Water splashed as the rock behind exploded forward. Little bits of rock fell over me. I popped up and ran back out of line-of-sight. I popped up and ran towards my camp again.

The good thing was I wasn’t hit; the bad thing was those casters were going to keep us pinned down until they won. I wasn’t sure how long that would be or if they would call for help. I just knew this wasn’t something that was going to work.

Even though I could attack, their return fire was leagues above mine. I had an arrow, and they were tossing out lightning bolts. I had one arrow left, so I headed over one last time.

I let the arrow fly in a high arc. I was far enough back that I was hoping I would hit something since I couldn’t see anything at all. I was rewarded with hearing a scream, and a few moments later, the waterfall side lit up with a fireball.

I walked back the 50 feet or so to my lean-to. While I would have to wait a day for the arrows to come back, I was mostly happy with the results. I was able to bloody the goblins while they didn’t get a clean shot at me.

Could I win this way? Nope. Not even close, but I could keep working on them. Later tonight, I was thinking about climbing up the cliff and making my way around to above the goblins. If I was able to drop some rocks on them, I might make this hard enough that they left me alone.

Of course, if I could get Lannah out of here, then we could just leave. The problem was the climb. Even with her stats, she was unlikely to make it without falling. If I could right something up to get her out, I would, but I didn’t know how to do all the fancy rigging that climbers did.

Lannah looked at me from the fire as I came up. “How did it go?”

“Not great but not bad. I didn’t get hit but I know of only one kill. While the item is great I’m not sure it is our way out of here. If you could climb I would have us chance that but I’m not sure that is our best bet.”

“I don’t even have one level in climbing. I grew up in the city so that wasn’t a skill I ever worked on. I think we are stuck here until we get rescued.”

“Yeah, that was what I was kind of thinking you would say. Which means we have to figure out how to survive. If the goblins figure out how to get up the rock wall then we are going to get over run.”

I sat by the fire to hide my nervousness. “If they make it up we are going to need to pull back to the storage room and try to hold them off. I don’t like our chances if it comes to that. I have seen how they fight and so our hope will be to completely block them off.”

Lannah looked at me. I could see her trying to puzzle out what I was saying. “I don’t know what you are thinking. How do we block them off completely?” She asked.

“I have runes that will let me cast Dirt to Stone. Using that I would be able to seal off an area and keep them from coming in. Hopefully, it won’t come to that because I am not sure how long we could be in an enclosed area. It would be the last thing that we tried but we need to make ready for that idea tonight.”

“What all do we need to do?”

“Mostly we want to move as much water as we can in there. If we are in there for a few days then we will want the water. I already have all my food in there. For me I need to make runes to pull this off. It would be better if it were an item so that I could drop a core in it.”

Lannah stood up, “alright, I will fill the water skins and get them moved into the room.”

As she walked away, I could help but feel a little helpless. There were too many goblins, Blink was missing, and Lannah was mana, but she was also an anchor holding me here. If it wasn’t for her, I would be up the wall already. Of course, she was going to get me to more people, so I wasn’t really angry with her. I was just angry about the problem.

I pulled out my tools and started to work. I was carving runes into a short stick to make a wand for dirt to stone. I was planning on putting a core in the wand so it wouldn’t be a one-time use item and so that the magic of the core would fix the problems I might have added.

That was the nice thing about these cores; they seemed to clean up the intent that I had when I first made the item. It wasn’t perfect, and I never truly knew what I was going to get. Like my arrows, I wanted them to hit with an area-wide effect. However, I didn’t give them any runes for an attack because I didn’t think they could take it. Then they add cold damage.

I wasn’t upset I just didn’t know how to plan for something like that, and I liked planning. In fact, most of what was making me mad right now were that my plans didn’t work out how I wanted.

My traps didn’t give me enough time to escape because I had someone who couldn’t climb. My attacks didn’t do enough damage, and I didn’t take into account them having magic. It wasn’t just that my plans weren’t working; it was I didn’t have enough information to make plans.

Sure, I got plenty of information from Lannah, but I couldn’t just get info from her. I needed to figure our way out of this mess. I was angry at Sam; if he hadn’t wasted so many of my questions, then I might have been ready for this.

As it was, I had half-finished ideas, and things weren’t going as I planned. Yes, I was lucky to have found Lannah. She provided the power I needed to make some tools that could get us out of here. She had her dad coming to get us. Which, overall was great. However, I wasn’t ready for my conflict with the goblins.

Once I finished adding runes to my wand, I filled back out my missing runestone set. I tripled up the fire and rain. I had a plan that might work or might not work.

Lannah came over to the fire, “I have everything in the storage room. It is dark in there anyway we can get some light?”

“I have the spell glow. It is what I have been using in there for lighting when I need it. I guess I should make something with it.”

Lannah gave me a wane smile. “I need to send a message to my dad are you good with out me for a while?”

“Sure, I am going to just finish this wand and then I will keep watch for a while. Once you are done with your talk with your dad head into the storage room. I will wake you for your shift.”

I quickly finished off the wand I was making and dropped a core into it.

Item core created

World first!

Magical wand

As your wand core is the first it is uncapped in level

Normal wand cores will be capped at level 22.

As your wand levels its helpfulness increases.

I opened up the interface to see what this wand core could do.

General

Showing up in all gold.

Arn’s wand of rocks

Level 0

Type item core

Class Ultra Rare

Durability 100/100

This is Arn’s wand of rocks. While many may feel that a wand is a weapon this is not the case. A wand is a tool that is used for many things that it is not able to do on its own. Arn’s wand of rocks was made to turn dirt into rock. Some might say making a wand to do this was ingenious. That would imply that having a magical item that didn’t take on the form of the intended use wasn’t proving a brain of igneous.

This only had two tabs.

>Growth

To level your item core you must use it for its purpose and provide for it material to level to the next level.

Hard Wood 0% Mana 0% 5 Sedimentary rocks 0%

>Traits

These are the abilities or traits that your wand has.

Durable- This wand is durable, it will not wear out from normal use durability will only decrease with targeted attacks. This is not a weapon but a tool. To use this as a weapon will count as targeted attacks and decrees the durability. This wand will turn a 3 foot wide, 6 foot tall, 3 foot deep area of dirt into rock that matches with the closest other rock. This wand also will be able to return any rock it created back to dirt. No other stone will be effected.

I grabbed a couple of the river stones and headed to just the edge of the tree line. I couldn’t see the fires, which meant they couldn’t get the right angle on me.

I wanted to try something that had been bugging me since I had been attacked by that dumb bird. I wanted to see if I could use an overcharged mana stone as a weapon.