“Sorry,” he told Olaf when he realized he had drifted off into thought.
“Not easy, being Lord of the Domain, is it? Even running the town is a lot of work. Interesting, though.”
“I sort of hate it, but I hate letting the place go to hell even more. At some point, I want to pass the buck onto someone else. Maybe you, if you’re interested.”
Olaf thought about it for a few seconds. “I might be. Don’t know how far I want to go on this Path to Power. And I liked playing Civ games as much as RPGs.”
“All right, I’ll keep that in mind.”
I know. I won’t do it unless I think it’s for the best. For everyone, not just me.
Hawke had to admit that he was looking forward to risking life and limb in a Dungeon. That was the sort of challenge he enjoyed. Even if it killed him.
Eleven
Hammer down. Again. Again.
Hawke looked at the chunk of iron – and about one seventh of a percent carbon and twenty percent nickel – that he was trying to turn into a sword. He had spent a couple of hours a week making the initial block, and now was ready to hammer it into shape. In a world without magic, that would take several steps, many of them requiring a lot of hours or even days. In the Realms, if you had the power, you could save a lot of time.
The metal bar had the required mix and density of metals and carbon needed. His Analyze Item blacksmithing ability allowed him to learn an object’s exact composition down to the molecule. All he had to do was fold the metal a few more times, keeping the balance between soft and hard alloys, and he would be done. Hammer, hammer, and hammer again. When the metal began to cool down, he sent thirty Mana coursing into the bar, reheating it. A forge was easier to use but took more time, and he had the power to burn. Even better, when he was done he could use the magical energy to cool down the blade at the appropriate rate.
He kept hammering and reshaping the bar until he had what he wanted: a double-edged blade with a point and a long metal tang at the other end, where a handle would cover it. More Mana flowed into the weapon, doing the work that would normally take hours in a matter of seconds. The final steps were the trickiest ones: creating an edge and point by sheer force of will took enormous concentration, because he was literally forcing metal atoms and molecules to align in the exact way he wanted them to. His Advanced Mana Sight came in handy, too, showing him how the magical energy interacted with the metal, and more efficient ways of focusing it.
When he was done, he used another fifty Mana to extract the heat from the finished product in a way that left it stronger than before. The metal bar had been turned into a sword. He Analyzed it and found he had made a Good Quality Longsword. It had no enchantments or spells, but the metal had the right balance of hardness and flexibility that would allow the user to stab or slash an opponent. It would do the job.
Congratulations! Your Blacksmithing Skill has been raised to 4!
You have earned 300 Experience towards your Arcane Blacksmithing.
Katros stepped up behind him. “Solid work,” he commented.
“Only because I can drop a hundred Mana into the job to make it happen.”
“What does it matter how you reached your destination, Paladin? The job is done, and that is a fine sword, one that will not shatter in someone’s hand because of impurities or weaknesses within the blade.”
“Okay, you have a point,” Hawke said. “Now all I need to do is learn how to imbue special powers into my work.”
“That will come to you when you reach the fourth tier in the Craft,” Katro replied. “You will gain two Enhancers then, and two new ones every time you rise to another level. If you did more work at the forge, you would be there already. Having enormous reserves of power to toss around speeds things up something fierce.”
“Hard to find the time,” Hawke said. “I spent all morning practicing with the party I’m taking on a dungeon crawl, the had a work lunch with the Guard Captain to nail down the garrisons for the town and the Stronghold, plus a cavalry patrol on the road. Had three hours I could spend here, and after I’m done, I’ll try to squeeze an hour or two on, uh, another ability I need to train.”
Hawke stopped himself before mentioning his Mana Channeling. The ability was largely unknown in the Common Realm, and he already had a reputation for someone with too much power for his own good. That power had kept him and a bunch of people alive, but it still made some of them uneasy. He couldn’t blame them, either.
Katros just gave him a ‘better you than me’ look. The Arcane Smith was happy with his career choice and his rapidly-increasing skill, and cared little for other people’s problems. Working with the high-grade tools of the Arcane Smithy had helped him hit seventh level, enabling him to make a few enchanted weapons and armor pieces every week. The town was buying most of them and paying retail prices, which had made Katros one of the wealthiest people in town. His only problem was that the Stronghold wasn’t a great place to live. He had ended up renting a house in the Arachnoid village, which meant a walk up a steep tunnel to get to and from work every day, but helped keep his sleep free of nightmares.
“I’m sure you will maintain peace in the Valley, Paladin. Then you will have the leisure to hone your skills. When you do, you will become a smith of legendary achievements.”
The man was very stinting with praise, so he meant what he had said. Looking back, Hawke saw how his special senses and ability to manipulate Mana – his gigantic pool of Mana – had allowed him to take several shortcuts not normally available to Arcane Craftsmen. If he ever applied himself, he might start making his own Masterwork or even Epic items.
Working as a team might be useful. Hawke reminded himself to keep an eye on the Vocations the other members of the Guild chose as they leveled up. Most of them were still below fifth level, unfortunately, so he would have to wait until a budding Enchanter showed up. But even so, knowing he didn’t have to do everything himself would be a relief. Until then, though, was there anything else he could do?
Maybe he could skip the Chakra awakening and concentrate on his smith stuff tonight. He still had a couple of hours before he had to go to sleep. With his superhuman attributes, he could get by with four or five hours of rest, but if he pushed those limits he started to pay the price. What could he do in that time?
He went over his abilities. Simple Spell Inscription jumped up. He could write down, carve or paint a pattern that stored a spell, along with a condition to trigger it. Not as good as an enchantment, since it would only work once and he had to put a lot of Mana into it: fifty plus twenty-five times the cost of the spell in question, to be exact. Not exactly useful for a weapon. But how about ammunition? Hawke had taken to lugging around a thousand arrows for Tava. Since his inventory now had several bags of holding and other containers in them, the ten slots the hundred-arrow sheaves took weren’t a big deal. He produced one of the arrows, a simple steel-headed one. He couldn’t write on it, but maybe he could carve the pattern?
When he’d placed spells on the walls of the Stronghold, he had scratched the Inscriptions with a metal spike. The arrowhead was too small for that; he was going to have to miniaturize the Inscription and then figure out how to write it on the small metal point. An idea came to him. He already could make Mana objects, even a walking dummy that could perform simple actions, like wandering through a trap-filled corridor. He created a Mana tendril and tried to make it sharp and unyielding, like a needle. Or like a laser beam. Just what he needed to engrave an arrowhead.
By the time the two hours were up, he’d destroyed half a dozen arrows and had improved
a Mana Channeling ability:
Congratulations! Your Mana Channeling Ability: Tulpa Creation, has risen to Level Two!
You can now construct tools or weapons made of Pure Mana. A Tulpa Weapon does a maximum damage equal to your Willpower x (Tulpa Creation Level); it bypasses all defenses not specifically set against Pure Mana attacks. Creating a Tulpa Weapon requires 2 Mana per maximum point of damage it inflicts.
Your Tulpa Puppets now have a maximum Strength and Dexterity of 20, at the cost of one Mana point per level, and Health equal to the total Mana you invest into it. Maximum range of the projection is equal to 100 feet per Tulpa Creation Level.
“Whoa,” Hawke said. He hadn’t intended to create weapons or improve his Tulpa ability, but sometimes you struck oil while digging out a septic tank. He concentrated, spent 104 Mana, and created a blade of glowing blue energy that did an average of 26 and a maximum of 52 points of damage, which couldn’t be resisted by any defenses he knew of. As long as Lucasfilm didn’t find him and sue the pants off him, he’d gotten himself a genuine laser sword!
The weapon didn’t do a lot of damage, but it would be useful when facing something with high resistance values. It also meant that as long as he had Mana, he wouldn’t be weaponless. Hawke could think of a number of applications for his new super-power, some of which would provide some nasty surprises to his enemies. His attempt to carve Inscriptions into arrowheads failed, though. He was going to need to a lot more before he would try again.
Feeling like he had accomplished enough, he went to bid Katros good night and discovered that the smith had already left. Hawke shrugged and teleported back to Orom.
The next morning, he and the party left for the Shadowy Foothills.
Twelve
“Evil has infected the Old Woods,” Gosto Kintes said, watching the contaminated forest below.
“Alchemist Flava had warned me that something was going on in the Shadowy Foothills.”
Hawke had only seen the Foothills in a vision when he had created the Sunset Valley Domain. In it, the heavy forest that created a thirty-mile wide belt of wilderness between the rest of the valley and the Dragonback Mountains had looked dark and ominous. But whatever was going on now was something else.
The trees he could see down were much larger on average than the ones filling the Highlands Forest on the southern part of the valley. They were old; the smallest reached a good forty or fifty feet toward the sky and several were sequoia-sized monsters. The forest would have been impressive or even intimidating in normal times, but things had changed for the worse. The leaves atop every tree he could see had acquired an eggplant-like color. Their bark bad turned a near solid black. Whatever was keeping them alive now wasn’t sunlight or anything normal. Hawke didn’t see any birds flying between or above the trees, and no other signs of life, not even insects.
“The trees are Undead?”
Tava waved from the bottom of the hill, giving them the all-clear. Next to her, Rabbit looked as close to being afraid as Hawke had ever seen him; the Dire Bear’s kept watching his surroundings with his teeth bared. There might be no enemies nearby, but to Rabbit the whole place smelled like an enemy.
Hawke had clocked Blaze’s flame jet at around two hundred and fifty damage per second, with a maximum burst length of three seconds. The sweet little babies could burn him to death, at least if they caught him out of his armor. He wasn’t taking helpless puppies into danger, but rather two very dangerous little devils. Hawke felt proud of them. His adopted kids were going to grow up to be the champions – or the terror – of the Realms.
“No burn,” he told the dragon-kit before looking back at the rest of the party.
Grognard was leaning on his Enchanted Quality polearm, surrounded by a blue aura that clashed badly with his mismatched armor; his segmented-plate cuirass was bright red, his helmet plain steel, and his greaves gleaming bronze. The armor pieces didn’t look pretty, but they were all Enchanted and gave the Battle-Mage plenty of protection and Attribute bonuses. He was a tall guy, with light brown skin, courtesy of his Cuban and Haitian heritage; like some players, he had made a character that resembled the real him. Hawke wasn’t sure if that had made the shock of arriving at the Realms better or worse. Grognard didn’t seem to be bothered by much, though, so it was hard to tell. The sight of the purple forest wasn’t doing the trick, either.
Gosto stood next to Hawke, looking worriedly at the tainted trees ahead of them. The young Druid was a teenager but looked much older in his leather armor and antlered helmet. A knobby staff tipped with the silver head of the Fae god Cerunnos was gripped tightly in his hands. Olaf was right behind him, a medium-sized man with a shaved head and short goatee, clad in the robes of a Priest of Shining Father, complete with a sunburst sigil on the Enchanted Quality garment and holding a bronze wand in his hand that didn’t look like much but not only increased the Priest’s Intelligence, Spirit and Willpower by 3 but could also shoot beams of Light energy that did extra damage to Infernal and Undead creatures. “My phaser,” he called it.
Hawke’s hideous land lobster was resting quietly behind him. The demi-Elemental had very little in the way of personality. Digger would eat meat and a few rocks each day and sleep whenever it didn’t have any orders to follow. Nobody was particularly fond of the creature, and Blaze had shown no inclination to use its segmented back as a resting place, the way Luna did with Rabbit. Maybe some deep-seated prejudice against giant crustaceans was at work, but since Digger didn’t seem to care, Hawke decided not to as well.
The other two members in the Party were out of sight but not mind. Hawke could spot their invisible shapes when he turned on his Advanced Mana Sight. Alba was following Tava and Rabbit, and Girl had been posted to the rear of the group, serving as an invisible reserve.
Everyone around Hawke was invisible to outsiders, thanks to his Twilight Mantle spell. Tava, Luna and Rabbit were scouting too far ahead to remain inside the stealth aura; so was the eagle-shaped Nature’s Guardian that Hawke and Gosto took turns to keep flying above the group. Tava had her own Camouflage ability, however, which made her and her pet hard to spot; it wasn’t quite as good as invisibility, but every bit helped. Surprise was a great force multiplier.
I know. I’m not counting on us remaining undiscovered. But I want to see where all the Woodlings I killed at the Battle of the Foothills went.
They had passed the mass graves Hawke had his summoned minions dig for all the Fae creatures killed in the fight against the Revenant. The bodies weren’t there anymore; the Revenant had come back and raised himself a new army of zombies. Hawke should have burned the bodies, but he hadn’t thought of that. Fae creatures weren’t supposed to become Undead. The Revenant was breaking rules that had stood in the Realms for millennia.
Hawke gritted his teeth when he thought of the two hundred and fifty other Revenants currently residing in the Stronghold’s Vault. If one of them was causing so much trouble, he couldn’t imagine what the rest could do. He had to destroy them.
Sounds like a plan, Hawke agreed as the group entered the Shadowy Foothills.
It was like crossing an invisible line dividing normalcy and horror. After taking a few steps through the purple-leafed woods, Hawke felt as if the temperature had plummeted, even though the mid-morning sun was still shining down on
them. The air itself had a cold and musty quality about it, even though Hawke couldn’t smell anything different. The group staggered to a half before he could say anything; his own feet stopped, seemingly on their own. Blaze huddled up against his armored shoulder and whined. Rabbit stood on his hind legs and snarled a challenge while Luna clung to his fur and produced her own, far squeakier, growl.
As someone with Fae blood, the effect was even deeper for Hawke. The Foothills had been suffused with the energy of the Wild Sidhe; the area was sacred to them, and their leaders and deities had been gathering power there. All of that had been corrupted with Undeath, and even though the Fae were no friends to humans or most other species, what was happening was much worse than whatever the former rulers of the Foothills had been planning. The Fae might enslave or kill, but the Undead could torment you forever.
“Let me check what’s happening,” he said before turning on his Advanced Mana Sight.
From the inside, the view was even worse. Hawke had seen the dark purple colors of Undeath magic permeating the forest, but he hadn’t realized how bad it was. The entire area was in a state of flux as Undeath, Death, Life and Nature energies struggled for dominance. The term ‘a curse lay upon the land’ sounded trite until you saw it happen in living color, saw the very life force being leeched away from every plant and animal in the area – and realized it was also happening to you and those around you.
“We need to counteract the curse or we’re going to start losing Health by the minute, or maybe by the second,” Hawke told everyone before casting Healing Wave, sending a pulse of restorative energy in a hundred-foot radius around himself.
Labyrinth to Tartarus: A LitRPG Saga (The Eternal Journey Book 3) Page 8
