Chapter 123: 123: Hamfisted Exposition

In the year 6887, A pair of Harbingers established the Order of the Seeking Hand and seeded its dogma across the universe in a vain attempt to provide some small comfort and camaraderie to the Ravagers. Those souls, divorced from their own people would forever suffer, never return to their homes, even when the Great Front has passed them by. Why should they be without belonging for all eternity?

So we try to pluck out the exceptional, as a soul too big for its container shows in many ways. We test them, in the hopes that we can find our lost brothers, sisters, leaders, friends, again.

…I regret the many lower life forms that are sacrificed to single out even one Ravager, but I would slay every breathing creature across the face of thousands of worlds if it meant I could speak to my Jeneveve again.

Even for these lower life forms, there is a benefit to carrying on these practices. A Ravager, once located, will become a nexus of change. The anger seated deep down in their souls will compel them to cast down oppressors –

“Did he really believe this shit?” Calvin asked, glancing up at Murak, who was industriously filling and signing documents like his life depended on it: which it did.

“He really did.” Murak said without looking up, his tongue caught in the side of his mouth as his eyes scanned between ledgers, reading them at a rate that Calvin would have described as inhuman…if he didn’t know the man was a Legend.

A Legendary Banker.

The gnarled old man obviously had no combat skills, Exclusively focusing on ones that allowed him to make more money. He’d focused on his merchant Skills to the exclusion of all else when he was young, and when he could afford it, he’d bought his way into Veteran status, and then become a Legend when he joined the Order of the seeking hand.

“So, can you make gold coins breed in captivity with Bent or something?”

Murak glanced up at him with a scowl that carved deep wrinkles through his face. He looked like he wanted to burst into a tyrade. Calvin could feel the man’s barely suppressed urge to cuss out this young upstart.

Calvin lifted his knife into the banker’s field of view.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” Murak finally said.

“I think I understood some of the advice I got.” Calvin said, closing the book and frowning in faux concentration. “I was told to grab the money of Uleis by the balls. You are responsible for more than a quarter of Uleis’s wealth. You also have temporary possession of Orson’s assets since my company was declared traitorous and dissolved by the state.”

“That means, you have over a third of this nation’s capital. And I have you. So no. I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

Murak radiated extreme frustration, but he hid it well.

“Fine. Just keep quiet. I’m concentrating.”

“So can you make gold coins reproduce?”

“Yes, but it’s a novelty and a waste of my time, okay!?” Murak said, his gnarled fingers tightening around his pen.

“Neat.” Calvin opened the cult’s ritual book again, starting from where he left off. “Do you believe?”

“No. joining the order of the seeking hand was just a step on the road to power. Not joining them was a good way of being tossed into the Abyss by a competitor.”

“So how did Kurawe believe in everything without realizing he was the oppressor?”

“It just turned out that way. Strong-bonded boys club. One member gets wealthy, shares the opportunity with the other members of his cult. The situation propagates over hundreds of years. It’s no surprise they wound up in control of the entire country.”

“Huh.”Calvin kept reading about the cult’s origins and Ravagers in general. Apparently they were Harbinger souls who’d been subjected to some kind of process that marked their soul to the system, which would redistribute them at the edge of the Great Front, which was shorthand for the outer edge of the Harbinger empire’s line of expansion.

Of course, infinite space meant infinite expansion, and ever more diluted forces. Harbingers attempted to keep up via portals, FTL and massive expansion in the number of Harbingers, but at the same time, conquering planets was easy.

So easy in fact, that the Harbingers got complacent, and despite no resource scarcity, they nearly fell to civil war. The immortal king of the Harbingers at the time ascribed to the theory that like every living thing, the empire needed some kind of light opposition to keep the stagnation at bay.

So he created the Ravagers. Harbinger souls exiled into lower life forms to rally them against Harbinger control.

Bad Harbinger commanders get defeated, are replaced with better ones. Bad harbinger tactics are replaced with better ones, bad Governors, etc. Opposition to facilitate strength.

The dead flesh is scoured away, that healthy flesh may thrive.

But it never ended well for Ravagers. One soul against an empire of naturally Bent-manipulating creatures? Invariably, after the ravager had exposed the Harbinger’s weakness, they lost, were killed, and moved further afield, toward the edge of the Great Front. Even some of the ravagers who seemed to be on route to carving out their own territory, without making a single mistake, were inexplicably beaten within a single day.

Calvin felt his hair stand on end.

Am I one of these things? The sheer enormity of the book’s claims seemed nonsensical. What about the gods? Are they the gods? Other worlds other than Marconen? Everything he knew from the beginning of his life had taught him there was only Marconen, and anything else was myth.

 What about the creation of Marconen and Soscath? Is that true?

Yes, life on other planets exists. Don’t let it distract you.

Chances are pretty good you’re a Ravager. That’s what they called me. This book has been very informative. Keep it around. Those passages about the sudden inexplicable defeat of certain ravagers leads me to think there might be some kind of failsafe in the System code in regards to Ravagers. I’m going to be doing some soul-searching for a kill-switch of some kind. Nobody puts a fucking kill switch in my soul and lives to tell about it.

In the meantime, don’t overthink it. One way or the other, this doesn’t really affect you until you get off-planet. Just keep doing what you’re doing and try not to think about the insignificant mote of dust you’re fighting over.

Thanks, Calvin thought, rolling his eyes. I can always count on you for helpful advice.

Sometimes, ‘don’t think about it’ is the right advice.

I’ll take it under advisement. Calvin thought, closing the book, breathing in deeply then letting all those thoughts go. It wasn’t a problem he could solve right now.

Extensive Training has raised your attributes!

+1 Stability

Focus on something I can do. Don’t just waste time waiting for the report to come. Studying magic calmed Calvin down. Or at least made him manic enough to ignore his concerns for a few hours.

Calvin opened his satchel full of dozens of monster ingredients. Each of them had been reduced to powder and carefully labelled with a knick-knack inscribed picture so he knew exactly which organ they’d come from.

There’s so much to do.

Splitting.

31/32 Bent Remaining.

Calvin copied the entire bag and set aside the original.  He took the pink orb out of its case and peered through it. On impulse, Calvin glanced at Murak.

The shriveled banker was upside down and shrunken in the view of the lens, but there was something else, too. Calvin could make out odd yellow shimmers blinking in and out of existence around him.

Hmm…

Calvin dug through the bag until he found the powder that used to be the sensitive material, then added water to it, slathering it over the lens, leaving a pinhole for light to go through.

Calvin pointed it at Murak, peering through the pinhole.

The yellow glinting glimmers resolved into a rain of gold coins constantly falling around Murak, bouncing off him and tumbling to the ground, only to vanish.

He was still upside down, though.

Very interesting. Calvin thought, eyeing the material slathered around the lens. With a little work I could make a spyglass out of this.

Calvinian summoning.

Atom Ant.

30/32 Bent remaining.

Murak yelped when dozens of Knick-knacks appeared out of thin air.

Calvin closed his eyes and pictured the design of such a spyglass, keeping every detail and every material carefully catalogued in his mind.

Drafting has reached Level 4! 20%

Get to work.

The Knick-knacks began pouring through his duplicated materials, aiming to create his vision. He was going to hold onto the original material for now until he was sure that was what he wanted to do with it.

“You can create a workforce of knick-knacks?” Murak asked, his jaw slowly slackening. “Do you have any idea how valuable they are?”

Calvin glanced up at Murak.

“Yes. Who did you think crashed the price of lace?” Murak’s grip on his his pen tightened again, but from his gaze, the man wasn’t angry as Calvin had thought he’d be, he was instead experiencing a wave of greed that bordered on orgasm.

“nnggg,” Murak bit his tongue and got back to work, visibly setting aside the overwhelming desire to ask follow up questions.

You, Calvin mentally selected a dozen knick-knacks waiting on the edge of the spyglass construction. Hold these.

Calvin gave them several vials of powders taken from the Lure and the Stalkers. He poured water into each and started testing their effects, using the knick-knack’s torches to heat the vials.

***

“How do I look now?” Calvin asked, dabbing a bit of refined Lure juice on his nose.

Murak sighed with exasperation, looking up from his paperwork. “I told you, you don’t…” He stopped speaking. “You look like a horrifying abomination, composed of a huge pile of money, my dead wife, and my Bolesian villa.”

“Interesting,” Calvin said, wiping the stuff off the tip of his nose. Must be too concentrated, and I don’t have a method of forcing it to choose one illusion or another, so it defaults to all of them.

That must have been what the lure was using the lens for. Accurately identifying a person’s current desire, then targeting it. There must have been an organ that fine-tuned the illusion that was displayed, because I’m just getting a mishmash of garbage.

It wasn’t actually changing the way he looked, though, just the way he was perceived.

Maybe…

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Calvin took the lure blend he’d been working on, took out the visual stimulating elements, diluted it, cut it with Stalker juice, and pumped the result through the inward turning, curly-que organ that generated the Stalker’s Complacency Aura.

“How about now?” Calvin asked, glancing up at Murak.

“You look normal.” Murak said, glancing up at him. “You know, conquering kingdoms is a fine goal, but at your age, a strong saving account will be priceless in the future. I’d be happy to show you how to manage your money.”

Murak lifted a paper, showing it to Calvin.

“This document here is a -”

Calvin shook the mixture out of the stalker organ, clearing its tubes.

Murak blinked. “What the Abyss was that? It was like I didn’t care about what you’ve done to me.”

“Don’t overthink it,” Calvin said, making a note of the combination and its effects in his journal. “Get back to work.”

Let’s call that one Charm.

Calvin shrugged, writing it down. Good a name as any.

Next was the Unqua beads.

Unqua were fascinating in that they grew two beads, one small and black, twice the size of a bean, the other large and silvery, yet pebbled, about the size of a Bola nut.

The two beads sat in a complicated section of bone and muscle in the center of the Unqua, designed to push the beads closer together and lock them in place.

The beads repelled each other with a significant amount of force, but when they were forced together…

Calvin tried to force the two beads together with his fingers, watching the size of the room fluctuate around him as his own size fluctuated rapidly in time with the two sphere’s distance from each other.

The rules for how the beads worked were very interesting. Organic matter touching the beads directly would shrink completely, without leaving any part of the creature behind, along with a small amount of aura around that matter, entirely dependent on the mass of the creature.

In short, if a huge creature like the Unqua shrunk, it could carry several people with it, but if Calvin did it, he could barely keep his clothes with him.

Push these together, Calvin through, handing them to a knick-knack, interested in the impact on a construct.

The knick-knack was far stronger and steadier than Calvin was, and it managed to shrink itself easily.

So maybe it’s not living matter so much as contiguous matter. Calvin thought as the Knick-Knack enlarged itself again. He set a glass lid on top of the knick-knack’s head, looking like a little hat.

The next time it shrunk, the hat stayed the same size, covering the ant-sized Knick-knack until it grew in size again.

Calvin instructed the nearby knick-knacks to weld the glass to their companion’s head.

A moment later, it shrank again, and this time the hat shrank too.

According to the knick-knack, the resistance to pushing the two beads together was a tiny fraction higher with the extra amount of mass.

Interesting. Calvin thought as he took the two unqua bead out of the kncik-knack’s hand.

I could design a contiguous wagon, or some kind of large transportation method that relies on a vice of some kind, pushing the two beads together with an inhuman amount of power, then locking the two beads into place.

Basically, copy an Unqua. One side would have to be solidly attached to the rest of the wagon, while the other side would have the vice mechanism attached to it. The entire wagon would be massive enough to include the vice mechanism and cargo in the aura generated.

Calvin thought a little more. Did he have to keep the beads the same shape?

What would happen if I were to process the two stones into a thread and wound it around something?

I need more time to study this stuff.

Calvin wished he could spend all of his time playing with his new toys, but life was what it was.

The door to Murak’s office clicked open, and Polluq stepped inside. He paused for a moment, holding a clipboard as he watched the Knick-Knacks putting the finishing touches on Calvin’s spyglass. “…These are the sewer maps you requested.”

“Ah, just the person I wanted to see,” Calvin said, holding out his hand.

  The knick-knacks placed the spyglass in his hand, and Calvin inspected the man in front of him, his hackles rising as he saw the man’s lust for power personified in the form of broken bodies and chains around necks. It was a total violation of the man’s privacy.

But they weren’t friends.

“You’re going to curb that temper while you’re working for me, understood?” Calvin said, setting aside the spyglass and holding out his hand for the report.

“Understood,” Polluq gritted through his teeth, handing him the report. Calvin flipped through the details of the tournament’s security, clapping his hands in glee.

“Yay! Fifty-two royals in attendance! And thirty five of them of them are the king’s children! Wonderful!”

“About that.” Polluq said. “There’s a good chance a large portion of the royalty may not attend, or send representatives in their stead. Especially with Kurawe’s sudden disappearance. He was the primary reason the royal family was forced to be in attendance. If he doesn’t show himself, they won’t feel the need to do so, either.”

“Son of a bitch,” Calvin muttered. “Gather several men who generally look like Kurawe, the more you can find, the better. About the right age, too, preferably.”

“If you’re looking for a body double, just say so and we’ll find one.” Polluq said.

“Did I misspeak?”

Polluq’s jaw tightened. “No.”

“Anything else?”

“The royal contestant has been seeded in the tournament proper, leaving fifteen open slots. As of this morning, those fifteen slots have been filled with these people.” He handed Calvin a stack of papers.  “Kurawe’s plan was to give the winner a prestigious prize and then toss them in the pit after recouping the prize. I’m assuming you don’t want to follow the original plan?”

“You assume correctly,” Calvin muttered, scanning through the profiles, until his eyes landed on a familiar name.

Grabnar The barbarian

“Is this actually the contestant’s name?” Calvin asked, pointing it out.

“Those are the names they gave.”

Well, that’s obviously Baroke. The meatball used the name when they played conquerers back when they were younger.

Jinnei always hated playing the princess.

Calvin scanned the rest of the fifteen until he found Ella, the only six-foot tall woman with iron skin in the tournament.

As he read, he couldn’t help but laugh.

What the Abyss are they doing in a godforsaken tournament?

Rescuing you from kurawe, maybe?

That’s the only reason I can think of. Calvin thought, shaking his head, still giggling.

“Something funny?” Polluq asked.

“This tournament is what’s funny. It’s not Kurawe’s absence that’s causing the royal family to scorn it. It’s boring. What you need is real spectacle. Team battles, ocean warfare, deadly monsters. Pitfalls and explosions. Fireworks. You get all these legends together and waste their talents on a handful of one on one fights?”

Hahahahaha! Baroke is gonna be pissed!

Polluq paused. “Where is the money for that going to come from?” he asked.

The two of them glanced meaningfully over at Murak. The gnarled old man sank into his desk, clutching his head with trembling fingers and moaning.

“Got it.” Polluq said, nodding. “We need the right bait.” He frowned. “I still don’t know why you’re insisting on this, though.”

“Why is my business.” Calvin said. “Clear the Arena for the night, send the Kurawe lookalikes to the arena, arrange for drastically more spectacle, whatever it takes, and…” Calvin tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Announce that I’ve been captured and will be executed at the end of the games. That should help lure out the royal family.”

Too much for a practical joke at Baroke’s expense?

I’m just scared of Ella’s reaction at this point.

“True.” Calvin said, nodding. But she should at least be able to sense that I’m fine.

“What’s true?” Murak asked.

“We’re leaving.” Calvin said, standing.

“We?” Murak asked.

“What part of keeping you within eyeshot at all times did you not understand?” Calvin said, eyeing the powerful banker.

“I didn’t think you were serious.” Murak muttered.

“Like I would let a snake like you disappear back into the underbrush.”

Murak began shoving all his paperwork into a case with a growl.

Macronomicon

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