The party walked through the broken gate, the two guards doing or saying nothing to stop them. Players scampered around the town clearing rubble and carrying the corpses of monsters towards the center and ones of players outside the town. All of the monsters were dragonkind; kobolds, drakes, and a rare tier winged humanoid type Shin hadn’t encountered called dragonewts.
Charred marks painted the town, most often next to burnt sections of buildings, few remaining undamaged. The wall fared even worse. Much of the battlements were destroyed, the walls proper full of holes and craters, less so on the interior that what they saw entering, but the mountain side wall had a large destroyed section split right down the middle.
Donny spotted a familiar face as they all inspected the state of things. “Oi, Freckles.”
A hay blond freckled young man startled as he looked up from his stone bench seat. “Oh, you guys came back.” He said, seeming a little relieved.
“What happened?”
The man’s expression turned a bit solemn. “Monsters came out of the dungeon once it turned night. They just… swarmed. Attacking everything and everyone. All of them, even the boss. They just kept fighting…”
“Town’s looking sparse.”
“...the town lord and his people started fighting first but they soon forced every player to fight too. Killed anyone who refused. A lot of us died… Some parties ran away during it, more left after… I survived because I was able to upgrade my skill, thanks to you.” His voice perked up at the last sentence.
“Best keep doing that, then.” Donny said as he walked on.
“Hang in there, Freckles.” Yen said somewhat indifferently as she followed.
The young man turned his head to them but couldn’t find the words he wanted to say. He turned to notice Shin smiling calmly beside him, his body language jolting more on edge and respectful. Shin silently handed him an uncommon tier bauble and moved on without a word.
The four walked straight to the Inscription store where Grenda sat in her usual seat by the counter, her building better than others. Shin showed no surprise, having already scouted the town before the party returned.
“You left town at the right time, boy.” Blunt words but spoken without sarcasm. “I don’t suppose…”
“I raised Control. 195.”
“Better than nothing. Best I tell you about the different paths then.”
“Goblin.” A voice from the side interrupted her, a greater peasant man in decent gear. “Chato wants to talk.”
The party looked up to the part of the wall the man gestured at with his head. Chato stood surrounded by a dozen guards, looking towards the mountain. Shin headed off without a word and without heed of whatever the messenger had intended, and the party followed. Over to the wall and up the stone stairs built into sides, the four of approached the solemn town lord, who turned and a smile found his face.
“Just the guy I wanted to see. My job?”
“Done.”
“Okay. Great. Then we can, negotiate man to man. You see all, this shit.” He gestured around the town. “Happens every five days. Next time is the end of the tenth. But… If someone clears the dungeon,” He clapped. “No big fucking battle. For those five days at least.”
“You want us to clear it.” Donny spoke up.
“Yes. Yes. And since we are now friends, I give you the, friendly offer. 200 gold. Every five days, you get me.” Yen opened her mouth but Chato cut her off. “Ah, ah, ah, ah, no haggling shit, I don’t do bargaining.”
“Generally what a negotiation is, mate.”
Chato smiled at Donny and started laughing, thoroughly amused as he started to set his posture right again. “200 is what, five, ten days busting your asses out in the wild? From my board.” He quieted down as he looked at them, his expression subtly growing a bit more serious.
“I did say we were friends, didn’t I say we were friends?” He asked behind him.
“You did, boss.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re right, I was being a bad friend. 250 gold. Final offer.”
“Okay.” Shin agreed.
Chato clapped his hands again, this time in a show of content. “Okay. From now own, you don’t pay the gate toll. My people don’t give you problems, you don’t give me problems, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Chato laughed. “I like working with you, Goblin, it’s easy.” Chato starts to walk away in direction of the large mansion in the center, looking back with a point. “The tenth. Remember.”
Shin and Donny made no sign of moving so the other two didn’t until the eccentric gang lord left fully.
“Didn’t we just agree not to do dangerous shit right now?”
“I tried it the first day. You’ll be fine after 5 days.”
“Like we were fine with the shugs?”
Shin adjusted his promise. “Probably.”
Yen sighed. “Well, we’ll be lesser lord by then, I guess. So I guess training now.”
“Inscription.” Shin informed her.
“...I’m not standing out in the open without you as a deterrent.”
Shin thought for a moment. “Get a profession. 25 points for reaching novice.”
“More shit you neglected to tell us!” Yen chastised. “What else, get everything out now.”
“Monster Slayer. Apostle Slayer. Dungeon Conqueror. Player Slayer. Boss Slayer. Dungeon Pioneer.”
“Apostle?”
“Players with blessings from gods.”
“What?!” Yen became the most animated she had so far. “How do you get one, what do they give you?”
“They sent an invite. You meet with them and decide if you want to accept. 30% boost to all stats.”
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
Yen started to yell then stopped herself. “That’s better actually. Explains why your stats don’t make sense.” She thought for a moment then looked over at Kamala. “You have one, too?”
“No.”
“You didn’t get an invite?” Shin asked, his tone unchanged but somehow the complimentary surprise was easy to note.
“I refused.”
Shin had a look about him like that made sense. “You’ll get sent more. Don’t pick any with less than a greater blessing. Some of them give messages with the invites.” He added.
“No confidence for the commoners?” Yen pressed.
“No?” Shin answered, confused with her assertion. “You’ll get one.”
Yen’s face flustered, a little embarrassed over being petty, and changed the topic. “Okay, so we go work on professions until you finished up. Train at the end of the day?”
“Yeah.” Shin jumped down the wall and blurred away to the inscription store.
Donny started down the stairs. “Any ideas what you’re gonna take?”
“Need to look around first.”
“No.”
---
Shin appeared by the side door and casually entered as though it was his own home. Grenda glanced over from her chair. “All done?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright. Might as well start from the beginning.” The old gnome turned in her seat to face Shin directly. “When the Tower was spoken into being, those Words of Creation became embedded in the very laws within these walls. And accompanying those spoken words came runes, written sigils that held a part of that power in silence. Runeforging carries the weight and power of this natural world. Inscription was created after. What we use are glyphs. Symbols that guide the flow of mana to alter its qualities. Similar to skills. You put mana in and something happens. Just with inscription you can see the rules that make it work. And unlike runes, it’s not constrained to an unchanging set of words. Understand what this means?”
“No.”
“Glyphs are limitless. That said, even the greatest sage gods can’t do anything without figuring out the right pattern. Limitless potential means the journey never ends. You take this craft as far as you can go with limitless ways to fail.” Grenda paused for a moment, her stare a bit serious. “You the type that wants to finish things, boy?”
“No.” He spoke exactly as he had before but a subtle weight lingered from Shin’s words.
“Good. Then we can get started proper. Let’s get the basics out of the way. There’s three branches of this craft, talismans, scrolls, and crests. There’s more to talismans than you’ve worked with before but you should get the gist of it by now. Scrolls are stored skills, magic specifically, not martial arts. Anyone can use a spell scroll but it costs three times the normal mana and takes longer to cast, so anyone with half a brain won’t rely on them unless your desperate. Fundamentally similar to talismans, but more difficult and you actually need someone with the spell in question to imbue it.”
Grenda took a puff her her pipe.
“Crests are different. Unorthodox glyphs that you paint onto something, much like runic brands, ‘cept crests only work on living creatures and disappear after use. There’s a lot you can do with crests, grant resistances, enhance the body, change its qualities, even alter the skills you use but its the most complicated of the three and takes quite a bit of time. Not something you can do on the fly when you need it. Also, like talismans, crests can only be used by scribes, unless someone has skill for it or a…” Something made her silent and blank faced for a moment. “Anyways, takes a hell of a lot of time to progress down just one branch of inscription. There’s overlap, sure, but not as much as you’d think. So which one do you want to focus on?”
“Talismans and Crests.”
“You know how to count, boy…?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Let’s start with talismans, a bit different than you’ve done before.”
Grenda drew a perfect square on a slip of paper with incredible deftness, drew symbols around it and ends with a flourished dot within the square. The talisman popped with a puff of smoke and a small featureless paper golem took its place, the dotted square on its face.
“Origami. Makes for decent laborers and not much else.” She jabbed it with the end of her pipe and the paper golem burst back into a damaged talisman. “No souls, no personality, and only enough intelligence to carry out simple tasks. Although this gets better at higher tiers.”
“Shikigami?” Shin asked.
“That’s two steps up from where you are now. No point even thinking about it.” Grenda tapped out the ash from her pipe. “Need another display?”
“No.”
“Material is all there in the back. Give me twenty exactly like that one and we’ll move on.”
---
Yen leaned off the counter of the Jewelcrafter’s store and walked off, the other two following.
“No good?”
“Trinkets don’t mean anything unless you enchant them, which is a different thing.”
“Gonna get that instead, then?”
“Don’t know… Doesn’t really matter as long as I get the points. Fucking daredevil going into a rare tier dungeon…”
Donny glanced over. “How long’ve you been with him?”
“Day five.”
“He any stronger than back then?”
“No really.” Yen answered before thinking about it. “I guess. Can’t really tell.”
“Then we really need to get stronger if the dungeon gave him trouble. Least enough to take on normal lord rares.”
Kamala wandered off without a word, talked a bit with a storekeeper, then entered the Apothecary.
“Guess she found hers.”
Yen didn’t respond but instead had already run over to a different store. Badly damaged but still standing, she stared at the clothes behind the glass window, some burned but captivated her attention all the same. She walked to the counter of a pompous looking blond haired elf.
“Tailoring right? Can it make magic clothes without enchanting?”
The elf looked over lazily. “Dexterity?” He asked with a bored flamboyant tone.
“14.” Yen asked, slightly confused.
The elf sighed. “Find something else, your clumsy ogre fingers won’t make anything of value.”
“Wha?!” Yen was caught off guard by the insult. “Look here, I’m paying so fucking teach me!”
The elf scowled. “One silver a-”
Yen slammed a bag of eight on the counter and walked through the door. The elf rose to his feet with a sigh. “Fingers and grace.” He sarcastically remarked to an increasingly annoyed mage determined to shove those words back in his face.
Seeing that Donny headed off on his own, no particular craft in mind. He simply wanted the easiest thing to practice in between training. He walked by the open smithy, forge blazing with a few players banging away at lumps of metal, glowing orange from the heat.
“What do you need for this?” He walked over to a half scaled man with horns and eyes like a dragon.
“Strength and Control, some dexterity.” A gruff response returned with little fanfare.
Donny handed him a bag. “Guess I’ll do this then.”
---
A mana veiled Shin sat at the desk with a content slight smile, surrounded by paper golems ambling around. Some stood still glancing around lost, others bumped into each other and picked themselves up to continue marching aimlessly. Grenda walked over and scanned over Shin’s work. Her hand blurred and the end of her pipe claimed the lives of numerous defenseless paper golems, leaving only nine remaining.
“Precision is key.”
Shin showed no concern for the failed origami, starting another attempt before a knock at the door brought the three others of the party inside.
“Stuck up bastard elf…” Yen grumbled.
“Bout time to train, yeah?”
“Mm.” Shin hadn’t progressed as much as he would have liked but getting them stronger was more important right now. His gaze stopped on Kamala, as he handed her a bracelet.
“...Lesser Fire Resistance?”
“Kinda limited, don’t you think?” Yen questioned.
“It’s for the dungeon. Drakes gives off a lot of heat so everyone needs resistance for that.”
“Is holding back important information your hobby?” Yen asked him, half serious.
“No. I have an item for that for you. We can buy one for you” He looked at Donny then back at her.
Yen flinched, her expression awkward and a bit guilty “...I have one already.”
Shin tilted his head for a few moments before remembering when they first met. “Liar.”
“Shutup. We weren’t in a party yet.” Most of the guiltiness replaced with justification. “What’s the dungeon like?”
“Traps and kobolds. Then drakes. Didn’t go far.”
“Regulars won’t matter that much when we go, how much superiors and elite mobs?”
“One variant. We only fought about 20.” Shin answered.
“That what you call the 25% or 50% mobs?”
“25.”
“We called ‘em greats and lords.”
“Shutup." Yen curtly told the new member of their party, whose intentions in this debate was to mess around, she was fairly certain. "We should decide on one set to keep things simple.”
“It’s variants and elites.” Grenda said from her chair in a bored tone.
Yen looked over and then at Shin, whose natural casual face somehow seemed like gloating, annoyance finding hers. “Fine. And we should use low, mid, and high for the subranks. It’s faster.”
“Sounds good.”
“Mm.”
“Okay then. Let’s go before we lose all the light.”
The party took their leave, heading over to their plot of land to find it occupied by a large squared wall about 10 feet tall. Through the entrance they could see a wide open area covered with coarse arena sand having replaced the dirt they were used to. Roped wooden poles and training dummies planted into the ground at the sides. Shin held out a hand to the entrance and a barrier prevented him from entering. He looked over at the sign above labeled ‘Training Grounds’ and then at the board at the side of the open gateway. 5 silver an hour for entry and with it came doubled mana and stamina recovery rate. Shin put a gold coin on the small counter and turned to the others as it disappeared.
“We’re living here now.”