doJason Salazar

    “May I?” The Artificer Archetype asked, his bushy white brows cocked as he glanced up at Will.

    “Go ahead,” Will gestured to the jar of Relic Dust.

    To Will’s surprise, the old man dipped his pinky in the jar then put it in his mouth, his face becoming contemplative.

    “Psychic….debuff…contract…and a bit of dirt,” He said, smacking his lips together and spitting.

    “Sorry,” Will said, shrugging.

    “Oh, no, for an unplanned Relic Loss, this dust is about as clean as you could possibly get it, which is good, drives cost down. I’ve had to filter out blood and saltwater and soil before so…”

    “You want the good news or the bad news first?” He asked, glancing up at Will.

    “Bad.”

    “The bad news is that your weapon is going to be very difficult to recreate. Large amounts of time and money difficult. To the point where you may decide that it doesn’t suit your plans going forward. If you’re planning on going above the tenth floor, there’s a better chance of finding something better than this, and faster than it’d be done. Assuming you don’t die.”

    “I’d have to get an artisan to create a blank relic that matches your previous one perfectly, which is a tall order and would require you to be on hand for it’s creation since you don’t have a charcoal imprint. After that I’ve got to apply your Relic dust there to it.

    “While he’s doing that’ I’ll be carefully sifting the dirt out of your Relic Dust.”

    “Once we’ve got the blank, it’s going to absorb one to three of the dust’s affixes. Now we might get lucky and get all three but it’s more likely we only get two, and even likely I only get one.”

    “ if only one or two affixes land, I’ve got to go buy up some Relic dust from relics which only had affix of the appropriate type. Which Then I’ve got to bake the affixes in one at a time in a time-consuming ritual.

    And after all that’s said and done, you get a weapon kinda-sorta like the one you lost.” The Artificier said, handing Will back the jar of dust.

    “What’s the good news?”

    “The good news is that particular combination of affixes is rare and valuable, so the value of the relic, once It’s done being re-created, would be worth the effort.”

    “I could also buy the dust off you for a good price,” the Artificier said with a shrug before glancing down at Will’s missing hand. “But you seem like the type to stick to something even if it’s hard.”

    “That is the case,” Will said with a smile, glad to know that it possible.

    Now that he knew what was needed, he was confident he could use a modified Sourdough to imprint the tomahawk’s affixes on something else.

    Will thought.

    There were as many potential upgrades as there were monsters, which was to say…an infinite amount. But Will could narrow it down a bit by checking potential suspects first.

    Just from what he’d heard, the process of recreating the axe wouldn’t be too dissimilar from how Will imagined Sourdough functioned.

    Will thanked the aged artificer for his time and took his jar of iridescent dust for a walk.

    At least, the only one who wasn’t under some kind of contract with a Lord or a major crime syndicate.

    Will had been through four rounds and was now in the semifinal. Once this was done, he would have a free pass up to the 6th Floor.

    There was nothing protecting Will from a double-cross aside from the Baron’s regard for his own reputation. That might be enough by itself. Will had spotted several other interesting looking figures in the box today with the Baron.

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    He couldn’t hear what they were saying over the roar of the crowd, but he could pretty damned well.

    Mark Wyrd sitting next to the baron, and someone who looked suspiciously like Mark was sitting in the big seat that was normally reserved for the Baron.

    ’ the man’s mouth had seemed to say.

    If the Wyrd patriarch knew exactly what Will had done in Oilton, he would probably be a bit more pissed, but even if he didn’t know Will was responsible for debacle, he knew that Will had slipped his mercs once before, and now he saw him carving his way through the ranks of a tournament meant select potential Lords.

    No…there might even be more going on here than just Will.

    The mercs were in town. The Wyrds were in town…the Tangled were in town.

    There was already Tangled in the city that Will had personally witnessed. Will corrected, thinking of the Baker Girls. What was the chance that in a city this big, in only a matter of days, he had run into every single one? there must be a high density of them to allow that to happen…

    That brought Will back to Oilton. The dead city they’d discovered on the Third Floor.

    It had been flooded by a single Tangled that had self-replicated.

    If there were even only a dozen or so, it would a major problem for the city guard, given how strong they were. The Class was pure melee aggression with serious disdain for personal safety given their regeneration and self-replication.

    If the Wyrd Patriarch was planning on taking out Akul, there had to be some kind of unknown factor that would disrupt the city’s functions drastically enough that the Tangled could begin to grow and spread through the city, establishing a foothold before the citizenry could stop them.

    But…Will’s experience with stealing someone’s slot on a kaiju hunt revealed to him that there were hundreds of mercenaries on this floor with expertise in subduing the monsters.

    It seemed improbable that Frederick Wyrd could take out the Baron, the Kaiju Force, the mercenaries who made their living killing kaiju.

    In Will’s imagination, mindless Tangled spread rapidly through the streets, attacking anything that they possibly could, while kaiju loomed above the city, crushing homes and businesses as they tore through the flimsy human constructions.

    It was so vivid, Will might’ve mistaken it for a memory.

    Still, just one kaiju might be able to be handled by the city guard and citizens. For that to be a solid tactic, there would have to be more than one at once. Several, even.

    So in will’s imaginary scenario, Frederick Wyrd would kill the Baron and unleash multiple Kaiju on the city as well as dozens of Tangled that he’d smuggled in over time. Sear?h the N?velFire.nёt website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

    There was just one major issue with Will’s hypothetical plan to destroy Akul.

    It wasn’t like they grew on trees. they spawned incredibly slowly, and didn’t spawn inside city limits at

    there was nothing special about the man-defined walls of the city that prevented the tower from doing its worst.

    Will tried slotting that puzzle piece together, trying magical Abilities, good fortune, low-miasma, divine favor, but none of them fit perfectly with what he knew already to explain why there were no kaiju spawns inside city limits.

    Will thought back to his conversation with the Baron. The revelation that the number of Lords and their Strongholds on the floors above them had an effect on spawn rates was eye-opening.

    That got will thinking.

    The baron was using a technique whereby a farmer pruned one branch to make the fruit that grew on the others more plump and juicy.

    If Kaiju couldn’t spawn within a certain distance of each other…then the Baron could’ve restrained them under the city to prevent spawning inside the city for decades, which would be vital to creating such a large settlement…this had the added benefit of causing that extra unused miasma to divert to spawn kaiju outside the city at a higher rate, where they were caught and harvested.

    Will didn’t know all the facts, and it was nothing more than a guess, but fit everything he know perfectly.

    After a few minutes of thinking, Will hit on the vague memory of nearly dying because of the berserk debuffs they’d been hit by when they first arrived on the Fourth Floor, causing them to fight each other.

    Loth had been particularly hard hit by it as all her bugs had succumbed completely, killing each other in a matter of seconds and devastating their numbers before she got them back under control.

    Then he thought of the cursemage who’d been able to direct Ear Collector to attack other people and leave Will hanging…

    As a plan began to come together, Will found himself wondering about the timing.

    Will would’ve guessed today, when the Wyrd Patriarch could’ve caught all the Lords in one place with their metaphorical pants down.

    Will didn’t know enough to even guess about who might be betraying who, but if not today…

    Will thought back to the missing item from the Oilton Patriarch’s office.

    Wyrd wasn’t above a little petty robbery, but it had to be good.

    And if it was good, chances were it would be at that auction.

    Something was about to happen, and Will was sure it wouldn’t be good.

    Once Will got back to the inn, he took Loth and Travis to the side. Neither of them were currently in the tournament, they had more ability to move freely, and they had the skillsets that he believed could ruin the Wyrd’s plans for the city.

    “There’s something I’d like the two of you to do.”

    Loth cocked her head as Will began to explain what he wanted, while Travis’s jaw slowly went slack.