Micky and Marnok were still shaken by the things that they had seen over the past couple of days. Sadly, they didn’t have the time to rest or mourn the others. A vast jungle teeming with monsters stretched behind them, a slightly less vast lake full of unknown horrors lying before them. While the sailor was busy burying Nodarr’s body by the shore, Micky seized the opportunity to refill his host’s cores, contemplating the best way to proceed.

  Once Marnok was done paying his respects to his fallen crewmate, Micky began crafting a new ice construct. It looked a bit like a spear, though its blade had a spiral shape, leading to an extremely pointy tip. Not satisfied with the tool’s hardness, Micky engraved a few unit cells on the ice. He kept the enchantments relatively simple, knowing that making something on par with his scythes or Cloak would take too long.

  Even the half-assed runes he drew on the tool were bound to be quite useful, however. The structural integrity enchantments would help the construct endure the strain as it drilled into the lakebed, while the sharpness runes would allow it to pierce deeper and through tougher materials. The controlled self-repairs would not only help with the spear’s maintenance but also give Micky the ability to easily replicate it. Finally, he included rotation runes to make the construct more mana-efficient for what he intended.

  ‘Mind tellin’ me what all this is for?’ Marnok asked upon seeing Micky snap the spear in two, fuelling its pieces with mana to regrow them into a couple of brand-new copies.

  ‘It’s to locate the tomb,’ Micky replied, before elaborating. ‘It would take forever for us to shovel the whole lake out by ourselves, but we don’t need to. We just need to find the right spot to dig.’

  Burying a corpse didn’t require that much space. However, this wasn’t just some random person’s burial site – it was the final resting place of a demigod, so Micky figured that it had to be somewhat spacious. More importantly, it had been designed either by the Saint himself or his associates to weather the endless march of time and, if Marnok’s information was to be believed, to hide a sizeable stash of Fools’ Amber.

  All things considered, Micky felt confident that the tomb had to be several metres across at the very least – probably much larger. That meant that he wouldn’t have to drill the holes too close to one another. If he spaced them out in fixed intervals, he could slowly poke around the lakebed until he found what he was looking for.

  To demonstrate, he grabbed one of the constructs, pouring some mana into its runes. Stabbing the ground, he allowed the tool to start spinning. Within mere seconds, the sharpened drill had pierced dozens of metres through the dirt and even the thick layer of stone beneath it.

  More importantly, Micky had designed the construct to consume as little mana as possible, so that he could have a bunch of them working at once without draining his host’s reserves too quickly. Like that, he should be able to search most of the lake within a couple of days – especially since he and Marnok didn’t need sleep. If they got lucky, it might not even take that long.

  ‘That’s good ‘n everythin’, but how are we goin’ to know that we found it?’ Marnok asked, clearly not entirely convinced.

  ‘Well… I bet it’s been enchanted to the high heavens to survive for so many years. Its ceiling should be much tougher to drill through than the surrounding stone, so we can compare how much resistance the tools encounter from one hole to the next. As soon as we run into something odd, we can keep pushing to see if there’s a hollowed-out section even deeper.’

  Marnok nodded in understanding, though he still didn’t appear particularly thrilled. What Micky had just described was merely the method to locate the tomb. They’d yet to discuss how to protect themselves from the aquatic monsters most certainly living inside the lake.

  Luckily, Micky had come up with a few ideas about that too.

  Leaning over the edge, he dipped his host’s hand into the water, channelling mana from both cores and allowing it to mix into ice. The liquid began freezing immediately, icy roots spreading out from Marnok’s palm.

  Micky carefully controlled the shape of the emerging constructs, having something very specific in mind. He also kept his consumption to a minimum, not in a hurry to empty his host’s reserves.

  Taking deep breaths one after another, he made sure to refill the organs as fast as he was depleting them, to always keep them above eighty percent of their capacity. It was imperative to have enough mana to defend oneself while working in a potentially hostile environment like this.

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  ‘Now what are ya doin’?’ Marnok asked again, sounding genuinely curious rather than critical. ‘Ya’ll never freeze the whole lake like this.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Micky replied. ‘But lowering the temperature enough to make it unpleasant for its inhabitants should be manageable.’

  The sailor creased his brow, probably finding even that to be overly ambitious. The lake was a couple of kilometres across, and they didn’t even know how deep it was. Even if Micky kept pouring mana into the water for weeks, he’d never be able to cool the whole lake down fast enough to matter.

  However, Marnok still had no idea what Micky was capable of.

  Shaping the ice into a thick, square slab thrice as large as his host, Micky allowed it to float to the surface. Hopping on it, he confirmed that it was big enough to support a person’s weight without sinking, and wide enough for him to balance on it with relative ease.

  Getting off again, he began drawing enchantments on the slab, the runes mostly resembling the one’s he’d adorned the drills with. Only, he swapped the sharpness and rotation runes with adaptive, controlled heating enchantments.

  He didn’t stop after the first layer either. With the help of his Scribing trait, he carefully arranged the unit cells into an even larger controlled heating enchantment that spanned the entire surface of the slab. Satisfied with his handiwork, he then broke the construct in half, using mana and water to grow more floating platforms.

  Scattering the blocks of ice in a circular area with a diameter of a couple dozen metres, he spread them out into an intricate formation, once again using his spectral trait as his guide. As soon as the fiend inside his wisp was happy with his efforts, he finally began pouring mana into the slabs, fuelling the numerous enchantments he’d just drawn.

  The smallest heating runes were the first to activate, a pale glow emanating from the constructs. The water appeared unchanged at first, but Micky didn’t doubt that it had already started cooling rapidly.

  It wasn’t until the second layer of runes came into effect that numerous frozen tendrils emerged from the slabs, snaking beneath the surface of the water. They looked just like the ones from earlier, though they were spreading from several points at once!

  Micky was still carefully rationing his host’s mana, not consuming the resource any faster than he was recovering it, yet his enchantments allowed him to get much more value out of every single drop.

  ‘Holy Saints’ above!’ Marnok exclaimed. ‘I never knew ya could accomplish so much with runecraftin’.’

  Micky grinned. ‘You haven’t seen anything yet.’

  As if on cue, the pale roots interlocked under both his conscious and subconscious control, completing the final rune in the formation. Three layers of enchantments complimented one another, working in unison to accelerate the freezing process.

  The air around Marnok instantly chilled, sending a shiver down the poor sailor’s spine. A downside of fusing two common mana types from separate cores into their composite affinity was that it didn’t grant their owner as much resistance to the resulting element. Thankfully, Marnok’s two Yellow cores had strengthened his body enough to endure the leakage of the formation without much trouble.

  ‘Brrrr… Yeah. I can see where yar confidence stems from,’ he admitted. ‘I’m still not sure this’ll be enough though.’

  ‘It will be,’ Micky insisted. ‘We don’t need to freeze the whole lake. Just chill one section at a time, to drive the beasts away.’

  Obviously, Marnok was far weaker than Kassorith, making it impossible for Micky to unleash a formation on par with the one that he had used in the tournament. His current host only possessed about a fifth of the Thess’kalan’s reserves, and the lake was much larger than the stadium – not to mention filled with water rather than air.

  Even so, if he were to split the place into, say, ten smaller regions, and take his sweet time channelling mana into each one, he should be able to lower the water’s temperature by several degrees, giving him and Marnok space to start digging.

  The lack of a domain also prevented him from preparing the formation in an instant, but that wasn’t a problem in a drawn-out operation like this. Finally, he’d made sure that both the slabs and the spears he had crafted were highly mobile, so it wouldn’t be difficult to move from one spot to the next.

  Marnok whistled in appreciation once Micky was done explaining his plan in detail, though he still had some questions. ‘How do ya know the beasts will swim away instead of attackin’ us?’

  ‘Well… I don’t,’ Micky admitted. ‘But imagine that you’re a dumb animal and your environment suddenly gets freezing cold. Would your first instinct be to go around looking for a mage that might be causing it, or just to leave for somewhere more comfortable? And remember that these beasts might have never even come across sapients before.’

  Marnok nodded, yet Micky wasn’t done.

  ‘Some of the creatures might still attack us, so help me keep an eye out. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Our drills can be used as weapons, and I’m confident that we can handle a few isolated creatures here and there. They’ll help us restock on food too.’

  They still had most of Micky’s rations, as well as a lot of leftover crab meat from the day before that they had frozen and stored inside the spatial seal. It should be more than enough to last Marnok for weeks. On top of that, all three of Marnok’s affinities were excellent for surviving in an inhospitable environment for a long time.

  He could conjure drinking water and breathable air, in addition to preserving food for months. That said, they had no idea what awaited them inside the tomb, so having some extra food wouldn’t hurt.

  Happy with their plan, the two said nothing else, commencing their operation. Whether the Saint’s tomb was truly here or not, they were going to turn the lake upside down searching for it.

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