Chapter 205: Progress

“This is godsdamned highway robbery is what it is! Do you have any idea how valuable this is even one floor up or down!?” Sammohan demanded, shaking a bag of sand in the merchant’s face.

“But you’re not one floor up or down.” The general store owner said, leaning on the bar separating the front from the back. “You’re on the tenth Floor, and unfortunately, we’re experiencing a food shortage. I could, however, give you a nice discount on rock salt.”

The merchant held up a bag of salt and shook it with a patronizing half-lidded stare.

“I sold you that rock salt!”

“Indeed.”

Just as the enormous miner looked like he was about to explode, Will swept in beside him.

“Sammohan, how you doing?”

The miner tensed, turning to face Will, his feral snarl retracted behind a gruff professionalism.

“Not well. All our food was stolen overnight, and this CUNT is trying to overcharge me to restock. I’m half-convinced he’s the one stole it and is trying to bleed me dry selling it back to me.”

“Let me show you something.” Will said, motioning for the general store owner to open up the divider.

Will escorted Sammohan into the storage area, where the general store owner’s stock-boy sat in a chair staring at the handful of sacks of flour and dried meats. Typically the owner wouldn’t allow Sammohan back there, but Will was good insurance against bad behavior.

“The thing that hit you hit the Stronghold too.” Will said, gesturing at the meager supplies, giving the miner plenty of time to take it in before Will escorted him back to the front of the shop.

“We’re barely limping by. If you want more pay for your finds right now you’re going to have to take them to another Floor.”

They both knew that if Sammohan went down a floor, it would be at least a month before he made it back, which cut on the time they could spend mining. He couldn’t send a delegate either, for fear of the haul getting stolen. He’d be seriously affected by lost time.

“How about you buy it from me?” Sammohan asked. “I know you’ve got plenty of food and cash in storage.”

“Not as much as you might think. I can’t just give you our emergency food.” Will said, frowning. “But…I can lend you some of my time. How about this? I store your haul in my vault until it can be sold downstream, and in the meantime, I take Badur out hunting with your guys to keep them fed?”

“What do you get out of it?” the massive miner asked.

“When your stuff is sold in the future, I’ll take five percent for storing it for you.”

Since the relative value of ore was crippled compared to food and supplies at the current moment, Will offering to delay the sale of the ore was essentially dodging the bottleneck.

Even taking a five percent cut, by waiting, Sammohan would come out far ahead of where he would if he tried to barter his product for supplies now.

Sammohan chewed his lip for a moment, then nodded.

“Alright.” The miner’s meaty hand closed down around Will’s and the deal was struck.

Will gave Sammohan the lowdown on recent events and how supplies had to be monitored constantly or else Attrition would get them, then they took Badur out for another round of hunting.

It was fun to get out with the rough-and-tumble crowd and do a little hunting and forestry to resupply the miners. They treated Badur fairly well even though he was a pencil-pusher. Despite being weak and sickly-looking, The man didn’t utter a word of complaint, and that made a world of difference in the eyes of the miners.

They spent the evening acquiring their supplies while Brianna loaded all their ores in Will’s vaults.

The minute Will got back, he got started on making a more potent version of the Homefield Advantage. Will added a handful of Homefield Advantages from his collection, along with one of his even-split stat-booster blank Relics, and a couple AOE boosters.

Amulet of the Homeland Advantage

+8 Strength

+8 Resistance

+8 Kinesthetics

+8 Acuity

+8 Focus

Active: 1 Charge.

Load a terrain into the Amulet for a charge, Summon that terrain around the wearer for another. This does not consume the terrain. Up to three terrains may be loaded into the amulet.

Area scales with Resistance

+40% area of Abilities.

There we go.

The stat boosts were great, but the real juice was the extra terrain storage and the fact that the area scaled with Resistance.

The forty percent boost to area was just a bonus to make the whole thing scale faster.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Now it should be able to make an area wide enough to catch the raid boss. Now I need to work on inventing a terrain that’ll catch it.

…how the Abyss am I supposed to do that?

Will went back to the slime. His only point of reference was the interaction between Attrition’s slime and his Ability to solidify terrain.

To that end, Will spent the next day locked in his freezing laboratory, carefully dissecting the miasmatic structures in an attempt to find some way to stall out Terrain Dive.

Will diced the miasma structure up and tried interlacing parts of it with other structures that he’d studied.

Add the terrain fishhook here, what does it do? Add the smaller squiggles onto the ends of other things, what does it do?

Will made a noxious gas, melted off one of his fingers, and made a boatload of nonsense that accomplished nothing, until he tacked the ‘terrain’ fishhook onto the end of a ‘air blast’ miasmatic structure that he’d stored a few months back.

Will liked to let Climbers pay for some of their supplies by demonstrating Abilities in his tower, and Will of course made sure to save any miasmatic structures that he possibly could.

Now, it wasn’t possible to blatantly copy an activated Ability, because a lot of the work happened inside the user’s body, and the effect that popped out fully formed was a work in motion, but Will had been able to preserve the image and use it as a reference to find something similar in a mutated plant that tended to explode.

Will extracted the miasmatic structure, then very carefully added the fishhook to the end of it.

The work was tiny and painstaking, carefully slicing off the end of one miasmatic structure and grafting it to another, so much so that Will had a wicked cramp in his hands and neck by the time he was done, but to the Uru drake’s eye, it appeared to be as perfect as it would get.

Will applied the slime effect to it, expecting it to be neutral, or to pass through at the very least.

BANG!

Instead the moment the two miasmatic structures touched, the concoction exploded violently outwards, shoving his hand away.

Will hissed and yanked back his hand, more out of habit than anything, given how often he melted or exploded his own hand.