CC 10: Thesaurize ~ Nineteen!

Several days of traveling in the air and planting his shrines felt nearly anticlimactic after the duo of back-to-back successes. Joe was itching to destroy another village, or find a hidden gem like the strange obelisk from the elites of Vanaheim. Abyss, at this point he’d even take finding a field of snow flowers that he could use to start growing local flora in his greenhouse.

But, instead, Joe was merely traveling over a vast empty world as per usual. He couldn't be too upset about the forced alone time, as he was making great progress on altering rituals. As it turned out, figuring out how to cleanse the Ritual of Sacrificial Regeneration had been far too complex with its Master-level quotients and variables, and so Joe had set it aside in favor of doing a few less intense versions as practice. Currently, he was trying to figure out a way to combine several of his other rituals into a single one with a unified purpose.

“Gravedigger’s Requiem, Ritual of Proximity, Ritual of Structural Repair.” Joe had found multiple points of similarity between the three magical diagrams, and he was looking for a way to get ahead of the power curve of the upcoming Beast Waves. They hadn’t had to deal with any kind of underground attack yet, as they’d set up their mines outside of Novusheim. But somehow, Joe had the feeling that when they upgraded to a City, they’d be tested in an entirely new way—not just with new monsters.

“If I can set this up to go off when it senses something burrowing, maybe I can collapse the tunnels those creatures are making, taking out any beasts following along behind them.” Joe was still stuck on the ‘intent’ phase of his project, and was trying to determine exactly what should happen as the end result. “If I can work in the Ritual of Structural Repair at the same time, I can keep the walls up on the surface from collapsing as the underground tunnels are destroyed.”

Joe made a few more notes, and slowly his vision began to come to life. “What if instead of collapsing the tunnels, we filled them in with surrounding materials? Then all I’d need to do is set up the ritual to pull loose dirt and stone from the surroundings from the entirety of a single layer of the ground. Eventually, that would make everything in Town sink a few inches. If it happened enough, perhaps the city would someday be entirely underground.”

Something told him the Dwarves wouldn’t mind that too much, so long as there were limits to how deep it got. Still, there were plenty of issues to work out, but Joe felt that he was starting to get a proper setup going. He continued working on that for a while, and when his brain started to feel like it was going to melt, he switched over to simply continuing his work on creating a functioning Ritual of Featherfall.

That was easier mentally, because he simply had to generate something that already existed instead of designing it from scratch. Still, it was slow going due to the sheer amount of math that he had to account for. Depending on the height that he began to fall from, he needed different equations. If he was falling from a height below where he would reach terminal velocity, the ritual needed to expend much more power in a short amount of time, whereas if he was falling from a greater height, he needed to create some form of altimeter that would ping the ground and wait to activate the main portions of the ritual until Joe was within a certain range of hitting an object.

There weren’t many things that made him happy to do high order math, but falling out of the sky twice within the same amount of days was one of them.

Originally, he’d intended to just create the ritual as it was, but he’d been spending more time with Master Stu, and the Dwarf seemed especially extremely eager for him to rely on this ritual for some reason. That made him cautious, and he eventually found the issue: the magical diagram was optimized for a different planet with a different mana density, as well as slightly different gravitational pull. There was a good shot that if he’d used this, and it was set for Midgard, or even Alfheim, he would’ve hit the ground at full speed before it even started to slow him down.

Eventually, his bubble landed. Joe created a shrine, and popped back to Novusheim ready to get a good night's sleep and do it all again the next day. Mana drained out of him, and the Ritualist appeared thousands of miles away from his previous location.

It was the smoke that told him that something had gone terribly wrong while he was off gallivanting around. With great concern, his eyes swept over the scene, expecting to be met with chaos and destruction. Luckily, although it was evident that a brutal Beast Wave had occurred, there was no sign of damage to the civilian sectors.

Still, it seems like a section of the killing corridors was on fire, he could see cracks in the innermost walls, and hundreds of corpses were being pulled in for processing. “Well, at least the water towers are going to be refilled today. We're all going to need a shower after this is fixed up.”

Mentally rolling up his sleeves, Joe ran to the nearest cluster of workers that were milling about so that he could figure out where he was most needed. “I just got back into Town, can someone fill me in on what happened?”

Eyes that were blank with shock slowly gained a bit of life as they registered the presence of the member of the council in their midst. Yet it was a human that walked over, happy to have someone to speak with. The Dwarves sank back into their uncharacteristic moroseness, and Joe tried to memorize their faces so that he could find information on them later. For an extremely warlike society to have people this unused to the effects of combat seemed… odd.

“It was one abyss of a Beast Wave, partner!” The man spoke with a clearly Texan accent, going from empty-handed to holding up a bowl of jambalaya for Joe to chow down on while they spoke. “Looks like we still get bosses coming every once in a while even if we don't have a Town upgrade going on. That was one mighty fearsome creature that was particularly unhappy we were in its path. A bunch of humans died right away, for some reason they were practically sitting ducks at the entrance to the walls. No one's heard much from them yet, since almost all of them are still waiting on respawn. But to hear the Dwarves talk about it…”

Here his face gained a slightly pained expression as he quickly glanced around to see if he was in earshot of any Dwarves. “They almost seem glad? Don't suppose you’d know why that is, do ya? Seems strange that they’d want their allies to suffer.”

As thanks for the soup and the information, Joe filled in the chatty man about the situation with the humans and the requirement that the Dwarves had made for their rehabilitation. Even as he spoke, Joe found himself deeply dissatisfied with the callous treatment of his fellow man, and resolved to do something about it.

He’d been holding off on creating one type of tower that Socar had offered to him: a bunker-like structure that would allow people to enter it and attack with relative impunity. But if he was going to force people to stand and fight, he was at least going to give them a chance at living through it. Otherwise, this wasn’t going to end with people happy that they were joining Dwarven society; it was going to turn into hundreds of people ready to burn down the city as soon as they got access to it.

After mopping up the last vestiges of his meal, Joe wasted no further time in moving out to the walls to assess the damage and organize the necessary repairs. Creating a Ritual of Structural Repair was very straightforward for the Ritualist at this point—especially as he’d been spending lots of time in his bubbles recently studying it and trying to break down each individual part. That made finding a stone or other object that could contain the ritual the most difficult portion of creating it, keeping in mind that it was best to use something that wouldn't break down too quickly under the effects of Jotunheim’s environment.

Making a half-dozen of the rituals, he passed the objects off to work crews that had been assigned to him, sending them off to fix the damage that had been done to the walls. After a quick survey of the stonework, Joe grimaced as he realized how desperately they needed to find a way to enchant the high-tier stone against cold and extreme impacts. “It's going to take so long to repair each individual section… still, there should be plenty of time before the next Beast Wave hits.”

Repairing the walls was one of the easiest tasks that needed to be done, even if it would be extremely time-consuming. Far more frustrating was the fact that Joe needed to replace multiple fallen towers. That was going to require aspects, time, and mana. Most of the towers that had fallen had been fully destroyed upon impact with the ground, rendering the Ritual of Structural Repair useless on them. There was a strong likelihood that the ritual that had been assigned to them had been destroyed as well, which would in turn shatter any of the stabilization cubes that had been set into the claw-like edifices.

“Four fixes because one little section of wall went down. Bleh. Looks like I have my work cut out for me.” Joe had never been afraid of hard work, but at the same time he didn't want to get trapped in a repetitive loop of his talents creating something and then being forced to maintain them forever. Not at the cost of being unable to further pursue his craft. “It's a prison sentence if I need to keep doing work without meaning. Honestly, I don't know what I’d do if I couldn't delegate most of this off.”

He let out a sigh of relief at his forethought, turning his attention to the task he’d set for himself of creating Rare-ranked bunkers. When he went to the area where the humans had been setting up camp, he found a group of hopeless, despondent people that were trapped between two options: stay, fight, and die, or leave and try to survive in the frozen wasteland surrounding them.

Joe didn’t offer them an alternative fighting area immediately. First, he replaced the bubble rituals that had been destroyed by the rampaging beast, resupplying the humans with shelter. Then he made sure that a hot meal and drinks were brought out for them, and had them relax as he and his temporary workers began creating defensive encampments.

The bunker was very straightforward to make; essentially it was a large single room covered on all sides with a layer of dense Rare-ranked metal. When the first of them had been completed, he stepped back to admire his handiwork and realized that when the back door was shut, it would look almost exactly like the shell of a box turtle. The main differences were that there was an open area where weapons could poke out. “Plus, it’s a building—not a turtle. Heh. Why is Jaxon living in my head today?”

For some reason that inane thought made Joe laugh, and he started planning out the placement of the next bunker. They were large enough that he couldn’t just drop a bunch at a time, but small enough that monsters should go around them in an effort to get to the Town Hall instead of attacking the building directly. “Pretty sure I'm just making traffic circles for monsters. But, if it works and it keeps people safe, it's worth doing!”

He waved over the nearest group of relocated people, who were looking at him with great admiration in their eyes. Before Joe could say anything, the tall spokesman that he’d interacted with in the past marched right over to him, thrust out a hand and gave Joe a firm handshake. “We thought you lied to us, and this was just going to be another form of torture. Thanks for not making us want you dead anymore.”

“I can see why they chose you to speak for them. You’re… articulate.” Joe could understand their feelings, and so didn’t press the issue further. Instead, he brought everyone over to the new ‘tower’ and showed them how to use it properly. The openings for weapons and spells to exit didn’t appear unless the large metal ramp was pulled up and secured to the side of the safe haven. This was to ensure that enemies surrounding the building couldn’t prepare a nasty surprise for anyone who was running to get into it.

After he was done with the bunker, Joe took a bit more time to see what other issues the people were suffering from. Unsurprisingly, it was mostly the same issues that they originally had in the center of Town. For one, the false sky didn’t extend out this far, leaving them with two weeks of day or night depending on where they were in the cycle. Joe promised to remedy this, as well as setting up a ritual to give them clean water whenever they needed it.

With their basic needs met—or at least having a plan in place to fix them—Joe felt confident in taking a deep breath and turning to the next task on his list. He looked up, at the entrance to the walls, where there was a conspicuous lack of defensive ritual towers.

“It's almost like the person in charge of moving the towers out here wanted to see some Elven sympathizers suffer.” He rolled his shoulders, pulling out the blueprint for his most updated and upgraded ritual tower of Infernal Conflagration. Socar had already agreed to Joe’s plan, though he did so with a pained expression and muttered calculations as the Ritualist took the agreement at face value and ran off. “Let's go ahead and make sure this Town is safe for anyone who needs it. Kinda weird that I'm going to protect people with blasts of unholy fire, but, whatever it takes.”