Eli POV

_______________________________________________

Once I got home, I changed into more typical peasant clothing with a large empty sack on my back. I then walked about the streets and rummaged through the trash of several butchers. Fortunately, everyone who was still awake at this hour was too busy telling their view of the legendary bout to any who would listen to keep an eye on me so I was able to pick up a lot of bones and even a deer skull with horns without drawing attention in the dark alleys.

When my bone fetching was completed I headed back home and laid the bag of bones on the second story. Then I just slept away my day's worries.

The next morning I got my breakfast at a local food cart while shopping for some metal bars as I don't want to alert any soon to be spies of what I was making in the future. But I had to focus more on my immediate needs as I headed home to experiment on a few more bark crafts. However, these would have to incorporate dual elements if I wanted to keep my involvement in it

Dual elements functioned a little bit differently than the base elements, that and the rarity of anyone born to use them, meant that their principles and all their spells weren't fully explored. The first was that they didn't require a summoning circle to use in their enchantments. The mana construct was put over the triangle instead and that was then fed mana. The big difference between the four is that only lightning could summon the material used. The others wouldn't just let you summon the raw material, it had to be provided beforehand to be manipulated.

So I made the plant bark craft and placed some grass over it. I had the bark pieces manipulate the grass into becoming vines that grow out into a simple square. But the vines quickly withered when the ambient mana ran dry.

I experimented on it for a while and theorized that if I could supplement the plants' nutritional needs that it might lower the mana costs to sustain it. After going out to the fishery I looked at some of the soil where they dumped the leftover fish parts. Looking over the dirt it had a rich darkness to it that must have everything any plant could ever hope for. On my way back I saw several parents fighting and haranguing other students.

"Is he the one?" A bearded man shouted at another man in a leather jerkin who was shielding what looked like his son.

"Did any of you make the volcano's strike?" a nearly hysterical woman screamed at a small group of younger women in the schools' robes. She had long brown hair and was dressed in an expensive green dress with white frills. But she seemed disheveled in appearance despite her finery.

The crafting students had run into the distraught mob of casters' parents. Now the nobles were shouting, cursing and even in some cases fighting as the local guard tried to restore order. Fortunately, I seemed to be imposing enough for the aggrieved mob to let me pass.

It occurred to me that it probably wasn't a good idea to make a very powerful hidden identity while I was too weak to survive with my known identity. Of course, making these two arsenals would require a place to make them. As I stepped over a squabbling pair of wives pulling at each other's hair I went over the best way to go about digging out and hiding my little workshop.

Once I got back to my warehouse I used another bark craft to shovel into the stone lisp about a good foot above the waterline. It was surprisingly easy as the magic of the craft did the heavy lifting of breaking apart the stone as I scooped the broken bits away inch by inch. The biggest obstacle was when it absorbed all of the surrounding mana and I had to supply it with the mana produced by my body.

Pushing in further, I got underneath what I guesstimated was the middle of my home's wooden floor on land. Since suffocating would get in the way of my concentration, I used a hole spell to put several small openings into the floor just underneath the wood boards near the dock ramp and a wind enchantment near the entrance that would pull in air through one side and push it out the other. I laid my sack of bones in a corner and want back upstairs.

When I looked out the window it was pitch black and I realized I had let myself get carried away. I slept like a baby that night. Waking the next morning I golfed down a large breakfast to make up for my missed dinner and went to my workshop to work out some new ideas.

This would be harder than the more outrageous bone crafts I'll be making. I had to get by on a set up that didn't use any of the dual elements but met my high standards for protection while not relying on principles that were too exotic. It also had to meld with my fighting preferences, which was not fighting at all.

If the enemy can still fight after the first blow it was doing its job as a maiming tool to make way for the real killer weapon that would soon follow. If they're capable of seeing me it's just a failure by my regular standards. Maybe it was my fighting style that enabled me to live this long or maybe it was my long life that shaped my fighting instincts? I have never really given it much thought.

But such indirect methods may not be feasible here. Without any radio communications or drone equivalents in this world, I can't use my typical kit. Those would probably draw attention from the necromancers agents anyway. If they had penetrated the ranks of the mythical elves, the human system didn't have a prayer of resisting infiltration and I was working on too little information about them to start bringing in otherworldly items. For now. Still, I should be able to keep the fight out of arm's length at a minimum.

The first idea to come to mind was a sniper rifle. No. I need to stick to mostly magical concepts that could be easily explained if I want the spotlight that's coming for me to ever fade. Trying to explain all of the concepts in such a long-range weapon would be too much. Eventually, I will rise to prominence but it needs to happen when I have a more powerful backing to support my future industrial plans.

Maybe a shoulder-mounted cannon in the same vein as my stone hammerhead? Well it's going to be putting all of the recoil on my shoulder and I am not as strong as that soldier was, so the odds of such a set up tearing my arm out of its socket were high. That design was also front heavy and relied on a large setup of cushions to make the ricochet bearable which leaves it unsuitable for long-ranged attacks. As a mid-close range closer, it was perfect but I didn't intend to get that close.

A design presented itself and was similar enough to most fireball spells and other crafts in this world that I could probably get away with it. But what would I use as ammo? Pure flame wouldn't have the kinetic force it would need. Stone was the most obvious choice but I didn't feel like that was enough. Cannons needed some explosive element to them, an entirely arbitrary requirement but we had to have some standards in our lives.

Superheated stone melted down to lava? It could work but how would any of the material handle that level of heat? I thought about it for a while and decided to go with the design principle similar to my arm guard. It would be a wooden tube a little wider than my arm about 4 feet long with a copper inner-frame dotted with holes to allow the summoning enchantments through while still protecting the wooden body. There were alternating triangles of earth summoning and superheated flame to turn the brick into a near lava-like consistency.

After growing and shopping for the pieces, I assembled my latest creation on the dock overlooking what I had dubbed the 'pool' area of my home. I was sure as hell going to be near water while working with this much heat.

I looked in the back end, from a safe distance of course, and saw the red hot brick floating in the middle. It occurred to me that the flame shouldn't work as there would be no way for the chemicals to react as they materialize in the stone and for that matter, it shouldn't have worked in the water either. Maybe the chemicals used were summoned mid combustion instead of being ignited in the infinitesimally small fraction of time after summoning?

'Focus Eli, there are far more interesting puzzles and mysteries to ponder over if you want to waste time.' I scolded myself internally.

Unfortunately, the cannon started smoking. I quickly used a water spell to overload the enchantments. Freed from its constraints the brick fell onto the bottom of the cannons shaft and slowly started burning through. Sighing I knocked the failure into the water below and went out to get a replacement. Working with metal magically was such a mana intensive affair that it was better to just get the cheap replacement from the smith.

For this prototype I had the metal frame come with a few extra holes. I decided to use air enchantments to make the air around the brick denser while having this heated air flow out the front. This time it didn't start smoking even after half an hour. So then I installed some manipulator enchantments.

These used a special triangle type that I had read about in my previous days of studying. It didn't take any input from a summoning circle, in a manner similar to a dual element craft, but instead manipulated the material that passed through a certain predetermined area. This was mostly used for construction tools or in moving large gates in the wealthiest cities. It also had the complication of needing more mana based on how far the object was or if it was fighting the items' natural momentum.

I had a long line of them set up to move any stone in their field to their left or right depending on their orientation at the highest speed they could. The trick was to have the front end enchantments fire first so they could be primed to increase the speed of the projectile before it flew out of the barrel. This time the brick flew out into the side of the stone lisp and gouged out a chunk of it, and splattered on the surrounding stone. The slag then fell into the water and let loose another explosion as it hit the water.

I felt some pride at my achievement but in truth, this was something that had already been done by the crafters in this world. Large barrels working on similar principles had replaced this worlds catapults but came with severe limitations. One was limited range, they couldn't clear most walls as their ammo would lose cohesion and get tossed away by water or wind magic. When installed on top of walls they could fire in the general range of several hundred feet. The second was the sheer cost of making so many mana constructs from different elements together into a single device.

But the biggest drawback was personnel. Anyone with enough ability to work such a device was typically valuable enough to not be put in the line of fire operating such a hazardous position. The giant barrels were a magnet for the enemy's magical attacks as disabling such a weapon was usually high on their to-do list.

Slap on an outer metal shell to help absorb external damage with the brick placed further in the back so that it wouldn't melt my shoulder if the device failed and my baby was finished. Well the main portion, I still had to make a handle imbued with the connection with a hole that would let me fire it when reconnected with spirit magic and the leather strap to allow for the smooth motion of quickly firing it from my shoulder. This invention would be a considerable achievement but still well within the margins of limited success that I was shooting for, as long as no one got a hold of it and noticed that it would keep working after being hit with a spell.

It was getting late and I had been working all day, so I made my way to the hammock. My 'life' story was already worked out so I just needed to squeeze as much construction time as I could out of these next few days if I wanted a full kit that would satisfy me. I swirled in the sea of ideas for a few minutes before my world gradually went dark.