CC 10: Thesaurize ~ Twenty-Eight!

However flimsy his excuses were to focus on his one true love—magic—the results spoke for themselves. In a mere four days, Joe was able to completely repair the ritual to his satisfaction.

Staring down at the floor, it was clear to see where he’d added his own work. The previously weathered sections had been replaced with simplified, elegant lines of light from his aspect inscriber. The entire room was filled with a low level of ever-escalating energy, as if the world itself was taking notice of what he was doing.

Joe could only hope that it approved of his actions.

When he had first completed the ritual, he’d cheerfully gone to activate it, panicking momentarily when he realized that this was a Master-rank ritual, but he didn’t have a matching Artifact core to activate it. Then he realized he was being ridiculous: thanks to the difference his changes had made to the original ritual, a Unique Core would more than suffice to get it up and running.

Still, he’d learned his lesson by now, and had gone all out in ensuring his work was protected. Not only did he carefully go over each of his lines, he had dozens of people formed up around the area that this ritual should open up, just to make sure there were no surprises with monsters popping out of the woodwork once again.

Reasonably certain that they would be able to handle any nasty surprises, Joe started pumping mana into the diagram and hoped for the best. A passing thought crossed his mind, and he sharply sucked in some air, “I hope that opening this doesn't give us yet another monster type to have to deal with.”

Even speaking quietly, enough people heard him that they shuffled in place uncomfortably. Still, disquieted or not, Joe wasn't about to stop after having put in this much effort. Mana surged through the inner circle of the ritual, expanding out until it was coursing through the entire diagram. Ancient mechanisms creaked and rumbled as the design of the ritual revealed itself by lifting up from the floor on one side, and sinking in on the other. “Gyroscope. Called it.”

Mana from the ritual drained down into the square of the floor, and he could hear bolts being drawn back from deeper and deeper recesses. Finally, the ritual stopped in place, completely perpendicular to the ground, and the ground started to shift.

The entire square area lifted slowly out of the ground, revealing an enormous metal box, finally resolving into a smaller version of the immense vault that they were in. When it had fully emerged from the ground, the wall facing the outer door of the building split in the center, a seam going from top to bottom slowly pushing apart straight out to either side. Everyone that could see it leaned forward, weapons raised and spells prepared.

They needn’t have worried. As the door opened fully, a light flicked on and their breath was taken away. This inner vault was filled with thousands upon thousands of stacked, gleaming ingots of a type of metal Joe didn’t recognize. As far as he could tell, there was only that and a small folder that sat atop it within the innermost sanctum.

“Okay.” Joe took a deep breath, trying not to be disappointed that they’d gained… crafting materials. He was certain it would be extremely useful to everyone else. “This has to be pretty valuable, why else would they go to such lengths to protect it, even going so far as to have a secondary vault with a Master lock on it?”

A Dwarf Joe had seen working in the forge on many occasions stepped forward, raising his hand halfway up toward Joe, though his eyes were locked on the metal in the vault. “Mind if I take a whack at identifying it?”

The Ritualist motioned him forward, but the Dwarf had already started moving. Joe watched as the bearded individual lifted an ingot, letting out a grunt of approval at its weight. Then things got… somewhat strange. Hefting the metal was only the start, the Dwarf tried to bend it, examined it very closely with what looked like a jeweler's examination tool, licked it, and even tried nibbling on its edges. Finally, he turned and whipped it at a wall, where it bounced without leaving any visible damage on either surface.

“Was that necessary?” Joe inquired with a bit of bite in his voice.

“Kinda yes, kinda no.” There was a smirk nearly hidden by the bushy beard as the Dwarf motioned for someone to pick up the ingot. “I only needed to do it if it turns out that I was right.”

“Yeowch!” The person who had picked up the bar of metal dropped it, shaking their hand and quickly dropping it to the freezing cold floor. “How’s it that hot?”

“Yes!” The apparent metal-identifying expert hurried over and grabbed the ingot with a pair of tongs, before bringing it back and setting it atop the stack. Soon thereafter, a gust of warm air blew Joe's hairy cloak out around him, offering him a moment to appreciate the warmth and how clean his clothing was. As far as he could tell, the rest of the metal had absorbed and somehow increased the amount of heat that the first bar was giving off. “It’s gotta be Jotunheim Alloy.”

Only a few people seem to know what that meant, and by their hushed excitement, Joe took it that they thought of it as a nearly legendary metal. The Dwarf turned and swept a hand at the pile, “It's a superconductor of energy, whether that is heat, concussive force, or all manner of things like that. It's extremely useful in weapons because even without enchantment, you can get a lengthy fire buff just by swinging the metal through a fire before heading out to fight. That’s just the most common usage of it, I'm sure there's all manner of things we can do with it.”

By the end of the impromptu lecture, Joe was practically salivating over the significance of this discovery. This was an alloy with the inherent ability to create intense heat, and it would most certainly be an effective, formidable tool against the frozen monsters that roamed this world. But, the most exciting thing to him was how many ideas were popping into his head of what he could use this for.

Almost immediately, he started muttering as he stepped forward to look over the pallets of ingots. “Cut them into small chunks, we have instant hand warmers. Pull them out into wire and I bet we could figure out how to fix the water tower issue we've been having with it freezing after being left alone for too many hours. Ooh… what if we installed this in our roads as we build them, so they constantly stay toasty and melt the snow and ice that lands on them?”

The metallurgist Dwarf seemed nervous at what he was hearing, “Look, lad, there's quite a bit of this, but not enough for roads! You'd be hard pressed to make… let's say, a thousand weapons out of this? Maybe two?”

But Joe wasn’t listening. Instead, his eyes were on the small folder, which had a few wisps of smoke rising from it where it was resting on the pile of ingots. He snatched it off, patting out the tiny sparks that were trying to catch hold of the ancient, dry document. He opened it, and found himself reading a manual detailing the process of creating this particular alloy. “Ahhh… so that's what it is. The entire vault system, all of the contingencies, even the monsters that must’ve been herded into here? It wasn't to protect the stacks of alloy. All of this was put here to keep this recipe safe.”

“Ye’ found the recipe for it?” The Dwarf nearly stumbled over his words as he rushed over to try and grab the document from Joe's hands, but the folder vanished into the human’s codpiece before the hairy fellow had taken his second step.

Joe put a bright smile on his face as he looked around at all of the people staring at him with hunger in their gazes. “I don't know about the rest of you, but I think we can call this quest complete!”

Even as he reveled in their find, and the Dwarves murmured amongst themselves, a low rumbling began to fill the air. At first, everyone moved back into formed lines, ready to defend against the threat, but then a section of the ceiling fell to the ground. Joe wasn't sure who it was, but a mad dash for the exit ensued over the next few seconds when someone screamed, “The whole place is collapsing! It’s a contingency trap!”

Joe didn't stick around to try and play a hero, or make sure that everyone else got out first. A single Omnivault let him exit the doors along with the stampede of Dwarves, their immense speed ensuring that everyone escaped into the open before the structure began crumbling to the ground, tipping over as it did so. Finally, the huge obelisk fell into the walls of snow around it with a calamitous *boom* as though it were the largest bell in Eternium.

“If that doesn't draw monsters in, I'd pay double.” Joe growled at the interruption, casting worried glances at the building and hoping that they’d be able to claim the rest of their prize before they had to flee. Surprisingly, the collapse of the building had been arrested thanks to the snow and ice around it propping it up. Making a snap decision, he threw himself back inside, rushing over to the inner vault.

The Ritualist wasn't able to store the thousands of ingots into his codpiece, but luckily he wasn't the only person motivated by greed at the moment. A dozen people stood around him, accepting armloads of the extremely heavy metal and rushing out of the doors, some of them even coming back for a second load after tossing the ingots to other waiting arms. As the last of it went out, Joe started for the door once more, only to notice that the inner vault section had remained in its position when the rest of the structure had partially sunk around it.

“The ritual has it!” Joe sprinted back to the now-floating cube, Omnivaulting to the top of it and grabbing hold of the swirling gyroscope. He was familiar enough with the design at this point that he was able to slightly shift one of the rings, and immediately the box started floating toward the door. “Of course a super advanced society wouldn't want to carry all of this by hand. Flying elevator, let’s go~o!”

Riding the floating vault out of the falling vault, Joe had a wicked smile on his face as he hovered over the Dwarves and pretended he was about to lose control. That worked only the first three times, then he started getting people tossing him rude gestures instead of throwing themselves out of the path. He laughed out loud, only to be nearly knocked unconscious as a chunk of the larger building fell to the side, smacking him and the cube out of the air like a fly swatter hitting a gnat.

Even as he was tumbling across the surface of the snow, Joe only tried to regain control to see what had happened to his metal box. When he laid eyes on it, pure nervousness filled him.

A small section of the top of the box had been sheared away, and mana was beginning to spill into the air around it. Joe thrust a finger at it, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Master rank magic going critical! Evacuate immediately!”

Throwing himself forward, Joe latched onto the ritual and tried to figure out a way to cancel it without allowing the magic to detonate. After only one full second of study, he was able to decide without a shadow of a doubt that he had a better chance of finding a warm, sunny beach on Jotunheim than fixing this before it went *boom*.

Just before he abandoned it and started running for the shrine like everyone else had done, something caught Joe's detail-oriented eyes. Where the ceiling of the metal cube had been damaged, retractable bolts were holding onto the walls. Hoping that he wasn’t sentencing himself to another death, he got inside of it and cast around for anything that looked like, “There! An emergency release lever!”

He yanked on the lever, and the ritual-inscribed ceiling launched into the sky while the rest of the walls fell off of the container and clattered to the ground. There were still a few stragglers near him, so they and Joe grabbed the walls and floor, moving as quickly as they could toward the shrine. “I hope this works!”

The Dwarves were laughing maniacally, “Can we hold stuff while we teleport?”

“I've never shown up naked before, so I've got a good feeling about it!”

“Just go one hop over,” Joe instructed them quickly, “otherwise the amount of mana it's going to take is-”

Then he couldn't hear his own words. The sky was shuddering with such intense turbulence that it was chopping up what he was saying. A glance upward told Joe that it was definitely time to go; he was fairly certain the clouds had melted and the entire horizon was falling toward them even as he watched.

Activating the fast travel, Joe whooped as the adrenaline from evading the consequences of his greed hit his system.