Origin Witch - Red Alerts in the Rain
Rain had been drumming against the high balcony glass for four straight hours when the trade ping finally shattered the quiet.
It was not a single chime. It was a chaotic, rapid-fire burst of red notifications that vibrated through the floorboards of the Spire like a hornets’ nest hit by a rock.
Corinne did not rush down the wooden stairs.
She hovered on her second-floor workbench, slowly sipping a hot cup of Piper Bell’s fish-noodle soup, letting the continuous, passive 600-point mana regen wash through her veins before she even looked at the desk screen.
When she finally drifted down to the ground floor, her black frames were resting on her nose, the blue-tinted lenses reflecting the wall of bright red text scrolling across her private inbox.
Jasper Finch’s message was flagged urgent, three repetitions of the word blinking at the top of the thread.
[Jasper Finch]: CORINNE! WHAT THE HELL WAS IN ROUND NINE?! [Jasper Finch]: ANSWER ME IMMEDIATELY!
Corinne set her empty clay soup bowl on the desk, wiped her mouth with her tunic sleeve, and typed back with one finger.
[Corinne]: I was eating lunch. What happened?
[Jasper Finch]: WHAT HAPPENED?! ELODIE’S PISTOL IS IN PIECES! THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED!
Corinne’s eyebrows raised slightly behind her wire frames. She let out a long, quiet breath through her nose, feeling a deep, cold surge of satisfaction settle in her stomach.
[Corinne]: Explain. Did the round fail to fire?
[Jasper Finch]: FAIL TO FIRE?! IT EXPLODED LIKE A HAND GRENADE IN HER HAND! [Jasper Finch]: She went to the northern quarry to test the batch just like you said. Rounds 1 through 7 fired perfectly, punched clean through an inch of solid pine and dented granite. Round 8 kicked like a mule and blew a chunk off a stone boulder. [Jasper Finch]: Then she chambered Round 9. The moment her finger pulled the trigger, the entire steel slide shattered into shrapnel! The breech blew out, the frame cracked down the center, and two steel fragments tore through her leather glove!
[Jasper Finch]: She nearly lost her thumb! The pistol is completely destroyed! It’s a pile of twisted scrap metal!
Corinne hovered on her floating straw pile, her face completely impassive.
“Target down,” she whispered to the empty room.
She took three full seconds before typing her reply, keeping her text tone confused and faintly defensive. The exact tone an amateur crafter would use when an experiment blew up.
[Corinne]: I warned you, Finch. I literally typed it in our chat two hours ago: Kaelum’s raw sulfur and nitre are heavily infused with volatile ether. [Corinne]: Rounds 8 and 9 were heavy magnum loads. I used raw sulfur dust from the southern volcanic trench. Did Elodie check the barrel for obstruction after Round 8 fired? If a piece of lead jacket from Round 8 remained lodged in the barrel, a heavy magnum charge behind it would create a catastrophic pressure back-spike.
On the other side of Sector 666, inside a darkened, stone-lined hideout, Jasper Finch stared at his desk screen.
Beside his desk stood Elodie “The Cold-Eye.”
Her left hand was wrapped in thick white linen bandages soaked in red blood, and her right hand was holding the ruined, twisted frame of her 9mm handgun. The slide was split wide open like a peeled banana, the steel chamber blanched black from high-heat scorch marks, and the internal firing pin was completely gone.
“What is she saying?” Elodie rasped, her voice cold, hard, and laced with pain. Her face was pale, sweat dripping from her dark bangs.
“She says Round 8 might have left a barrel obstruction,” Jasper said, rubbing his temple with two shaking fingers. “She says the volatile Kaelum ether in the sulfur created a back-pressure spike.”
Elodie glared at the ruined piece of iron in her palm.
She was a professional. Back on Earth, she had served six years in a private military security contractor unit in South America. She knew guns. She knew what a barrel obstruction explosion looked like.
The slide had blown outward, not forward. The steel chamber had literally melted from a sudden, hyper-concentrated thermal surge that no standard Earth powder could ever generate.
“She did it on purpose,” Elodie spat, her teeth clenching as a sharp throb shot through her bandaged thumb. “The little witch sabotaged the load.”
Jasper looked at Elodie, then back at his desk screen.
“Why would she sabotage it?” Jasper asked, his voice low. “She gave us the test batch for free. She didn’t charge us a single wood log.”
“Because she’s floating thirty feet in the air in a white dress,” Elodie snarled, dropping the ruined steel frame onto Jasper’s desk with a heavy, metallic clatter. “A sniper rifle or a semi-automatic handgun is the only thing in this forest that can kill her before she drops a bottle of acid on your head. She doesn’t want guns in Sector 666.”
Jasper stared at the twisted pile of ruined steel.
“She knows what you know,” Jasper said quietly, almost to himself. “No potions means a shredded hand rots in the damp and you die screaming. Cross the only alchemist in the forest and there is no second source. She does not forgive, Elodie. So you take the crossbow, you heal, and you fly her contracts. That is the whole math now.”
He was a broker. He did not care about guns, pride, or military tactics. He cared about numbers.
He pulled up the system appraisal box and set the ruined pistol on the small screen:
[Item Appraised: Ruined Handgun Frame (Scrap Metal)] [Status: Destroyed / Irreparable] [Note: Internal pressure exceeded structural metallurgy threshold by 400%. Chemical propellants containing Kaelum volatile sulfur possess an extremely high explosion failure rate in standard firearms.]
The system note was right there in black and white. High explosion failure rate.
Even the system itself was confirming that Kaelum’s raw mineral chemistry made Earth firearms wildly unstable and prone to blowing up in the shooter’s hand.
Jasper let out a long, heavy sigh, pushing his gold-rimmed glasses back up his nose.
Whether Corinne had intentionally sabotaged the round or whether Kaelum’s volatile physics had simply wrecked the weapon didn’t matter anymore. The result was the same. Firearms were dead in Sector 666. Nobody was going to risk their fingers firing custom-packed cartridges when every ninth round had a chance of turning a pistol into a pipe bomb.
He pulled up his private chat with Corinne.
[Jasper Finch]: The weapon is destroyed beyond repair, Corinne. Elodie’s hand is shredded, and she’s out of commission for two days. [Jasper Finch]: This is a massive financial loss for my brokerage. I spent forty basic materials securing that handgun.
Corinne read the message on her third-floor balcony, a small, cold smile touching her lips.
[Corinne]: That’s unfortunate, Finch. But alchemy is an experimental science. You wanted custom ammunition without paying for research and development. [Corinne]: However, since Elodie is injured and I need her rifle threat out of the picture anyway, I’ll offer a settlement. [Corinne]: Send me the ruined pistol scrap metal and whatever leftover lead and copper you have left. In exchange, I’ll give Elodie five Grade-E Health Potions and a mechanical oak crossbow with twenty iron-tipped bolts.
In the stone hideout, Elodie looked at the chat text projected on Jasper’s screen.
Five health potions. And a mechanical oak crossbow.
A crossbow did not explode. A crossbow did not rely on volatile sulfur. And five Grade-E Health Potions meant her shredded left hand would heal by tomorrow morning instead of festering with an infection in the damp woods.
“Take it,” Elodie said, her voice bitter as she turned toward the door. “Give her the scrap iron. I’m not touching another brass shell in this godforsaken forest.”
Jasper did not argue. He deposited the twisted pistol frame, two pounds of lead ingots, and his remaining copper scrap into the trade square.
Corinne sent over five ruby-red health potions and a sturdy, heavy-duty oak crossbow she had confiscated from the three thieves she had blown up at the base of her tree two nights ago.
Trade Complete.
Corinne picked up the ruined pistol frame from her transfer panel.
The steel slide was split down the middle, blackened by sulfur soot, the internal chamber twisted into a useless, melted lump of iron.
She held it up to her black frames.
[Ruined Handgun Frame (Grade-E Scrap Metal)] [Material: Refined High-Carbon Steel (3.2 lbs)] [Alchemical Application: Can be melted down in an Abyssal Meteorite Cauldron to extract high-purity refined steel.]
Corinne tossed the scrap metal into her storage bucket, where it landed with a satisfying, heavy clank.
She had eliminated the pistol threat. She had forced the gunsmith out of the ammunition business. She had acquired three pounds of high-purity refined steel for her workshop. And she had gotten paid in lead and copper for doing it.
“Experimental science,” she whispered, leaning back against her terrace railing while the cold rain washed the dark soot off her fingers.
Up on the roof beam overhead, Steelwool let out a soft, contented click-click, preening its metallic gray feathers under the shade of the living vine canopy.
She reached up, tapped the owl chick once between its wings with a knuckle, and turned back toward the workbench. The scrap steel went into the crucible queue for tomorrow’s melt, and she closed the lid on the storage bucket with a flat, final clack.
The transfer panel was already scorching before the crate finished materializing.
Heat radiated off the Magic Desk’s transfer panel before the wooden trade crate even appeared, bringing with it a stink like struck matches and charred pork fat. Corinne shifted her weight in mid-air, her dead legs hanging beneath her dark linen tunic in a loose, familiar shape as she drifted two inches closer to the desk. The air inside the Spire’s ground floor was already humid from her afternoon potion runs, but the draft coming off the transfer panel was dry, scorching, and thick with yellow dust that made her eyes water behind her black frames.
Ding!
A heavy, iron-bound oak box materialized on the glass surface with a sharp clack.
Item Appraised: Volcanic Trench Crate (Grade-E) Source: Garrett Thorne Contents: 1x Fire-Resistant Brass Specimen Cage, 25 lbs Raw Sulfur Chunks, 2x Bundles Wild Fire-Bell Blossoms.
Corinne did not open the main lid immediately. Through her Spectacles of Discernment, the blue text box floating over the brass cage inside the crate was pulsing an angry, bright crimson:
[Volcanic Trench Worm (Grade-E Monster)] [Status: Enraged / Starving] [Properties: High-Density Thermal Ether, Volatile Acidic Secretions.] [Alchemical Application: Core catalyst for Explosive Decoctions, High-Tier Thermal Charges, and Permanent Heat-Runes.] [Warning: Emits localized mental disorientation upon direct contact with bare skin.]
Inside the brass cage, something squirmed.
It looked like a thick, arm-length sausage made of dark, blistered red leather, completely devoid of eyes, mouth, or fins. Dozens of short, fleshy stub-legs along its belly twitched against the metal bars, leaving tiny, sizzling streaks of yellow slime that smoked whenever they touched the iron tray.
Steelwool let out an alarming click-click from its perch on the lower storage shelf, its steel-gray feathers puffing up until the bird looked like a round, angry melon. It flapped its wings twice, blowing a cloud of pine sawdust off the workbench, before retreating into the shadowy corner behind the water barrel.
“Stay back, bird,” Corinne grumbled, wiping a line of sweat from her jaw with her sleeve. “It’s not food. It’s a pipe bomb with legs.”
A private chat window flashed blue on her desk screen.
Garrett Thorne’s icon appeared, tagged War-Band Leader.
[Garrett Thorne]: Did you get the crate?
[Corinne]: I got a cage full of hot grease and twenty-five pounds of sulfur. Where the hell were you hunting?
[Garrett Thorne]: Three miles south of the central creek. There’s a tectonic rift down there, a hundred-foot crack in the granite floor leaking molten basalt and sulfur steam. My boys call it the Charcoal Trench. [Garrett Thorne]: The air down there is so hot it scorches your lungs if you breathe too fast. Two of my front-liners caught heat-stroke within twenty minutes, and those red worms were coming out of the lava seams like maggots out of a dead ox.
Corinne tapped Thorne’s avatar.
The small picture showed the big warrior sitting inside a dark stone burrow, his chest armor unbuckled and hanging loose around his hips. His leather collar was charred black along the edges, his eyebrows were half-singed off, and his broad, bearded face was covered in a crust of yellow sulfur dust and dark, dried blood.
[Garrett Thorne]: The worm bit through Mellor’s iron boot before I cut its head off. The heat coming out of that trench is worse than the wolves. But the area is crawling with iron ore, obsidian, and those red bell-flowers you asked for. [Garrett Thorne]: I need fire protection, Corinne. Real fire protection. If my boys go back down into that trench without heat resistance, we’ll lose half the squad to lung burns before we can haul fifty pounds of obsidian out.
[Corinne]: I have the Fire-Bell flowers. But I need to run three test batches to calibrate the thermal suppression ratio.
[Garrett Thorne]: How long?
[Corinne]: Four hours. And it’s gonna cost you.
[Garrett Thorne]: Name the price.
[Corinne]: I want every Fire-Bell blossom your gatherers cut out of that trench, fifty percent of all raw sulfur chunks, and one pure D-Rank Fire Element Essence if you find one in the lava seams.
[Garrett Thorne]: Done. Just get the potions made before my squad’s armor melts off their shoulders.
Corinne closed the messaging window.
She did not waste time chatting. She reached into the iron-bound crate, grabbed the two bundles of Fire-Bell blossoms by their thick, fibrous stems, and pulled them out onto her worktable.
The plants were bizarre. They did not look like forest flowers. Each stem was thick as her thumb, dark reddish-brown, and covered in tiny, stiff bristles that felt like copper wire. Hanging from the top were five or six hollow, bell-shaped red blossoms that glowed with an internal orange warmth, emitting a faint, rhythmic humming sound like a miniature furnace idling in the dark.
She picked up her Spectacles of Discernment, inspecting the red petals.
[Wild Fire-Bell Blossom (Grade-E)] [Properties: High Thermal Absorption / Radiable Heat Resistance.] [Alchemical Application: Primary ingredient for Grade-E Anti-Fire Elixirs, Flame-Immunity Salves, and Volatile Thermal Charges.]
“Absorbs heat,” Corinne murmured, her thumb brushing the bristle-covered stem. “It doesn’t cool you down. It drinks the heat before it reaches your skin.”
She hoisted herself up the heartwood staircase to her second-floor alchemy workshop, her Zephyr Float holding her weightless while the brass cage, the sulfur chunks, and the red blossoms floated behind her inside her Pouch of Preservation.
The workshop was warm, smelling faintly of lingering fish-noodle broth from her lunch with Piper Bell.
Corinne did not light all ten cauldrons. For a new, uncalibrated formula, running ten pots at once was a fast way to blow out her stone array bases and waste twenty pounds of rare ingredients.
She hovered over her primary setup, the dark, star-iron Abyssal Meteorite Cauldron sitting on its three-legged granite base.
She opened her hundred-liter water tank, turning the wooden spigot to fill the meteorite pot with twenty liters of crystal-clear Anseic Water. The spring fluid was cool, sparkling with tiny blue ether flecks under her hanging lantern.
Next came the grinding.
Corinne took five pounds of raw sulfur chunks, dropped them into her Abyssal Meteorite Mortar, and raised the heavy iron pestle.
CRUSH. CRUSH. CRUSH.
The 50% extraction efficiency boost of her meteorite mortar made short work of the yellow mineral. In less than three minutes, the rock chunks were reduced to a fine, flour-like yellow dust that smelled sharply of battery acid and dry lightning.
She set the sulfur dust aside and picked up her Moonstone Carver.
She sliced thirty red Fire-Bell blossoms off their stems, dropping the hollow petals into the mortar. She did not grind the petals into powder. Basic Alchemical Potions warned that crushing Fire-Bell petals too hard would rupture the internal thermal cells, releasing the heat-absorption ether into the air as useless orange smoke.
She used her crystal knife to make three precise, parallel slits along the side of each red bell, letting the thick, glowing orange sap leak out into a clean copper bowl.
The sap was hot, so hot it made the copper bowl warm to the touch within thirty seconds.
“Base solvent ready,” she grunted, wiping her damp forehead with her tunic sleeve.
She dumped the yellow sulfur dust and the orange Fire-Bell sap straight into the cold Anseic spring water inside the meteorite cauldron.
A thin, spiteful hiss rose from the pot.
A cloud of thick, pungent yellow steam erupted from the pot, hitting the timber ceiling and spreading out in a dense, sulfurous haze.
Corinne did not flinch. She pulled a damp cotton cloth over her mouth and nose, stepped up to her granite array base, and pressed her thumb against the golden glyph in the center.
Channel.
The three stone legs of the array flared to life with a deep, honey-colored warmth. The iron pot groaned as heat rushed through the dark blue star-metal, bringing the twenty liters of fluid to a rolling, violent boil within two minutes.
She grabbed her Verdant Rod, the green, leaf-covered branch she had scavenged from Thane’s cellar, and began to stir.
Clockwise. Smooth, relentless circles.
The mixture inside the pot did not turn green or blue. It transformed into a bright, shimmering amber liquid that bubbled like boiling honey, releasing tiny, snapping orange sparks whenever a bubble burst on the surface.
Hour one. The steam stopped smelling like sulfur and began to smell like roasted pine nuts and hot copper.
Hour two. The liquid thickened, shrinking down from twenty liters to two liters of heavy, glowing amber syrup that coated the sides of the meteorite pot like liquid glass.
Hour three.
BRRRRRRRRING!
The mechanical alarm clock on the windowsill shrieked.
Corinne snapped her fingers, deactivating the granite array. The fire beneath the pot vanished instantly.
The amber syrup inside the cauldron flared with a brilliant, blinding orange light that lasted for four full seconds, casting long, vibrating shadows across the wooden workshop walls.
Corinne let the pot cool for ten minutes, then poured the thick amber liquid through her oak-barrel filter setup into a row of empty glass test tubes.
She picked up the first filled vial, holding it up to her black frames.
[Grade-E Anti-Fire Elixir] [Volume: 10ml.] [Effect: Grants +15 Fire & Thermal Resistance for 15 minutes. Neutralizes Grade-E Heat Stroke and prevents lung-scorching in high-temperature environments.] [Purity: 94%.] [Note: A masterfully balanced thermal suppression elixir. The inclusion of refined sulfur dust stabilizes the Fire-Bell sap, allowing the body to absorb environmental heat without damaging organic tissue. Tastes faintly of cinnamon and dry ash.]
Corinne uncorked the vial, brought it to her lips, and took a tiny two-milliliter test sip.
A strange, dry warmth spread across her tongue, followed by a cool, numbing sensation that rushed through her chest, down her arms, and into her torso. The suffocating, humid heat of her alchemy workshop suddenly felt like a mild spring breeze.
“It works,” she whispered, her voice rough. “+15 Fire Resistance.”
She filled two hundred test tubes with the glowing amber elixir, plugging each one tightly with a cork stopper before stacking them neatly into her green stasis crate.
She floated down to her Magic Desk on the ground floor and opened her private channel with Garrett Thorne.
[Corinne]: The Anti-Fire Elixirs are ready. 200 vials.
[Garrett Thorne]: Already? That was less than three hours!
[Corinne]: I don’t waste time, Thorne. Here’s the trade: 100 vials for your initial supply contract. The other 100 vials I’m putting on the public market at 80 basic materials per vial.
[Garrett Thorne]: Deal. Sending the D-Rank Fire Element Essence now.
Ding!
A system trade window opened over the desk screen.
A heavy, leather-bound box materialized on Corinne’s transfer panel. She opened the latch.
Inside lay a fist-sized, dark red crystal that burned with an internal, twisting flame, a pure D-Rank Fire Element Essence. The heat coming off the stone was so intense it warmed her face from two feet away, casting bright, flickering orange light across the wooden floorboards.
Corinne picked up the burning stone with her leather-gloved hand, her eyes glinting behind her spectacles.
She did not put the Fire Element Essence into her storage grid.
Instead, she floated up the wooden stairs to her third-floor high observation terrace, holding the burning red crystal in her hand.
At the western corner of her terrace, right beneath the shade of the living vine overhang, sat a five-foot-long wooden planter box she had built out of oak planks three days ago, filled with two feet of rich, black forest soil.
Corinne dug a three-inch hole in the center of the black soil, set the burning D-Rank Fire Element Essence deep into the dirt, and covered it with earth.
Instantly, the soil inside the planter box turned warm to the touch. A faint, reddish-orange glow seeped up through the dark dirt, making the soil steam softly in the cool night air.
She pulled ten wild Fire-Bell seeds from her herbalist bag, planting them in a neat circle around the buried heat crystal, and watered the dirt with fresh Anseic Water from her stone well.
An indoor, self-sustaining fire-herb nursery.
She would not need to rely entirely on Garrett Thorne’s dangerous trench trips anymore. In a week, these ten seeds would grow into her own private crop of Fire-Bell blossoms, right on her third-floor balcony.
Corinne brushed the black dirt off her tunic, resting her hands against the cold wooden railing of her high tower, looking out over the dark forest of Sector 666.
Deep to the south, the sky above the Charcoal Trench was glowing a faint, angry orange against the black clouds.
She reached into her pocket, pulled out her Zippo lighter, and struck the wheel. Flick-spark. She watched the small yellow flame dance against the dark night wind.
— Origin Witch —