Fate Alchemist - A Regression Academy LitRPG

"Kalee, are you ready with the spell Skill?" Wulf asked.

"I've got it," she said, holding out a simple, round construct covered in runes. She crushed it in her grip, sacrificing it to fuel her ability.

"Hit the back half of the horde."

Wulf took a position ahead of the charging stream of demons, holding his arms up and preparing for impact. Two fiends rushed at the head of the pack, jumping through the water like monkeys, half using their arms and legs, and half running with just their legs. They wielded nothing but their claws. Behind them, a fiend holding a whip of pure magma surged forward, the water coming up to its mid-thighs.

Wulf swatted one of the empty-handed fiends to the side with his remaining sword. The blade struck the beast's carapace and sent it tumbling to the side. It hit the waves with a splash, sent up a plume of water, and howled.

The other one approached from the side. He stabbed at its forehead with the tip of his blade—his arm hadn't been in a good position to slash. The blade clacked off the beast's armoured skull and didn't break through, but, shouting with exertion, he heaved forward, sending the beast stumbling back.

Kalee activated her Skill. A circle of orange runes burst out around Wraith's forearm, and another circle appeared beneath the waves, catching half of the fiend horde. In the distance, another Oronith's mage launched a bar of flame over the surface of the waves, and it struck the whip-wielding fiend just hard enough to send the creature stumbling back into the runic circle on the ocean floor.

The orange light trembled, struggling, but still partially amplified by Kalee's skill and their Oronith's Silver-tier strength. It wouldn't hold long.

The runes activated, and crushing gravity weighed down on the back half of the demon cluster, breaking the formation. Five of the nine beasts sloshed downward, falling into the ocean, tugged downward for a few seconds as the four others mindlessly charged ahead.

Whatever had put them in formation was gone now. They weren't getting any new commands. They were moving on their instincts again, picking the most appetizing targets. At the moment, that was Wulf.

Now, the fiend in the lead Wielded an enormous club of black steel, with spikes protruding from every angle. Wraith's mana-lights illuminated the beast, making its armour glisten and the steam rolling off its back shine pale white.

It slammed its club into the water, hollered, then sprinted forward. Swinging the club back and forth, it deflected Wulf's sword to the side. He raised his forearm to block, but the fiend was much stronger. Mana sparks rained from the roof, the dream-link shone dark purple under the strain, and distant stone cracks echoed through the cockpit. He placed his remaining sword in position to help him.

"Body integrity dropping!" Seith called. "Your knees and elbows haven't been reinforced with modern joints or new, arcane rune-lines. They can't take strain like this."

Wulf tried to pull to the side, but the spikes on the club caught the curved obsidian blade's fuller, dragged down it, then hooked. The entire blade shattered, giving the club a free route to his chest.

It impacted with the weight of a mountain, cleaving away a section of Wulf's chest panels. Wraith spun, disorienting him and pressing him back in the harness. The next thing he knew, water bubbled around the cockpit. They collided with the muddy sea floor, and the visor glass cracked. Water dribbled down from the ceiling above.

He didn't have long. If Seith and Irmond were still holding on to the outside, they were going to drown.

From the way his golem's panels pressed into his back, trying to push his spine out of alignment, he guessed the fiend had a foot on his back.

"We're not going to match them for strength in this Oronith," Kalee stressed. "You're not a brawler anymore. You're an alchemist."

Wraith placed a hand down on the seafloor. Wulf gritted his teeth with the strain. He didn't have the strength to respond.

He needed more time. If he could just make a strength and speed potion, he could get them out of this. But as it stood, they were stuck, and they were going to drown.

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Spirit's cores can lend their effect to a construct, Dr. Arnau had said, either a lecture last week or two weeks ago. Kalee had probably said something like that too. Attaching it, taking that effect, is the difficult part. You need a bridge, and a way into the core's center. The bridge is simple: any arcane metal will do. To crack the core requires much more care, and we won't go over how in this class. Simply, we're here to classify the types of spirits, what they do, and how we can use them to help us.

Wulf had to try it. There was nothing like a little pressure if you were going to innovate.

He unplugged his dream socket, then opened his golem. With his head facing downward, he plummeted, landing on the visor glass in front of them.

Then, he reached into his haversack and withdrew both his lab storage core and the storm spirit's core.

There wasn't time to think. He needed a chunk of arcane metal. A cork stopper would do the trick—he could transmute it.

"Wulf, what are you doing?" Kalee shouted.

"I'm buying us time!"

"How can I help?"

"I need something with lots of order," he said, stomping on the cork until it splintered. He picked up the largest splinter. "Irmond, Seith, just hold on!" They couldn't respond, but hopefully, they could hear him.

"Take this!" Kalee called, producing a metal construct from beneath the skirt of her dress. She dropped it, and Wulf caught it. It was made from the Shimmer-Copper he'd transmuted on the voyage over, but crafted into a…construct of some kind. He couldn't say what it did, and it didn't really matter. But given a purpose, made into something, it had more order. It was fuel.

He pulled his scissors off his shoulder, then harvested the construct's order. It was about a hundred units. Then he harvested its chaos, leaving behind only a dribble of primal material, which he let fall to the ground. It ate into the stone of the inner cockpit, but not enough to do lasting damage to the Wraith.

He transmuted the chunk of cork into a shard of metal. Since it was so small, so much order in such a small place had a greater effect than he could have predicted. The cork turned into a faint green metal, whose name he couldn't pick out off the top of his head. He didn't have time to assess it or figure out what it did.

It was arcane, and that was what mattered. Besides, he'd had good luck with green-coloured things before.

Now came the hard part: cracking the spirit's core.

An actual twenty-year-old probably wouldn't have had the precise control under pressure, but Wulf had decades of experience. He needed to crack the glassy outer coating, but not destroy the orb.

He knelt down, placed the orb on his knee, then tapped on it with his new chunk of green metal until it cracked, then more, and more, until there was a crack big enough to slot the metal in through the crack. It touched the center of the core, and the smokey clouds within it swirled about, trying to climb up the metal, but with nowhere to go.

Wulf activated his storage pendant. The storm core's usual effect was to speed up time around the person looking into it, or so it felt. A second staring into the core turned into minutes in real life. He needed the opposite effect.

"Kalee!" he called. "Can you hold this?"

He tossed both halves—the core and the pendant, and she caught it. She said, "This could be deadly. This could trap you in a time loop, or—"

"Or it'll save us. Do you want to drown under a demon's foot? How do I reverse the core's effect?"

"For a storage pendant?" She pressed both halves together, touching the core's metal link to the crossed, intertwined tips of the pendant. "That's simple. You connect it to the end of the rune-lines instead of the front."

Wulf nodded. "I'll fuel it if you hold it."

"Will do." She pressed the pendant and the core together in the right place. Or, what she thought was. He'd have to trust her—she had more artificing experience than he did.

Then, he scrambled up the walls of the cockpit until he was closer to her again, and he fuelled the storage pendant again with his mana. Kalee drew an opening with it in the air, and before she could stop him, Wulf dove in.

He slid to a halt on the floor of the pendant. Outside, everything moved in perfect slow motion. Kalee's chest heaved up and down at a fraction of its usual speed. There was a school of fish fleeing by in the corner of the pendant, but they now only moved a fingernail's width every second.

He couldn't even waste a second of his extra time.

He turned to his potion-making setup. "Alright, grass. If you haven't improved your tier, then I don't know what to do with you."

Last year, he'd made High-Silver potions. This year, he could guarantee something better. He needed it.

Pendant Fescue Grass (Low-Iron Quality)

For some reason, someone has taken to growing grass within a storage pendant. No effect.

No effect, but the quality was still there. He trimmed a handful, enough to make a batch of ten potions.

The process was the same. He didn't have any tinctures pre-made, but he could solve that problem with a touch of chaos.

If he had to guess, time outside was moving a hundred times slower, but that still didn't give him forever. He had to finish these potions, or they were going to drown. He needed some kind of effect to empower his own body. Something to strengthen him and help him slip out of the fiend's grip.

Cracking his knuckles, he set to work.