Percussive Maintenance

I cast the flame ward as the last seconds of the barrier spell ran out and held my breath. The good news was that I wasn't instantly overwhelmed by a rushing horde of elementals. That was a big one. I took a step towards them. The bad news was that the room was entirely filled with elementals of all sorts, to the point that what had previously appeared to be spaces in between them quickly became apparent as some of the many air elementals that I had previously dispatched. More than that, considering how many elementals I'd killed before, I had a feeling that the room was not just full of elementals, but continuously re-filling. So, as I had become to rely on over the past forty-ish hours, I solved the problem with magic.

I first tried casting what was quickly becoming 'ol faithful- the invisible barrier spell. I tried to cast it in a sort of a wedge pattern on the floor, to leave me a triangular sort of tunnel just wide enough for me to crawl through. But as the room was full of elemental creatures, I learned something I had suspected about the wall from the beginning- it couldn't be cast in a space that would leave it intersecting with a creature. Even the invisible, nearly intangible, air elementals prevented me from bisecting them with the wall. I could have expected this, as if it wasn't the case, the wall would go from a very useful tool to the best possible weapon in the Tower. If I could just cast it inside a monster, splitting it apart, I had a hard time imagining what sort of a creature could survive something like it. Maybe a massive demonic earth-worm, or something.

So I thought more about my options. I could try clearing the way for a barrier-tunnel by first killing some more elementals. I didn't know what a 2% reduction in the number of elementals meant, but I knew that it wasn't anything I could feel with my normal senses. The air seemed the same sort of neutral stale as it usually did, I didn't feel particularly cold, and reality wasn't collapsing, or anything. Maybe one or two more percent wouldn't be the end of the world. On the other hand, maybe the wizard that created the Tower only left a 3% safety margin on a problem that could cause catastrophic failure and killing two or three more elementals would eject us all into the void of space. It was not that the thought of smashing all the elementals and machines to take the bastard's toy away didn't appeal, but I would rather survive the experience.

The plan that eventually worked took some trial and error. I started by conjuring two sheets of ice. By coincidence or by design, these were just as large as the wall segments I could divide my barrier into. I held on to them, and it only took a dozen seconds before my fingers were painfully freezing. I laid on the ground and pushed the same triangle shape that I'd been going for with the wall in the first place, and then cast the wall immediately underneath the ice-planes, leaving a 1 foot long protuberance of the tunnel inside the engine room, or whatever it was. And that was what I went for. I would surely use massive amounts of mana casting these spells over and over again, and from my pseudoportal experiment it was now very clear that if I ran out of mana it would be painful and immediate. I could maybe cast two or three spells after that before dying, but I would start worrying about that when the tunnel became too long to reach back to the exit.

Shit, I was hoping that wouldn't happen. I wasn't very good at geometry back on Earth, but even then I could have probably figured out that I could get around 15 ft into the room before running out of runway. I was hoping that this was a small room, like a boiler room or something, but I was a dozen feet in, no opposite wall, mechanism, or end of elementals in sight. It was getting hot even with the slabs of ice and my fire resistance spell, as the density of elementals seemed to increase. Well hell, I wasn't feeling tired in my mana- whatever that would look like- and I would have to take risks now and again. I kept going. It was slow, painful and annoying, and I had to take utmost care to line up the tunnel perfectly, because I didn't fancy my chances going back if there was even a few degree angle in the wrong direction.

I hit metal. Or maybe it was stone. Plastic? No, probably not plastic. Whatever it was it was slightly shiny dull gray and it had fingernail-sized runes of glowing purple scribbled into every inch of the device. It was only a foot or two away. One more casting of the wall, as the ice slabs melted on my frostbitten hands. One last one and-

Lurch

Fuck, ow, that hurt. Again, it felt like all of my organs warning me of some limit at the same time. Shit. I did not have nearly enough rope to get back out. Only one thing to do, I guess. I pressed as close as I could to the cylindrical device and waited for the barrier to expire. There was a great pressure on my back the second it elapsed. It wasn't quite bad enough to bludgeon or crush, but it was heavy. I hadn't felt so pinned down since being held down by bullies in elementary school. There was no way I could push myself up, but I could pull myself towards the cylinder at just a slight incline, enough to slowly pull myself up to see the face of the device.

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When I finally got up to its top I learned two things: first, this was the most complicated piece of mechanical engineering that I'd looked at directly in my life. Second, it was burned to shit and, probably, blown up. As I stood there, my face a dozen inches away from the blasted hole in the device, a flame elemental started first bubbling up, then bursting out into the room.

I was sure that my fire resistance spell would last for quite a few more minutes, so the elemental slithering by didn't burn me to death, instead just rising the temperature I actually felt to nearly unbearable. I could just barely stoop over the dais of the complex machinery, the pressure on my shoulders, both of air and weight of stone was almost more than I could bear, and much more than I thought I could have borne. I didn't know how the mechanism beneath me worked, and I couldn't begin to imagine how to build it, but the damage at least seemed pretty mechanical. Some sort of a pressure from within had burst through the surface of this heavily runed cylinder and now that it was broken, elementals that were supposed to go somewhere else, were now going into the Tower.

It wasn't as impressive a realization as it sounds, honestly. There was a hole with metal claws jutting out of it, like any breached pressure seal you could see in a movie or on a youtube video. So, what the fuck could I do about it? I'd heard somewhere about how welding works, and even if I thought that the new fire spell from the goblin monarch could burn hot enough to work, I knew that there was supposed to be some sort of a binding agent used in welding or something. Maybe. In any case, I was pretty sure that the fire wasn't hot enough, it burned orange-to-yellow, nowhere near the blue coming off of welding torches. So it'd have to be some sort of an even more slap-dash botch job than what my amateur fumblings at welding could have been.

I remembered something from the goblin classroom where the elementals had initially exploded out of. Rather, I remembered how the Monarch had finally sealed it. It had happened almost naturally, with the combination of the heat coming off the fire elementals melting the rock of the stone elementals and the air pressure from the air elementals somehow melting together into a dense, glass-like substance. So, I was pretty sure that that would work here. The only problem was how. I'd been standing here for over a minute, and only the second one of the elementals had just about squeezed out. That it was a stone elemental grinding and reshaping its parts out of the tube slowly still didn't make me think that there was enough pressure building up in the-

Gah, my eye. Several air elementals had pressed together around a stone elemental not but a foot or two away from me, and squeezed it until it cracked and shattered blasting me in the face with its shrapnel. This was not an environment conducive to…

Hm. Air, fire, vacuum, pressure. There was something there, and I wished I'd paid more attention in physics class. I didn't want to cast the new spell without really understanding what I was trying to achieve there. So, okay, vacuum cleaners. Vacuum cleaners create suction by emptying a container of air, so when a vacuum occurs, other air rushes in to replace the vacuum, which nature, famously abhors. Which, I don't know, a lot of nature seemed to be made up of vacuum, but I think I got the idea. So really, theoretically at least, the vacuum magic would expend most of the magical energy on holding the vacuum in place, not actually creating it. Fucking hell, I was so unsure of any of this, even knowing that my memory was now as sharp as it ever had been. Indeed, it had only taken me seconds to go through this whole train of thought, even as I could remain detached and calm despite my surroundings. Knowledge, Willpower, Enlightenment were now stats on my character sheet, and I had raised them as high as I could.

I was fully out of mana. Whatever this plan was had to take no more than one spell. Maybe two, but I really didn't trust my health if I did that. Hell, I could be killing myself, or, at least, knocking myself with the first spell I would cast. Unless… My staff. I still had the invisible barrier charge in it. So, as long as one of the spells was the barrier, I could probably manage two, and, in desperate straits, try for three. And it would have to be one of them, wouldn't it? No matter the exact plan I went with, I still needed to seal off the canister with the invisible barrier just like the Monarch had.

I was running out of time, and I had most of an idea formed. I really would have liked an idea that would suck all the elementals back into whatever system they had come from, but there just wasn't anything like that I could do. But I could momentarily increase the density and pressure of elementals at the top of the canister. I took a deep breath and tried standing a little bit more straight. I waited for the right-ish arrangement of elementals to push towards me- air and fire above, earth below. And I cast the new vacuum spell.

Gh-Fuck god damn. My vision went white, then black as my eyes were pierced by a thousand needles. Blood-flavored vomit jutted out of my mouth. All of the strength in my shoulders went out and I collapsed on the floor. I only had about a minute, get it together, god-damn it, move, legs. I wiped the blood off my face, and found my beard soaked, even as it dried and crusted near-instantly in the hot room. I blinked for half a minute before I could get my eyesight back, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't stand up. I was still counting back from 40, and waited for just the right moment to blast the barrier out of my staff, in a cube that would fit in the space just above the vacuum that I'd created inside the cylinder. Screaming elementals were suddenly pulled by a powerful force into the cylinder, as the vacuum sphere collapsed and I cast the barrier in as small a space as I could, just barely avoiding the new elementals pressing in. The cylinder was sealed and there was a grinding hissing coming from within.

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