Chapter 63

In the end, the financial issues arising from the bounty system actually working without the need for the dungeon delvers to carry a grizzly token of their endeavors somewhere to exchange the trophy for coin was resolved in a few days. The party delayed their departure while Madame Silva dealt with the city council, the banks, and a thousand other headaches which resulted from the system … working as intended.

Rory had been the one to alert her to the issue in the first place; he had been drowning his sorrows in a mug of ale in the same inn where Tom’s party had been staying. Silva had followed the matter back to the banks, and, realizing the source of the issue was Tom, had delayed the party’s departure until it was resolved.

The city council was reluctant to pay the guard their due, especially not alongside the guard’s normal salary. The dungeon had been cleared down to floor ten at this point, and by most estimates over a thousand zombies had been slain.

High level zombies, which the traditional bounty system did not account for, but the new one did. Tom had entered the bounty of three marks for a level fifteen zombie. The system calculated the value of a level forty zombie, which was the level of the monsters appearing below floor ten, to be ten times that. Even divided among the guardsmen responsible for the individual kills, the sum became an incredible amount.

The men and women of the guard who had been clearing the city dungeon were now among the richest citizens of Caseville. A third of them retired upon both hearing that the bounties would be honored and checking the balance of their accounts.

In conjunction with the king, Silva decreed that the bounties were legitimate, and in fact that the guard should have been getting paid for clearing the nearby zombie dungeon all along, rather than simply having it part of their training and duties. While this latter declaration was supposed to have been the case all along, the city had been estimating the number of zombies that the guards were slaying every month to be an even two dozen. According to most reports from the guards themselves, the number was at least five times that.

The guards were not pleased with the city council when it was discovered that they had been getting short changed by a significant amount for a very long time.

The council, for their part, was not pleased when prominent members of the guard began running for positions on the council. Council members Ken and Karen had already been ejected by council vote after their disastrous power play in arresting Emil had backfired, and the positions were up for election. The council had intended to replace the vacant positions with Merchants, but the Guards applying for the position, on top of having a significant amount of name recognition in the city already, were now officially Class Holders. That added considerable weight to their names and opinions in the eyes of the populace.

The guard was forced to place guards at the entrance of the dungeon to prevent the unqualified citizens from delving in pursuit of bounties and the possibility of unlocking their class. The council, reluctantly, created a waiting list and training regimen for their citizens to participate in delving the dungeon which had been created in their city. It was headed up by one of the sergeants of the guard who wasn’t interested in public office. It was a sideways step for him, as it became apparent that the city guard was destined to become something other than the brotherhood of martially inclined Commoners that it had once been.

While Rory was offered his position back into the guards when it was proven that he had committed no wrongdoing, he was preoccupied with another opportunity that had been granted to him. Madame Silva herself had offered him an opportunity to try out for the Knighthood. After carefully considering the matter for thirty seconds, he accepted the opportunity and rushed off to tell his ma.

Rory was rather uncertain how to feel about it when Aisha explained to him the concept of a ‘longitudinal study’ and how that applied to her investigations into lifelines. He agreed, with some reservations, to continue his contributions to science at regular intervals so that she could observe his changing lifelines as he increased in level.

He was rather unsurprised to learn that his lifelines had shifted significantly upon his class awakening and, after posing at levels one and ten, that they had shifted further upon leveling up. Aisha considered him a fascinating subject for her study. Rory considered her fascinating for other reasons, which he tried not to think about in her presence.

Mostly, when he was around her, he just tried to think of his grams and other non-stimulating subjects.

Once Silva announced that the issues in the city had been resolved, the party, plus their new acquisition, began the return journey to Weaver Estate.

~~~~~~

He was in pain.

The pain was all he knew when he awoke, choking on air.

He was tied to the bed. He should have been able to literally tear the bed frame to which he was tied apart with his strength as a high-leveled warrior. The fever sapped his strength, and, when he checked his status, he noticed that it was currently listed as eight. He was literally weaker than he’d been at age fifteen, when he had unlocked his Warrior class.

He was alone in his house. He tried calling out for help, and it came out as a garbled mess. His throat, something was wrong with his throat. It was bandaged heavily, and he was having trouble breathing or swallowing his own saliva.

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He tried again calling out, and this time someone responded. It was the healer, the local wise woman. Not a proper healer, he recalled. She didn’t have magic, just folk wisdom and experience in treating the various injuries that were inevitable in village life.

As the memories came back to him, he realized how lucky he was to be alive.

And he wondered why exactly his subjects had been neglecting him. He had been injured in their defense and they couldn’t even send for a proper healer from the nearby Tuksan?

“You’ve been unconscious for days, my lord,” the healer informed him. “It’s been difficult, keeping you alive, but I’ve done my best. I’d say you’re out of danger now, but it’s hard to tell for certain. I was keeping you asleep with medicine while you healed. Unfortunately the messenger we sent to Tuksan returned to inform us that the Healer there deemed you a lost cause when your injuries were described to her. I’m sorry that you’ve been cursed with my meager talents due to her decision to avoid placing her fat posterior in a saddle and see to the hero of Tilluth Village.”

Lubald paused a moment as he considered her words. It was at least an explanation for why his injuries weren’t healed by magic. He tried again to speak, but only garbled noises came out.

“I’m sorry, my lord, but it’s unlikely you’ll regain your voice,” she supplied. “Elder Lukan has in his possession a manual for dealing with deaf children that includes hand-speech. Some of the villagers have already taken to studying it in order to communicate with you once you recovered. The men and women of the village have taken back every unkind word they’ve ever said about you, my lord, and the children are in a state of hero-worship.”

She scoffed. “I remember that you were a drunken lout not very long ago, but even I recognize the sacrifice you made. Worked hard keeping you alive I did. I hope it was worth it.”

She proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes by torturing him. She slaked his desperate thirst with honeyed water spoonful by torturous spoonful. It was the same task she had performed every day during his coma, the only difference was that he was now awake to experience the agony of swallowing drop by drop the liquid that she fed him.

Having him awake simplified the process for her, but it introduced a new level of agony for him.

At least he was alive, Lubald told himself. Alive, and a hero to the village.

He was fairly certain he’d prefer to have never left his family’s estates in the south.

~~~~~~

Far to the northeast, Queen Galya was receiving a report which she would much rather not have heard. Her agent in Welsius had, contrary to her express commands, attempted to interfere with a System Quest!

Yes, she had issued the initial order to apprehend the Controller’s family, but that had been before the announcement by that devil Fenard that the boy had already been issued a quest. She checked her status once more, just in case, but to her relief the system had not yet revoked her Title as Queen of Velund.

She sighed. Perhaps she was being paranoid. The agent had failed, after all. She, ironically, owed Anaxis and Queen Gloracia a debt for killing that man. The system was known to be most unforgiving with those who attempted to interfere with a Controller’s system issued quests.

She exhaled a frustrated sigh. What was the system thinking? It gave the world so few Controllers these days, and the few that it did grant were killed off with the impossible quest to conquer the world dungeon. Nobody even knew for certain where the blasted entrance was! And the monsters within the most likely candidates were impossibly high leveled.

It was not discussed, certainly not with the controllers themselves, but those in the know knew a terrible secret about the Controller Class. It came with a shelf life. Once they reached level eighty – an inevitable benchmark if they were to perform their duties to the world – they received that fatal quest. And like moths to a flame, like flies to honey, like fish to bait, they were drawn to delve more and more dangerous dungeons, searching for the World Core.

To do what, she didn’t know. Nobody did. Eventually the Controller would find a dungeon which they and their party could not overcome. Marshal, the previous Controller, was an exception in that his party had survivors to return to tell the tale. That Antoine the Vanquisher had returned thirty levels higher than he had entered with a skill which beggared belief in its potency was an astounding exception to the rule; Fenard’s father had sent Marshal off with an official blessing and had unofficially begun planning the man’s funeral.

It was just bad luck that Antoine had returned to deliver the news of his party’s demise after they had been officially announced dead and the mourning for crown prince Fenard’s dear cousin had begun.

The vanquisher had been mostly unmanageable since then, although he had been instrumental in several emergencies of national or international import. The rampaging dragon that had been terrorizing Regalis was but one of the man’s many successful conquests. What good the man could have done the world if it were not for his rage against all of the monarchies for the haste of but one man!

And now, another man had cost her whatever would be left of Tom Weaver’s usefulness once he completed this other Quest that the system had issued him. If, in fact, he even managed to complete it before level eighty and the inevitable decent into madness that the impossible World Dungeon Quest would cause him.

She paced her balcony, fretting the consequences of her own hasty decision. She’d known that playing hardball with Tom Weaver through his family was a dangerous move. She hadn’t realized until Fenard’s conference how risky it would prove to her.

She checked her status once more.

She was still queen.

She exhaled a sigh of relief and resumed fretting.

It was just by chance that she was looking at the City Core when it happened. A loud “Crack!” resounded through the city, and a fracture appeared in the City Core.

Then it shattered.

She watched, stupefied, as the monolithic crystal which was the center of her city, of her kingdom, burst into shards so small that they were dangerous to inhale. She watched as the shards began releasing the Blight.

She pulled up her system menu, and for the first time in her life, the simple mental action which she had perfected in childhood did not work.

She rushed to check with her ladies-in-waiting, and they couldn’t pull up their menus either. Neither could the guards outside her room, nor anyone else who was questioned.

In the land of Velund, the cascading error that would lead to the complete collapse of the system known as Core Network Three had begun.

And Queen Galya had alienated the one person in the world who might have been able to halt its advance.