After coming home from the library, Zeth walked back through the front door of his parents’ house, calling, “Mom, Dad, I’m—”
He stopped, face turning to stone.
Oh. Right.
He cleared his throat.
“Mom, I’m home,” he said in a smaller voice.
The moment I get strong enough, I am going to murder those fucking bandits. They will not get another second of their lives with his blood on their hands, even if they are rotting in some jail cell right now.
After his mother came to meet him at the doorway, he sat and ate with her and his sister. One thing he’d always missed about living here were the home-cooked meals; the stuff he got living in guild housing was awful in comparison.
“Where were you this morning?” his younger sister asked.
“I just dropped by the library,” he responded.
“Ooh! Did you get me anything?!”
“No, I was just there for myself this time. I’ll get you a new book some other time, though.”
“Oh.” Her face fell. “Well, don’t leave without telling me! I tried to find you and got scared.”
He winced. “Ah, right. Sorry.”
It was still difficult for Zeth to remember that he’d really been gone for so long. The world, everyone’s lives, they’d just…kept going that whole time.
“What did you do at the library?” his mom asked. “When you left, I’d assumed you were going out to speak with Garon at Otis and Roul’s.”
“Hm? Why?”
“Well…” She pursed her lips. “You looked a little angry when I said he fired you. I was worried you might go and tell him off. Besides, you do still need to go and collect your last pay. We could use the money.”
“Oh, right. I forgot about that.”
“Maybe you could go today?”
“Uh, maybe. I’ll definitely do it soon.”
Zeth hated to be dismissive of the obvious money issues his mom was going through, but he wasn’t about to walk into that guild until he was sure he could survive an attack from the mage. He knew what he’d seen on that person’s boot during their fight—the logo for Otis and Roul’s. The mage worked in the guild. Walking into a place he knew they might be seemed like a great way to get murdered.
He knew he’d have to go there eventually, though—not just to get that money, but also to investigate. If he was going to kill the Blood Mage, he’d need to figure out who they were. And besides, there was also that person who warned him before he went into the mine in the first place. They’d said “If you go down there, you’ll die,” but didn’t elaborate any further when he tried to figure out who it was. Why didn’t they do any more? And who were they? If he wanted to get answers, he’d have to go looking.
But right now, it would be too dangerous to go near there. He needed to figure out more about what was going on, and hopefully reach a baseline of being able to protect himself first.
He swallowed his last bite. “Mom, do you have any pigs ready for slaughter? If we want to make some more money, we’ll need to get that ball rolling sooner rather than later. That last bit of coin from the guild can be a nice boost if we need it, but we need something sustainable.”
“We have one that’s around that age. Sophie, can you show him where we keep the pigs?”
“Okay!” Zeth’s sister leapt from her seat and ran to the door, looking toward Zeth. “C’mon, let’s go!”
It turned out the shed was too cluttered to do work in, so Zeth first needed to clear it out. Sophie had shown him where they were keeping the pigs, so he knew where to go once he was ready, but in order to work, he first needed space. Not just for the animals and meat they produced, but also for the more illegal activities he’d be doing with their blood.
Sophie, after showing him where the pigs were kept, decided she wanted to help clean. He wasn’t sure if she would actually help all that much—especially since he was secretly also preparing this shed to be a ritual room in addition to a butcher’s workshop—but he just didn’t have the heart to tell her ‘no.’
The room was full of random clutter; bags and crates and a dozen different farming implements covered every surface inside. However, underneath, Zeth still saw potential.
He and Sophie started clearing it out, throwing trash in a pile outside and sorting the rest neatly. Or, Zeth was the main one sorting stuff and carrying all the heavy stuff, while Sophie dragged out most of the smaller planks of wood or random scraps of garbage. Once enough floor space was cleared, he let her sweep instead.
“So…has mom been working you hard while I was gone?” Zeth asked.
“Kind of,” she responded. “It’s fun to take care of the plants. But she never plays any games with me. And I wish I could read more.”
“Are you working so much that you don’t have time?”
“Mom says I shouldn’t waste so much time reading. And she never buys me any books.”
“Well, you at least have a bunch from before, right? I’m sure with the money I’ve given her to pick books out for you, you’ve got a big shelf of stuff you haven’t read yet. I think I asked her to buy some math books for you last, have you gotten around to those yet? It can be useful for working with the System.”
She looked away, face turning red. “...I don’t know.”
Zeth frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I—I don’t know. I haven’t read any math.”
“Well, what all have you read?”
“Um, I mostly re-read a bunch of stuff. I read An Old Woman’s Guide to Magecraft again, and Spooky Stories Volume 2.”
He chuckled. “You really like those, huh? I should probably try to find another book about magic Classes if you’re already re-reading An Old Woman’s Guide, what…the fifth time now? What about Spooky Stories? I thought I asked mom to get you the first and third volumes a while back, do you just like the second one more?”
“U-um, yeah. B-but you should definitely get me more magic books! Those are the best and I don’t have any!”
“Man, what is mom getting you if you still don’t have any more magic books? She knows those are your favorite, right?”
She averted her gaze even more. “I don’t know…stuff…”
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Zeth stared at her. “...Sophie, she has been buying you books with the money I gave her, right?”
She didn’t say anything, turned away and fiddling with the broom in her hands.
“Sophie, she specifically promised me she’d buy you books with that money. If she’s been lying, you need to tell me.”
Suddenly, she spun around on a heel, shouting, “You can’t tell her! She said she’d get really mad if you ever knew! M-mom needed to spend the money on the farm, so she hasn’t really gotten me anything. But please don’t say anything!”
Gods fucking dammit, he thought with a sigh. “It’s okay, I mainly asked her to get them for you because I was so busy with the guild. I’ve got a lot more time now. Which books hasn’t she gotten for you? I guess you haven’t gotten those math books that I asked her to get you the last couple months, anything else? The one before that was…an animal encyclopedia, right? I can go and grab those with the last of my savings, or something.”
“U-um, she hasn’t gotten…any of them.”
Zeth blinked. “What? What do you mean?”
A sniffle. “She, she never got me any books. The only ones I have are the ones you got me. Please don’t say anything to her! She’ll get mad!”
What the fuck do you mean she didn’t get you any?! he wanted to scream. With fists clenched, Zeth took a deep, shaky breath. “Any. I’ve been giving her an extra few silver every month for your education for the past, what, year and a half? And she has not given you a single book?”
“...No.”
She’s been lying to me for that long. If she needed more money, why wouldn’t she just ask? “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? She knows you want to go to the Wizard’s College when you’re older, right? She knows how tough those entrance exams are?”
“U-um, mom actually said…she said that we didn’t have the money for me to go there.”
“I’ll pay for it,” he immediately said. “It should only be the cost to travel out to the city and maybe the first year of tuition; being able to say you’re attending the Wizard’s College should help you get a solid job out there.”
“No, um, she doesn’t think she can keep running the farm without me. So, she wants me to keep working here.”
Zeth saw red.
“...Are you mad?”
“Do you want to work for her?” he asked. “Do you like it?”
“...No, not really.”
“You still like reading? You still want to get an education?”
“Y-yes. But it’s okay if I can’t, I can just—”
“Sophie, I can do the rest of the cleaning by myself. You just go back to the house, please. Thanks for the help.”
“...Um, okay,” she said after looking up at him for a moment. Then she turned and started walking out of the shed. The door creaked open as she stepped through, pausing for a moment and looking back at where Zeth stood, frozen in the middle of the room. “Um, Zeth, can we play Scrim later? I haven’t really played it since you were gone, and—”
“Yeah, for sure, Sophie. We can play tonight if you want.”
“...Okay.”
She turned and left. Zeth watched her walk through the fields toward the farmhouse until she eventually disappeared behind a distant line of crops.
He turned around and slammed his fist into the wooden chopping block.
“The fuck is wrong with her?!” he shouted, voice echoing through the shed.
Another hit. Pain radiated through his knuckles.
He took a breath in an unsuccessful attempt to calm himself down. “Does she just want to trap Sophie here for the rest of her life? Refuse her education so she has no choice? That doesn’t work, dumbass. She can’t keep working here, no matter what her other options are, because she will fucking starve to death under poverty. You all will. She’ll have to work at the fucking mining guild too, and wow, look at how that turned out for me.”
Another deep breath. But he couldn’t be calm. He needed to act.
“No way are you doing that to her. I got fucked over, but she won’t be. She’s a fucking genius, don’t you see it? What nine year old asks to read an adult level math textbook for fun? What nine year old can beat any adult she plays at Scrim? What nine year old is interested in the theory of magic beyond ‘I wanna cast spells and shit?’”
Another punch against the wooden desk. A third deep breath.
He couldn’t get distracted from his current goals. Helping Sophie was absolutely something he needed to do, but it wasn’t as urgent as everything else going on. Right now, peoples’ lives were in danger. Some rogue Blood Mage was on the loose, likely killing and sacrificing more innocent people to fuel their own rituals.
He needed to figure out their identity and slay them. And to do that, he needed power. And to obtain that, he’d need to get a ritual circle made in this workshop.
So he got to work.
At this point, creating an Empowerment Ritual would require eight hours of work to finish. Clearing out some space on the dusty floor of the decent-sized shed wasn’t too difficult to do, but working on his hands and knees for eight hours without being discovered? That was harder.
He worked with a massive cloth hung up between the door and his ritual working area, hiding himself from anyone unexpected who might have walked in, and with another cloth sitting on a nearby table he could use to cover up the ritual circle in an instant if he ever heard the door open.
With that setup, he drew for the full eight hour requirement. His main goal was just to work quickly enough that he could get the thing done by the minimum time, not needing to go for any longer. At three and a half feet of required diameter, it was getting seriously large in size—something he suspected would have been borderline impossible for him to draw at his beginning level of skill. But now, he was a little more used to pushing mana through his mind and tracing the intricate swirls and designs across the ground. And the extra points in his Shaping Stat didn’t hurt, of course.
By the time it was dark out, he finally finished drawing it. His entire body shook, aching so much from the work of such intricate, flawless labor performed for such a long time, only one break offered to him when he was called by Sophie to come and eat dinner. He’d exerted himself to such a degree that he finally understood why Blood Magus, a magic-based Class, would be given a Stat like Endurance on Level-up, when most magic Classes received none of those physical Stats at all. If he’d be doing this every day, the time and effort required to complete these circles only increasing with his Level, he’d need it.
But it was finally done. Once that was completed, he went out and led the pig ready for slaughter into the shed. He’d done the whole process plenty of times earlier in his life, back when this was his appointed job on the farm. So it was simply a matter of rediscovering his muscle memory. After taking it away from the rest of the herd, he took a poleaxe from the shed and swung the flat end into the hog’s head, caving in its skull. It fell limp instantly. From there, he tied its back legs to a pulley system in the back of the shed—in the area behind his curtain—and strung it up directly above the ritual circle.
Usually, the next part would be to slit its throat to drain it and let the blood flow down the slanted floor into the gutter leading out of the back of the shed, but in this situation, Zeth had a very specific use in mind for what was usually considered a waste product.
Uncovering his ritual circle, he took a deep breath, double-checking outside to ensure nobody was around, and then went back over, grabbed a simple knife from the table, and cut the pig’s neck open. Liquid gushed from the laceration, pouring out onto the floor where the circle was drawn. Only, instead of splashing out and ruining everything within five feet, it instead sank straight through the floor as though nothing was there. A stream of blood came out of the pig and went…nowhere, like there was an invisible portal opened up by the circle. It got Zeth wondering about where the blood actually went.
But he was distracted from that thought by the ritual circle’s sacrifice progress quickly filling up as more and more blood disappeared into the ground. Thirty percent, then fifty, then seventy…
Realizing the pig would probably be more than enough to complete the ritual, and once it was complete, the blood would cease vanishing and start splattering against the ground like normal, he took a step back to avoid getting covered.
Eighty…ninety…ninety-nine, and—
[Ritual complete: Empowerment Ritual.
Sacrifice given: Large amount of weak animal blood.
Level Up!]
[Empowerment Ritual’s Rank has increased to 3.
+1 Skill Point. You have 6 Skill Points.]
[Blood Magus’s Level has increased to 4.
+3 Endurance. Your Endurance is 18.
+1 Awareness. Your Awareness is 4.
+2 Poise. Your Poise is 8.
+7 Shaping. Your Shaping is 28.
+3 Skill Points. You have 9 Skill Points.]
Instantly, the pig’s blood began obeying the laws of reality, splashing against the floor like normal. Zeth read through his notifications as the sound filled his ears.
Alright, nice. Now then, let’s see…New Rank on Empowerment Ritual; an extra Skill Point’s always appreciated. And—
Just then, he felt more information burst into his mind.
Oh, a Skill unlock notification. What is—wait, what?
He blinked, reading through what he’d just received. Then he barked out a chuckle, face breaking out into a grin. The chuckle evolved into full laughter, manic cackling combining beautifully with the sound of pork blood drizzling onto the stone floor.
This Class is fucking awesome. Three new Skill unlocks from one single Level-up?!