Ruthless ~ 34!

~ 34 ~

“Seriously.” Joe complained as he worked to fine-tune a ritual diagram. “I warn them about an incoming attack on our town, and they shrug it off like it doesn't matter that a huge  amount of people are coming here to claim the greenhouse and smash up our town.”

“They obviously don't know that the time investment there is absurd.” Hannah grumbled along with him. “Did you know that a couple deer got in there and totally destroyed the apple trees? The gardener in that area was so mad about it that he killed them in there, and now we have deer-men spawning in that wing. Now there is a strict no-killing-new-things rule in there. It's already starting to act like a dungeon, even though they’ve been careful to cut down all the ‘weeds’ that have been popping up.”

Joe nodded along at what she was saying. “This entire world is designed to get the best out of people. You work hard, and you get rewarded in a tangible way for it. Can you imagine how that would have changed our lives back on earth?”

“That would have been interesting to see.” Hannah looked at Joe, opened her mouth, then closed it before she said what she had planned to say. Joe saw, and simply waited quietly. If she had something to say… “I just want to make them see! Seriously, if people would just work as hard as we do, they would have their own ways to become powerful! Abyss, have you seen what that level twelve Janitor was able to do? He can walk into an area, and everything starts to clean itself. He still gets experience for it, too!”

“Wait, really? Does that mean… hold on.” Joe took a step back mentally. “It really isn’t our place to tell people how to live their lives, Hannah. If we force people to have our same viewpoints, that becomes a bad day for everyone. I recently had to fight a cult that had the actual same mindset on everything, and they were only used for someone else’s gain. Imagine if a king or something had that kind of power? That’s not a leader anymore, that’s a tyrant that people will fight with everything they have.”

“Huh.” Hannah’s non-answer made Joe sigh. It seemed that she had her own viewpoint on this, and had been hoping for a simple agreement, not a conversation. It had been difficult to find a good conversationalist recently. Joe chuckled at that thought: ‘Conversationalist’ sounded like an upgraded Bard class. In fact, he was almost sure that existed somewhere.

But, Joe had found that once someone had formed their own opinion, they needed to experience something that let them change their mindset. Talking it out or being presented with data had almost no bearing. He connected the final symbol on his ritual and gently blew on the ink to dry it. As far as he could see… perfect. “There we go. Now, here’s the fun part.”

He took out a small ingot of gold, placing it in the center of the ritual diagram. Since he was making a Novice rank enchanted ritual, his personal mana was more than enough to fill the diagram. The diagram lit up and wavered on the paper as it started seeking out an acceptable item to merge with. The gold was detected, and lines started flowing from the paper to the ingot. There were a few more moments where the gold buzzed, but the high purity and density of the material allowed the magical matrix to settle.

Ritual of Remote Activation complete! Select up to four rituals to modify.

“It worked!” Joe lifted the world’s most expensive remote into the air excitedly. The difficulty of this ritual was simply the high barrier to entry clearly shown by the cost of the materials. He looked closely at the ‘remote’, seeing that there was a large central button and four smaller ones next to it. After pulling over a ritual diagram and holding the remote next to it, a message appeared.

Rituals selected to be used in the Ritual of Remote Activation must be primed.

“Okay…” Joe looked around for a primed version of the flamethrower ritual, one that had already had the mana and activation components stored within it. He only had a single one, but he added it cheerfully. This time, as he got the ingot close, one of the smaller circles slid off the ingot and added itself to the activation portion of the flamethrower ritual.

Chances of accidental activation, mitigated by spell stability: 8%. Stabilizing… stabilized.

Joe blanched at the line that flew through his vision. There had been a chance that adding the remote activation would have activated the flamethrower while he was standing over it? Not only that, but his spell stability was… Joe checked. “Fifty-eight percent? So there was originally a two-thirds chance that this would have activated by adding in the… abyss!”

He looked at everything that was neatly stacked and organized in the room, and decided that they would no longer be adding effects to primed rituals while surrounded by expensive consumables on all sides. It would be a good chance to play outside. “What if I added a Ritual of Remote Activation to another Ritual of Remote Activation? Would that check against all the spell stabilities the first one was connected to?”

It had been his plan at the outset to connect four of these rituals together so that he could activate sixteen flamethrowers at the same time. He wasn't going to give up on that dream, but perhaps the Novice ranked ritual that he was using right now wasn't the best choice to make that happen. It was like connecting a power strip to the wall: one was fine, but if you connected a power strip to another and another; you only created a nasty fire hazard. Actually, in this case it was exactly like that.

Joe got a few members of his coven together and empowered three more flamethrower rituals, then hooked up the Ritual of Remote Activation. Eight percent chance to have it go off was a risk worth taking, and they all settled into place without issue. Joe stored everything into his ring and waved as he walked to a strategy meeting. His concerns had been mostly ignored, but that didn’t change the fact that they had to get ready for an attack.

As he walked into the war room, Mike looked up, nodded, and waved him over. “Good, you’re here. I want you to take a look at this map and tell me if there is anything that you can do to help us get ready.”

After getting close, Joe raised an eyebrow as he saw the quality of the map on the table. It looked almost like a satellite image, certainly not something hand-drawn. Still, it must have been hand-drawn. Mike pointed out the trouble areas right away, “Here, at the center of the town, we have the Guild Hall. Connected to the hall is a barracks, one at each cardinal direction. In the north-east section, we have the greenhouse. South-east holds the mess areas, also known as the general courtyard. South-west holds the wells where we draw our water when there are no water mages to fill up the cistern in the same area.”

Mike took a sip of water, likely thinking about his thirst as he talked about the wells. “Now, here in the north-west section is nothing yet. Nothing permanent, at least; though there are a few merchants that have set up a small shopping area. They might protest, but they need to move out of there so that we know that this area is secure. Thoughts?”

“Yes.” Joe waved at the rest of the map of the town. “What about everything else?”

“We’ll get to that.” Mike promised, waving away Joe’s concerns. “Right now I am looking at worst-case, if we need all of our guild to be brought in behind the secondary defensive wall.”

“You think you might need to sacrifice the rest of this?” Joe pointed at all the other buildings on the map, lingering over the Pathfinder’s Hall.

“Again… worst-case.” Mike nodded and continued. “Thanks to your magic and our resources, we have an outer wall around the entirety of the town as well as this core area. What I would like to see in this will-be-empty section is either a defensive structure or something that can give us a large-scale defensive boon. Is there anything you can do about that?”

“Mmm.” Joe muttered, closing his eyes. The first thing that came to mind was some kind of altar or the cathedral, but the Pathfinder’s Hall had an attached temple that gave out no area buffs. Was that only because he didn't know how to make it happen…? Either way, “I can't think of anything that I can add in there right now. Perhaps after I spend some time learning about all the options from my architect instructor?”

“Nothing in the short-term, got it.” Mike turned back, “Keep your eyes open for something, we need to find a way to defend our area without losing people.”

“I can make a ritual that makes people sick if they aren’t supposed to be there.” Joe offered with a shrug. “It won’t hurt them, beyond some embarrassing accidents if they press on, but you can activate it every once in a while to flush people out?”

“Can you make one that hits anyone that comes within, say, fifty meters of our walls?” Mike asked hopefully.

“I… could do one that will do that for one of the walls, but…”Joe’s eyes trailed off, and he thought about his new remote activation ritual. “Yeah, I could do that. It’ll be expensive though, because it is four large, fine-tuned rituals that will be linked by yet another ritual that activates them all at the same time.”

“Make it happen, we’ll cover the costs.” Mike signed a requisition order and handed it over. “Feel free to delegate some of this, as well. I know you have been teaching some people your class abilities. I don’t need you to do it, I just need it done.”

“Fair enough.” Joe grinned, “It’s a lot more expensive when someone else does it though. I maxed out my bonuses already.”

“We’ll cover it.” Mike pointed at another few areas. “Here is another section that we need to defend, and the unfortunate part is that the wall that we have will make it hard to hit attackers here, here, and here.”

“I am really glad that you are so invested in all of this. I was really worried that you were just going to blow off my warning.” With a dark chuckle, Joe pulled out a paper. “Let me ask you something. Would having four massive flamethrowers for those trouble areas interest you?”