smart puzzler

“How kind of you,” I chuckled, slipping to one knee and placing a hand on the ground. With a silent command, I let Ereb slip into the earth again and sent him reaching out towards the mass of stone. Crocea Mors followed a moment later, sliding into the surprising amount of steel that had apparently be a part of the building, and then I drew upon Levant and sent the air gliding over the debris. I felt the objects clearly in my mind, but though the sheer amount of them should have reduced it to a singular blob of sensation, I had no trouble discerning between the many, individual pieces. I checked my math again quickly and felt gratified—as I’d thought, there were one hundred thirty-three thousand five hundred and eighty-six pieces of this puzzle.

Now all I had to do was put them all back together in the right order, to compose an image I’d never seen, from over a hundred thousand massive pieces.

Like I said. Simple.

All told, I spent about twenty minutes merely sorting through the rubble—which was perhaps five, outside of my Accelerated time. Simply moving all the pieces in so many different ways while so Accelerated was a massive strain, despite the boosts from both my barriers and Mana Reactor, but after looking over my math again, I thought I had the right of it.

At last, I rose—and layers upon layers of steel and stone rose with me. Where I’d sorted the pieces from the bottom up, I now worked in reverse to rebuild the ruins, lifting those on the upper most layers into the air. Lifting a hand, I curled my fingers as if squeezing something and dozens upon dozens of pieces changed position in midair, smaller parts connecting with larger ones or else gathering into larger ones. I watched carefully as the pieces came together, shifting positions slightly here and there as I saw new patterns emerge. Then, with the flick of a wrist, I set the giant stone block down.

Lifting my other hand, I drew a hundred more pieces into the air and started to arrange them as I saw fit, fingers curling again as I did so—but this time I didn’t even wait until it was finished to raise my right hand again. Another tune, if one only I could hear, rose to a crescendo as the pieces fell into place again and again and again, and I set down block after block, arranging them in rows I could all but see from the wreckage. Within mere seconds, as broken carvings gave way to complete or near complete images, I was certain and that surety made me move even faster.

In perhaps two minutes, the majority of the massive structure had been assembled from the wreckage, rebuilt in the opposite order in which it had been destroyed, as if I’d pressed rewind on an extremely convincing hologram. It was an enormous step pyramid—almost a ziggurat, really—or so it seemed on the surface. But…