Chapter 3 - Wars and Studies

Natlan

Stadium of the Sacred Flame

Speaker's Chamber

Yaquica had created a schedule for himself. In the morning, he would check the production lines to see if everything was proceeding smoothly. Then he would attend his lessons until lunch, and try to decipher the Iridescent Inscriptions for exactly two hours, because any more made him want to take a hammer to the issue.

Afterwards he would work on new weapons until his babysitter told him it was time to stop.

Speaking of Xilonen, he was having a prank war against her right now. It wasn't the usual pouring salt into each other's drink, or jumpscaring each other.

It had started innocently enough with her accidentally spilling lemonade on him, and laughing afterwards. He couldn't let it stand, and covered her tools with glue.

Things got out of control afterwards. She had booby-trapped his private workshop, and while he dodged the first swinging bucket, he didn't dodge the spring arm that nailed him in the stomach, nor the bucket when it came back.

He sabotaged her favourite nap tree to go down while she was on it, and Xilonen had trapped him in a hole, and had dumped tar and feathers on him. His retaliation was to gently carry her to a raft, and push it to the middle of the small lake near the tribe.

When she woke up and stretched, the raft had capsized and sent her down to the cold waters for a shocking wake-up call, which ended up with her locking him in a room with a very cranky Tepelisaur, though both were taken to the Pyro Archon before explosives could come into play.

And the Pyro Archon did not look happy at all.

"Yaquica, Xilonen, you are two of the brightest minds of this generation, and I have no doubt your contributions to the war against the Abyss will be remembered for a long time." Her voice was gentle, though he didn't think it would continue to be.

"However, your dislike of each other and your prank war end here now. Yaquica, you are going to grow a new tree for Xilonen, no matter how long it takes, and replace her tools." Yaquica nodded, because how was anyone supposed to say no to that glare?

She turned to Xilonen, wiping that smirk off her face. "As for you, Xilonen, you are going to repair the damage you caused to his workshop and take lessons from Saurian vets to learn the dangers of messing with them." Mavuika watched as both children grumbled about the "unfairness of it."

"Understood?" Xilonen slowly nodded, followed by Yaquica, who folded under her glare. "Excellent, you may leave." Mavuika shook her head as the children were taken away by their chief.

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Yaquica, as he had promised, bought a new set of tools for Xilonen and planted a new sapling after removing the stump of the old one while she was cleaning up his workshop. With her extra lessons, they didn't see much of each other, except when she came at the end of the day to tell him work was over.

Which was fine for him.

His decryption of the Iridescent Inscriptions was painfully slow, with days passing with no progress at all, but he continued on nevertheless. He had an idea, though, to compare Iridescent Inscriptions with similar functions to infer what part of the inscription was responsible for what action.

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Initially, it went well. He acquired the core of a Secret Source Hunter-Seeker and managed to restart it, and some still-working ruins that were meant to levitate objects.

The problem was, even though he found which parts of the inscription were responsible for causing the core to levitate the Hunter-Seeker and the objects, those parts were also responsible for other actions. Somehow, unlike the Phlogiston Engravings, a single inscription somehow carried out more than one command.

Phlogiston Engravings were limited to one command per engraving, and the power needed grew exponentially, so after a while you needed an inscription bigger than the object, which wasn't possible.

He had no idea how the Dragonlords managed it, much less putting several commands into a single inscription of that size.

Stumped, he put the parts back into the storage, trying to think of an alternative, but nothing came to him.

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He was watering the sapling that was meant to be Xilonen's new nap tree; in a couple of years, as part of his punishment, his mind was still stuck on how the inscriptions worked.

Which had to wait because the chiefs of the six tribes had gathered in his workshop to speak with him.

Abyss had brought in a new, flying monster, an eye with two wings, and the grenades were too slow to use against it, and the Chiefs wanted something new. 

Right now, they were in a discussion that didn't include Yaquica, the one who they wanted the weapons from. Whenever he attempted to speak, they interrupted him, each one presenting their own ideas. After being cut off for what felt like the umpteenth time, Yaquica had enough of their voices.

"Excuse me." He shouted, and the Chiefs turned to him. "You want new weapons, right? To fight those creatures?"

"Yes." Chief Pacal responded, the rest nodding quietly.

Yaquica nodded. "THEN GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WORKSHOP SO I CAN DO MY JOB!" He screamed in their faces, and the Chiefs were taken aback, though they slowly filtered out of the room. Yaquica made sure to slam the door on their faces with a scowl and got back to working.

But Xilonen appeared before he could even sit down to tell him the day was over.

Wonderful.

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The following day, after taking some time to cool off, he began working on a new weapon designed to take down those flying monsters. From the way it was described, its shape and speed made it a slippery target to hit for the grenade launchers, so he needed a different approach to the problem.

His first idea was to create a gun that would violently eject phlogiston to cover a wide area, but he couldn't generate enough power during the tests to fire the phlogiston far enough.

Instead of going for a wide area, he narrowed the barrel to the size of a pen, and the gas pressure launched the phlogiston in a single, narrow beam, but it couldn't fire for more than five seconds before the barrel heated too much and risked melting. So he added five more barrels instead, all tied to a single source of phlogiston to fire in a rotation to avoid overheating and still lay down enough fire at a good distance to be useful against anything flying.

But it was fraught with challenges. 

The barrels could rotate to cool down, but the firing mechanism still risked melting on the hands of the user, and there weren't many materials that could keep liquid phlogiston for long durations and be light enough to carry.

In the end, he had a giant machine that could fire pressurized liquid phlogiston to about two hundred meters every four seconds. There were several tubes that drew phlogiston from a thick steel container and were cooled with water afterwards to avoid any damage. The phlogiston was then pressurized with a pump and launched at the enemy.

The giant pressure weapons were mounted near the grenade launchers to be used together, with one covering the skies and the other, the land.

His current factory lines could not make the pressure weapons anywhere near the speed of the grenade launcher production, so each tribe only got one before the Abyss began its next attack.

And it was a success, though it took more than one shot to bring down the monsters, and the weapon took some time to aim, but it was better than the tribes having to put their best warriors on hold to wait for the Cyclops, as they were named.

The Pyro Archon wanted him to make the weapons less cumbersome to carry and operate, so for the next few months, Yaquica carried out her order.

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The next iteration of the rotary cannon was smaller in all aspects of it except the phlogiston tank. The smaller size of the cannon made it easier to aim and relocate it as necessary, though the complex system had to stay.

Since the chiefs and warriors were satisfied with it, Yaquica spent the next month setting up the necessary production line and went back to focus on understanding the inscriptions.

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He was watering Xilonen's new tree again, and an idea came to mind when he thought about how much it had grown.

What if the Iridescent Inscriptions were actually bigger but folded enough to be that small? It was a method tried where the engravings were folded on themselves to cover less space, but it had failed.

Iridescent inscriptions, on the other hand, were added to the object after it was finished to give it the necessary properties. 

So, if he could find the material behind the inscriptions' creation, then he could employ the same method to fold the engravings on themselves without failing.

Taking out the core of the Hunter-Seeker, Yaquica, after a lot of work, managed to crack it open to take a look inside, only to encounter no phlogiston at all, even though the core should have been at full charge. The cores worked after centuries of disuse; no way this one had just broken like that.

Putting that thought aside, Yaquica began to inspect the inscription with the magnifying glass he had for situations like that, but it was useless. If he wanted to see what the inscriptions were made out of, he needed to see them way closer, and he had nothing capable of that.

Slamming his hands on the desk in irritation, Yaquica inadvertently knocked the ball of solid phlogiston he kept as decoration on his desk, causing it to roll and hit the broken core. Ever so slightly, the inscriptions glowed brighter, and the core moved before falling down again. Intrigued, he took the ball and brought it closer to the inscriptions, causing the broken halves to glow brighter and rise again.

Taking the core away, the parts fell on the desk again.

So the Inscriptions somehow drew phlogiston from their surroundings, just like the Engravings.

It was most likely a command inside the Inscriptions, but it wasn't just a single part that glowed like with the Engravings, but the whole Inscription did.

With how easy it was to do so, there was no way the Dragonlords needed the phlogiston drawing command to be that size.

So, why did the whole inscription glow?

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The Pyro Archon had granted his request to comb through the scrolls left by past citizens of Natlan on the Dragonlords so he could hopefully find a clue.

Which brought him to the Masters of the Night-Wind, since they kept records of almost everything, and with the Archon's special permission, Yaquica started his research.

There wasn't much, and most of the scrolls were on Xbalanque and Natlan's war against the Dragonlords, not the secrets of their control over phlogiston, but one excerpt had caught his interest.

"The way the Dragonlords control phlogiston is leagues above what we could hope to do, but their arrogance will also be their downfall, as they continue to underestimate our forces. I have seen them use phlogiston as more than just weapons, because to the Dragonlords, it is not only the hammer but also the chisel and the stone."

It made him think. People of Natlan used phlogiston as a power source through engravings, but from the scroll, the Dragonlords used it for more. 

In that moment, it dawned on him. Phlogiston wasn't just an energy source but also a material to be shaped.

The inscriptions weren't made out of some unknown material; they were simply phlogiston given a different shape and purpose.

All that was left to do was to figure out how the Dragonlords had achieved it.