Scientific Sorcery 51 : Blightcoal

I expected the fairly basic black gunpowder barrel to explode and to maybe expand the cavern a bit while making a whole bunch of noise to impress Cali with, but the resulting detonation went way above what would have happened back on Earth, behaving almost like dynamite.

Seeing Cali’s utterly shocked face made it all the more worth it, assuring that she would not take me to the curious corvids.

Gunpowder definitely made a hefty argument against being disassembled. 

Yes, the explosion had certainly exceeded my own expectations, but I wasn't about to let the Arcanicx know that.

While she had slept over the past week, I had been busy preparing for this little demonstration. I had spent away the nights carefully extracting charcoal from the interiors of trees that had been exposed to dragonfire. The process was tedious but fascinating - whatever the White Blight and dragonfire had done to Svalbard's trees produced perfectly carbonized wood inside them.

The charcoal resulting from the combo of Gygr’ designed blight and dragonfire was unlike anything I'd seen before. It was incredibly lightweight, almost seeming to float in my hand. When I crushed a piece between my fingers, it crumbled into an impossibly fine, velvety powder. 

I decided to call it Blightcoal.

Due to its dryness, high porosity, low ash content and uniform particle size Blightcoal made an incredibly effective gunpowder ingredient. It was a pity that I had a finite amount of it, on the account that dragon flames only torched so many dead trees in Svalbard.

The blasted cavern was now big enough to fit in several of Cali's sleighs, so I had the horses pull the sleigh inside. The cliff and river made my position quite well fortified compared to the pub, yet I knew that I couldn’t simply rest, so I spent the rest of the day with Cali cutting down more trees and bushes to conceal the entrance to the cavern.

As the final touch to the fortification, I secured ropes around Glinka’s megalith and dragged it a bit closer to the cavern using the strength of six horses empowered by witch-grass. Combined with the power of one witch-man, in a day the megalith rested on its new, non watery location.

Any ruffians would absolutely have to deal with the wrath of the river if they wanted to hostile my new cliffside residence.

At that point, Cali simply stopped asking questions.

She quietly assisted me whenever I asked for it, with Stormy sitting on her shoulder. Judging by her expression, the young Arcanicx probably had a mild case of gunpowder-related PTSD.

Over the next few days, I improved on the design of the gunpowder, chopping down more dragon-burned trees, optimizing its explosive potency.

Knowing what was coming, I tirelessly worked night and day, not allowing myself any rest.

During the last evening before the arrival of the warband from Bernt, I used the Arcanoelastic Resonator on all of the witch-metal at my disposal, using a mundane, carved birch log to produce a fairly straight metal tube and handle. 

I decided to call the violet-tinted metal Ferronite, on the account that by being kept next to Gem 62 the iron became sprinkled with star-like violet constellations which somehow massively reinforced its tensile strength.

. . . 

As Stormy had predicted, on the ninth day after our coversation, the warband from Bernt arrived in Svalbard from the Southern forest, slowly making their way into Svalbard on horseback.

I watched from my hidden vantage point atop of the cliff as sixty-six men, led by Jarl Bobliss, entered the ruined village.

Bobliss was easy to spot - he was a giant of a man with a thick red beard and the fanciest armor. He carried himself with the confidence of a seasoned leader, directing his men to search for us with a booming voice.

The men trailing behind him were a mix of grizzled veterans and younger fighters, armed with swords and arbalests and looking wary. Cecil was there too, I recognized his skinny frame right away.

I observed silently as they spread out, searching the ruins of Svalbard.

A few of the men dismounted, entering into the door-less pub, while the rest spread across the ruins of town.

Their somewhat orderly movement lasted only until the moment when one of the men cried out “Gold! The gold of Svalbard!”

I watched as the entire warband converged on the pub, drawn by the promise of riches. Before their arrival, I had carefully staged the scene to appear as though we had just departed in haste. A few personal items were scattered about, leading to an open hatch.

In the cold room at the back of the pub where the hatch lead, I had placed several heavy cases.

These cases were my own special creation - huge iron chest filled with rocks, with an arrangement of gold coins fused to the topmost layer.

The ladder leading down was broken and the chests were impossibly heavy, requiring multiple men to even budge them.

In minutes, all sixty-six men crammed into the pub, jostling and shoving as they quickly reached the cold room.

"Rope! Get a rope!" I heard one of them cry.

"Out of the way imbecile!" Another shouted.

The Jarl's voice boomed orders, but his men simply weren't listening, wanting to fill their pockets with coin, wanting to pull the massive chests from the cold room.

A wave of nostalgia washed over me. The nameless pub of Svalbard, the last intact building in the village, had been my home for almost two months. It was where I'd first resided in this strange new world, where I'd begun my journey of discovery and experimentation, on the step of which I met stormy.

For a moment, I allowed myself to reminisce about the quiet nights spent poring over my notes, the breakthroughs I'd made within those wooden walls, and even the tense encounters with Cali. The pub had been my sanctuary, my laboratory, and my fortress all rolled into one.

"Goodbye, old friend," I murmured, raising my hand in a solemn salute. "You've served me well."

"Heave, lads!" I heard one of them men. "The gold of Svalbard is ours!"

"Pull it up! Pull it up!"

For several minutes, the men struggled with the cases, unable to lift them. Finally, after much effort and cursing, they managed to raise one slightly off the ground.

"The coin's all frozen solid!" Another marauder complained. "That boy must have poured water on it hoping to secure the gold."

"Out of the way, you idiots!" Jarl Bobliss boomed. "See how a Bobliss handles the..."

The Jarl's strong hands finally lifted the iron case from the floor, which released a hidden plate, triggering a mechanism that ignited the barrel of gunpowder I had concealed beneath the floorboards.

With a blinding flash, the entire pub suddenly erupted in a catastrophic explosion.

Time slowed as my heartbeat accelerated a thousandfold.

The roof that had survived the dragon, soared into the air like a monstrous bird taking flight. The walls bulged outward for a split second before disintegrating into a cloud of splinters and debris. A massive fireball bloomed at the heart of the explosion, its orange glow briefly turning evening into day.

The shockwave hit me a moment later, a wall of air that made my clothes flap eve so slightly. The roar of the explosion left a ringing tone in my ears.

As the initial blast subsided, I watched as burning timbers and fragments of the pub rained down across the ruins of Svalbard. Where the sturdy building had once stood, there was now only a smoking crater, filled with the twisted remains of my clever trap and all of the men of Bernt.

“Is… is it over?” Cali crawled to my side, trembling ever so slightly and looking at the smoke pouring from the remnants of the pub.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s over. Greed had done them in. No marauder can resist a chest full of gold.”

Cali relaxed ever so slightly.

Now that the warband no longer hung of over my head like the sword of Damocles, I could focus on the problem of her Jotunification curse. 

Suddenly, the rubble of the destroyed pub shifted. I squinted at it. Was something simply settling after the blast or…

The rubble shifted again.

Shit.

Nothing should have survived that explosion, yet there was unmistakable movement among the smoking debris!

Suddenly, a muscular hand burst forth from the wreckage, then another. The hands worked in tandem, throwing aside bricks and burning wooden beams as if they were made of cardboard. 

A naked, scorched man and covered in blood emerged from the center of the explosion, a scowl on his face revealing an exposed skull, almost like that of a terminator from judgement day, more more precisely the villain from Masters of the Universe.

As I stared, transfixed, Skeletor inhaled deeply, his jaw opening wider than what was humanly possible, sucking an ungodly amount of air-filled sparks and smoke inside his lungs.

A bright red aurora began to radiate from his body in the Astralscope’s view, spiralling inward, sucking air into his lungs, his muscles pulsing with an otherworldly energy. 

The blood coating his flesh, spread all across the ruins, began to impossibly flow back into his body on its own accord, like rivers of shimmering fluid, glowing in my view.

As the blood returned, the man’s muscles rippled and rearranged themselves, healing his horrible injuries, bones snapping back into place.

I swallowed.

As the man reformed and grew a new layer skin, my gaze became drawn to the man’s naked chest, where a hexagrammic tattoo pulsated with an eerie red light. Trailing voids emanated from the pyramidal design, folding into themselves in impossible ways that hurt my eyes to look at directly.

Blood magic. Bobliss was a fallen hero, a slayer of witches, doomed to turn into a Jotun upon his death.

With a gesture, Jarl Bobliss extended his arm. 

Blood poured from fresh cuts that opened along his skin, gradually coalescing into the shape of a sword. Within moments, he held a blade of solid blood, its surface rippling with eerie, red shimmers.

"Cali," I whispered, not daring to take my eyes off the blood-wielding, cursed-tattoo tagged, unkillable Nordstaii Champion, "I think we might have a bit of a problem."