CC 11: Thunderplump ~ Twenty-Two!

“How far away do you think that thing has to be in order to be hidden behind the curvature of the planet?” The words fell out of Joe's mouth before he thought all the way through them. It seemed the Dwarf next to him was in an equal amount of shock, because the answer that came back was practically nonsensical.

“This planet is so huge that you could be forgiven for thinking it was flat.” The  scout began rambling. “At the mining camp fifty miles out east, you can look back and see Novusheim at the same level. Our walls are forty feet tall. That thing has its face covered by clouds every once in a while. Nine hundred feet? Maybe a thousand? More?”

Joe stayed silent for a few minutes, slowly coming back to himself and finding that he was flanked by battle-hardened Dwarves and nervous human defenders. Not a single one of them was paying attention to what was going on in the local area, instead focused on the far-distant threat. Closer to the battle, the clanking of armor and weapons still rang out, barely managing to break the hushed tension mounting atop the walls. Looking around, the Ritualist sucked in a breath to try and make a light-hearted comment, but one of the people in the surroundings beat him to speaking.

“Well, look who's fashionably early.” The Dwarf slammed the butt of his ax handle on the ground, startling those near him. “I'll bet my beard that’s a Legendary-ranked monster. We shouldn't have to deal with one of those until we’re trying to create a Megalopolis. Not City, not even a Metropolis. You all know what that means, right?”

No one answered, but now all eyes were on the Dwarf, full of curiosity and desperate for any spark of hope. With a tight grip on his weapon, the Dwarf pumped the air and shouted, “They’re afraid! We’re so awesome they needed to send a boss two full ranks above our settlement!”

His whoop of exuberance fell flat for a moment, then Joe caught on and chipped in, “Yeah!”

Everyone in earshot exploded into cheers, banging their weapons on shields, hollering at the giant in the distance, and in a few cases even lowering their pants and shaking their rear at the incoming threat. It might have been Joe's imagination, but as the giant's eyes intermittently appeared and vanished behind the swirling clouds—like a deity playing peekaboo with them—it seemed that the expression on its face shifted to a scowl.

Quietly distancing himself from the group, Joe started rushing back toward the Town Hall to bring this matter to the attention of the council. “Good to keep up appearances in front of the troops, but… this is absurd. A Legendary-rank monster on a Town upgrading to a City? We need a plan and lots and lots of coffee.”

Then he slid to a stop, pausing and rethinking why he felt the urge to go in person to make a report. “This is literally why we have scouts and messengers. I don't need to be doing this. I need to keep building up our defenses and maybe figure out a ritual that can take that monster head-on. Let's see, a Legendary-ranked monster, that would be… okay, maybe a different plan. I don't think I'm going to be able to put together a Grandmaster-ranked ritual before that thing steps over our walls like they aren't even there.”

Beyond putting together a bunch of rituals to go on towers, which might or might not be effective against such a high-ranking beast, there were only a few options for increasing his personal power in the short-term. Joe decided to go with one of those options and sighed softly as he looked at his Ritual Orb of Constitution. “Sorry, Morsum. It's not that you're not strong, it's just that the monsters here are so much stronger that you seem weak.”

The fact that the pseudo-lich head was not currently summoned to this plane of existence made the choice easier, so Joe returned to his workshop and opened all six of his Ritual Orbs, filling the room with a mess of tangled wire thread. “Right, probably should’ve done these one at a time. Ugh… I practically just finished fixing and re-tweaking the repaired version of this.”

Joe rushed to his workshop and locked himself inside, pulling open his Ritual Orbs and carefully inspecting them. Luckily, the first several ritual circles remained mostly the same, mostly needing a shift so that additional sympathetic lines could be pulled between them and the additional circles that would be surrounding them soon.

Looking over his options for summoning things from other planes, Joe was able to easily tick off the first of them as impossible. “Celestial Wyrm, nope, that's at least Grandmaster rank. I need something that’s Expert at the worst. A Valkyrie Shield Maiden? That's promising… oh wait, she would automatically attack me because I have a neutral alignment. This book is very helpful.”

By the time he’d crossed off abyssal horrors, he was down to Expert-ranked elementals. Thinking about how the council had refused his request to build an elemental playground, which would make the summoning of a creature like this easier and more effective, he allowed a moment of annoyance to be experienced, then let it pass. “I could do an earthen colossus? That might be something useful against a titan like that. Wait, no, I think it would only reach its ankles. Oh, that thing is slow. Elemental of wind? That’d be pretty powerful in a place like this. Lots of wind, lots of snow. Also… even the Penguins probably have some resistance to wind.”

He turned the page and found another diagram, dismissing it immediately and flipping to the next section. Before he could fully move on, he felt a warm heat wrapping around his left hand. “Mate? What’s up?”

*Burble.*

The elemental shifted its body to look like a human hand and used its index-finger-like appendage to point at the diagram Joe had planned to ignore—then back at itself, bending the ‘finger’ in a way that would be impossible for anyone but Jaxon to replicate.

“You want me to use this on you?” Joe looked over the spell diagram, carefully considering it instead of skipping past as planned. “You don't ask for much usually; are you sure that you want to get so directly involved?”

The spell in question was a type of summoning, but a much more literal planar shift. Instead of pulling an entity out of a separate plane, it used an already summoned creature to pull in a copy of its plane of existence, creating an area where the summoned creature would be vastly more powerful than usual. It didn't negate attacks or send them away; it was a straightforward empowerment. In other words, not something that Joe would typically bother with. But… as he put more thought into it, he realized that this spell would fulfill one of his lifelong dreams, if it worked.

“For a short time, I’d literally pull over a chunk of the elemental plane of coffee. I would bathe in coffee, breathe coffee, and to top it off, you would be super empowered. I'm starting to like this plan. Are you thinking that, by getting a boost like this, you can help all of our defenders have a huge burst of energy? Or, do you know exactly what this will do? Help me out here, how many people could you pump caffeine into if I managed to activate this at the Expert rank? One hundred?”

The coffee elemental swirled in the air.

“That was… not a yes, you were adding on a zero. Right? So a thousand?”

*Burble!* Mate swirled again.

“Ten thousand? Surely you must be joking.” Mate and Joe stared at each other for a moment, and the Ritualist slumped slightly. “Wait a moment. You don't know how to do math.”

*Burb!* The coffee elemental cheerfully bubbled at him. It swirled in the air four times, and the Ritualist could only shrug helplessly.

“Okay, all I can think is you’re trying to tell me you could give a boost to somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand people. You know what? Good enough. Let's start putting this together.”

Joe briefly considered switching the orb that was the central focus of the planar shift spell. It made sense to him that, if he shifted it from the orb of Constitution to the orb of Strength, he would be able to make stronger coffee. Yet, he talked himself out of it by reminding himself that he didn't need coffee that could punch someone; he needed coffee that could impact those who had massive resistances. “I hope this works!”

Frankly, even if it didn't work the way he expected, Joe was sure he would still be happy with the final results. Pulling out his needle-nosed pliers—he had never given them back, finding them far too useful—Joe began pulling at the wires as he stared at the diagram in front of him. The changes to the first several circles were very straightforward, and the outer ones moved along quickly, thanks to his extreme comfort with rituals at that low of a level.

“I wonder if I can find a potion that has the affinity of coffee, or caffeine? Hmm. Probably not in a reasonable amount of time, and I wouldn't be able to access them if Jake made it for me. I’d need something at the Expert rank, at the minimum. Another time.”

As time passed, the complex diagram slowly came into being. The odd, arcane runes on the outer edges were easily molded, and as he attuned the entire diagram to Mate—who sat at the center of the ritual for this part—a subtle ripple went through the entirety of the ritual. Joe checked on the sections he’d just finished, finding that several of the symbols had shifted slightly and now looked like latte heart art.

For a few moments, he tried to decide if that was an error or simply the results of the heart-shaped Ritual Orb of Constitution making itself known. “I mean… it kinda works for what we’re going for here.”

When the ritual diagram was fully set, Joe pulled out the Unique Mana Battery that usually sat in the Ritual Orb and left his workshop. “Just gotta put this on the recharge station, fill it up, and we should be good to go.”

It was the first time using the recharge station, and he was understandably nervous as he approached it and slotted his battery. The fluctuations surrounding the table dimmed precipitously, and he hoped that he had just saved someone's bone marrow for the short-term. Three people were standing inside the bubble, two of them guards, one of them tasked with placing and pulling cores. Joe walked up to that employee and pulled out his Ritual Orb. “Mend. Lay on Hands.”

Luck +1!

There was no visible difference, beyond the human looking somewhat confused as to why he was getting the treatment. Joe clapped him on the arm with a smile, “Yeah… we’re gonna keep doing that. As a perk of the job, at least once a week, make sure to see me for some casual healing. Never know what kind of debuffs you’ll pick up from… the, uh, the cold.”

His employee nodded awkwardly, scooting slightly away after Joe instructed him to keep that battery safe for him and have it delivered as soon as it was full.

After that, he simply stepped out of the bubble and began practicing using his Ritual Orbs in conjunction with each other to expand out to the intricate, six-circle Expert ritual diagram. While it wasn't exactly easy, he quickly got the hang of it. So quickly, in fact, that he realized his mental Characteristics must be playing a significant role in his use of the exotic weapons. This was quickly confirmed as his skill level began to rapidly rise.

Combat Ritual Orbs (Exotic) (Student 0 → Student IV)

“It's been so long since I first got to Midgard. I almost forgot that, if you show a higher level of mastery than your sheet indicates, it will rapidly catch up.” He tossed all six orbs into the air, where they exploded like metal fireworks one at a time, forming into all six circles and linking up as quickly as his mind could make them move. “Better. Now let's see if I can get this down to less than three seconds.”