When Devon and Trey exited Ray’s burrow they found Zane waiting outside. The elusive man took one look over Trey’s blood splattered figure and Devon's red slicked spear and nodded. They didn’t need to spell out the fact that the matter was settled. Zane left without a single word.
Trey and Devon returned to Plainstown in silence. They had already worked out everything they needed for the immediate future within the solitude of Ray’s hideaway. There was no need to further discuss such matters in the open, where anything could be overheard by the overseer that stalked Trey’s every step.
The silence allowed Devon to fully contemplate what he’d learned from the fight.
Ray had gone further into specialization than anyone else Devon had yet fought. The man had been astoundingly fast, so much so that Devon wondered if he’d bothered investing a single free point in anything else. Despite his guaranteed hit effect, his attacks had all been incredibly weak.
Still, Devon couldn’t deny how frustrating it was to fight an opponent so slippery that he couldn’t even land a single attack.
I need to refine Quickstab next. I don’t ever want to be in a position again where I lose to overwhelming speed.
He felt like he could deal with almost anything else so long as he stayed within his weight class. Overwhelming strength could be avoided, and vitality and endurance could be whittled down. The only other one he wasn’t sure of was arcane. There was just too much unknown there, but since the arcane stat seemed to act as both a measure of skill and resistance then he’d at least be able to take a hit or two.
He looked over at the system notifications he’d gotten.
Task [Recruit a Powerful Piece] has been completed.
Auto-generating Tasks based on intent… Done.
Scheme Task [Setting the Stage] added.
Potential Scheme sub-Plot detected. Accept sub-Plot?
[The First Step]
Tasks: [Assume Identity], [Distribute Ill-gotten Gains]
Accept Plot.
Confirmed.
A sub-plot, huh?
Devon looked in his list of plots and schemes and saw that the sub-plot took the space of a normal plot.
So it’s meant to act as supplementary gains on the path to achieving the primary goal, huh?
Basically, the profession was set up so that the biggest goals were prioritized over anything else. If additional power needed to be accumulated on the path to achieving the overarching goal then it would generate a sub-plot to keep the user on track. Else they might feel the need to go off and create unrelated plots only to gain more strength.
Devon couldn’t help but smile slightly at how the system called Trey a ‘piece.’ When Eve had been the target of his previous plot it had called her a powerful warrior, not a piece.
Yes, that woman is certainly too much of a wild card to possibly call a piece. A piece is something that I can control, move as I desire.
It didn’t feel right to think of Trey that way, but that was the easiest way for him to visualize the world around him. Devon would be the master who moved pieces from the shadows, and Trey would be his linchpin, the one that held everything Devon could not directly touch together on the board.
When they returned to Plainstown they went about business as usual. Trey greeted people while Devon went off to maintain his gear.
On the surface nothing had changed. But that was just for today. Tomorrow everything would begin.
----------------------------------------
Lex sighed as she worked on her next project. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t particularly mind the break from her office job the tutorial presented. But after two weeks spent here she felt like she was ready to go back home.
She had no talent for fighting, so she’d been relegated to crafting. It had been rewarding at first, but she quickly realized she was falling into the same basic pattern she’d lived back on earth. Wake up, go to work, get paid, eat, sleep.
Except here there were none of the friends she’d liked to hang out with, and no family to confide in. She missed her comfy couch and bed, and wanted more than anything to go back and finish the show she’d started before being sent here.
Still, she was glad that word had been spread yesterday that the ladder killer had finally been stopped. That was the title people had given to the person who'd been killing rankers. Even if she wasn't someone who would have been targeted it felt good to know there was one less psycho out there.
She put down the piece she was working on when someone stepped in front of her stand. “Oh, Terance!” She said, happy to see him.
Terance wasn’t one of the camp’s heavy hitters by any means, yet almost everyone knew him because of how much positivity he brought to the camp. He chatted with anybody, and always put on a smile.
He was only level 17, but he frequently went out with parties much higher level than him because he played more of a support role. Almost all of the camp’s warriors knew him as a reliable companion, and nearly everyone else knew him as a trusted friend.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Hey Lex,” He said, and she felt a soft flutter in her chest at the realization that he’d remembered her name from the single time he’d bought something from her before.
“Uh, hi. What do you need?” She asked, shoving her recent project aside.
“I was actually wondering if you might want to take a look at some stuff I found,” He said, reaching into his tile.
Lex’s brain automatically switched into business mode as she looked over the things Terance put on the table. There were several different types of materials, but all of them were extremely exotic. Lex hadn’t seen any of their like before, but she innately felt that some of them were very high quality.
“Where the heck did you get this stuff? I haven’t seen anything like it…” Lex asked, bewildered. She knew that they were in a completely different world, but even still. Some of the stuff he’d pulled out of his inventory looked truly alien.
“I found this really interesting spot, but I kinda wanna keep it on the down low, okay?”
“Uh… Okay.” It was usually standard procedure around Plainstown to share information so as to better the group as a whole, but Lex supposed it was naïve to believe that everyone shared that mentality. Of course people were going to want to keep prime hunting or gathering spots to themselves.
“Still,” She said, “A lot of these things are materials I don’t really work with. You’d have much better luck taking it around.”
“Yeah, I know. But I’m not as familiar with what everyone is specializing in, so I figured I’d take it all to someone who’s more knowledgeable.”
“That’s…. fine, but-“
“I know, I know. I’m not going to ask for payment for items you can’t properly assess. So how about I come back tomorrow and you can let me know how much each thing was worth, and who I should just take it to direct next time?”
The request was honestly way outside the bounds of what she normally did, but when Terance mentioned that he’d come back tomorrow as well…
“Yeah, okay. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Great!” He said, and his smile made her have to turn around, lest he see how hard she was blushing. When she turned back, he was gone.
“Someone’s got a crush,” The vendor next to her snarkily said.
Lex spent the rest of the day going around and assessing the various materials Terance had brought her. She was surprised when everyone who saw them had an even higher opinion of their quality than she did. When they desperately asked where she’d gotten them she just smiled and said it was a secret.
Later that evening, about an hour before the suns set over the mountain, she was happily counting out the money she’d gotten from selling Terance’s materials. They’d netted what could be considered a small fortune in this world, almost 1000 talons. Of course, she’d keep maybe a hundred of that for herself since she’d had to spend her day going around and distributing the stuff, but it was a seriously great haul.
She noticed entirely too late that the street around her had gotten eerily quiet. When she looked out of her stall to see what was happening she recoiled at the figure that stood before her humble place of business.
The large and scaled body of one of the overseers stood before her, its imposing presence cowing any curiosity she’d felt just a moment before. But what truly terrified her was the rage that burned within the creature’s cold reptilian eyes. And those eyes were fixed on her.
[Overseer Kal’o Kir – Level 47]
The scene that had been burned into her mind on the first day, of the overseers mercilessly cutting people down, replayed itself in her mind. She let out a strangled cry of panic and tried to run away, to flee anywhere she could, but she found a scaled hand around her throat before she could move more than a few inches.
She was turned to face the overseer, then lifted off the ground by the hand that gripped her neck. She struggled and beat against it, wondering what she could have possibly done to deserve this. She felt tears run down her cheeks. She didn’t want to die today.
“Where…” The overseer said slowly, its speech forcibly translated in her ears by the omniversal language function. She hadn’t picked the function up herself, she had no need of it, so it must have been the overseer’s doing. “Where did you get the things you had.” It wasn’t a question, it was a demand. A demand for an answer she would have to give, or she would die.
But she didn’t understand. “What?” She gasped out.
“The things you distributed today! Where did you get them?” It shouted at her, its patience waning. All around the street everyone had stopped to witness the sight of the overseer. They stood in deathly stillness and silence, as though afraid one wrong move would turn the creature’s wrath on them.
“Terance…” It took every ounce of her meager strength to spit out the words that would save her life, “I got them from the hunter Terance…”
She crumpled to the ground, violently coughing as the overseer released its grip on her neck. For a minute she strained to regain her sense of reason. She had survived, it wasn’t going to choke her out there on that spot.
She faintly smiled at that before she realized what she’d done. The overseer had never cared about her at all, it simply wanted to know where the items she’d sold had come from.
And she’d just served Terance up on a plate.
The vendor from the stall beside hers was at her side before she even realized it, helping her to her feet. Together they followed in the wake of the overseer.
When they caught up they saw a crowd of people surrounding an open area with the overseer and Terance. Unlike how it had dealt with her, the overseer stood a small distance away from Terance. But it did have a savage looking axe drawn, and its gaze was even more focused than before.
“Where did you get the materials you gave to the one known as Lex?” The overseer’s body language told everyone who witnessed the scene that it was ready to strike if Terance made a single move.
“What? What the hell are you talking about?” Sweat poured down Terance’s face as he was forced to stay rooted to the spot, “I don’t have any idea who you’re talking about! I was sleeping all day!”
Lex felt something break inside her. The man she’d thought had seemed to be the most likable of the group was trying to pin whatever this was on her, when she didn’t have anything to do with the stuff that he had brought her.
“Hey, what’s going on here?” Trey, the one everyone looked to as the leader of Plainstown muscled his way into the clearing.
“Trey! Come on, tell this thing my guard shift ended earlier so I went to sleep! Remember, I passed off my shift to you personally! I don’t have any idea what it’s talking about!”
Trey frowned, “What the hell are you talking about? I was out surveying a potential hunting ground today.”
Terance opened his mouth to say something, but before a sound could be uttered his head was slit in two by the overseer’s axe.
[Notice]
Overseer Kal’o Kir has killed initiate Terance. Kal’o Kir’s Overseer status has been rescinded.
Several cries of panic and anger could be heard from the crowd, but Lex was deaf to the world. All she understood was that the one she’d had a crush on was killed before her eyes.
Ah, that’s right. How could I have forgotten? I’d grown so used to the presence of these overseers constantly looking over our shoulders that I forgot what they truly are. Monsters.