“It depends on your class for the most part,” Ranic said wearily. “For a warrior, it mainly increases their chance to hit or be missed by a critical hit. For an adventurer, it increases the loot dropped from monsters inside dungeons. For an actual gambler, it increases the good cards they get while gambling or the roll of the dice, but their opponent's luck counters that. For farmers, it increases and decreases the frequency with which they receive percentage chances. With your luck at a hundred, it will double or halve that frequency.”
“So, it does nothing for me,” I said.
“Not the way you farm, but other farmers would scream with glee to have their luck as high as yours.”
“Most people believe higher luck actually makes you luckier,” Jeric said, “but as there is no measurable way to prove this, scholars tend to ignore it.”
“That’s true,” Ranic said.
I looked over at Jeric. “I think you got the better end of this deal.”
He looked at me and smiled. “Thank you.”
Your relationship with Jeric has improved from Friend to Ally. As your Ally, Jeric can be relied upon to keep your secrets and help you when you are in trouble. Your problems are his problems.
As I read the prompt, Jeric turned to Ranic and said, “Thank you. You don’t know what this means to me.”
Ranic lost some of his humour and his eyes turned haunted. “It pains me to say that I do. Children are the most precious gift you will ever receive in life. There is no length I would not go to for a few more minutes of time with my own. My heart overflows with happiness for you.”
It was easy for me to forget that Ranic was 143 years old. That he had outlived everyone he loved. Looking at him, he could be mistaken for a healthy, fit man of 70.
The room fell silent as we all began to reflect on what we had and what we had lost. The silence stretched on and, in only a few short minutes, was replaced by the soft snores of my two friends. A contented smile formed as I closed my eyes and joined them.
Chapter Twenty-Two
A BIG PROBLEM, A BIGGER SOLUTION
Hamlin closed the door, leaving Ranic, Jeric, and I alone in the parlour. The random summons in the middle of the day—along with Jeric’s dour expression—suggested that the news wasn’t good. He’d been waiting on the regent’s answer over whether or not they would abandon the village for more than a week. Each passing day left him tenser and more stressed. And finally, he had an answer.
“They’re not going to abandon the village because of what we did.” Disbelief filled Jeric tone even as he told us. “The regent says the price they are obligated to pay the villagers if they wanted to sell their land back to the crown once the abandonment order is made is now too high, even at a tenth of the new base value. She would rather deal with the consequences of having the village destroyed by the giant than emptying her coffers.”
Ranic hadn’t had a chance to sit me down and explain how the whole village system worked, so I was a bit confused by everything that Jeric was saying. “She’s sending the adventurers, right?”
Jeric shook his head. “There’s no one to send. All the high-level adventurers are off either trying to track down the hobgoblins that keep sacking villages or dealing with the silkworm spiders. The only adventurers available are all around level twenty and they’re nowhere near strong enough to deal with a giant.”
“Hire mercenaries then,” Ranic suggested.
“The regents tried,” Jeric said. “None of the mercenary companies that are available are strong enough to take on a giant. And before you ask, I’ve made my own enquiries and found the same response. The only one willing to even attempt it wants to do a defensive action and they aren’t confident they will be able to kill the giant even if they do.”
I huffed out a breath. “So if we can’t abandon the village and we can’t call in aid, what’s our next step?”
Jeric swallowed. “I was hoping you might be able to make a trap that could kill it.”
Fear gripped me, squeezing my guts, twisting them into a tight knot. Flashbacks of the giant tearing through my barn like it was a gingerbread house filled my mind. I didn’t want anything to do with the giant.
I looked at Ranic, fighting the urge to tremble. “Is that even possible?” Goosebumps broke out across my skin as my clothes dampened with sweat.
Ranic shook his head. “It’s never been done…it would be suicide to try. A primitive giant’s skin is almost as tough as iron and you have to get through their fur to reach it. Their bones are stronger than steel and there is enough muscle to spread whatever force you try to use against them. A ballista bolt usually only penetrates about a foot deep and they treat it like it’s little more than a blackberry thorn. They are walking fortresses with an unnatural amount of health. The traps in your barn would cause paper cuts. The axes might cause a flesh wound if you hit it in the head, but it would still bounce off its skull.”
“What about setting it on fire?” It was my go-to backup plan for dealing with anything.
Ranic snorted. “You’d have to burn through its fur—and that takes time. Wizards consider it a death sentence to try. They focus on electrical spells, hurling lighting at them.”
Jeric frowned. “I only made the suggestion because I recalled a ballad about some adventurers who trapped a giant in a ravine.”
“They did,” Ranic said. “But the whole incident was an accident, and there were so many dead by that point that they didn’t even manage to kill the giant, only slowed its progress long enough to get away. Jeric, I don’t think you understand how dangerous giants are. When they are fully grown, their only natural predators are dragons and even then, giants hunt the adolescent dragons when they come into the giant territory. They’re the reason northern city walls have to be a hundred feet high, and why the dwarves don’t live above ground.”
His last words planted a seed of an idea. But I needed more information to water it and let grow. “So walls can keep them out?”
“Walls can keep one out,” Ranic said pointedly. “If there are more than one, then they will work together to help each other over.”
“But stone is strong enough to stop them?”
“Nobles wouldn’t spend all that money on it if it wasn’t. What insane idea are you coming up with this time?”
Jeric grinned at me, hope entering his gaze.
“I’m not sure yet. I need to get a drink to calm my nerves and maybe go for a walk.” I stood up, heading for the door. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”
Jeric nodded and turned to Ranic. “Chess?”
“Sure, why not? It’s not like I have much else to do around here.”
The socialite ability cleared my head in a matter of minutes, letting me think rationally. My first instinct had been to tell Jeric I couldn’t help him. Just thinking about the giant made me almost animalistic, stripping me of my ability to reason. Every instinct told me to flee. However, Jeric was my friend—probably my best friend. I couldn’t abandon him.
There was no one in my old life that I would have handed over a fortune to. I might have even thought twice before going through with giving it to family. But that wasn’t the case with Jeric. He’d helped me again and again. He’d told me I’d created an exploit even when he didn’t have to. He’d given me land for free. He’d kept my secrets, despite what betraying me would gain him. I couldn’t do any less for him after what he had done for me.
He had a giant problem. That meant we had a giant problem. I wandered around the village, walking past empty buildings, reading my notes on trap designs. None of what I had could be used for a giant, but they inspired me. After about an hour, an idea began to form, sprouting from the seed Ranic had planted in my head. After another hour, it started to flesh itself out enough to share. I wasn’t egotistical enough to think I could do this on my own. There was so much about this world that I didn’t know. But it was a place to start.
I had surrounded myself with smart friends who could h
elp me sort out the rest.
I made my way back to Jeric’s parlour. He and Ranic were in the middle of a game of chess. Each had a glass of wine and there was a plate of cheese and small salamis beside the chessboard.
They looked up as I entered, forgetting the game.
I took a seat and jumped straight in. “Can we make a giant-sized pitfall?”
Ranic coughed, clearing his throat, moved to speak, and then frowned in silence. Several seconds passed. “The spikes might injure it if the fall was great enough, and I have to stress the might, but they wouldn’t kill it. Even if you managed to lure it in successfully, it would pick itself up and dig through the ground creating foot and handhold to climb out.”
I nodded, expecting the answer. “You said killing it was next to impossible, so I wasn’t thinking about killing it—though it would be nice if we could throw fire and a few other items at it to try.”
“A giant is not like other monsters,” Ranic said. “You were there. You had to have felt its presence. That sense of overwhelming power. You will not scare it off with a few injuries.”
“I wasn’t thinking about scaring it off. And I wasn’t thinking of digging the pitfall into dirt either. My idea requires us to dig into bedrock. If we can make a pit big enough to contain it, and deep enough that it can’t climb out of it, and strong enough that it can’t smash its way out of it, then all we need to do is lure it into it. After it's trapped, we can just keep it there. Let is starve to death or die of dehydration.”
“Giants can hibernate very effectively,” Ranic said, “so it will take a couple of years to kill it through starvation or dehydration…but making a massive pitfall just to hold it…now that has some possibilities.” Ranic's gazed off in thought, focus disappearing from the room. He began talking to himself. “You’d need to know how far you would have to dig down to reach bedrock and then keep going for at least three and a half fields. The sides would have to be rounded so it couldn’t prop itself in a corner to shimmy out, and it would also have to be wide enough that it couldn’t touch two sides simultaneously in any way.” He picked a mini salami and took a bite. “You’d also want the curve of the wall to be gentle enough that it couldn’t run around to get up and out…that would make it much bigger. It would almost be the size of an underground reservoir…well, why couldn’t it be? It could be multipurpose. It would save on infrastructure costs later and then the mining guild would have an understanding of what they were building. It would also benefit from my skills…but the cost would be astronomical.”
I glanced at Jeric, smirking. “Do you think he knows we’re still in the room?”
Jeric smiled back. “Undoubtedly; we just aren’t worth his attention.”
Ranic suddenly stood and glanced at Jeric, not having heard a word we said. “I need access to the village interface and the surveying maps that were created before the village was constructed.”
Jeric frowned. “Is it entirely necessary?”
“Yes.”
Jeric sighed and stood. “Follow me.”
I was more than a little intrigued by what a village interface could be. If it was anything like my farming interface, there would be all sorts of useful functions. We exited the parlour and moved through the house to a door that opened to a staircase leading under the manor. At the bottom of the staircase was a metallic blue door carved with arcane symbols. There was no door handle or obvious method for opening it.
Jeric stopped before the door and looked back at me. “Arnold, on the other side of this door is the village’s interface, the centre of its magical nexus. Please, put your hands in your pockets the entire time you are inside so that you do not inadvertently trigger the system to do something disastrous.”
I slid my hands in my pockets, even more curious—but a little bit annoyed. “Why aren’t you asking Ranic to put his hands in his pockets?”
“Ranic knows what he’s doing. You do not.”
Jeric turned back to the door and placed his palm against a rune on the top left corner. In blues and greens, runes and sigils lit up across the metal, illuminating the dark staircase. Heavy locks began to rotate inside the door before the door swung in.
To be honest, after the fancy door, I expected more inside.
The room was smaller than the parlour. In the middle of the floor sat a model of the village, surrounded by knee-high railing. Oak filing cabinets were against the far wall and several large oak chests were to my right. Apart from it being about as safe as a bank vault, there was nothing else that was interesting.
I followed the others inside, keeping that thought to myself.
Jeric took Ranic to the cabinets and started opening drawers to collect the papers he’d asked for. They started talking about things I didn’t understand, so I lost interest and began examining the model.
It was kind of impressive now that I was looking at it closer. It held every building in and around the village and even showed the hexagonal shape that was the extent of the village’s zone of influence. Each property had a small border line displaying where each person's land began and ended.
The longer I looked at the model, the more unsettled I became. It was almost too good. Then I noticed my property. Well, the small property I owned before I bought everything else. The farmhouse on the Darkwood farm lay in pieces and the barn was a torn, burnt husk. Its guts were open to the world. You could even see the open pit inside.
My mouth dropped open.
My hand came out of my pocket as I crouched down and reached out to touch the ruins of my barn, hoping to peel back the debris.
“Arnold, stop!” The shout came simultaneously from both Ranic and Jeric.
I froze, hand only a few inches beyond the railings. I turned and gave them a guilty smile. They looked genuinely horrified. “Can I put my hand back in my pocket?” They both scowled at me and nodded. “What did I almost do?”
“Any number of things,” Ranic said, since Jeric was too stiff and pale to talk. “You might have instantly rebuilt your barn, which would have cost ten times its base price, or you could have removed the property from the village.” He looked at Jeric. “I know he’s your friend, but you either need to kick him out for safety or explain the basics to him. He is as ignorant as a child right now.”
Jeric took a deep breath to calm himself and then walked over and pointed to the village in the middle of the model. “This isn’t a model of the village. This is its interface. It controls every aspect of the village’s magical system. And anyone can access it while in this room since the village doesn’t have a titled lord.”
He waved his hand and different sections of the model began to glow in a multitude of colours. He made a different gesture and the village began to grow. Jeric’s manor slowly doubled in size and then tripled. It wasn’t until the farmland around the village disappeared and the buildings became big enough that I noticed the fine, sand-like material that was moving towards each object.
“What’s with the sand?”
“It’s illusion sand. Like an illusion, it can take any form. Unlike an illusion, once it’s taken that form, it doesn’t require mana to maintain.”
“Handy.”
“Very. Now, you see this glowing blue area here, the one behind that temple. That is where I purchased the slot that will allow Ranic’s house of scholars to influence the village. Purchasing the slot wove it into the village’s magical nexus, which is why that area glows blue like the manor.”
“So that’s what will allow Ranic’s house of scholars to augment everything within the village’s sphere of influence once it is built?”
“Yes. Without that purchase, it would just be a building and have the same green glow as a farm.” He made another gesture and a number of small farms from the western side of the village appeared. Above them was the same green glow.
“So green indicates buildings that are influenced by the village, and blue indicates buildings that influence it.”
“Precisely.
But if that was all the interface was capable of, it wouldn’t be that useful.” He made another gesture.
All sorts of food items with numbers next to them appeared above the farms.
My jaw dropped. “Is that their production?”
“Yes. With it, I can keep track of the village’s income to gauge tax revenue and expenses.”
“Are there other resources besides food?”
“We were a level three village before we were sacked, which means we’re only big enough to have three influential buildings and resources. Currently, we only have one potential influential building and two resources.” He gestured and the model changed again, showing the woods on the western side of the village. There were two distinct areas, each with an indicator for daily production rate above it, along with what looked like a max production rate.
“The whole village is a top-down strategy game.” I giggled as I looked over everything. “I want one.”
“If you reach level 50 and Jeric agrees to let you build a farm manor, you’ll have access to one for your farm,” Ranic said without looking over.
“Really?”
Ranic shook his head, not bothering to answer my question a second time.
I turned back to Jeric. “So why can’t the village produce other resources?”
“The short answer is there isn’t enough ambient magic here to sustain more resource production. The village is already struggling to keep up with lumber. The forest’s daily maximums have halved since the eastern side of the village was sacked and we lost more than half of the population.”
“Magic for villages comes from the people within them, right?” I said, remembering the little Salem had explained. “So since there are not as many people around generating magic, there isn’t enough magic to magically grow trees overnight.”
Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer Page 25
