The Stargazing Witch & The Dungeon Planet
Side Chapter Blazer 5: Aftermath

Side Chapter Blazer 5: Aftermath

Not longer after Ceella shot down the warship.

“Everything went to shit, huh…” Susan let out a small, dry laugh. “Good that we are still alive…”

“Thankfully true, I couldn’t imagine how catastrophic COUGH!” Craftalot grabbed his chest as more blood dripped down his mouth.

“Grandfather… please… stay with me…” Susan tightened her hold as her arm hugged Craftalot’s back.

“Ah shut up, I’m perfectly fine. It takes a lot more than THIS to kill me, I just haven’t been harmed in ages. Positively painful, I must shockingly say.”

Susan rubbed his back in the damaged room. “You still haven’t explained how this happened…”

On the Blazer’s side of things, they weren’t simply hiding away during this conflict, as destruction happened everywhere else. Jordan had directly intervened in the conflict, and Aluber was directing security personnel around the tower. 

Craftalot’s jerry-rigged contraption forced the opposing sides into conflict with matchups favourable to those around the station. Mapping all the hostilities in a complicated web that he had to keep an eye on to make sure it didn’t explode. He was a proud craftsman, but a rushed job did have its potential risk that he wished to avoid.

Susan had taken a step back to keep an eye on everything; she was in contact with the staff as well, but with everything going on and her emotional turmoil, she was happy to have Aluber handle the major movements of the security.

However, the fact that the first segment became a full warzone meant that nowhere could truly be perfectly safe. Including their reinforced hideout.

After the repeated heavy explosions outside the tower committed by both sides, the shields held up strong, but the damage also affected the base of the segment, which caused different types of damage to the tower. Multiple individuals had stuck into the tower, causing severe damage. Jordan had managed to claim the lives of a few of these foes, but the strongest one continued to break apart the insides looking for the loot.

Their control room had been reinforced with additional layers of protection, some of which were set up by Craftalot himself.

“How does this bountiful bloody mess opportunistically occur?” Said Craftalot as he leant back and a soft blue glow continued to heal him.

“Can you please stop with the wordplay for once?”

“Not never.” 

“...” 

“What, I said I would stop?” Craftalot cheekily smiled. The grandfather and granddaughter duo sat on the side of the hemisphere where the core artefacts were held. And out of the three artefacts, the artefact that enhanced other artefacts was now missing.

The room should’ve been impenetrable. However, someone was able to break into their room after the wider destruction had occurred in the tower.

Craftalot sighed, "Well, after that bastard had broken into our room, stole a portion of my stuff and made off with the Enhancer. I then got injured due to the backlash of the artefact I gave that boyfriend of yours before he left.”

The intruder was a vague figure that they didn’t even notice until a number of the artefacts in his storage vanished. Some of which were going to go up for auction and some that were not. His main personal defensive and offensive items were safe due to his close connection to them, but the ones that were stolen were still a massive loss for him.

Then the thief stole the Enhancer, they tried to take the Delusionary Amethyst, but the defensive curse placed upon it kept it safe. Craftalot had been extra careful with a borrowed item. Craftalot was ready to develop his minions to chase down the vague adversary but he had ended up collapsing to the ground in a bloody coughing fit. Aluber kept on chasing the thief and he disappeared into the tower.

“Jordans not my-wait backlash? What are you talking about? Wait, does that mean Jordan died?!” Susan panicked slightly; she didn’t want to lose another one of her closest friends. However, she didn’t know exactly what Craftalot was talking about with the ‘Backlash’, why/how he should even feel negative backlash was a complete enigma to her.

“Hahaha, don’t worry; he should be alive. Probably.” Craftalot laughed. 

“Grandfather!”  

“Argh!” He coughed up the last bit of blood as his internal artefacts finally cleared out the gunk in his system. He scratched his ears. “You got to be quiet. I may be old, but my ears still work.”

“Then give me answers.”

Craftalot sighed. “Your two friends both have a powerful protection artefact on them that will stop them from dying. So don’t worry about that.” He omitted the fact they could still become extremely injured and unconscious. Reading the vital signs of Jordan before the connection broke, he wasn’t looking great. “Now, the backlash… It’s all my fault really, and messed with concepts I didn’t fully understand, I was bound to face some sort of consequence sooner or later.”

“I know I said stop with the wordplay, but that didn’t mean you could speak in a roundabout, unclear, frustrating way to understand.”

“Eh, let your gramps be a mysterious old man, why don’t ya?”

“No.”

“Eh, so boring. You got that from your grandmother.”

Susan just kept staring at him.

“Argh, fine.” Craftalot stood up, fully healed. “The injury wasn’t all bad; it got the heart pumping, but anyway. You need to keep this next part a secret.”

“I will tell no one.” 

“To craft my more elaborate items, I needed more energy…”

“Why? Did they need to store more mana with them to make them function?”

“Not exactly, you see artefacts found in the dungeon while solid, and we can see their structures are actually made of pure mana. And it's not something we can naturally replicate, but I found out these artefacts were still connected to a source that powered them… So I just tried to build my own connection to that source using my soul as a bridge–”

He explained to his granddaughter what he believed transpired, and now he was curious. What managed to violently break the connection that caused him to be hurt, something that never even occurred when his items had been shattered.