Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

Testing the Necklace and confirming what it did wasn’t very hard. I put it on, and just Cast low Scarab spells, looking at the effects.

They did indeed immediately jump an entire Scarab level, although you actually had to have the higher Scarab available to channel the energy through.

However, it didn’t work beyond Gold for me, as the Diamond-centered path I used simply didn’t ascribe to standard progression, and the Necklace couldn’t compensate for it.

That was absolutely fine. Everyone else who tried the Necklace on and managed to resonate with it did indeed improve, some of the elders casting Pyreal spells in delight for the first time in over a decade.

We didn’t have a lot of comparative evidence, but the existence of this Necklace made it plain that the virindi had been limited in the spellcasting, too. Possibly only the most powerful of the species, with Caster skills in excess of 520 or higher, had managed to retain ALL of their spellcasting ability. While the Puppets and Servants of the race hadn’t been affected, their Casting ability initially a whole realm above what they usually wielded, there was a lot of supposition that the Masters, Directors, and higher virindi had lost access to Pyreal and Platinum spells, while the most powerful had lost access to Incantor spells.

The Necklace was plainly intended as a method to return the power they had once wielded to them, smoothing out the chaos and irregularities in the manafield that were hampering the magic, and making simpler spells stronger and more complex automatically… in the prescribed patterns.

The Necklace was limited by School, it seemed. This one the Profatrix had borne was aligned to the evocation energies of the school of War Magic. I could only assume that if they used Creature and Life Magic, the virindi with those would be dedicated Buffers and Debuffers for their respective schools. They hadn’t seem to used self-Buffing in the past too much, but that could be changing in the future…

Regardless, unraveling the secrets of the Necklace did end up costing us it, but that was fine. Artificing genius was on the job, and Mira went after the secrets of it with a will and burning desire to figure it all out. Since we weren’t actually alien to the mortal realm and using a weird Quiddity mental energy for the effect, it actually went much easier than the virindi doubtless had progressed.

Helped to have a working example of what to do, of course. Just needed to tweak and rotate it to work with a decent native energy, instead of their quasi-psionic/elemental one.

The Necklace had no effect on the Matrix side of the equation, so I left the problem to her. Raising a spell a Valence wasn’t hard, and a blanket effect could be done by hitting Eleven and Burning a Ring, a decision I hadn’t had to face yet.

Actually making the things would be a different story. Magic items could no longer be churned out by Wish-level magicks popping up 25k in goldweight progress a day, enabling basically assembly-line speed of making things. Indeed, talking with the old artificers who’d made so many popular items and powerful magic items back then, they couldn’t even recall precisely how they’d made just so much stuff. Suits of armor that should have taken days to craft and then even more time to enchant were just churned out… somehow.

One of the important things was Set Magic.

I wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept. While Aelryinth had played The Power of Ten lovingly, he’d dipped into other games, like Diablo2, where Sets of armor and weapons synergizing together had benefits above and beyond the routine enchantments attached to them.

The Power of Ten had such things, too, but they generally weren’t major endowments… and certainly weren’t something you put on first, then attached some worthless minor spells to which got the whole thing trashed as unviable and a complete waste of time to do.

The System here didn’t seem to have adjusted to Weapon Sets, and definitely not integrated, cross-type Jewelry/Armor/Weapon sets like Diablo2 had done. It did have Armor Sets… which were also pretty randomized and not complete.

Instead of having specific designs for Sets, the Armor here instead had possessed ‘designations’, as in ‘this armor is designed for defense’ or ‘this armor is designed to be proof against lightning’ and various other effects. The Armor then upgraded the more pieces with the same designation you were wearing, maxing out its benefits with five of the nine possible pieces you could wear bearing the same designation.

The looser format… was actually something new and different. Most Sets I knew of were specific objects of specific designs that had to be worn together. Here, ‘Set’ was just a designation attached to any piece of Armor, the other abilities of such Armor could be literally anything, and it would still work fine.

There were surviving pieces of Set Armor, although not many, cherished things that had run out of mana and been stored away and forgotten, or lost in Villas and Mansions and Cottages when the Fall came through and tore them apart.

Finding just one such object in an entire settlement made our scouring of such settlements more than worth it. We had so much to rediscover and rebuild, and this time we were not going to let the information and process devolve into fuzzy recollections nobody could quite understand.

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“First time we found one,” Kris admitted, looking over the incredibly overgrown area of the wilds with me. “Wherever they were located dimensionally, they popped up in places out of the way. We’re hoping to find the others, but doubtless they will be in some small location completely overgrown by now.”

One of the scouts had reported stumbling over the remains of a palatial bed out in the middle of a thick forest. Careful investigation had turned up the moldering remains of heaps and piles of random junk scattered all over the place under the thick brush and cover.

Veterans who’d helped clear Cottages settlements realized what was happening, contacted us, and Kris and I had rapidly come out with a Scour team to find what we could.

The brush was slowly being cleared away and deposited to the sides as we looked for anything left intact in the mounds and heaps here.

Also, there had been a LOT of the overpowered magical rats here, who’d obviously been eating some crazy magical stuff with them blowing fire, lightning, and acid and so forth. So it had turned into some nasty scrapping with the little buggers, too… although there was a very curious banderling tribe nearby who had been enthusiastic to help out if they could take all the meat away, which was perfectly fine by us.

This roughly nine-acre junkyard of rat warrens and random crap was the remnant of an Apartment Complex from before the fall, a large dimensional space with literally hundreds of small rooms which could be rented out by adventurous sorts as homes and storage areas. Small and cheap, they’d often been crammed full of extra stuff and just used as storage rooms by those renting them, and otherwise forgotten.

During the Fall, these large dimensional areas didn’t even get the grace of being treated as Dungeons. Just like the long-vanished Town Networks, the Apartment Complexes had simply vanished without a trace.

Now we had stumbled across the remains of one, the belongings of hundreds of adventurers dumped randomly out in the wilds out of nowhere, and left for the wilds to overgrow.

The banderlings nearby had vague stories about the rat-attracting junk falling out of the sky, and had even taken away random coins and the like, those which had survived. Mostly, they wanted nothing to do with the obviously cursed stuff, given the events going on at the time, and I couldn’t say I blamed them. That the concentration of broken magic and odd housing items seemed to attract a lot of rats, which made for good hunting, was serendipity and they took advantage of it.

We were happy to tell them we’d be leaving most of the junk here, and the rats would return after we were done churning the place.

There was a LOT of stuff here.

Briggs and the Mick were still prosecuting the advance on the Hea. The wine-skinned tumeroks kept trying to use hunting and raid tactics against an army, and it wasn’t working so well. They kept trying to flank and get behind the army, and kept running into sentries and scouts making them dead, while being crowded out of larger and larger areas.

Summons were being Sealed across large areas with great speed, destroying their reinforcements even as their warriors failed to come back from the dead. The waves it was sending through their fighters, so used to being immortal, was playing havoc with their morale.

It didn’t help that the most powerful among them were easily butchered in challenges against Briggs and The Mick, and the scornful way the two treated the best of the Hea archers and snipers wasn’t to be dismissed, either. The Royal Scouts and Aun were totally capable of playing cat-and-mouse with the Hea, and did so enthusiastically.

Equipped with Named Weapons and upgraded Armor, they had no problem dealing with their opposite numbers, either.

The Mick was still looking out our eyes as a steady flow of coins, gemwork, flakes and nuggets of salvage, and some barely-intact magical items, flowed on to deployed Disks, to be Itemized or Tapestried as we accumulated enough of them and sent off for usage. It was all Energized stuff, in the end, and it all had uses.

-Grab that one,- the Mick /spoke up, halfway to Dryreach and crouched in the shadow of a boulder, unmoving and watching an easy water crossing ahead of him. The birds were chirping and frogs croaking around him, no sign that he and his Roaches were around anywhere. Ki flexed through his system, circulating and alleviating any pain, stiffness, or boredom, working and improving while sitting there like an absolute motionless block in true Shadow Stalking style.

I flicked a hand, and the bloody red jewel on the greenish-copper wire necklace on a passing Disk being walked past us was drawn up to my hand.

“Definitely magical at some point,” I agreed with him, holding it up before my eyes and going over the magical arrangement, both him and Kris eyeing the greater magical detail I could see it in.

Kris reached over, and black nails danced delicately over it. Internal burned pathways and imperfections added themselves to the analysis.

-That be a Bloodstone Necklace, a nasty little piece o’ work involved with the murder o’ the first mayor of Ayan Baquar. It gave ye a nice boost to yer Health while ye wore it. The magic were eventually duplicated in other items, an’ it fell out o’ style, mainly cause it had such a small reservoir of mana t’ feed it. That, and it were pumping with the blood an’ pain of a man sacrificed t’ dark powers an’ all, but who is going t’ care about such minor frivolities on something so useful?-

The Mick knew his fellow adventurers well, it seemed.

“So, a repulsive piece of work, with magic in it that didn’t need to come from such corrupt origins, but easier to do it that way, so why not?” Kris interpreted, shaking her head as she eyed it. “That pattern… it remind you of something else?” she asked me directly.

I tilted my head, leafing through a lot of Spellcraft patterns. “Nothing in the Arcane end of things, even incomplete and temporary Constitution boosters. Boosters, Health… huh.” I turned an eye on her midriff, where the curious currently couldn’t see the five Tatted bars arranged in a triangular format right over her diaphragm, pointing up between her Nothing to See Here.