“Looks like you are having performance issues. Please stop grabbing at your crotch. Try this; it’s just iron, and it doesn't matter if it’s destroyed or not.” Havoc waved at Joe to hurry up and get the process started. The Reductionist touched the ball, then let his mind slip into the feel of an Intrusive Scan, feeling his mana dip for a flash; too little to see before regenerating the spent resource.
Item: Iron Ore
Reduction value: 10 Common aspects, 43 Trash aspects.
Reduction cost: 5 mana per second.
Then Joe’s mana just kind of… swirled out of him; and he could see an intricate ritual light up across his body. He went from sporting clear, unblemished skin, to the most tattooed person he had ever seen in his life, all in the span of a moment. “Hope that’s not permanent… a whole career in the military didn’t convince me to get a tattoo; certainly didn't mean to get one accidentally. I wasn’t even drinking!”
The ball of iron ore took five full seconds to completely reduce, and Joe was left with… nothing. No aspects, whatever those were, and thankfully no tattoos, either. He pulled up his status screen and found nothing to indicate that the aspects had been stored. There was nothing on the ground, nothing on him. As his last option, Joe checked his notifications and had to hold himself back from growling.
53 aspects lost! You do not have any external storage devices that can contain aspects, and your bound storage device is full! Either create some space in your bound storage device, or have external devices ready to store aspects!
“What sort of external devices can I use?” Joe whispered darkly at the system, which refused to answer him. “What do you mean my storage device is full? I was able to put an entire warehouse in there, and I never heard a single complaint about lack of space!”
“Hold up a moment…” Havoc looked at Joe askance, his lips pulling his face and wretched beard into a scowl. “What kind of storage device do you have that can hold an entire warehouse?”
“A full one, apparently.” Joe shook his head at the thought and tried to carefully explain the fewest details that Havoc needed to know about his exile. “When I left Midgard, I was able to take anything with me that I could carry. I admit, I have been having some trouble accessing it since I got here, but I figured that had more to do with the Zone than the device… Havoc? What… why are you shaking your head like that?”
“Let me guess… you can't get any individual item out? Even if you know for a fact that it is there?” Havoc took a few steps away, making sure to stand well behind Joe. “How much space was it supposed to have? Don't give me that look; I have no interest in stealing from you. How much space?”
“Thirty cubic meters.” Joe tried again to pull out a weapon, or herb, anything. “You’re right; I can’t get anything out.”
“That's what I thought. Thirty meters, huh? That’s massive for a storage device, but certainly not enough to contain an entire warehouse.” Havoc grinned and shook his head. “Not without… well, you’ll see. Try to take out everything at once, and make sure to be moving backward when you do it. I'd recommend jumping backward, actually, after seeing your jump skill. I want to know the story behind that when we have some more time.”
Joe crouched down, wanting to get this over with, both so that he knew what was going on, and in order to alleviate his nervousness. He jumped backward, ordering the device to eject everything from the spatial codpiece at the same time and drop it on the ground.
*Boom*.
A massive brick appeared in the air in front of Joe, the sheer mass of it slamming it to the ground and shaking the tiled floor where they stood, even breaking it in a few places, if the sounds were anything to go by. Havoc took a step forward and eyeballed the condensed matter.
“Wouldn't you say that looks to be about, oh, three point one-oh-seven meters on each side? Thirty cubic meters on the dot. Yup. Destruction by compression.” Havoc’s words barely reached Joe, who was staring at the cube in horror. The human reached out a hand, hesitating to touch it; hoping that this was just a bad dream. “It's not all bad. You must have a very high-quality spatial device, or else it would have just exploded and crushed you with the brick. Maybe taken out a small town with the backlash of all that mana being released. At least this way you get to keep the container… but this is just a block of broken things, at this point.”
Chapter Eleven
“At least some of this needs to be salvageable… right?” Joe slapped his hand on the cube that stood roughly twice as tall as he was, and activated his… it was Intrusive Scan, but not, at the same time. He decided to think of it as ‘Ritual of Reduction’. In a flash, his mana had washed over his cube and returned with a base value.
Item: Hyper-compressed cube. Note: most items compressed within this cube are raw resources. Anything not a raw resource was destroyed, dropping its aspect value greatly, and increasing ‘Damaged’ aspects. Several Cores are trapped within, as energy cannot be destroyed.
Reduction value: Unknown.
Reduction cost: estimated at 125 mana per second.
Viable bound storage device detected.
There was a lot of information to unpack in those few simple sentences. “What in the…? One hundred and twenty-five mana per second? Why is it so much more than before? Why didn't my ring count as a valid storage
