The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 649 – Questionable modifications

Running out of options, Percy decided to ignore many rules that he had learned in his capacity as an enchanter, modifying his formation in all sorts of ways that were generally inadvisable.

He was already using multiple methods to maximize the potency of his runes, such as concatenating his enchantments in three layers and incorporating amplification runes in his unit cells. Each of these techniques operated on different principles and worked independently of one another, allowing them to be combined for even better results.

The art of runecrafting was commonly likened to whispering in the ears of the universe and beseeching the world itself to temporarily bend its rules in one’s favour. In that analogy, employing a more advanced runecrafting language such as the Vault’s magiscript was like speaking more clearly, using amplification runes was the equivalent of shouting instead of whispering, and repeating an enchantment through multiple unit cells or formations was akin to having a crowd of people talking at the same time.

The problem was that there was a limit to how much benefit could be extracted from each method before running into diminishing returns.

Including too many amplification runes in a unit cell meant lowering the ratio of other runes. After crossing a certain threshold – which varied depending on the enchantment in question – amplification runes began to hurt more than they helped.

When it came to adding more layers to a formation, it typically wasn’t worth going past three. Including a fourth wouldn’t weaken the enchantment per se, but the benefits would be marginal and come at too great a cost. Each new layer increased the space, material, and effort required to construct the formation, as well as the minimum amount of mana needed to fuel it.

Percy stopped caring about all of that.

He and his companions were already proficient enough with their Masterful spell to fit a three-layered formation on a disk no wider than Kassorith’s chest. It wouldn’t take more than a few minutes to create enough copies of the metallic construct and arrange them into a pseudo-enchantment about as large as a house, thus adding a fourth layer to the construct.

The resulting enchantment would be too troublesome and bulky to use in an actual fight, and the effect would barely be any better than simply scaling the three-layered version up, but that was fine. The rules of the event gave them plenty of time to waste, and they needed to squeeze out every drop of cleansing power they could get from their runes.

Percy also added more amplification runes, fully aware that they would start to eat away at the potency of his purification runes. To counteract that, he included more purification runes as well, lowering the ratio of self-repairs, structural integrity enchantments, heating and lightning resonance runes.

Sacrificing so many of the formation’s key components would cause its overall efficiency to plummet, massively lowering the damage that the crimson beams would be capable of.

This was an acceptable price, since the enchantment was already nearly three grades more destructive than it needed to be to slaughter the Green beasts on Spiralis B-3. Percy and Kassorith had been feeding their formations with less than four percent of the mana they could support. The modifications would drastically lower the output and raise the input, but there was still plenty of leeway in that department.

The greatest change happened in the top-most two layers of the formation, however. In the previous version of the structure, Percy had only included the complete unit cells in the two bottom layers – the texture of the metal and the interlocked pieces of steel – but not the top layer which had consisted of only a single heating rune.

This time, Percy had changed both the third and fourth layers into pseudo-enchantments that combined heating and purification runes, thus further skewing the overall effect of the formation toward the latter.

The new construct ended up requiring a lot more fine-tuning than Percy would have liked, but it was ready about an hour later.

It took the form of a metallic abomination that would be an absolute pain in the ass to carry around the gold-specked desert. Unlike before, activating the runes would probably drain Kassorith’s mana reserves significantly, and the crimson glow they released was unlikely to put a scratch on even a Sixth Circle mage – let alone a Seventh.

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‘It doesn’t matter,’ Percy reassured his companions. ‘It’s not like this event is particularly taxing on our core anyway. As long as the formation gets the job done, we should be able to keep using it for a couple of days.’

Knowing that Kassorith had probably slid even further down the rankings over the past hour, Percy was too scared to pull up the list. His current priority was to ensure that the new formation worked. If it did, closing the gap to those at the top would be trivial.

If it didn’t… well… it wouldn’t be too late to resume killing the beasts. Less than a quarter of the allotted time had elapsed, so there was still a slim chance of them passing Remlat – though Zurvanai would be out of the question.

Kassorith and Micky took off in search of their next target while helping Percy drag the giant web of engraved metal. Unfortunately, the burden halved their traveling speed – which wasn’t ideal – and the density of Green beasts in the central region also appeared to have decreased during their break.

They’d already spotted countless carcasses in various states while hunting earlier – some of them burnt to a crisp, others crushed to a pulp or sliced into pieces – left by their rivals. They’d even caught sight of other participants every now and then, though nobody had seemed interested in interfering with Kassorith at the time.

It was obvious that most – if not all – of the competitors had spent the first quarter of the event scouring the central region, either because they’d all been dropped here, or because they’d deemed the circular plane to house the highest concentration of prey.

Sadly, staying here was growing less viable by the minute.

It was admittedly a large area, but Blues could cover a lot of ground in ten or so hours, and there had been as many as eighteen of them – all of them elites – competing in the same region. They’d probably slaughtered over eighty percent of the creatures by now, and that number would only go up until there was nothing left.

‘I suppose the organizers expect us to branch out into the spiralling strips of land at some point,’ Kassorith said.

Percy was about to voice his agreement when he caught sight of a live beast by the westernmost edge of his Sage’s Pond. Darting toward his prey – or at least flying towards it as fast as he could while dragging the colossal chunk of steel behind him – he hoped that the creature wouldn’t get stolen by a rival mage before he had a chance to test the new formation.

Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be any other Blues in Kassorith’s immediate vicinity.

Upon reaching the unfortunate beast – a creature akin to a scaled gorilla – Percy pinched it in place with his willpower, moving the metallic formation right over it. Kassorith promptly poured enough lightning mana into the runes to activate all four layers one after the other, directing the ominous red light onto the struggling animal.

Using his formation on the creatures made Percy feel like a child burning ants alive with a magnifying glass, which he didn’t enjoy. However, he reminded himself that he was dealing with infected beasts that were better off purified or dead than left alone in this state.

Wisps of black smoke gushed out of the gorilla’s blistering flesh about twice as fast as they did before, which was somewhat promising.

‘It eats up ten times as much mana though…’ Percy noted with a bitter smile.

In any case, it would be worth the cost if it allowed him to cleanse the creature in a reasonable timeframe. Or well… that would also depend on how many points the action rewarded Kassorith with, but judging by Falanor’s insane lead, it was bound to be plenty.

Enduring the drain on his host’s reserves, Percy watched with bated breath as the formation continued to purge the beast’s negative thoughts. Thirty seconds later, he had to lower the intensity of the beam, since the animal looked like it was about to die despite the enchantment having been designed for purification over damage.

In the end, the creature drew its last breath after being subjected to the crimson light for a bit under a minute. Unfortunately, it still hadn’t been fully cleansed, awarding the Thess’kalan with only a single point, though Percy wasn’t too disappointed.

‘Is it me, or was the black smoke several times thinner during the last few seconds?’ Micky asked.

‘I think so too,’ Kassorith confirmed.

They were close. Percy could practically taste success. They just had to slow down the cleansing process slightly, but it seemed to just be a question of minor tweaks now. Of course, they needed to find another test subject first, which was going to be a hassle.

After wasting another ten minutes flying over the golden graveyard, Percy grew surer than ever that they would have to switch to a new hunting area, though he did eventually spot a giant flightless bird that he was tempted to describe as a four-legged ostrich.

Jumping at the opportunity to test the formation out again, he was much more cautious this time, halving the intensity of the beam from the very start. After around seventy seconds of getting cooked under the crimson light, the dark smoke emanating from the bird thinned once more.

Thankfully, the creature was in a much better state than the gorilla, so it was able to endure for another twenty seconds, until the final black wisp evaporated under Percy’s relieved gaze.

The poor ostrich was badly sunburnt, its feathers having either fallen off or burnt to ashes. It breathed heavily, halfway submerged in a puddle of molten gold, looking like it was unlikely to survive the next few hours. Still, it was alive for now, and that was hopefully all that mattered for the event.

Summoning the courage to check the list again, Percy’s borrowed eyes instantly homed into his host’s score, the corner of his equally-borrowed lips curling up.

It had gone up by ten points!