The Legend of William Oh-Chapter 205: Progress

“This is godsdamned highway robbery is what it is! Do you have any idea how valuable this is even one floor up or down!?” Sammohan demanded, shaking a bag of sand in the merchant’s face.

“But you’re not one floor up or down.” The general store owner said, leaning on the bar separating the front from the back. “You’re on the tenth Floor, and unfortunately, we’re experiencing a food shortage. I could, however, give you a nice discount on rock salt.”

The merchant held up a bag of salt and shook it with a patronizing half-lidded stare.

“I sold you that rock salt!”

“Indeed.”

Just as the enormous miner looked like he was about to explode, Will swept in beside him.

“Sammohan, how you doing?”

The miner tensed, turning to face Will, his feral snarl retracted behind a gruff professionalism.

“Not well. All our food was stolen overnight, and this CUNT is trying to overcharge me to restock. I’m half-convinced he’s the one stole it and is trying to bleed me dry selling it back to me.”

“Let me show you something.” Will said, motioning for the general store owner to open up the divider.

Will escorted Sammohan into the storage area, where the general store owner’s stock-boy sat in a chair staring at the handful of sacks of flour and dried meats. Typically the owner wouldn’t allow Sammohan back there, but Will was good insurance against bad behavior.

“The thing that hit you hit the Stronghold too.” Will said, gesturing at the meager supplies, giving the miner plenty of time to take it in before Will escorted him back to the front of the shop.

“We’re barely limping by. If you want more pay for your finds right now you’re going to have to take them to another Floor.”

They both knew that if Sammohan went down a floor, it would be at least a month before he made it back, which cut on the time they could spend mining. He couldn’t send a delegate either, for fear of the haul getting stolen. He’d be seriously affected by lost time.

“How about you buy it from me?” Sammohan asked. “I know you’ve got plenty of food and cash in storage.”

“Not as much as you might think. I can’t just give you our emergency food.” Will said, frowning. “But…I can lend you some of my time. How about this? I store your haul in my vault until it can be sold downstream, and in the meantime, I take Badur out hunting with your guys to keep them fed?”

“What do you get out of it?” the massive miner asked.

“When your stuff is sold in the future, I’ll take five percent for storing it for you.”

Since the relative value of ore was crippled compared to food and supplies at the current moment, Will offering to delay the sale of the ore was essentially dodging the bottleneck.

Even taking a five percent cut, by waiting, Sammohan would come out far ahead of where he would if he tried to barter his product for supplies now.

Sammohan chewed his lip for a moment, then nodded.

“Alright.” The miner’s meaty hand closed down around Will’s and the deal was struck.

Will gave Sammohan the lowdown on recent events and how supplies had to be monitored constantly or else Attrition would get them, then they took Badur out for another round of hunting.

It was fun to get out with the rough-and-tumble crowd and do a little hunting and forestry to resupply the miners. They treated Badur fairly well even though he was a pencil-pusher. Despite being weak and sickly-looking, The man didn’t utter a word of complaint, and that made a world of difference in the eyes of the miners.

They spent the evening acquiring their supplies while Brianna loaded all their ores in Will’s vaults.

The minute Will got back, he got started on making a more potent version of the Homefield Advantage. Will added a handful of Homefield Advantages from his collection, along with one of his even-split stat-booster blank Relics, and a couple AOE boosters.

Amulet of the Homeland Advantage

+8 Strength

+8 Resistance

+8 Kinesthetics

+8 Acuity

+8 Focus

Active: 1 Charge.

Load a terrain into the Amulet for a charge, Summon that terrain around the wearer for another. This does not consume the terrain. Up to three terrains may be loaded into the amulet.

Area scales with Resistance

+40% area of Abilities.

There we go.

The stat boosts were great, but the real juice was the extra terrain storage and the fact that the area scaled with Resistance.

The forty percent boost to area was just a bonus to make the whole thing scale faster.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Now it should be able to make an area wide enough to catch the raid boss. Now I need to work on inventing a terrain that’ll catch it.

…how the Abyss am I supposed to do that?

Will went back to the slime. His only point of reference was the interaction between Attrition’s slime and his Ability to solidify terrain.

To that end, Will spent the next day locked in his freezing laboratory, carefully dissecting the miasmatic structures in an attempt to find some way to stall out Terrain Dive.

Will diced the miasma structure up and tried interlacing parts of it with other structures that he’d studied.

Add the terrain fishhook here, what does it do? Add the smaller squiggles onto the ends of other things, what does it do?

Will made a noxious gas, melted off one of his fingers, and made a boatload of nonsense that accomplished nothing, until he tacked the ‘terrain’ fishhook onto the end of a ‘air blast’ miasmatic structure that he’d stored a few months back.

Will liked to let Climbers pay for some of their supplies by demonstrating Abilities in his tower, and Will of course made sure to save any miasmatic structures that he possibly could.

Now, it wasn’t possible to blatantly copy an activated Ability, because a lot of the work happened inside the user’s body, and the effect that popped out fully formed was a work in motion, but Will had been able to preserve the image and use it as a reference to find something similar in a mutated plant that tended to explode.

Will extracted the miasmatic structure, then very carefully added the fishhook to the end of it.

The work was tiny and painstaking, carefully slicing off the end of one miasmatic structure and grafting it to another, so much so that Will had a wicked cramp in his hands and neck by the time he was done, but to the Uru drake’s eye, it appeared to be as perfect as it would get.

Will applied the slime effect to it, expecting it to be neutral, or to pass through at the very least.

BANG!

Instead the moment the two miasmatic structures touched, the concoction exploded violently outwards, shoving his hand away.

Will hissed and yanked back his hand, more out of habit than anything, given how often he melted or exploded his own hand.

…it’s fine?

Will glanced back at the vat of miasmatic structures. The liquid had rapidly calmed down after the rapid boil.

There was no heat or caustic energy…just gas? It definitely shoved my hand back, but it didn’t really hurt or anything.

Will frowned, peering into the vat, eyes widening as he spotted the edge of the steel container closest to the miasmatic structure.

A tiny section of the steel itself had bubbled like the foam on top of a beer.

Steel isn’t supposed to do that, Will thought, running his finger along the bubble-filled steel.

The water returned to normal because it was a liquid, but the steel stayed foamed up.

I wonder if that would slow the thing down if the terrain it was trying to swim through kept foaming and pushing back against it. Would it be able to get traction with nothing to push against, or would it be even faster? Or exactly the same?

And how would I make it so the ground would be the only thing that would foam up, and not the air?

I wish Loth was here. This would probably go a lot faster, Will thought, slumping down after cleaning up the mess. Probably would’ve caught the damn thing already.

Can’t wait until she passes through again. Will thought, smacking his cheeks and refocusing.

How do I infuse an entire terrain with miasma? My hands and feet do it just fine.

Will studied his hand, watching as the miasmatic structures shifted like strange internal organs inside his arm as he merely thought about solidifying the air.

Will grabbed a cylinder of air in front of himself, paying careful attention to how it moved.

It was lightning quick, such that Will nearly couldn’t see it’s progress.

There’s no difference. It seems to trigger the exact same way each time. Unless the change is in a place I can’t see.

Will paused, before going and grabbing a mirror and then staring at his own face.

Or rather, the incredibly complex network of miasmatic structures dancing around in his brain.

Will began clenching and unclenching his hand, solidifying a piece of air over and over, looking for some evidence of which one let him control Terrain.

It was far too complex for Will to even see much, but Will had a little cheat.

He created a Map of his head in his mind, as he looked at his own mind.

Having a roadmap of his on brain helped him focus on different parts, identifying where they were and what they were connected to. Will could manually fill in the parts that he could see using the map’s legend, but he still hadn’t found the right Sacrifice for the Map to see miasmatic structures.

After a few hours, he thought he might’ve located the right spot, but it was difficult to tell, and far too complex.

…no freaking way I can copy that, Will thought, inspecting the constantly fluctuating snarl of miasmatic structures. At least, not yet.

If I could actually see miasmatic structures on the brain, I could filter out the versions I don’t want. I could trim out the clutter of basic stats.

Will had already identified what Strength, Resistance, Kinesthetics, Acuity and Focus looked like. If he could strip them away from his map like he could with unnecessary terrain, he could…

The miasmatic structures in his brain fluctuated oddly for a moment, causing Will to frown. What is:

“ACHOOO!” Will sneezed, aiming away from the mirror.

Damn dry air, Will groused.

Well, that was certainly interesting, and an excellent example of how the Map could be helpful, but…anything in the brain is a total dead end right now. I need a much deeper understanding and much better tools before I could even hope to begin such an endeavor.

Especially because any modification of the Class inside his brain was risking exploding or melting his head, and Will was fairly certain there was no coming back from that.

Will glanced at his left hand.

Is there a way I could…

Will’s eyes widened.

What if I could modify the terrain post-hardening?

Will put his head down and got to work.

The Terrain dive had proved to him that Will’s solidified terrain could be interacted with. Why couldn’t it be modified?

How would that work?

Will found his answer in the venom of the same giant scorpion that he used for his tweezers. It’s venom rendered Climber’s Abilities dulled or muted entirely, disrupting their Class and Abilities.

The people hit with it usually died shortly afterwards, so the details of the poison weren’t common knowledge.

When Will applied the miasmatic structures to his own Terrain, the miasma holding everything tightly in place got viciously chopped up by the venom, corroding a large area in a matter of seconds and rendering it down to meaningless fragments of miasma that floated away in a matter of seconds.

Well, that’s interesting.

…would it be easier to just hit the raid boss with the venom and destroy its Abilities?

…would it still be a good Sacrifice afterwards?

Point.

“Now…how do I take advantage of this?”

“Maybe you can modify the venom to insert a bit of new miasmatic structure. We can also try and figure out why it doesn’t affect itself. That could lead somewhere. If we can figure it out and get that inked on your left hand, we might be able to make a wide-area modification to terrain already under your control.” Ghoul said, handing him another batch.

“WHEN DID YOU GET HERE!?” Will demanded.

“like, a day ago?” Ghoul said with a shrug. “Great stuff, by the way.”

“Is everybody still starving?” Will asked Anna through the voice-tube, his gaze landing on some sandwiches that had magically appeared on one of his cluttered tables.

“Technically, no.” Anna’s voice came back through the hole in the wall. “ We’re…surviving. They’re not…super happy about it, but I don’t think they’ll try anything with Ghoul here.”

“Still working on it. Thanks for the sandwiches and sending Ghoul up.” Will could only imagine how much of a luxury bread was right now.

“You’re welcome!” Anna’s cheery voice called.

“I need to make another one of these,” Will muttered, touching the amulet that prevented him from suffocating.

Having an extra pair of hands might help stop him from losing time like that again.