Chapter 59: Paradox’s first Loss

Chapter 59: Paradox’s first Loss

Pelochard’s Symbiotic Spirit (Master Difficulty)

Create an essence-free environment with Ostoth’s draining, disposing of the clay beads in a safe area. Bottle a creature’s soul using a Gorbosh’s Acidic Curse and Pecholard’s Soul Trap.

Make sure Pecholard’s Soul Trap is modified to reduce the amount of strength it pulls with by raising the ratio of reticulating Jelly to Death Sand, from 1:3 to 4:1, Jelly to sand.

This will cause the draw on the soul to become gentle enough to maintain the creature’s metaphysical properties as Gorbosh’s Acidic Curse gradually eats away at the creature’s physical form.

Other curses are ineffective, as they damage the soul, while Gorbash’s Acidic Curse is entirely physical and causes very little trauma to the soul.

When the creature’s physical body expires, The modified Soul Trap will bottle the pristine soul in the designated container.

This is the first step.

Next, the creature’s soul must be subjected to a variety of treatments to prepare it to become a symbiotic spirit.

The next step is to ‘activate’ the spirit through alchemical means. Normally a soul is inactive when outside a body, and therefore unable to interact, bond or produce Essences. This must be remedied.

Extract and refine vivant root essence, making sure to achieve a concentration no less than eighteen hundred kors per nacre. Once it has been mixed, lock it into a closed box lined with mother-of-Gabras, alongside the bottled soul. Phase the concentrated essence into the soul dimension with Pecholard’s Soul Shifting. Once the essence has been phase shifted, heat the entire box to slightly scalding and have your apprentices maintain the heat for no less than sixteen hours.

Perry sighed as he flipped through the spell, it was about fourteen pages long, and these ancient wizards seemed to have some kind of allergy to using precise measurements.

I also gotta figure out the heck a kol and a nacre are in units of measurement. Perry had had the same problem with the ‘jangle’ of areonite.

This ritual was the closest spell he’d seen to modern industrial chemistry, following a long series of detailed steps to create a very specific finished product.

I can kinda see why Gadrevan didn’t like the process. It wasn’t the complexity so much as the cruelty implied in the spell.

Perry wasn’t planning on doing the ritual, though. He already had plenty of stuff in his soul and according to his grandma, trying to add anything new would probably upset the delicate balance and cause him to explode or go insane.

He was mostly going through it and noting any references to techniques or materials that affected the soul, in order to look up those specific rituals and do some research about how they worked, what they did, and what they used.

Then Perry would have to figure out an ethical way to...dick around with living souls.

Hmm.

Perry set down mom’s spellbook, wrote down all the processes he wanted to look up, then he carefully pried open Gadrevan’s theses on soul-rituals.

Gadrevan’s Soul Storage

Gadrevan’s Soul Anchor

Gadrevans’ Soul Hook

Gadrevan’s Soul Phasing

Huh, Perry thought as he skimmed the hand-written notes. “One of these two guys is lying.” Perry could read manitian, but not as fluently as he’d like, and Gadrevan’s cursive was making that extremely difficult, but he could tell that a lot of the rituals were largely the same.

Gadrevan’s magnum opus was Gadrevan’s Soul Storage, which was basically...

Perry did a double take. Poking a hole in your soul and gradually expanding it, while lining the opening with infrastructure designed to allow you to both store and release essences.

So like...body modification...for the soul.

Interesting. Perry flipped through the thesis and began taking notes.

Extensive notes. Not just because the entire thing was new territory and he needed to drastically expand his knowledge before he could even understand what these guys were talking about...but also because there were a bunch of Manitian words he needed to get someone else to read for him.

Plus gramma would be pissed if I wrote in the margins like mom’s spellbook.

Once Perry’s head was swimming and he couldn’t stuff it with any new wizard-lingo, he switched gears and began working on his business.

1 mid-sized sedan is about 3300 lbs.

1 lb of parts at my current performance rating are about 800 dollars.

Perry had first gotten his aluminum parts appraised at about 2 dollars apiece, but that had been when he’d only had an Attunement multiplier of 1.62. His current Attunement multiplier was 3.07, meaning the value of his bits and bobs had gone up exponentially as they beat out high-tech, expensive alternatives.

3300X800 = 2.6 million

Perry’s brows rose.

The cost of buying a junker was negligible. Maybe five hundred dollars. The profit margin was insane.

Perry tempered his enthusiasm by checking the total traffic on the Tinker marketplace.

His limits weren’t set by his supply. They were set by demand. It would be incredibly easy for him to oversaturate the market.

Perry did some quick math and estimated if he were to corner the cheap goods market, he could sell about five junkers worth of parts per month on the Tinker Marketplace before demand began to dwindle.

Now hold your horses. Perry surely wouldn’t get a profit of thirteen million each month. Far from it.

-1 mil for monthly wages.

-40% for taxes.

-10% for Locust.

1/2mil for upkeep costs + buying scrap.

11and 1⁄2 mil @50% = 5.75 mil.

Perry tapped his fingers and cut the number down by another 30%

There was absotutely no guarantee he would be able to corner the entire market, and he would most likely earn far below his projected maximum.

Still three million a month. Damn.

It would only take a couple guys to disassemble five cars in a month.

So what are the rest of my hundred and fifty employees going to be doing?

Perry tapped his pencil a couple times before he began coming up with a plan to keep everyone busy.

He could offer higher than asking price for junk, drawing in scrap from across the city. He could offset the loss with his massive profits on the sale of Tinker-parts.

The influx of scrap could then be fed through his hundred and fifty employees, who would convert them back into useable materials.

Those useable materials would be sold back to the city as raw goods, while a large portion of them would be secretly delivered to Perry’s lair.

I could also manufacture some of my less proprietary parts here and ship ‘em to my lair. Motors, sheet metal, batteries, beakers, tanks, valves, etc.

Yeah, that would work.

Booom!

Perry toppled out of his chair as the entire building shook.

He bolted for his armor before skidding to a halt, glancing over his shoulder at the books on ritual magic.

“Alright, it’s on,” BOM said, whipping out his uzis from under his arms with the ease of long practice. The veteran super didn’t seem affected by the sudden loss of gravity that Breaker was experiencing.

The hard-bitten, confident, monkey-slinger melted, renderingdownintoa soup on the ground.

“Oh, god, he killed him!” Breaker shouted, eyes wide. I wanna go home!

“He’sss fine, it’sss nonlethal. Get your head in the game,” Snake said, slapping Breaker on the back of the head on the way past, also unaffected.

“You didn’t do your research on Paradox beforehand?” Fish asked as he walked past Breaker, shaking his head. “This is why I don’t like working with amateurs, Snake.”

“Everyone’sss an amateur at sssome point.”

“Not me,” Fish said.

“Ssspoken like an amateur.”

“I’mma smack you once this is over.” Fish said as Paradox and Tung-stan landed in front of them

Breaker watched in horror as his two team-mates rushed in to do battle, and proceeded to get the floor wiped with themselves.

Snake, whose acid spit was completely ineffective against both Tung-Stan and Paradox, got passed around like a bean-bag, while Fish stayed in the game longer using a wall of water to shield himself from the two monsters, playing keepaway until Paradox cut him off and kicked him out of his pillar of water.

Breaker’s skin went cold as he imagined Tung-Stan’s stony fist pulping his delicate bones.

“Hey.” Monolith’s deep voice cut through Breaker’s terror induced imagination.

“Uh, yeah, boss?” Breaker turned to Monolith, keeping himself grounded on the pillar of concrete.

Monolith looked displeased.

“I’m not paying you to float around doing nothing. I’m paying you to capture Locust’s pet project. If you don’t get to work soon, I’m gonna break your spine and make sure you never dance again.”

Well, that’s highly motivating.

Breaker turned toward the two approaching supers.

“Hey, um, you guys!”

“Eh?” Paradox grunted, looking at him.

“I challenge you both to a dance battle!” Breaker said, his voice breaking unintentionally.

Click. Breaker felt his power click into place, like popping a knuckle.

***Paradox***

I mean, we seem to be doing just fine at Regular Battle, so...

“No thank you?” Paradox said, but it was too late.

Seemingly out of nowhere, intense, bassy music began to pump through the parking lot.

The track suit super began to twirl in midair, taking advantage of his weightlessness to pull flips and shit that boggled the mind.

Tung-Stan staggered backwards, reeling away.

Perry felt an impact wash over him.

HP: 4

Oh, crap, it’s a Wildcard.

Wildcard powers were arbitrary and powerful effects, similar to catalysts, but often had a social dynamic to it, rather than physics-based.

Perry tried to leap forward and knock the guy out, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t force himself to move. He tried melting him, and the beam seemingly passed harmlessly around the dancing super.

That’s not good.

The dancer twirled in midair an inordinate amount of time before he spun to a halt, perched on top of a concrete pole meant to stop cars from jumping the sidewalk, perfectly balanced.

Perry had to admit it looked pretty smooth.

HP: 3

Perry heard the sound of strained concrete, and glanced over to see Tung-Stan flailing his arms and legs wildly, sending chips of asphalt everywhere.

“What are you doing?” Perry asked, brow raised.

“The only way to beat this guy is by dancing better than him, obviously! Cirque had something similar! I learned some swing in college but I don’t think it’ll be enough! Bust a move, kid!” Tung-Stan shouted.

“Umm..” Perry said.

“I can barely feel that,” Track-suit said, rolling onto his head and doing an upside-down pihouette.

HP: 2

HP: 1

“Gah!” Tung-Stan groaned as he seemed to accumulate damage.

Perry shrugged.

When in MegaRome, do as the MegaRomans do.

Hands.EXE (6)

Blades.EXE (13)

Perry gave himself six extra hands, to make himself look like Shiva, holding his palm out with a sassy pose in the universal ‘Halt’ symbol

The breakdancer’s wild spinning came to an abrupt stop as he winced, clutching his chest.

Perry began to give his best approximation of a pop-and-lock, spreading his thirteen blades out behind him in a shimmering peacock-like display as his summoned hands copied his rough, unpolished moves.

Track-suit leapt into a one-handed hand-stand, spreading his legs out wide before twisting them, flowing seamlessly into a shoulder-spin, which morphed into a head-stand, followed by the worm into a backflip.

HP: 0

Perry popped and locked HARDER, but it didn’t seem to phase Track-suit after the first demonstration.

Crap.

Having bypassed Perry’s HP, he felt an inexplicable force wash through his body, like he was at the bottom of the ocean and the pressure was crushing him.

Perry’s breathing turned ragged as he did the thingy where you pass your hands across each other while knocking your knees together.

It didn’t work.

A wave of damage rolled over Perry and the work went dark.

I gotta learn how to dance, Perry thought before he collapsed.