As Degritone flew over the countryside, he contemplated the system. Why does it even use Mana and Stamina when it's already built on the use of Stavch? Is it not a defense mechanism for the invasions? It obviously acknowledges the invasions, but is that not its primary purpose? Is it like Sozoryoku was in the RP, a way to find people who are geared toward using Stavch?
When Degritone finally saw some farmland, he slowed down so he wouldn't make noise as he approached. It was currently night, but he still wanted to be careful. He was somewhat confused why farms existed in the first place, given the fact that just 60 Endurance removed the need to eat, and why he hadn't seen anyone yet, considering they didn't need to sleep. They could be limiting system usage somehow, like... Jaquelyn? asked me before, if I remember correctly, Degritone thought.
He took a few minutes to construct a system that would detect light coming into him from all angles and replicate it on the opposite side of him so he'd effectively be invisible and kept it active while he gently floated over to the nearest building. Checking around its outside, he found no windows, so resorted to his Stavch through sight to see if there were any halflings inside.
It took him a bit to properly scan through the what he had now definitely determined to be a barn, given that air and light were also non-static Stavch, but he did pick out around 50 10-year-old-sized bodies inside, each with a strange Stavch flow on their left wrist. Either there are many times as many halflings as humans, or the person who owns this barn is rich, he thought. He then went to the door and very slowly rolled it open before shining a dim light inside to be able to see.
There were, in fact, many halflings. However, with his actual sight, he could see they were definitely treated badly. Not enough that they'd die, but many had bruises, some had cuts on their hands and/or feet, and all of them seemed mildly malnourished. On each of their wrists was a dark band of some sort. Probably the slave crest or whatever to call it, Degritone thought.
Degritone realized at this moment that he should have looked at some bread or some other food in order to know how to make some. He walked in, dropped his invisibility, and walked over to the nearest female halfling. A lump formed in his throat looking at her, but now that he was this close to everyone, his Revitalizing Aura and Being of Vitality Bloody Aura rapidly repaired all the physical damage to every halfling here.
After creating a box of perfectly still air around him and the loli he was now standing over, he tried gently waking her up. She woke up with a fright and screamed when she saw him. He sat down and held his hands up, confident in his silencing of her scream to the outside world. She tried to back away, but the frozen air would not let her through. She screamed until her lungs were empty, while Degritone sadly sat there, waiting for her to calm down.
After she stopped screaming, Degritone said, "I am very sorry to have frightened you, but I felt it would be dangerous for me to wait until morning. I have a couple questions to ask. Is that ok with you?"
She carefully nodded a couple times.
He held out a hand toward her with his pointer and pinky fingers held out. She recoiled and he felt sadness and extreme anger, but he held the latter off until it wouldn't further scare the loli in front of him.
"I know it might be scary, but I'm uncertain as to the extent of the magic in your slave system here, so I want to at least implement some way of potentially getting around its magic, assuming your owner," he said with venom, "has made it so you can't say things. Please grab my finger if you do," he wiggled his pinky finger, "not," he wiggled his pointer finger, "understand what I just tried to do."
After thinking for a bit and slowly working up her courage, she hesitantly reached out and grabbed his pinky finger for a fraction of a second before rapidly retracting her arm.
Nodding, Degritone said, "Good. Your owner does," a wiggle of his pinky finger, "not," a wiggle of his pointer finger, "physically attack you, correct?"
She nodded at the question, but carefully reached out and grabbed his pinky finger.
"Killing your owner would," pinky, "not," pointer, "kill any slaves he owns, correct?"
She grabbed his pointer finger.
"You do," pinky, "not," pointer, "wish to be free."
She shakily grabbed his pinky.
"Killing your owner would," pinky, "not," pointer, "immediately set you free."
She grabbed his pointer finger.
"Killing your owner would," pinky, "not," pointer, "transfer your ownership to me."
She thought for a second before grabbing his unextended middle and ring fingers.
"You're unsure?"
She nodded.
"Your owner does," pinky, "not," pointer, "have a small female relative or acquaintance that would be sad to see them gone."
She thought quite hard for a few seconds before grabbing his pointer finger.
"You are," pinky, "not," pointer, "allowed to speak."
She sadly grabbed his pointer finger.
"Any orders given to you by your previous owner would," pinky, "not," pointer, "disappear upon their death."
She grabbed his pinky finger and looked him in the eyes.
He nodded and created a thin rod of copper. Holding it out to her, he said, "Will you please draw a map leading to all locations you know of that contain other slaves in this town?"
She nodded resolutely as she took it and did so. It was quite crude, but he didn't comment on that fact.
After memorizing the map, he said, "Thank you. I am very sorry for waking you up, and more sorry for scaring you. I should be seeing you again soon, probably in the morning if all goes well."
She nodded and handed the copper rod back, which he promptly turned back into static Stavch. "You are," pinky, "not," pointer, "willing to let me touch your head."
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
She froze and slowly reached out to grab his pointer finger before cowering down. He sighed in sadness and said, "I am sorry. Then, goodbye. Please get a good rest." He dropped the silence and took a while to reconstruct his invisibility before quietly leaving. He then repeated this for each and every building in the town. By the time he'd finished, it was getting noticeably brighter and he'd learned there were three families with young daughters that spread out to make roughly half the town effectively unkillable.
And that was just what the probably highly uninformed loli slaves knew. He decided to play it safe and just find a way to remove the slave crest and only kill those running the world. He hoped he'd figure out cloakium before he got noticed. For now, he worked on constructing a long-distance messaging system that would simply carry his voice to all the lolis he'd contacted. He didn't trust there to not be a way to check friend lists and messages.
Once day had arrived, he finished the construction and said to every loli he'd contacted, "I am sorry. It seems I won't be able to kill your owners. I will work on a way to remove your slave crests. I am very sorry for getting your hopes up. It causes me physical pain for me to not be able to kill your abusers, but I cannot risk yet more pain coming from my actions."
As he finished his message, he noticed his hands were smoldering. They weren't in pain and checking his Health, he saw whatever had happened did zero damage to him, but his hands were extremely disfigured and charred like meat that's been over a fire too long. He flew away from the town, and as he did, the damage began slowly spreading.
By the time he got far enough away to be comfortable with dropping some arms without anyone finding them, his entire forearm had been affected. He cut them off and with a couple Revitalizes, they regrew normally. Guess that's why it doesn't use raw Stavch for everything. I don't remember the RP's energy being harmful, but this one does work differently.
It must be related to the construction of Stavch structures, as if it weren't, any two Stavch flows would be harmful to the other. Or it's something else entirely, but I doubt that, since it sped up after I started flying. I'd bet my balls it doesn't happen to pure, solid Stavch, just to matter, as otherwise, there would be no way for an omniverse hopper to exist. I highly doubt I'm wrong about the source of invasions.
He shrugged and tried to remember the Stavch flows in a slave crest and realized he should have made a permanent memory packet of them. So, even as his fingers began to once again be burned by constructing Stavch, he flew back to town while invisible and looked at the slave crest, making it a permanent memory packet, and flew back out of town.
Delving deeper into the flows, he found they were a mix of a few structures he already knew, namely the zombie structure and many of the mood-altering structures, with quite a few he didn't know. The fact that the mood-altering structures could be consistently used to create what was effectively mind control was interesting to Degritone, as it either meant the people here were more advanced with Stavch than the knowledge packet given to Degritone or the people who'd made the system figured it out themselves and these people were just using an image to do it.
Degritone was betting on, and hoping for, the latter as he deciphered the exact structure that made it. All of the Stavch-settling structures he knew only worked on specific Stavch flows, rather than purely generic ones, so he'd have to figure out a way to stop the flows that made up the slave crest. He figured that, if he could even just figure out the way to smooth the zombie structure's flows, the slave crest would stop working.
So, he captured a small animal from nearby, put the slave crest on it, and linked it to himself. He ordered it to sit and not move. It immediately complied. He tried taking control of the slave crest with a separate control structure, but it was statically linked to himself. Sighing, he got to work figuring out the exact structure required to negate a zombie structure.
Every few minutes, he'd have to cut off and regrow his arms to stop the Stavch corruption from spreading too far. By nightfall, he had massive piles of corrupted arms to each of his sides and one free squirrel. The majority of the crest was still on the squirrel, but it seemed unaffected by the mood-altering flows that weren't touching its brain.
He reapplied it and worked on figuring out the perfect material for it. Out of all the materials Degritone knew to make, it was pure uranium-238 that he'd found to be most effective, generating a baseball-sized effect for a structure with a volume of 25000 cubic feet. He created the structure out of physical uranium-238, cutting off three more arms in the process.
The speed at which the corruption was spreading seemed to be growing as he continued to fight the symptoms, rather than the cause. Degritone didn't care, as it was still manageable and he had lolis to save. Once it was fully constructed, he tested it on his test squirrel, and it worked. Every time he reapplied the slave crest, moving it through the area of effect of the structure caused the zombie portion to disappear.
By the time he was done verifying the physical structure's usefulness, the entirety of his hands would get corrupted per application of the slave crest. So, now nearly the middle of the night, he destroyed all his corrupted arms before going back to the town where he removed the zombie portion of the slave crests of every slave in town, then silently flew them all back to the permanent slave crest remover.
All the while, his self-mutilation was in full view of everyone. He spent the next few hours making proper houses and beds in the middle of the woods for them to use. One of the less grateful of the bunch asked him, "And how are we supposed to get food, exactly?"
Degritone thought for a while before responding, "Do any of you know where I can find some bread back in town?"
One of the lolis responded, "I do."
"Would you be willing to lead me there, or at the very least tell me which house it was?"
She shrunk when he mentioned going back to the town, but said, "I can tell y-you which house it is."
He grimaced at her shrinking back and responded, "Alright. Please do so, and I'll be back in a bit, then make something to fix the food issue."
Ten arms on the way there and back and he had memorized the molecular structure of bread. Once he got back, he got to work creating two more permanent structures: One to create bread and one to create water. The ex-slaves that watched him directly grimaced every time he removed one of his arms. He'd decided to just directly delete them with Stavch constructs, rather than remove them then do so.
He was interrupted half way through the bread construct by one of the lolis he'd first contacted coming up and pulling on his shirt. She said, "Please stop hurting yourself for us. You already freed us. Most of us agree that's enough."
Degritone immediately stopped and gently said, "Can I at least finish the bread and water structures before I begin following that order?"
"Does it hurt, when your arms get damaged like that, or when you remove them?"
"No, Stavch corruption is painless. Cutting them off does hurt, but just deleting them does not. Not using Stavch will make freeing every other slave on the planet much harder..."
"You don't need to sacrifice yourselves for us. But, if it's not painful, then yes, it would be appreciated if you could secure our food and water sources for us. It's still uncomfortable seeing our savior damaging themselves for us lowly slaves, though."
He turned and knelt down to her eye level after that before gently saying, "Look, I am the Lolicoknight. I can't just leave lolis like yourself suffering, or even uncomfortable. These homes are the best I can do at the moment, and I'm sorry I can't do any better, but still. I will stop damaging myself after these last two structures, ok? If it makes you uncomfortable to watch me work, then please don't watch."
She met his gaze and said, "If you're willing to hurt yourself for us, we can deal with being unsettled in order to properly honor your work."
He let out a single exhale of a laugh and said, "There's no need for that. All I want is for every loli everywhere to experience no negative emotions. I don't care about being 'honored' or whatever. I just want you safe and happy."
She slightly tilter her head forward and responded, "And we want to make sure to never forget our savior."
He weakly shrugged and sadly said, "Do as you wish," before getting back to work.
Three hours and over one hundred pairs of arms later, he'd completed both the permanent bread structure and the permanent water structure. Turning to look at the gathered crowd, he said, "I don't ask for anything in return for this, though I will probably return with other freed slaves later, since I know this place has guaranteed food and water. When I do so, please don't push them away. That will- is not repayment for me saving you, that is simply a request from a simple man to a community."
"Just don't hurt yourself like that again," he heard from somewhere in the crowd before the air around him was smothered in so many similar sentiments that he couldn't make them all out.
After they died down, he said, "I'll make sure not to. I hope to see you all in good, or at least much better, health later." Before a response could be made, he dashed off into the woods in search of the next town.