The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 651 – Puppets

Percy had no idea whether his plan would work, but he saw no reason not to try. He and his host had practically secured second place – it would be really difficult for Zurvanai to surpass them again – so at worst they would be wasting their time.

Since they intended to use both Kassorith’s bloodline and spiritual blood, they needed to find something for the Thess’kalan to eat and replenish his lost mass. Percy didn’t want to risk consuming a corrupted beast, so he made sure to fully cleanse a tasty-looking buffalo before butchering it.

Checking the list, he had hoped to keep the ten points that they’d been awarded for the creature’s purification, though it appeared that the event’s organizers weren’t fools. Slaughtering a perfectly healthy animal penalized Kassorith by nine points, bringing his score back to what it would have been if he’d killed the creature without cleansing it.

‘Oh well… it’s just a rounding error at this point,’ Percy thought with a mental shrug.

If anything, this was good news. The organizers seemed to be quite strict at ensuring that a participant’s score reflected their contribution in the planet’s purification. Another mage would probably be severely punished if they were to directly interfere with Kassorith’s work, making it even less likely that anyone would bother.

The other Blues had likely spread quite far from one another by now, so it would be difficult for anyone to even find the Thess’kalan. Not to mention that there was only a handful of people in the group who would be directly affected by his performance.

Ignoring their rivals for the time being, Percy focused on the task at hand.

The body of a Green beast was generally tough and barely edible, so he made sure to chop the bovine’s flesh into tiny pieces before pounding them for good measure. Kassorith was better than most sapients at consuming weird things, due to his higher grade, enhanced physique and related bloodline, but it wouldn’t hurt to prepare a less unpleasant meal.

Once the meat was as soft as it was going to be, Percy asked his host to inflict a few shallow cuts on his skin – just enough damage to meet the minimum threshold of his ability. Activating Moult, the Thess’kalan shed a layer of crimson scales held together by a thin membrane, though the rest of his body didn’t lose much mass.

Eating the prepared food raw – mostly because Percy didn’t want to waste time cooking it – Kassorith quickly regained the few centimetres of height that he had just lost, returning to full power in less than ten minutes. The snake person didn’t stop there, repeating the process one more time to create a second crimson husk.

‘Well? How useful are they?’ Percy asked, some anticipation finding its way into his host’s slit pupils.

This wasn’t the first time they’d used Kassorith’s bloodline after acquiring the Penitent’s Decree. They’d activated it a couple of times to mend the Thess’kalan’s injuries after some of his toughest fights in the tournament, so they already knew that the discarded flesh synergized well with spiritual blood.

However, they’d never tried it with such light wounds before, so Percy wasn’t sure that they had shed enough skin for this to work. It might have been more prudent to inflict deeper cuts, but Kassorith would have to spend a lot more time fixing them, which might not leave them enough to catch up to Falanor.

‘Hmmm… I can feel the sand directly under their scales, and I can even move them slightly, but they’re not very practical without muscles or bones,’ the Thess’kalan summarized after a few moments of deliberation.

To illustrate his point, he tried to make one of the empty husks stand. Due to the spiritual blood still lingering inside the abandoned flesh, he was able to make the hollow puppet wriggle and even pull itself upright momentarily, though it collapsed almost immediately.

At the same time, the Thess’kalan shared the new senses with Percy to give him an idea of their limits. The hollow sentries could only feel the ground within a metre or two of their scales, which wasn’t very useful.

Percy frowned.

He’d wanted to create a pair of clones that would wander a kilometre away from Kassorith, expanding the range of their Sage’s Pond so that they could scan the desert even more efficiently for new prey.

If everything had gone well, the crimson husks might have also served as bait to lure the aggressive animals from farther away, saving Kassorith a few precious seconds of flying toward them. Percy hadn’t expected much, but accelerating their gains by even a modest fifty percent might be enough to reach first place by the end of the event.

The problem was that the clones clearly weren’t mobile enough to keep up with Kassorith or evade a Green beast in their current state. Their senses were also far duller than those of the fiends that Percy could fashion out of his own spiritual blood.

‘What now? Should we just forget about Falanor and stick to what we were doing?’ Kassorith asked.

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Percy remained silent for a couple of seconds before metaphorically shaking his head. ‘Let’s not give up just yet. The clones aren’t perfect, but they might be salvageable with a few tweaks.’

Not bothering to explain, he slithered towards the nearest husk and poured a lot of liquid metal into its mouth, slowly inflating its body into one that was vaguely shaped like a real Thess’kalan.

Percy didn’t saturate the space with metal, as that would have only made the clone too rigid and heavy to move. Instead, he tried to create a replica of Kassorith’s skeleton, using loose-fitted screws, bolts and hinges to imitate the Thess’kalan’s joints to the best of his ability. He even made sure that the bones were hollow to further limit their weight.

‘I don’t have any way to give it fake muscles – at least not without wasting a lot more time than we can afford – but the skeleton should at least help it stay upright. You’ll still have to move it by controlling its skin though, because the mana will be too far from your body,’ Percy said once he was done.

‘It’s better than before, but I’m not sure it can outrun a Green creature,’ Kassorith protested.

‘Not yet,’ Percy agreed.

Leaning over the puppet, he used his Adaptive Arsenal to draw lots of unit cells on the metallic bones. The clone’s husk was in the way of Percy’s domain and senses, so he kept things relatively simple by focusing on a bunch of amplified lightness enchantments fuelled by ambient mana gathering runes.

‘Well?’ he asked again.

Kassorith had the puppet slither around for a minute or two, testing its speed and agility.

‘It’s still slow, but we need to drag the cleansing formation around anyway, so I don’t think the clone will hold us back too much. The Green creatures can probably catch it after a relatively short chase, but that won’t be a problem if we get to it first. It only has to travel half the distance toward us,’ the Thess’kalan concluded.

Percy exhaled in relief, feeling a lot better about the plan. They had at least solved the issue with the puppet’s mobility, though there was one final problem: its limited senses. As things stood, Kassorith wouldn’t even know where the clone was going until it ended up in the belly of an infected beast.

‘We’ll have to cheat,’ Micky suggested.

‘Indeed,’ Percy begrudgingly admitted.

Over the next ten minutes, he gave the second clone the same treatment while fine-tuning the skeletal structure and the enchantments of both puppets to make them a little faster still. At the same time, Percy seized the opportunity to covertly slip a drop of his own spiritual blood inside each fake Thess’kalan, causing their senses to explode outwards.

The puppets’ unique vision was still inferior to his own, though it now included a faint thermal sense and Soul Vision. Percy felt the range of his Sage’s Pond increase by a few dozen metres in every direction as two new sources of information entered his mind.

The difference was negligible while the puppets were right next to his host, but the impact should grow by an order of magnitude or two once the clones moved to the edge of his vision.

‘It should be good enough for this.’ Percy sighed internally. ‘It’s a pity that I have to go to such lengths to conceal my blood though.’

The clones weren’t nearly as mobile or subtle as the crimson bugs that he could create out of just his spiritual blood. Kassorith’s discarded flesh only obstructed their senses and slowed them down massively, but it was the only way to prevent any observers from noticing something strange.

In theory, Percy’s spiritual blood should be indistinguishable from Kassorith’s, so nobody would be able to detect it. If someone asked why the puppets were more independent than they were supposed to be, he could blame it on his runes or the Thess’kalan’s bloodline again.

Happy with the results, Percy and his companions took off once more, dragging the cleansing formation behind them and sending the scaled puppets in opposite directions. The clones slithered along the metallic dunes until they reached the boundaries of the Sage’s Pond.

Or rather, the former boundaries.

Just like he had expected, the organic probes caused his secondary domain to stretch and expand in an atypical shape, broadening his reach by another kilometre in each direction. His host did admittedly have to fly about twenty percent more slowly for the clones to keep up, but they should still sweep through the desert much faster than before.

Unfortunately, the crafting and testing session had eaten up another hour, so Percy knew that they couldn’t afford to waste another second. Resuming their search, the trio lured one beast after another under the giant formation, cleansing them for ten points a pop.

Four hours later, a much faster avian beast nearly caught one of the puppets. Kassorith managed to reach and pin down the creature before the clone suffered more than a couple of lacerations on its scaled back, but it had been close.

From then on, Percy decided to pull the puppets a little closer so that he would have more time to react. That reduced his range slightly, but it was better than losing a clone and having to waste another fifteen or so minutes replacing it.

Part of him felt dumb for not trying this approach earlier.

If they’d upgraded their strategy a dozen hours sooner, they would have surpassed Falanor with plenty of time to spare. However, Percy had been too focused on beating Zurvanai and Remlat to harbour any ambitious thoughts of catching up to the blessed Ollorian.

Regardless, there was nothing more that he could do – besides pressing onwards at full speed and hoping that all of his tricks would be enough to close the gap.

Hours flew by one after another, until a bright yellow sun rose in the horizon once more, the golden sands shimmering dazzlingly under its blinding light. The amethyst emblem on Kassorith’s tunic also began blinking without warning, indicating that the competition was nearing its end.

The participants had probably spread pretty far by now, so the conclusion of the event wouldn’t necessarily coincide with the sunrise in this region. Still, Percy understood that he was almost out of time, so he worked with his companions to cleanse a few more beasts, even going so far as to risk the puppets more liberally now that they wouldn’t be needed for much longer.

About forty minutes later, the Thess’kalan was whisked out of the desert as suddenly as he had appeared, the trio finding themselves back on the metallic floor of the stadium.

Percy was about to check the score, eager to find out whether he and his companions had succeeded in the end, but he paused when he noticed that all the other participants were giving his host strange looks.

“What? Did you bastards think I was going to be happy with tenth place?”