Delve

These days, it took quite a bit to make Rain out of breath, so as he swung the two-handed sledgehammer, the tortured burn of his lungs was really saying something. With his body under Velocity’s influence, the heavy lump of carved deepstone at the end of the hammer’s sturdy handle felt like an obstinate star resisting his efforts to pull it out of the sky. And pull he did, though not as hard as he could have, for precision was his goal, not destruction.

The hammer fell, and with one resounding strike, Rain drove the rail spike through the wooden tie, making the section of rail jump as it was pinned into place. Both the spike and the rail were made of a nameless alloy of nickel, copper, zinc, beryllium, and a bunch of other leftovers they’d had from their smelter operations going back months and months. It wasn’t quite whatthefuckium, as there were no Tel included, but it was close. Whattheyhadium, perhaps, for they’d used up all of their steel, titanium, and aluminum. They were even out of tin, else they’d have just made bronze.

Hence, railroad.

This track would be nothing like the continent-spanning network Rain described to Luna, simply leading from the canal to the main base. Temerity was out at the moment, anchored offshore of the as-yet-unnamed island they planned to use for exchanging goods with the Banker’s Goldships. Vanna, Samson, and a complement of several hundred volunteers were there too, working on clearing land for something of a cargo yard. It was too soon for Luna to have gotten them the ore that they’d asked for, but the island itself had sand and rock aplenty, which, ore-wise, was a damn sight better than the muck they’d been raking from the canal.

Temerity would be back this evening, hauling as full a load as the construction team had managed to gather, hopefully already melted down by the ship’s smelter. Tallheart was blocked until it got here, unable to complete the second airship without aluminum, titanium, and steel.

Of all the supposed hells, one of them surely had to be dedicated to logistics.

The vibration of the strike still reverberating in his bones, Rain released the hammer and stomped down on the rail to realign it before scooping up another spike. It felt heavy in his hand for a moment, but only until he browbeat Velocity into accepting it as ‘worn’, at which point it felt light as a feather. Faster than an observing eye could follow, he maneuvered it into place, jamming the point into the waiting wood and aligning it for his next strike. Before the hammer’s handle had even hit the ground, he snatched it up again, raising it high over his head and impressing on Velocity the notion that he wasn’t wielding it.

The speed-boosting Aura—and Arcane speed-boosting skills in general—didn’t increase speed in the physical sense. Instead, they let the affected entity skip through space itself, covering more distance in less time without affecting momentum. Since his target wasn’t an entity, wibbly-wobbly physics-defying damage rules didn’t apply. If he wanted the hammer to land with sufficient force, he had to accelerate it outside the spell’s effect, something the system did not like for anything that fell into one of its item categories. It was the opposite problem of the spike, really, and it meant his muscles had just as much work to do in a fraction of the time.

With his Strength boosted, that was all well and good, but things added up after several thousand repetitions. He was not Velika. He didn’t have the physical stats, let alone the skills to help his body cope with speedster bullshit, and he paid for it with pain and sweat. Without the proper skills, biology was the limit. Meat.