Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 175: Fishing with Paradox

Chapter 175: Fishing with Paradox

Normally a structure of the size Perry was considering would take months, if not over a year.

But in this case, Perry moved it to the top of the list of things to make with Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation: People couldn’t go without food for another year.

“Okay, so pike are dumb, aggressive, and voracious,” Perry said, motioning to the massive concrete wall they stood on top of. The structure was about the size and shape of a stadium, solid concrete, extending hallway out into the water, the wall extending fifty feet above the surface of the water.

The franklin engineers would be proud, Perry thought.

“I mean, from what I’ve heard they almost beach themselves trying to get swimmers in water that’s less than ten feet deep…reliably.”

“So…” Mark asked, a green shamrock pinned to his hat.

“So we’re gonna lure them to attack some shiny bait,” Perry said, pointing towards the lure underneath them, a chromed swirly piece of metal roughly the size of a car, with neon yellow highlights that cut through the water, designed to catch a pike’s attention from as far away as possible.

“Then we’re gonna close the gates behind them,” Perry said, pointing to the gate areas, marked with red paint. “And pump all the water out of the area, suffocating the fish. Then there’s a steel grate that will lift the fish up…”

Perry pointed out some of the massive gear slots that the lifting engines would fit into.

“And the lifting grate can be driven on, so we can just butcher the fish onsite, load the bigass filets onto refrigerated trucks and drive them where they need to go.”

Side note, make electric motors for the refrigerated trucks, too. Gas is running low.

“Seems complicated.” Mark said.

“Not really,” Perry said with a shrug. “When I was workshopping ideas, this one was better than a mega fishing pole, because the sheer unpredictability and forces involved meant that someone would eventually get torn in half by the steel cable if it snaps or snags on something. Running a boat out there and just shooting one of them and towing it back sounds like it would work, except the bone on these bastard’s heads it crazy thick. Even with advanced weapons, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t kill it instantly, and then you’d have a pissed off fish half the length of a football field thrashing directly underneath your boat.”

“My way, we flip a switch and everyone goes to get lunch. When we get back there’s a dead fish. If anything unexpected happens, everyone’s at a distance behind some thick concrete.”

“When you put it like that…” Mark shrugged.

“And the best part is butchering the pike on the grate will chum the water when we open the trap back up and draw in the next one. I figure we can probably do…three a day?”

“How do they even survive at that size?” the lanky captain asked, motioning to the river. “Don’t they need…more food or something?”

“Not necessarily.” Perry said, shaking his head. “Tide gigantism can be the result of a host of inter-related supernatural physics bypasses. In some cases, its ignoring the square-cube law that would cause a man-sized ant to suffocate, and in others, it’s either hyper-efficient metabolism that draws more than 100% of a meal’s energy, or a supernaturally rapid growth speed, bypassing the sheer amount of heat it would generate for cells to divide that quickly, as well as most of the energy required to do it.

“These monsters have been in the lake for decades, but no one knew about them until the last few months, so it’s hard to pin down what their method for gigantism is,” Perry mused.

“Typically, supernatural growth speed without the metabolism for it leads to a voracious appetite, which is what we see here, but I’m informed that they’ve always been like that, so it means nothing. If they simply have efficient digestion as a response to starvation sometime in their past, then they might’ve just grown this big over the last fifty years because them eating each other results in a net energy gain with supernaturally efficient digestion.”

“Does it make a difference which one it is?” Mark asked.

“In the short term, no.” Perry responded. “But their method of growth will dictate whether or not we can eliminate enough of them to make the lake safe again. If it’s supernatural digestion, then the average size will drop to a sustainable level after a while and we’ll be able to keep it there…eventually.

“On the other hand, if they simply grow crazy fast, new maneaters will pop up left and right, and it’ll be damn hard to make the lake safe ever again.”

“What if they got both?” Mark asked.

“Well, then the lake’ll never be safe again, but on the other hand, the meat’ll never run out. Silver linings, ya know?”

Mark’s expression soured at that.

The glittering metal spinner in the water beneath them disappeared.

“Oh, here we go!”

Perry reached out and slammed the button on the gates, which slammed shut, sending up towering sprays of water as they displaced the liquid, locking the building-sized fish in its new temporary enclosure.

Perry pressed the next button, which began pumping water out of the newly water-tight trap.

An omnipresent hum shook the entire structure as it began pumping water out, dropping the water inside the trap precipitously, about a foot per minute.

That’s faster than it sounds. Still, it’s gonna take an hour or so before our prey starts to suffocate.

The gargantuan pike started thrashing way before it started suffocating.

A two-story fin emerged from the lake and sent a tidal wave of water crashing up against the wall while it propelled it’s supernaturally dense skull up against the concrete wall.

Perry’s concrete was up to the task, but the entire structure bucked like it’d been bitten by a horsefly.

“Goddamn,” Perry murmured, glancing down at the fish swimming in tight, aggravated circles inside the trap. I wonder if there’s a way to make a spirit totem from these things? Or a gitaxian bone-spear? They’re crazy mean. Could make good battering rams, too.

“Paradox!” Mark shouted, tapping him on the shoulder and pointing at the section of wall that’d gotten drenched.

Wasn’t there a worker standing there monitoring the pumps a moment ago?

Badump.

Perry broke into a sprint.

Dragor’s Kinesis.EXE

Perry broke into flight.

By the time Perry arrived, the splash from the worker was just beginning to fade. He could make out their reflective vest sinking into the water.

Crap.

Perry dove toward the water, reaching out with Dragor’s Kinesis.

The reflective vest vanished as something massive passed over it in the murky water, causing a swell of water as the dark shape swam past, nearly invisible.

DAMNIT! The stupid giant fish were quick as hell.

Perry impacted the water and slammed into scales as thick and hard as armor.

Hold your breath, Perry silently advised the rescuee. Sure he was being sucked down a gullet lined with razor sharp teeth, but as long as he went toward the gullet and didn’t struggle too much, he probably wouldn’t lose too much skin.

Once again, the beautiful thing about Dragor’s kinesis was the lack of a weight limit.

Perry reeled himself, a massive spherical chunk of the lake, along with the ten-story fish, up and out of the water.

It began thrashing violently as Perry hauled it up and tossed it over to one of the abandoned office buildings.

PPP.EXE

Perry swooped down on the thing and tried to pierce the base of its neck with the pernicious prison formed into a blade, striking where the spine connected to the brain, but the damn thing’s armor was supernaturally strong along the head, neck and back, making a coup de grace difficult.

Alright, what else can we do? Perry considered as the dapple green and yellow fish pulverized the nearby office building in its flopping struggle.

Perry’s second instinct was to drain its vitality with the spell to make it stop moving, but that might drain the guy inside the fish too. Perry hadn’t done any testing with draining the vitality of things inside other living things.

It’s always real-world applications that make you realize what you missed.

Perry sent the pernicious prison into the pike through its eyes, jabbing spikes into its brain in a truly horrific end.

Once the fish was relatively still, Perry retracted his creation and sliced open the soft underbelly.

‘soft’ was a relative term, as even the ultrafine scales on the belly seemed to give Perry’s spell a run for its money.

Eventually Perry got through it, peeling aside the wall of flesh between him and the stomach, a pale membrane wrapped around a wiggling shape. The stomach was thin enough that Perry could make out the struggling worker’s reflective jacket.

Wiggling is good, Perry thought, slicing open the stomach.

A flood of half-digested pike spilled out along with the worker, who gasped a shuddering breath, their entire body shaking with shock. Most of his skin was slumping off, his hands were shredded, and his legs appeared to be mostly digested already.

Okay, so an efficient digestion mutation is definitely present.

“Try to control your breathing,” Perry said, taking slow breaths as an example as he put his hands under the man’s armpits and dragged him clear of the mess, his stump-legs kicking weakly, as though he were still trying to escape.

Perry willed his spell embedded in the fish to suck out the vitality.

The fish’s brain was soup, but most of it’s cells were still technically alive.

A patch of the fish above them shriveled a tiny bit as Perry absorbed the life energy and pulled a thread of the PPP down, touching the worker on the back of the neck.

The skin of his hands that had been shredded from trying to slow his descent into the monsters mouth were welded shut, their scars vanishing in seconds. The man’s feet sprouted from beneath melted coveralls, and his face emerged from beneath the sloughed off skin.

He had olive skin and curly hair under the half-melted hard hat, with a pronounced chin. Brown eyes stared out into the distance as he shivered.

“There you go,” Perry said, pulling the man over to an undamaged building and setting him up against the wall. “Don’t try to stand yet, your legs are probably gonna give out. Give yourself some time to let your heart catch up.”

“Hey look at that,” Perry said, taking off the guy’s hardhat and showing him the damage. “Wearing your PPE saved your ass. Good job.”

“Damn,” Mark said as he surveyed Perry trying to take the guy’s mind off his near-death experience. “you’re good at this.”

“Please,” Perry said, rolling his eyes. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had to cut someone out of a stomach.”

“It’s not?”

“‘Course not,” Perry muttered, “world’s a scary place.” He rubbed his chin as he studied the unending pool of blood spreading out from the gargantuan fish, staining every surface for nearly the entire city block.

“…You know, Mark, it’s times like this I think about the benefits of sacrificing blood to the Blood God.”

“…What?”

“It’s fine, Gintax is cool.”

I could definitely get some areonite for this much blood. Hell, if the pike in lake michegan have the rapid growth mutation as well as efficient digestion, Chicago could host Gintax on a more permanent basis. Might even get sponsorship from the blood god.

I’ll have to run that one by him, as soon as I find out what their replacement rate looks like.

So far it looked pretty promising, what with there being two massive fish nearly within a fin’s length of each other. That was the only way the second one would’ve been close enough to grab the guy monitoring the water pressure before Perry could fish him out.

If the whole lake had a population density even close to that, there was an enormous amount of untapped blood ripe for the taking.

Perry glanced over at the trap, still draining to suffocate fish #1. Gonna have to see what I can do about modifying the grate to include a Shrine of Gintax.

And maybe I can use the fish’s bones to substitute for a Selvian Devourer’s to make an Arcane Missile. I do still need to start looking for more earth-based substitues for typical Manitian spell ingredients. Maybe even make some new ones. I even have a quest for it.

“Whaddya think,” Perry checked the worker’s name tag, “Cody, should we grab some booze and fry some of this up? Have a barbeque party to celebrate being alive? We usually do that after a close shave in Franklin, but idunno how you guys celebrate near-death experiences in Chica-”

The pike’s tail twitched, crushing a nearby sedan and sending a rumble through the city.

Cody didn’t respond, his mind still working its way back, judging by the vacant stare.

“Hold up.” Mark said, gesturing with his hand. “Let’s go back to subject of a blood god?”

“Yep,” Perry said, hands on his hips, studying the massive fish. “If I know anything about Gintax, he’s gonna love your city. With the right infrastructure, Blood magic could be a chief export. Nobody else has a captive population of self-sustaining maneaters this size just lining up to get slaughtered. Reliably harvested meat and blood is actually pretty rare. I know the Nocul sector in Washington’ll be begging to get their hands on the trade we can get from their deity.?

Perry nodded to himself, a strong facet of Chicago’s future economics coming into focus.

He did say we would need a lake of blood. Lake michigan’s a pretty freakin’ big lake.

“You’re crazy.” Mark breathed, leaning away from Perry.

“No…I’m Paradox.” Perry said, glancing over at Mark with a raised eyebrow.

“Um, yessir.”