New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

Chapter 994  Precious Metal

The crisp *Ding* he got from the rod proved his thoughts right, and he turned to David to confirm.

"Is this what I think it is?"

David nodded, inspecting another of those rods only six inches further in, which went at a diagonal across.

"Yes. These are magisteel rods. I don't know how they got rods of these in here, but that stuff is worth a little fortune, even in New Eden… Unless they smelted them on their own, it makes little to no sense that this would be here," David acquiesced.

"Should we bring these back too? I'm sure Jack and his lab coats would love to get a sample and figure out how to craft weapons with them instead of monster bone," Alex noted.

"These rods are ten feet long, and an inch thick each… Getting them all out will take a little while, and bringing them with us will be too cumbersome. Unless you have a way to magic your way outside the dungeon again, which I would only dare to assume is extremely mana intensive, we should just cut them out of our way and keep going."

Alex looked at the bars, and the thought of leaving such a valuable resource here repugned him.

"Urgh… We can't just leave these here, David. Their experimental worth alone is immense, without counting all the practical uses the metal itself can have, if smelted back down and reforged," Alex complained.

With a sigh and a roll of his eyes, David backed away from the rod he was inspecting.

"Whatever. Just, whatever you want to do, do it quickly. If we let that kobold get too far ahead of us, we'll be fucked. So, hurry up," he said, raising both hands to the ceiling in defeat.

Alex nodded, his face stretching into a victorious grin.

"Violette, how confident are you in using ice magic right now?" he asked, turning to the girl.

The sudden question took Violette aback, and she stammered her response a bit.

"Uh… I… I think I'm close to full control? Why?" she said, almost questioningly.

"Could you freeze the extremities of each pole fast enough for the magisteel to become brittle? If you can do it, it'll save us a lot of time to extract them, instead of digging them out. Whatever material stays in the walls, I am willing to lose for expediency."

Violette looked at the metal and wasn't sure how to respond. She had rarely used her magic to cool objects and had no idea how confident she should be about her abilities on the matter.

"I can try. But I don't know how long it will take to freeze metal," she said, looking unconfident.

Alex smiled at her, walking next to her and laying his hand on top of her head.

"I have full confidence in your abilities. You got this," he said, petting her head lightly.

Violette's face turned red, her ears becoming hot as he treated her like a child.

With a light bat of her hand on his wrist, trying to seem like she wasn't enjoying this so others wouldn't think of doing the same, Violette walked to the poles and looked at the lower extremity she could reach.

Grabbing it in her hand, she let her mana slide inside the pole, to feel its presence, before she manipulated the particles into freezing.

Surprisingly, the pole reacted to her mana very fast, and the closest part to the stone started forming frost over it in seconds.

Looking at her handiwork, Violette nodded to herself before looking up at the other end of the pole.

She focused her mind on the edge against the rock of the tunnel, and recreated the phenomenon, her hand back to her side, and watched as it froze as well.

"I can do this," she murmured to herself, before looking at the rest of the poles with a resolute grin.

Closing her eyes, a pulse of mana left her body, her senses taking in the entirety of the tunnel in, before another pulse echoed the first, this one super-charged with mana.

Alex could see the mana particles turn blue, as their elemental composition changed to match Violette's instructions and rush to each metal pole extremity. In a matter of seconds, all the poles had two frozen white tips, and Alex grinned.

Extending his hands forward, he grabbed the first pole in the tunnel and gave it a quick, but strong tug, and with a snapping sound that resembled breaking off an icicle, the metal rod broke off in his hands.

He repeated the process for the other rods, and all of them gave way to him just as easily, until the corridor was free once again. But this didn't fix his other problem, which was that they couldn't carry them to the end, either.

But he melded with Asmodeus again, this time less forcibly, and lay his hand on the stack of magisteel rods.

'You can't keep popping through that barrier, Master Alexander. You'll drain all your mana. We can hear your thoughts inside the mind space, and I know you have a battle ahead,' Asmodeus warned him.

'Then do you have another way of sending this outside? Because I'm not leaving this precious resource in here,' Alex replied to him, mentally.

Alex heard a mental tongue clicking and smirked at the demon's sass.

'Fine. I can show you how to transpose only material. But if there is someone in the way on the receiving end, I will not be responsible for any injury,' Asmodeus replied, reluctantly.

'I'll deal with that, sure,' Alex said, mentally waving his hand dismissively.

A quick image flashed inside his mind, with a runic circle that represented the spell sigil that he needed to make for this to work, and Alex quickly got to work.

Drawing the sigil in the air over the metal rods with mana, Alex felt his mana reserves deplete by half, as the twelve rods vanished from sight, making him smile.

"Alright! We are good to go!" Alex exclaimed, satisfied.

In the meantime, in the cargo hold of their private plane, Major Schrute was startled out of focus by the clanging of twelve metal rods suddenly slamming on the ground behind her, making an unholy cacophony of steel.

"what in the fuck"