Nooooo! They can't have eaten Grimal! I still need to pick his brain some more!

Oh, wait, there he is, he chewed a hole in the wall right behind where he was sleeping. He must think he's safe because they can't fit inside the hole. He must not have seen them dig yet, the only thing keeping him safe is their profound interest in the table they're eating. I slowly follow the wall across to where Grimal is hiding, careful to move in a smooth manner to not attract attention. Most creatures react to sudden movement, after all.

Finally I reach Grimal's hidey hole. "Psst! Grimal, you healed up enough to walk a little yet? We need to get out of here."

I get a grumbled reply. "I'll manage. What's the plan?"

"The plan is to get out of here before they run out of tables to munch, then you and me are going to put together some kind of weapon that can kill them. You haven't seen these guys dig, this hidey hole will last exactly 2 seconds till they start chewing on your feet, and I can't kill them. We can go hole up in one of the rooms in the hallway down to the jungle, and I think I'll open the barricade to your old place and see if the rest of the Tiny Grimal army can buy us some time. Maybe they'll even win, in which case Eliza can go clean house afterwards."

"Come on, enough chitchat, let's move!" The nice thing about not having a voice is that I don't have to whisper.

We begin the painstakingly slow trek out of the room as I grab up my bag and the miscellaneous papers I left for Grimal to read.

A hole opens in the barricade as we pass, and it grows larger the closer we get to safety. No need for chaos while we are still here, after all.

----------------------

"So if you link this mana construct to that one, it overloads and explodes?"

"Yes, it's really dangerous, one of the things you need to avoid. Wait, stop that!"

"You just said it explodes. That sounds like exactly what we need right now. If I make these temporary mana constructs with soulthread and link it to one of these mana crystals... and put more soulthread in the crystal to temporarily convert it to a fire crystal like the temporary fire crystal I had for my flamethrower at one point... then leave the circuit broken like so... Does it explode immediately, or is there a delay?

"That's so wasteful... I'm horrified to have taken part in this."

"Grimal. How long is the delay before it explodes?"

"Oh, a few seconds, maybe a minute or two."

"All right, so we need three things. We need to figure out how to make the time consistent till the explosion. We need to see if we can make it impact triggered, it would be nice to have exploding crossbow bolts. And we need to figure out how to make bigger explosions!"

"Why don't you use a mana battery rune instead of mana cores?"

.....

Brain.exe is experiencing abnormal activity and must be shut down. If you experience this problem again, please contact your system administrators.

Rebooting...

3%

12%

34%

55%

74%

99%

99%

99%

99%

.......

"Mana Battery rune?"

"Yeah, you use it in all your spells, it looks like this." He scrawls it in the rock with a claw.

That squiggly thing.... was this useful the whole time?

The key to godlike power was hiding in plain sight?

How did I miss this?

"Tell me Grimal, do you know what I mean when I say the word Logic?"

........

Let's go back to the drawing board, I can do better.

...........

Unfortunately, the mana battery squiggle is not rechargable. It also is way slower at transferring mana than a mana crystal. This means that the explosions I can manage with them are weak at best. But I managed to get some info out of Grimal about some Logic after I explained a bit. With some knowledge of how to make a few gates, I make an array which can continuously provide mana when hooked to multiple mana batteries. It switches to the next mana battery in line once the signal cuts. This means I can set up a spell and make it last as long as I want, and just leave. I'm no longer necessary.

In short, after a bit of work, I now have lots of one use flamethrowers and 2 magic crystal grenades.

I can't believe I thought I'd be making clubs. Instead, Grimal suggests I just make bigger arms. Clubbing something is just punching with extra steps, and he happens to notice that I have 4 arms, after all.

I grow my lower arms up until the point I start to have problems with balance, then cut it back a bit.

I might not have figured out the crossbow yet, but I have a bandolier of rocks that spew fire in two directions at once after throwing. They spin around like flaming wheels of death, and I love them.

And I made a pile of "Magic wands". I guess they might literally be magic wands, but they're just sticks that spew fire from the end.

I've got a hunch that the grenades are the best part of the whole thing though. I left blast marks with a radius of three feet when I was testing. There was even a small crater in the stone floor. That's a lot of damage. I have a hunch, also, that they won't quite work like regular grenades. A lot of creatures seem rather dumb, after all.

..........

I trudge back to the cafeteria, a grenade in one hand and a Flaming Death Wheel in the other.

I have each of them on the verge of being primed as I peer into the room, trying to get a good view. The rodents are being massacred. They're pouring into the room, yipping the whole while, and frantically chewing on the metallic armor of the giant centipedes but they're not really making a lot of progress chewing through the metal plating. There's teethmarks, but no penetration. Meanwhile, the centipedes are flailing wildly, crushing rodents in their massive jaws, and under their roiling bodies.

I prime and hurl one of the mana crystal grenades. It's a rather large mana crystal, one from one of the lizards in the swamp. Everything fighting pauses, and one of the centipedes dives for the crystal and swallows it.

Yes! They're as dumb as I thought!