Keron
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Chapter 175 - Cliff Carving
🕑 Added 2025-04-25 17:00:38 +0000 UTCThe sun peeks over the south-eastern horizon behind Emily and Pod, chasing away the night and bathing the sprawling sand and grass on either side of them with light. The dry air gains a salty tang as they run through the early-morning light, and the faint sound of crashing waves grows closer until it's loud enough to fill the air.
A tint of blue creeps over the horizon, but it’s not until they drive their heels in and come to a grinding halt at the edge of a looming cliff that they get an unhindered view of the rolling ocean.
“Woah,” Pod exclaims in awe, leaning out to peer down the sheer rockface at the jagged rocks and white-water hundreds of metres below. “This is where we’re setting up?”
“Yep,” Emily confirms with a nod, scanning her gaze over the cliffs and rapidly adding the location’s details into the designs for her base.
She spots a few wild beasts breaching the surf and struggling against each other, but she barely pays them any attention as she focuses on her magical senses, reaching out feelers into the cliff face. She doesn’t find the thrumming pulse she’s looking for immediately, but she does feel a faint call from far below.
“Wait here,” Emily instructs before stepping over the edge and plummeting towards the rocks below.
Her range of magical influence drops with her, allowing her to get closer and closer to the source.
Almost.
Runes flood from her skin and form into the twisting magic circle of Air Walk, catching her only a few metres from the churning water’s surface.
There!
Her senses brush against a powerful, beating pulse of magic running through the rock tens of metres below the surface.
If I create a central gathering array there and connect it to a heating chamber above… Add some intake vents with some wheels for extra kinetic generation… I can recycle some of the residual mana from that to heat a working room here…
Emily takes a few steps back, her cortex buzzing with ideas as her eyes flicker over the exposed cliff face, observing the layered composites of different rock types formed into a beautiful mosaic of black and grey.
After a few minutes, she kicks off the nearby surf, shooting back up to land on the cliffs beside Pod.
“I found the mana vein, but it’s deep beneath the cliff,” she says, pouring out mana to form into a several-metre magic circle for a modified form of Earthen Detection.
The spell sends out several pulses of earthen mana, which return a dense feed of data from the ground.
“We’ll reinforce the upper layers so I can cut away a space to use as our workshop while we expand. Here, take these and deploy them a few hundred metres back from the edge.”
Emily tosses Pod four prepared anchors, thick arm-sized pikes of metal with several earth crystals in their cores and runes coating their surfaces.
As he turns and scrambles away to drive the spikes into the ground for her, two in the sand and two in the dirt, Emily steps back out into thin air, floating away from the cliff. She lowers herself to midway down the wall before drawing a few more anchors from her belt and driving one into the rock.
It sinks into the stone with surprising ease until only a fist worth of material is left above the surface, where it locks into place and begins seeping earthen mana into the ground.
She moves along the sheer face, driving in several more anchors before returning to their perch on the edge to scan the rock again.
Podrick jogs back over, his speed still boosted by the slowly fading winds wrapped around his legs, as Emily nods in satisfaction.
“That should be enough for now, but they’ll need ten minutes to finish connecting,” she says, dropping down to sit with her legs hanging over the edge as her plans are torn apart and rebuilt over and over again in her cortex, refining her future workspace.
Pod drops down beside her, swinging his bag into his lap and pulling out a small, portable crystal-lit stove. Emily hands him the amerax meat she strained while making their speed charms without moving her gaze from the horizon, and he carefully splits it into strips before frying them up in a prepared blend of spices and oil.
They eat their breakfast in silence, and by the time Emily wipes the dirty pan clean with a spell, the anchors have finished their work.
“I’m going to start cutting material away from the cliff face,” she says, untying the empty drawstring pouches tied to her belt and placing them in Pod’s lap. “Separate and store anything I move up here into these for now. It’ll mostly be stone, but I have a use for it later.”
He nods as Emily pushes herself over the edge of the cliff, dropping halfway down before she stops herself this time. She turns to the flat stone surface and opens her virtual notebook, overlaying her factory designs onto the world before her and tracing the shimmering boundary visible only to her, marking where the first workshop should go.
She floats to one of the rectangular slot’s corners and raises both hands, pouring out a steady stream of mana to form into a glistening silver magic circle. The dense mana gathers in the centre of the spell, twisting and solidifying into a sleek metal pike two arms long.
Emily draws her left arm back as the magic circle disperses, leaving enough mana in the conjured construct to keep it active for ten minutes. Two more magic circles spin to life around her, one earth-based spell wrapping the length of the metal pike while a twisting matrix of air runes curls around her metal muscles.
She takes a breath and thrusts her arm forward, driving her palm into the base of the spike as both magic circles pulse in sync with the hit. An intense vibration starts in her shoulder, sending an unpleasant rumbling through her flesh before it moves down into her mechanical arm. It shoots into the connected spike as its tip starts to cut through the stone wall, growing in intensity as it moves across its length.
The moment the vibrations reach the tip of the spike, the earthen magic circle wrapping it bursts, and the spike vanishes into the cliff, carving a deep hole and causing the rockface to shake enough to dislodge several chunks of stone, sending them tumbling into the choppy surf below.
Emily nods in satisfaction, feeling the metal rod sitting in the earth over a hundred metres away, undamaged. She moves down to the next closest corner of the rectangular window and repeats the process, burying another rod in the cliff.
The shaking is a little worse this time, with visible cracks forming from the two narrow holes and working their way across the exposed rockface to connect. As planned, not a single crack appears outside her intended work area.
The third spike widens the cracks, and the fourth starts a deep rumbling reminiscent of an approaching sandworm.
“Shit!” Emily hears Pod cry faintly from above as a large, overhanging shelf of the cliff shears off and drops towards her.
She raises her hands, releasing a flood of raw, earth-attributed mana to cushion the falling mass. It takes over two thousand points, almost as much as it cost to form and bury her excavation markers, but she kills its momentum and slowly pushes it back up to land on solid ground beside Pod.
“Well, that was inefficient,” she mutters in dissatisfaction, turning her attention back to the slot she’s attempting to cut from the cliff.
Emily places a hand to the stone, tracing her fingers along the faint cracks as she casts Earthen Detection again to check on the structural damage she has dealt so far.
A few microfractures appear to have spread outside the intended cutting area halfway through… those anchors on the surface weren’t enough to control it fully. I’ll have to reinforce the walls a bit more as I go, but I should have enough mana to do this in one go.
She moves to the centre of the damaged area, trailing her hand along the cracks as she steps across thin air. She plants her feet and draws her left arm back again, leaving her right pressed against the wall.
She shuts her eyes, releasing another wave of earthen mana that stretches to the edge of her active control over a hundred metres away. The energy spreads out, seeping into the rock surrounding her working area without a fancy spell to control it, reinforcing the earth with her iron will.
A twisting brown magic circle forms around her cocked left arm, with sparkling flecks of green streaking through the densely packed runes.
Emily takes a sharp breath before slamming her fist home into the wall.
The cliff shakes, drawing another cry from Pod far above, but nothing else falls on her. The wall craters inwards as the hair-thin cracks are torn open, widening to the width of up to a finger in places.
Chunks of stone fall away around her, but Emily doesn’t pay the small loss of material any mind as her gaze settles on her left bicep. The skin around her arm’s connecting cuff is torn and bleeding, with several strips of muscle visibly disconnected from the bone.
“Shit,” she mutters with a frown, using her right hand to wrap the wound with Bandage. “I need to control that impact better. This spell’s brutal.”
Ignoring her injury, Emily turns her gaze back to the hollowed-out wall. She steps into the cavity, standing on a thin ledge of rock and casting Earthen Detection again.
The scan reveals that the serious damage only spreads a dozen metres into the rock, with the majority of her marked space still tightly bound together by the weight of the earth above it.
Five more hits should do it. I’ll need to start moving rubble after two more though.
She draws back her fist again and continues casting Tremoring Blow, this time taking care to weave an extra layer of protection into the spell, blocking the intense vibrations it generates from leaving her mechanical limb.
Her alloy knuckles impact the cracked wall, pulverising the stone as they hit and sending another echoing shockwave through the rubble before her and into the rock behind, growing the opening again.
Her bicep complains with a jolt of pain but, other than slowing her healing a bit, the backlash has no effect.
Emily drives her fist into the wall a third time, once again pouring thousands of points worth of mana into a controlled vibration humming through the ground.
The rock before her turns to dust, and she steps back to survey the damage, ignoring the slight feeling of exertion caused by emptying half of her mana reserve so quickly.
A quarter of that hit was wasted creating useless dust.
She turns to face the ocean, pausing for a moment to admire the rolling view of nothing but water and sky stretching across the horizon before she steps out and kicks off the air, propelling herself back up towards Pod.
He’s hard at work despite the tremors, driving metal wedges into a hunk of stone with a sledgehammer, breaking off chunks of rock big enough to fit through the wide mouths of the pouches she gave him.
“I should have made an explosive hammer, not a spear,” he complains with a grunt as she lands beside him, gritting his teeth and swinging the hammer over his head.
“You can still make one if you want,” Emily says, reaching out with her right hand to take the hammer from his grip after his swing lands. “We’re going to have a lot of material to move.”
He watches with a frown as she lifts the hefty hammer in one hand before slamming it down on the large rock, shattering it into big pieces with brute strength alone.
“Well, that’s just not fair,” Pod grumbles, moving to pick up the fragmented stones before Emily sweeps them into his bags with a wave of spatial mana.
“As much as I’d like to do that for all of it, I barely have enough mana to finish the excavation right now,” Emily explains, gesturing towards the cliff’s edge with her head. “Come on, I need help down there.”
Pod follows her to the edge, reaching over his shoulder into his bag to dig around for one of his creations. Emily notices and chooses not to help him, stepping over the edge and falling back down to the skeleton of her workshop.
She looks up after landing and sees Pod jamming a metal anchor between two large rocks jutting over the edge of the cliff. He clips the end of his recently created ascender to a metal loop at his waist before looking down and making eye contact with her.
With a deep breath and a confident grin, Pod leaps into the air, pressing one of the buttons on the mechanical gearbox attached to him and pouring machina into it. His cable extends with a whir, letting him skip down the rock face towards her while letting out excited yips each time he kicks off to swing through the open air.
“That was amazing!” he cheers happily as he touches down beside her.
He starts to absent-mindedly tug on his cable, trying to dislodge his anchor, while observing the wide slot cut into the cliff, filled with loose stone.
“Leave that,” Emily says, reaching over and unclipping his ascender from him, leaving it hanging loosely from the cable fixed above them. “You can use it if you want to go up later.”
“Okay,” Pod nods, staring at rubble-filled crater formed by Emily’s fist. “You want me to start cleaning this?”
“Yep. It should be broken up enough for you to store everything within at least ten metres. After that, you’ll probably need to start breaking things up a bit more.”
“Got it.”
The boy immediately starts pulling chunks of rock from the wall, inspecting them before dropping them into the appropriate storage pouch.
“I’m going deeper,” Emily lets him know.
She lifts her hands and pours out spatial mana, pushing the purple mist into the cracks in the wall and forming it into a narrow corridor tunnelling through the loose earth. Once the mist reaches hard-packed rock again, she retracts it, pulling a wave of rubble into her belt in one go, taking another hefty chunk from her mana reserves.
I should make some machines or focused spells to help with excavation. The mana vein should help here, but this is burning way too much power.
A few more tasks are added to her mental backlog as she vanishes into the narrow tunnel, lit only by the glowing mana seeping from her skin before spreading out to reinforce the growing cave’s walls.
