by Dakota Krout
However, he had plenty more than just a single thing to gripe about. The Dwarf had an entire list of grievances when it came to the metal-shaper. The main one, the big one, was that the Grandmaster always tried to play up an air of mystery and untouchableness. Havoc peered around the room, observing dozens of weapons appearing in the hands of the Smiths that had been training when he entered. Currently, the room was entirely silent.
“Hanger-ons!” Havoc bellowed to the room full of people that had only become more nervous when they realized who had entered the workshop. “Where is my little brother? McPoundy! You have five seconds to get out here before I start breaking things! I don't care how far in ‘seclusion’ you are; I don't care one whit about giving you ‘face’, or any of this other garbage that you have been picking up from hearing Elves talk! First thing I break is your anvil; next thing is your trainees! We're in the Capital! They’ll revive tomorrow, but how much time will you need to spend training them back to-”
“Hold on a moment, will ya? Murderous degenerate…” Havoc crashed into a wall as a metal-shod boot tried and failed to cave in his sternum. A bearded Dwarf built like a short defensive wall strode heavily toward Havoc, even as the latter calmly stepped forward out of the crumbling mortar he had been embedded in. “What did I warn you about the last time I saw ye, Hank? Why do you always barge in here, insult me, insult my employees?”
“Hello, little bro. I go by ‘Havoc’ these days.” The mad-scientist Dwarf cracked a wide smile, and smoke released from his mouth, even though there was no cigar on his lips. “I need a favor from ya. Need a custom weapon; I got a magic-type human mentee assigned to me, if you would believe it. Joined the Legion not long back, currently in Officer selection.”
“How is that my problem?” The burly Dwarf demanded, stalking closer and closer toward Havoc until the shorter Dwarf needed to back away to be able to see his face. The smith was clearly trying to edge the scientist out of the forge.
“Hey. Let me say it again, McPoundy. He’s been assigned to me.” Havoc let a little smile show when his brother’s face contorted. “That's right, someone wants him to fail. Someone took an actual, promising Candidate, and gave them to me. I'll tell you right now… the human passed my first quest.”
“Hortatory.” McPoundy sighed as his arms dropped from a defensive position in front of his chest. “It always comes back to that. You come in here, a man that I'm sick of seeing, extort me, and depend on my voluntary compliance. You listen here… just because someone can complete one of your inane quests doesn't mean they are someone deserving of my work. If you want me to make something for them, Candidate or not, I'll be judging them for myself. I will hear nothing else about it. I’ll give them a fair chance, and you will leave. Now.”
“Happily.” Havoc turned on his heel and stormed out of his brother’s forge, trying not to show his true, seething rage. This meeting, in fact, had been one of the most cheerful reunions with one of his previous contemporaries. The fact that he was not outright attacked was likely due to their relation more than anything else. Certainly more than respect for Havoc’s position or threat level. “Now who to see…”
“Human’s weapon is taken care of… I need to find him trainers, put together a squad that he can't boss around… scratch that. I think he is going to need to be a lone agent like I am. We’ll call him a consultant.” Havoc browsed the various shop fronts and work areas. “Armor? Yes… who do I know that can stitch together some good Mage gear? Potions? Components should be taken care of… Cores?”
“Hocus-pocus always takes so much effort.” Havoc muttered as he went from shop to shop, acquiring things in Joe’s name, shamelessly using his Candidacy instead of paying for services. By the end of the day, Havoc had created a full suite of options for Joe, ranging from high-end teachers that could start in a few weeks, to gear that would be perfect for supplementing his abilities and playing to his strengths.
“Heh.” Havoc chuckled as he looked at the total reputation bill for the services. “Never say I don’t do right by the people assigned by me. Least not the ones that prove themselves. Where is that human, anyway? I can’t imagine that he stayed in the dump longer than he needed to. I’m betting he hunkered down near an exit and got out as soon as the quest completed.”
Hours passed, and eventually the Dwarf went to bed. Nothing. No sign of the human. Rather than becoming impressed, Havoc was faintly disgruntled. “There's no chance that being down there is actually useful to him, right? Or maybe he just got trapped in the garbage? Well… then he should show up sometime soon; the debuffs down there are enough to kill a Major, and getting buried is a death sentence.”
Havoc arose the next morning and waited longer, becoming increasingly impatient, until the human finally appeared. Still, it had been over a day since the quest was complete, and the Dwarf wanted answers. Trying to remain calm, he adjusted his goggles and gave Joe a stare-down. “You're late.”
“Hmm?” Joe unenthusiastically replied. The Dwarf observed the man, noting the extreme fatigue apparent on his face. Havoc knew that going into the landfill created long-lasting debuffs if you lived long enough to face them, but he could tell with a sniff that this human didn't even have ‘Stinky I’ on him. “I have… just so much to talk to you about.”
“Hold up.” Havoc’s notification was flashing at him like a strobe light, indicating that he was going to start getting punished if he did not pay out the quest rewards immediately. “Before you say anything else, I'm going to let you know that you passed my quest. I have a whole bunch of things for you to look over, and we have figured out some directions that we can go. Just had to let you know before the world started chucking lightning bolts at me.”
“Has… that happened to you before?” Joe glanced at the Dwarf sidelong.
“Hasn’t happened in the last couple a’ months.” Havoc shrugged, calming down now that the system knew that he would be fulfilling his oaths. “What took you so long to get back here?”
“Horde of Dwarven zombies down there.” Joe’s statement was casual, but it made Havoc freeze in concern. “Got a quest to clean them out; couldn’t manage to finish it before I died. Still, that's not what got me in the end.”
Havoc took a long draw on his cigar to hide his shaking fingers. He couldn’t offer a quest to take out the zombies down there; no one really could. There was no reward that could match the danger. The landfill was pretty much death for anyone who entered it. Frankly Joe should never have been able to survive that quest. There was a reason that Havoc was going all-out on making sure he fulfilled his promises; he didn't want to end up as the ‘boss’ of an instant dungeon beneath the city. “So… what eventually gotcha? You really like to leave big pauses when you speak. Are you sure you aren't an actor or something?”
“Hubris.” Joe answered grimly, ignoring the slight taunt. “I kept making one mistake after another. I knew that there was a big baddie down there, but I got way too involved in collecting aspects. At one point, I dropped a bunch of acid on the garbage, got pulled into the collapse, and I thought it was over. Nope! As soon as I dug my way out, I found an absolute treasure trove of things to break down. I kept going, going, going. Dropping my shields so I would have just a little more power, taking chances that I really shouldn't have, but I was gaining so much.”
Havoc waved for him to continue, and Joe launched back into his story. “I found an Artifact down there, Havoc. An Artifact. I was so excited that I went over and tried to check it out. Don't worry, I wasn't dumb enough to attempt to break it down without a lot more power to draw on. It gave me a warning I had never seen before: ‘You can’t reduce living things’. I thought it was just talking about… you know… how enchanted things are ‘living’… but then it stood up.”
“Hidden Guardian, Havoc.” Joe’s eyes were burning with a combination of indignation and excitement. “There's a malfunctioning Guardian down there, and it's a big one. I thought I was just walking over to break down a b
oulder that had somehow become an Artifact; turns out it was a fingertip. It was not happy that I had grabbed it. Apparently, that counted as me starting combat. I didn't even see it move, Havoc. I only know how it killed me because of my combat logs.”
“How are you so happy about this?” Havoc wondered the question aloud.
“Hidden. Guardian.” Joe’s eyes were shining with a manic light. “I'm not telling you that it is the boss of a dungeon, I'm telling you that it is the name of a quest. If I can fix up the area around it and convince people to stop using that space as a landfill, I can reclaim that Guardian as a second protector of the capital. How does that sound?”
Havoc blew a cloud of smoke out of his nose, deliberating over the details and Logistics that would go into not only cleaning out the garbage and the monsters, but also convincing an entire city to stop putting their garbage in the place they had dumped it for generations. He decided to give Joe an honest answer.
“Hard.”
Chapter Nineteen
Joe didn't go over the majority of his experience with Havoc, but the details were certainly on his mind. He had learned a few interesting things while he'd been in the landfill, and while the hidden Guardian was certainly the most interesting, it certainly wasn't the only information he had found.
At one point, he had nearly died because he tried to rely on an old gaming trope he had heard about over and over. He cast ‘Mend’ on a zombie as it was coming at him, expecting that the healing of the spell would damage the undead creature. Unfortunately, he had forgotten that Mend was a dark spell. In practically no time flat, the zombie had gone from jogging at him to sprinting at him. He wouldn't be doing that again.
When he had managed to return to Havoc, Joe had been on his last legs. He wanted to hear the Dwarf out, but instead found a bed and slept for nearly twelve hours. The rewards will be there after he woke up, after all. Once he regained consciousness, he decided that he should take stock of the changes over the last week or so. First, he browsed through his spatial devices.
“Eighteen Trash-ranked Cores, some Unique garbage that I need to break down; I have my ritual and spell books, ritual papers, and… that’s about it. What about aspects? I feel like I made a good haul…”
Aspects gathered
Trash: 10,253
Damaged: 8,312
Common: 5,951
Uncommon: 2,983
Rare: 1,132
Special (Zombified): 323
Unique: 735
Artifact: 0
Legendary: 0
Mythical: 0
Core energy: 81/81 (Trash)
“I…” Joe stared at the numbers, “…really want to make this into a ritual that I can use on large chunks at a time.”
Pulling out a small chunk of garbage, Joe tried to reduce it at the same time as studying the ritual on his body. He saw the glowing lines appear again, but they did not mean anything to him when he saw them. A couple more attempts, and he’d made no progress whatsoever. He rubbed his eyes, then paused as he had an idea. He activated Essence Cycle, then reduced the-
“Wow.”
The ritual within him lit up, shining lines radiating out from his spine until they reached his skin. It was… beautiful to the extreme, but also incredibly abstruse. The only thing that Joe could really compare the lines to would be a spatial device. There was no way that the sheer size of the ritual should have been contained within a fleshy body; it was within him, it was him. “Is this what a class looks like?”
It was not just the energy within him that was impacted. With Essence Cycle, he could see that all of the floating energies in the air were being condensed, swirled, pulled to enter him. The energy that was taken in flowed along his skin, intermingled with his mana, and exited the ritual that was Joe, the Ritual of Reduction. The power flowed back out of him, and for the first time, Joe was able to see a physical object being reduced into aspects.
Caution! You are attempting to see into the inner workings of Sage-ranked spellwork! Calculating… intelligence threshold far too low!
Joe's eyes bulged, his mana backlashed, and his head exploded with a retort like a grenade detonating.
He ignored the message that appeared to him when he was in his respawn room. He had died twice in the last day, and Joe had a fleeting thought that he should be upset at this point. However, he could not manage to get into that frame of mind. He was too elated. Ecstatic, in fact. “I have a working model of a Sage-ranked ritual! It’s… I’m barely touching the potential of this class!”
Beyond the direct excitement of having such an interesting class with a huge amount of growth potential, there was something about dying for new knowledge that was practically nostalgic. He was trying to think back to the last time he had been working on a spell model that had backfired so badly, it had actually managed to kill him, and he could not easily think of one. It did resurrect a different, unpleasant thought in his thankfully reconstituted head, however.
“Have I been getting… complacent?” Joe’s brow furrowed. “When was the last time I was really pushing the boundaries of my magic? I know that I have been focused on my class, but… I'm so far away from even being able to study the depths of my own abilities that I died when I tried. What do I need to do? Just get my intelligence to that level? No… I need to get my skill to a point that I can use it. I need to have the intelligence to match… I'm… I'm so excited!”
Pulling open his status sheet, Joe instantly started wincing as he saw the downgrade in experience. “Feces… I lost three levels.
Name: Joe ‘Tatum’s Chosen Legend’ Class: Reductionist
Profession I: Arcanologist (Max)
Profession II: Ritualistic Alchemist (1/20)
Profession III: None
Character Level: 19 Exp: 192,704 Exp to next level: 17,296
Rituarchitect Level: 10 Exp: 45,000 Exp debt: 14,714
Reductionist Level: 0 Exp: 176 Exp to next level: 824
Hit Points: 0/1,573 (Currently respawning)
Mana: 0/2,152 (Currently respawning)
Mana regen: 44.55/sec
Stamina: 0/1337
Stamina regen: 6.36/sec
Characteristic: Raw score
Strength: 129
Dexterity: 129
Constitution: 125
Intelligence: 138
Wisdom: 118
Dark Charisma: 80
Perception: 118
Luck: 60
Karmic Luck: 8
“I'm all the way back down to level nineteen… yeesh.” Joe puttered around the room, messing around with various things. Then he noticed that one entire wall was filled with a flashing icon of an unopened letter. He tapped it and found hundreds of letters from his mother, his guild members, and his Coven. He paled as he went through them, concerned that things had gone wrong. After a short while, he had to wipe out his moist eyes.
His mother had written him a letter every single day, ever since he had been exiled. He sat and read through each one, then composed a reply that went over most of the things that he had been going through. His Guild had questions for him about the new Zone, which he offered answers to as much as he could. Finally, his coven had mostly technical questions that he was happy to resolve. It was always refreshing to see someone else's work and discover ways that he could help them improve or improve his own things, based on their creativity.
Before Joe knew it, the portal had opened and it was time to leave. Thanks to the large amount of time that he had been forced to spend in the room, Joe had gone through all of the emails. He promised himself that he would take time to regularly answer questions and emails in the future, but he needed to find a spot where he could access the mail portion of the game. He had thought that he would need to find an actual post office of some sort, but once again, the game came through in a way that he did not expect.
Feeling refreshed, re-centered, and ready to roll, Joe stepped out of the portal and came face-to-face with Havoc.
“Do you have any idea how bad it looks for me when my trainee’s brain matter is splattered all over the room I gave him in my house?”
Chapter Twenty
“What are we doing?” Joe finally broke down and asked the question. He was standing in an empty room with Havoc staring at him; the only thing that had moved in the last five minutes as they watched each other was a long line of smoke that lifted into the air above the Dwarf.
“We are doing nothing. You are about to impress me.” Havoc's words were not a guarantee, nor were they a plea; they were a demand. “I let you go into one of the most highly restricted, most dangerous, and for you… potentially most profitable places under the protection of the Dwarven Oligarchy. You are about to show me that you did not waste your time huddling in a corner the whole time you were down there.”
Joe made a ‘what the abyss’ motion with his hands. “I already told you that I went and did all sorts of things! I found a Guardian-”
“Oh look! I can turn lead into gold and fart rainbows!” Havoc rudely interrupted. “There, I told you! Now you are going to believe me, right?”
“Just…” Joe’s arms dropped to his sides. “Fine. What do you want me to do?”
“Make me something new. At the minimum, I need you to make me something that we can use to conquer a minor fort.”
“That’s unreasonable!” Joe declared without a second thought. “We were going to do a whole bunch of little stuff to start with, weren’t we? Infiltrations, an Uncommon alchemy house, a-”
“No, that was a lie to get you to go along with my plan to dump you in the garbage. I never expected that you’d pull through.” Havoc didn't hold back at all, his voice rising as Joe gaped at him in shock. “Let me explain something to you. You, if you haven’t noticed, are a human. You are trying to get nobility among the Dwarves. Whoever sent you to me had it out for you; they want you to fail. They expect you to fail. Do you actually think we can convince the upper echelon to make you a noble if we try to play it safe?”
