Book 8 – Chapter 28 – Weaponsmith

The time it took for the Winterscar knights to all get the message, go looking for Father and deliver Drakonis ended up being three days.

Three entire days, left unsupervised with a workshop, Wrath, and nothing out there trying to kill me.

During which the only question I had running through my head during all three days: Why be the heroic intrepid hero who fought battles fair and square when I could just win?

And so three days of the most insane engineering projects mixed with the occult came about. I’ll be fair, most of my ideas didn’t pan out or ran into physical limits. Or Wrath simply told me it would be just as likely to kill me and everyone else as it would my enemies.

Bummer there. But I had my wins.

First, was the heavy hitter. Hexis’s passed down knowledge of fractals, of which I had about a good fifteen selected out as useful for the war effort.

There were a few variations to the shockwave fractal, for example one wave that would be more of a magnetic wave forward rather than a physical one.

To’Aacar’s displacement fractal also showed up, but it was tricky to use. Listed as a higher order fractal that required a particular pattern of thought in terms of space and time. I might have had a shot at it, but decided to focus on other fractals and weapons crafting.

“Attempt to fly, test seven.” I reported, giving the new aerospike jets hooked by my legplates a few pats. Bell nozzles had been tried, but we found the best results with the aerospike design due to sheer versatility with ambient pressure ranges in the underground. Mite biomes could have just about anything.

An external power cell was affixed right on my lower back that fueled both jets that way the system didn’t tap into Journey’s own personal power draw.

“Ignition in three, two, one.” The jets to my side hummed to life, burning within at the lowest possible speed. It was enough to give a small gust of air on the ground, but otherwise hardly noticeable. “System shows green on my screen.”

“Journy confirms they’re working just fine.” Cathida said.

The last few models went with less moving parts for more sustainable long term survival, but the limits had been too much, requiring me to compensate with the occult grapples.

We decided since we were traveling together for the most part, Wrath would simply do daily maintenance with her nano swarms to keep these working right. They now had plenty of vector motors attached, slaved up to Journey’s HUD and controls.

The real problem had been power to weight ratio. These jets were still the size of my legplate, which sounded large but in the scheme of things was rather tiny. Relic armor weighed past four hundred pounds, without factoring my own weight. Too much to handle for two engines, especially on more fragile motors that could vector around.

But I’d fixed that.

“Ready to record trial.” Wrath sent back. She was currently on the other side of the village tending to admin duties, which meant talking to the people there and spending time with her citizens. But she could multitask pretty well, which meant watching through cameras and data from Journey. “Begin at will.”

I took a running jump up into the air and the occult surged through me as I triggered the fractal of gravity, sending me hurling forward in my last direction. The aerospike engines roared from the dim sparks of heat into something that would actually propel me forward, and wow did it do that job well.

Outright physical force pressed me backwards into my armor. I felt my breathing stop, vision starting to narrow down. Cheeks, skin and everything was being pulled in one direction.

Journey compensated for my loss of control, the admin password letting Cathida adapt some movements as needed. Such as locking my spine up so that it wouldn’t bend backwards and ruin my posture. Which I needed, since this system could accelerate me past six G’s of force and that was starting to be above what I could handle.

The acceleration ended and I found myself zipping straight through the air, steadily slowing down and veering off course as the air was both breaking my speed and moving around me in non-uniform ways.

“So far so good.” I said, letting the engines go back to idle as I slowly turned through the air on prior inertia and a few small vector changes. The HUD showed me the numbers I needed. “Zero to sixty in 0.42 seconds. Journey is registering just about 6.5G’s, and wow did it feel like that. We might have to tweak the top speed down a little more, maybe keep it at 6G’s max. No way I could pull off multiple attempts at that speed. Maybe we don’t need engines this big and can reduce their size some more?”

Wrath could certainly see all the numbers already, but it felt better to talk out loud.

“Just let Journey handle how fast you need to go to avoid things deary.” Cathida said. “Keeping top speeds available for emergencies is going to be needed. Probably more than anyone normal would want, but you are you.”

“I get the feeling, that’s coming half from you and half from Journey itself.”

“The armor’s increasing your odds of survival by good numbers if you keep escape speeds at this range. The silver bimbo did point out this would be the near top of the bell curve in overall utility vs the damage inflicted on your body.”

“Yeah, but that’s factoring her healing me up every now and then after my spine’s been compressed ten or twelve times over.”

“I would agree with your armor’s engram and overall justification.” Wrath said over the local comms. “Manually set your speed at 4G’s maximum for your personal movement, with the ability to override such limitations when you truly need it. As for my healing, consider it paired with expected maintenance of your jet system as a whole. If I am not there to fix the engines, you will likely have more difficult events ahead of you than being restored to full after each excursion.”

I wasn’t going to argue too much, accelerating with the jets to that speed was fun. Sure the pressure on my body was harsh and it felt like my guts were getting squashed, but four G’s was perfectly fine to handle for constant changes, and the occasional emergency six point five G’s would work.

As for actually flying at cruising speeds or doing stunts in the air, Journey automatically adjusted and anticipated where I wanted to go, using a combination of leg, arm and head movements all linked together in some kind of predictive modeling net.

Just turning my head around wouldn’t be enough to trigger a direction, but moving my legs and head would pass a threshold. Or arms and head. Or legs and arms. An eye tracker was also added, and so forth.

It was honestly amazing how much tiny subtle touches Journey could pick up on just from having sensors by my neck pinging all nerve triggers. The longer I practiced with the system and corrected what I wanted, the more accurate Journey became.

And then I learned why: “You’ve been offloading your homework to Wrath?”

“Eh.” Cathida shrugged. “She’s got better processing power to crunch the numbers and her system is just better built to train models. Less data needed with more accurate results. Journey predicted your chance of overall survival would be increased with a better algorithm at the helm here.”

“Can’t be angry with that logic.” I said, zipping downwards and turning off the gravity fractal within my armor plate. That had me instantly start dropping like a rock onto the ground, which Journey handled without issue. “So, metrics?”

“You can keep flying at maximum thrust for about two and a half hours with one power cell. But since you basically only use bursts of speed or occasional continuous curving averaging out to five point three seconds of use, you could fly around for five to seven hours. Even more if you just glide through the air with minimal uses of it. The gravity fractal is doing the heavy lifting.”

She snickered at the pun, having picked up some bad habits from To’Orda’s rock.

“Right, what have we got for To’Sefit’s panels?” I asked, halfway through lunch with Wrath.

“They’re unusable, she has physically turned off all power to the fractals on the other end of it.” The glutton answered, having Yrob bring her another plate of food from his latest experiments. Apparently the loss of the machine network also meant the loss of their cooking forums and gathering spot. But that didn’t deter the machines here from recreating their own local copy from what they remembered or saved.

“Weird, wonder why she did that.” I waved the chunk of bread in her direction before dipping it into sauce. “If you ask me, that’s a little bit paranoid.”

“Probably has to do with you and your bombs deary.” Cathida said from the helmet speaker on the table. “They’re quite charming.”

“I’m about to become a proper gentleman real soon then.” I said, proud of my current work thus far.

“Indeed, since your fight with To’Orda exposed a flaw in her setup, she has amended the vulnerability with the assumption you would find your way to take more of her panels in the future.” Wrath said.

“Me? Why, I would never.” She likely had never thought anyone could be holding onto her plates, so the shut off switch on the other end hadn’t been built in. And now, after running into me, she’s acting all paranoid. “Rather rude of her to make assumptions I’d steal her plates a third time. Next time you talk to her, let her know I’m very upset she’d throw such baseless accusations at me.”

“I will inform her next time we meet.” Wrath agreed, finishing the latest trial cooking plate. The machines had now evolved their cooking style away from things that were edible by human standards, and were playing around with non-edible material. Metals and minerals that would break my teeth trying to chew on, for starters.

I looked down at the plates with a bit of sadness. Firing beams that would rip apart just about everything in the way would have been pretty good to have. Maybe at some point in the future I could blackma- I mean convince her to let me play with these again. So I kept the pocketed within my collection of stolen goods for now.

“Unfortunately the Odin frequency weapon will be too difficult to carry around.” Wrath said. “I have studied the schematics and requirements, it is not possible to scale it down without removing its intended effect. The only option is to scale it upwards.”

The Icon had sent us a small list of all the different tools and plans the Odin had built up over the years to prepare for their upcoming inevitable fight with the machines to protect the Icon.

Bob had been an unexpected threat. But the machines? Known threats, with centuries of time to prepare. The Odin had done just that, and deployed quite a lot of it when fighting off To’Naviris and his minions.

The best of the best were very large near stationary radar-like weapons that would send a frequency directed wave forward. One that matched the exact resonance frequency of general power cell containers.

It would make those shatter. The weapons would alternate pitch and frequency until it penetrated the enemy machine and the rest was history. Very effective. It’s a shame the power cell fluid itself was stable in any form besides super-critical, so there wasn’t a way to detonate those from a distance.

Unfortunately, Wrath was right that the entire weapon system would be too large to use anywhere. The Odin had to outright move those around using full mechanized vehicles and then set them up ahead of time.

So, best Wrath could do was build them up as point defense systems within her city. Waste not, want not.

“Shame we don’t have occult portals like To’Sefit has.” I said, looking at the stolen plates. They were unfortunately, one to one. And despite our attempt to replicate them, there was something missing in the way to connect them together. Some step To’Sefit had.

Secret knowledge that Feather hoarded in some way.

Which sounded like a perfect target to steal.

So I had Wrath build up the Odin weapons, not just to protect her city here, but on the off chance we managed to sack To’Sefit’s secrets. We’d need the firepower on the other end of the portal to use.

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I figured out the time fractal Drakonis and I had discovered at the pillar heart. By day two of diving into it each night, I’d found out what it wanted as payment.

See the issue with non-linear timeline, is that payment was demanded at a different time period rather than upfront like all other fractals. And what it demanded back, was time itself too.

Standing before Wrath, her swords lit up, I charged forward with my own blade. She met my charge, overclocking her system. I could already tell I’d be losing in a few seconds flat from now.

Occult pulsed and I triggered the time-warping fractal. A ring of power expanded around me, in a large sphere. Only one thing within that sphere was caught – Wrath. She began to move far slower, as if underwater.

There was another concept deep within this fractal. I thought it had been about just my own soul, but no, it affected all souls. Anything within this bubble of space that had enough identity to form the concept of a soul was caught and had their time slowed down – except for me.

Even with her overclocks going at full speed, I was able to keep up with her inside this domain, albeit not for very long. A Feather moving at full speed on an overclock was stupidly fast. Even slowing them down by half their speed was still slightly faster than I could move myself.

The range of shock and surprise on her features was excellent, something Cathida was gleefully recording to replay. But Wrath quickly realized what was going on, and simply leapt outside the field of control I had going.

It did not move when I moved, instead it remained in place relative to the planet itself.

“I see you have discovered new methods of madness.” Wrath said from outside the domain. “This is indeed an interesting trick. What are the downsides?”

“This.” I called out, then took a step outside the field.

It collapsed, and the payment was demanded upfront at that point. Time for time.

The world around me started to blur in speed. People walking in fast-forward. Wrath outright looked to have sprinted up to me, a finger tapping my helmet a few times far faster than I could even keep track of.

And then the world returned back to normality.

I could slow down time for anyone within the domain that I marked personally. But then I had to slow down time for the same amount as when I stepped out. On top of the field collapsing. The longer I spent within the field, the longer the payment required at the end was.

“It would indeed assist with evening the odds of combat.” Wrath said, sounding skeptical. “However, the payment required would be too steep. If the enemy is not defeated in time, then you will likely be too vulnerable at the end. Are you able to remain within this field indefinitely?”

“Nope.” I said. “Lasts a minute at most. I can summon another one easily, but in between it collapsing down on me, paying the price for a full minute of time slow, and then recasting the bubble, I’d probably be stabbed and killed several times over.”

There were some directions I was considering. Like staying within the higher dimension safely and executing this bubble from that point. I could tell it would work similar to sound and light in that all dimensions were equally traveled through.