So long dead asshole was ruining my day.
In fact, if I had to put a word on the emotions I was feeling - well, this would be the ti that youd pull out the pretentious words kept high up in the drawers with the fancy silverware. Words like irate, wrathful and my favorite: tempestuous.
That was a good word for this.
The object and focus of my malcontent was this single piece of scrap tal practically leering at . Sowhere buried deep inside this ingot of tal forged in the bowels of hell itself was a fractal that if I so much as sneezed on would stop working.
Also Id be down a small fortune, but thats just par for the course.
Further experintation over the last few days slowly confird my suspicions about how the warlocks had hidden their fractal. I could certainly be wrong about it, but the chances of that were more slim. The real issue is the next step forward.
I had no tools to derive an equation from an image, so if I happened to break even a small part of the pattern, Id be left stranded topside with no ride ho. Thered be no way to figure out what the missing piece was and Id need to start over from scratch on a different blade.
I already had my work cut out for here, but wait - it gets worse. See, the warlocks seed to have figured that soone, at so point in ti, would know about fractals and use that extra bit of info combined with real science analysis to crack their little secret.
Ergo, soone just like .
So, clearly disturbed by the thought of anyone else having a slice of their cake, theyd made it their personal mission to put a stop to that. And theyd gone with all the stops possible.
First of all - Journey couldnt eat the tal. Sothing about the forging process it went through made it more like mite-made material, which needed to be re-processed in so way first before it could be consud. My one-hit wonder tool that Id lovingly abused so far to cheat through every bit I could squeeze out? Worthless here.
I suppose I cant fault the warlocks on this one. Everyone knows that armors eat material to repair itself. They also knew materials existed that armors couldnt eat. Obvious in hindsight that theyd go out of their way to forge the fractal into sothing armors couldnt touch. Id bet that was the very starting point for picking out how to hide the fractal.
I had no idea how they did that, maybe pewter itself was a material relic armor couldnt eat. They couldnt eat the ceramic white plating machines had, I knew that for a fact. So for all I knew there was a whole shopping list of odd materials armors didnt like to munch on. Bad for their diet and all that, poor things.
Okay - thats not too bad. Id simply need to take my ti and slowly file down the tal bit by flaky bit until I spotted sothing different in the tal composition. And on reviewing the video footage of the dispeate slices, I found theyd thought of that one too.
Whats better than burying a fractal all in the sa tal? Why, burying a dozen randomly engraved patterns along with the fractal. And thats exactly what they did.
The whole block is actually filled with random engravings, which causes heat deformities to appear at every slice, in every part. No way to know which bit is part of the fractal and which isnt.
With the blade being made of all the exact sa pewter composition, there werent going to be any clever solutions like heating it to a specific temperature, or using acid to eat away at so parts of the tal.
Now, I pride myself on finding the optimal solutions to challenges that co my way. By optimal, I an the ones that involve the least amount of work and effort. This blade here is the anti-Keith. Every trick I could think of, theyve thought of it too and planned for it.
The only viable solution I could think of was the single most effort and ti intensive one left - manually filing away at the pewter one tiny layer at a ti. Checking in between each scrape to see if Id hit my target or not. Fractals glowed bright Occult blue when they were active, thats the one of two advantages I still had.
I did ntion that there were two advantages I had. Besides fractals glowing when powered, there was sothing else the ticulous warlocks didnt seem to have any counter for: The soul fractal.
In my sanctum I ditated on my opponent. With the soul-sight I could detect faint traces of sothing coming from the center of that hilt. If I focused enough, I think Id be able to peer through the pewter and get a better sense of distance. With that kind of info, I could easily grind away the layers right up to where the fractal would be and then take it more delicately, saving days of work and reducing the whole ordeal to sothing that'll only take a few hours.
Heres the conundrum: The warlocks so far have proven to have plotted a counter to every possible tool I could use to pry that secret out of the pewter. Except soul-sight. That seed really odd and out of character for them.
There were three possibilities for this. The first is that the Warlocks actually didnt know about the soul fractal and have only been using the common fractals up to now. Maybe when they rediscovered the Occult this key fractal had been cut out or otherwise too hidden away. So naturally, they couldnt co up with a counter to sothing they couldn't have know existed.
The second option is the complete opposite - they did know about the soul fractal and they did setup a counter to soone sniffing around with soul-sight, and the one whos ignorant right now is . I might be walking into a trap of so kind. This second option is why I havent really dove into the soul-sight and started using abusing it. Sothing could be lurking inside there that I didnt know about.
The third option is that they knew about the soul-sight and decided it wasnt worth the effort to protect against. As in, if soone had all the tools to both discover their fractal and also the soul-sight to excavate it out, there wasnt an option to stop that that wouldn't weaken the other thods. Rather, they could be using this to recruit new mbers into their guild. Test by trail of so kind. And to be fair, whoever discovered their secret wasn't likely to go around telling others what could potentially be a quick and easy path to a luxurious retirent. Why make more competition?
Option one and option three ant I would live if I used soul sight to pinpoint where the fractal was inside. Option two ant that I could outright die to sothing I had no idea was there. One in three chances of sothing going terribly wrong.
Well. There was a fourth option: I give up trying to get this done fast.
Instead I very slowly grind away the pewter one scratch at a ti right from the start, turn the blade on and off after each scratch, and keep going until I uncovered sothing.
It really burned on the inside, but ultimately I had to pick option number four. One in three chances to possibly die was not odds I wanted to gamble on. As for why Im talking today of all days, thats because I already had picked option four - almost an entire week ago.
Since then, my life has been steady and uneventful. Early mornings with Cathida and Kidra. Once Id shown my sister the basics of the technique Id co up with, and had Winterscar inscribe the soul fractal on the inside of her helt, Kidra had been good to go. A few hours of practice and getting the new movent down, and she was now a nace to all the houses with dreams of competing for the position of First Blade.
I didnt know if she was actually going for the position, Atius hadnt yet announced he was looking for a replacent.
Coincidentally, since she was the undisputed master of it, she's the one that ca up with a fitting na first. Behold, the Winterblossom technique.
Kidra made a pretty good case for the na. The majority of our soul remained inside the soul fractal that had been etched inside the helt, forming the blossom, while small bits of the soul would be woven back inside the body at just the right spots, forming a root-like shape. Hence why Kidra suggested that as the word for it. It by no ans had anything to do with her fondness for flowers or anything. The 'winter' part should be evident, what good is a secret technique if we weren't going to stamp our na on it? That's just not done.
It kind of stuck and was better than what I had been thinking of naming it, if Im honest, though the words will never leave my lips.
After morning training, Id usually have a few hours of doing minor chores for House Winterscar. Once my responsibilities were done, Id officially be off duty and allowed to do anything I wanted. Unofficially, what I really did was slink back into my sanctum and continue to grind away at the small pebble of tal from hell that was left.
The part that cost the most ti was dealing with their angle shenanigans. The fractal could have had sharp points, lines almost. One of those lines had been setup to purposefully point straight up where the most obvious point of grinding would co from. The result is that the mont soone ground at the line, a small section of it would be cut - which ant the line was no longer at the exact length to fit the pattern and so the whole thing would lose cohesion before even the grinding tool was lifted off.
So, Id been grinding away at an angle instead of straight down, the choice of which drastically increased my difficulty. It was impossible to grind sideways on a lit blade - the occult edge would out-grind the grinder. I had to keep turning the thing on and off and checking my work each ti to see if there was any glowing signs from the pewter.
A few days ago, Id grinded away through the hilt until I hit the first bits of Occult light and my hunch turned out right. The big thing that I was holding my breath on was if I'd picked the right angle to co at it from. There was a case where I'd be grinding in the single worst possible direction. For that, I only had hunches and guesswork to rely on. A lot of 'If I were a slimy warlock, where would I angle the fractal to maximize suffering while minimizing my own?'
Turns out, I'd been right. I wasn't sure if I should feel proud that I could put myself in shoes of these sneaky bastards, but if I got a working blade out of it, I wasn't going to complain too much.
Since Id co from a good enough angle, I hadnt grinded out any of the X or Y axis, only a tiny bit of the z-axis which isnt critical in a two-dinsional rune. That had been a really happy day for , as it let re-orient the grinder to be exactly even with the direction of the pattern and made it easy to grind away the remaining chunk until I got close to the excavation.
From here it had been back to ticulous grinding. Bit by bit, the fractal beca exposed as I delicately removed the excess pewter. The closer I got to success the slower I beca, being far more cautious. I could have reached the end of this days ago, instead Id taken the safe route at all possible tis.
See, if the fractal winks out of life before I had fully uncovered it, there was absolutely no way to tell what parts of the pewter were the remainder of that fractal and what parts were the false trails leftover. So all my work would get instantly iced, and I'd probably rip a lot of expensive things in blind fury.
Today I was filing away the last glowing trail of a line that still showed signs of being hidden away.
Scrap by scrape, it was taking hours just to remove what would be a small cloud of dust, taking pictures in between each, just on the case everything shut down on anyhow.
Eventually, there wasnt any part of the fractal that seed covered up by pewter. I unscrewed the ingot from its mooring, lifted it up and examined it, searching through the pattern for any missing trace while it was turned on. The blade on the hilt had beco a thin warped thing, shrinking down with each layer I scrubbed away.
This mont should have been my crowning mont of glory... and all I wanted to do was verify that it worked and then go to sleep. Honestly, I was so out of it after hours on hours of tedious grinding.
I think Im done. I breathed out, to nobody.
Only took you forever. Having a hard ti sitting up yet? Bones aching? Thats the first thing to go. Next you'll sprout a cane and then a need to yell at people. Trust , I know all about it. Cathida grumbled out.
She had liked the process as much as I had, by which I an we both hadnt at all. It was utter suffering that the warlocks had pulled through, but in the end I was the one holding their precious little fractal, all revealed and excavated.
I didn't even have the heart in to quip back, instead going all business. Journey, take a snapshot of this image and lets give it a whirl.
There was a tiny tal rectangle Id already setup at my side, ready for this mont. Reaching down, I brought that up and Journeys spirit floated by, swirling around the surface before retreating.
I brought the tal piece up, to the light. If this doesnt work
Well. If it didnt work, Id just dip my head back and try to figure out what else was missing. Possible that there was a second fractal that needed to be dug up. Or worse - what if there were three? And the third one was sandwiched between the two? Maybe thats why the warlocks hadnt bothered protecting against a soul-sight solution, knowing it would be practically impossible to excavate three different fractals inside.
My mind was a spiral of doom and gloom, already expecting the worst to happen. That all my work had been for nothing, that the secrets of the warlocks had run deeper than I had anticipated.
I lifted that little rectangle of scrap, gave the order to pass a current through it, expecting nothing to happen.
Instead, all four sides of that scrap tal began glowing a bright Occult blue.
Next chapter - aning of life (T)
User Comments
0 comments from readers