Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 139: Interlude Karl

“Don’t you ever feel it’s weird, handling stuff this expensive?” Weinbaum, another engineer, asked Karl as he withdrew a carefully measured amount of Demon Lord Blood from his storage space.

“Sure, it’s as weird as everything else.” Karl said through clenched teeth as he concentrated on carefully pouring the substance into a prepared metal vessel, then added a few different chemicals “Just as weird as me being able to do this.”

As he spoke, the metal vessel’s top closed shut on its own accord, sealing itself with no seam or sign that it had ever been anything other than a featureless metal cylinder. It seemed to be an odd way to conduct an industrial chemical reaction, or rather, an alchemical reaction, but this was an exceedingly odd substance. If this reaction wasn’t conducted in a perfectly sealed container, and not just any container, but one far stronger than anything normally used in chemistry, it would blow up quite violently.

Or at least this kind of mixture would. Professor Chandler had created a dozen different processes to refine the Demon Lord’s Blood and each was vastly different from the last.

Sometimes, this stuff was distilled down using traditional methods, with the apparatus all the while being reinforced by the half dozen strongest [Engineers] on campus to prevent it from tearing itself to pieces. The resulting syrupy liquid had been more uniform than the initial substance and less likely to react volitively as the part actively being burnt switched from extremely slow to react to highly reactive. However, even though it burned evenly, it also burned far hotter than any device Karl and his fellow [Engineers] constructed could utilize or even survive.

Meanwhile, the current method used a few alchemically enhanced fire-suppressing chemicals to slightly reduce the volatility and ‘chemical’ energy contained within, reducing the potential yield but making it actually possible to use.

… the entire process also made precisely zero sense to Karl. As an engineer with a Master’s degree, he should have been fairly knowledgeable about how this stuff worked and he also had a decent grounding in chemistry. Yet all that was telling him was that none of this should work.

Fire suppressing chemicals reducing the chemical energy in flammable materials that were not currently on fire, all without creating an appreciable amount of heat or pressure, yet explode if there was a way for the energy to escape? Impossible!

In fact, it was almost as if there was something malevolent left in the blood, trying to ensure that no one could adequately use it. Sure, Isaac had reassured them that this wasn’t the case and that the substance was merely supremely volatile, but Karl was painfully aware of the fact that there were hard limits to Isaac’s knowledge. By his own admission, the returnee had not been a researcher in the other timeline and as such lacked the kind of knowledge that would have been truly useful in everyone’s research efforts.

If there had really been some kind of issue with using Demon Lord Blood, would he even have known about it?

But at the end of the day, there was nothing else to do, nothing except to continue experimenting until either this stuff finally submitted or an accident got past their myriad safeguard [Skills] and this entire lab got shut down.

“Careful, careful, we don’t have much of that stuff.” Weinbaum warned Karl, but he merely rolled his eyes. Whenever Karl was handling this precious substance, Weinbaum started acting like a helicopter parent whose child had gone to school for the first time.

Not only were they peers, but they actually had far more of this stuff than one might assume because Isaac had given them a lot of it. Sure, he’d pawned off some to many different organizations and institutions, but those had been tiny portions, creating an illusion of scarcity, and all the recipients had been incredibly grateful.

“I won’t juggle it, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Karl grumbled, stepping up to their latest engine prototype. Once he’d judged the reaction in the metal vessel had come to a stop, so he peeled open the top and placed it in the intended receptacle.

Then, he skipped out of the room, shut the door behind himself and took up his position behind the massive, armored window that allowed them to view the process within.

“Ready?” Weinbaum asked.

“Ready.” Karl nodded, flipping open the laptop next to him “[Automatic Transcription], [Sense Structure].”

In other words, anything that happened in that room and was picked up by their senses or [Skills] would now automatically be taken down, and that range would now be vastly expanded.

“[Understand Process], [Sense Flaw], [Pristine Measurements] …” Weinbaum chimed in, tacking on his own [Skills].

It was a little weird for people to speak all their [Skills] out loud, certainly, in Professor Bailey’s team, they only announced them when someone else should hit the deck to avoid it. But here, it worked a little differently. It was important for everyone to be aware of what everyone else was doing, and so that everyone knew that every item on the checklist had been completed.

And after another minute, things were ready. Karl pressed the button, a big, red one for … reasons, and the machine in the secure experiment room activated. It wasn’t anything fancy or complicated, just a basic engine that converted burning fuel into kinetic energy that could power, for example, a car. An old, slow, incredibly basic one. And until they knew what worked, there wasn’t really a reason to get fancy.

At first, it seemed like things were going fairly well, the engine slowly grinding to life … and then it was as if a miniature star had been born at the heart of collection of moving parts, metal cracking and splintering as energy surged outwards.

The world inside that room seemed to come to a sudden halt, the incredible sheer wrongness of an incredibly volatile situation turning into a three-dimensional still of an explosion, shards of metal and gouts of flame hanging in the air.

Then reality itself suddenly seemed to rewind, leaving behind a mere afterimage wreathing the seemingly repaired machine. And finally, the afterimage became a little more saturated and played out what would have happened had the [Skill] [Accident Simulation] not kicked in.

When all was said and done, all that was left was a smoking engine with cracks running across it sitting on the table and a massive accident report scrolling across the screen of the laptop, being written far faster than any human could manage even now.

Sadly, as powerful as [Accident Simulation] was, there were limits.

For one, it couldn’t fully repair anything damaged in the beginning stages of an accident, it could only stick the broken various pieces back into place but not fix the damage.

In addition, the [Skill] wasn’t prescient. It could only kick in when it was clear that an accident was actually happening, as machines started breaking down and rivets started flying at speeds that could take someone’s head off. Therefore, there was always a significant amount of damage.

And lastly, it didn’t kick in if the intended process occurred in a way that wasn’t intended, something that they’d tested out with a few literal explosives. Since the whole affair was meant to explode, and it exploded due to faulty wiring rather than being detonated using the intended method, well, that was that. Better not stand to close!

As Weinbaum began to swear next to Karl, a claxon call rang all through the building. Unlike other labs, this alarm didn’t mean ‘danger, evacuate’, but rather, it merely informed everyone to stop any and all dangerous experiments that had been conducted under the assumption that any accident would be mitigated as the [Skill] that would do the mitigating was on cooldown.

“Get any closer?” a new voice, tinged with sympathy, rang out from the corridor.

“A little, Professor Jäger.” Karl sighed and pulled a few mana potions out of his spatial storage, passing them into the already open and outstretched hand. This was how these things usually went. It took a while for the Professor’s mana to recharge [Accident Simulation], even if he didn’t use it for anything else. As such, without these potions, it would take a good long while until the ‘dangerous’ experiments could resume and the head researcher would have been functionally useless as well.

“Eh, it’ll take a while. You’re making great progress.” Jäger said with an encouraging grin, making Karl chuckle. Jäger was busy with his own things, he couldn’t know that, but he was nonetheless trying to encourage them.

***

‘BOOM!’

… another day, another explosion, more mana potions paid to the good Professor.

“So that’s what happened when you try to add the dust of a Thermite Avatar to the Blood of a Demon Lord.” The other Professor commented.

“Really, Professor Chandler?” Jäger sighed “That seemed like an obvious result.”

“But now we know it’s the result.” Chandler replied.

“Was it worth it, though? An irreplaceable substance burned to ash, [Accident Simulation] on cooldown, and the room is more scorched than I’ve ever seen.”

“It was.” Chandler said with the infectious enthusiasm of a six year old let loose in a chocolate factory.

Karl just sighed and moved on to properly repairing the machine, his [Aura] sinking into the whole affair, each bit clicking into place and sticking there like a puzzle piece, foreign, burning mana being pushed out of the material to prevent it from interfering with the repair process.

Once more into the breach, he supposed.

***

“And this is the part where it explodes, right?” Amy asked, looking over the machine carefully reinforced by bands of telekinetic force.

“It’s not supposed to.” Karl muttered under his breath.

But nothing happened, the machine happily chugging along, growing faster and faster andfasterandfaster and …

[Accident Simulation] activated, Professor Jäger came running, and Karl handed over some mana potions.

“This is new.” The Professor observed, looking over the melted mass on the table “What happened?”

“Everything worked perfectly, the machine was going faster and faster … and then it turned out that the Blood can make the engine work at speeds well beyond what we built it for. We can harness the fuel, now it’s on us to provide it an engine that can take advantage of that power.”

“Alright, carry on.”

***

Engine number seven-hundred-and-nineteen chugged away happily, seemingly fully functional.

Karl stood in the room with it, proudly gazing out through the safety glass window … where a bunch of his colleagues were standing, looking extremely apprehensive and like they were ready to fling themselves behind cover at a moment’s notice.

And the worst part was, he couldn’t entirely blame them.