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

The fact there was an undead force hiding on top of Mt. Linvak Igloo (the proper Lugian name for it, they loved the foreign word as exotic and so proper, ‘ice hut’. Material and construction style all in one!) rather surprised all the Royal Scouts who’d been in the vicinity of it, and even checked it for Summons in the past, finding none.

Detect Undead revealing the undead keeping themselves concealed in the permafrost ice and snow at the top of the mountain wasn’t quite as easy to thwart as passing eyes, and it was the undead’s turn to be completely surprised when Chained Shardrays bored through their layers of camouflage and put them to the vivic torch.

The leader had a dozen Minor Shivering Stones on him when we checked his white ashes. Clearly the undead had known this was a valuable place, and it also meant the other locations of the Stones were likely to be watched over by buried and tightly-concealed undead, which put a whole different flavor on dispatching teams to them.

It also meant that they validated the fact that the Stones kept on renewing, we just had to confirm that it was at Natural Renewal.

The other Minor Stones locations had all been swept by in the past, and neither Stones nor anything else had been seen to be present. The undead had done a marvelous job of concealing the fact from the curious.

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The Mick had Bunita out, ready to experiment.

Bunita had been remade by Kris, Name moved into the upgraded Warfang Weapon. The Mick had grown that Name relentlessly over the past months, motivated by the memory of Weapons he had wielded in the past and just how far he could take his own Weapon instead of relying on random loot drops.

Kris had told him it was good enough now to accompany him into Eternity, but an Eternal Weapon had an initial upgrade of two THOUSAND goldweight. That was literally years of Naming Karma!

But that was fine. You could get a Weapon to some pretty insane limits before you made it Eternal by stacking the right stuff.

The adamantine Claymore was a QL 45 work of perfection now, and just him drawing it had been known to take the breath away of some Sword users who had faint inklings of what they were looking at. It and Quaver had instantly cemented Princess Kristie as the best swordsmith alive, and that hadn’t changed even with Briggs there, as her Natural Swordsman Talent trumped his Natural Smith when dealing with Swords… and ONLY when dealing with Swords.

There were four systems interlocking on the magical Weapons here. The first was the Naming and Artifice System of Matrix magic, which was gradually interfacing with the second, the Isparian Item Magic system of Weapon Buffs and the like. The third was the Empyrean Crafting Runes, namely Biting Strike, Crushing Blow, and Armor Cleaving, and the fourth was the Socket system pioneered by Atlan and whoever had built the Silifi of Crimson Stars.

Sockets could technically be placed in three areas: the blade, the guard, and the pommel. Kris, being the overcompensating sort that she was, had placed Sockets in all three locations.

The Major Elemental Stones, which included the Prismatic Stone, were shaped for the pommel. The Minor or Silifi Stones could be placed in the guard, while the ones on the blade were reserved for Blackfire Stones in the future.

The Mick slid the cool blue Minor Stone into place on the basket hilt guard of Bunita, and it snicked into place audibly, crystalline Runework immediately glowing about it on the blue-black metal there. An Aura of pale blue light shimmered for a moment over his skin and faded, while another field of additional energy snapped up around the Blade, a swirling icy blue-white field that quickly interacted with the Lost Light, turning the spiraling swirls into cold glittering diamonds that left a sparkling trail as he cut the adamantine back and forth through the air.

“That’s definitely the base Icy Enchantment, and what looks like a Gold-grade Fire Protection,” I nodded at him. He nodded agreement, stitching the Heavy Weapon around like a rapier carefully, his dark eyes measuring the magic on it. “A bit of bonus cold damage when you hit things, and protection from fire attacks. Not a bad effect, and, I presume, will be reflected by the other Minor Stones.”

“An’ now for the big event.” He turned Bunita down, exposing the pommel, and laid his gloved hand upon the glittering kaleidoscopic gem there.

The Prismatic Stone granted Armor Cleaving and Elemental Slayer to a Weapon. There was no reason NOT to have it equipped if you owned the Stone.

A bit of concentration, and the Lost Light swirled and rippled around the stone, prismatic refractions vanishing from the Light and returning to the Stone.

With another click and pop, it was forced up out of the pommel’s Socket and into his palm.

He calmly put it into his purse for the moment, and from there slipped out the deeply luminous Major Shivering Stone he’d pulled out of the Serac Vault only a couple of hours before.

The Minor Stone in Bunita immediately pulsed, was matched by the Major Stone in his hand, and then the two Stones were visibly rippling together in time to his heartbeat.

He gave me a glance as we both studied the effect. “Seems like a good sign, aye?”

I nodded. “It does. Go ahead.”

He slotted the long Stone into the Socket, which accepted it with a meshing of Runework and metal as it sank into Bunita’s pommel.

The snap as the metal of Bunita’s blade turned to pure crystalline ice energy was sudden and savage, despite us expecting it. I saw the Cold and Fire Protections overwrite and amplify one another, and the Lost Light spiraling around his Sword looked like razored snowflakes now, tiny, delicate, exquisite… and deadly.

Looked damn pretty, too.

“Base Icephasing, Fire Elemental Slayer, Armor Cleaving. The obverse of the Fire Elemental Stone, and the same as the Prismatic Stone, except only the opposite Element,” I nodded to him as I placed my hand on the solid frost energy of the Blade, which still retained all its properties of adamantine, too. “That’s a Platinum-grade set of Protections from Fire and Cold,” I told him calmly. “And the Icy field on her is diamond-hard, looks ready to break and crash open at a touch.” I cast about and settled upon an inoffensive spur jutting up out of the peak. “That rock doth offend me, great master! I prithee, remove it from my sight!” I pointed dramatically.

He grinned, swirled into a flamboyant and exquisite bow I just knew he’d been practicing for the Queen Mother, and cried out dramatically, “As the lady wishes!”

Sharding was one of the base Enchantments on his Sword, Slotted and always available. There was barely a reason ever to NOT have it available for him, and he promptly executed two blurring crosscuts, the perpendicular arcs of cold force slashing out like launched missiles at the inoffensive stone.

I noted the second stroke shattered the Icy field on his Sword, and the arc he threw had a thousand fractal edges inside it as it followed the first.

The first strike didn’t do much to the stone, which had weathered a whole lot of icy weather up here, but the second strike actually shattered a clear wedge into it, shrinking and making the stone brittle before a blast of lethal icy force tore it open.

“Gor, that were impressive!” he admitted, holding up Bunita for a look at the instantly-restored Aura.

“Icy Burst. Base 1-10 damage on a crit of bonus cold damage, multiplied by the weapon’s crit modifier. So, your Biting Strike and Crushing Blow are feeding it nicely.”

He considered that, looking at his Sword, and then slowly shook his head. “It be not enough.” I lifted an eyebrow. “There’s more here than that. That effect be working off the Empyrean Runes t’ look so impressive. By itself, it wouldnae be much special. There’s something else here.”

I held out my hand, and he laid the blade of solid crystallized cold into it. My skin promptly shaded to blue there, but it did no harm as I considered the feeling of it.

“You are correct, there’s a second effect, tied to the dual Stones. It’s Quenching! The Enchantment does some additional damage to creatures of Fire, much like a Bane Infusion, but it also extinguishes flames, including magical flames, at a touch. The combination of effects is popularly called a Frost Brand!”

I brought a trio of flaming Darts up around my other hand as I stepped away. “Parry, deflect, Strike,” I told him, raising my hand, and he snapped up to guard instantly.

The first burning Dart streaked out, and he Spellcut it, whistling when it went right through and didn’t deflect around his Sword. I’d been his main instructor for the technique, and he knew exactly how hard my magic was to Spellcut.

The second Dart ran into the flat of Bunita and was deflected away, breaking up and spinning into nothingness after it did so. He instantly snapped into a lunge, covering thirty feet in a blur of motion as I ducked and dodged, and effortlessly slashed through the third Dart around my arm, disrupting the rest of the spell easily.

“Gor, this be wicked nasty against Fire,” he nodded, stepping back with a quick return to neutral guard position. “This be not about channeling an’ mastering cold. It be about overcoming Fire!” He extended the Blade for another look up and down at it, shaking his head slightly.

“Another worthwhile upgrade?” I inquired of him lightly.

“Aye, an’ no lie t’ that!” he agreed heartily. “O’ course, ye need a two, three-socket Weapon t’ make use o’ it, an’ the Icy Burst be nigh-useless without the Empyrean Runes to give it some teeth. An’ how many people alive are making Four-System Weapons, now?”

“I think I can count them on two fingers,” I said agreeably, and he just nodded.

The knowledge of how to use the Sockets was spreading throughout the native smiths here, but the Matrix methods were mostly restricted to spellcasters, not Smiths, despite Kris and Briggs both using Runesmithing instead of Artificing to accomplish that. Relearning Weapon and Armor forging in the Matrix style was a true pain, I’d been told, and without that Four-System pure smithwork, this likely wasn’t going to work for most other weapons.

Triple Socket areas? It still boggled the mind of other smiths how easily Kris had deciphered just one set of Sockets active on a Weapon, in any of three locations. All three at one time?

Without Matrix Smithing, it just wasn’t possible!

“This is probably not coincidental, all things considered. How do you feel like opening up diplomatic relations with the Crater, and making a trip through the Jahannan Vault?” I asked him thoughtfully.

He looked down at Bunita’s shimmering length of life-eating cold, back up at me. “I be thinking I be not in much danger from Fire Elementals while I be wielding a Frost Brand,” he admitted cheerfully, but then his face slipped a bit. “On the other hand, I remember Jahannan as a royal pain-in-the-arse. Jumping Dungeon on these hanging platforms an’ whatnot, Elementals all over the place bugging ye, an’ it were organized like a master planner took a perfectly fine Vault, shook it up inside a jar, an’ poured out the resulting mess to become a Vault.

“Place is bloody annoying.”

“Well, if we’re lucky, we only have to go through it once, and we can just fly. Then we can put in a Seal Focus to recall to the end and pick up the Stones without, eh, jumping through hoops.”

He perked up at that. “That be sounding more like it. Oh, an’ lettin’ the people o’ the Crater know they ain’t alone!”