Aether Engineering

Chapter 15

Candis East Highway

The Voidlands outside Maston

Myles’ leg hurt badly. He hadn’t noticed it at first, preoccupied as he had been with the fight, but he was having trouble putting weight on it. It didn’t help that he was having to help carry the unconscious Silas and put pressure on his wound.

Still, he was the one who needed to do it. Kate had evoked thin layers of pure mana to cover all their bleeding wounds in an attempt to block out the smell.

Myles still had a hard time grasping that pure mana could block out smells. Sure, Primrose had told them that pure mana was considered the ‘universal defense’, but Myles had assumed that just meant it could block a punch or a fireball. The reality was that universal meant far more things. Pure mana blocked smells, light, wind, and any other force that it came across. Of course, it used up some of its mana for every force it blocked.

When he had been fighting the ogren, they had eaten through his mana quickly because he had to block the force of their attacks, but without needing to do that, evoked mana could be held in place for some time. Still, Myles had run through his whole supply, so, he wasn’t able to evoke anything until his aether well refilled.

Closing his eyes, he could see just a tiny bit of mana at the very bottom of his aether well. He still found it easiest to think of the mana as glowing streams of energy. Based on his prior observations, it took a little over an hour for his well to fill up entirely. He would have to leave the evoking to Kate for now. That wouldn’t be a long-lasting solution though. She had been using her mana in the fight too, and even if she hadn’t been, it took more mana to maintain even a thin evocation then could be refilled in the same time.

Even working together, they would quickly run out of mana, allowing all the monsters in their general vicinity to smell their blood. That was a problem.

There was a potential solution right in front of them though. An old wagon, the type that was used to haul supplies between towns. If Myles had to guess, the wagon was probably abandoned out of desperation—probably by a group who had run into similar problems as they had. He just had to hope that it could help them out of their desperate situation.

Kate peered into the wagon as soon as they got near. “Its empty. No supplies or anything.”

Myles let out a few choice words in response. Without medicine, Silas had little chance of survival. Not to mention, Myles’ own leg might not heal well.

Kate shook her head. “This is my fault. I thought we could avoid any monsters if we were smart. I thought we might even be able to fight off some weaker monsters.”

Myles took a deep breath, setting his friend down gently on the ground and kneeling to examine the wagon, specifically the metal frame it sat on. The wagon was nothing if not common. It had a wooden top, covered in rough canvas to hold supplies. It might be big enough for three people to climb into if they were desperate enough, and the canvas seemed like it was thick enough to keep most smells contained. The important part was the frame though. The wagon was a common model and so it was no surprise to find that it used the most common metal in existence, the same metal that Myles had spent the last month working with in his aether engineering classes, basium.

Myles cursed himself for his lack of foresight. If only he had brought some of the battery constructs, they had made in class, he could have used the basium frame to make a basic evocation construct that could have used the batteries’ power to surround the wagon in a thin layer of pure mana, blocking their scent from any monsters.

Kate leaned over his shoulder. “What are you thinking?”

“What!?”

“You always make that face when you’re deep in thought. You make it sometimes in training and pretty much whenever you’re working on your engineering stuff.”

“Oh.” Myles didn’t realize he made any faces like that. He’d have to check with Silas or Jane. Assuming Silas was still alive when he woke up or assuming Myles wouldn’t get mauled to death by some monster as soon as they caught a whiff of his blood. “I was thinking I could make an evocation construct to hide our scent in the wagon if we had some source of pure mana, but I left the batteries I made back at the academy.”

Kate’s face lit up in hope. “We do have a source of pure mana though. We can use the ogren cores.”

“What now?”

Kate pulled a knife out of her bag. “Wait here and cover your wounds as best you can.”

Myles hastily did as she asked, focusing deeply to evoke the thinnest possible pure mana bandages to place over their wounds. It was a struggle to evoke any mana from his aether well at all. The emptier it was the more of a toll it took to evoke any. By his best estimation, Myles had maybe one unit of mana at best. That would be enough to barely cover their wounds for maybe thirty seconds.

Fortunately, Kate returned quickly, bringing what looked like a clear jewel with her. “This is an ogren core. Concentrated pure mana.” Kate squatted down, handing Myles the jewel, and taking over for him just as his mana finally ran out.

The core was covered with runes, some of which Myles recognized from the aether index, the book his aether engineering instructor had given him. There was one rune that was repeated throughout the core, one that Myles recognized as a simple containment rune. It was the same rune that he had used when he had first created a battery to store pure mana.

“Well?”

Myles looked over to Kate. “I think it will work. I only recognize a few of the runes, but…”

“Stop. I don’t care how it works so long as it does.”

In a different situation, Myles might have rolled his eyes at Kate, but as it was, he took her protest in stride. “Fine, but just keep your distance alright?”

“What? You need room to concentrate or something?”

“Its more that I’m worried I’ll trigger a rune that will blow me up really.”

That silenced Kate although it wasn’t entirely true. Runes could do a lot in the ways of directing mana, but they couldn’t change the base property of the mana. They wouldn’t be blown up any time soon even if he did fail. Although, if he triggered a rune that caused the pure mana in the core to rapidly expand, they would find themselves slowly suffocating while unable to see or feel anything. It was probably best that Kate just decided to move back.

Myles spent as much time as he could, keeping in mind that Kate’s mana was draining quickly as she continued to hold evoked mana over the group’s wounds. The process wasn’t easy. The runes were the same as he had used with Jane when they had figured out how to make a device that could evoke pure mana, but he usually carved the runes into hot, soft metal. Here, Myles had to make sure the runes were precisely drawn while slowly shaving pieces of metal from the wagon’s frame with Kate’s knife.

Kate began estimating how much time they had left until she ran out of pure mana, releasing the smell of their blood across the voidlands.

“Ten minutes.”

“Five minutes”

“Two minutes”

“One minute”

Kate finally ran out of mana, sagging down in defeat as Myles finished carving the last rune. The time had come to test his theory. Myles jammed Kate’s knife into the ogren core. As it was made up of pure mana, the knife which was made of basium started absorbing the core. Without runes on it though, the reaction wasn’t contained, and the mana was conducted throughout the knife and back out in chaotic ways.

Myles took a deep breath as the expansion of pure mana he had expected came to pass. It poured out of the knife and into the surroundings. Myles was able to throw himself back far enough to avoid being trapped in the pure mana, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

Myles didn’t stay still for long as he picked up Silas and heaved both of them into the wagon just as its frame started circulating the mana from the core according to the rules Myles had setup with his runes. The frame started evoking a steady albeit thin stream of pure mana focused on blocking any gaps the wagon’s canvas covering missed.

With the pure mana bandages gone, Myles and Silas bled freely into the wagon’s rotten wood, but the pure mana surrounding the wagon kept the scent of the blood from leaving, making it harder for any monsters to find them.

Now they just needed the medicine that they had given away.