Forged Legacy

While the rest of Heaven enjoyed their Sunday by sleeping in, catching up with family, and going to church, Harvey was hard at work on his latest project. Wands. A simple stick shooting bolts of condensed essence had been his very first weapon, and now he was trying to figure out how to replicate them so people like his sister who still hadn’t made their Class would have an easy weapon to rely on. Cash and Celeste both touted the benefits of starting your ascension in angel school instead of fighting bloodrunn alone in the woods, but Harvey thought the faithful could do with some more hands-on learning. You could listen to a master swordsman talk about swing trajectories, blocks, and ripostes until your ears bleed, but that wouldn’t help much if you never actually picked up a sword. That’s why he wanted every faithful to have a wand in their pocket for when things went wrong.

[Pretty hard to mess up when all you gotta do is point and shoot.]

Harvey gently nodded his agreement, careful not to disturb his brush as he carefully painted a thin line of lightning ink on the silver wand in his hands. It was the first permanent inscription he’d found after dozens of temporary arrays he’d tested with Adaptive Inscription. Creating something that ran purely off channeling essence was surprisingly difficult, especially since his only reference material had blown up inside the throat of a sentient Iron Elemental. Most of his inscriptions up to this point either ran on absorbed kinetic energy or drew large amounts out of an essence crystal. Powering arrays with directly infused essence wasn’t any harder, but creating an array that was both efficient enough to be used repeatedly and powerful enough to kill something took some trial and error. In the end, Harvey bought a handful of simple wands from John’s shop and used their complex inscriptions as a blueprint, adapting them to his own ink supply and budding brushwork.

When the last lines of lightning ink completed the circuit, he rushed over to the door leading inside the house. “Eleanor! Can you come out here for a sec?”

“We’re eating lunch! Why don’t you come join us?” Cassandra called back.

“No thanks! I need Eleanor to come shoot me with the wand I just made!”

Harvey grinned when he heard his mother’s worried gasp, then laughed out loud when he saw his little sister dart around the corner. “Don’t have to ask me twice.”

Closing the door behind her, Harvey handed her the wand and moved to an empty spot away from his forge. “Alright, I’m going to cover my chest with one of my defensive skills. When I say go, start channeling essence until it fires.”

Eleanor rolled the wand between her fingers, inspecting the arrays that shimmered slightly with pale blue light. “What does it do?”

Harvey grinned. “Shoots lightning bolts.”

“What? Like Tyler? Are you sure we should be doing this in the garage? What if you get hurt?”

He was pleased to see her enthusiasm about shooting him didn’t completely erase her concern for his well-being, but he wasn’t worried about getting fried. “It’s G-Grade ink! I’ll be fine. I can’t fit a skill like Tyler’s on a stick. Not yet, anyway.”

“What if the lightning stops your heart or something?”

“Then it’s a good thing you’re holding a magic defib machine,” Harvey joked. Letting the Fangburner shield he’d conjured over his chest dissipate, a new one sprang up around his leg. “But if it makes you feel better, you can zap me in the knee.”

Suddenly looking very nervous, Eleanor pointed the wand at his leg. He could see the tip gently shaking as the arrays began to glow. “Careful now, you don’t want to hit the house.”

“Shut up!” His old wand had barely taken a second to charge, but the array covering this one kept drinking in more and more essence. He didn’t know if it was Eleanor taking things slow, but it took almost four seconds before the bolt finally shot out, slamming into his leg and scorching the earthen barrier. Harvey was surprised to find it actually managed to spread cracks through the stone, and he had to suppress the burst of retaliatory forgefire before it burned down the garage.

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“Ow. I should’ve used my real armor instead,” Harvey groaned.

“What? Why? Are you ok?”

“I’m fine. Just got lazy and almost set the house on fire.”

“Are you serious!” Eleanor gasped, tossing the wand on a workbench like it was about to explode.

“Not the wand!” Harvey chuckled. “We’re safe. Don’t worry. Were you trying to charge the array that slow?”

“I don’t think so? I mean, I’ve never done it before, so I could’ve been charging it wrong.”

Harvey walked over to the button on the wall and clicked it, the tiny electric motor whirring to life as it rolled up the metal garage door. Grabbing the wand from the workbench, the two of them walked to the edge of the sidewalk. When he pointed the wand at the asphalt, Eleanor tugged his arm. “What are you doing? You’re going to get us in trouble!”

“What? I gotta test it somehow, and who cares about a few potholes? It’s not like there are any cars here.”

Before she could protest more, he began channeling essence into the wand. Pushing as much through as he could without destabilizing the array, it still took three seconds before the bolt shot into the ground.

“Damn it!” he complained.

“What’s wrong?”

“It takes way too long to charge. That might be fine if there was some sort of manual trigger rune, but I designed it to fire the second it had enough essence.”

“Is that a problem? The lightning seems pretty strong. I bet most monsters wouldn’t survive the blast.”

Harvey shook his head. “Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe if you were hunting level 7s, but I doubt that’s what will be waiting for us when we get back to Earth. The problem with that charge time is you’d have to anticipate exactly where your target’s going to be three seconds from now, which might be chomping down on your throat. Even if you do time it well and hit it before it gets you, it will probably get up before you can hit it again. How much essence did it take you to use it?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like there’s a number I can check,” she shrugged.

Harvey handed the wand back to her. “Shoot a few more times and tell me how you feel. You’ll know when you start running low.”

With a Level 25 Profession, a Level 12 Race, and no Class, Eleanor managed to shoot the wand a dozen times before the telltale headaches of low essence reserves sent her staggering over to a stool. Harvey took the wand and gave her one of his G-Grade essence potions, refilling her reserves before trading the empty vial for a water bottle.

“That sucks,” she groaned, the sound muffled as she buried her head in her arms while lying on his workbench.

“You can take a break,” Harvey said, patting her on the back as he looked at the wand. It was definitely powerful, but not practical enough for a G-Grade warrior. He’d put all his effort into the array's destructive capabilities without considering what that extra firepower would cost. For the wand to be considered a practical weapon, he needed to cut the charge time down to less than a second, add a manual trigger to activate the array, and make it efficient enough for a G-Grade to use it more than a handful of times before bleeding their essence reserves dry.

Harvey spent the next week refining his inscriptions, testing different inks, arrays, and materials in the pursuit of a wand that could be mass-produced for all the Faithful who had fallen behind under Heaven’s teaching methods. He found that different resonances performed better with different types of runes, and had the most success creating simple fireball wands. He was sure there were runes that would work just as well with lightning, ice, or more esoteric attacks like spikes of earth and metal, but he didn’t have the knowledge base to create great combinations of ink and runes. In the end, he settled on a design that incorporated two arrays. The first was a relatively cheap fireball that could be used frequently, and the second was a watered-down version of the original lightning bolt that could be used when you needed a little extra punch. Both arrays incorporated the trigger rune missing from his first tests, and used simple G-Grade Ink he could refill over and over again with the help of Protean Ink since the cost scaled with the power he was trying to replicate. Cassandra and Eleanor kept one strapped to their waist at all times, and other families in the neighborhood were already starting to notice. Harvey made sure Mackenzie, the mother he’d saved when a Helltaur tried breaking into their basement, had one and knew how to use it, but saved working on any more for when he was hiding out in his freshly camouflaged bunker waiting for the day’s battle to start.

Inscribing a few G-Grade wands wasn’t too taxing on his essence reserves, and now that he had Hidden Fortress to disguise Legacy’s Redoubt among the rubble, he had plenty of room to work. Harvey settled into a routine where he slept through the morning, worked on other new projects in the garage all afternoon, then snuck out for another round of sniper leveling each night. He wasn’t getting another Class level every night anymore, but another 6 days of shooting still netted him 4 more levels. Add the 3 Profession levels he’d gained making wands, and his Race was up to Level 68. If he could just hold out for a few more weeks, getting to Level 75 before the trial ended was a real possibility.

Everything went off without a hitch that first week, but he got some bad news when Cash and Celeste joined the Thorne’s for Sunday dinner.