Chapter 1155 (2/2)

Randidly seemed embarrassed and scratched his cheek. “...I don’t know how to make an absorption array powerful enough to be helpful.”

“Ha! You are kinda a bad Heretic, aren’t you? Modified absorption arrays are generally the way most people start down the Path of the Heretic. But then again, you never were one to take the easy Path…” Vualla walked to Randidly’s side and began to use one of the long metal fingers of her gauntlet to rapidly draw a series of runic sigils in the dirt beside them.

Halfway through, Vualla paused. That cannot be right, right? You would waste so much overflow this way. Better to add an intermediary array too so that the tree doesn’t get overwhelmed by the pressure… Mirrored stabilization around the core… how much energy can plants absorb, anyway…?

For several minutes, Vualla got lost in the minutia of crafting the array. Not only had she studied the subject extensively as a child, but Vualla had gathered quite a lot of practical experience in energy utilization since arriving at the frontlines. It was only due to those tricks that she had survived. And she brought all of her experience to bear as she studiously crafted the array.

There obviously had to be a wider containment area with all the changes to the interior of the array, and then a mechanism that gathered all the energy in the containment area and provided it to the tree. The delivery could be more wholistic, just based on the principles of energy singularities, yet that would mean that it would rely primarily on Randidly maintaining the proper energy density to control its output.

Chewing the inside of her cheek, Vualla continually revised her exact plans for that mechanism. If I make to antagonistic flows of energy and run them against each other, the pressure should refine the energy into a more consumable form. The only problem is how volatile the energy will then become… maybe a core array that is also powered directly by Randidly or I? After all, we both have the energy to spare- this isn’t supposed to be a broken Heretical array-

Vualla froze as she realized that Randidly had been silent for some time. She hurriedly cast her mind back and realized that she had been working furiously for several minutes. Coughing, she finished off a few details and took a step back from the fully three meters of array runes that she had hastily sketched out. “Yes… well. Something like this would probably suit your needs…”

Vualla coughed again into her hand when Randidly regarded her intently for several seconds. Then he looked down at the arrays with gleaming eyes. “Vualla, you… you truly are a genius. I’ve done a little with energy transformations, but compared to that… man, my work was rough.”

Feeling somewhat embarrassed, Vualla shrugged. “I haven’t had much of a chance to work with runes since coming to the frontlines… but most of what I studied when I was home was Engraving and Aether Mechanisms. Although they are put into practice differently when it is internal, the same sort of principles apply to how you utilize energy. So it ended up being pretty relevant to how to fight, especially once my images became strong enough to matter.”

Grinning at Vualla, Randidly rapidly began to sketch out the array that Vualla had outlined around his tree. There were a few times that Vualla forced her mouth to open and correct the shapes that Randidly was drawing, but she was inwardly very impressed by how even his Mana distribution was.

In Vualla’s experience, Mana was much harder to manage than Aether when making these sort of Engravings, so to see his smooth movements was an eye opening experience. And utilizing Mana as the base for the array would draw a lot less suspicion from the System.

After working together for a few minutes, the array was completed and hummed to life. Then Vualla received her second shock as she watched Randidly absolutely dump energy into the array in order to fuel the growth of the tree. Which resulted in her third shock, as Vualla could see that while the tree was now growing quite a bit faster, it wasn’t that much faster.

“What the hell is this tree that it requires so much energy to grow?” Vualla asked in wonder.

Randidly looked at her, and then, of all things, he blushed. “It’s… a gift. But I had to do a few work arounds to get near to the flavor I wanted, so… it’s a bit complicated.”

Still, Vualla could quickly realize why Randidly was so embarrassed. As the three grew, she immediately recognized the stubby trunks and the spade-like leaves. After another minute, the first small fruits began to grow out of the branches. And to Vualla’s shock, the speed of growth slowed to an absolute crawl as soon as the fruits appeared.

Randidly shook his head rather helplessly. “Yea, this is the hard part. I didn’t really how much energy making the fruit into trees and then trying to harvest more fruit would take…”

Vualla just watched silently. Because she knew what this was; Randidly was growing oranges to pay her back for the entire flask that he had devoured. Which made Vualla’s eyelid twitch to remember, but her heart softened as she saw how earnestly he poured his energy into the creation of these fruits.

It’s not like it would be a problem for Eliot to get me another, but for him to make me some himself… Vualla’s heart fluttered.

Then it started to beat rapidly as she began to pay more attention to the amount of energy that Randidly was casually pumping out into array. And from the relaxed expression on his face, he wasn’t nearing his limit.

“Uh, Randidly,” Vualla finally said. “Are you… sure you aren’t a Heretic? That’s… a lot of energy. Like a ridiculous amount of very pure energy.”

Randidly, the smug bastard, actually had the gall to chuckle.