Chương 134: Chapter 155: Pierce the Heavens

Hot air slapped me like a flyswatter, and I felt my skin scorch just a bit as I was tossed through the air, rolling wildly, out of control. I relaxed into the tumble, my skirts flying all around me, and I focused on up and down. I took a glimpse of sky, and of ground, and started to orient myself. I used small flicks of flight energy to slow my spin every time I saw the ground, and in a minute I was oriented, face-down, freefalling towards the ground. Now that I've controlled my fall, I can slow my fall.

I eased into flight, and the roaring wind in my ears eased and slowed, and now I was just hovering. God damn I was high up. Thin air, like flying with Rinnie. I looked down at the ground, and could not find any landmarks that I recognized. So I just oriented to the fireball that was still rolling upwards into the sky, adding a red-orange cast to the sunlight over the whole region. Rising on a pillar of smoke like a mushroom.

"Damn," I said, chuckling.

"Now that's a hell of a thing." The prairie below was a riot of rolling stones, falling avalanches, and breaking cliff face. The cleft sheared off a thousand tons at a time, chunks the size of triremes were tumbling like a child's blocks and bouncing across the landscape. Some of them were falling down at an angle, and I could see that some of those had actually gotten lift, bursting up and away before arcing back downwards.

But most of the force was wedged at strict angles through the sedimentary strata of the stone, fracturing them into sheets that fell loose from each other, the impact carried across the stone for a long, long way before there was enough give for it to dissipate. By turning all that explosive energy from an expanding sphere into a directed route, I could carry it so much further. Using the properties of incompressible medium to do what raw undirected power never could.

And then I dumped a lot of huge raw power on top of that anyway. Massive clouds of dust were roiling around, obscuring the upper reaches of the cliff, so I could only hold my breath and watch with the rest as this whole cacophony rumbled on. The vibrations were a steady thrum in the ground and the air, and my eyes were fused to the scene. Even a couple miles away, I was clearly way too close for safety, but it was still a damned good view of the explosion.

Sadly I had missed the real climax of the show, because I was dead-center of it. I hope the lightning effect worked out how I planned. At least I could see for myself that the pyrotechnics went off without a hitch, they were still rising through the atmosphere in an incandescent roil. Next time I won't need to put on a show for anyone. I won't need to be administering lightning, so I can move to a safe distance and actually see the explosion for myself.

The lightning is a proven feature, proof of concept is settled, now I need to make sure of the other aspects. The cliff was smashed like the pickaxe of God had smote that bitch, carving a trench through the top that spilled out at the bottom.

It was rough, and uneven, and would take lots of work to fill the gaps and break off the peaks, but that right there was a continuous contiguous ramp that ran from the top to the bottom, right past the edge, for a dozen miles back and a dozen miles forward, with a decline rate of just under 1: 12. A definite slope, a difficult slope, but a navigable slope. Send in a crew with hammers to break off the protrusions and dump the spall into the gaps, and it's ready to brick-pave and call a road!

And, it satisfied the requirements of our contract with room to spare. I was well inside our agreed-upon terms. It didn't just build the way for the road, but if there was anyone here they had just witnessed a fireworks display that left a mushroom cloud of flames arcing up to the heavens, and a display of power that would shame most wizards. Could they bask an area in flames from the sky? Sure. Can they throw earthquakes that can tumble buildings down? Yes. Can they bathe a city in lightning? Absolutely.

Can they see and hear across the world? In some circumstances. But can they take that kind of destructive force and target it on an area six feet across? Never. Can they shape that kind of power to something as specific as an engineering task? Forget about it. And can they take that lightning into their own hands? Only once. Everyone is used to sorcerers doing things that no wizard can do. But they are always dismissed as tricks.

Well I just blew up a few miles of stone wall with such accuracy that someone could potentially walk from the top to bottom, if they're careful. That's not a trick. Also there's a huge difference between seeing some wizard rain down fire from the sky, and feeling the vibration in your boots as an explosion roars out with a flaming mushroom cloud that rises up to pierce the heavens. Take that, heavens! Huh, that's a lot of heavens getting pierced. From this close I can't actually see all that much of it.

The column of smoke, steam, vapor and debris is like a wall from this close, and the expanding top of the cloud was blotting out the sky. I portaled myself a dozen miles back and it... doesn't actually look that much smaller. Another few dozen miles, and I look again. It's much easier to see the edges and the scale of the thing now. A hundred miles away, I could really see the shape. And now, a whim. I head back to Quoissi's encampment, and the first thing I notice is that everyone is staring to the west.

I turn with them and look, and I can see the top of the cloud pushing up through the atmosphere. It is shrugging aside other cloud banks as it rises, finally slowing, finally dissipating. I was hovering a dozen feet in the air, because this is one of those days that I'm just not going to spend much time on the ground. Nevertheless, the majordomo managed to appear nearby to me and take my attention with a throat-clearing cough.

"Young miss, are you responsible for that?" he asked, gesturing.

"That's the part that escapes in the process," I told him.

"The pressure valve so the reaction doesn't do too much collateral damage. If I sealed my work up so that the cloud could not escape, there wouldn't be much of the cliff left at all, on either side. If I'm going to keep control of this project, I needed a way to let a little of the energy leak out into the atmosphere." He left that in silence for several seconds. And then, "hm." I decided that sound means "I admit now that I have misjudged and underestimated you".

Because gods know he's sure not ever gonna say those words to me, even if he had in fact misjudged and underestimated me. And those nearest me, at the back, turned and looked up at me. A row of eyes fixing on me, and then another. A wave moves through this crowd, people turning, staring. Some expectant, some confused, some delighted. At the far right of my vision, Duke Quoissi is making big gestures at me.

I'm not sure what he intended them to be, kind of a big door-opening gesture with both arms, but I was going to assume this is "well don't just stand there, say something!" I flushed away steel with peacocks, and my resilience was replaced by an attention-hungry showmanship. I hovered in front of my open portal.

"So, did you like step one?" I exhorted the onlookers. Bodyguards stared at me with wariness, hands on their weapons, most of them have just realized they don't like sharing space with someone who can put a burning crater anywhere she wants. The VIPs themselves were a mixed bunch, some in awe, some visibly disappointed, others scared, and plenty were already delighted.

I gave a big wave of my arm, and a fine glittering dust waved out in the sunlight, shimmering as it spread across the air in this expensive campsite. Mostly copper and some small flecks of mica. Mostly. I spotted a familiar face. Well, there were many, but one more familiar than most: Rabert Frantlin. He was right here, watching with the rest. He was watching me, but he was talking quickly to someone older, richer, and important. I gave them a smaller, more private wave, and a broader, more open smile.

And just a couple rows behind him, another familiar face. This one was giving me a much different look. Fuck. Casser gods-damned Swamman. Not who I wanted mixed into anything. But I ignored him, and turned on for my audience.

"Good theater requires good suspense," I declared, looking over every head out to the west, before I turned the shine on, big smiles, and a grand bow. One hand to my waist, and the other swept back and away as I dipped low, and held that pose as I began floating upward, flying now to get some elevation. I straightened, and beamed. All eyes on me, star of the show. I felt it like a giddy energy running through me.

"That was the first. They will be marching east from there. This space will be the tenth. I'll be back by later to to make the rounds for anyone that wants to hear the technical details and the nitty-gritty of how it's done, but for right now I'm going to go to work. This is step one, think of it as a preview! Don't worry, I want you all to know what to look for before we do the big show. Hold on to your hats, it's gonna get loud!" I winked, and I laughed, and I dropped through a portal.

At my second site, I practiced the steps, getting things done smoothly. Through my checklist: drilling the guide-bores to a uniform depth and distance, measuring off the angle and the proportion. Power and control, through the power of math. Wooden rods, copper ferrules. I dropped to the nadir of the V, where I had marked the space with a scratched X to get exactly the right point. And then, the final guide-bore, sinking deep.

A single void buried at the back, and then curving stone to break up everything around it, forming the shapes of the big tunnel to come. Don't forget to sprinkle the copper dust in so it looks good and magical for the audience. And for the first time I realize how unnecessary that step is. These people know about magic. They were never raised on movies that needed a special effect to prove that something had happened. They don't associate glittering clouds and twinkling chimes with magic.

Still, it's a good theatrical effect and I'm sticking with it. Besides, I need to bulk out the volume just a little bit. The actual demolition charge here comes from the fact that I'm releasing a larger volume into a space just a little too small for it, in a single inescapable instant. Okay, I fly up out of the way. Release the gravity bomb. It blows out the big tunnel. Drop back, three singularities, start the timer. Start the lightning, and pour in salt and water in equal proportion.

Lightning dances from rod to rod, marking out the area I'm targeting. I create my portal and drop back a respectable ten miles before I release this charge. I can see the flash of the explosion, the sharp-edged moment that the sun's own plasma lives upon the ground, before the expanding wave of wind and dust obscures the impact zone. The noise is titanic, and the destruction is absolute. I fly in close, measuring, verifying. From there, the third. This is feeling comfortable now. I'm getting the hang of it.

Each time, right at the end, there's that moment that I feel overextended, too much weight on my channels, my account just slightly overdrawn. I'm balancing too many forces, and I am just barely strong enough to pull this off. It's taxing, but I can do it. After the fifth detonation, in fact, I'm ready for another break. I head back to the pavilions, let's share some handshakes with the high-power audience that Quoissi has been generous enough to assemble for me. I took a break, rested up, got a snack.

Some light conversation as we watched the westering sky. A row of columns in the distance, the furthest one almost completely dissipated, the nearest still roiling and swelling. It takes a while for a mushroom cloud to distribute its heat and force enough to fade out, after all. I can hear the rising excitement in people's voices as the march of impacts approaches, twenty miles at a time. Hell yeah. I am so fucking good at math.

I relish my victories for a few minutes, absorbing the ambient excitement and anticipation before I decide it's time to bring it all the way in. I finish my treat, a kiwi drizzled with candied yogurt, and I wish everyone well as I head out to get back to work. The next four should go fast. At number six, I'm picking up the pace. My practice and experience are showing, I've got this process down.

I rupture the world and geyser heated vapors to the sky, shattering cubic miles of settled stone into shards that scatter across the scape. I've been using this weapon against humans and monsters, but clearly the real utility of this power is its capacity as a placed demolition charge. The science is straightforward enough. The weight of a few miles of stone is a lot. The molecular bonds that keep stone from breaking are strong.

The physical laws that force atoms to maintain certain minimum distances are orders of magnitude stronger. So releasing a larger volume into a confined space creates the kind of concussion that just does not care how much stone it has to smash to make room for itself. After that, it's just a lot of scratch-paper math to make sure there's something left when I'm done. At an intellectual level, that is satisfying as hell.

And being able to see it, and to feel that thrum of violence as it passes through my body is a thrill and a rush. But then I channel void. Not to displace or destroy my emotions, just to feel that connection. My void. My singularity. My explosions. I've got this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I don't want to miss any of this. The gratifying feel of my power unbound is like molten chocolate, Christmas, a first-place trophy and a good sweaty workout. And again. And again. It feels like Kudder's foundry.

It feels like I am taking my revenge against this gods-forsaken world itself. I carve one notch after another, slopes and paths for the professionals to turn into roads. At the scale I'm working at, potholes you could lose a house in are acceptable. And my proposal papers did include a recommendation to get a wizard to throw one or two earthquakes at these things to help the stone all settle together. Kind of like shaking a jar of sugar cubes to help them pack down against each other.

The teams of mages and manual laborers that come through will have their work cut out for them, this is going to be the equivalent of building a road on the side of a particularly steep, unstable, and uneven mountain pass. But that is still orders of magnitude more feasible than trying to cut in nine miles of switchbacks or nine miles of tunnel to accomplish the same thing. Do you know what else is difficult to the point of being unfeasible?

Pulling off a stunt like this ten times in a row without anything going wrong. I was really nailing it, everything exactly to the plan. I can't even call it luck, not after literal weeks of practice and preparation and double-checking. The geological makeup of the place was extremely consistent, almost every strata was perfectly level and there were only minor deviations.

Layers of sedimentary rock, laid down in neat consistent sheets, are just about ideal for this kind of work and frankly someone less qualified than I am could probably have done most of this. It is strange, or even inexplicable, that such a consistent geology would persist for such a huge area, but it suited my purposes! And I wasn't any kind of geologist or geographer on Earth, but it really seems like there should be more variety and differentiation.

Maybe this is part of why there are no mountains anywhere in Hearstwhile? Well, as it turns out there are irregularities. And unfortunately some of them are in hard-to-test places. My ability to understand stone with my affinities does have a finite range, and it is a lot less than a mile.

So scanning the wall, and the ground of the high side of the cliff, lets me get a lot of information, but there is a significant amount of the interior that I have to make assumptions about, based on "well if the rest of these factors stay consistent". And sooner or later, they won't. The ninth detonation feels like another good place for a break. Let's go see how my adoring audience likes it.

Again I find them staring at the rising roil of atmospheric forces, the heat from the plasma-flash forming a tunnel in the air that opens up above. Twenty miles away and we're standing in its shadow, at these scales twenty miles is not much at all. The excitement in the air is electric, the conversations are hushed but frantic, I see high color standing in many cheeks, and a wild glint in many eyes. Partly they're intoxicated by the suspense, the tease of this epic sensation.

Partly, they're intoxicated by Quoissi's generously-poured libations. Partly, they're intoxicated by the carnival atmosphere his entertainers have brought. And partly it's because unlike me they were not curving air to purify it from the Uchislowi pollen I had seeded gently over the area the last two times I was here. I didn't expect that anyone here was going to allow themselves any sort of selfless, thoughtful or affectionate reactions, so they should not go fully delusional.

But they should have that vague, sparkly overlay that I've come to associate with a low-grade Uchislowi toxicity. Just a little extra giddiness, a little extra excitement. I added to that by raising the oxygen levels just a bit, getting everyone good and lightheaded. But ultimately, I am just gilding the lily, because the mushroom clouds are speaking louder than I ever could. I glared at the majordomo. He ignored me. Bit by bit, though, the rest of the gathering turned to face me, their faces expectant.

Quoissi waggled eyebrows at me, giving me a signal. As usual I could only guess what it was.

"So now you know what we're expecting, and we're just getting started. This next bit is the big show, all at once, no holding back! I may ask you to cover your ears when we get to the climax. Please do keep in mind, this is my first time doing this work on this scale, so we're all here to witness a triumphal inauguration! And as an aside, today is my first time doing this work on this scale... so if you see me running, try to keep up!" I laughed at my own joke, and vanished away.

So of course this is when things go sideways.