Fate Alchemist - A Regression Academy LitRPG

Wulf sprinted along the deck. It was slick with rain, and pellets of hail rolled beneath his feet, threatening to slip away and send him sprawling across the deck. It didn't help that they were trying to climb the next swell. It also didn't help that his legs hadn't completely adjusted to the realities of seafaring yet.

A group of sailors stepped in front of him, hauling a rope and adjusting the mainsail, but he ducked around them, then raced to the bow, where sailors were backing away from the lightning spirit, holding their hands up and glancing between each other nervously. If they made sudden movements, they'd draw its attention and convince it they were a threat.

A Middle-Bronze spirit wasn't intelligent enough for anything else, but given time and plenty of mana, a spirit could become much more intelligent. But in this case, they were making a wise decision.

Wulf pulled his scissors off his back and pried them open, then darted around the winch at the front of the ship. He held them with one hand, practicing a grip that the style guide from the weavers had suggested. With the other hand, he snagged a potion from his haversack, a vial of a simple nauseating poison potion, and popped the cap off with his thumb.

Swinging his arm, he launched an arc of potion out from the vial, then captured it with [Arm of the Alchemist] and controlled it into a thin tendril. It wouldn't be long before the rain diluted it, but he didn't need long.

He flicked the tendril of potion like a whip, striking the lightning spirit on its nose. Its form didn't break or buckle, but the creature skidded back along the deck and collided with the bow railing. The wood creaked and groaned under its weight.

"Get back!" he shouted to the sailors. They listened and darted back.

One yelled, "We need to tighten the forestay, or the wind will tear the sail apart! And soon!"

Wulf registered the shout. It just meant that he had to deal with the lightning spirit quickly.

By now, a few of the other students were emerging from belowdeck, and just in time to engage a wind spirit that jumped up onto the ship's midsection. Wulf didn't have time to assess its tier, but it looked similarly solid as the lightning spirit. Probably a Bronze as well. It took the shape of a seagull, though it was the height of a human, and instead of lightning, its main form was made up with tendrils of pale wind. It wasn't just air; that'd be invisible. But the world had natural auras. The Field ensured it. Said auras could sometimes manifest physically. Wind aura's had a gray colour.

"Wulf!" Kalee shouted. She darted in front of him and struck the lightning spirit with her staff, driving it down to the deck.

"Sorry," he replied. "Too distracted."

He wished he could say he hadn't been known for being distracted in his past life, but there was a reason he tended to work alone, and hadn't led at the head of an army. There was too much going on, and he'd hyperfixate on one thing instead of looking at an overview of their situation.

But there was always time to improve. This time, he was going to be a good Pilot. That meant focussing and trusting the others to do their jobs, too. A bunch of Irons could handle a wind spirit, and Dr. Arnau was there to help.

He took a two-handed grip on his scissors, then turned back to the lightning spirit. Practicing a jab (from the weavers' style guide as well), he lunged forward, attacking the lightning spirit at its midsection.

He pierced its flank with the slightly-parted tip of the xerion scissors, then…drew on them. It was almost like a tug on his core itself. He imagined his mana cores as a spool, and that he was pulling a thread of yarn through the scissors, drawing something out of the lightning spirit.

He used it as a focus, first, to enhance [Chaotic Alteration]. The lightning spirit, however, was hardly poisonous. There were only a few aspects of it that could be considered poisonous by the loosest definitions.

He pulled one, maybe two units of chaos through that method, and stored it in one half of his scissors.

The lightning spirit still shrieked. It whipped its tail toward him, and he jumped back. The air tingled with static, and there was a smell, almost like freshly-washed laundry.

"Kalee!" he called. "Do you have the wood chips ready?"

He wasn't about to vent only a single unit of chaos, especially when that wasn't the essence they needed. But his plan was simple. He was better with chaos. Better at isolating it, better at drawing it. He had Marks and skills for that. Though his scissors could in theory work with order, it wasn't as natural, as innate. He didn't technically even have a skill for it—he was just relying on the xerion's natural properties.

Without first isolating the order, he couldn't use it.

Next, he drew on [Wraithmaster], his Grand Mark. It was similar to triggering a Skill, especially when the Mark was one like [Wraithmaster] that had active properties. It was essentially another skill.

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He plunged the scissors into the spirit again and drew out the rest of its chaos with a single pull.

The lightning spirit didn't like that. It really didn't. It screeched and hollered, and finally, its form shrank. It was mostly chaos, as lightning should be, so when all that was left was order, all it had was the slightly orderly aspects of itself. The jagged bolts of light forming a koi-fish shape were gone, replaced with only a rigid stack of straight lines of quivering energy. He didn't exactly know what they were, and they didn't matter. It was some 'orderly' component of lightning, and that was what he needed.

He spread his scissors wider, then isolated the half that didn't hold any chaos. He plunged it into the remains of the lightning wraith, drawing out a thread of order. It wasn't nearly as fast, and though it took the same process as before, it didn't seem as natural. The order certainly didn't want to enter his body.

In fact, it seemed more willing to cross over between the two halves of the scissors, crossing over the xerion bolt, and trying to merge a new material against his will. It took all his concentration, pulling on a thread of the Field, just to keep the order and chaos isolated.

"Kalee!" he shouted. Currently, she used a spell Skill to hold a crew member to the deck as they crested over a high wave, saving his life. She concentrated the gravity beneath him, keeping his feet firmly planted to the deck.

The ship hit the other side of the swell with a crash, and a spray of sea foam splattered over the bow. Water tried to wash Wulf off his feet, but he widened his stance and resisted the tug. "Kalee! I need the wood chips! Now!"

By his estimation, he had just accumulated about fifty units of order. If his calculations were right, that would be enough to transmute the wood into a simple shimmer-copper, a slightly arcane variant of copper ideal for carrying runes. That, along with a single extra unit of chaos. After all, metal wasn't just order.

The remains of the lightning spirit shriveled into a tiny pebble of glass, then fell on the deck and shattered. As Kalee released her spell Skill and ran toward him, Wulf turned back to the crew members and shouted, "It's safe!"

The sailors scampered back to the bow and grabbed the ropes, but Wulf pushed them to the back of his mind. Kalee presented him the wood chips, and he used his scissors to inject the right essences. By reversing the process he used to draw out the order, he could inject it back into his chosen target.

He transmuted two wood chips before running out of order, and it was just in time. The excess chaos flooded across the center pin of the scissors and filled the entire weapon, swirling about, but safely stored for the moment.

Kalee, meanwhile, held up the shimmer-copper to the light. It was a rusty orange, like regular copper, but whenever lightning flashed, the copper took on a faint purple sheen. One of them had gotten slightly tarnished and had green flecks around its edges; he'd added slightly too much chaos.

"It worked!" Kalee shouted.

"Let's try to get you a little more!" he yelled. "So you can keep making constructs!"

But for that, he'd need to vent the chaos from his scissors as a whole. Kalee held out a third wood chunk, and Wulf pushed nearly three-hundred units of chaos into it at once. The wood trembled, then burst apart. Kalee flung it overboard before it could hurt her, but the chunk of wood and its transmuted components were forever lost to the ocean.

"Whoops," Wulf said.

"A little warning next time?" Kalee exclaimed.

"I didn't think it was going to do that."

She sighed. "What did that make?"

"No idea. I don't remember off the top of my head. Probably something volatile and dangerous!" He tilted his head. "Or I need to do more reading! I seem to recall something about needing stable environments and high-pressure surroundings to easily transmute high-tier materials!"

Kalee groaned. "Alright, then let's stick with shimmer-copper for now!"

"Will do!"

They spent the next half hour, maybe forty-five minutes, using Wulf's scissors to create more shimmer-copper chunks, until Kalee had a fist-sized pouch of them. More than enough for her own work, and more than enough to upgrade Wulf's storage constructs. That meant they had to harvest spirits.

Dr. Arnau was busy on the quarterdeck, fending off her own horde of lightning spirits, and the other students on the main deck gathered around the mast, protecting the sailors and the ropes from hungry wind spirits. They launched spell Skills, enhanced arrows, or just bashed the spirits with their fists, taking no care to harvest anything from them. There was nothing important to harvest from low-level spirits, unless you counted the tiny glass bead at their center, which some trading posts would exchange for minor goods if there was a bounty on spirits.

That left the bow to Wulf and Kalee. No one was paying attention to their order- and chaos-stealing operation, especially not in these conditions. But still, Wulf carrying around a pair of scissors was suspicious enough, and especially when a discerning eye might realize they were xerion. For the moment, he had to trust that no one expected him to have xerion, so no one was looking for it. It worked in his favour.

He'd still have to deal with that, eventually. Mask them—somehow.

But, almost immediately after Wulf had finished transmuting the last pellet of wood for Kalee, a roar washed over the ship, and a gust of wind pelted them from the side. A faint voice screeched on the wind, as if chanting some ancient hymn. The mast creaked, the sail fluttered, and all the remaining lanterns below deck went out.

"Not good!" Wulf yelled. He and Kalee shared the same look. Even though they'd never been out to sea, they both knew the signs to look for in a massive storm.

If there was a big spirit causing the storm, it tended to sound like this.

"Take down the sail!" Wulf shouted. "Take it down now, or we'll blow over!" He turned his scissors over and sprinted back across the deck. "Cut it loose! There's a spare!"

"What is it?" Irmond asked, wiping water from his eyes with the back of his hand, before pulling another arrow from his hip-quiver and nocking it.

Wulf tightened his grip on the scissors. "We found the storm's nucleus."