A violent snap echoed from the slingshot launcher, followed by a shockwave that flared Vivi’s hair, shaking the air itself.

  A gaping hole appeared in the raven’s chest. A flurry of ethereal feathers scattered, then promptly disintegrated, as the missile ripped through the monsters and into the sky.

  The facets blew up, taking the blunt of the missile’s force. Cracks formed, and glass-like shards of the facets fell, revealing levelstone above. Vivi’s missile got stuck there, poking out of the crack.

  The raven’s momentum slowed, and it began falling. It crashed, and a cloud of sand burst to the air upon impact. A beacon of wisps rose, and the raven turned into its host bones: a large dark piece of rock now with a hole in it, loose black hair, and what looked like a giant shedded snake skin.

  Behind her, the ballistics team and the ballista makers were dead silent, examining the dead monster. The Luminary’s Light had his hand on his sheathed runesword. Slowly, he let go of his grip.

  A few seconds later, Vivi’s missile dropped from the sky. Heads rose as people squinted against the facets’ light.

  The missile had left a small dent in the levelstone.

  “Mother of the abyss,” Patryn said in shock. “Did we just… Did we break fucking levelstone?”

  Everyone was staring at the spot, wrinkles on their brows from the surrounding facets’ bright glare. The ongoing fight in the distance, with the poisonous shell roach still alive, seemed to escape everyone’s mind.

  “Reload it, Patryn,” Vivi said. She handed him the slingshot launcher. “It’s not over.”

  “Right,” Patryn said. He took the weapon, examining it. “The stretch rope got ripped in half, and looks like the pulley system is dislocated.”

  “Can you get it working?” Vivi asked.

  “We brought replacement parts, yes,” Patryn said. “Give us a minute.”

  He turned to the ballistics team, and they got to work. The Luminary’s Light watched. He turned to Vivi, speaking carefully. “What… exactly did we just witness?”

  “It’s a new weapon,” Vivi said. “Using new technology. Just a prototype, though.”

  Vivi left him baffled, and she turned to the ballistics team as they loaded up another missile, this time a mass-produced simpler one. They quickly assessed the launcher itself, making sure that the barrel wasn’t deformed. Everything appeared operational. They lubricated the new missile and the barrel again, and added the enhancement string to the missile.

  Vivi took the weapon and faced the giant shell roach, still a ways off in the distance. She ran closer carefully, keeping the slingshot launcher stable to avoid surprises.

  “Coshi!” Vivi shouted. “Run behind me!”

  The Luminary and the two others noticed her, and her odd weapon. Then they quickly followed the order and sprinted toward her. Within ten seconds, Coshi made it next to her.

  “Your plan?” Coshi asked right away.

  “I’ll kill it,” Vivi said. The shell roached charged closer, straight toward the barrel. The designers had said the optimal operating range was something around two hundred feet. But the shell roach was large. And Vivi certainly didn’t want it any closer to the city.

  She aimed with the iron sights, holding it steady with a healthy amount of ether in her feet to make sure she didn’t wobble at all. She enhanced her eyesight, pointed the iron sights exactly at the monster, and said, “Coshi, pull the lever, please.”

  “What, this one?” she asked.

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  “Yes. Carefully.”

  Confused, Coshi pulled it.

  Everything that followed happened simultaneously—from the recoil of launch to the impact, the damages were as good as instant.

  A jolt punched Vivi in the shoulder, followed by a shockwave from the sheer speed of the launch. The stretch ropes were ripped with an ear-piercing snap, as if something had been whipped with thousands of pounds of force. The beacons of ether were pushed out of the way by the force of its shockwave.

  A splash echoed loudly, as if a bug had been stomped. A giant crack appeared in the shell roach’s carapace. Not quite the head, where Vivi had aimed, but slightly to the left. The mass-produced missile didn’t quite pierce through, but the monster was deformed, as if a boulder had crashed on the spot where the missile hit. The poisonous cloud grew rapidly alongside thousands of full wisps escaping from its body.

  The shell roach continued limping for a few steps. Then it collapsed, writhed and struggled, until it became limp, and its carapace began disintegrating.

  Coshi and Vivi stared at it for a full ten seconds.

  Then the shouts of celebration began.

  The archers atop the walls rejoiced. The battalion, though nobody had even fought, laughed in disbelief. Vivi couldn’t call it cheering. These were the celebrations of someone who was glad to be alive.

  The ballista makers, however, were shouting like total crazies. “A shockwave!” one of them was shouting. “Curse the damn abyss, it leaves a shockwave!”

  Lucius cackled alongside them. “Amazing!” he said in Vivi’s head. “This is colossal! A fitting weapon for the destroyer of the abyss! This might be even better than runesmithing!”

  You still don’t know how the weapon even works, Lucius.

  “It goes boom, and it goes whoosh!” he said.

  The desert was now mostly clear of monsters, but for a few stragglers. Coshi stood next to Vivi, watching the sizzling corpse. “Vivi…” she said calmly, eyeing her weapon. “What is that?”

  “It’s the slingshot launcher.”

  “Yes… I’m asking what it is.”

  “It’s kind of like a skill wisp,” Vivi said. “Except in weapon form. Pretty much, we’ve invented how to engineer skills.”

  Coshi’s face was blank, showing no reaction. “Vivi… We had two fourth elevation hunters in that fight, you know.”

  “Yes?” Vivi asked.

  “Without your runeswords, that monster would have attacked the walls. Even with your runeswords, we were waiting for a poison resistance skill to be delivered.”

  “What… are you trying to say?”

  “You aren’t allowed to one-shot monsters like that,” Coshi said. “You just aren’t. People train for decades to cause damage to something so tanky.”

  Vivi still had no idea what Coshi was trying to say. “So…”

  Finally, Coshi let out a disbelieving laugh. A grin suddenly appeared, and Coshi slammed her hands on Vivi’s shoulders. “Are you a deity, Vivi, or what?”

  “Uh,” Vivi said, awkwardly leaning back. Coshi leaned uncomfortably close. “I’m just a runesmith?”

  “You can’t just invent engineering skill wisps, Vivi!” Coshi said with the widest grin. She patted her shoulders hard, laughing.

  While she was doing that, something cracked next to them. Coshi turned her head to the slingshot launched just as the pulley system broke, the release lever falling apart. Once again, the launch had further damaged the weapon.

  “It’s just a prototype,” Vivi said. “We’re designing the actual weapons next.”

  Coshi watched it for a moment. Then her eyes became founded again. The look of a leader. “You’re serious, then?” Coshi asked. “This isn’t just a one-time thing? You can create more of these?”

  “This one was made without my help. These weapons can be mass-produced.” Vivi said. She glanced up at the facets, at the crack. “Only that missile was made by me.”

  Coshi frowned at it. “Vivi. There’s a crack in the levelstone.”

  “Is… that bad?”

  “Levelstone is impenetrable.”

  “Well… looks like it’s not?” Vivi said, uncertain whether the Luminary was mad at her or not.

  Coshi’s emotions were hard to read. She was silent, shadows underneath her eyes. Then she met Vivi’s eyes, a fire burning within. “Curse us all, but we might actually live for a week. What do I need to pay for you to arm my archers with those things? Slingshot launchers?”

  Vivi glanced behind her. “We’re already making more. And we’re designing a better one. This is just a test to see if the concept works.”

  “You are a deity, Vivi,” Coshi said. “Know that. This is absolutely brilliant.”

  She flushed and looked away. “I’m just a runesmith.”

  “The ethersmith, maybe,” Coshi said.

  Vivi only grew redder. “Please stop. We still need to defend this city. When is the next storm hitting?”

  “They’re all breaking at once,” Coshi said. Her tone barely changed; the earlier statement had already been fully serious. “We’re on defence duty now. If we can venture out and kill bosses before the walls, that’s great, but it’s also dangerous. We need to survive for one week. That’s when support is coming, after the exalted knights on the sixth level have cleared the majority of their storms.”

  Lucius frowned at that. “I wouldn’t rely on that.”

  “We’ll be dealing with wild monsters,” Coshi said. “Those ones were still nothing. There will be bosses with auras worth upwards of a hundred thousand ether. Whichever affinity the monsters obtain—agility, strength, tankiness, ranged attacks—they’ll all be as potent as fifth elevation hunters, if not more so, with defences as tough as levelstone.”

  Vivi put on her most serious expression. “Then,” she said, “we must create a weapon to destroy levelstone itself.”

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