Chapter 36: Chapter 36 – Break-in

Amber is pretty insistent that she can hang on as long as we need her to, so when we go about setting up for Adam’s Spur-Of-The-Moment Plan, Round Two, we take our time. For that matter, while Zidanya doesn’t outright say any such thing, I have my suspicions that she’s drawing on borrowed time in a way; when she moves, she moves with purpose and direction, more like Amber’s lethal directness than her usual style.

Combining that with her patient insistence that we get things right the first time and set up for the cleanest, hardest hit we can get, suggests a straightforward predicament: a very small drain so long as her nature-mimicking spider exosuit is running, a much larger one when she acts, and possibly a crash coming as soon as she dismisses it.

She’s got enough wherewithal to throw some webs out, and some line. I have no idea how the webs are sticking to the smooth metal wall of the … building? scenario sector? I think we’re breaking into, but they are; at a guess, it’s either some kind of electrostatic thing - the details of one of the possibilities nags at me from just out of memory’s sight - or one of those weird liquid adhesion things, but either way it’s clearly different from how her spider legs are adhering and just as clearly effective.

Amber doesn’t relax, even when the webbing is anchoring her, or maybe she’s been sufficiently relaxed all along. Her feet are wedged into holes that she kicked through the wall when I weakened it, and her hands and arms are through the wall; I can watch and see the rippling of her muscles as she adjust her position every now and then to move the strain onto a different part of her arm or hand, but mostly all I can see is the almost relaxed look of her neck and shoulders, and the small, amazing smile that hasn’t left her face.

Mostly, all I can see is the trust she has in us, and I’d really rather not let her down, so I redouble my focus on [Manipulate Mana].

The first problem with the plan shows up pretty soon. My mana regeneration is dropping, slowly but noticeably, and I have to re-cast my airflow orb a little bit earlier than I’d expected. I don’t use as much amplification for it this time around, which helps a little, but even so I’m running behind on Mote conjuration. The plan had originally been for me to use three Motes each on four different orbs - Suppress, Dampen, Earth, and Air, with two different mana-to-motion linkages on the last two, for their respective purposes - but I’m worried, so I take a break from trying to shove spellwork out of the narrow bands of metal we’re targeting and do some quick mental math.

It’s not a great conclusion, what I come to. We’re facing the familiar, or at least familiar-to-me, resource constraint: the draw goes down as the density goes down, until you approach not enough draw to keep up with your base load. In this case, the base load is enough mana for Zidanya to keep up Mimic Nature and for me to generate Motes faster than they expire.

We’re going to hit that point before I get enough motes for all four orbs.

Zidanya’s spider legs are a sort of off-black, a dark enough grey that I can barely distinguish them from the gloom. They stand out pretty well against the silvery-steel-looking wall that we’re working on, and it’s kind of entrancing watching her crawl across the area. The tips of her legs leave a trail of what looks like slime, but by the fierceness with which she warns me off of it when I go to look closer I figure it’s probably some kind of strong acid. She calls it volcano-gas, and tells me that I can’t touch it with metal or glass, much less flesh, and it hits me that it’s hydrofluoric acid, which is more than a little bit terrifying. A thousand different quarter-formed ideas flash through my mind about weaponizing it, storing it, using it for interesting chemistry experiments, or just using it as a jumping-off point to figure out even more interesting things that Zidanya can produce. Dioxygen difluoride comes to my mind, since it’s already on the subject of fluorine compounds, and I realize that I’m stalling, trying to find anything else to focus on rather than letting her know that I can’t deliver on the plan.

Knowing that I’m stalling is enough to get me to stop. I tell Zidanya we’re going to have to do it with three orbs, and I tell her why, and she looks like she’s going to scream. If I wasn’t practically immobile I’d be trying to scramble away from her, but the fury passes from her face and body language in a convulsive shudder that puts a terrifying ripple of detach-reattach through the tips of her legs. She dances in place for a second and then settles, and then heaves a breath that’s visible even through the wrapping armored bits that go around her torso.

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We’re ready pretty soon thereafter, with three orbs. The motes trigger first, an Empower targeting an Amplify and another Empower for each orb; it’s gotta be around twelve-fold, the boost from those three Motes, and I could get it a little higher by throwing more stacks of Amplify in there but it’s got a logarithmic falloff at best, and I’m already edging up onto the limits of what the diminishing ambient mana will permit. So I stick with what I know I can make work, and what I know I have time and mana for, and we’re hoping it’ll do.

When I’d used Suppress and Dampen earlier, to weaken the wall enough for Amber to punch and kick through it in order to make better hand- and footholds, I’d targeted a wide band of the wall for a few reasons. One of those was that I was hoping it would shatter farther than the width of her fist, but mostly it was that I wasn’t exactly sure where I should place them, where it was comfortable for her to put her weight. This time I was going for a far narrower band; a couple millimeters across, in a square starting half a meter above Amber’s head and going a half meter below her feet.

As soon as the first two orbs trigger, I can hear the acid getting to work. It’s just been sitting, droplets adhering somehow to the impervious metal, but it’s etching in now with a hissing, bubbling noise that makes me want to flinch away. Manipulate Mana is doing its share as well in what feels like a clear recursive synergy with the effects of Suppress and Dampen; the latter weakens the structure that resists the former, and as the former shoves the spellwork away from the band of metal in question, what magic is left is even more affected.

Three seconds. I take the time to be grateful that I’d been so diligent about copying even near-duplicate runes and runes that I didn’t think I’d be using with the Visor; everything I was using right now was something I hadn’t thought would wind up all that useful, except for the obvious Amplify and Empower duo.

One second. Zero; I fire the Air orb. Mana churns through it, before being turned into motion; with the assistive nature of what I keep calling the orb-runes, the runes that elevate it over being just a Mote, that motion is a gentle-but-firm pressure of air against the acid in the exact square that I’ve been diligently weakening.

The sound is horrible. The bubbling, hissing noise from earlier is amplified with a vengeance, and there’s what seems like a wailing scream that sounds like superheated air escaping a pressurized vessel, a fweeeee that grinds against my mind and assaults my concentration. I don’t let up the slightest on Manipulate Mana, and the air orb is autonomous and can’t, won’t let up, and the auditory onslaught grows second after second.

I endure; there’s a pretty firm limit to how long I’ll have to cope, and that helps. Ultimately, though, I’m pretty sure I could endure just out of pure spite even if I didn’t have the motivation of keeping all three of us out of the infinite Void below us, where we would mercifully suffocate long before anything else.

The sound cuts out about a second before I expect it too. Amber’s in motion the moment it does; she kicks off of the wall, and we hang in the dark, suspended over the Void Between by only a series of spider web lines that are barely slowing us down before they give way.

My heart is in my throat by the time my brain catches up, and about then the loops that Zidanya had put around Amber’s and my waists tighten and send us hurtling back into the now-open space where a square of wall used to be.

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