Origin Witch - Heart of Obsidian
Glass edge snagged her tunic cuff before she even cleared the bottom step of the heartwood stairs, ripping a thin thread out of the gray linen. Corinne didn’t bother checking the tear. She hovered four inches above the floorboards, her bare feet dangling, while her right hand held a cold iron lantern against her hip.
Down in the newly expanded sixty-square-meter ground-floor storage vault, the air smelled like wet gravel, cold iron, and fresh pine sawdust. Stack after stack of raw materials lined the heavy oak racks. Jasper Finch’s haulers had worked through the early hours of the morning, transferring thousands of logs, stone blocks, and iron ingots through the Magic Desk node until the Spire’s storage grid looked like a regional supply depot.
Corinne drifted past a pile of copper slabs, her black frames glinting in the lantern glow. She stopped in front of the far corner shelf where three jet-black, glassy blocks sat resting on a thick oak plank. Through her spectacles, the pale blue text box flared to life:
[Raw Obsidian Block (Grade-D)] [Weight: 85 lbs] [Properties: Ultra-Dense Thermal Conductor / High Ether-Shock Absorption] [Alchemical Application: Core foundation material for Tier-4 High-Tower upgrades, automated defensive wards, and high-temperature furnace liners.]
She reached out, her fingers touching the top edge of the nearest block. The rock was slick, black as oil at midnight, and sharp enough along its fractured edges to slice clean through a leather work glove if you pulled across it too fast. It felt dense, heavy with an internal, volcanic chill that resonated in her palms.
“Obsidian,” she murmured, her thumb tracing a glassy ridge.
Ding! Her private trade interface chimed on the desk nearby. Garrett Thorne wrote that he was at the Spire’s southern boundary stone, his boys hauling the rest of the Trench payload, ninety-seven blocks of obsidian and four more Fire Element Essences, and asked her to open the trade node or send her broker down to count the rocks. She adjusted her glasses and told him to send it through the desk node, that she wasn’t opening the outer barrier gates for ninety-seven blocks of rock. He grumbled that the transfer node took five minutes per batch and his haulers had dragged the sleds through three miles of swamp mud since dawn. She told him to sit in the mud for five minutes per batch, that he was getting forty health vials for the shipment and could wait. Three seconds passed on the thread before he called her a paranoid little witch. She answered that she was a living witch, and to send the first batch.
When the ground-floor transfer panel began to hum, Corinne didn’t use her hands. She hooked her Moonstone Carver into her belt to hold her Strength at 32, hovered two inches off the floor, and dragged the eighty-pound obsidian blocks across the room with a heavy oak pry-bar, stacking them against the eastern wall as they thudded in. Her tunic was soon soaked with sweat, her dead legs swaying limply beneath her hem, but her shoulders stayed solid under the crystal knife’s enchantment. By three in the afternoon the full delivery of ninety-seven blocks was stacked, and Steelwool watched the pile from a high shelf, its round yellow eyes tracking every heavy thud, until Corinne told it to stop staring before one rolled onto its foot and flattened it.
She opened the Spire’s structural upgrade interface, bringing up the requirements for the Tier-4 High-Tower evolution:
[The Spire – Tier-4 Evolution Blueprint] [Requirements:]
– Wood Logs: 100,000 / 100,000 (Complete)
– Cut Stone Blocks: 10,000 / 10,000 (Complete)
– Black Obsidian Blocks: 100 / 100 (Complete)
– D-Rank Fire Element Essence: 5 / 10
– Grade-D Monster Core: 0 / 10
She stared at the last two lines. She had the wood, the stone, and all one hundred obsidian blocks. Thanks to Garrett Thorne’s trench raids, she already possessed five D-Rank Fire Element Essences, including the one buried beneath the soil of her third-floor balcony planter box. The roadblock was the Grade-D Monster Cores. Not a single one had appeared on the public market or in Jasper Finch’s black-market auctions. The reason was simple: Grade-D monsters didn’t spawn in the shallow woods near the central creek. They lived in the uncharted mud-swamps to the north and the volcanic lava rifts to the south, beasts like the Swamp Hydrake or the Volcanic Trench-Worm that could tear through a Tier-1 wooden shelter in three seconds. To get ten Grade-D cores, someone had to take a squad of heavily armed fighters into the black mud and hunt creatures that made timber wolves look like house cats.
Her Magic Desk chimed again. Garrett wrote that the obsidian was delivered, his haulers taking their health potions back to the ridge, but there was a problem in the northern swamp.
[Corinne]: What problem?
A scouting team from Sector 665 had crossed the boundary line an hour earlier and set up an armored camp near the northern marsh ridge, fifty men in iron plate armor with heavy steel halberds and tower shields. Corinne’s eyes narrowed behind her spectacles. Sector 665, the neighboring zone. Before the Ether Tide, thick gray fog barriers had separated each ten-thousand-person sector. But as the tide broke, the fog walls had thinned, opening trade routes and invasion corridors between adjacent regions.
[Corinne]: What do they want?
Garrett said what she expected. They had seen Sector 666’s population drop from ten thousand to three thousand during the tide and thought they were weak, thought the forest was open land waiting to be harvested. Their commander had sent word to Marnell’s squad at the southern ford: surrender all Tier-3 fortresses and hand over fifty percent of daily potion production, or five hundred armored soldiers would march across the border by week’s end.
Corinne let out a slow, quiet breath through her nose, her thumb rubbing the smooth glass lens of her spectacles.
“Five hundred armored soldiers,” she whispered into the quiet room.
[Corinne]: Who is leading them?
A man named General Caldwell, a former Earth military officer who had run a private mercenary company before the transfer and organized Sector 665 into a unified military dictatorship. He wanted their herb fields. Garrett told her his own squad was fortifying the northern ridge, but his boys wore leather jackets and iron caps against Caldwell’s tower shields that could stop an iron bolt at twenty yards, and that fighting in the open swamp would cost thirty men in the first ten minutes without heavy offensive firepower.
Corinne turned her floating torso toward her second-floor laboratory stairs. Through the wooden doorway, she could see her ten dark blue cauldrons on their granite array bases, and her spatial bag packed with sulfur dust, corrosive flower sap, and dried wolf bile.
[Corinne]: Tell your boys to hold the ridge line. Don’t engage their main vanguard yet.
[Garrett Thorne]: What are you going to do?
[Corinne]: I’m going to test my new decoctions.
She closed the thread with Garrett Thorne, opened her private channel with Jasper Finch, and typed three words:
[Corinne]: Bring me sulfur.
Ten minutes later, fifty pounds of raw yellow sulfur chunks dropped onto her transfer panel. Corinne didn’t waste another second. She hoisted herself up the curved heartwood stairs to her second-floor laboratory and ignited all ten granite array bases at once. Golden glyphs flared to life beneath the iron pots, bringing a hundred liters of pure Anseic spring water to a roaring boil within three minutes. She dropped five pounds of crushed sulfur dust, ten pounds of Fire-Bell sap, and twenty ground wolf hearts into the cauldrons, stirring with her Verdant Rod while Steelwool watched from the top shelf. She wasn’t going to build iron shields for Garrett Thorne’s men. She wasn’t going to trade for better crossbows. If General Caldwell wanted to march five hundred armored soldiers into Sector 666 to steal her herb fields, she was going to turn the northern swamp into a boiling pool of yellow acid and liquid fire before his tower shields ever reached her tree.
— Origin Witch —