Thankfully Lock didn't have to stick his hand into anyone's ass that day, the insertion being a simple cut open, put in, and sew shut affair. With the help of grandfather's great wisdom they didn't have to to deal with anyone trying to bite his butt either, tying up the corpses before completing the process.

It was disquieting, watching people he'd freshly killed thrash against their bindings and foam at the mouth. One might have even thought they'd never died in the first place, were it not for their dark sclera and obvious wounds. They only had two wisps, so they'd reanimated the corpses of Potato and Angry due to them having more meat on their bones than Calm.

Grandfather, for once, did not have an answer to something. “How the hell am I supposed to know what part of humans cyclops like to eat best!” So Lock simply slathered the bodies of Wisptato and Wispangry with a mixture of poison that would inflict upon whomever consumed them several types of cancer in less than a minute or your money back.

“I probably should have done that before we put the wisps inside the bodies,” Lock commented after finishing the task, having avoided having his hand bitten several times.

“Just be glad you put some of the poison inside the body while it was still cut open,” Grandfather said and pointed at Wisptato, who was trying to eat bark off a nearby tree. “Imagine trying to feed these idiots.”

-/-

After a small break for the poison to solidify and soak into the wisp-infested bodies, they dragged the two of them to the dungeon entrance. It was a hole under the water that wasn’t letting any in and that Lock could not discern the dimensions of.

Lock dropped Wispangry into the hole, expecting for a moment for something to go wrong. But his fears were unfounded, and the body slipped into the hole as if it was being sucked inside. The same phenomena occurred with Wisptato’s body.

They'd dropped both bodies inside at once due to the fast acting nature of the poison. The cyclops would hardly fall for the same trick twice. Lock also did not want to spend too much time in the presence of what basically amounted to two zombies.

Grandfather was the first to take watch. His job was to stand next to the dungeon entrance to watch for any cyclops suddenly emerging from it. His other job was to kick down the wisps if they tried to exit the dungeon instead of going further inside.

A thump promptly resounded. “That was fast. I’d assumed they would take longer to free themselves from their bonds,” Lock commented as he pulled out the book he'd bought in Trydan. He hadn't even looked inside yet, the title Battle Alchemy simply being too tantalizing to ignore.

He sat down on a tree stump and opened it. It was old, that was for sure. It was a common misconception that old was better, which Lock didn't really understand. It just meant the book was more likely to fall apart and the language harder to comprehend. At least the language this particular book was written in was only slightly outdated.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He wasn't capable of reading uninterrupted due to having to guard the entrance every hour or so when his grandfather started to lose concentration, but he soon came to understand the general gist of what the book was. The thing holding Alchemy back from being the best non-combat profession for an adventurer was the fact that you couldn't do it while on a, well, adventure. The equipment one needed to make even a simple boil cure potion could maybe be carried around by a single person, if that person forwent things such as food, and clothing, and weapons...

Therefore you needed to buy or make the potions and substances that you thought would be useful beforehand. The problem being that no plan survived contact with the enemy, and thus Alchemy as an adventurer profession was damned to never stand on the same pedestal as cooking of all things.

Battle Alchemy, the name of the technique that the book introduced, attempted to remedy that problem. In a... highly unorthodox manner. The problem with Alchemy was definitely the equipment. Battle Alchemy attempted to solve that problem, and even further improve upon that concept by allowing for the creation of potions mid-battle. The solution was very simple: simplify potion recipes to the point where you only needed a cauldron, and then use your own stomach as that cauldron. There were some simple recipes listed in the book, a minor stamina potion and a wound cure being the only beneficial ones on the list, the other nine being poisons.

Normally, mixing substances in your own stomach to create poison of all things would be pretty dumb, but not if you had the Iron Gut skill levelled to at least three. You also needed the Stomach Storage skill to prevent the fluid from being processed and getting it back in your mouth, where you could then spew it at the enemy if it was poison, or feed it to your teammates if it wasn't. It was disgusting on so many different levels, and watching someone actually attempt it would probably give him a brain aneurysm, but Lock couldn't help but feel that there was potential in the idea.

Not in the actual potion making. That was just genuinely idiotic and unlikely to work in the heat of battle. But the simple idea of storing potions in your own stomach, where you could then use them without having to pull out a bottle to chug down or throw in the midst of battle, was quite tantalizing. Lock imagined locking blades with someone, fiery looks being exchanged, and then his enemy receiving a chunky dose of poisonous projectile vomit to the face. It was a beautiful image, suffice to say.

He only needed two skills to make it reality, Iron Gut and Stomach Storage.

Iron Gut was even available at level five of Vanguard, if one fulfilled some prerequisites. Skill trees varied with the path the owner of the Class took upon themselves, so every single one was completely individual. Similarities existed of course, because people were very much reflections of each other, but there were even cases of twins with the same Class and personality being offered two vastly different divergent skills at the same level.

Naturally the basic skills that everyone got access to were not affected by the addition of divergent ones. They were simply more possibilities. He'd known about this, naturally, it was just that none of the documented divergent skills for level five Vanguard interested him enough for him to waste time specialising himself. He'd gotten used to the idea of simply taking Shield Bash and being done with it, but now that he saw the potential of Iron Gut...

Stomach Storage wouldn't be hard to achieve either. Simply train away your gag reflex, attain control of the necessary muscles, learn how to channel some mana into them, manipulate it in harmony with your muscle control, and bam, you now had access to an inventory. Which was your stomach. Slightly inferior to a real pocket dimension, but still.

“No time like the present,” Lock muttered. He walked over to the forest edge where'd he'd seen a red mushroom while hiding from the incoming bandits, picked it up, and popped it into his mouth raw.

The Iron Gut skill was attainable by eating increasingly disgusting, poisonous, and corrosive stuff for a few years and surviving, but he would simply start on that path to get the skill offered to him as he reached level five in Vanguard. It was a common theme for skills offered with level advancement to be perfectly attainable on their own; they just usually took a lot more time to develop that way.