I just couldn’t stand it and gave up nearly immediately. Alchemy was somehow extra boring. Even worse, common sense forced me to rethink my skills. There would never be a better time to change things around. Mining and smithing stayed as they were. Enchanting ultimately made consumables… Breathless’ words kept coming back to me. Magical power was my most important stat, better to link it to something I intended to do a lot of – which meant also having to enjoy it. Much like with hobbies, it was hard to keep at something if you thought it sucked.

I bit the bullet. First step… nothing - just some clerical changes. Next step… a sense of deep loss. Holy shit. Everything felt gray and lifeless for a good fifteen minutes before the very bad thoughts faded away and things returned back to normal. Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad for having sunk the opportunity cost now instead of later. Enchanting switched to MS, thinly veiled vandalism to MP. This left physical speed open for leatherworking since it seemed to compliment my requirements well enough. This fulfilled all the requirements for steadily improving my own gear. Self-sufficiency ended rather high up on my list of needs, while services were widely available, opportunities for paydays were not. Moreover, money also fueled my attacks and functioned as another way of accumulating power.

I met Kris while she was readying to head out on my way to Mel’s office. She demanded a word. Nicely, her manner implied there was no refusing.

“Pay attention. You got your big win and I helped you -” She shushed my thanks, “consider it a courtesy. I expect the same from you now. Your disruptive bullshit ends here, or I’m going to start being difficult. Don’t answer, just think real hard about whether you want to keep living here or become a hermit out there. Mel has it rough enough, so from now on you’ll start being real helpful. Maybe volunteer for some service, there’s a ton of wood coming in - it needs cutting, don’t you think?”

She accepted my nod and left it at that. Then she actually left. I took her words to heart, not much choice there. It was a good thing Kris wouldn’t suffer any backtalk, it eased me into refraining from pointing out I was technically homeless already. Our ‘talk’ made me a bit worried about the next part though, asking for my pen. My whole spiel about having changed my skills around and wanting to get the low hanging fruit out of the way didn’t impress Mel, but she gave me the benefit of the doubt after profuse promises to bring the scriber back whenever reasonable.

Absolute bullshit, jumping through hoops for my own stuff. Like my things, my time also belonged, in part, to the government these days. I’d help along with managing the timber stockpile for a couple of hours every day, processing the raw lumber as it came in rather than in bulk, just like I’d been voluntold. Mel was rightly suspicious of my change in attitude but she took it at face value in the end. A few marbles separated from my crystal coin, it felt like a good time to pay my taxes – ten percent of the haul.

Which just left one order of business. Jared already told me about all the tools needed for leatherworking. Unfortunately my attentive listening hadn’t been accompanied by attentive thinking as well. The slip brought me back to Jared, who still oversaw the local crafting houses, or more accurately, gossip dens.

“Hey Jared, quick question. What the fuck is a beveler? And a skiver?” He sorted me out and we made some copies.

And so the days went by. At first my efforts remained focused on the same old practice plate, then pivoted into reforging my leather armor for added durability and so I wouldn’t get exiled by Kris for hogging the pen. My workflow was furious, my pace unbroken, only interrupted by end-of-day drinks, the occasional bit of tempting gossip, and more pub visits.

Jill and Walt had turned into regulars as well, while Jen came back on evening 47. The originally observed cliquing behavior had begun to fracture, with mostly the usual suspects turning into one big mingle – except for the nerds, those liked sticking together but they were still part of it. Barry made so much booze, drinking was basically free after you got to know him a bit.

Boss lady returned eventually to the usual fanfare, making incredible time on her own. I cornered her outside the tyrant’s office and asked after my swords while Mel patiently crossed her arms and tapped her bicep; the blades were gone with no compensation incoming. She’d found her targets in both cases and given them a piece of her mind. It turned out they were the kind of things you’d see down in the Solo’s layer, if slightly weaker. Those started at a hundred and went up without a preset limit. The one in the nearby Underway had been close to a hundred, while the armored magicat was at 77.

Wonder if she had any trouble? “So how’d it go against my nemesis?”

“Not too rough, you actually helped a little.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Did I? How?”

“It had some lingering damage, a groove on its chest and a deep one on its face. If you’d tried a little harder, you might’ve done the job yourself. Used ‘em to strike a killing blow, the armor was hard to damage. Now the loot’s mine. Interesting tidbit, material’s the same bonemetal you found but unlike the stuff in the Solo’s layer it’s of much higher quality.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

She pulled out a blue bonemetal plate and showed it off, which sparked recognition and greed in me, quickly tempered by horror. “Nope. Better luck next time, hah!”

Kristen misread me, happily bounding away to commission a new edge for her instrument of violence. I couldn’t care less about the spoils. Sending an enforcer to clear my private hunting grounds of danger was well worth the loss. It was the facial scar that drove me nuts. It resulted from a blind shot down the hallway - I hadn’t even turned around to look. No one believed me while bragging about it at the pub.

An offer of true government employ went unrequited when our turn at the farm came around. My time on the road was better spent enchanting. Our trip was exciting, hallmarked by plantsplosions and snap heart attacks. I messed around with one during a break by cutting my way to the heart, a field of black flowers, constantly destroying the filament mat as it settled, mostly interested by the viability of it. The whole thing ended up being a relatively easy fifty crystal but wasn’t worth the damage to my hearing, never mind the added risk of doing this in the dark. The experiment ruined a bunch of perfectly fine future dice too. As if tinnitus wasn’t enough, the rest had breached the barrel and sealed it once more during my absence. We spent the rest of the road trip gossiping, mostly me and Jeb, who switched shifts with someone else in favor of accompanying ours. It started raining near the end of our walk, normally the pour would’ve been a cause for mild discomfort yet my expensive cloak turned the wet stroll into a period of smug gloating amidst clattering droplets.

“Great work on the jacket man, you really outdid yourself. Not a drop’s getting through.”

Jeb wiped a waterfall off his face before replying. “My daddy always said ya gotta be prepared. Wish I’d listened to ‘im more.”

Our arrival heralded the departure of the previous shift, which disappeared with our wooden, enchanted oxen-like things and cart. I got mining out of the way first. As Barry once said, we had to let the drop-rocks cook a bit. We hadn’t been able to avoid spilling our secrets, so the previous waves had been busy there - incidentally solving a slight food shortage the village had been struggling with for some time now. Maccie D’s and some porridge output alone weren’t quite cutting it, especially with one of, if no longer the, most devoted alchemists only caring about a quick buck. Somehow doubling the grain production did the job.

I wasn’t a coward anymore, nor freshly leveled up. Now the snakedrop-rocks died to a single launch and their attacks turned into mild inconveniences. Quicksteps dodged everything easily. Tension had been replaced with boredom, resulting in some exotic maneuvers like ineffectively mindslashing the falling appendages and air-braking with swords after a jump, although my favorite was mentally twisting the knife. Hell, even meleeing them wouldn’t be too hard. Newfound bravery didn’t make me an idiot however and fencing against giants still seemed like a dumb fucking move. The experience did shed a light on a longstanding question – magical speed apparently governed how good you were at mental swordsmanship. It made no sense whatsoever and I had no plans of taking my complaints to the department responsible.

Thus, the killing became easy and cheap. Barry wanted to re-negotiate our agreement, mostly towards the end that free didn’t mean infinite. Fair enough. Much like some all-inclusive hotels of the old world, Barry discovered the arrangement worked rather egregiously in my favor.

The future looked promising indeed. The mining gave me a few more points of physical power and it influenced the force of my control skill, all but confirming flight was on the menu. Neat. And tactically advantageous. Raining down death from above held extraordinary appeal. If things went well, my self-designation might improve to fighter jet.

Less promising was our haul, having to share with other teams meant we no longer had an ideal distribution of fully matured growthstone-droppers. We counted the tendrils to find out how far along they were and used ten as a cut-off point for culling, except for the last day there where we slaughtered everything across our path. It was somewhat tedious but mostly trivial to bully the little ones to death.

The farm had been touched up a lot too, big block of wood that it now was. The interior was actually quite nice and cozy as people spent time adorning the place, carving reliefs and other such luxuries. It now comprised of a central building with many rooms, big and small. The days of camping in tents were over. The small ones were half height rectangular sleeping cubicles with extra thick walls while the big ones were used for things like the communal kitchen, a drinking room, and so forth. The storage room was even larger than those. Calling it the Fort might be more appropriate now. We only had a single guard in a tall tower on top. Wanderers weren’t an issue anymore, everyday labor forces kept the zones aggressively in check.

Then it was our turn to accept a cart handover and be off, at least that’s how it would’ve gone down. Instead my wooden horse crossed the distance at a gallop. Enchantments didn’t tire out but Christ was it uncomfortable. The plan was to make it back before day 60, impossible while traveling with the group. Not for the sake of community service, I’d earned myself an exemption this time around - some carrot to go with the stick. There just wasn’t a lot of entertainment to be had, even if the rock-slaughter was enough to lessen my jitters. The first truly notable thing since the apocalypse was going to happen and I wanted to be there for it, sharing in the experience like a soccer match.

My team was playing, sort of.