Henrietta felt somewhat sheepish about having taken Oliver at his word, and never questioning whether it was truly feasible for one man to build an entire tower by hand. Yes, she had the thought at some point about assigning Jacob to assist, but even then it hadn't been much more than to provide muscle power. The thought of having all five of them work together simultaneously on different steps just... hadn't occurred to her.

Which really felt like something that a good leader should have thought of. But apparently she'd just gotten too enamored with her assembly-line idea, with each of them handing their parts off to the next person, and hadn't realized that only worked so long as every link could work at the same rate.

Which they couldn't.

For all of Oliver's many incredible strengths, his upper body did not number among them. He was, after all, the smallest of their crew by no small amount. Two-ish months of living in the wilderness had ensured that none of them could be described as out of shape, and their bodies had gotten to the point where they didn't even sunburn anymore. Oliver was doing a marvelous job of pacing himself and ensuring he could work all day every day, but Henrietta had already noticed he overworked himself. That he didn't collapse from utter exhaustion randomly spoke more to his ability to gauge his nominal limits and stay within those.

Is that an Archmage thing? she suddenly realized. Cara, her Expedition's Healer, had also been a relatively young archmage, albeit closer to Alyssa's age than Oliver's, and Henrietta had likewise never seen her truly exhaust herself instead of progressively slowing down.

Idly, she wondered whether it had something to do with the physical requirements for the title, or if it might be related to how bad it would be to run out of power halfway through a ritual, but then realized she could probably just ask Oliver at some point.

Not right now, though. Now didn't seem like a very good time.

The tower was by her estimation roughly a third of the way to completion, with herself, Clark, and Alyssa all contributing to its construction. Jacob was still recovering, with the wounds he'd sustained while fighting the fourgle - Oliver's abbreviated name being the one that stuck - still flaring up if he attempted too much for too long.

Normally, Oliver would also be here overseeing and stacking bricks himself, but recently the hut's Shadow ward had stopped working yet again. Henrietta had told Oliver to not even bother trying to diagnose it this time, and to instead just make an alternative that would work, and they could bolt it onto the side or whatever needed to happen.

He'd protested, of course, because it would be less effective and less efficient and a bunch of other reasons that didn't change the fundamental reality that right now, the ward he had created sometimes decided to do the exact opposite of what it was meant to do, and a different enchantment probably wouldn't. It would be janky and not a long-term solution by any means, but she really didn't care.

The next time this happened, she'd just have them coat the entire thing, inside and out, with clay. No, it wouldn't be as effective as an actual magical solution, and they'd miss out on some of the sleeping benefits which that particular section of the wards provided, but caking the entire hut in mud even less likely to randomly fail so spectacularly.

She called him back up when they finished a layer of bricks, he did his ring-enchantment around the perimeter, and they continued. One brick at a time.

Oliver's replacement enchantment worked admirably, and after several days showed no signs of odd functionality. And the tower kept growing, one brick at a time, one layer at a time.

It wasn't all smooth sailing, of course. The brick-making factory kept running into issues, largely due to her grindstone and the ways in which her inkling could interact with it in odd ways. Their minds were by necessity fairly simplistic, as with her scant mental sketchbook, there was a finite amount of detail she could put into her creations. It was almost a fun challenge, seeing how well her greater skills and practice with her Notebook translated into the sorts of abilities which a native of her other expedition's world would have had, but she mostly found the limitations more annoying than anything.

Besides, she got the sense that she'd be stretching her ability to convey and detail in as little space as possible well after she got some more points in Capacity.

She sighed, dismissing a bit of an inquisitive eye from Alyssa as the Ranger mistook it for an attempt to get attention, and carefully set down the latest batch of bricks. The tower was tall enough that they needed actual scaffolding while laying down new bricks, which Oliver had pointed out could simply be a simplified version of their eventual flooring, instead of some elaborate reed construction on the outside.

Prior to creating the new 'floor,' they'd simply been standing, or kneeling, on the bricks themselves. That carried obvious risks when it came to disturbing the bricks or the drying clay around them, but they'd managed thanks to how thick the walls were at the base. Henrietta felt that it might be overkill, but at the same time, overkill was likely needed.

Already, they'd encountered two windstorms almost back to back that had threatened to tear down much of their progress. The first windstorm had knocked down several bricks, but Henrietta had managed to support the then-much-shorter walls with her flail, and the second one had run into bricks that were functionally reinforced by their floor-scaffolding. The toothtongue's eponymous appendage had more than proved its worth, and Henrietta was honestly somewhat sad that they hadn't encountered another one in all the time since.

Really, they hadn't had many run-ins with wildlife at all since moving to First Tower, which none of them properly understood but all appreciated. Their best guess was that it had something to do with the walls, but considering the number of predators they'd encountered back at Shelter within just their first few days after landing... they also suspected something else was going on.

Nonetheless, they all appreciated the ability to comparatively focus. Not that any of them worked on the tower exclusively. Well, Henrietta herself might have been the closest with her primary alternative tasks being managing the supply chain in some form or another. But Alyssa still went hunting and gathering, Jacob still kept healing, Clark kept cooking - though Jacob was currently acting as their primary cook - and Oliver kept repairing the endless breaks and malfunctions in their water cleaning, in their brick kiln, in his workshops, everywhere and anywhere.

And through it all, the tower kept rising.

With each layer, the scent of Technology grew stronger, signified by the aroma of Rune magic growing more prevalent. As the tower stretched ten, twenty feet into the air and another floor was added, and as Jacob recovered well enough to begin contributing to the construction.

"Woah!" Henrietta's attention instantly snapped to Alyssa, who was overbalancing and recoiling from a mass of bluish-purple sparks. Her arms windmilled and she toppled backwards, fortunately to the inside of the tower. She groaned as she landed, and Henrietta dropped the giant mass of wet clay she'd been transporting with a splat, using it to instantly traverse the distance and figure out what was happening.

The smell of burning Technology invaded her sinuses as she arrived, an overpowering and acrid smell that was difficult to ignore. She still pushed back it, looking over Alyssa's prone form, "Are you alright?"

"Just... just winded," Alyssa wheezed.

Below them, Clark and Oliver were looking on somewhat dumbly, and with neither of them in the way, Henrietta used her flail to grab the brick Alyssa had just placed and - it didn't move?

An instant later, a jolt of magic cascaded down her construct, carrying with it a strong sensation of pepper. But before it could reach her body, the ink-sketch collapsed and the smell shifted to one Henrietta recognized as Draconic in nature.

"Smith!" she called out, and the call galvanized their Artificer to action. With a start, he climbed up to the floor and, as soon as he arrived, immediately started casting. The smell of Arcane began seeping through the area, and he chattered a chant in Magespeech, something Henrietta couldn't fully follow.

"Tame the... build up... slay the dragon... sleep now... counterspell!" The final few words were accompanied by a surprisingly straightforward to follow motion of thrusting his hand forward, and the flames subsided a moment later.

Oliver was panting heavily, "Probably best to give me a bit of space. I suppressed it, but it's not fixed."

Alyssa vaulted over the half-built wall on the far side of the tower, lightly landing on the ground below, but Henrietta simply turned to the mage. "Is it safe?"

Oliver's eyes were half-lidded, and he was muttering words under his breath, but after a few moments he spoke up enough that Henrietta could understand him, "Ehhh... fifty fifty. It could go boom, it could fizzle."

"Then I'll stay, in case you need assistance."

OIiver gave no indication that he'd heard her, but got closer to the troublesome brick, picked up a loose reed, and poked hard at the offending bit of masonry. It shifted slightly, but otherwise didn't react. He frowned, but before he could attempt again, the brick detonated into whitish-blue-purple sparks, a sharp retort accompanying the dematerialization of what should have been a perfectly mundane brick.

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A fragment of pottery whizzed by Henrietta's ear, a buzzing noise that made her blood run cold, while Oliver collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. Instantly, Henrietta rushed to his side and assessed the damage.

A jagged fragment of brick had lodged itself in his hand, the sharp edge of the shrapnel poking out the backside of his hand. His cheek had been torn open, a line of blood and bone mere inches from his eyes, and his upper arm had seemingly had a fragment pass straight through it.

None of them were immediately lethal, but they did require immediate attention. Not even bothering to wait, Henrietta sent her tendril to snatch Clark from where he'd been standing next to Alyssa and deposit him next to the collapsed mage.

A slight groan escaped from Oliver's throat and out of the gash in his cheek, and to the Healer's credit, Clark only froze for a few seconds before moving to [Unblemish] the other man's wounds away.

Henrietta sent Alyssa to get some water, and she returned with a full pot, clean water sloshing out over the sides after just a couple of minutes.

Fortunately, most of the water wasn't needed, and Clark was able to patch Oliver up well enough. He'd be a bit out of it for a while, and Henrietta ended up needing to take over the per-layer enchantments by using [Refined Calligraphy]. That slowed them down even more, because unlike Oliver and his seemingly infinite stamina, enchanting something that large exhausted her mana almost in its entirety.

When she asked him what had happened, he'd explained that, "It was a compound mistake. As best as I can tell, I malformed a glyph maybe seven or eight layers below, and then had a lot of other glyphs above that further out of alignment and with their own mistakes. That pushed the flows through the wall into a bit of a semi-chaotic pattern, but it couldn't go fully chaotic because of how much this is meant to oppose Elemental Nature, so instead of Nature, the mana ended up skewing into Elemental Dragon. I'm not sure how it generated Dragon with so little power, but..." he shrugged.

"If we're lucky it came from lingering traces after Jacob's [Frostblade] exploded, and if we're not, it could be some underlying issue with the tower itself." He chewed his lip, "This really isn't good. At a bare minimum, Dragon mana means that there's something that isn't under proper control in the construction. Which... isn't really a surprise, I suppose. But it still shouldn't be showing up now."

Henrietta was very aware of the dangers posed by elemental Dragon. Back home, it could be somewhat mitigated by blocking its entry into clean rooms, but here not only was that an option, the nature of the Base Material Planes meant that enough uncontrolled and powerful mana stood a high chance of directly creating Dragon mana, making it impossible to truly block. And Dragon mana was bad news.

It, like its namesake, was incredibly powerful and almost impossible to tame. In fact, it 'took offense' at the simple idea of being tamed or controlled. Though potentially not actually the Antithesis of elemental Hand, it was pretty close. It actively fought anyone trying to do anything with it, and dramatically increased the potency and strength of anything it mixed with, which itself made things harder to control.

It singlehandedly was an enormous part of why it was a terrible, almost suicidal idea to interrupt a mage as they cast. A sufficient lapse in control could be pounced upon by Dragon mana in the area, and that would in turn spiral even relatively harmless spells into something far more powerful than they ever could be otherwise. A simple Light Candle might turn into a Fireball, or a Fireball into an inferno of Dragonfire.

In alchemy, where it was thankfully rarer, it could make potions explode, animate otherwise-harmless construct, vigorously transform anyone nearby... or make incredibly effective and potent bombs, albeit ones that were uncomfortably volatile. Intentionally harnessing Elemental Dragon was playing with fire in the worst way.

"Can we mitigate it?" she asked.

"I... don't know," Oliver admitted. "I don't know what caused it to begin with, so I can't counteract it. This isn't something I feel comfortable making the decision for."

Henrietta drummed her fingers against her arm as she internally debated.

"Haleford!" she eventually called out, "Get up here."

Once he had, she motioned to the bricks around her, "Hero has Associations with Dragon, right?"

He nodded, but before he could speak Henrietta kept going, "I want you to keep an eye out for anything you see that might be elemental Dragon. If you do, you need to let me and Smith know. And especially take a look around here right now to see if you can spot any more traces. And be ready to [Unblemish] it away, but only after I or Smith get the chance to study it."

Clark threw her a quick salute and started peering around with comical exaggeration, while Oliver regarded her curiously. "There's none around here though? If there was any Dragon still around here, I would let you know."

"I know," she confirmed. Arcane was also Associated with Dragon, but Oliver's arcanoception was a lot less capable of picking up on fine details than most other forms. Scent was the best at noticing trace amounts of an element, but unfortunately none of her current elements had close enough ties to Dragon to let her sniff it out. "But I want us to be absolutely certain. If we see any more, we call a halt to the tower until we figure out why. Until then, we treat it as a one-off coincidence, and let Haleford clean it up."

Oliver gave her a quick nod, and they returned to their jobs.

Bricks were fired. The Grog-mill broke and was repaired. Wet Clay was hauled to the top of the spire, reeds were harvested en mass for floor-scaffolding and for extremely fragile wands. Injuries were accumulated and mostly-healed. And brick by brick, layer by layer, the tower grew.

The third floor came and went, then the fourth and the fifth. A second fourgle attacked, but fortunately it was when Jacob had been working on the top floor, and he'd managed to sever two of its wings with a single mighty ⟨Piercing Strike⟩ that had seen him leaping off the tower and into Henrietta's awaiting tendril, and the fourgle itself crashing into the ground far below.

The tower in general seemed to be quite the point of interest for all the animals around, and at times when they weren't working on the tower itself, they'd return to find birds perched on the walls and curiously pecking at the flooring.

One particularly notable time, they'd come out to find an entire flock of squawking blue-feathered critters absolutely covering the entire construction, with talons locked into cracks along the side, forming a chattering mass on the top floor, and jostling for position on the top of the wall. They'd also been almost entirely fearless and had refused to move as a whole, only fluttering away whenever one of them tried to actually attack them up until Alyssa had killed nearly a half-dozen of them with her hunting sling. Impressively, she'd once managed to literally kill two birds with one stone.

"It would have been a lot more impressive if I'd been aiming for either one of them," she muttered when Henrietta had praised her on it. But intentional or not, the birds ended up being decent eating. A bit tough, but not bad as a whole.

There were a lot fewer non-flight-capable creatures that were attracted by the tower, and about half of the ones larger than a cat ended up in the cookpot eventually. The others ran away when Alyssa attempted to hunt them, with the one exception being a fox-looking thing with black 'petals' instead of fur. That one just melted away into any nearby patch of darkness when they got too close, looking at them with two sets of bluish-green eyes glowing at them from the shadows. But once it appeared, it pretty much always showed up any time they left the tower unattended, and it kept trying to dig under the lower levels of the brick for some reason.

Well, the reason almost certainly had something to do with the tower's massive foundation wards, but what about them was so attractive to the wildlife was a complete mystery.

Another windstorm had them all biting their nails nervously, but remarkably despite the incredibly powerful winds at the top of the spire, the tower stayed standing! It did strain the enchantments, and Oliver attributed it to some of the enchantments they'd been spinning into the walls, but the rest of them mostly just cared that they hadn't lost weeks of progress all in one go.

"I think we just need one or two more layers," Oliver commented after his first enchantment since his hand had finished healing. "The Significance is almost compounded correctly, and I think I can get that working at the same time I start refocusing the side-channels..."

He trailed off, and Henrietta waited for him to continue, but instead he simply wandered off and started casting what she guessed were diagnostic spells at the wall. She shrugged, and went back to transporting a load of bricks up to the topmost floor, when Oliver came back.

"Actually, I was incorrect. We'll need to bring this into a bit of a dome. You see, with the-"

"Apologies Smith, I need to focus," she hated cutting him off, but right now if she got too distracted she ran the risk of slamming several hundred pounds of supplies into the side of the tower and causing a major collapse.

"Oh, right."

By the time Henrietta had finished moving what she needed, Oliver had already moved on, so she shrugged and made a mental note to ask for more details later.

A dome? This might be tricky.

Amazingly, while the dome wasn't particularly easy to accomplish, neither was it too challenging. Oliver ended up making a lot of custom-shaped bricks by carving away at the dried but yet-to-be-fired ones, and each layer managed to support not only itself but also the ones on top of it, all but eliminating the need for a support structure to keep it all elevated. It was only towards the very end, when filling in the capstones, that any kind of external support was truly necessary.

Then, they poked a bunch of holes in the wall right below the dome, to allow smoke to escape. In retrospect, they really should have left a lot more holes in the tower, because that would have made it substantially easier to install the floors in later, once the tower was done. But, what was done was done, and they couldn't risk cutting a bunch of openings in the tower for fear that it would disrupt the magic flowing through it. It would be rather dark inside, the only real source of light being the door at the very bottom, and the air-holes near the very top. It did make filling the entire thing with dried wood and reeds somewhat tricky, but they already had a very convenient source of magical light in the form of the failed 'darkness' enchantment Oliver had inscribed onto a clay tablet.

When the entire thing was filled with what felt like enough wood to burn for a week, the five of them gathered at their biggest project yet. The tower was some fifteen meters tall, covered inside and out with runic symbols, absolutely reeked of all kinds of magic, and was coated inside and out with very dried yet unfired clay.

There was only one thing left to do.

"Would you do the honors?" Oliver asked, nodding to Alyssa. The Ranger's expression morphed from a mixture of anticipation and sadness to one of pure glee, then she walked up to the base of the tower, held her hand inches above some of the tinder just inside the doorway, and snapped her fingers.

And then, there was fire.

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