Chapter 6

While the others delved his dungeon without his direct participation, Tom was not completely idle. There were dozens of things which consumed his time.

He was constantly checking on his network, causing the dungeons which had been mined to regrow their damaged sections and otherwise keeping apprised of their situations.

He read up on his Class. Anaxis, the spy from Kortia who had accompanied his parents on their journey south, had given Tom a number of tomes on the Controller Class when they had first met. Tom had read those extensively, as well as the handful of books on the same subject matter which King Fenard provided when he reached Weaver manner.

He noticed a key flaw in the subject matter, however. They both focused extensively on the use of Sunder in conjunction with Collaboration. After his conversation with the gestalt spirit, whom Tom was naming Alpha, Tom was convinced that this was a terrible mistake. One which was, perhaps, responsible for the situation in Velund.

According to Alpha, Tom would never learn Sunder. He didn’t see a downside to this, as while it meant that he couldn’t create a village or town without a dungeon, his dungeons themselves were valuable thanks to his Seed ability. The settlements that he would found once he was higher level would require significantly higher level guards and adventurers to keep the village safe from outbreaks, but the proceeds of mining the dungeon would subsidize those efforts.

Besides, the traditional method of creating a single outlet core hadn’t really solved the problem to begin with. Tilluth village, for example, had been forced to clear the subsidiary dungeon on a regular basis to prevent outbreaks, and Caseville had been the same with the Zombie dungeon that Tom had accidentally destroyed. Putting the dungeon elsewhere didn’t, in Tom’s opinion, increase the safety of the settlement. It only moved the problem around.

Another task which kept Tom occupied was learning to defend himself.

Tom was not a fighter. He lacked the strength, speed, or reflexes of the Warrior or Rogue classes. He was no faster or stronger than a commoner his level. He did have very clever hands, thanks to his training when he was younger in attempts to unlock the Weaver class, like his father. So he adopted a weapon which would make use of his relatively high dexterity: the crossbow.

The actual weapon had been picked out for him by Antoine while they were in Caseville. It was a smaller version than the full-sized crossbow that the knights and the adults in the guards trained with, more portable and easier to load. It followed a design that had been introduced two centuries prior by a summoned hero from Earth, and it utilized a crank in the reloading process, allowing for Tom to operate it despite lacking his adult strength quite yet.

He spent hours practicing his weapon of choice while the others were delving the dungeon. He would have joined them, but until he was proficient he was too worried about missing a monster and hitting his friends by mistake. Additionally, the Controller Class siphoned experience from cores rather than gaining it from killing monsters, so killing the monsters inside the dungeon wouldn’t have increased his leveling rate.

But in order to claim wild cores, he would have to delve into dungeons with his friends, protectors, and his controlled monsters. He was tired of being useless and standing in the back until the fighting was over. He wasn’t certain how much help his crossbow would be, but he was determined to make the effort.

And he became quite proficient. He learned to reload and maintain his weapon quite quickly, and while he wasn’t a perfect marskman, he was fairly certain that he could avoid hitting his friends by mistake.

Not that he would be firing at the enemy while they were in melee with his friends, of course. He would be hanging in back with Jessica and Emil and attempting to provide support from the rear. He believed that doing so, in addition to the forces he provided in the form of his Claimed monsters, would at last make him feel like a valuable part of the team when it came time to delve again.

It was certainly better than standing around and feeling foolish.

Tom received a trickle of experience from his friends Delving Alpha dungeon, but not as much as he’d received before the experience from the other dungeons in his network had plateaued. He reached level twenty five as one by one his friends reached level twenty.

Emil, as the first to reach level twenty, received a skill that allowed him to imprint rituals into his own skin. While these rituals were inert, they could serve as a reference for his level one skill which allowed him to duplicate rituals with his mana.

Sevin was close behind, receiving an upgrade to Empower Weapon, a skill which allowed him to spend stamina to increase the damage of his weapon. Stamina, at least as far as Warriors and Rogues were concerned, was more than simply the ability to keep moving, but a unique force generated by the body which could be exploited for certain attacks. When a Warrior gained proficiency in a weapon, they gained the ability to imbue that weapon with their internal energy and enhance its efficiency.

The result was that an Empowered blow from his spear, or the axe that he kept slung across his back as a backup weapon, was more damaging than simple physics would imply. The impact released the stored Stamina into the target, causing damage that varied from reverberation to explosive damage in addition to increasing the penetration of the blade.

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Jessica was the next to hit level twenty, and she was very excited to receive a new element to her Sorceress repertoire. Specifically, she received light magic through a skill named Mirage. While she was disappointed that the skill did not allow her to create lasers with her magic, it complimented her Sonic Sovereignty skill perfectly.

Unfortunately her control over her light magic was at its beginning stage and she wasn’t able to establish illusions with much detail. General shapes and forms were her present limit. Additionally, all forms of her magic required her to actually be able to see her target, including her illusions. She could not make an illusory figure walk down the hall while she sat in a completely different room. She could make a sound come from a corner of a room, but not from another room entirely unless it was through an open door.

She was quite pleased with her new skill and dedicated significant effort into crafting believable illusions after receiving it.

Grant was next to reach the benchmark of level twenty, receiving a skill called Flicker, which allowed him to step through space the same way he was able to reach through it previously. The result was a massive increase to his mobility. And lethality, since in melee combat those two things go hand in hand.

Rory gained at level ten the ability to spend his stamina on his own defense, enhancing both his skin and any armor that he wore. Considering that he had awoken as a Shieldbearer, he was in the process of being fitted for a set of plate armor. He was looking forward to becoming an immovable bulwark for the team. His level twenty skill was the same as Sevin’s, an increase to his ability to enhance his weapon with Stamina.

As for Rowena, she did not reach level twenty. Her level ten skill allowed her to spend stamina to increase her speed and reaction time significantly, but Tom decided that it was time to proceed on with his quest before she had caught up to the others.

She was a little frustrated, especially since, because they were courting, she couldn’t accompany him on the next step of his quest. While they had had several official dates, all of their interactions had been in the public areas of Weaver Estate and/or under the supervision of a chaperone. Traveling with Tom on his quest, even in the company of the rest of the party, would not be proper.

So it was after spending more than a week at Weaver Estate, she returned to the care of her uncle in the capital. King Fenard barely noticed her arrival, except for the letter that she delivered from Tom. He found this letter most troublesome.

Tom did not detail his encounter with Alpha, but he indicated that he had a feeling that a second kingdom would begin facing the same trouble that Velund was currently experiencing within the year. Fenard treated the information with serious consideration, as the instincts of a Controller on matters related to Cores was not to be overlooked. He desperately hoped that the boy was wrong, however.

Matters in Velund were not ideal. Another three cities had fallen, and an unknown number of smaller towns, villages, and settlements were likewise being affected. The hopes that the spread of the blight would be contained or restricted to a certain area of the country were diminishing with every report from the spies and the official contacts that Yecha and Fenard had in Velund.

Refugee trains had already left for Petosh and Welsius. Some were even braving the great central blight to travel to Loracai, believing that the empty but miasmatic wasteland was safer than traveling through the wilds, and no worse than remaining in place.

Queen Galya, after having sent men to kidnap Tom’s family, had the nerve to demand through official channels that Tom be sent immediately to Velund to attempt to avert the crisis before the entire nation was lost. The gall of the woman! It was true that the kidnapping attempt had been foiled before the Weavers had ever learned of it by Anaxis – another fact which irked both Yecha and Fenard, as Anaxis was proving himself too adept at endearing himself to the Weaver family – and had thus never officially happened. But the intention had been there, even if it had been hidden behind a veil of plausible deniability.

At the same time, Fenard couldn’t fault her for grabbing at what flotsam she could as her nation sunk all around her. According to the reports he was receiving, even the system itself was faltering.

Other reports indicated that Galya was conscripting men and women by the tens of thousands. Officially this was to aid the in the evacuation of the blighted area, but if that was truly the case then there was no need to arm the conscripts, as Yecha’s reports indicated was occurring.

In response, Fenard had no choice but to order a buildup of his own forces near the border of the wilds between Welsius and Velund, as well as in the coastal cities along the eastern seashore. While war was not common in this world, Fenard was not so foolish as to assume that Galya would not attempt to take the habitable land of her neighbors to reclaim what she was losing to the blight.

He did not trouble Tom with all of these details, however. Tom was on a Quest. The urgency of that quest might, in fact, have something to do with the spreading of blight in Velund, and so he could only encourage the lad to continue it.

After Rowena had returned to the capital, Tom proceeded to level Alpha Core to level twenty five. While Alpha had not been sedentary long enough to begin regenerating health by itself, it gained an unexpected two extra points on top of the twenty points that Tom had been expecting it to gain from the process, increasing from three of twenty five HP to twenty five of thirty HP, after also gaining five points to its maximum. He leveled it once more, and at level twenty-six it was just one point short of its thirty-one HP maximum. It seems that at some point leveling had begun granting five points per level instead of the four he had expected it to grant.

After much nervous consideration, Tom decided to attempt to use the Tilluth Command Core to Link Tilluth into his network as well. As expected, the command core itself shattered, and his network suffered a significant amount of damage in attempting to Link the Tilluth, which was level fifty-nine, to the nascent network.

Alpha core, survived, but was driven back down to two HP. Tom exhaled a sigh of relief. He had truly taken a gamble with that move. The other cores in his network were likewise significantly damaged. Surprisingly, Tilluth’s core took more damage than any of lower leveled cores in Tom’s network, going down to twenty of sixty-four HP.

“Sorry Alpha,” Tom said to the Core and the Gestalt itself, although he wasn’t certain either was listening to him. “I’ll try not to risk you like that again.”

He proceeded to level Alpha once more to recover the damage he had just caused. He stopped at level thirty one, reluctant to push things further than that as he still intended to use Alpha Core to create training a training for his friends. This left him with a level thirty one dungeon with twenty-seven of thirty six health.

Satisfied with his efforts, Tom decided announced to the party, and to Lo, the other Korgoath, and his minitaurs, that they would be departing to begin the next stage of the quest the next day, after he had taken care of a few more details.