Published at 17th of September 2024 7:23 am

Chapter 206: The Manita Kit

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Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.EXE

The scenery in his seering sphere kept flickering and changing, but the differences were generally subtle and cosmetic with his internalized software filtering out ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine out of every hundred thousand possibilities.

It was still infinite, but a narrower spectrum of infinite

I think Gretchen would be proud of the improvement I made on her wilderness and stone castle creator.

With an impulse for the dramatic, Perry slammed his hands together on the one he chose, collapsing the seering sphere between his palms.

A multilevel factory manifested from the ether, containing all the tools he would need to make Charle’s comeuppance happen.

It was huge, dominating a large swath of the island, pushing the limits of what the Idyllic manifestation could accomplish in a single day.

Three more and it’ll be complete.

This time, he’d only made the servers, a bit of backup power, and a couple vats for rendering carbon into suits and drones.

Tomorrow, he would expand further towards making the nonessentials, such as giant fake squid.

Armor and drones first.

Perry clear-cut a swath of trees and dumped them in the intake on the side of the factory, which ground them up and fired them into pure carbon, doping them into different isotopes before dumping them into the vats that would tease the carbon into the proper shape on a microscopic level based on their isotope.

While the carbon was rendering, Perry designed the software to run them. He already had his suit’s software pre-programmed into Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation, so he piggy-backed on that – nobody’s got time to make software from scratch – and modified the drones to behave more like a swarm, sharing processing power and information.

Once the drones began emerging from the vats, shaking off the catalyst like amniotic fluid from their buzzing wings, Perry already had their orders.

Find these, Perry thought, sending the palm-sized carbon-based drones his wishlist.

Immediately, the swarm began to scan the island.

Perry needed, in no particular order:

Iron-dense minerals,

Rare earth metals,

Copper,

Chemical building blocks, such as sulfurs, water, nitrates, salt, etc.

Carbon, preferably from things that were already dead. Perry didn’t want to strip the island unnecessarily.

Materials with high Essence signatures, so Perry could start constructing a bag of tricks for his ‘Manita’ build.

And magical octopuses with particularly hardy nerve cells.

A simple wishlist, and the chemistry ingredients started coming in immediately. The metals were a bit harder to come by, since they were on an island, not a mountain range with rich mineral deposits.

Most of the metals the drones brought back were rusty nuts and bolts forgotten by the original builders of the underwater prison, there was even a copper ring with a skeletal finger attached that must’ve been from one of the corpses around the island.

It was more than just the one under the blade-tree. There were a dozen or so scattered around the island where they’d fallen victim to the native wildlife.

Creating an underwater lair on Manita was a dangerous prospect, after all.

Except what I’ve come across so far hasn’t exactly been a serious threat.

Maybe a blade-tree or a hopping butcher would catch a civilian off-guard, but Perry had to assume most of the people building the facility were combat mages, or protected by combat mages.

So…whatever killed them likely used to be on the island, but wasn’t here now.

I’ll have to keep my eyes open for that.

Ding!

In a few short minutes, one of the drone swarm had come back with an essence ping.

The drones weren’t smart enough or strong enough to obtain essences on their own, given the variety of magical creatures.

Perry followed the tiny drone out to the beach, where there wasn’t much but sand, boulders and a rocky tidal pool. Perry glanced either direction, seeing nothing above ground.

Is it underground, camouflaged, or invisible?

“Where is it?” Perry asked again, walking around the boulder to peer along the rest of the beach.

The drone settled on top of the boulder.

Perry’s eyes widened, and he flung himself backward an instant before four stony legs erupted out of the side of the boulder and tried to snare him between them. It was about the size of his cabin, and Perry was about the size of a snack.

The stood, orienting on Perry, the stony coloring fading away as its chitin lost the pebbled texturing.

Camouflage it is, Perry thought, reeling backwards as the crab went on the offensive, reaching for him with it’s oversized left claw which was unusually wide.

Dragor’sKinesis.EXE

(2/3) remaining

I wonder if that camouflage is the magic or natural…Perry thought, pulling himself backwards and readying the spell to pull apart the creature to see what made it tick.

The crab waved its oversized left claw dismissively, and the weirdest thing happened.

Perry’s intent to dissect the crab was deflected, and for a brief instant he wanted nothing more than to dissect the sand to the side of it.

The sand exploded as Dragor’s kinesis flung it apart. Perry recovered quickly and scrambled out of the way as the crab kept trying to perform a sliding tackle and pinch him between its legs.

Well, that was weird. Does the main claw divert attention, or does it divert ‘attacks’?

Perry picked up a rock off the ground and heaved at the crab’s face with everything he had, enhancing the throw with extra juice from Dragor’s kinesis.

The rock was moving at a speed not conducive to living flesh, but the crab effortlessly shielded itself with the oversized pincer, sending the rock careening off into the ocean, breaking the sound barrier all the way.

Okay, it didn’t divert my target, it only diverted the rock. The only reason it diverted my attention with Dragor’s Kinesis is because the spell is intrinsically linked to my thoughts, diverting it led to diverting my thoughts.

Well, no need to play around with this crab longer than I have to, Perry thought, flying up with Dragor’ kinesis and pulling some chlorine trifluoride out of the ether.

Aerosolize.

Deflect flaming poisonous gas, Perry thought, forming a barrier with Dragor’s Kinesis and puncturing the-

Is that thing’s other claw glowing?

A beam of red light sizzling with bits of chunky energy tore through Dragor’s kinesis, catching Perry in the chest and sending him flying back into the forest proper.

To add insult to injury, the pressurized can of chlorine trifluoride was ruptured, spilling all over him and setting him on fire.

HP:15->8

Ow.

Perry sat up, coughing out a bit of smoke before pulling himself out of the steaming divot his flaming body had carved through the forest floor.

Well, that was the most damage I’ve ever taken in one blow.Cool.

The crab didn’t seem to be chasing him. It probably wasn’t interested in going through the woods.

Perry leaned his elbow against the smouldering forest floor and considered.

He wanted the crab, obviously, but it was a tough customer, and one more hit might actually kill him.

No one said you gotta play fair. This is hunting, not a duel.

Good point, me.

He didn’t owe the crab an entertaining, climactic battle with everything riding on it, or even a swift death. He just wanted the thing’s corpse.

Perry hauled himself out of the coffin-sized hole in the ground with a groan and headed back to his shop.

Gimmie some drones with knives attached to them, Perry thought, designing a needle-like shape that housed propulsion internally, the sleek edges of the blade curving around the rotors.

Add a bit of extra weight in the form of some of the metals hed salvaged from the island’s previous inhabitants, and it was ready.

Paradox’s Arrow Swarm.

Not a spell, per se, but close enough.

Once the vats had spit out a few ten-thousands of the needle-nosed drones, Perry gave them the task of harrying the crab until it bled out or died of exhaustion.

I would be willing to bet that it can’t defend against more than one attack simultaneously.

Over the next few hours, the salvage drones began to bring back a steady stream of busted autonomous ‘arrows’. They were fed back to the vat and reborn, rejoining the fight in droves while Perry turned his attention to other matters.

It would die eventually.

The next ping he got was from a patch of empty grass on one corner of the island. It housed thousands of little bugs with metallic shells with a rounded bullet-like appearance.

They filled the clearing with little pops like the snapping of fingers as they jumped fast enough to break the sound barrier, treating their own body like projectile weapons.

Perry didn’t any reference for them in his spellbook or Tyrannus’s essence catalogue, so he called them ‘Bullet-hoppers’.

They weren’t nearly as dangerous as the crab, so Perry collected a large sample, keeping himself safe with Dragor’s Kinesis and harvesting them with the Pernicious Prison.

The next ping was an empty patch of forest that Perry had to wach for nearly half an hour before he saw anything.

An isopod crawling along the forest floor got hit by the web of a tunnelling spider, held like a net in its forelimbs.

That by itself wasn’t too unusual, but the isopod started smoking.

Intrigued, Perry studied the palm-sized spiders closer. They were black and deceptively fluffy looking.

On a hunch, Perry impaled an isopod on a voltmeter and wiggled it in front of one of the spider’s dens.

When the spider threw its web over the isopod, the needle spiked, hard.

About the same output as a taser.

That’s overkill for a bug.

Perry needed a replacement for Static Shock, and this bug might have the answer, so he set about collecting them.

After some experimentation, Perry discovered that they were easy to collect if you set down a piece of rug outside their lairs, and rubbed socked feet over them, drawing the spiders out of the ground like worms after a rain.

-he had to make a rug and socks for this, but it was worth it-

The spider was the least dangerous of all the ones he’d found so far, but with Perry’s ability to ramp up magical output drastically, he was hoping these would prove effective.

The drones found a brightly-colored bird that would echo every sound it heard, and those sounds could manifest actual effects, seemingly at the discretion of the bird itself.

When Perry tried to collect it, it made the sound of crunching leaves, and a phantom of the Dragor’s Kinesis appeared and tried to snap his neck.

He was eventually able to kill the bird by distracting it with a tongue-twister.

“Sally sells sheas sell BAWK!”

BOOM!

The bird exploded in feathers as Perry shot it out of the branches, bagging it and bringing it back to his factory.

When he arrived, he was thrilled to discover that his drones had located and dug up some vivant root, filling a tiny bin with the gnarled substance, practically radiating life energy and causing the inanimate bin to tremble with unspent enthusiasm.

Alright, let’s lay out our spread. What did we get today?

Vivant root.

Bullet-hoppers.

Taser Spiders.

Hopping butchers.

Blade Tree.

Perry glanced up and spotted the body of the giant crab being hauled back by drones, silhouetted against the setting sun it had the inoperable bodies of dozens of Perry’s ‘arrows’ sticking out of the softer tissue around its joints and eyes.

Hadoken Crab.

New octopus friend, Perry thought, waving at the magical octopus staring at him sullenly from its new container.

Alright, Perry thought, cracking his knuckles. Let’s make some magic happen.

First thing he had to do was figure out how their Essences operated.

Perry fed a small sample of each of the magical essences into a machine he’d been refining in Tyrannus’s lab.

It worked something like a password-guesser, bombarding the sample with hundreds of thousands of works of manitian literature, wavelengths of light, simulated Essences…everything it could.

It closely recorded the state of the sample, noting any changes and feeding them back into a algorithm that would pursue permutations of the triggering event until it had decoded a ritual that would fully activate the essence and see it ready to be used.

Perry, using his human brain could then make leaps of logic the computer couldn’t, interpreting the data and fitting it together, then he made spells that Ye Olde wizards simply didn’t have the infrastructure to support.

Paradox’s Ethereal Dodge (Neophyte Difficulty)

Hadoken crab (big claw) shell, 15 grams, anything above the connecting tissue. Hopping butcher tailbone, roughly 15 grams. The ‘Swaddling infant’ nursery rhyme in Old Manitan, and the ‘lover’s promise’ rhyme. Blood of the user.

Flatten both pieces, cutting the Hadoken crab claw to match the tailbone.

Inscribe the Swaddling infant on the flattened piece of chitin. Inscribe ‘Lover’s promise’ on the tailbone. Face the two inscribed plates together and make small holes on the top and bottom before injecting the user’s blood into the center. Diagram below. Seal the blood in with preservative to make the effect last longer.

If the user wears the resulting amulet, they will be moved out of the way of attacks. At base level, it will distort space slightly to make the user hard to hit. When fully ‘Paradoxed’, will completely encapsulate user in a demi plane if necessary to avoid AOE’s. Do NOT forget the lover’s promise, or the user may be stuck in a demiplane indefinitely…that gives me an idea for a banishment spell….

Paradox’s Sluggish Paralysis (advanced difficulty)

Echo Parrot larynx, Blade Tree knot, Vivant root, Silver dish, (or substitute with identical sonic properties.) speaker.

Cut the blade tree knot into.5mm slices, as shown in the diagram below. Thicker slices can be used but run the risk of stopping the target’s heart. Do with that what you will.

Soak the slice of knot in vivant root extract. Use a pressure chamber to speed up full absorption.

Repeat the process with the larynx, cutting a thin 1mm slice across the grain, creating a shape as shown in the diagram.

Sandwich the disc, larynx and knot slice as shown in diagram 2, attach a speaker to the back of the disc, the specifications of which are detailed below. Apply a pulse of sound as described in diagram 3.

The disc will release a cone of essence that will cause water to begin to move sluggishly.

The effect will paralyze just about anything with blood, causing it’s respiration and heartbeat to drop precipitously, putting it into a pseudo-stasis. May be dangerous if used on the infirm.

Paradox’s Second blade (Basic difficulty)

Echo parrot Larynx, 4g vivant root 4g, Hadoken crab pincer. (The small one) 10g, weapon of choice. hooves or other keratinous glue-substitute. (edit: needs mirrored cloud-giant eye)

Dry, powder and combine the ingredients. Mix in hot glue until it forms a thick paste. Press into the form of a handle and affix it to the weapon. (edit: Mirrored CG eye pommel)

Whenever the weapon is swung with intent to harm, a second, brilliant red energy-based phantom of the weapon will attack from another direction.

Addendum! Just cut off my hand and a bunch of my arm. Weapon needs a pommel of reflective material that limits the apparition’s manifestation point to a cone. Mirrored cloud giant eye would make the spell completely self-sufficient, but combining the current faulty enchantment with the Ethereal Dodge amulet may compensate for this problem.

Needs more testing. Little dizzy. Gonna go lie down.

“Ow.” Perry grunted, flexing his left hand, which was a little stiff after reattaching it using the Pernicious Prison as a makeshift bandage to make sure it stayed while he drained life-force from the local trees. “looks like the crab got the last laugh, after all.” He muttered.

On the plus side, the Second Blade cut through his HP shields like butter. It was more focused, far more concentrated than the crab’s attack, packing more punch per square inch. There were few natural or unnatural materials that could resist it, and it was WAY more powerful than the glass sword he’d attached the handle to.

Case in point: The blade of the glass sword had been truncated by an errant strike from the Second Blade.

We’ll work on it.

Perry rested his healing arm over his chest while relaxing after a long day of hunting the local wildlife and science-ing.

Tomorrow, I’ll make a couple squid-subs, and start the process of digging up Charles.

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