Chapter 10 - Production Line

Accrued Mana applied to Primary Class.
Level up…
Level up…

Stats adjusted: +4 Dexterity, +2 Endurance, +4 Intellect, +4 Creativity, +2 Perception, +4 Mana Reserve, +10 Free Stats

Skills Available! Please Select 1* Skills.
Class Skill Options:

Improved Mana Reserve (Rare)
Spells and Skills. Most require mana and so the measure of a researcher, a mage, a warrior, is how much mana they can wield and how long they can last. For those lucky few, this Skill increases the user's Mana Reserve by 5%. Increases by 0.5% per Skill Level.

Runic Intent (Epic)
Basic runes create basic effects. This issue can be handled by increasingly complex and convoluted runes. But why go through all that effort when you have the capability to command the mana itself within your runes? Why create complexity when you can indulge the simplicity of telling your rune what you want it to do? Runic Intent allows the user to impart intent into the mana they channel to their runes. Number of intents able to be imparted is equal to Intellect / 10. Strength of Intent increases with Skill Level.

Improved Magic Power (Rare)
A Spell is only as powerful as the strength of one’s mana. With enough Magic Power one can turn a gentle rain into a slicing storm or a campfire into a blaze hot enough to melt stone. For those lucky few, this Skill increases the user's Magic Power by 5%. Increases by 0.5% per Skill Level.

Runic Replication (Rare)
Runecrafter’s need to create tens of thousands of runes in their lifetime. The easiest way to do this is copy a rune you’ve already created. Runic Replication allows the user to spend mana to replicate an already created rune. Time and mana cost is based on Intellect, Skill Level and the quality of the rune being replicated.

Runic Modification (Epic)
Sometimes you create your rune and its structure is not fit for purpose. Happens to the very best. This skill allows the user to spend mana to make modifications to a completed rune. Changes made cost mana with the cost based on Intellect, Creativity, Skill Level and the extent of the modifications desired.

Nate’s grin stretched from ear to ear, and he rubbed at his face, smearing more charcoal over it. He knew he looked like a kid that had gotten loose with a permanent marker, but that couldn’t dull the joy he felt. He had another ten Free Stats to invest, and he’d already made a promise to himself. He wasn’t worried about Endurance for the time being, but he had noted that his Magic Control was limiting his ability to control the mana when extracted from the mana gems. His Mana Reserve was growing, now at twenty one, but his Mana Absorption still hung at a lowly twelve. With that in mind he invested six into Magic Control and four into Mana Absorption, bringing them both to sixteen.

With that out of the way he looked through his Skill options. He only got one Skill this time. Two were ones he’d seen before. Runic Modification and Runic Replication. Glancing over the other three, it was easy to see that two of them were direct increases to his stats. Five percent seemed like a decent bonus if he had more stats to work with, especially considering it looked like it could grow to more than double that by the tenth level, but that didn’t matter as it couldn’t hold a candle to the final Skill.

Runic Intent solved a problem that Nate had been lamenting for the past couple of days. How to guide his Runes without overcomplicating them. Even these Constructs had seemed to have minimal runes on them, yet had functioned above and beyond what the runes alone would’ve made them capable of. Now Nate knew he could do the same. Without a second thought he sent his choice to The System, bringing up his sheet a moment later.

Nate looked down at the piece of wood he held in his hand. Carefully, he drew on some of his mana and activated the new Skill. With Runic Intent he focused on two things. The shape of the Barrier and the distance it was from the rune. Up until now it had been like a half sphere that started almost a metre away from the rune. That had made sense to Nate. The Barrier was roughly two metres in diameter, so it was a metre up, down, left & right and started a metre from the rune. Very consistent. But he wanted it to be rectangular, flat, and start about ten centimetres from the rune. As his mana, guided by his Skill, touched the rune, he could feel the Barrier shift until it resembled exactly what he had imagined. This is a gamechanger, he thought. Attempting to expand the barrier's size, he quickly found it wouldn’t go wider than about two metres. That must’ve been what it meant about strength of intent as a limiting factor. With his newly improved Barrier rune Nate was eager to experiment, but first he had a room to explore.

Now that he was closer, he could see the garden below was a tangle of plants and what he suspected were weeds growing in the red soil. Nothing of use was there except for maybe some more wood for his runes. Of course, that wasn’t the most interesting thing in the room. He’d noticed them when he came in to lure out the third Construct. The antechamber had three doors leading out of it, each on one side of the room. Decorating each door was a mosaic.

Starting on the left of the room, Nate took in the story the mosaic told. It contained people, like the statues he’d seen in the corridors if the third eye was anything to go by, toiling in fields beneath an image of what he assumed was this temple. In the fields interspersed among the people were clearly constructs like the ones he’d just fought. It seemed that these people had used constructs to assist them with their manual labour.

Moving around to the next door, the mosaic decorating this door showed the temple again, larger this time. The people were kneeling as though in worship before two images. The first looked like one of the people from the statues but with an elaborate headdress. It was hard to tell, but Nate thought the headdress might’ve been made up of horns and feathers. Next to it, separated by a large white diamond-shaped stone was a construct, far more detailed than the field constructs, wearing the same elaborate headdress and surrounded by red and white stones like a starburst.

Nate walked around to the final door and the last mosaic. This one depicted an image of violence, with constructs standing over clearly bleeding or dead people, the elaborate construct with its headdress standing on the temple holding a white sceptre with the entire background done in black, grey and red.

The story was pretty clear to Nate. The people who had once inhabited this temple had delved into the use of constructs to assist them in their daily lives. They had then progressed to making some sort of special or advanced construct, which had ultimately turned on them and led to their downfall. It was just like the fears people had of artificial intelligence back on Earth. If he was understanding the mosaics correctly, he could expect to find more constructs as he explored this place.

Shrugging, Nate pushed against the door with the mosaic depicting the violent end to the people. It wouldn’t budge, and he frowned before walking back around the room and trying the second door he’d looked at. That one held fast as well, and with a sinking feeling he returned to the first door, with the people tilling fields with their constructs. That one wouldn’t budge either.

Am I just too weak or is there more to this? He roved his eyes over the mosaic, focusing on the temple first, then the constructs and finally the field when he spotted what he was after. There were four missing tiles for the field. Small ones, depicting some sort of melon, if the rest of the field was anything to go by. Four? Nate smirked and walked back to where the last construct had fallen to stone and dust. Rifling through it, he found what he was after, a slightly rounded green tile.

A pretty basic puzzle, but if it continues, it means I need to do one door at a time, he thought. Thinking about how he could prepare, he figured another rune just in case they’re not constructs this time was his best bet. Didn’t want to go in there expecting slow constructs and get run down by a cat. Nate gathered up the four mosaic tiles from the remains of the constructs before moving into the small garden to find some dead wood he could turn into a rune. Quickly drawing the Earthen Projectile Rune he had seen, it took the rest of the mana in his yellow mana gem to raise the wood to epic quality. The System immediately pinged him with a message which he quickly dismissed.

Congratulations on creating an Earthen Projectile Rune (Journeyman Quality).
Your achievement has been recorded.

Runic Knowledge Level 2 > 3
Improve Material Level 1 > 2

Walk your Path. Reach your Goal. Become One with Mana.

Putting the yellow mana gem into his storage, he pulled out a blue one that was still full and tested out his new rune weapon. Sending blasts of stone down into the mess of a garden was surprisingly satisfying, the impacts creating a loud thump on contact and exploding the red dirt into the air. Nate lamented his twenty-eight Intelligence which was restricting him to two Runic Intents. He could only pick two from shaping the projectile, altering its speed, altering the direction released, and altering its density. He wanted all four so he could blast holes into these constructs with their own weapon. After another round of testing, he was satisfied and accepted he’d just have to aim for the constructs joints for now and then use his mana exclusion rune to finish them off once they were disabled.

Walking toward the door, Nate dug into his hoodie pocket, which had been slowly becoming more and more filthy as it accumulated dirt, sweat, and tears. Pulling out the four green stones for the mosaic, Nate carefully pressed them into the missing slots on the image. As the last one slid into place, the doors groaned and shook, dust falling to the floor as they slowly swung inwards without a sound. Beyond the door lay an enclosed corridor that stretched for about a hundred metres.

From this distance Nate couldn’t tell if it had alcoves or which way it turned. Taking his time, with his barrier in front of him as he held the rune with his left hand, his right hand wrapped around his earthen projectile rune, he crept down the corridor. As he did so, he found no traps. He was beginning to wonder if he was being paranoid. Dungeons had traps. That was a thing.

Shrugging to himself, he got closer to the end of the hallway and could see it turned right. Sneaking up to the corner, he peeked his head around. After the turn, it opened up quickly into a huge room, easily covering most of the distance he’d just walked. The room was open air, much like the antechamber, with heat billowing out of it. The room looked kind of like some sort of weird reimagining of a production line. He could see multiple kilns with fires roaring inside them, interspersed with work tables made of stone that had small mana gems on them. The gem stones looked much like the ones he’d collected from the constructs he’d defeated, which sat alongside what he assumed were the pieces of more constructs. Each workbench was manned by a construct, though they seemed to be moving relatively slowly.

Nate did a quick count. With a workbench, kiln and construct roughly every ten metres and then one on either side of the room, he ended up counting twenty of the setups. At the far end of the room was a bigger construct. Even with his enhanced perception it was hard to make out, but it looked like it had its own workbench without a kiln.

Just to make sure, Nate triggered Identification and got back the expected response of Earthen Mana Construct. He’d wondered if he would get a different result, as it was clear these constructs had something akin to working fingers on their hands. A necessity, he supposed, for doing more intricate work. He tried Identification on the larger construct at the end of the room but got no response. So, it has a distance limit. I wonder if perception impacts that at all, or maybe it is just linked to Skill Level. Suppose I will just have to remember to test it in the future. As he continued to observe the room, he watched as one of the constructs being built was finished. It climbed off the workbench and walked down to the end of the room before climbing onto the workbench of the larger construct. The whole thing took over a minute at the constructs slow and awkward walk.

He continued to watch, remaining patient and was rewarded when the construct got off the bench a little while later, before it walked over towards a door he hadn’t noticed in the far corner. As it approached, the door swung open letting it through, before closing with a resounding and very metallic bang. Well, that’s not good. If these things are making more of themselves, and I am guessing rightly that that door leads to the next room, I really hope they haven’t been building for long. Else I am going to be facing an actual army of these bastards.

He moved back from the entrance a little and sat down to think. It was clear he couldn’t delay too long. The longer he delayed the more of those constructs would be created and the harder the second room would become. On the other hand, was what he had enough to handle that many constructs? Twenty he thought. Twenty plus whatever the big one was. Some kind of boss construct he imagined. If this was anything like the kind of dungeons they had in games back on Earth then he would need to defeat that one to be able to access the next room. Probably more mosaic pieces, he thought with a wry grin on his face.

Swallowing, he took a moment. He knew why he was sitting here rather than acting. He was afraid. The previous constructs had only activated when they could see him. Like some sort of detection ability. Probably a rune, he thought. That had made it easy to lure them out one at a time. But these constructs were all already active which meant they’d likely come at him en masse. Even if he lured them into the hallway so they were blocking each other, they’d likely be able to come at him three abreast.

Leaning his head back against the wall he thought through his plan to try and calm himself enough to act. The best way to start was to try and shoot from the door at the closest constructs. If he could disable them, then maybe he could work his way down the room. Otherwise, he’d have to fall back. Way back. A fighting retreat as he tried to disable them.

Nate sighed as he sat there. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was the best he had without giving these things more time to create more of themselves. He laughed a little. Sent to a world with magic and he ended up fighting self-replicating machines. Life just got weirder and weirder. It was time to get to work. Nate stood, squared his shoulders, swallowed the saliva in his mouth and prepared himself for a long battle.