"This is the World Tree's control over nature," Jenkins explained. "I can't manage sothing on the level of 'Ice Solidification' yet, but manipulating the temperature of the water vapor right in front of is no problem."
As they spoke, a grating, screeching sound echoed from behind the clock tower's face. The attacking vines had wrapped themselves around the tallic chanisms. Controlled directly by Jenkins, they jamd the warped gears and levers, entangling themselves with the now-animated tal components.
The vines were only intended to disrupt the machinery, but the chanical parts required flawless operation at every turn. In this contest of wills, the vines erged victorious.
Deprived of the power channeled from the clock tower's machinery, the gear-man's conversion by Jenkins accelerated.
Then, just as Jenkins had anticipated, he heard a distinct beeping sound emanating from within the gear-man's body.
"I knew it," Jenkins muttered. "No matter what the Difference Engine builds, it always includes a self-destruct feature."
Feeling the tal beneath his hands growing hotter by the second, Jenkins spun around decisively. In a single bound, he was back at the window. He snatched his backpack in one hand and the cat from the windowsill with the other, then vaulted out of the opening on the clock tower's top floor.
The instant man and cat cleared the window, a brilliant flash erupted behind them, followed a mont later by a deafening, thunderous blast.
The Difference Engine probably knew it couldn't kill Jenkins with an explosion, so the bomb inside the gear-man wasn't exceptionally powerful. It rely wanted to prevent Jenkins from converting its creation. Even so, as Jenkins fell, he felt shards of stone pepper his back. By the ti he neared the ground, the raging fire and cascading rubble declared the utter ruin of the clock tower behind him.
Jenkins braced for a face-first landing, clutching Chocolate to his chest to shield him. But just before impact, his descent slowed dramatically. He looked down and saw Papa Oliver standing among the crowd not far from the tower, a ring on his finger pointed directly at him.
A brilliant spiritual aura emanated from the ring; its power was what had cushioned their fall.
He scrambled to his feet the mont he landed, dashing to a safe distance before the flaming, smoke-belching tower could topple over. While being crushed by the tower wouldn't have been a fatal problem, it was still sothing best avoided.
Jenkins didn't ask Papa Oliver for an explanation. Instead, he waved him back, signaling for him to keep his distance. Tossing his cat and backpack aside, he gripped his cane and cautiously stepped into the clouds of smoke and dust billowing from the collapsed tower.
Night had now fully descended, and the faint moonlight was no match for the thick pall of dust and smoke created by the tower's collapse.
Jenkins summoned his monocle, its lens piercing the gloom to survey the tower's remains. With a sudden flick of his cane, he batted a bullet-like projectile into the distance.
A loud buzzing, like a swarm of mosquitoes, filled the air. But what Jenkins actually saw were swarms of tiny, brass-colored gears, none bigger than a fingernail, flitting about in small clusters.
He had taken fewer than ten steps into the ruins before realizing he was completely surrounded by the swarms of tiny gears. The gear-man hadn't been destroyed in the explosion; it had rely broken down into countless smaller components, its potential undiminished.
Since the Difference Engine had claid this was its most perfect humanoid creation, it was never going to be defeated so easily.
"Hold on for ten minutes! Reinforcents are on the way!"
Papa Oliver's voice carried from the distance. Because the gear-man refused to end the Mysterious Realm, the people within it continued their normal routines, completely oblivious to the sounds of the battle raging around them.
Papa Oliver blended into the crowd, both to ensure his own safety and to wait for an opportunity to help. After having given the evolution key to Jenkins, he had sohow returned to the power level of a demigod.
He was still dressed in his usual antique shop attire and carried no weapon. Apart from a black briefcase in his hand, he was indistinguishable from the other ordinary citizens of the Mysterious Realm.
Without exchanging words with Papa Oliver, Jenkins allowed the Bestowal's Fire to engulf his body. He let rage flood his mind and, with a ferocious roar, transford once more into a near-elental being.
Seizing the mont, he drew the Spiral Greatsword. A torrent of fla erupted from the blade, shattering the seals that contained its power. The reignited greatsword carved a fiery arc through the air, mirroring its wielder's fury as it incinerated the swirling gears.
The tiny gears didn't surrender ekly. So of them engaged Jenkins directly, while the rest swirled around him, forming a massive, triangular pyramid.
On the three faces of the pyramid, excluding the base on the ground, distinct ritual arrays began to materialize. Jenkins's Eye of Reality imdiately detected the flow of spirit, and he realized his opponent was constructing a threefold composite ritual.
The gears served as both pen and ink, and the ritual they ford was nearly complete. Wreathed in fire, Jenkins lunged, slashing at the brightest node in the array. He managed to shatter one of the three rituals, but the other two activated before he could strike again.
A colossal, fla-wreathed arm suddenly materialized from thin air right in front of him. It was no illusion—one of the rituals was a summoning.
Jenkins t it with a punch of his own. The fists collided, and the resulting shockwave blasted away the last of the dust from the tower's destruction. The massive fist instantly retracted, but Jenkins, unable to brace against the force, was sent flying backward until he slamd into the ruined base of the tower.
"What was that thing's arm?" he wondered, shaking his head. "It was stronger than a balrog."
He had no ti to ponder it further, as the second ritual was already taking effect. His nose twitched. He caught an unusual scent in the air, and a mont's consideration identified it as coal gas.
Jenkins imdiately waved his hand, summoning a gust of wind with the power of nature. It was nothing compared to a true storm-summoning spell, but it was enough to disperse the gas.
This was an open square; creating a gas explosion here, even without wind, should have been difficult. But the gas summoned by the ritual was far from ordinary. As Jenkins's wind swept through, the flying gears scraped against each other, generating sparks. A mont later, a second explosion rocked the ruins, with Jenkins at its epicenter.
Jenkins stood unmoved within the blast, but his eyes shot upward. The force of the gas explosion was being funneled high above, where the remaining gears had ford a colossal hand. This tallic palm gathered the blast's power and then slamd down toward him. Jenkins bent his knees slightly, aiming his two-handed sword upward. The blade of the Spiral Greatsword seed insignificant compared to the giant hand, but amidst the colliding flas, it held the crushing descent at bay.
The force contained within the tal hand was unleashed, a roaring, top-down pressure that made Jenkins's ears ache. The gears composing the hand tried to swarm down the Spiral Greatsword and engulf it, but the intense flas incinerated them all.
Finally, with a great burst of effort, Jenkins shattered the hand. Amidst a shower of sparks, the gears retreated from the man and his sword, reassembling into the gear-man atop the rubble. It looked considerably thinner now; many of the key components of its body had been destroyed in the self-detonation and the ensuing skirmish.
Without wasting words, they re-engaged. Seeing the gear-man had reford, Jenkins put away his sword for the mont and readied his cane. The gear-man, likely wary of being touched by Jenkins again, refused to engage in close combat, resorting instead to spells and rituals.
Jenkins deliberately drew the battle away from the square, trying to keep Papa Oliver and Chocolate out of harm's way. This montary distraction gave the gear-man an opening. Hundreds of minuscule gears, nearly invisible to the naked eye, flew from its shoulders, forming a perfect circle in the air above them. Simultaneously, dozens of small holes opened on the gear-man's legs, ejecting high-speed gears that traced complex patterns in the air.
The ritual coalesced, warping the spirit in the surrounding space as thick black smoke billowed up from the ground. Jenkins was about to scoff at his opponent for resorting to such a seemingly useless tactic again, but he imdiately sensed sothing was wrong with this smoke.
A black fog, so dense that even his monocle couldn't penetrate it, obscured his vision. The wind he summoned couldn't disperse it. All sound seed to be absorbed, and the world fell into an unnerving, absolute silence.
Jenkins stood his ground, scanning his surroundings. He instinctively tilted his head as a whirring blade grazed past his ear and vanished into the fog. He imdiately spun, waving the hand now bearing the Air Bomb Ring in the direction the blade had co from. The black fog vanished instantly, revealing the gear-man, which had been closing in. It recoiled violently, clearly terrified of making physical contact.
He pulled a handful of seeds from his pocket and scattered them on the ground in front of the gear-man. Then, with a wave of his right hand toward the ruins, a powerful telekinetic force sent a large boulder rolling aside, revealing the broken blade of the Star-Forged Magic Sword. The shard flew into Jenkins's waiting hand.
Like the White Bone Holy Sword, the shattered magic sword had lost none of its power; its broken form had not reduced it to a mundane object. Jenkins had only taken the upper half of the blade, and now he held it suspended before him with a combination of ntal focus and his command over tal.
Jenkins had a feeling that after this battle, he might be able to break free from the ability slot limitations of the Enchanter system, turning his spellcasting into pure instinct. But that was a thought for after he'd won.
The sword fragnt shot through the air toward the gear-man. The construct didn't move; the blade simply slid aside, repelled by a magnetic force. The gear-man was trying to control the blade as well, but this was not the Difference Engine itself. Its command over tal was no match for Jenkins, who stood firm in the ruins.
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