The workshop's ambient hum, once a resonant symphony of controlled creation, shattered into chaos as Agatha's mana surged like a storm unleashed. A raw, invisible shockwave exploded outward from her, whipping through the reinforced chamber with cataclysmic force. Drones multi-limbed constructs of metal were caught in the blast, their metallic frames hurled like leaves in a hurricane. They slammed against the reinforced walls with sickening crunches, sparks erupting in brilliant azure arcs as circuits smashed and plating buckled. One drone's gyroscope assembly sheared clean off, sending it spiraling into a bank of control consoles where it exploded in a shower of molten fragments.
The infrastructure itself began to tremble. The massive gyroscope rings around the nascent demiplane shuddered, their perfect counter-rotation faltering for a split second under the pressure. Hairline fractures spiderwebbed across secondary support struts, and the orichalcum floor vibrated violently beneath Seth's boots. Warning runes flared to life across the walls, pulsing urgent crimson. Seth's hands flew from his ears as he lunged for the command seat, fingers clamping down on its reinforced frame. The metallic blindfold feeding him a torrent of cascading alerts: structural integrity at 87% and dropping, mana containment fields straining, probabilistic collapse vectors spiking.
Shit. She's not holding back, he thought, adrenaline sharpening his already hyper-focused mind. If Agatha continued, the entire workshop and the fragile Spatial Loom would spiral out of control.
"Why don't we just calm down and talk things out, eh?" Seth called out, his voice steady despite the chaos, laced with that trademark dry confidence.
Agatha's eyes blazed pure white, glowing with fury. She levitated smoothly off the floor, her elegant dress billowing as if caught in an unseen gale. Mana coalesced around her in swirling cyan vortices. With a sharp gesture, her left arm thrust forward. A complex magic sigil intricate interlocking runes that shimmered like fractured starlight conjured instantly in the air before her palm. A single, devastating lightning strike lanced toward Seth, a jagged bolt of pure destructive energy crackling with ozone and raw power.
Seth reacted with inhuman speed. He flipped backward over the command seat in a fluid acrobatic twist, the blindfold's neural feed granting him perfect spatial awareness. The lightning struck the chair dead-center with a thunderous crack, vaporizing sections of its frame and leaving the rest a charred, smoking ruin. Superheated metal hissed and popped as residual electricity danced across the wreckage.
He landed lightly on his feet a few meters away, boots scraping the trembling floor. Before he could fully straighten, violet light ignited across his body frame, Agatha's follow-up telekinetic grip seizing him like an invisible vice. His muscles locked as he was hoisted into the air, feet dangling helplessly above the orichalcum plating.
"Come on, let's talk this out like mature...." Seth began, forcing the words through gritted teeth.
"Don't you dare give me that," Agatha snarled, her voice echoing with layered power that made the air itself quiver. "Should I remind you that I can kill you right here, right now?"
Seth's scarred lips twitched into a strained smirk, even as his body hung suspended. "And there's probably another reason you don't want to."
Agatha's right arm rose with deliberate menace. A second violet sigil bloomed around her wrist, glowing with malevolent intensity. Two enormous magical constructs materialized, massive lances of condensed mana and spatial force, each easily the length of a war spear and spinning slowly at first, their edges humming with lethal potential. One lance angled directly at Seth's chest; the other, with chilling precision, pointed straight toward the heart of the expanding spatial sphere.
"You aren't seriously going to do it, are you?" Seth asked, his tone sly even in mid-air, the blindfold overlaying threat trajectories and energy readouts in his mind's eye.
The lances accelerated, their spin building into a high-pitched whine that cut through the workshop's alarms. "You aren't seriously going to hit me given my condition, I still need time to heal up, you know," Seth added quickly, twisting slightly to gesture at the network of scars visible along his arms.
"You're current lying, and we can see if I'm bluffing after I put a hole through your chest!" Agatha shot back, her voice a whipcrack of fury. The lances spun faster, their violet auras intensifying, distorting the air around them into heat-shimmer mirages.
"Alright, I'm sorry," Seth conceded, hands gesturing helplessly at himself and then toward the sphere. "But you'll gain nothing from killing me." His voice dropped into a more urgent, persuasive register. "And the Void crystal isn't going to come back to you if you destroy the sphere."
"Is that so!" Agatha's eyes narrowed, the white glow flaring brighter.
"Yes," Seth pressed, the words tumbling out with rapid precision as data streams confirmed the escalating danger. "If you breach the physical boundary of the spatial sphere, it'll trigger a catastrophic chain reaction. Planar leak fluid and decompression will instantly vent the atmosphere. A dimensional collapse will violently shunt any surviving matter into the void. Spatial looping will trap escapees in an infinite paradox, and the backlash of raw force energy will unleash a devastating magical shockwave that could level half this floor."
Agatha stared at him, her expression a mask of cold calculation, the lances still spinning ominously.
"Breaking the bubble wall pops the secret room," Seth summarized with a pained, lopsided smile, "blowing everything heavily wide while a big magic boom hurts everyone. Including you."
The silence stretched, thick and heavy amid the dying echoes of the earlier shockwave. Agatha's gaze bored into him, weighing his words against the fury still radiating from her form. Then, with a sharp exhale, she released her telekinetic hold. Seth dropped mid-air, twisting instinctively to land in a controlled crouch, one hand bracing the floor as the impact jarred his still-healing frame. The two violet lances deformed and dissolved into harmless wisps of mana that faded like dying embers.
"And how do you intend to compensate me?" Agatha demanded, slowly descending until her heels clicked back onto the floor. She folded her arms in a guarded stance, the elegant lines of her dress settling as the white glow in her eyes dimmed to a simmering ember. "The Void crystal has exceptional value."
Seth straightened up fully, smoothing the front of his clothing with deliberate calm. The blindfold continued feeding him status updates; workshop stability recovering to 94%, the spatial sphere's surface rippling but intact. "Now we're getting somewhere." He walked back toward the control panels, stepping over debris from the smashed drones. "How much are we talking?"
"10,000 platinum plates!" Agatha declared without hesitation.
Seth turned to her, his skeptical expression evident even behind the blindfold. "Huh? What did you just say?"
"You heard me."
"100 gold is worth 1 platinum plate," he countered, voice flat with disbelief as he cross-referenced economic data in his neural overlay.
"I'm aware. When will you be paying?" she pressed, unmoved.
"That's overbearing. I don't have such an amount. Even small nations would struggle to gather 10,000 platinum plates," Seth replied, gesturing broadly at the workshop's opulent but resource-draining setup.
"I adjusted the pricing as a special courtesy for you."
"That's not consideration, that's brutality," Seth muttered, though a hint of reluctant admiration colored his tone.
"Probably because the Void crystal was priceless," Agatha continued, her voice gaining a sharp, regal edge. "Solely given to me by an outer god as a reward. You can't put a price on such!"
"I understand," Seth said, nodding as he touched the still-smoldering remains of his burnt chair, the metal warm under his fingers. She totally condemned it. "But I don't have any platinum plates on me, not even in my storage. I've used all of mine for metalwork and the Loom's lattice."
"Where are you going with this?" Agatha asked, her posture still tense, one eyebrow arched high.
Seth leaned against the fragile frame of the ruined chair for a moment, then pushed off. "Might not be today. I barely have anything that will fill even a quarter of what I've taken. But from now henceforth, anything valuable I come across, I'll give it to you whole if you find it interesting."
"Oh really?" Agatha's left eyebrow climbed higher, skepticism and lingering anger warring on her features.
"You have my word. And it's a lasting promise." Seth placed his right arm over his chest and inclined his head slightly in a bow that managed to feel both sincere and playfully theatrical.
Agatha gave him a long, piercing glare, the kind that could unravel lesser men. The air between them crackled with residual mana. Finally, she turned back toward the glowing spatial sphere, her expression softening just a fraction into reluctant acceptance. A soft gasp escaped her as she took in its stabilized beauty once more. "Fine, break your promise and I'll feed you to the Void."
Seth exhaled a deep sigh of relief, the tension draining from his shoulders. "Alright, alright. Aid, I need a new chair."
"Processing alternatives," the synthesized voice responded promptly, carrying that programmed paternal warmth. A fresh squadron of repair drones deployed from ceiling hatches, their limbs whirring efficiently. One carefully lifted the condemned, burnt wreckage and carried it away for recycling, while another maneuvered a pristine replacement into position. Seth ran his fingers over the new seat's cool, reinforced surface before settling into it with a satisfied grunt.
"Where were we," he murmured. Through the neural interface of his blindfold, the central system transmitted a seamless recap of their previous progress, overlaying holographic schematics directly into his perception. "Hmmm, okay. Time to proceed to the subsequent."
With renewed focus, Seth's fingers danced across the materialized holographic interfaces. He initiated the integration of the Caloric Anchor, a central machine of his own intricate design. It was a robust obelisk-like construct of living crystal and enchanted adamantine, positioned at the regulatory nexus of the Spatial Loom. Streams of raw magical energy fed into it, cycling continuously to generate and regulate temperature with flawless precision. Thermodynamic runes flared to life, establishing a closed loop that maintained a comfortable, Earth-like equilibrium inside the demiplane while preventing any wasteful leak into the workshop. The air around the sphere grew subtly warmer, carrying faint notes of ozone and distant, blooming starfields as the anchor stabilized the internal climate.
"What a monster you are," Agatha remarked, her tone a mix of exasperation and genuine awe as she watched the seamless integration. "I never knew you even had that in store."
Seth allowed a smooth smirk to cross his scarred face, the endorphin rush from earlier still lingering at the edges of his awareness. The blindfold highlighted every successful vector lock, every probability curve flattening into stability.
Next came the Planar Chronometer. This was a masterpiece: a massive, ticking pendulum clock mechanism integrated directly into the core's matrix. Forged from temporal-infused alloys and etched with localized temporal runes, it generated a synthetic, unshakeable 48-hour day-night cycle based purely on mechanical gears and planar harmonics. It decoupled the demiplane's time stream from the erratic flow of the material world, allowing Seth to manipulate relative passage of time within his sovereign bubble. As the device synced, the sphere's internal galaxies seemed to pulse in rhythm with the pendulum's deep, resonant ticks, audible now as a soothing, cosmic heartbeat echoing through the workshop.
The installations hummed along, each layer of foundational law weaving deeper into the demiplane's fabric. Structural integrity climbed back toward 99%, gravitational constants held firm at 9.8 m/s², and mana filtration systems purred in perfect harmony.
Seth leaned back slightly in the new chair, the blindfold painting a vivid, data-rich tapestry of the emerging reality. But a new thought surfaced amid the technical symphony. He tilted his head slowly aside, addressing Agatha without turning fully.
"Uh, hey, can I ask you for a favour?"
A long, weighty pause filled the chamber. The only sounds were the gyroscope's steady spin and the distant crackle of settling runes.
"Excuse me?" Agatha's voice carried a dangerous edge of incredulity.
"I was wondering if I could use your assistance with a matter," Seth continued, his tone carefully neutral, almost casual.
"What makes you think you can just ask such from me after robbing me in broad daylight?" she retorted, arms crossing tighter over her chest.
Seth tilted his head further, a silent internal sigh escaping him. She's still harbouring that? What a pain.
Before he could formulate a response, a sharp alert cut through the air.
"WARNING: CRITICAL REPORT!" Aid's voice boomed with sudden urgency.
"What now?" Seth murmured, his focus snapping back to the overlays.
"The second core power capacity is at 21 percent!" Aid reported.
"Ohh, 21 percent..." Seth replied smoothly at first, his mind immediately raced through recalculations. Then the full implication hit like a physical blow.
21 WHAT?