Ignoring the rub of his armor against the soiled robes that pressed against raw skin and scrapes, Ulric Einar took about twenty minutes to circle the narrow valley, like a small cleft in the otherwise gently rolling plateau they'd been crossing. An hour, no more, that's how long he needed to hold the attention of the [Gilded Queen's Rose] nursery. Carefully, not being incredibly careful about going quiet but not necessarily trying to make noise either, Ulric moved to the lip of the valley, watching as it dipped away at a relatively steep incline, about a kilometer and a half across and perhaps five long.
Alright Mr. [Lord of the Ancient Glade], time to earn your title.
Summoning his magics, Ulric reached into that reserviour of power that was his core, bringing the Ceraunic engine to life.
Carefully, Ulric wove Caelum laced with Ceraun, preparing the spell that was most likely to inflict maximum damage from this range without triggering a death spore cloud. He felt the little knots of hardened wind elongate at his command, thinning, sharpening, and forming curved scythes of almost metallic density. The faintly cyan blades of air were wrapped and bound by snapping arcs of electrical current, like chains securing them to the larger central blade that would guide his weapon. Ulric pushed the limit of his control, eight blades around their central leader, feeling the mental strain of keeping so many constructs moving in synch to his will. The pressure on his mind was immense and he almost groaned with relief when he loosed the spell.
[Galvanic Mistral]
Whirling Caelum and Ceraun howled across the slope of the valley, gaining speed as it did. A loud crack announced that the central blade broke the sound barrier as the spell ripped into the middle of the nursery, scattering shredded petals, roots and stalks into the air. Six of the Rose beasts died instantly, ripped to pieces, and they threw deeply indigo sap/blood to splash the earth like a modern art painting. Arcs of plasma holding the blades set flame to several of the creatures as the spell impacted.
Instant was the response, roots tore free of the loamy valley soil and the mother plant, which Ulric had been trying to target, but you keep a magical blender the size of a mac truck on track at the speed of sound, released a cloud of spores. The others, as Taipan had said they would, did not, but instead scattered and began to move back along the trail of his spell, winding backwards and forwards, searching. It was as predicted, the creatures didn't see, not directly. Instead, they smelled, homed in on vibrations through the ground and sound, and had some kind of thermal sense. Attacking from range was the way.
Ulric pulled his magic together again and gave the terrible mass of writhing thorns and snapping toothed petals another taste of the good stuff.
[Galvanic Mistral]
Another pocket of five [Gilded Queen's Rose] were rendered bite sized and another huge clod of churned up grass and soil scattered into the air to join the flying chunks of Greater beast and their almost fluorescent blood. This time, the search pattern became far tighter and they formed a wedge, its point directed straight at him, answering the question in his mind.
Twice. That's how many times they needed to pinpoint an attack vector.
From the valley floor there rose a low moaning sound, like a french horn but several octaves lower, he could feel it in his bones more than his ears.
Oh, Watcher, that was the roses screaming a near silent war cry as they berserked.
As one, the nursery went mobile and came up the valley's steep rise as if it were level ground, about as fast as a dog ran in the Before. A cloud came into being, birthed by a violent lashing of thorned vines, and Ulric stared uncomprehending for a few seconds until he realized that what he was seeing was a cloud of dartlike thorns flung at great speed in his general direction that was so thick it obscured the Twins as the storm of acid laden thorns peaked in their flight.
"Job's done!" Ulric announced, convinced that he now had the monstrous attention of his new, though, hopefully temporary, traveling companions.
Boots scraped against the rocks below as he launched himself into a hard sprint, long legs putting him at a ground eating pace to the South of the Plateau. He trusted the plan and focused on running for a few minutes. A quick look over his shoulder saw the last of the horde cresting the dell and he slightly increased his stride. It also revealed the steaming soil as vegetative matter, stone, and whatever else was eaten into by the vicious acidic fluid of the half meter long thorns now rising from the plateau like a heavy black grass.
Ulric was a man who liked to think on the move, the exertion of muscle helped get his brain to concentrate on a problem. Normally, he didn't have toothy company that made failures to come to conclusion quite so mortal a proposition but, here he was. Inspired by the distant hiss of chemical abomination on the landscape and the dull rustling whistle of roots bearing herbiferous death, Ulric Einar ran like hell for a good five minutes before slowing into a steady jog.
Heart beat steadily within his chest and he took deep, even breaths as he ran, his armor rustling little for the perfection of its fit. He reckoned he could keep this twenty-five kilometer an hour pace going for about a half an hour. That should be aplenty to keep any sign of the Orlethrem's passage from discovery. Meanwhile, Ulric was going to work out the theory for how to create an inverse to the spell he'd accidentally created, [Absolute Zero].
In his attempts, early on and very much in foolhardy innocence, he'd created a perfect vacuum which had also reduced the temperature of the air to kinetic zero, almost killing him with the supercooled air. It was a spell that he still didn't use willy-nilly. Now though, he was more or less certain that he could do the inverse. Instead of drawing air away, Ulric was going to drag it in and pressurize it. Rapidly.
There was a fire-starting tool for hikers called a fire piston. The little device was just a cylinder with a pocket for tinder in the bottom of it. You strike the piston, hard, and the compression lifts the temperature of the usual atmospheric gases inside the little metal tube to the flash point of dry grasses or cotton or whatever.
Now, he'd never be able to do that with just Caelum, the air magic simply didn't work like that. Mana expenditure rose roughly linearly to the volume of air you tried to move. To fire piston a large volume of air would take more mana than even his impressive core could muster. No sir, he was going to cheat a little. Unlike a diesel engine, which uses sheer pressure to bring fuel to combustion, he was going to use the admittedly less efficient but far less demanding hot bulb method of ignition.
The main difference was you needed a red-hot contact surface to trigger the ignition in a hot bulb. He would use a [Cinder Pearl] to accomplish that. The pressure he was going to get from taking an air mass from way up and driving it down a [Skyshield] cylinder beneath another [Skyshield] acting as the piston. The mass of air would serve as both piston and combustion gas.
Ulric was coming to terms with the fact that magic was cheating. It was impossibility. The classes were ridiculous nonsense that operated according to rules he had not yet figured out. However, the king of all bullshit was the feats of the pure mage, the possibilities of a core turning thought into reality.
There was some aspect of his old world's galactic wizards of the classic cinema, chief was that you had to believe what you were doing was real. If you didn't put your back into it, your doubts would cripple the working. No, magic demanded conviction. Ulric's revelations while in the grips of the Prime Elemental of Lightning, Ceraun itself, had opened his mind to the possibilities of true magic. One of those involved dispelling the illusion of distance. There was no difference in action on mana before him or kilometers away, only the image of what he was intending, the knowledge of the forces he was bringing to bear, and the precision of his weave.
A lifetime and change of learning provided the knowledge. The teachings of the Elves’ master sorcerers the precision, and the heartfelt desire to watch his enemies perish in flame the image. Ulric was not a nice person.
Ribbons of air magic reached into the skies as he ran, his core exerting its strength, twisting what could be into what was. Caelum, amongst all the manaforms he knew, was the most akin to the playing of music. It was nebulous, whimsical, and required harmony to bring Varda's atmosphere to bear. As his will extended upwards, threads of power forming a net to catch and direct the winds high above, he mused that he'd never learned to play an instrument properly.
Did playing the songs of mana count?
For half an hour, Ulric held streamers of Caelum herding the winds high above to form his piston, rounding up the masses of cool air so prevalent, clouds tearing as they were pulled into the working. The trick to this was patience. And focus. He was no Caelum cored Adept, nor did he have the subtle skills of a master Weaver. What Ulric had was the Elementalist class to help him handle fine strands of elemental force and a working knowledge of fluid dynamics. He was weaving rings of laminar spirals as fast as he could, each layer of rotating air adding to the one before, the mass of wind magic growing with each iteration. By using his strength to create the flows slowly, he was doing with painful increments what another might do in moments. However, he was also not burning through his reserves of mana, was conserving his might for the coming heavy lifting. Well, more like the opposite of lifting.
His working was sort of impressive, from a visual perspective. Majestic even. Anyone looking up would have noticed the spiraling clouds, white wisps mixed with faint cyan as he formed a spinning mass of deceptively violent air that was positively girthy in its accumulated atmospheres. Wind speeds in his working would be tornadic but, unlike a normal weather pattern in which the faster air was at the center of the spiral, his flows were in lockstep, forcing the outermost streams to move faster than the smaller rings within.
It was important to what he had in mind, and the difficulty of forcing his core to tie the layers together would be worth the effort. The improvisation he'd come up with, creating layers of laminar flow which would keep the windstreams moving without interfering with one another, like an onion whose rings spun independently of one another, made the need for [Skyshield] barriers obsolete. Ulric wasn't going to use the thin air between his piston and the ground as the combustion gas, the piston itself, crushed by its own mass against the ground would burn. If he could drop the mass hard enough, which was why his working was so high above the ground: he needed to give it plenty of space for gravity to assist the fall.
Boots scraped against the stones as Ulric skidded to a halt. He was sweating, his legs burned, and his mind knew none of it because his singular obsession was the rotating mass of Caelum held high above, the white and cyan tie dye of ordered fury whirling some half kilometer above. It was nearly the size of a soccer stadium and the strain of holding it in place was pushing his limits hard.
Even using the properties of air currents to his advantage, Caelum wanted to be free, wanted to burst from the confines of his weave and follow the Vatyn's currents, those skyroads established by the great patterns of temperature and pressure and the migration of the planet's very atmosphere. Ulric's little pocket of energy was nothing before those masses and it was all he could do to prevent them from tearing the piston apart. But he was done, he'd come far enough, some fifteen kilometers, and the time was now. Before his hold slipped.
Imagine turning a stiff door knob that had been greased. One can do it, friction will exist. But only if you squeeze godawfully hard. That is the equivalent of the effort of his core to coerce his spell to form at this magnitude.
Panting from the magical and physical toil, he watched the hunting monsters roll over the terrain like a gnarled tide. They had his scent. He didn't understand why they behaved as they did, why they came on with such single-minded hunger, the calories from his measly corpse would not feed so many creatures, did not warrant the energy expended to claim it. And yet they had come on without hesitation. Was it vengeance for the monsters he'd killed? Probably not. Taipan had painted this creature as one whose sole motivation was to feed, on sunlight, on unwary prey, it didn't matter. It fed, and it grew and that was what it would continue to do until it died. Like Kudzu from a horrorscape.
Well, they were in for a rude awakening.
Ulric stood with his arms overhead, hands clawed like he was hanging from the edge of an abyss, into which he would vanish. Which he would, if his will failed.
One last surge of the arcane, one final culmination of will, and Ulric drove his hands down, hurling with back and shoulders as if he held a sledge, and, with them, pulled threads of wind magic with all his might, turning those laminar flows of circular air currents into a downward spiral. Like a stampede of bison, dragging the leader to the side caused the entire herd to turn and, when they did, nothing stood before the weight of their charge. The vortex plummeted, slowly, at first, and faster. And then faster still.
The timing was a little off, the nursery wasn't going to be directly under his working but he didn't have the concentration to spare on that, what was done now was utterly done. Besides, the last little iota of his will was now spent on a humble [Cinderpearl], bringing that tiny little jewel of flame to life, its incandescence brilliant even under the light of Midsunsrise.
With a flick of his hand, Ulric sent the gem hissing through the air and dove for cover behind a tiny divot of earth, bordered by a few knee high stones, which were the reason he'd stopped in the first place.
Peeking over the barrier, Ulric watched a calamity unfold.
His mass of air hurtled into the earth like a giant's fist, smashing dust up into the air, flattening the horde, even as the rotating winds pulled their vines and petals into its vicious flow, like a concert hall raising their hands to the song. That tiny jewel of Incendere sitting under the center of the air piston was crushed, releasing the pent up heat inside and the faster moving winds at the outer edges of the working dragged the thermal bloom outwards, flames rolling away from the center along the grounds instead of up, even as the Caelum piston crushed itself, its density skyrocketing.
All according to-
The world turned to flame and the ground bucked. Ulric's barrier came apart and was thrown, and he behind it, twenty meters across the ground, in a kaleidoscope of grass, sky, clouds, earth, sky, grass again, spinning like he'd been tossed into a tumble drier. And a drier it was, air like a blast furnace around him would have injured him had it not passed so rapidly over his form, rising as it went, carrying its wicked furnace with it skyward. He was probably yelling but he couldn't hear past the roar of the explosion.
*PING!*
[Cloud Hammer]*****OVERRIDE*****[Vortex Flare]
*PING!*
Face down in the dirt and gasping for breath, the former engineer knew for certain that he would never speak of this to Taipan. She'd never let him live it down. Lifting his head to stare at ground zero, he groaned a loud "Not even close."
Scorched earth terminated about five meters shy of where his little blast shield had been, fat lot of good that had done him. It would appear that ignition had sort of saved his life a little, the rapidly heating central mass, the densest point of his working, had burned fiercely and created a negative pressure, drawing the incandescent heat upwards, forming a nice little roiling fireball upwards as it did. Without that, the reverse vortex he'd made would have rolled over him in its full glory, baking him.
The scary part was that he hadn’t exhausted himself in the doing. He’d taken so long to put the spell together that the crystalline construct inside him was able to harvest Varda’s Field and sustain his reserves. As insane as it seemed, Ulric could have done worse. And died for it.
He had to stop doing it this way. What was this, like, the third or fourth time he'd nearly blasted himself to smithereens? Ulric now knew what a rocket oxidization chemist felt like. Your entire life is spent making things that you knew would destroy you, the room in which you stood, and, likely, the entire building, if you made even a tiny miscalculation or mishandled so much as a drop of your life's work. But what the fuck were the safety protocols for making spells to wipe out hordes of monsters? Don't?
The answer to that question was "Nope." Because there, in that little charred field of blackened grass and falling ash, was exactly zero sign that the nursery of [Gilded Queen's Rose] had ever existed. Very likely, what was left of them was up in that rising pillar of fire, vacuumed up in the reverse shockwave.
"Can't argue with results like that Old Man." Ulric spoke aloud, gravely rough with fading adrenaline and the euphoria of the skydiver whose parachute successfully opened.
He couldn't use this on people, Ulric realized, not at that level. [Vortex Flare] was a war crime waiting to happen. Nothing he'd ever managed to do before could enact damage on this scale, not even his full bore [Core Capacitor]'d [Stormfire] had this kind of potential. Such was the power of working with what is, in harnessing the power of the elements of this world instead of generating the force from one's own core.
It took a little time, and a lot of finesse, but the energies present in a humble low-pressure front was colossal. Ye gods, a Caelum Archmage was an entity of vast power, Ulric realized. To wield the atmosphere as a weapon, with all of its weight, mass, and latent force, they'd likely be able to snuff out Ulric's little working like a candle. How exactly the fuck had Idra managed to kill that Infrig Archmage? Ulric asked himself, realizing anew the incredible feat that must have been.
Stiff from being rag-dolled across the plateau and whispering praises yet again to Uldin for the majesty that was his armor, Ulric rose and collected his sword, whose sheath strap had broken in the tumble and which he re-tied as he walked.
There had been two distinct pings in the middle of all that nonsense. The first one he had been prepared for, there was always a little notice of a new spell. The second one though, he hadn't been expecting. Which meant it was time to bring up that spooky little widget that defied reality to access his own link to Varda's manaweb, his very own page of the Akashic Record of the world.
[Status]
What caught Ulric's eye immediately was the title. Weaver of the Heavens. Varda had acknowledged his growth in creating workings of the elements using his awakened core, no longer was he merely counted amongst the mages who had survived their core's awakening to an elemental tuning but he was also firmly in the ranks of those who went beyond. Ulric's diligence and training had been recognized.
He didn't feel different, that wasn't normally how the Akashic thing worked, except for that one time with the [Lord of the Ancient Glade] but that was a story all on its own. He'd been sort of adopted as guardian by a fae land of incredible magical potency and steeped in the legacy of the Ancient people of Varda, a proto civilization that had its origins in magitech and whose descendants had become all the races of the present world of which he knew. Normally, the titles were recognitions of specific achievements of renown. For anybody who [Scanned] him now, they'd see that Ulric was considered a master of his core and its powers.
Nifty. And creepy, but he was long since resigned to the Akashic shenanigans being bizarre.
The rest of the status was, mostly, the same. Traits unchanged?
Check.
Classes? Oh, damn, there must have been a notification in all that mess earlier. His Elementalist class had changed a bit. Multithreading. Interesting. Why did so much of spellwork remind him of programming?
Making his way to the North and East, circling to intercept the caravan of refugees, Ulric wondered what his dearest Taipan would have to say. He'd cleared a whole entire nursery of the rampaging flower demons by himself and had generated not one, but two new spells that could deal some extremely hefty punishment. Careful not to be too absorbed by the blue boxes of Akashic nonsense, Ulric inspected the spells next, knowing that there would be some new information there.
[Cloud Hammer] was no joke, the sledge hammer of air had bashed a rather imposing monster into the dirt, if not killing it, then at least causing it no little distress. If he worked at it a little, Ulric had a feeling he could get the shape of the working to be refined to a point, like the pick side of a war hammer, and that, falling like a ton of bricks from directly overhead, would leave whatever it hit at the bottom of a nice crater.
At his best guess, he figured his [Cloud Hammer], as he'd just used it, to be around five ton moving around five hundred kilometers an hour. The delay was the problem. It took a long time, twenty minutes for him to create the working, and there was a significant, say ten or twelve seconds, for it to reach the ground from its origin. Now, Ulric could do it faster in the future, given that the mental algorithm was in place, but it still took a lot more time than his normal spells.
Hmm…as he strolled, eyes scanning the surrounding grass for more trouble makers that Varda spawned like a dog shed fleas, Ulric figured he could cut the time to make a half ton hammer to about two minutes. A long time, but he only had to hit something once with it. Pure kinetic force was a different kind of power than his fancier lightnings and fire spells.
Of [Vortex Flare] he needed no consideration. Even if he scaled it down as he was planning to do with his [Cloud Hammer], it'd still be massively destructive over a wide area. He couldn't use it with anything that might be collateral damage around. Damned thing might as well be a firebomb of the variety used to kill cities during the turn of the century wars in the bad old days.
All that and he was just moving air around. What was the limit? Could he move gases selectively? Separate the air solution into distinct phases and remove, say, only the oxygen from an area? Surely there had to be a way. Maybe through ionization. Apply Ceraun to the air, to charge it, some gases would charge easily, some less so, so he could charge the reactive oxygen and extract it, like an ion filter. He'd know if he was successful if the resulting contained Caelum caged gas was flammable. He'd also know by the color it ionized in response to his Ceraun arc. Oxygen carried a distinct blue violet while nitrogen was a pronounced red. Other gases would each carry their own signatures but, at least on old Earth, these two elements were the most abundant fraction by far.
Alright, yeah, that was a pretty easy way to test his results. He'd need more mana to ionize the nitrogen component, it being the more stable molecule by far with its triple bonds. Many of the trace gases, such as carbon dioxide and the noble gases were also stable, at least compared to diatomic oxygen.
Okay there Ulric, you're onto something here, he told himself cheerfully.
Hey! Since he'd been playing around with moving heat into an area, what about out of it? The ground was a thermal sink, could he use Infrig to draw the latent heat from the air into the ground below, generating a cold field?
On impulse, Ulric refined unaspected mana and then, with difficulty, as his Ceraunic core still made generating Infrig touchy, he used the ice magic as a siphon, connecting the air thirty meters away in a space the size of a minivan to the ground beneath it. There was a distinct temperature difference between the hot air and the cold stone beneath the ground and he found it was rather easy to use Infrig to amplify the gradient exponentially.
A moment later there came a loud hiss and a fog cloud billowed away from the area effected by his spell. It wasn't even that hard to widen the mouth of his siphon and increase the radius of the spellform.
Huh, grunted the former engineer, neat.
Fingers of frost slithered relatively quickly into the surrounding turf, covering the sparse grasses in dense white crystals of condensate frozen to sparkling crystals even as he watched.
"Woah," Ulric commented.
He walked over slowly to the chilling field and put his hand close to the encroaching frost line. As soon as his fingers broke the plane of those icy feathers of grass he felt bitter cold, the kind that hurts as your exposed tissue is damaged by the frigid effects of frostbite.
Jerking his hand out of the area of effect, he noticed that his mana was being depleted at an alarming rate and realized that the outside air was feeding its heat into his working. He needed a closed system to do this properly and shoved a dome shaped [Skyshield] around the area reflexively, cutting it off from the outside atmosphere. Instantly, the ground fogged and crystals of ice precipitated from the air, a diamond dust glittering in the light of the Twins behind the Caelum barrier.
*PING*
"Well I'll be damned." Remarked Ulric, considering that he'd maybe not been using his talents to their utmost.
There were all kinds of nifty things you could do if you just isolated a volume of atmosphere and played with it.
He'd almost drained his mana reserves with the experiment, a dangerous thing to do in Varda's wilds but inspiration was difficult to come by and he was probably alright, given that the nursery would have eaten just about everything it detected for kilometers around. Anything with a sense of smell that had any survival instinct would have fled the horde of spawning Greater beasts. That fact made his and Taipan’s little plot here telling for its ludicrous risk, as the jibes of the Orlethrem had made them well aware.
For the next two hours, Ulric walked, keeping his eyes on the environment while his thoughts strayed to some of the dirtier tricks involving the things a man could do with thermal gradients and intense cold. He also lamented, briefly, that he could not give to his wife the gift of the matriarch beast's core, a thing suggested by her father so very long ago as a joke. It would have been amusing.
All things considered, this little hike with the flowers had proven most expedient. He’d gotten in his exercise for the day. He got to do some pretty bitching magic. Doing that bitching magic had given him some new ideas for even more bullshit reality hacks. His class abilities expanded and he got a fancy title. Hell! Even his level, whatever the fuck that thing was supposed to mean, had almost increased, courtesy of the score and some of ravening plant monsters.
What a day!
Ignoring the rub of his armor against the soiled robes that pressed against raw skin and scrapes, Ulric Einar took about twenty minutes to circle the narrow valley, like a small cleft in the otherwise gently rolling plateau they'd been crossing. An hour, no more, that's how long he needed to hold the attention of the [Gilded Queen's Rose] nursery. Carefully, not being incredibly careful about going quiet but not necessarily trying to make noise either, Ulric moved to the lip of the valley, watching as it dipped away at a relatively steep incline, about a kilometer and a half across and perhaps five long.
Alright Mr. [Lord of the Ancient Glade], time to earn your title.
Summoning his magics, Ulric reached into that reserviour of power that was his core, bringing the Ceraunic engine to life.
Carefully, Ulric wove Caelum laced with Ceraun, preparing the spell that was most likely to inflict maximum damage from this range without triggering a death spore cloud. He felt the little knots of hardened wind elongate at his command, thinning, sharpening, and forming curved scythes of almost metallic density. The faintly cyan blades of air were wrapped and bound by snapping arcs of electrical current, like chains securing them to the larger central blade that would guide his weapon. Ulric pushed the limit of his control, eight blades around their central leader, feeling the mental strain of keeping so many constructs moving in synch to his will. The pressure on his mind was immense and he almost groaned with relief when he loosed the spell.
[Galvanic Mistral]
Whirling Caelum and Ceraun howled across the slope of the valley, gaining speed as it did. A loud crack announced that the central blade broke the sound barrier as the spell ripped into the middle of the nursery, scattering shredded petals, roots and stalks into the air. Six of the Rose beasts died instantly, ripped to pieces, and they threw deeply indigo sap/blood to splash the earth like a modern art painting. Arcs of plasma holding the blades set flame to several of the creatures as the spell impacted.
Instant was the response, roots tore free of the loamy valley soil and the mother plant, which Ulric had been trying to target, but you keep a magical blender the size of a mac truck on track at the speed of sound, released a cloud of spores. The others, as Taipan had said they would, did not, but instead scattered and began to move back along the trail of his spell, winding backwards and forwards, searching. It was as predicted, the creatures didn't see, not directly. Instead, they smelled, homed in on vibrations through the ground and sound, and had some kind of thermal sense. Attacking from range was the way.
Ulric pulled his magic together again and gave the terrible mass of writhing thorns and snapping toothed petals another taste of the good stuff.
[Galvanic Mistral]
Another pocket of five [Gilded Queen's Rose] were rendered bite sized and another huge clod of churned up grass and soil scattered into the air to join the flying chunks of Greater beast and their almost fluorescent blood. This time, the search pattern became far tighter and they formed a wedge, its point directed straight at him, answering the question in his mind.
Twice. That's how many times they needed to pinpoint an attack vector.
From the valley floor there rose a low moaning sound, like a french horn but several octaves lower, he could feel it in his bones more than his ears.
Oh, Watcher, that was the roses screaming a near silent war cry as they berserked.
As one, the nursery went mobile and came up the valley's steep rise as if it were level ground, about as fast as a dog ran in the Before. A cloud came into being, birthed by a violent lashing of thorned vines, and Ulric stared uncomprehending for a few seconds until he realized that what he was seeing was a cloud of dartlike thorns flung at great speed in his general direction that was so thick it obscured the Twins as the storm of acid laden thorns peaked in their flight.
"Job's done!" Ulric announced, convinced that he now had the monstrous attention of his new, though, hopefully temporary, traveling companions.
Boots scraped against the rocks below as he launched himself into a hard sprint, long legs putting him at a ground eating pace to the South of the Plateau. He trusted the plan and focused on running for a few minutes. A quick look over his shoulder saw the last of the horde cresting the dell and he slightly increased his stride. It also revealed the steaming soil as vegetative matter, stone, and whatever else was eaten into by the vicious acidic fluid of the half meter long thorns now rising from the plateau like a heavy black grass.
Ulric was a man who liked to think on the move, the exertion of muscle helped get his brain to concentrate on a problem. Normally, he didn't have toothy company that made failures to come to conclusion quite so mortal a proposition but, here he was. Inspired by the distant hiss of chemical abomination on the landscape and the dull rustling whistle of roots bearing herbiferous death, Ulric Einar ran like hell for a good five minutes before slowing into a steady jog.
Heart beat steadily within his chest and he took deep, even breaths as he ran, his armor rustling little for the perfection of its fit. He reckoned he could keep this twenty-five kilometer an hour pace going for about a half an hour. That should be aplenty to keep any sign of the Orlethrem's passage from discovery. Meanwhile, Ulric was going to work out the theory for how to create an inverse to the spell he'd accidentally created, [Absolute Zero].
In his attempts, early on and very much in foolhardy innocence, he'd created a perfect vacuum which had also reduced the temperature of the air to kinetic zero, almost killing him with the supercooled air. It was a spell that he still didn't use willy-nilly. Now though, he was more or less certain that he could do the inverse. Instead of drawing air away, Ulric was going to drag it in and pressurize it. Rapidly.
There was a fire-starting tool for hikers called a fire piston. The little device was just a cylinder with a pocket for tinder in the bottom of it. You strike the piston, hard, and the compression lifts the temperature of the usual atmospheric gases inside the little metal tube to the flash point of dry grasses or cotton or whatever.
Now, he'd never be able to do that with just Caelum, the air magic simply didn't work like that. Mana expenditure rose roughly linearly to the volume of air you tried to move. To fire piston a large volume of air would take more mana than even his impressive core could muster. No sir, he was going to cheat a little. Unlike a diesel engine, which uses sheer pressure to bring fuel to combustion, he was going to use the admittedly less efficient but far less demanding hot bulb method of ignition.
The main difference was you needed a red-hot contact surface to trigger the ignition in a hot bulb. He would use a [Cinder Pearl] to accomplish that. The pressure he was going to get from taking an air mass from way up and driving it down a [Skyshield] cylinder beneath another [Skyshield] acting as the piston. The mass of air would serve as both piston and combustion gas.
Ulric was coming to terms with the fact that magic was cheating. It was impossibility. The classes were ridiculous nonsense that operated according to rules he had not yet figured out. However, the king of all bullshit was the feats of the pure mage, the possibilities of a core turning thought into reality.
There was some aspect of his old world's galactic wizards of the classic cinema, chief was that you had to believe what you were doing was real. If you didn't put your back into it, your doubts would cripple the working. No, magic demanded conviction. Ulric's revelations while in the grips of the Prime Elemental of Lightning, Ceraun itself, had opened his mind to the possibilities of true magic. One of those involved dispelling the illusion of distance. There was no difference in action on mana before him or kilometers away, only the image of what he was intending, the knowledge of the forces he was bringing to bear, and the precision of his weave.
A lifetime and change of learning provided the knowledge. The teachings of the Elves’ master sorcerers the precision, and the heartfelt desire to watch his enemies perish in flame the image. Ulric was not a nice person.
Ribbons of air magic reached into the skies as he ran, his core exerting its strength, twisting what could be into what was. Caelum, amongst all the manaforms he knew, was the most akin to the playing of music. It was nebulous, whimsical, and required harmony to bring Varda's atmosphere to bear. As his will extended upwards, threads of power forming a net to catch and direct the winds high above, he mused that he'd never learned to play an instrument properly.
Did playing the songs of mana count?
For half an hour, Ulric held streamers of Caelum herding the winds high above to form his piston, rounding up the masses of cool air so prevalent, clouds tearing as they were pulled into the working. The trick to this was patience. And focus. He was no Caelum cored Adept, nor did he have the subtle skills of a master Weaver. What Ulric had was the Elementalist class to help him handle fine strands of elemental force and a working knowledge of fluid dynamics. He was weaving rings of laminar spirals as fast as he could, each layer of rotating air adding to the one before, the mass of wind magic growing with each iteration. By using his strength to create the flows slowly, he was doing with painful increments what another might do in moments. However, he was also not burning through his reserves of mana, was conserving his might for the coming heavy lifting. Well, more like the opposite of lifting.
His working was sort of impressive, from a visual perspective. Majestic even. Anyone looking up would have noticed the spiraling clouds, white wisps mixed with faint cyan as he formed a spinning mass of deceptively violent air that was positively girthy in its accumulated atmospheres. Wind speeds in his working would be tornadic but, unlike a normal weather pattern in which the faster air was at the center of the spiral, his flows were in lockstep, forcing the outermost streams to move faster than the smaller rings within.
It was important to what he had in mind, and the difficulty of forcing his core to tie the layers together would be worth the effort. The improvisation he'd come up with, creating layers of laminar flow which would keep the windstreams moving without interfering with one another, like an onion whose rings spun independently of one another, made the need for [Skyshield] barriers obsolete. Ulric wasn't going to use the thin air between his piston and the ground as the combustion gas, the piston itself, crushed by its own mass against the ground would burn. If he could drop the mass hard enough, which was why his working was so high above the ground: he needed to give it plenty of space for gravity to assist the fall.
Boots scraped against the stones as Ulric skidded to a halt. He was sweating, his legs burned, and his mind knew none of it because his singular obsession was the rotating mass of Caelum held high above, the white and cyan tie dye of ordered fury whirling some half kilometer above. It was nearly the size of a soccer stadium and the strain of holding it in place was pushing his limits hard.
Even using the properties of air currents to his advantage, Caelum wanted to be free, wanted to burst from the confines of his weave and follow the Vatyn's currents, those skyroads established by the great patterns of temperature and pressure and the migration of the planet's very atmosphere. Ulric's little pocket of energy was nothing before those masses and it was all he could do to prevent them from tearing the piston apart. But he was done, he'd come far enough, some fifteen kilometers, and the time was now. Before his hold slipped.
Imagine turning a stiff door knob that had been greased. One can do it, friction will exist. But only if you squeeze godawfully hard. That is the equivalent of the effort of his core to coerce his spell to form at this magnitude.
Panting from the magical and physical toil, he watched the hunting monsters roll over the terrain like a gnarled tide. They had his scent. He didn't understand why they behaved as they did, why they came on with such single-minded hunger, the calories from his measly corpse would not feed so many creatures, did not warrant the energy expended to claim it. And yet they had come on without hesitation. Was it vengeance for the monsters he'd killed? Probably not. Taipan had painted this creature as one whose sole motivation was to feed, on sunlight, on unwary prey, it didn't matter. It fed, and it grew and that was what it would continue to do until it died. Like Kudzu from a horrorscape.
Well, they were in for a rude awakening.
Ulric stood with his arms overhead, hands clawed like he was hanging from the edge of an abyss, into which he would vanish. Which he would, if his will failed.
One last surge of the arcane, one final culmination of will, and Ulric drove his hands down, hurling with back and shoulders as if he held a sledge, and, with them, pulled threads of wind magic with all his might, turning those laminar flows of circular air currents into a downward spiral. Like a stampede of bison, dragging the leader to the side caused the entire herd to turn and, when they did, nothing stood before the weight of their charge. The vortex plummeted, slowly, at first, and faster. And then faster still.
The timing was a little off, the nursery wasn't going to be directly under his working but he didn't have the concentration to spare on that, what was done now was utterly done. Besides, the last little iota of his will was now spent on a humble [Cinderpearl], bringing that tiny little jewel of flame to life, its incandescence brilliant even under the light of Midsunsrise.
With a flick of his hand, Ulric sent the gem hissing through the air and dove for cover behind a tiny divot of earth, bordered by a few knee high stones, which were the reason he'd stopped in the first place.
Peeking over the barrier, Ulric watched a calamity unfold.
His mass of air hurtled into the earth like a giant's fist, smashing dust up into the air, flattening the horde, even as the rotating winds pulled their vines and petals into its vicious flow, like a concert hall raising their hands to the song. That tiny jewel of Incendere sitting under the center of the air piston was crushed, releasing the pent up heat inside and the faster moving winds at the outer edges of the working dragged the thermal bloom outwards, flames rolling away from the center along the grounds instead of up, even as the Caelum piston crushed itself, its density skyrocketing.
All according to-
The world turned to flame and the ground bucked. Ulric's barrier came apart and was thrown, and he behind it, twenty meters across the ground, in a kaleidoscope of grass, sky, clouds, earth, sky, grass again, spinning like he'd been tossed into a tumble drier. And a drier it was, air like a blast furnace around him would have injured him had it not passed so rapidly over his form, rising as it went, carrying its wicked furnace with it skyward. He was probably yelling but he couldn't hear past the roar of the explosion.
*PING!*
[Cloud Hammer]*****OVERRIDE*****[Vortex Flare]
*PING!*
Face down in the dirt and gasping for breath, the former engineer knew for certain that he would never speak of this to Taipan. She'd never let him live it down. Lifting his head to stare at ground zero, he groaned a loud "Not even close."
Scorched earth terminated about five meters shy of where his little blast shield had been, fat lot of good that had done him. It would appear that ignition had sort of saved his life a little, the rapidly heating central mass, the densest point of his working, had burned fiercely and created a negative pressure, drawing the incandescent heat upwards, forming a nice little roiling fireball upwards as it did. Without that, the reverse vortex he'd made would have rolled over him in its full glory, baking him.
The scary part was that he hadn’t exhausted himself in the doing. He’d taken so long to put the spell together that the crystalline construct inside him was able to harvest Varda’s Field and sustain his reserves. As insane as it seemed, Ulric could have done worse. And died for it.
He had to stop doing it this way. What was this, like, the third or fourth time he'd nearly blasted himself to smithereens? Ulric now knew what a rocket oxidization chemist felt like. Your entire life is spent making things that you knew would destroy you, the room in which you stood, and, likely, the entire building, if you made even a tiny miscalculation or mishandled so much as a drop of your life's work. But what the fuck were the safety protocols for making spells to wipe out hordes of monsters? Don't?
The answer to that question was "Nope." Because there, in that little charred field of blackened grass and falling ash, was exactly zero sign that the nursery of [Gilded Queen's Rose] had ever existed. Very likely, what was left of them was up in that rising pillar of fire, vacuumed up in the reverse shockwave.
"Can't argue with results like that Old Man." Ulric spoke aloud, gravely rough with fading adrenaline and the euphoria of the skydiver whose parachute successfully opened.
He couldn't use this on people, Ulric realized, not at that level. [Vortex Flare] was a war crime waiting to happen. Nothing he'd ever managed to do before could enact damage on this scale, not even his full bore [Core Capacitor]'d [Stormfire] had this kind of potential. Such was the power of working with what is, in harnessing the power of the elements of this world instead of generating the force from one's own core.
It took a little time, and a lot of finesse, but the energies present in a humble low-pressure front was colossal. Ye gods, a Caelum Archmage was an entity of vast power, Ulric realized. To wield the atmosphere as a weapon, with all of its weight, mass, and latent force, they'd likely be able to snuff out Ulric's little working like a candle. How exactly the fuck had Idra managed to kill that Infrig Archmage? Ulric asked himself, realizing anew the incredible feat that must have been.
Stiff from being rag-dolled across the plateau and whispering praises yet again to Uldin for the majesty that was his armor, Ulric rose and collected his sword, whose sheath strap had broken in the tumble and which he re-tied as he walked.
There had been two distinct pings in the middle of all that nonsense. The first one he had been prepared for, there was always a little notice of a new spell. The second one though, he hadn't been expecting. Which meant it was time to bring up that spooky little widget that defied reality to access his own link to Varda's manaweb, his very own page of the Akashic Record of the world.
[Status]
What caught Ulric's eye immediately was the title. Weaver of the Heavens. Varda had acknowledged his growth in creating workings of the elements using his awakened core, no longer was he merely counted amongst the mages who had survived their core's awakening to an elemental tuning but he was also firmly in the ranks of those who went beyond. Ulric's diligence and training had been recognized.
He didn't feel different, that wasn't normally how the Akashic thing worked, except for that one time with the [Lord of the Ancient Glade] but that was a story all on its own. He'd been sort of adopted as guardian by a fae land of incredible magical potency and steeped in the legacy of the Ancient people of Varda, a proto civilization that had its origins in magitech and whose descendants had become all the races of the present world of which he knew. Normally, the titles were recognitions of specific achievements of renown. For anybody who [Scanned] him now, they'd see that Ulric was considered a master of his core and its powers.
Nifty. And creepy, but he was long since resigned to the Akashic shenanigans being bizarre.
The rest of the status was, mostly, the same. Traits unchanged?
Check.
Classes? Oh, damn, there must have been a notification in all that mess earlier. His Elementalist class had changed a bit. Multithreading. Interesting. Why did so much of spellwork remind him of programming?
Making his way to the North and East, circling to intercept the caravan of refugees, Ulric wondered what his dearest Taipan would have to say. He'd cleared a whole entire nursery of the rampaging flower demons by himself and had generated not one, but two new spells that could deal some extremely hefty punishment. Careful not to be too absorbed by the blue boxes of Akashic nonsense, Ulric inspected the spells next, knowing that there would be some new information there.
[Cloud Hammer] was no joke, the sledge hammer of air had bashed a rather imposing monster into the dirt, if not killing it, then at least causing it no little distress. If he worked at it a little, Ulric had a feeling he could get the shape of the working to be refined to a point, like the pick side of a war hammer, and that, falling like a ton of bricks from directly overhead, would leave whatever it hit at the bottom of a nice crater.
At his best guess, he figured his [Cloud Hammer], as he'd just used it, to be around five ton moving around five hundred kilometers an hour. The delay was the problem. It took a long time, twenty minutes for him to create the working, and there was a significant, say ten or twelve seconds, for it to reach the ground from its origin. Now, Ulric could do it faster in the future, given that the mental algorithm was in place, but it still took a lot more time than his normal spells.
Hmm…as he strolled, eyes scanning the surrounding grass for more trouble makers that Varda spawned like a dog shed fleas, Ulric figured he could cut the time to make a half ton hammer to about two minutes. A long time, but he only had to hit something once with it. Pure kinetic force was a different kind of power than his fancier lightnings and fire spells.
Of [Vortex Flare] he needed no consideration. Even if he scaled it down as he was planning to do with his [Cloud Hammer], it'd still be massively destructive over a wide area. He couldn't use it with anything that might be collateral damage around. Damned thing might as well be a firebomb of the variety used to kill cities during the turn of the century wars in the bad old days.
All that and he was just moving air around. What was the limit? Could he move gases selectively? Separate the air solution into distinct phases and remove, say, only the oxygen from an area? Surely there had to be a way. Maybe through ionization. Apply Ceraun to the air, to charge it, some gases would charge easily, some less so, so he could charge the reactive oxygen and extract it, like an ion filter. He'd know if he was successful if the resulting contained Caelum caged gas was flammable. He'd also know by the color it ionized in response to his Ceraun arc. Oxygen carried a distinct blue violet while nitrogen was a pronounced red. Other gases would each carry their own signatures but, at least on old Earth, these two elements were the most abundant fraction by far.
Alright, yeah, that was a pretty easy way to test his results. He'd need more mana to ionize the nitrogen component, it being the more stable molecule by far with its triple bonds. Many of the trace gases, such as carbon dioxide and the noble gases were also stable, at least compared to diatomic oxygen.
Okay there Ulric, you're onto something here, he told himself cheerfully.
Hey! Since he'd been playing around with moving heat into an area, what about out of it? The ground was a thermal sink, could he use Infrig to draw the latent heat from the air into the ground below, generating a cold field?
On impulse, Ulric refined unaspected mana and then, with difficulty, as his Ceraunic core still made generating Infrig touchy, he used the ice magic as a siphon, connecting the air thirty meters away in a space the size of a minivan to the ground beneath it. There was a distinct temperature difference between the hot air and the cold stone beneath the ground and he found it was rather easy to use Infrig to amplify the gradient exponentially.
A moment later there came a loud hiss and a fog cloud billowed away from the area effected by his spell. It wasn't even that hard to widen the mouth of his siphon and increase the radius of the spellform.
Huh, grunted the former engineer, neat.
Fingers of frost slithered relatively quickly into the surrounding turf, covering the sparse grasses in dense white crystals of condensate frozen to sparkling crystals even as he watched.
"Woah," Ulric commented.
He walked over slowly to the chilling field and put his hand close to the encroaching frost line. As soon as his fingers broke the plane of those icy feathers of grass he felt bitter cold, the kind that hurts as your exposed tissue is damaged by the frigid effects of frostbite.
Jerking his hand out of the area of effect, he noticed that his mana was being depleted at an alarming rate and realized that the outside air was feeding its heat into his working. He needed a closed system to do this properly and shoved a dome shaped [Skyshield] around the area reflexively, cutting it off from the outside atmosphere. Instantly, the ground fogged and crystals of ice precipitated from the air, a diamond dust glittering in the light of the Twins behind the Caelum barrier.
*PING*
"Well I'll be damned." Remarked Ulric, considering that he'd maybe not been using his talents to their utmost.
There were all kinds of nifty things you could do if you just isolated a volume of atmosphere and played with it.
He'd almost drained his mana reserves with the experiment, a dangerous thing to do in Varda's wilds but inspiration was difficult to come by and he was probably alright, given that the nursery would have eaten just about everything it detected for kilometers around. Anything with a sense of smell that had any survival instinct would have fled the horde of spawning Greater beasts. That fact made his and Taipan’s little plot here telling for its ludicrous risk, as the jibes of the Orlethrem had made them well aware.
For the next two hours, Ulric walked, keeping his eyes on the environment while his thoughts strayed to some of the dirtier tricks involving the things a man could do with thermal gradients and intense cold. He also lamented, briefly, that he could not give to his wife the gift of the matriarch beast's core, a thing suggested by her father so very long ago as a joke. It would have been amusing.
All things considered, this little hike with the flowers had proven most expedient. He’d gotten in his exercise for the day. He got to do some pretty bitching magic. Doing that bitching magic had given him some new ideas for even more bullshit reality hacks. His class abilities expanded and he got a fancy title. Hell! Even his level, whatever the fuck that thing was supposed to mean, had almost increased, courtesy of the score and some of ravening plant monsters.
What a day!
