Chapter 047 - Sequenced

Since her first encounter with the Skeletal Champion, Anna had learned a few things about her most hated enemy in this new life of hers. The Grand Necropolis were world conquerors, raiders, slavers, and a grand hegemony that expanded its power through every corpse it created. It was a self perpetuating machine of conquest and only the other great forces in the multiverse kept it from running ramshod over everything in its path. As she stood in the control room of the garden, brushing a bit of bone dust off of herself from the stragglers they’d crushed outside, she learned another fun fact.

They were fucking lazy.

Maybe it was because as undead, they lived a long time, or maybe it was this sense of superiority that led them to see ordinary tasks as beneath them. Regardless of what the origin of it was, watching Beval, a slave, who-if she was being honest with herself-she would never allow to learn how sensitive equipment like this worked if she were part of their faction. Yet there he was, deftly navigating the oddly cylindrical panel of glowing rods. He paused at one point and glanced their way. “Are you sure you want me to do this?” he asked.

Anna shrugged. “Get on with it.”

He nodded and went back to work, she turned her eyes to Catherine who was standing in pensive silence, her eyes distant again. “Zoning out?” she asked.

Catherine looked up at her with a surprised jerk and shook her head. “No, my Lady. I-”

Anna frowned. “We’re going to talk later,” she cut her off. “I thought we were past this kind of bullshit.”

Catherine’s expression fell a bit and she met her eyes. “This is very personal, Anna,” she said with a slight strain to her voice. “This is not a matter involving our relationship, I promise. This will neither hurt you nor help you, I suspect. Only that it has given me much to think about.”

The two stared at one another for several moments before Anna crossed her arms and let out a sigh. “You could have just fuckin’ said that,” she said. “I don’t like having to drag shit out of you,” she added and turned away, walking over to the control cylinder-thing. She waved a dismissive hand. “It’s whatever, tell me when you’re ready.”

A murmur of thanks was all she got back as she stopped next to Beval and squinted at the cylinder, reaching out towards its surface. “Is it safe to touch the black part?” she asked him.

He blinked and looked up, startled to see her there. Sheesh, did I forget to turn my presence back on? She frowned. Oh, yep, sure did. She cranked it up gently to a low setting so he was aware of her presence but she wasn’t tossing it around like a jock’s ego while Beval seemed to process what she was saying. He looked back at the black surface that made up most of the device and shrugged. “I’ve had nothing happen and had no warnings about it,” he said.

She placed her hand on it and ran her fingers across it, nodding to herself. Despite how smooth it was she could faintly make out the texturing. She pulled her hand back and rubbed her fingers together thoughtfully. “One big engraving,” she said. “Damn, this is leagues beyond anything I could do,” she muttered and crossed her arms. “I wonder why they left the engraving on the outer surface rather than putting it on the inside of the cylinder.”

He stared at her before looking back at the stone. “I uh… have no idea. It’s just rock. The gemstones and the dials on them make everything work.”

She shook her head. “Nah, they’re just the knobs,” she said and rapped a knuckle against the stone. “This is what makes it work…” she trailed off and stepped back a bit from it as he gave her an odd look before getting back to what he was doing. She ignored him, It looks like a thumb print, there’s so many swirling lines. I don’t get it. Why would you design it this way? She scoffed, Shit this makes me feel like a total noob. Engraving plates are obviously baby’s first engraving tinker-toys by comparison to this level of understanding.

She mused on how long it might take her to engrave something like this. Mana per square inch… she glanced up at the top. I’d say what… eight feet tall? She walked around it to see if there were any bare spots. Full coverage. With meals, breaks to cool down my mana and other shit I have to do. At least two weeks, maybe even longer. That’s counting on me replicating it perfectly, shit. She rubbed her temples. I have a long way to go, she thought and squatted down a bit to look at one particular section. Where are the runes on this thing? Are they isolated around the control crystal-knob-things?

She stood up and scrutinized one he hadn’t touched. I don’t recognize the runes but I expected that. She rubbed her head. Then why do all this extra engraving outside? All these loops and swirls, they’re functional, I know it, but I don’t get why. I feel like it should be obvious if this is something that they distribute on a mass scale. You need to be able to maintain it if there’s a problem.

She frowned a little more and crossed her arms, tapping her foot. What am I looking at? The patterns are deliberate and they’re mostly running parallel to one another. She groaned and turned away to look around the rest of her chamber to clear her head. The interior of the control room was made of the same dark stone as the rest of the building with no decoration save for a few unintelligible mosaics along the walls. A single large spherical stone provided light from overhead and the control device was set into the floor at the center of the room.

On one end of the room there  was a door that led out onto a landing that split between steps going back up to the surface and down into a large subterranean field of gray-brown dirt dotted with bones jutting out from the ground all over. A literal garden of bones. She sighed and glanced back to the other side of the room, past the device. There was a large window that overlooked the garden itself and another jet-black cylinder that Beval had indicated was where the fuel was deposited.

This whole place is designed so one person with barely any background in any technical field can use it if they’re given a rudimentary explanation, she thought. They really don’t like menial tasks.

“Uh…” Beval spoke up, drawing her attention. “S-sorry this is taking so long. It takes a minute to um… get going,” he gestured to it. “It all starts up in a sequence, once it’s ready we need to put the fuel in.”

Catherine straightened a little off to the side. “I will go get it. What does it need?”

“Depends on how many you want this thing to make,” he said, rubbing his neck and looking out the window uncomfortably. “The big chunks on display in the storage room are practically useless, it takes several of them to get this thing going. I used identify on them once, they’re extremely impure rock,” his eyes went hard. “The overseer made us lug them around for entertainment. The real stuff is in the crates at the end of the storage building.”

Anna and Catherine exchanged a look and the knight marched out of the room without a word. For her part, Anna leaned against a wall and stared at the control cylinder as he made a few more adjustments. “How many can it make?”

“I overheard the overseer complaining that a Bone Garden should be able to make hundreds of skeletons at a time,”  he said. “I don’t think he realized that we weren’t using the right fuel.”

Anna clicked her tongue. “Lazy, stupid, pompous,” she bit out and tapped her foot again, her eyes narrowing on the cylinder as she tried to focus her annoyance at how inefficiently the overseer had used this place. If he bothered to use it properly Catherine and I would be dead by now. Tsk, fucking shit. How the fuck is humanity supposed to deal with this kind of power right out of the tutorial? Doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Fucking system.

Fwoom.

Anna pulled herself out of her irritated grumblings and followed the source of the small sound, one of the rod-like crystals in the cylinder had lit up and a faint pulse spread out from its base before vanishing into the black material. She squinted at it and tilted her head. “What was that?”

“I finished making adjustments,” he said. “That was the ‘ready’ sound. Just gotta put in fuel, um, my lady? My liege? I’m not really sure what to call you.”

“My lady is fine,” Anna grunted and stalked across the room to examine it again. “So it’s waiting for input?”

“Yes, my lady.”

Anna ran her hands over the surface of it again, concentrating on the ridges of the multitude of small engraving channels forming that swirling pattern. She followed it around, occasionally picking up on a prickling against her fingertips. She cranked her presence up a bit more and pushed it inside as if she were about to do an engraving herself. Then she felt it, faint amounts of mana moving through the structure in a slow-but-steady wave. Occasionally she would feel the channels split off but the mana wouldn’t change direction, just double back on itself. She found another split and this time the mana shifted, as one. She followed it and it swept over one of the smaller crystals, a bit of mana going into it. No chime, but there was a reaction.

“...it’s using it for logic,” she breathed. “Even the channels are set up to take a specific amount of time before… You can do that?”

Her eyes widened with wonder. “This is amazing,” she murmured. “It’s like a fucking computer. They split one channel into dozens to slow the flow to just the right rate and amount of mana to kick off the next portion…”

Behind her, Beval shifted on his feet. “Uh… I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

She waved a hand at him to shut him up and found herself at another one of the control rods, it was also primed by the slow flow of mana without actually chiming. It can wait to see how much its going to get from the fuel and then make adjustments to compensate, she thought. I have no idea what any of these runes actually mean but it’s clearly already ready to go. It’s just designed to make it seem like it needs fuel to go through the rest of the process and to give the operator extra time to make adjustments.

Ideas spun about in her head as she drank in the principle being applied here. She knew she was only scratching the surface of the concept but she already had some insights she could put into making better engravings. Shit, I need to figure out the deconstruction skill so I can get the old water heater engraving off. I’ve got so many thoughts on improving it.

<Your skill has Improved!>
Engraving (Mortal-Common-Middle)
Use your will alone to engrave, carve, and alter the surface of an object with a small amount of mana. Utilizing knowledge from a magical proficiency can allow one to turn engravings into enchantments. Presence and Intelligence increase the efficiency of this skill. Your engraving is now slightly more accurate. You have a higher chance to successfully produce common-grade engravings.

Anna nearly jumped out of her skin at the notification, her eyes widening as she read it. “...holy shit my skill went up.”

Beval blinked at her. “...huh?”

The door opened behind her and she turned with a grin only to see Catherine walk inside empty handed. She furrowed her brows before Catherine made a gesture to open up her inventory and understood. She held out a hand and a spherical rock popped into it, unlike the craggy looking rocks that were set up on display in the storage room, this thing was contained in a glass casing and actually gave off a low humming sound. 

“It’s small,” Anna commented.

“It’s also uncommon-grade,” Catherine said and walked past her to hand it to Beval who took it gingerly in his hands. “It’s a shame we don’t have a generator in the precinct. There were a good number of them in those crates,” Catherine said, turning her way. She raised an eyebrow, “You look happy, my lady.”

“Engraving skill went up,” Anna said with a smug smile.

Catherine glanced at the control tower. “From just looking at that thing?”

Anna shrugged. “What can I say?”

Catherine scoffed and they both turned to Beval who had opened the lid of the fuel input. He slipped the item inside and shut it before walking over to the dials. He looked like he really didn’t want to do this next part. “Is there any way you can send me off after I turn it on?”

Anna crossed her arms. “Don’t be a wuss,” she said. “Just stay in here, you’ll be fine. Catherine and I will-”

“Actually, just you,” Catherine said evenly.

They both looked at her. Catherine didn’t even blink. “My lady, my skill ranks are fine,” she said and raised her eyebrows in a knowing look. “You can always permit me to loot some of them if you feel so inclined. But this is far too great an opportunity for me to take from you.”

Anna stared at her. “You’re joking.” Catherine’s eyes took on that hard flint that she knew meant she very much wasn’t joking. Anna let out a sigh and called up her club. “Fine. What are you gonna do?”

“Watch you from the back and correct errors as I see them,” Catherine said. “Speaking of which, you had a class ability quest.”

Anna felt a pit form in her stomach. “...uh, Catherine?”

Catherine nodded sagely. “Yes, parries, was it?”

Anna’s lips formed a line. “Please, don’t say it.”

“My Lady, I believe for this first round you should only parry attacks,” she said. “Parry and riposte, that is it. No magic and no using your gauntlets either. Practice with your weapon proficiency on as well.”

Anna gaped at her before shutting her mouth and reaching up to run her fingers through her hair. Catherine had never been wrong about what the best path for getting stronger was so far, if this was what she suggested, Anna trusted her. She slung her club onto her shoulder and turned towards the door. “Got it.”

Anna stepped out onto the landing as Catherine turned to speak with Beval about how many undead Anna was going to have to wade through. She pivoted to the stairs leading down. It was a narrow stairway where only two of them could come up shoulder to shoulder at a time. Clearly intended to make the undead manageable if whomever was in charge of controlling them was indisposed. She bounced on the balls of her feet and popped her neck, setting her jaw tightly before getting into a comfortable fighting stance.

A low rumble went through the building. The bone-planted soil stretching past the stairs below rippled like water. She tilted her head forward and drew her presence in to the bare minimum. Just enough to be barely visible to them. 

Then an arm exploded from the dirt and they came running.