§110 Alchemy (Patreon)

If magic didn't work on something directly, then it was time to try indirect effects. Taylor pulled three projectiles from his inventory, conical slugs of heavy alloy, and shot them at the monster using his modified Rock Shot. Magic propelled the slugs at near supersonic speed, but the ammunition was perfectly mundane. Taylor was greatly encouraged when the torso staggered from hits to the heart and head, but the wounds were shallow and the chimera healed within seconds.

The frontliners were entirely armed with shields now, in the hope they didn't take a tentacle attack, but the limbs were whippy and could reach over the shields. As Taylor watched, a massive claw grasped a defender and held him still, while a tentacle struck him several times, sending him back to Twilight. There was another spirit that would die if he didn't find a solution to the life-drain problem.

"Enough, tell them to retreat. I need room for this."

The spirits fell back from the abomination. Taylor shot it again to get its attention, putting holes into the scorpion's front eyes. It charged his makeshift command post, but was caught by Taylor's gravity well. As soon as its legs were off the ground, it was helpless, tentacles and claws and arms waving fruitlessly, finding no purchase in mid-air. Taylor raised the center of the well higher, taking the monster along for the ride.

Magic didn't work on this monster, but physics had at least some sway with it. Gravity magic cast directly on it would have been useless, absorbed like all direct attacks. But gravity from a nearby source functioned well enough. Taylor fed it all he could, until spirits had to retreat even further, debris lifted from the ground and sailed at the enemy, and the carriage he stood on began to lift. A normal human at the center of that well would have been crushed, but the monster continued to struggle against the effect.

Reluctantly, Taylor eased up on the gravity. It wasn't doing enough damage to overcome the creature's healing, and Taylor couldn't pay the mana cost of a tenfold increase. He had to think of something else. He flung a few desultory spells at the suspended monster, but he didn't fare any better than the spirits had.

The only attribute left to try was the unthinkable one: corruption. He pulled deeply from another one of his mana stones while he thought about it. As near as Taylor understood, corruption worked by weakening the bonds in atoms. A little bit drove mutation or caused cells to malfunction. A lot of corruption caused tissue to liquify, fractured crystal lattices, corroded steel, and generally reduced everything to its most basic form. Corruption was entropy. It wasn't innately evil, any more than plutonium was. But he wouldn't want either inside of him, that was certain.

The problem with his using corruption magic was that his techniques were very structured: thin slices of force were held together by interwoven threads of intent; bolts of energy cohered by using a narrow band of focused mana; conjured objects were stable imitations of real matter. Corruption's wild entropy ruined all of that.

He decided to build a new technique based on Fireball. Since he couldn't use the corruption attribute directly, Taylor leaned on Permutation to create what he needed. Several thick lines of tempered mana wire, twisted into the new glyphs, were enough to convert his mana into corruption, which he encased in a stable shell of force. The shell wouldn't hold for long, but it didn't need to. He shot his improvised chaos bomb at the horror floating above him. The outer shell collapsed just before the spell reached its target, and the corruption mana exploded early.

The spell was a mess, but the effect was gratifying: The abomination screamed from two mouths as a five-foot sphere of mass turned into dripping black gunk, taking a bite out of the abdomen and severing the tail. Droplets of black sludge and chunks of flesh exploded away from the creature, then were sucked back into the gravity well. Taylor shot two more corruption balls at the monster, destroying most of it, but had to pause to recharge.

Balhadra considered the damage and the monster's speed of regeneration. "I have a suggestion, Dux. My element, fire, is particularly unwieldy. There is an old technique for creating a beam of fire that is quite different from today, but may be applicable to corruption."

"I'm always up for new techniques."

What Balhadra had in mind was forming threads of mana and twisting them to give them structure. It was easy enough to try. It didn't work quite as intended, but instead of going everywhere all at once, like the attribute wanted to, the effect was more like a firehose, spraying in a cone. Taylor had to get quite a bit closer to the chimera for it to be effective, close enough to feel the pull of gravity, but the partial success worked well enough to finish it off without draining Taylor's reserves. The thing screamed like a hundred tortured souls as he hosed it down with corruption, until all that was left was a puddle of black proto-matter suspended in the air.

With a purification circle and more of his dwindling supply of mana crystals, the corrupted matter settled into different elements: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, silicon, and a smattering of other elements in far smaller amounts. Some of the mass turned into simple solid compounds like sand, and fell toward the center of the gravity well. Water formed over that, and then a bubble of atmosphere. When Taylor released the gravity binding, the entire mess fell to the ground and raised a cloud of dust.

It looked like victory, but he didn't get a quest notification.

"Check on them," he said wearily. "Find out if that stopped the life drain."

Orangeatang disbanded, and Taylor pulled him back into Aarden a minute later. Meanwhile, one of Ramitha's healers left to check on survivors in the circle of protection. Both came back with the same news: people were still dying. Slower now, but still dying.

He was supposed to be tracking down Kasper, not saving total strangers. But he couldn't turn his back and let all these people die. Not while he knew there were things he could try.

"Dig it up," he commanded without much enthusiasm while pointing at the mound of mixed matter. "There's something still in there."

Spirits ran for the remains of the chimera and brushed the debris aside, looking for any part of it that wasn't destroyed, while he watched with listless eyes. He'd pushed himself farther than he realized, and he was nearly out of his mana stones. But he still had crystals. He chucked a couple of crystals into his personal inventory, hoping that would help. He should drain them automatically, without having to think about it.

There was an excited call from the search party, and they brought him a piece of carved stone the size of his hand. The stone was green, some variety of quartz, and it sent a shiver of nerves up his arms when he touched it. It was worse than corruption: it was evil. He dropped the stone.

With a pair of tongs he used for alchemy, he picked it up to study it. Genova, Balhadra, Ramitha, Hermes, and Orangetang all gathered around to examine it. The stone was engraved with a scorpion with tentacles and a human torso attached to it. As they watched, a thin film of flesh began to grow over it.

"I may be ill," said Orangeatang, and the proctors nodded their agreement.

"I believe there is a soul imprisoned within," said Hermes in a hushed voice. "The foulest of magics. The phylactery must be destroyed, to release the soul to Death's embrace."

Genova spoke everyone's worry. "We don't have much time before some of us are unmade."

"Fourteen of us," Orangetang specified.

"And six mortals," added Ramitha. "What is there left for us to try? There has to be something. Try hitting it."

Genova's vines trembled. "No, I can sense it from here: the container is even more durable than the monster in its full form."

"I have an idea," said Taylor. "We're out of magic options, but we haven't tried alchemical ones, yet."

He pulled two large cabinets from his satchel and started scanning the drawers. In his visits to the major cities of the empire, he'd picked up all kinds of useful minerals for his alchemy. Aarden might not have a grasp of modern chemistry, but they weren't ignorant, either. They used fluorite as a flux, for example, to lower the melting temperature of iron. It was commonly available in certain areas, and Taylor had a box full of it.

What he had far less of was antimonite. He could break it down into antimony and sulphur, but it wasn't something he had collected much of. It was mainly used to make cosmetics.

"What are you making?" Hermes asked.

"The most destructive acid I can think of. I don't even have a container that will hold it."

"You don't want to try anything weaker, first?

That wasn't a bad idea. Taylor dug another cabinet from his satchel, this one full of carefully sealed containers of various materials. They were his stores of reagents, refined precursor compounds for experimentation. One of the items he had on hand was hydrofluoric acid. It was useful in small amounts, so he usually had a pint of it on hand.

He pulled out a silver bottle, a silver bowl, a magic respirator, and protective gloves from the cabinet. "Put these on, put the phylactery in the bowl, and pour some of the contents of the bottle on it. Let me know if it harms the totem. When you're done, pour a bunch of this baking soda on the acid."

"Why?"

"It neutralizes the acid so you don't accidentally harm people. This isn't the kind of substance you can toss into the gutter. Go on, and let me work."

Taylor worked as quickly as he dared, but he was building a dangerous chemical process. Some reactions needed to happen in a vacuum, which meant using special containers, while one of the intermediate products had to be cooled to keep it in liquid form. He triple-checked his math and all of his assembled connections before starting.

When are we leaving?

They won't hurt Kasper. They need him alive and healthy. We'll get to Bostkirk before them.

Tristan's impatience threatened to distract him, but Taylor pressed on, starting the chain of reactions that would yield the super-acid, fluroantimonic acid. If he had more time, he would try aqua regia and other well-known acids first, but he doubted anything well-known would be enough to dissolve the phylactery. It was made of a silicate rock, so it should be vulnerable to what he was making. Short of throwing even more magic at it, which seemed highly unlikely to work, this was his best idea. If it failed, then he didn't know what else to try. People and spirits would die.

Taylor figeted while the processes began, waiting for a leaky join between parts of his process, or for lethal gases to escape. Even when nothing bad happened, his tension eased only a little. The final acid was so potent that he had to suspend it in a small vacuum space within a miniature gravity well. He was burning through the last of his mana stones at an uncomfortable rate.

That's when it hit him: he needed a vacuum for his crystallarium. His twinned crystals ended up with bubbles in them because the growing process trapped air where the lattice changed directions between neighboring crystals. Alchemy let him cheat at chemistry, sometimes wildly so, but there was a lot to be said for leaning in to the more mundane processes and reaction chains. For one thing, it cost less mana. 

Hermes returned with the silver bowl full of baking soda. He dug the totem out with a gloved hand, and Taylor rinsed it with water. They inspected it together, with Genova and Ramitha looking over their shoulders.

"It's very clean," observed Ramitha. "Certainly cleaner than it was before."

"But otherwise unharmed," finished Genova.

As they watched, a new film of skin started to form on the totem. It was using the life it drained from its victims to build a new body. Taylor had them burn it again while he put away most of his materials and equipment. He wanted to limit the damage if things exploded.

With protective gear on, body enhancements turned up high, and everyone else cleared from the area, Taylor used his tongs to lift the stone toward the gravity well until it drifted toward the acid. He stepped away and dramatically increased the strength of the well, hoping to keep splashing and contamination to a minimum.

The reaction started slowly, but it was there: the skin that kept trying to form on the phylactery melted away, and bubbles formed on the surface. After several seconds, just as Taylor was beginning to doubt whether the acid would work, the bubbles turned to foam, and the foam grew to the size of a man's head. Then, the foam changed from white to green, with a murky black core. His hopes rose and, after another minute, the reaction became more violent. Heat and splatters of murky liquid escaped the well and splattered the area. The only reason Taylor didn't get burned was because of the defensive barriers he put up, but the ground between him and the gravity well changed color and threw up clouds of noxious vapor.

Then, the air itself caught fire and howled with a rage born of pain. How many years had the soul been trapped in stone? How many lives had it consumed? A rank wind emanated from the well in a corona of tangible hate.

"Hermes!" He shouted over the din, "Disband and check on the others!"

The howling and the conflagration continued for a long minute. Souls were not immutable, nor were they truly immortal. They could grow, they could be hurt, and though it was rare, they could be ended. Taylor didn't want to know what the necromancer had done to that poor soul, not really, but he couldn't help but wonder.

Quest Complete: [Kill the Chimera]

When it was over, and the depot returned to silence, he let the mess of black and smoking gunk fall into a heap of baking soda stolen from the tavern's kitchen. Hermes reported that the life drain had stopped, and Ramitha reported the same among mortals.