Chapter 88 — The First Roar
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The masons and their apprentices sat on the ground resting, watching with envious, reverent eyes as the enchanting materials rose into the air under Heddy's magical guidance and were drawn with precision onto the rock face, while an enormous translucent hand assisted at the side, stripping away the vines that would have interfered with the array's formation, adjusting the fine lines of the runes in the delicate places, or setting mana crystals and other amplifying materials into the key nodes—and in the gaps between the runes all across the array were the holes and crevices they had carved out earlier, crammed full of glittering crystal "gravel."
In their eyes, those tiny crystal fragments, averaging only the size of a grain of rice, really did look about the same as gravel.
These utterly exhausted men had no idea yet what they were taking part in; they did not even know Gao Yang's plan to blast the cliff face down. They were simply laboring here on their lord's orders. But watching these people, Amber was struck by an odd feeling.
Apart from the final drawing of the detonation array, the vast majority of the entire process had actually been carried out by ordinary people. The serfs of the kiln district had fired the crystals; the Net No. 1 that charged those crystals had also been built by ordinary craftsmen—Rebecca had taken part in the Net's design, but had not used any extraordinary power at any point in the process. Then the conscripted laborers had hauled the crystals here, and the masons had chiseled holes into the rock face and packed the crystals inside...
In fact, were it not for the need to draw the array on the cliff face and the limited time available, even the drawing of the array itself could have been done by ordinary people—so long as they could guarantee that every rune went in the right place and that the magical materials were correctly installed at the key nodes. That required some knowledge and skill, yes, but no extraordinary power. Amber was certain that even the common folk of the domain, given study and training, could master it.
As for how people with no mana could activate the array... Rebecca had already produced a rune trigger, and that rune trigger had proven capable of operating on a detonation array. Even without it, the domain's Net No. 1 had already achieved the ability to supply power externally; one need only extend a charging line from Net No. 1 and ordinary people could set off this thing Gao Yang called a "grand artwork."
True, the process was far more complicated and difficult than an archmage snapping his fingers—but the mere possibility that such a process could be realized sent a slight chill through Amber:
A crowd of ordinary people with not a scrap of spellcasting ability could actually use this "magical device" to blow an entire cliff to rubble...
The more she thought about it, the stranger her gaze toward Gao Yang became: this bizarre man who did not look in the least like a noble... did he even know what he was doing?
But a moment's serious reflection was all it took to burn through the last of Amber's sobriety. She clapped her hands, glanced up at the sky, saw that it was not yet mealtime, and so turned and dissolved into the depths of the shadows.
She still had to keep monitoring the movements of that horde of aberrations and relay intelligence back here at any moment. Her task was still a heavy one.
Meanwhile, on the other side—at the mountain pass southwest of the camp and along the mountain road leading in—the two knights Philip and Byron were accompanying Rebecca, doing something they had never done before.
Directing their subordinates to bury traps in the ground. Explosive traps.