Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 210: Know Your Enemy

Turns out, kiting the gorm wasn’t hard when you had access to Tinker-enhanced cargo planes that could keep running indefinitely.

The cargo plane was because Perry needed some space to stretch his legs and set up his lab. The soundproofing was excellent and the autopilot advanced, so Perry only really felt a bit of turbulence every now and then.

So far, no evidence that the gorm could fly, which was actually worrisome.

If they could fly, Perry could rest assured simply by outpacing them, but they must’ve taken the floating castles down some other way.

And he didn’t know if his plane was immune to that or not.

The others? They were in the capital working on the portal…to the extent that they could.

Sadly, run-of-the-mill combat mages didn’t have the level of theoretical knowledge it required to repair and then improve the most advanced ritual spell that Manita had ever created…for some reason.

Lack of education in adults these days.

He had them cleaning up debris, hunting ingredients, casting restoration spells. Setting the stage for Perry, who was working on the fine details through his suits via remote control while his plane drew a pattern around the main continent that drew the locals away from the capital.

Once everything was ready, he could show up in person ahead of the gorm, flip a switch to activate Spendthrift, and hop back to Earth.

Charles was still with him, though.

Perry was keeping that guy close at hand. He wasn’t as concerned about the others abandoning them should they luck out and finish the portal early.

If Perry’s new minions came back to Earth without either of them, then nobody would be able to protect them from Marigold. They understood the stakes.

In the meantime, Perry had made huge strides reverse-engineering the counterspelling equipment his drones had dredged out of the ocean, along with the time dilation spell that had been built into the facility.

Turns out time dilation leans heavily on an artificial membrane that resolves the conflict between the two time zones.

Big step forward for Perry’s Haste spell.

The days were rolling by, and they were making good progress repairing the capital, when Perry discovered why all the floating castles failed.

Perry was drying his hands off on the way out of the bathroom when he stepped into the main hull of his oversized cargo plan, and froze.

There was a scintillating whorl of distorted light dominating the space of his laboratory.

Okay, so they teleport, or…perhaps quantum tunneling? Getting places they’re not supposed to be?

If they teleported on purpose, Perry would have been torn to shreds in the first few minutes of the chase. This was something else.

And…it looks like we’re running out of time to think about it.

“ChArLes!” Perry said, his voice Igniting to slide prehensile as it wrapped around the cosmos.

What is word? Field Disappearing Vocab or…rewire strong meat-connection? “AMBULATE!!”

Thankfully, leg meat-connection worked fine.

Perry bolted away like a startled deer.

The whorl of distorted light lunged after him, and Perry watched as the surrounding lab equipment warped and twisted, shifting like living things as the creature swept by it.

The…thing wobbling at the top of Perry’s torso-stalk hurt real bad as he intercepted old dumb-fuck exiting sleep-space, a stupid look on his…

FaCE!

Perry shoulder-checked into Charles and drove them both into the floor, triggering his Spendthrift perk.

The floor melted away under them, dropping them tumbling into the sky.

Dragor’s Kinesis.EXE

Perry held them aloft with Dragor’s kinesis while-

If I could just stretch myself to encompass the hollow left by the difference between light and speed, I would understand reality itself.

The errant thought coincided with the gorm falling past them, its whorls of reality-warping energy brushing by Perry, causing him to seriously consider stretching himself into taffy.

Dragor’s Kinesis tried to make it reality.

HP: 14

Ow, ow, ow. Perry canceled the haywire spell and resumed falling. He put a foot down and used Spendthrift to raise the viscosity of the air 315.36 times. About six times more viscous than water, roughly in the same ballpark as vegetable oil.

Their fall slowed down just in time for them to hit the earth without breaking anything.

“Yo, Chuck, you alright?” Perry asked.

He couldn’t let his precious XP bag suffer any permanent damage – yet – so he made sure his uncle was alive.

“What-what just happened?” Charles asked, looking discombobulated.

Perry frowned, checking the man’s eyeballs, then used his fingertips to check his pulse, then his brainwaves.

Scattered to the freakin’ wind.

The brush with the plasticity of reality seemed to have messed him up good.

Then why am I not messed up good? Perry thought, glancing up and scanning his surroundings.

He had…maybe five minutes before the horde of gorm were on top of him.

Not to mention the one that fell nearby after manifesting itself inside my plane. Even less time for that one.

In the distance, there was a loud explosion as his plane crashed into the ground, releasing it’s near-infinite fuel into the atmosphere as the autopilot failed, destroyed by proximity to the blob’s reality-warping presence.

Perry peered over his shoulder at where the crash lit up the canopy and froze.

There was a woman wearing skins holding the hand of a gawking child. She had a basket against her hip and was staring at them like one might stare at a clown at a wedding.

Absolutely horrified.

Perry cleared his throat.

“Greetings,” he said in Manitan. “You may wish to put some distance between us and yourself. there’re gorm coming.”

At ‘gorm’, The Manitian unfroze and tugged her child over to a nearby boulder, banging on it with her fist.

To Perry’s amusement, the ‘boulder’ opened up to reveal a hollow interior concealing a staircase that led deep into the earth. The cross-section of the ‘boulder’ was made of an interesting layered opalescent structure, only visible from the cut section of the door.

She frantically gestured for them to follow.

Nah.

A moment later, the door closed, and the two disappeared inside.

“Eh, gorm? Gorm are coming!” Charles said, his voice gradually growing shrill as his brain re-established rational thought. “We have to follow them, we could-“

“Shhhh,” Perry said, shushing his uncle and seizing his arm uncle’s arm before he could rush off and bang at the door.

“We are not going to do the trope where our carelessness brings a swarm of gorm down on that woman’s home, and we feel super bad about it, because we are not ungrateful punk-bitches wildly out of our league.” Perry said, flicking his uncle’s forehead.

“We are proud Manitian royalty wildly out of our league, and we will act with some decorum.”

“You’re just saying that to spite me,” Charles muttered.

“Yep,” Perry said. He was operating on what he liked to call the ‘will this behavior make Natalie sad’ model of ethics. Since he needed some kind of guidelines to operate by while he was High Attunement, He figured he might as well just build a mental model based on previously observed emotional reactions to various stimuli and extrapolate that then apply it to his own behavior.

Put simply, he avoided doing things that would make Natalie sad, and that seemed to be working well enough so far.

Nat wouldn’t mind spiting Charles a bit. The dude sucked.

Now. let’s figure out why that encounter didn’t rattle me as much as it did with Charles, even though I was closer. It probably has to do with Stat distribution. And here our test subject comes now.

The plane-invading Gorm bore down on them, and Perry did some rearranging of stats.

Let’s try and resist the destabilizing effect long enough to kill this thing.

Attunement 67 -> 55

Stability 55 -> 67

….

……

The next thing Perry was conscious of was harsh panting, the sound of his heart and lungs working at their maximum capacity.

His brain rebooted and was able to understand what his eyes were seeing. He was leaning against a tree, his other side torn up pretty bad.

“Okay,” Perry muttered, pushing himself off the tree, staggering in place. “Obviously that didn’t work as well as I was hoping.”

Stability 67 -> 61

Body 40 -> 46

Areosolize.

With his good arm, Perry sprayed a clotting agent over his wounds, and between it and his Body stat, the cuts had fully stopped bleeding in a matter of seconds.

His whole body felt like it’d just been put through a ringer, like he’d gone ten rounds with Titan wearing nothing but a naked apron.

Perry chuckled and carefully lifted his wounded arm to scratch the itching wound above his left eye, when he realized his hand had something in it.

A gorm.

“GAH!” Perry flung the dog-sized whorl in reality away from himself and scrambled backwards.

The Gorm didn’t move.

“What the…” Perry scowled, looking around. The sun was lower in the sky than it’d been when he’d decided to try his hand at fighting them.

Where’s uncle?Where am I anyway? How much time do I have before the others show up? Scratch that, where’s the one I was fighting?

Perry scanned the dark forest, scowling. Well, Chuck was either gorm food, or Perry would reacquire him later.

He glanced back down at the tiny gorm on the ground.

He kneeled down beside it, his concept of up and down, dream and reality under assault as his fingers approached the dog-sized disturbance in space, causing him to slump bonelessly over, contemplating ‘deep thoughts’ rather than touch the thing.

Thinking as fast as he could with his addled brain, Perry started shifting his stats around, searching for the optimal combination that let him murder it.

…

Body 40 -> 34

Attunement 61 -> 67

By frontloading everything he had into his mental and metaphysical stats, The unmoving whorl of light in front of him almost came into focus, like the letters at an optometrist’s office.

Perry could feel the distortion in his very thoughts, and could trace where each errant thought and sensation was coming from to specific points in three dimensional space. The myriad distortions seemed to come from a central core that ran along the unmoving gorm like a spine, Perry couldn’t make out much more than that.

I need more Nerve to process what I’m seeing, but if I drop Attunement, I’ll lose it.

Well. Fingers crossed Solaris can’t smell unbalanced Attunement.

Perry dropped fifteen of his thirty-six free points into Attunement.

Attunement 61 -> 76

The gorm peeled open in front of him, but the flurry of sensations and thoughts beyond the scope of humanity was little more use to him than a particularly vivid dream.

To counterbalance, Perry used Sliding Stats to reel Attunement back in and funnel it into Nerve

Attunement 76 -> 70

Nerve 44 -> 50

The dead Gorm snapped into focus.

It was a long, tube-like structure, stiff, about two and a half feet long, thumb’s width, seemingly hollow, with innumerable reality-warping tendrils emerging out from it, tightly packed in an almost -but not quite- tessellated shape, the smaller tessellations were interlaced with each other, and the whole thing was bi-laterally symmetrical.

Perry focused on the interlacing between the tendrils. He ran his fingers over the reality warp, focusing on keeping his hand a hand by imposing his understanding of himself on it and overriding the tendril’s suggestions.

It was distinctly uncomfortable, but despite wobbling a bit, Perry was able to run his fingertips over the interlocked tendrils.

He gave them a little tug, feeling the distinct sensation of barbules losing their grip and disconnecting from each other. There was an interesting snap-shift in reality that nearly turned his fingers into earthworms at the patterns rearranged themselves, but Perry muscled through it.

He’d learned two things:

#1: This was not a dead Gorm, it was a piece of one.

#2:…

“Gorm are fucking birds?” Perry demanded, scowling down at what was obviously a semiplume feather made of distorted, branching reality.