A part of Lori had been a little surprised that had been everything for now. Rian sometimes recalled matters while in the middle of eating and brought them up as needed, but today Lori had no distractions as she ate, still contemplating the question of lightning. With targeting now resolve and the proof of concept functional and usable, it was time to refine it all into something practical.

  This wasn't the first time Lori had used otherwise simple bindings to make a tool, but it would be the first time she would be making such a thing that was meant to be carried and used by her. Usually when she built something like this, she made it out of stone and it was meant to be a permanent fixture. The closest thing she had to it so far were the evaporators for extracting salt from seawater, and perhaps the wisplights and air circulators.

  Finishing her food, she pushed her bowl and cup towards Rian to deal with and got to her feet to head towards the bone pit. There weren't a lot of bones left since they were in the middle of making bone meal to fertilize their fields and dungeon farm plots. As such, most of what was left were the ones that were large and therefore difficult to break down, such as vertebrae and pelvises. On one side of the pit were the bones from today's meals, stripped as bare as they could humanly be and crawling with bugs as they tried to recover the rest. Lori looked at the sight with distaste, but even now she couldn't think of a more efficient way of stripping the bones clean.

  Some of the bugs roused at her approach, and she quickly claimed and bound airwisps and firewisps together, forming a binding that blew hot air at the bugs to discourage them from approaching as she knelt down to inspect what was there. She picked up three shoulder blades that were sun-bleached white and dry, doing so gingerly. Lori tossed them off to the side, then claimed some lightlwisps and formed a binding that bathed the bones in unseen light to kill any dustlife, flipped the bones over, and did it again. Only then did she take the bones in hand, and even so with the intention of washing them

  Now, she just had to take these with her so she could combine them with her… bone…

  …

  Sighing, Lori headed back to the dining hall—after taking a detour to the laundry area to wash the shoulder blades—where she found the bone she'd been using that morning on the table where she'd been eating… as well as her staff. Well, that was embarrassing. Best to pretend it had never happened. Ignoring Rian—who was looking at the bone strangely, probably because she'd left the binding for the targeting activated—she grabbed the bone and deactivated the binding. While she didn't really need to preserve imbuement—she was a Dungeon Binder and thus had limitless magic at her disposal—she considered it a good habit to maintain. As she turned away, Lori caught some nudging and whispering out of the corner of her eye.

  "Your Bindership?"

  Lori sighed, wondering what last-moment thing had been remembered. "What is it, Rian?"

  "Riz has something she'd like to ask, if that's all right?"

  Well, that was unusual. She turned towards the pink-haired former militiawoman who was most definitely not, nor would she ever be, an officer. Lori had given a written guarantee of the matter. "Yes, Erzebed?"

  Riz hesitated a moment, glancing at Rian, who gave her a smile that was probably meant to be encouraging and visibly squeezed her hand just under the table. Mikon didn't bother with subtlety and just put her arms around the woman, although that might have just been Mikon being the libidinous woman that she was. "Great Binder, I noticed you have those lights… are they for aiming your lightning? At least, I think that's what they're for?"

  "That's what they're for, yes," Lori said, deciding she'd allow Riz two more stupid questions before simply walking away.

  "And you use them by lining them up with whatever you're aiming at?"

  "That is how I use them, yes…" One more question.

  "I beg your pardon if you've already considered this, but… why not just use something like a crossbow sight?"

  "…what is a crossbow sight?"

  "It's how we aim with a crossbow, Great Binder," Riz said, looking slightly nervous again. "Crossbows have a notch near where your eye would be and a post at the far end. You line up the notch with the post and whatever you're aiming at, and with practice you're almost certain to hit your target."

  Lori tilted her head slightly. "Almost?"

  "Well, you need to get used to accounting for how much the arrow drops between leaving the crossbow and reaching your target, and sometimes the notch and post are a little off so you need to account for that and aim a little to the left or right…" Riz trailed off slightly at the flat stare the Dungeon Binder was giving her.

  "I see…" Lori said.

  Rian coughed. "Well—"

  "Rian, if you're sick ask Shanalorre or Taeclas to heal you before you start spreading it around."

  "… noted, your Bindership. Don't worry, it was just some spit that went down the wrong way. I was just going to remind you that we have transparent metal, and that perhaps you could make something from that? I've seen the aiming sights on a crossbow before, and there's no reason why you can't make the parts from lightwisp-alloy so that your aiming device doesn't obstruct your view."

  "Oh, yes, Great Binder! While simple sights like that are built into crossbows, some militia from wealthy families have these special sights made from glass that are like farsights, with a crosshair built into it to indicate the target. If you had a tube, you could probably make something similar with fine thread or thin wire."

  "Or anything that was solid and transparent," Rian added.

  "Yes Rian, I managed to make that logical connection, unorthodox as it was," Lori said dryly.

  He lord shrugged unrepentantly. "If we didn't have the alloy, I'd be suggesting hollowing out a bone into a tube and putting your aiming binding inside it."

  …

  Ugh, that was actually a good idea, and something she should have tried earlier given the options she'd been pursuing.

  "I will take the suggestion under advisement," Lori said. And she would… once she'd gotten the main lightning bolt binding how she wanted it. "Could our smiths make such a thing?"

  "Oh, it doesn't even need to be smiths, Great Binder," Riz said. "Anyone could do it with a file and a string, as long as the sight was as straight as the arrow."

  "But probably a good idea to have someone who knows what they're doing take care of it," Rian stated the obvious.

  "I will take the suggestion under advisement."

  Lori had to return to her room to work on shaping the bone into the desired shapes. She still had some bone tablets there, which were among the flattest surfaces she had access to short of the anvil the blacksmiths used. Sitting at her stone table—she'd seen no need to replace it with a wooden one since it was still perfectly serviceable—she claimed the earthwisps in two of the shoulder blades she had gotten, formed the earthwisps into a binding to soften the bone so it had the consistence of thick clay, and used one of her remaining bone tablets—thankfully it would still be some time before she had to make more—to flatten out the bone into a flat panel about ten yustri wide, forty yustri long, and about a yustri thick, cutting the edges straight with the same beast-tooth knife and a straight edge that she used for making the tablets. The panel was thicker than the tablets the demesne was using for writing daily tabulations and notes, but that was because it needed to be materially able to resist heat, and mass tended to help with that.

  Once the panel was made and she was sure it was reasonably flat on both sides, Lori took the last shoulder blade and softened that as well, then used her bare hands to remove a portion that she rolled out into a tube which she stuck onto the panel near one end so that the tube stuck up vertically. Fusing the two pieces of bone together, she grabbed the now-protruding handle and flipped over her assembly so that the panel was on top and partially resting on her forearm.

  It… well, it looked like she was holding an incomplete pretend crossbow ineptly made by a child, and doing so backwards. Either that or one of those weapons Mentalists used, the one that was just a stick with a handle at a right angle, also made by a child. Still, it sat well in her hand and was stable, and was only really a means for trying to refine the lightning binding.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Lori anchored the unseen piercing light binding to the flat part of her creation, then took the still deactivated lightning ball binding and anchored it to the other end of the bone panel. Then she sat back and considered both together, grimacing at the unviability of the arrangement. To send out lightning, she used the unseen piercing light to create a line of lightningwisps in the air for the lightning to flow through, which she then drew from lightning ball binding using a third binding of lightningwisps. Up until now, she had handled each step of the process separately, but since she was at the point of refining the process…

  All right, clearly the binding that drew lightning from the lightning ball to the line of lightningwisps could be a part of the unseen piercing light, since lightning would be needed as soon as the line made by the unseen piercing light was coherent. However, that meant she would need to increase the intensity of the unseen piercing light so that as soon as the binding was activated the concentration of lightningwisps would be thick enough for the lightning to flow through. Not that the lightningwisps didn't appear quickly already, but making it a little faster wouldn't be amiss…

  Lori added the conduit of lightningwisps that went from the unseen piercing light to the lightning ball—or possibly the other way around—giving the conduit directionality so that lightning would only move along it one way, away from the lightning ball and towards the light. In fact, the conduit penetrated well into the lightning ball, and Lori had to carefully form the two bindings so that their wisps interwove around each other, otherwise lightning might have leaked out from the conduit where the two bindings intersected. To compensate, she set the conduit to actively draw lightning from the ball rather than simply giving the lightning a path of little resistance

  As it was, it was more likely that the lightning ball binding would actually siphon lightning back into itself as the conduit drew and therefore reduce the output, but that was something she could mitigate later by adding more conduits if this did turn out to be the case, and this way she didn't have to worry about lightning escaping the ball if the air should become thick with lightningwisps from repeated bolts. With this configuration, it should be possible to simply leave the lightning ball binding active, so the only binding she needed to control was the unseen piercing light. Combined with a means of aiming—which she'd have to conduct more test on, given the new methods she'd been informed of—she'd finally have an accurate—and hopefully fast-repeating—means of throwing lightning.

  Normally, that would have been it, but the very vivid memory of being burned because Lori had anchored a lightning ball binding to her skin prompted her to add heat mitigation in the form of a layer of firewisps around the lightning ball that would absorb and delete any heat the latter created. The lightning ball binding was the basis for the fire ball binding and the fire sprayer binding after all.

  Everything looked complete now, but she wouldn't know for sure until she actually took it outside and tried to use it.

  Lori picked up the bone panel, with all the bindings anchored to it, and headed downstairs.

  It was mid-afternoon when she stepped outside, and most people were sitting in the shade away from the sun, save for those still washing clothes in the laundry area, and even they had a roof over their heads to block out the heat. Her targets were still in the river, as the lightwisps and darkwisps weren't anchored to anything of physical substance for water to dislodge, and they still had sufficient imbuement.

  Gripping the handle on the bottom of the panel, Lori pointed vaguely at the water and began to imbue the unseen piercing light binding before activating it. The light erupted, straight, intense and invisible, the air filling with lightningwisps in its path, and also incidentally not going anywhere near the target she'd tried to aim at, but that was to be expected. It still made Lori frown as she deactivated the binding so she could reform it slightly and increase the intensity. While the current one was sufficient to create a path for the lightning, Rian had a point when he said that she might need the lightning to be stronger, and a path with a higher concentration of lightningwisps would help ensure that the lightning would remain on course. At least, that was the hope. For all she knew the path of lightningwisps would be sufficient for any amount of lightning.

  Raising the panel once more, she aimed it at another target—the breeze had dispersed the previous path of lightningwisps— before activating the unseen piercing light binding again. This time the air immediately became thick with lightningwisps as the light passed through it, although they also started to stream away with the breeze. Huh, she'd have to be careful with that. If she was facing the wind, there was a chance that the lightningwisps coming towards her could cause the lightning to curl back in her face.

  …

  She'd have to be very careful of that.

  After one last test—aim was still suffering, but that wasn't the point of this—Lori carefully activated the lightning ball binding. At first, the only sign she had done so was the feeling of the fine hairs on her knuckles and forearms standing on end. Then the air started flicker with little sparks of lightning. The sparks became streams, and in a few moments miniscule threads of lightning began to trace the outline of a ball. The streams continued to grow, becoming brighter and brighter until finally the lightning ball became as bright and radiant as one would expect.

  Lori hefted the bone panel to aim—she was at least consistently hitting the river—and immediately found a flaw with this configuration: the lightning ball was right in front of her face, blinding one eye with its glare and making a determined attempt at the other.

  …

  After wrapping the lightning ball in darkwisps to block off the glare and pacing impatiently for a moment as she waited for her eye to recover, Lori raised the panel again and aimed it at the river. Through her connection to her demesne's wisps, she could feel the now black-shrouded lightning ball filled with lightning, heat and light, as well as a small void of airwisps in the binding. The inside of the lightning ball had gotten hot enough for the air to ignite, and if it weren't for the added layer of firewisps, the fire that would no longer be held in by airwisps because it wasn't air would have escaped. The layer of firewisps sapped it of heat, causing it to collapse back into air, and from there the air would either be pulled back into the lightning ball or escape out, which explained the strange breeze on her face

  She activated the unseen piercing light binding and the lightningwisp conduit, and flinched at the loud retort that occurred. In hindsight, it was completely to be expected. The lightning pulled by the conduit obviously heated the air it passed through to such an extreme that there was a minor crack of thunder. The same thing had happened in previous tests, but in those instances the minute thunder hadn't been happening in front of her face, but rather at an arm's length away. It was only then that she realized the small difference could be significant.

  In the moment, however, Lori had no way of knowing that as she flinched at the sudden loud sound and abrupt flash of light as the lightning passed through the conduit. Thankfully this did not affect the course of the lighting, as it was following the trail of lightningwisps created by the unseen piercing light, and so the lightning went straight to the river, where it made the water explode again. Even with her ears ringing and her vision seared by a line from suddenly having a bright conduit of lighting appear close to it, Lori could tell the explosion was a little bigger than before.

  Hastily, she deactivated the unseen piercing light and the conduit, as her startled movements had caused the light to sweep through the air. While the lightning continued in the line it was already traversing, there were forks developing as offshoot bolts tried to follow the other paths that the sweeping had created, though thankfully they all seemed to arc down into the water of the river. The offshoots caused no explosions, not heating the water enough to do so.

  Lori looked down at the bone panel. Even with some spots in her eyes, she could tell that the bone directly underneath the lightningwisp conduit had been darkened by some kind of scorching, no doubt from the heat of the lightning. Even without touching it, she could tell from the concentration of firewisps on the panel that it was very hot. She carefully wrapped the conduit in firewisps, darkwisps and airwisps to mitigate the extreme heat, light and sound, then after a moment's consideration also did so for the unseen piercing light binding, just in case. By the time she was done, it looked like someone had taken some sort of classroom alchemy distillation rig and covered it in black paint.

  Seeing it like that… actually, there was no reason that the lightning ball had to be so far away from the unseen piercing light, besides possibly making space for a means of aiming. If it weren't for possible interference from the lightning itself, she might be able to stick the latter inside the former, and simply have a black ball that shot out lightning…

  On the other hand… this configuration, as it was now, worked. Sure, it needed to be anchored to something besides her skin, although the additional layers of firewisps probably dealt with that now… —no, no, not doing that. While it needed to be anchored onto something that wasn't her skin because of heat and possibly loose lightning, it worked as intended, and anchoring it to something meant they could attach a means of aiming. Best to build a usable tool from this base before she tried to make it obsolete by refining even further.

  Lori tried to ignore the little voice in her head that sang that temporary solutions always became permanent measures.

  Raising the bone panel one last time and pointing it at the river, Lori activated the binding. This time the crack of not-quite thunder was more muted, and there was no flash of light beyond the bolt of lightning that followed the path of lightningwisps the binding created. That… well, that still made her blink, though she managed to keep the bone panel steady. She'd need to find a way to mitigate that.

  Beyond that, however, the binding functioned exactly as she wanted it to.

  Now, all she had to do was put a means of aiming on it.

  Of course, her newly refined lightning binding wouldn't be her only weapon if one of the wizards with the settlers eventually tried to move against her. It took a lot of preparation, and even if she had one prepared earlier on her person, if she was taken by surprise she'd need some other binding that would be faster for her to form and deploy, or at least one she could anchor to her skin. And while the lightning would be deadly against Deadspeakers who would have no means to defend themselves, and other Whisperers would be comparatively vulnerable unless they were willing to use their body's own lightningwisps to create a defensive binding, Horotracts and Mentalists would be able to defend against it easily once they were aware she was using it, although doing so should hopefully limit the latter's maneuverability.

  A problem for tomorrow, however. For now, she needed a more comfortable and easier to use platform for the binding that she could integrating a means of aiming into. And for that, she'd need to see exactly how effective Riz's crossbow sights were.

  Humming to herself, Lori headed back to her room to make another bone panel for testing.

  Number 40)is out on Patreon. It's about Mentalist Nansi Hightown and and her first encounter with a perfectly ordinary little girl named Shana.