me to use now, my fingers are starting to freeze over just holding it. But this is pretty good for a first attempt.”
Her hand drops to her belt as she gets lost in the crystal, absentmindedly activating The Clock.
I can do it better.
***
Several resets later, once the core of the greater ice crystal comes out of its shell of impurities completely smooth, Emily moves on. She adds the powder that was released while refining the core to her bullet mix and moves on to creating her sleeping needles and grenades again.
She finishes crafting her preparations and sleeps for six hours, waking up perfectly on time to set off towards the battlefield. After repeating her conversation with Angela on the ship’s steps, Calypso sets off and flies towards the border. The moment the first scout comes into view on the horizon, Emily looks down at The Clock.
15:14 exactly.
She waits for a minute before voicing an odd command.
“Turn around and fly away at full speed.”
Anton, Angela, and Tony all glance at her in confusion, but they follow through without question.
And now, we wait.
Emily pours machina into the ship, flooding the engine and the propellers to give them a boost to escape the scouts as she walks through the corridors towards the engine room. She settles down and enters the Spellweave, completely blocking out the surrounding world until The Clock reads 15:14 the following day.
***
Emily opens her eyes twenty-four hours later and activates The Clock, sending herself back to the moment she first spotted the five scout ships sitting on the horizon.
Perfect. Now I can return to the start of the battle, fully rested.
Instead of asking the crew to turn around, Emily silently spins on her heel and marches towards the drone hatch. She steps out and falls to the ground below, closing the distance with the scouts on the floor once again.
The process of knocking out the ships’ crews with poisoned needles goes just as smoothly on the second attempt and, after ensuring all of them will be sleeping for two hours, Emily grounds their ships and returns to Calypso without spilling any blood.
She lands back on the ship’s prow, preparing the Whisper and settling into firing position to wait for contact with the rest of the army. It doesn’t take long before the ships and infantry come into view again, and the grounded artillery enters Emily’s maximum range.
She unloads three volleys of shots into them again and this time, instead of each cannon being wrapped in a thin layer of frost that binds them up, they’re all encased in a thick, transparent ice that burns cold to the touch.
Emily jumps off Calypso after the final volley, running towards the infantry lines before dropping flat to the sand and aiming up at the ships flying over to meet her own. She aims for a single spot on the hulls of the bombers, just behind the connection to the propellers’ shafts, and fires five superheating bullets to jam their movement.
She manages to take all five small attack craft out of the fight with one shot each this time and quickly turns her focus to the boarders while loading a fresh magazine. She fires ten explosive rounds towards their boosters, aiming for the outer edges of the exhaust tubes.
Six of the boarders lose half their propellers but make it out with little other damage, while the other four’s rears erupt in flames, and Emily gets a familiar notification as the last one goes up.
¯¯¯¯¯
-Leave the country without killing any of your pursuers (Failed)
_____
“Tsk,” she clicks her tongue, reaching down for The Clock at her waist. “Aiming for the booster exhaust is certainly effective for taking them down, but maybe a little volatile. Maybe they’ll move to the front of the ship if I give them a little warning?”
***
Emily repeats her takedown of the five scout ships smoothly, and once again disables the full artillery array the moment it enters her range. After knocking the bombers from the sky, she once again attempts to take down the boarders without casualties.
She fires four shots into the leading boarders, safely knocking the propellers from three and destroying the rear of the fourth. However, this time she doesn’t get a quest failure notification as the ship starts to slowly fall from the sky.
No one was near the back!
Taking a deep breath, she waits for a few moments, allowing the crews of the other ships to realise what’s happened before lining up her next shots. Two bullets land on the backs of the next two ships, one of them bursting into flames and the other simply ripping apart the metal structure around it.
Both ships start lowering to the floor without a system notification.
The last four, however, activate their boosters before Emily can fire at them. The ships lurch forward, attempting to close the distance with Calypso. Emily adjusts her aim along their linear paths and fires four more shots. All four bullets land in sync, hitting the outside of the booster exhausts and bursting, stripping the propellers from one side of the ships and sending them careening off at skewed angles.
No deaths so far.
Emily stands up and turns towards the infantry that have started moving in on her position. As they start lifting their guns to fire at her, a large explosion sounds behind her and she quickly looks back as the familiar quest notification pops into view.
¯¯¯¯¯
-Leave the country without killing any of your pursuers (Failed)
_____
“What now?” she mutters, scanning the scattered ships she’s grounded and quickly noticing a large smouldering wreck.
Her eyes fix on the large flaming ball of metal and fire, and she easily makes out the forms of two different ships.
“Really? A boarder fell on top of a bomber?” she says incredulously, activating The Clock again. “Talk about unlucky.”
***
Emily follows through with her mechanical routine, taking down the crews of all five scouts before disabling the mounted artillery from afar and setting up on the ground to take down the approaching ships.
The bombers go down without issue, and this time she leaves a slightly smaller warning gap before dropping the last six boarders before they have a chance to activate their boosters.
“Finally,” Emily mutters, putting the Whisper away and turning towards an incoming volley of shots from the floating interceptors. “Time for the main course.”
She charges her legs with power, casting lightning step and weaving through the hail of projectiles. A few shots from the soldiers on the floor catch exposed flesh on her limbs as she closes the distance, but she activates a single injector on her spine to compensate and charges on, ignoring the minor damage.
Emily slips into the enemy's ranks with ease and dances her way through the mass of bodies attacking her to meet the first interceptor. She leaps into the air, only solidifying her elemental connection the moment she exposes herself, shooting up with a burst of lightning that stuns the soldiers directly below her take off.
As she rises up towards the interceptor, she casts a new spell she has been working on to deal with the strain sky step applies to her body, reinforcement. A mixture of brown and silver runes wrap around her body, forming a detailed mesh of magic that releases a metallic bronze sheen after a few seconds of casting, which seeps into Emily’s muscles and bones.
Her rise slows slightly as reinforcement increases her density, but she pours more mana into her legs to make up for it and soon slams into the front of the ship with a weighty thud. She draws back her fist, wrapping it in a gauntlet of charge before thrusting it forward, tearing a hole straight through into the ship’s bridge.
She drops a sleeping gas grenade through the hole and uses her machina to send the ship to the ground before leaping towards her next target. She manages to send four ships into the sands below, scattering the grouped-up infantry in panic, before Virgil takes it upon himself to stop her.
Emily feels a wave of heat approaching as she makes for her fifth target, so she listens to her instincts and pauses mid-leap, slamming her feet against a small, solidified platform of crackling charge to cut her momentum. A small, condensed cylindrical bolt of fire rips past in front of her, singeing the ends of her hair on the way past and bursting harmlessly in the sky above.
Emily looks to the fire’s source and sees Virgil standing with his arms raised, surrounded by several mages wearing a mixture of robes and armour, all of them pouring mana into a large array forming around the Hibiscus patriarch as he ignores them and creates three more forearm-length bolts. He flings all of the flaming bolts towards her like spears, but as she dodges them, she feels an obvious difference in temperature compared to the flaming flower he shot on her first rewind.
They’re fast and seem to explode to about the size of my fireballs. Those are only third circle spells.
Not wanting to give him a chance to use the massive amount of mana being supplied by his soldiers, Emily draws the lightning surrounding her into a single point, compressing it between her hands into a densely crackling orb. She ignores the few soldiers below, who are still firing towards her, letting their bullets dent her armour and dig into her exposed flesh, only leaving a small field of crackling charge around her head to deflect any fatal injuries.
Another flaming bolt flies towards her as she’s focused on controlling the increasingly unstable mass of mana between her hands, but Emily barely pays it any attention as the core still working on her defences sends a small arc of lightning out to meet it.
The flaming projectile bursts, covering Emily in scorching flames that fail to break her immense focus. She slowly lifts both hands and presses them together against the compressed orb of power. The bright light flooding the battlefield from the dense mass of mana seems to vanish for a moment before Emily’s fingers part slightly and a channelled torrent of charge tears through the air, blinding everyone who sees it.
The powerful wave of electricity flies towards Virgil, scorching the air and lighting up his retainers’ faces with fear. However, the fourth circle combat mage calmly weaves between a few abstract gestures, and the array surrounding them all rapidly shifts. The burning runes floating in the air reform, and in an instant a twisting wall of fire stands between the group of mages and the violent stream of lightning.
The two great forces of mana meet, clashing against each other and battling for supremacy for a few moments before the powerful lightning strike fades, revealing several charred corpses, ripped to pieces by the clash of the two spells, outside a wall of fire, reduced in size but still standing.
“Tsk,” Emily clicks her tongue as a wave of exhaustion hits her in sync with a system notification about her quest failure. “I thought he’d dodge to save the soldiers near him instead of blocking. I guess I’ll let him attack next time instead.”
With a frustrated sigh, Emily activates The Clock again.
