Chapter 7-190 - Cheapskates (1/2)
“Which naturally translates to?” I went along agreeably.
“You’re cheap?” Sama piped up cheerfully, then looked at Clavus and that bright red Luan Core sitting atop it, worth mucho dinero. “Okay, greedy?”
“I prefer thrifty and acutely aware of the monetary requirements of my chosen career,” I replied loftily, and they both guffawed. “Given such a well-established monetary habit, exactly how likely do you think it is that I’d actually dump forty goldweight down the drain just to make two Walls of Icefire Permanent?”
That narrowed the eyes of both of them. “Okay, you’re doing something clever... and thrifty,” Briggs added nicely. “So, what did we miss?”
“Do you think I’d blow forty goldweight on something I couldn’t pick up and take with me?”
They both gaped, then turned their heads skywards and muttered something about spellcasters too smart for their shorts or something. “What did we miss from way over here?” Sama asked with a sigh.
“That’s two Icefire Walls... anchored to the top of Shaped stone rods buried in the ground. Sama could trundle over there, pick them up, and say, put one rod over there, and one here, with the flames facing the lava.”
“It’ll freeze the stone solid and create a bridge in seconds!” Sama stated, blue eyes lighting up with a feral light that promised bad things to some people. The Sword playing at dagger-hood behind her began to chime in a certain ominous two-tone nobody with sense wanted to be the target of.
Never said Cultivators had any sense. Challenging the heavens was much safer than challenging Sama!
“And look at all the nervous nellies who’ll still be constrained on the far side while a couple goober no-magic Forsaken smash shooty-shoot holes in their little pyrotechnic show’s finale.”
Whatever Hagchildren had, being non-expressive wasn’t part of it. Her smile was wide enough to qualify as comic horror as she burst out cackling, and pretty much everyone felt something going down their spines, even if they were immune to fear.
Yeah, she’d been hacking on crap for basically a day straight, and when she wasn’t, she was butchering it, and she was still ready and eager for a whole lot more.
Just like everybody from the game back on Terra-Luna...
“We’re gonna need another half-hour at least to clean this place up,” Briggs spoke up before Sama bolted across the lava. “What’s the degradation of the Dome looking like?”
“Two hours,” I said calmly.
Gold glowed over Sama’s hands, turning her fingers into Vajra-buttressed knives. “Time to demonstrate proper butchering technique from the Sage of Swords!” Sama announced to no one in particular, and darted off to get the necessary but boring part of today’s regularly scheduled gory entertainment completed.
Briggs hmphed and went to do the same. Endure was pretty good at being a faux axe and splitting skulls open to make it easy to get at their Cores... although we were also saving a lot of said skulls to make Baneskulls out of them. If they had the beasts here, then they certainly had a lot more of them out in the Orient by now...
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It’s remarkable how much you can fit in a Widen II’dTapestry, 20x20x10, when you have custom crates and square jugs to pack everything nice and tight and keep it organized.
You can fit even more in a bunch of them, and then you can fold them all up pretty easily.
A whole lot more goldweight was stacked up and reduced to an image on some fairly large sheets of cloth I’d had my Allegiance acquire ahead of time (sailcloth, mostly).
When all was said and done, Sama did indeed take off across the lava pool, ignoring a couple thousand degrees of temperature, maybe more with the Fire Qi laboring in the air.
Her speed raised a wake like an arrow, but there was no way the Cultivators could see her to anticipate what she was doing, and so maybe stop her somehow. We all sat and watched her zip across lava that could melt iron (in her bare feet, no less), hit the black magma at the far side, and zip right on up to the end point of one of the encircling Icefire Walls.
I had good eyes, and even with the distortion, saw her hiss when she got too close to the cold flames, glancing at me across the lava in annoyance, to which I just smirked. She dug out the short-capped rod in the stone I’d Shaped up when I’d made the Walls, pulled it up and turned it over, and with the bottom of the Wall anchored to the lower side now, zipped around the Dome, the Wall naturally shortening as she did so.
They had some people up on their picturesque little walls, who naturally yelped in surprise when they saw the burning blue flames suddenly going away on one side of their defensive Formation. They didn’t see what was causing it before the icy fires were down to a narrow sliver of cold between the two rods, and she zipped over towards the lava lake with both rods in one hand.
The Dome over there sort of stabilized, although it was kind of wobbly. It didn’t stop the degradation, just slow it down. She plopped one of the rods down on the ground over there, and held the other one behind her, anchoring end down, as she zipped back across the lava at a speed to annoy any cheetahs looking on.
The supernatural cold of the icefire blackened the lava instantly, and within seconds it was starting to solidify behind her. When she reached us, she skidded up to the edge of the lava, set the rod down, and a two-hundred-meter line of blue fire, the cold-burning side down, was raising great swathes of mist as it warred with the heat coming up from below. Black rock was spreading out to either side of the sideways Wall, bubbling and rippling with the conflicting temperatures, sizzling and competing audibly.
“Am I wrong in thinking that your Wall might eventually cool the whole caldera?” Briggs mused.
“It’d just be putting a cap on a pressure cooker. Not a good idea,” I answered, and he inclined his head in agreement. Mt. St. Helens had been a thing not too awful far from here. Permanent did have a time limit, we just weren’t sure what it was. Tying it to an anchor also meant that if the anchors were ruined, the spell would still collapse. Needs must and all that!
Mass Resist Cold was more than sufficient to allow everyone to walk on the super-cooled rock... or trot, as the case might be. Sama held the second rod, skating ahead of everyone as we advanced over the searing-cold pathway that was steaming with restrained mist, safe on Disks that could repel above the stone, regardless of how unstable it was in reality.