Chapter 771 – Underground ocean (5)

Shortly after registering the Shapeshifting Sentries spell, Percy and Micky had experimented extensively with different iterations of their constructs. Unfortunately, they’d only found two versions that were useful enough to bother with.

The fist-sized minions were the smallest sentries that inherited the full power of Percy’s sensory domain. Micky could only support up to a hundred constructs of that size. Producing more than a hundred resulted in debilitating bursts of nausea that completely immobilized Percy, Micky, and all their clones.

Be it Percy’s or Micky’s main bodies, or any of their severed wisps, they could only control a few dozen sentries at any given time, and peer through the sensory domains of a handful of minions. They hoped to eventually increase those limits through their advancements, spectral traits or mindsets, but they had yet to make much progress in that department.

However, they could already potentially control the entire army and even peer through the eyes of nearly half of the constructs if they split them up into several smaller groups and delegated a squad to each of their clones.

By investing ten times as much spiritual blood into each sentry, Micky could produce up to ten human-sized minions that were about as powerful as Greens. The range of their Sage’s Ponds and the number of constructs that could be controlled didn’t change, but this was a viable option if Percy and Micky needed their soldiers to possess a certain amount of combat power.

It wasn’t like Percy and Micky hadn’t considered other sizes, but nothing else had seemed particularly viable.

Making the minions any smaller than a person’s fist caused their sensory domains to shrink dramatically, without increasing the maximum size of Micky’s army enough to make up for it. On the flip side, pouring all his spiritual blood into a single construct didn’t improve its strength enough to be worth it.

An elephant-sized sentry required almost all of the Huehuan’s reserves, and was only about as powerful as a Blue. That wasn’t too bad in and of itself, yet a squad of ten Green-level combatants was simply better in most situations, be it for reconnaissance or combat.

The only exception would be a situation where Percy and Micky cared more about their minions’ pure bulk and raw physical strength than their overall combat capabilities – which, funnily enough, was exactly the situation they’d found themselves in while searching for the magical droplets.

After discussing the issue with his main body, Percy had arranged to receive a steady trickle of spiritual blood through the cord for as long as necessary. The amount of soul-freezing ice that the Orange snail’s fragile soul could endure hadn’t changed, making Percy regret not picking a slightly stronger host.

That said, he’d grown too fond of his current arrangements to bother abandoning the snail, so he’d had no choice but to grit his non-existent teeth and make do with what he had.

It took nearly two full months to gather every drop of Micky's spiritual blood and pack the construct with as much soul-freezing ice as it could hold. Percy and Micky had debated several times whether to stop trying to do everything by themselves and just reach out to one of the natives.

In the end, they had decided that maintaining their anonymity and self-sufficiency was worth delaying the mission by a few weeks. Besides, whether their oversized sentry would collect the droplets more slowly than the Tenefyrians remained to be seen.

Percy and Micky hadn’t poured everything into the giant construct – only about ninety-five percent of their spiritual blood. The difference was negligible but had allowed them to retain the handful of fist-sized sentries that they’d been using up to that point.

They hadn't spent those two months sitting idly on their slimy bottom, either. They’d kept scanning the underground ocean day in and day out, slowly getting better at spotting the inconspicuous geodes, evading the local mages, and memorizing the location of every droplet that had yet to be collected by the natives.

When the towering monstrosity of soul-freezing ice finally took form, Percy and Micky sent it into the depths of the planet, where most of its smaller cousins still resided. As the elephant-sized minion phased through kilometres of solid ground and dove into the ocean of magma, it rapidly transformed into the intricate shape that the aspects of the Lone Wanderer had long since discussed and agreed upon: a giant pufferfish.

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It was admittedly a silly form, but Percy and Micky hadn’t chosen it randomly. They needed to reduce the rate by which their sentry would absorb heat from its surroundings, which meant minimizing its surface area. A sphere was the best shape for that.

Of course, keeping the construct cool wasn’t the only consideration. In its corporeal state, the colossal creature would no longer be able to ignore the viscous magma, so Percy and Micky had adjusted its shape into a slightly more aerodynamic one – or magmadynamic, perhaps.

They’d made the front side of its body slightly narrower, giving it the overall shape of an egg. They’d even added as many as three tiny fins spaced evenly around its midsection, to grant it the means to propel itself against the scorching liquid.

Once the construct finally reached the nearest geode, Percy willed it to materialize into the real world. A quarter of the sentry’s volume evaporated in an instant as a thick shell of solidified stone formed around it, but the rest of the construct luckily survived the transition.

As expected, the minion’s exoskeleton greatly slowed down the transfer of heat, though not as much as Percy would have liked. At this rate, the rest of the soul-freezing ice would be consumed in a couple of days at most, which was clearly a problem.

Micky’s main body had already ceased his other activities to begin replenishing and sending a new trickle of spiritual blood to the clone, but the past couple of months had proven that the Huehuan would struggle to keep up with the rapid expenditure.

Being able to deploy the colossal sentry for just a couple of days every two months would delay the accumulation of droplets by several years, even if Percy and Micky used their minion’s limited time as efficiently as possible.

Thankfully, Percy had thought of another solution to their problem.

Kissing the geode, the elephant-sized pufferfish opened its small mouth just enough to swallow the sphere, while ingesting as little magma as possible. Once the object was swirling deep within the construct’s magical body, Percy willed the soul-freezing ice to churn, crushing the geode open and allowing the midnight blue mana stored inside to mix into his construct.

The size of the magical droplet was negligible before the enormous sentry, yet its effect was anything but.

Percy felt the temperature of the sentry plummet in an instant, causing the flow of soul-freezing ice to slow to a crawl, and helping the construct’s stony shell to keep the intense heat at bay. The irony of the icy minion growing sluggish from the cold wasn’t lost on Percy, but he welcomed this development, knowing that his creation would be able to extend its trip slightly with every droplet it consumed.

‘No time to waste, then,’ he told his friend while steering the monstrosity towards the next droplet.

Another benefit of turning the sentry corporeal was that some of the previously inhibited senses were finally operating properly again, expanding the range of its sensory domain slightly. The pufferfish’s heat vision was actually its most powerful tool for locating the droplets, as the frigid mana painted a stark contrast against the backdrop of scorching magma.

The size of its body also helped more than Percy had expected. A few metres were negligible compared to a normal Sage’s Pond, but they made a difference when the sensory domain wasn’t much larger than the sentry itself.

Consequently, while the pufferfish was swimming through the underground ocean several times more slowly than before, it ended up spotting two droplets that the other sentries had missed by the time it reached the one they had singled out.

‘Awesome! If each geode buys the sentry a couple of hours and we keep finding so many additional droplets, we’ll have enough for the blessing in a couple of months!’ Micky exclaimed through their connection.

‘Let’s just hope we don’t run into a native,’ Percy replied with a mental sigh, trying to temper his expectations.

The pufferfish had proven even more effective than expected, but it was also mind-numbingly slow. The other sentries were scouting around the construct for Tenefyrian mages, but there was no guarantee that the giant minion would have enough time to steer clear of a massive incoming bubble of willpower.

Percy and Micky would have to work very hard to balance out the consumption of their spiritual blood, the negative side-effects of the Clear mana, and the threats in their surroundings over the following weeks.

The good news was that – through sheer luck – the elephant-sized construct had ended up resembling the local wildlife slightly. Wasn’t its body essentially a mass of grey liquid concealed within a stony shell, just like the snails, tortoises, and even the sapient Tenefyrians themselves?

Percy hadn’t planned for that, and there was still no excuse for a “Green” beast that had suddenly decided to swim within an ocean of magma, a dozen kilometres beneath the surface of the planet, but at least the locals were more likely to blame each other if they accidentally stumbled upon the construct – which was much better than realizing that a disembodied alien had invaded their world.

Of course, Percy and Micky would still lose all of their spiritual blood, accumulated Clear mana, and months of hard work if their sentry were to fall into the wrong hands, so they had to make sure they completed their ambitious operation on their first attempt.