The Factory Must Grow - [Book 1: The System Must Live]

The light pulsed and spread, covering the horizon with golden flames. It was intense enough that Alyssa could feel it, a tingling but ancient sensation carried to her skin on the breeze. The simple fact that the winds flowing out from the golden flames were strong enough to reach her even here was… concerning, to say the least.

Is this the calamity? she couldn't help but wonder. They'd speculated a bit on what the impending apocalypse might be from time to time, but with no real information to go on, it had never really gone anywhere. She had proposed an asteroid strike, but Oliver had pointed out that the Material Planes didn't have asteroids. At least, not in the same way home did.

But this... could this be it? Were they about to all burn in golden flames?

"It's stopped spreading," Henrietta noted, and Alyssa felt herself suddenly untense. "They're not going up the cliffs, but I can't tell what halted them in other directions. If there is something, I can't see it past the trees."

"What even is that?" Oliver asked, awe in his voice.

"What, don't you know?" she half-teased. Only half, because seriously, she had kind of been hoping he would be able to tell her.

"No? I mean, it's a lot of very wild Mana obviously. But I assume even you can see that just fine."

"Yep," she totally knew it was wild mana instead of… some other kind of mana. Wasn't all mana not controlled considered wild mana? Was that what he was saying?

"How long before it might reside?"

"Why am I supposed to know that? I don't know what that is, or what caused it, or anything. My guess is genuinely as good as yours. Could be seconds, could be years. Well, probably at least a few hours before it's safe, that much mana in one place will leave lingering effects for a while after it fades, and that's not even counting things like elementals or environmental hazards. I'm not sure I'd want to go there for weeks after it… oh dang it."

Alyssa chewed her lip, "Thinking about how it looks like our shelter is in the middle of it?"

"Yeah…" Oliver agreed, defeated. Then he frowned, "Are Jacob and Clark alright?"

"We can only hope," Henrietta replied, eyes fixed on the wall of gold as it twisted and deformed, a sheet of raw magic obscuring a sizable section of the forest. "How robust are your defensive wards, Smith?"

"Less good than I'd want," he muttered, "I don't know if even back home I could make something that could stand up to that."

"What?" Alyssa cut in, "That's more than what you can build against?"

I mean, yeah it was impressive, but Oliver was their Artificer! It was smaller than a hurricane or a volcano, and those were the sorts of things he was supposed to be able to protect them against, with their equipment and stuff!

"That's not what I said," he grumbled, "I said I don't know. Because I don't. Without measurements, I don't know how strong that storm is. But do you think you could survive someone throwing a grenade at you?"

"What level?"

"Doesn't matter. Whatever you'd need to survive it."

"Then why'd you ask?"

"Because I was making a point, Alyssa."

"Pretty awful point if you need to tell me what you're going for in order for me to get what you're going for," Alyssa mentally made sure her sentence made sense, then continued, "Seems like you need to make better points, Oliver. See? I can do the naming-you thing too."

"Both of you…" Henrietta began.

"Sorry ma'am."

"Stopping."

The Commander rubbed her temples. "Smith, you're saying you can't tell how strong the storm is, because you've never seen it before. Like comparing a tornado to a hurricane, just because they're both wind doesn't mean you can compare them in the same ways."

"...That would have been a better comparison, yes."

"Good. We can move past it then. Do you think any of your creations survived?"

"You just explained why I have no way of answering that."

"Didn't know if you had a low confidence estimate, like with minimum safe-time."

Oliver looked at the storm. "No. Not without getting closer than is safe. Way, way closer. If that's pure Dragon mana, nothing is surviving. If it's more Nature or Storm, then it's a much, much better chance. But I can't tell without being close enough to be in a danger zone."

"Alright then. Change of plans. We're not returning to Shelter, we're going to set up here – I heard you calling this place First Tower, Smith? That's it's name now. And, we're changing our primary base to First Tower. Until that storm goes away, I want us to be working on bringing this place up to an appropriate standard. Smith, can you pick out a place for us to build a new hut? I remember hearing you complain about the magic in the place we chose for back at the Shelter, so find somewhere that you'll be happy with."

"You weren't supposed to hear that," Oliver sheepishly muttered.

"Don't worry about it. I just want you more involved this time around. It's something I really should have consulted on you last time. I'm not much of an architect, so I simply hadn't considered how much location mattered for something that trivial."

"It both does and doesn't. There isn't a Location element, but the positioning and Tapestry-"

"I'm sure it's fascinating, Smith, but some other time."

"Right, sorry."

"Get started on that, but if you end up thinking that the tower will be our best place long-term, you can pick out something temporary. We'll survive without full-bore defensive enchantments. The spire should work well enough against anything we might run into."

Oliver pointed into the distance, which took Alyssa an embarrassingly long moment to realize it was meant to be indicating the giant storm of wild magic.

Henrietta paused, "Good point. Still, keep in mind the possibility of a temporary shelter, depending on what we find out once the storm resides. Ride."

"Yes?" Alyssa jolted her body to attention.

"Go find a good source of reeds nearby. The closer the better, obviously, we'll be needing a lot of them. Also try to track down reliable food sources. I won't deny Shelter was better in several key ways, but I'm going to assume that the storm is leaving things uninhabitable until proven otherwise, so we need to be ready for the long haul here. If you can manage to, as you're doing so also keep an eye out on the storm and be ready to head out for a rescue op at a moment's notice. Understood?"

"Yes Commander."

"Excellent. While you're doing all that, I'm going to send my pseudowyvern to investigate the storm area, then go pick up a large batch of reeds to get us initial construction material, then start making some ladders and bridges."

"Thank you," Oliver softly replied.

"Any questions? No? Excellent. Go."

By the time the storm had properly subsided nearly two days later, First Tower was already seeing an appreciable amount of growth and stabilization,. It was already turning what had previously been essentially a mudpit in Alyssa's mind – because there was just so much mud – into an actual… camp. Reeds had been erected for scaffolding to their future hut, a half-dozen ladders were set up to make getting up and down the rock spire easier along the face next to the clay-making factory, and there was even a half-made bridge to get across the river. It probably wasn't going to last forever, because none of them thought the riverbank was solid enough to keep the support posts in place indefinitely, but if it stayed in place for a couple weeks that was still a win.

A big part of it, Alyssa knew, was that 'recreate our camp' was a clearer goal than they'd had in the… however many weeks they'd spent on this world, so it was a lot easier to get things actually into a workable state. But also, she and Oliver agreed that most of it was that they'd just gotten a lot better at the skills needed already. The number of splinters gotten while working with reeds had drastically reduced, how long it took her to cut up branches with her hatchet was way down, and she now actually knew how to use a random rock as a hammer instead of just blindly guessing.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It made her feel good, and actually a bit hopeful that things really would get better…

Assuming this trip didn't end with her finding the dead bodies of their Healer and Warrior, anyway. Henrietta's inkling presumably hadn't survived contact with the storm - though they weren't able to check what had killed it, only that something had. But if a similar fate had befallen their teammates, she was pretty much screwed.

"Stupid, piddly little spear, check," she muttered to herself. "Hatchet, deliberate uncheck, because they need it here, which is annoying. Water gourd, check. The last of the jerky, check. Okay, I think I'm ready."

The last part was said louder, and primarily directed at Henrietta, who responded with a nod of her own.

"Then let's get going."

A tendril of ink wrapped around Alyssa, smooth and cool against her midriff, and lifted her into the air as their team leader took to the sky with a flap of inky wings.

"Remember!" Henrietta called out, loud enough to be heard over the wind in their ears, "If you need me more urgently than my flybys every few hours, light a signal fire!"

"I know!" Alyssa yelled back, "Just make sure you put me down somewhere that we can sit down at and still be seen by you!"

The trip by air took just a couple of minutes, easily knocking hours off the overall trip time, depending on how long it might have taken Alyssa to make and pilot another reed-boat to cross the larger river.

"We really are getting to the point where we need to start naming these things, aren't we?" she mused.

"What was that?" Henrietta called back.

"Don't worry about it!"

She still ended up explaining when Henrietta landed on the shoreline to catch her breath. They couldn't even call the massive river 'the First Tower river' because First Tower already had a river, and it was one that fed into the larger one anyway. The couple minutes they spent before parting didn't result in any ideas better than calling it the 'First River' with its tributary 'Tower Stream', but they lightheartedly agreed to discuss it more in a couple days when Alyssa returned.

And with that… she was off.

The first part of the journey was exactly what she expected, and Alyssa was able to find her way through the increasingly-familiar woods with barely a hiccup. Some parts definitely felt a bit different to her magic sense, but that much was expected. She had expected that to grow in intensity as she got closer to the area the storm had affected, until it became completely different, but instead it stayed at a very low level for a couple hour's worth of travel, and then…

"That would be the cutoff, I suppose," Alyssa ran her hand down the trunk of the tree she was next to. It felt, well, like a tree. Nothing that odd, just a living and growing behemoth of wood and leaves. Smooth, dark gray bark and sporting a vine coiled around its base, with arrowhead-shaped leaves starting about ten feet off the ground. She could even see the roots protruding from the ground, a half-dozen wooden tendrils embedded into the leaf-covered soil.

All of three feet from the base of the tree, the normal leafy ground was just… gone. Oh sure, there were still lots of leaves lying on the ground, but the soft soil was entirely absent, and in its place was rock. On its own, that wasn't the weirdest thing, because wild magic could be absolutely crazy, and soil and rocks were both earthy, so one transmuting into the other didn't seem that odd to her.

But what was weird was how the soil followed the roots. It genuinely looked like someone had cut a section out of the rock designed to fit the roots, the solid stone swooshing and curving organically in response to the wooden protrusion. It wasn't even that the tree had somehow simply survived having its roots embedded in rock either, there was still soil a few inches around the roots, unaffected by whatever crazy magic had transformed the landscape.

It wasn't just the ground, either. Where trees had previously been dominant in the forest, now spires of stone and pillars of red-to-purple crystal jut out of the rocks at random angles, looking for all the world like the floor of a cave that had been transposed into open air.

Alyssa took a few hesitant steps into the transformed region, noting a couple wisps of gold floating around the air, and knelt down to get a better feel of the area.

Surprisingly, she didn't get much. Motes of earth, traces of air, and what might have been crystal, but overall she couldn't get much of a read on it. Whether that was because what elements were present were just ones she couldn't feel very well as a [Ranger of Far Lands] or because there was still an active storm of magic underneath the ground, she couldn't say.

Out of curiosity, she next ran her fingers across the dividing line between the soil and stone, and felt exactly what it looked like, a sharp cross from normal forest floor mana to the incomprehensible stone. Further adding to the confusion was the fact a few moments of feeling and a bit of digging later, she realized that not only did the stone courteously bend around the tree roots, when the tree roots went underground, so did the soil.

There wasn't enough time to give it as thorough an exploration as she wanted to, but the entire thing was really weird, and the scene wasn't unique in its weirdness. All along the border between forest and stone, similar sights repeated, where random plants acted as the boundary between where the storm had raged… and where it hadn't. Whatever constraint had kept the wild magic from spreading had done so with precision, and Alyssa truly didn't know what to make of that.

Curiosity firmly un-sated, she kept going.

Even though the storm had gotten rid of all of the trees in the area, and thereby her landmarks as well as her ability to track herself, it also meant there was a lot less visual obstruction between her and the massive cliff their shelter had been built at the base of, so it evened out.

The entire area felt almost oppressive, in a way that Alyssa had first mistaken for some kind of magical presence but subsequently realized was mostly the atmosphere. It was like the entire place was dead, with the only sound a keening wind resonating with the odd spires, barely audible on its own yet managing to drown out all other noises.

Even her own voice was affected, her loudest shouts barely sounding louder than conversational volume.

The stone wasn't safe either, with solid-looking surfaces crumbling under her feet regardless of [Leafstep], and piles of loose rock would collapse as she passed them for no apparent cause. The light reflected by the crystals was usually harmless, but at one point Alyssa felt a sharp burning sensation as she passed through the light cast by a purple crystal, one strong enough to leave a singe on her skin.

Beyond that, the entire place was still changing. She was thrown off her feet as a crystal broke the ground right underneath her, creating a pillar twice as tall as she was. A pile of rubble un-collapsed into a spire of stone as she watched, and a boulder broke itself free from the ground and drifted into the air, only to come crashing down after a few moments.

While there wasn't much life present that Alyssa saw, that didn't mean there was nothing. It just wasn't any creatures she recognized. A red lizard-looking thing with six black legs skittered over a stone as she passed, and she made sure to give plenty of space to the purple-headed snake as thick as her arm and probably twenty or thirty feet long as it lounged atop a giant red crystal.

A blue crystal as big as she was caught her attention for how rare the color was around here, but she didn't investigate. Instead, she refocused on where she thought the shelter should have been…

Where it was. Wow.

A fissure had opened up right at the base of the cliff, following where their creek had been and plummeting some forty, fifty feet into the ground where a river flowed by at high speed. It was only ten feet wide, so not too bad, but still.

And yet the Shelter itself still stood. It was on the far side of the fissure, naturally, but while it hadn't escaped unscathed, it still obviously existed. The trees and branches had been transformed into opaque red crystal and the arch it had been built under had expanded in size, swallowing where their pond had been before and turning it all into a cave.

A flicker of movement to her right prompted Alyssa to bring her spear up just in time to fend off an attack from a mass of fire. She interposed the shaft without even thinking about it, but the elemental slammed into the reed with all the force of a large dog and fell to the ground.

Before Alyssa could decide what to do, the creature ran away and curled up on a dome of glowing stone maybe twenty feet from her, letting her get a good look at it. The salamander – one with six legs but still obviously a salamander – was the first truly familiar-looking creature she'd seen on this world, and it hissed at her with a tongue of fire, for all the sound was carried away by the keening wind. Its underbelly was the color of ash, most of its scales were the color of molten and glowing copper, and its scales flickered with the orange color of a campfire, assessing her with eyes of glowing coals.

It didn't seem like it was going to attack her again, so Alyssa turned back to the shelter. She leaned her spear against her hip and cupped her hands around her mouth, yelling as loudly as she could to try and break past the anti-sound effect, "Hello the Shelter. Jacob, Clark, are you there?"

She barely even had time to wonder whether she should just jump into the Shelter opening to check inside directly before the familiar face of their Healer to pop out of the opening and wave to her. He said something, but the sound was carried away.

Alyssa waved back, shouting, "Clark. I can't hear you. Move out of the way, okay?"

It took the man far too long to move, even after she started waving for him to get out of the entrance. Even then, it only seemed to be because Jacob had pulled him inside. Fortunately, their Warrior was much quicker on the uptake, and only needed a brief wave of the hand to understand that she needed space to work.

With a running start, it was simplicity itself to jump into the shelter, but she nearly overbalanced and fell face-first into the ashen firepit when she did so.

"Alyssa!" Clark happily greeted her, his voice entirely unmuted inside. He gave her a surprise hug before she could maneuver out of arm's reach. "You're okay!"

"I'm okay? Obviously. We were worried about you, but it looks like you've been… alright?"

She looked around the shelter. It was far, far darker than she was used to on account of the far wall now being an actual wall rather than an opening to their pond, but that was lightly offset by the glowing crystals that comprised the other wall.

"What happened there?"

"Wild magic storm," Clark unhelpfully supplied. "I thought you would have noticed?"

"That's not what I… sure. Whatever."

Even beyond the fact it had all been turned into crystal, there were lots of lines glowing a faint blue color, and when Alyssa brushed one of them with her hand, it was obvious there was a lot of enchantment-work going on underneath.

"We took cover here two days prior, in the wake of a storm being unleashed upon the death of a tree I slew."

"Hold up, you… actually no, I can wait until we're back at First Tower. The site we went to," she added in way of explanation, "Oliver and Henrietta are there setting up a new camp, don't worry about it. Why haven't you left?"

"Twofold," Jacob continued. "The first is practical, we knew this would be the first location investigated for us and did not desire to make the search any more difficult than it could be. The second is that… well, the salamander out there is quite territorial, and attacked me when I jumped across to set something up for Clark to cross."

"The water down below is a bit too fast for me," Clark cut in to add, as though it wasn't entirely understandable why you wouldn't want to go swimming in a fast-moving river at the bottom of a gorge that a magic had just spawned out of the ether.

"It didn't seem that tough to me," Alyssa shrugged. "And it's a fire elemental, you're telling me your [Frostblade] didn't absolutely annihilate it?"

"Oh, absolutely. Which is precisely the problem. We have grown rather fond of him, and don't wish to kill him. But I can't fight it unarmed, and when even a tap with my sword would definitely do it in…"

Alyssa laughed. "Got it. Well, we'll get you home in no time."