From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 101: Allaran’s Massive Building Delivery Service

The ruins were exactly where Finn said they would be. There were many collapsed walls, and skeletal remains of buildings that had belonged to people that no longer existed. Silver ran through every structure.

I pulled out my yo-yo. I hadn’t suffered any backlash from Switch in a while because of my vow, but it was still better to keep whatever energy it used as full as possible. I assessed the site and decided where to start.

Then I switched.

I targeted a section of wall where the silver was the densest, I identified a chunk that was as large as I could physically carry, and switched it onto my hands.

The weight hit my arms immediately. A solid chunk of silver, rough edged and dense, pressing into my calloused palms with the particular satisfaction of something useful.

Wip had a couple of comments to say about me moving rocks that she could not play with, but I ignored the Wips.

I then ran back.

Ten minutes at a steady pace. Wip stayed in the pack and did not complain, she probably liked being carried at a high speed.

The camp came into view. Kira had already extended her vine marker higher. Coco crouched beside a small pool with his hands hovering over it while Coll watched nearby with patient interest.

I set the silver down in front of Finn.

He looked at it. Then he looked at me. Then he looked at the corridor line stretching away into the wasteland, the marked route, the distance that needed filling.

"This is... good." He said carefully while rubbing the back of his neck. "I mean, it’s really good silver. But if we are making a full corridor... we would need much, much more than this... I am not sure how to say this."

Jim descended from his scouting position and landed nearby with the neat precision of someone who never wasted a movement. He looked at the chunk of silver in the dirt, then at me, and made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was clearly not not a laugh either.

"At this rate." He said in his flat analytical tone while studying the chunk like a calculation. "Assuming one run every ten minutes, accounting for fatigue degradation over an extended period, and the total silver mass required for a functional corridor of this length." He paused briefly. "This would take years. Plural."

I did not say anything.

He was correct. The math was embarrassingly straightforward once someone said it out loud.

Wip poked her head out of the pack and looked directly at Jim with her large black eyes, holding a long, unblinking stare.

"Wip." She said quietly, and not the warm kind.

Jim adjusted his glasses and looked at her with the neutral expression of a man who did not consider small animals a relevant variable.

I crouched and gently pushed Wip’s head back into the pack.

"Give me a few minutes." I said calmly.

Jim’s eyebrow shifted a fraction. "Are you going back?" He asked.

"I am going back." I answered.

"To bring the same amount." He said.

"I told you, give me a few minutes." I replied.

He did not say anything else, but the glasses adjustment said enough.

On the other side of camp, Coll had apparently decided that while Coco produced dark water, the bottle situation was the real problem. He was already moving in short bursts between the nearby pool and the camp’s small pool, filling what small vessels they had with methodical cheerfulness. The amounts were limited by the containers, not by Coll’s speed.

Jim glanced at Finn. "Use the silver he brought to build a large bucket first." He said in the same analytical tone. "When we have a proper reservoir Coll can fill it in one run and Coco can convert the whole volume at once."

Finn blinked. "Oh." He said as the idea clicked into place. "That is actually... yes. That would work much better."

He picked up the silver chunk and immediately started working it with the focused intensity of someone who understood silver the way I understood spatial relationships.

Kira, who had been laying vines along the first section of the corridor line, paused to watch him work. The dark water from the canteens had already fed a thin growth along the ground, low and quiet, barely distinguishable from the natural wasteland growth.

I was already running back toward the ruins.

But this time I’d do something different.

I stopped at approximately the halfway point between the camp and the ruins. There I used Sense, extending my awareness outward in that particular way it had taken me weeks to make reliable. The ruins materialized in my perception as a cluster of dense shapes, sitting heavy in the spatial field I was feeling.

I crouched and grabbed a handful of the dry wasteland sand.

The sense spell had a range limit. The ruins were at its edge. I had never tried to Switch something at this range, something I was only barely touching with the outer edge of my perception. Also something that massively large.

But the principle was the same.

I’d once suffered backlash just by moving a large rock.

Now I had a vow that could randomly throw me across the wasteland, but it granted me a boon that reduced Switch’s cost to almost nothing.

A boon I’d barely used. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

I identified a full building, the largest intact silver structure in the cluster. It still held its shape more or less.

I extended my arm and focused on the sand in my hand.

Switch.

My mind started to hiss.

This time I did feel some recoil from using Switch, but barely. This boon was something really strong I hadn’t explored at all.

Wip felt really surprised when the entire building appeared out of nowhere. She started doing some angry Wips toward the structure, probably not understanding where it came from.

I then went back to the camp at a steady pace. No silver in my hands. Nothing to show for the trip.

Jim was watching from his elevated position as I approached and descended slightly when I came closer.

"You came back empty-handed." He said while studying my hands.

"I noticed." I replied without looking at him.

"So you have given up on the silver." He said, sounding more curious than mocking.

I stopped walking.

I extended my Sense across the camp, back along the path I had come from, all the way to the midpoint where I had been standing.

Then I picked up a small handful of dirt from the ground beside me, held my arm out to the side, and closed my eyes.

Switch.

An entire ruined building made of silver arrived next to me with a deep crack, like reality briefly slipping out of alignment.

It hit the ground at an angle, dust erupting outward in a wide pale cloud as it settled into the wasteland with the casual enormity of something that had no business being there.

The silence afterward lasted about three seconds.

Then Coco said "Oh." in exactly the same tone he used for everything.

Finn had gone completely still, both hands around the silver basin he had been shaping while staring at the building sized mass of material that had just appeared from nothing.

Kira’s vines had stopped growing.

Coll was grinning.

Jim stood very still in the air above the camp with his glasses slightly askew, looking at the building, then at the dirt I had taken from the ground, then at the building again.

"That should be enough for the first section." I said.

Jim said nothing. But for the first time since we had left the Spire, he did not adjust his glasses.