“I hear that Jorn kid can even control ghosts and they tore apart the Sable clan bunker. Yanked turrets right out of the walls.” A gnome whispered to another gnome inside a different bunker a few miles away from Will.

“Whoah! Seriously? That Jorn kid is amazing. We better watch our step around him. If he’s so dangerous, why does he work for that William Oh guy, though?” The other gossiper asked.

“No idea. Rumor is he’s even stronger, but…could just be a bluff.”

“Yeah, he hasn’t actually done much has he?”

Will groaned, collapsing into a puddle on the floor of the room he’d taken in the Gold clan bunker.

“Why did I even try?” Will asked aloud. “If people can’t see what you do, you’re screwed.” Will was starting to regret attuning fragments of his map to the halls of the gnome clans to listen for possible betrayal.

There was no overt betrayal. Just hurtful rumors, which arguably did more damage than if they had treated him like a threat.

“Can’t win ‘em all, buddy.” Loth patted Will on the shoulder. “You’ll just have to be satisfied with only the people you care about knowing that you’re a big, strong Climber man.”

Will squinted up at Loth. “Are you patronizing me?”

“Yes.”

“Good work.” Will said, giving her a thumb’s-up. “Keep it up.”

“By the way, I took the Flame clan bunker for my own uses.” Loth said, glancing to the east.

“What use would that be?” Will asked.

You remember how Mother wanted to escape from you as quickly as possible? It seems as though Fate treats you like a focal point, so I thought I would poke causality a bit by plotting something in a place you can’t see and we’ll see what happens.”

Will frowned and checked his map and found the fifth and final gnome bunker was so mucked up with miasmatic threads that he couldn’t tell anything apart, effectively censoring his view of whatever magic going on there.

“Huh.”

“The idea is to test whether or not fate will bend depending on whether or not you perceive it.”

Will scanned Loth top to bottom. Nothing about her demeanor said she was carrying any ill-will against him.

“Then wouldn’t it be better not to tell me?” Will asked.

“That wouldn’t be cool. And you’d investigate if I didn’t tell you.”

“So you want me to just close my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears and wait for you to stab me in the back…maybe?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, but you have to promise me one thing:” Will said.

“What’s that?”

“If you kill me then that’s a tacit agreement that you’ve accepted responsibility for all this ‘saving the world’ bullshit.” Will said, extending his pinkie finger.

Loth clasped it with her own.

“Deal.”

“Now go back to telling me how cool and manly I am.” Will said.

“No. You’ve already agreed to my proposal. If I keep complimenting you, it will cease to have an effect.” Loth said, releasing his finger and turning away to hide her grin.

“Uugh.” Will deflated.

“But you are cool. Sometimes.”

“I’ll take it.” Will said, Loth’s praise pulling him back to his feet as he turned his attention to other matters “What did Sammohan find?”

“Sammohan found some unidentified mineral deposits that might contain the quicksilver in the converters, but the method for refining and melting has been lost to time. Mostly the gnomes just steal it from each other.”

Loth produced a lump of stone with grey patches of discoloration and tossed it to Will.

It felt similar to the quicksilver, but it was stubbornly bound up in the rock.

“Lemme try something.” Will said, hefting the rock in his hand as they headed to the Key Site, where the converter had already been removed from the Key Site, giving them the Door they needed to advance.

They were playing it safe and waiting until Will’s personal Door cooldown had elapsed, and also resetting Abby, so there were still two weeks until they moved on to the next Floor.

Will climbed the pyramidal obelisk in the center of the bunker, and stood an arm’s length away from the beam of concentrated miasma.

Will reached out with his right hand and withdrew it with a hiss of pain as the miasmatic structures in his fingertips lit up for an instant before being torn off and carried away by the stream of concentrated miasma flowing straight up.

Loth gave him a wordless eyebrow-raise.

“When I asked Arkesh why my left hand didn’t suffer any consequences from miasma sickness, he said my Class was like a tarp nailed to a perfectly waterproof roof. The water is seeping in where the nails are driving holes through the shingles.”

Will held the grey-flecked stone in his left hand and thrust it into the beam of blue light.

It felt…pleasant. Like gentle sunlight warding off a cold day.

“Doesn’t seem to be melting.” Loth said.

“Hmm…” Will pulled the rock back out and tested it with his other hand. it didn’t seem to have heated up or changed in any way.

I wonder if it’s just not concentrated enough?

He regarded the beam of concentrated miasma and thought back to his lessons on lensing with Ghoul. Light needed to be parallel for best results when lensing. The beam of miasma seemed to be travelling straight enough.

Maybe I can…

Will tried to use his Aspect to lens the Key Site’s beam. Unsurprisingly, the miasmatic structures were torn apart and carried into the sky as soon as they touched the concentrated beam of miasma.

Will put his left hand back in the beam and channeled a dollop of charge through his finger.

For an instant, the beam of miasma fluctuated as the internal pressure shifted.

I’m glad it didn’t explode.

“Couldn’t you have just stuck the rock in there on a pole?” Loth asked.

“I was curious.” Will said with a shrug, inspecting his unmarred hand. Will had gotten in the habit of unravelling his Class just below the elbow, a bit like rolling up his sleeves, or trimming his hair.

Over the course of a few days, the Class always regrew back to his wrist.

It was practice for manually interacting with his Class.

“Nothing alive can go in there without being mutated by miasma, right?” Will asked.

“Seems like there might be an exception.” Loth said. “On that topic. How much for that hand?”

“If it gets cut off again, You can have it. Otherwise, half a million Influence.” Will said, frowning as he thought.

Ah! I’ll just lens the rock itself.

Will had learned how to make dimensional blades, so dimensional lensing might work, especially if he tucked the Miasma away where it would be harder to get torn apart by the beam.

Will focused on the speckled rock in his left hand.

“You might want to take a safe distance,” Will said. “Remember when I cut myself in half?”

“I’ll stay,” Loth said, arms folded. “I wanna see what happens, and it’ll give you more incentive not to fuck up.”

“Pfft.” Will scoffed. “When have I ever not fucked up?”

“You’re still alive, so there has to be some example.”

“True.”

Will crafted a dimensional lens bound to the rock itself. The basic structure of the strand of miasma were similar to the dimensional blade, but where those two were smashed together violently, this one was carefully braided and formed into a gordian knot, tucked tighter and tighter inside itself until…

Pop.

The strings of miasma disappeared into a subspace and the rock in Will’s hand suddenly grew nearly three times its size.

Although it was bigger, it didn’t seem to be any heavier. The entire thing felt like it was made of some light wood instead of stone.

Will held the ore back into the beam of miasma, shielding the tiny knot of dimensional energy as best he could with his palm.

The grey specks in the stone turned to silver and melted out of the rock, dribbling down Will’s hand and forming a tiny silver puddle on the Key Site.

After half a minute, the beam wore away the gordian knot. The spell broke and the rock shrank back to its former size.

“If you can’t make the beam tighter, make the target bigger,” Will said, handing the ore off to a gnome, who glanced nervously back and forth between it and the quicksilver on the Key site.

Will scooped a bit out and watched as it hardened and turned grey in his palm, turning from a magical liquid into a flaky oxidized crust.

He got the rest of the liquid into some vials and turned his attention back to Loth.

“Let’s find an easier way to do that.”

Loth pursed her lips, rattling the vial as she studied the gray flakes.

“And they use this to pull Charge out of the air to power their machines?”

“Seems that way.” Will said. “It needs an extremely high Miasma concentration to do that, though.”

“Could it be alive?” Loth asked.

Will blinked.

“What?”

“The rule of thumb is that Charge cannot be generate by non-living material, but I suppose there was also a rule that nothing alive can enter the Key Site beam without being mutated, but we should definitely confirm that it’s a mineral before we assume things.” Loth thought aloud as she studied the flakes.

“I suppose we’ll need a microscope to check and for the miasma concentration…Will, do you know what a laser is?”

Will shook his head. He did not know what a laser was.

“Well, I think we need to help the gnomes make…something like one. Do you still have that heartwood that aligns Miasma with the grain?”

He nodded. Mason had his castle, and his castle had a ton of it.

Together, they spent the next couple days making a simple contraption out of thinly layered wood and giant’s bone that, when placed into the beam of a Key Site, was able to align and concentrate miasma enough to melt the quicksilver.

With that, they were able to open up, repair, and restart the miasma converters the gnomes relied upon to keep their livelihoods. That alone set them up for another several hundred years, at least.

Will was especially fascinated by how they pumped Charge through their hydroponics to convince plants to grow happy and healthy with little to no sunlight or nutrients, effectively creating nutrients from nothing.

Will stole one of the miasma converters and hydroponic machines from the empty bunkers and stored it in his castle basement after taking multiple sketches.

When trying to put something larger than Mason inside Mason, or if he just didn’t want his personal space violated, the nuker was able to manually open a portal to his interior, which seemed to be one of his Advanced Class boons.

As the time until their departure grew short, Will brought the gnomes together for several meetings to try and reinforce the weak alliance as best he could and sus out any detractors before they became a problem.

“How did you lose the ability to refine quicksilver in the first place?” Will asked Mong during one of these meetings. “Seems to be pretty critical.”

“Well, I wasn’t there at the time, but I do have some guesses,” Mong said. “The bunkers our clans live in are all military installations. They’re built with a lot of redundancies, but they’re not industrial plants.”

“Ah.”

It was fairly obvious when Will thought about it. They didn’t make it on-site, they made the quicksilver some other place, and that place had been completely destroyed. The only sign of civilization that existed outside of the bunkers was reddish sand.

“More importantly!” Mong’s dad interrupted. “Who’s going to get the dragonkin’s ‘laser’?” The white-haired old gnome’s eyes were bloodshot with the need to get one over on the Juniper clan.

“Your grandkids.” Will replied.

“Gah. Any children of Mong’s should be raised in the Flock bunker!”

“Tradition dictates that they stay with their mother.” Mong’s new wife said.

“Well…we’ll take her too!”

“Oh no you don’t!” one of the Juniper clan representatives burst in and the table devolved into squabbling.

Maybe I should just kill him, Will thought.

The squabbling turned to silence, and all the gnome’s gazes landed on William Oh. Will blinked in surprise as the sudden attention brought him back to himself. He relaxed back down into his chair, taking his hand off the handle of his axe.

The conversation resumed, much politer than it had been before.

Loth seemed to think it was funny.

Eventually they sought Will’s input on the situation, and Will gave them the response that had brewing during their stay.

“The gentlemen staying in the Sable clan bunker will be in charge of mining and refining quicksilver. They will sell it to you for a good price. You are going to raise your grandchildren to be well-adjusted individuals who love both clans, and when they are adults, they will get control over the quicksilver refiner. Eventually one clan will PEACEFULLY absorb the other, and everyone will be the same clan. I don’t care which.”

“The Flock clan will never-“

“If you think I give a shit about what word you use to call yourself, you’re dead wrong.” Will interrupted. “I will be stopping by every few years to check your progress. Don’t disappoint me.”

Or I will replace you with someone more agreeable.

“O-okay.” Mong’s dad turned pale and nodded.

That guy’s gonna be a problem, I can feel it.

Will weighed the damage done by leaving the problem be versus excising it right this moment.

It was equally bad either way. If Will broke peace, they had no reason to keep peace either, and the fragile alliance would probably fall apart in a matter of days.

But if he left the old man alone, he would probably continue pushing for genocide, one little step at a time.

Will couldn’t course correct by putting all the power into the hands of the Juniper clan either, because that would just spur the old man on and give him allies.

The best that Will could do was make sure that everyone else was as happy with the deal as possible so that the old man’s shouts wound up falling on deaf ears. That and making sure there was always a voice in opposition. Best if it was his own son.

So…make sure Mong is as happy as possible?

I hate politics, Will thought, rubbing his temples.