5 years later

  If there was one thing Rory had found particular over the years, it was the fact that years felt as fleeting as mere days or weeks, he’d slowly gained the ability to ‘let go’ of his perception of time. It reminded him of how, years ago, Aelia had once mentioned enjoying watching them from a more ‘standard’ frame of reference. At the time, Rory hadn’t really thought much of the comment.

  But now?

  He hadn’t been oblivious to the changes him, his perception of the passage of time, but the last five years had still been so fast. True to his word, the first few years had been dedicated to making Ehkorrus truly capable of surviving without him. Violet, Manda, and Marcie had successfully worked together as the first Ehkorrus Adventuring Team, Team MVM. Gil had received his Vocation instantly upon reaching A1, Novice Smith. Kal and Viviann, the two adults of the second wave of second-generation settlers, had also quickly gained their own Vocations: Apprentice Jeweler and Apprentice Inscriptionist. Getting them started on their paths hadn’t required much effort. Kal had needed a specialty Gem Crafting tool—a Convergence Monocle, as Rory had cleverly named it —to detect Convergence Points on gems, but he had otherwise picked up the craft with shocking ease.

  Viviann, meanwhile, had required something a little different than a magical monocle. Compiling every rune he knew, Rory had filled a tome with arcane knowledge.

  Over three hundred basic runes, one-hundred and six intermediate runes, fifteen advanced runes, and a single Evolved Rune. Learning a rune, although marginally less dangerous than creating a rune, was still perilous if one attempted to brute-force their understanding of more advanced runes. Thus, Rory had left the tome chock full of helpful notes to ease the process.

  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the entire process was that he had acquired a valuable skill in the process.

  Tome Crafting

  Rarity: Aberrant. Skill Level: Low.

  Passing on knowledge is the essence of paving a road for the future, a lit pathway rather than a treacherous forest trail. Instilling a tome with knowledge and measures of essence will provide a tool for others to learn, the lit path to guide their way. Those who learn from a crafted Tome will share a small percentage of their accumulated Ascension Essence with the Tome crafter when working with relevant subjects. The amount of essence used in inscribing a Tome will determine whether the difficulty of absorbing and learning from the knowledge of a crafted Tome increases or decreases.

  Warning: Attempting to digest a tome with a comparatively overwhelming force of essence may result in the shattering of the mind and soul.

  His main takeaway was that by crafting tomes, he could disseminate his knowledge, and by doing so, he would effectively impose a small ‘tax’ on those who learned from one of his tomes. Of course, he’d have to be careful; while adding more of his own essence to a tome would make it easier for someone to learn its contents, it could also overwhelm the reader's mind, leaving them little more than a vegetable.

  Keeping the warning in mind, Rory had given Viviann the tome with careful instructions not to rush it. Still, he wasn’t overly worried; he had barely used any essence in crafting his first tome.

  Moving on from Gil, Viviann, and Kal, the next most significant event was that John reached A1 two years after Gil. For his interest in architecture, the boy had received a Vocation tailored to architecture.

  No, nothing like Rory’s brand of ‘architecture’ but the literal version.

  As a Novice Carpenter, John had been given the role of handling most mundane architectural and carpentry tasks, provided he got the okay from Irene first.

  And boy, was that useful, given it wasn’t just the kids and two adults who had changed over the last five years. With another five years of Siege Waves, which Team MVM and Ehkorrus’s defenses eventually headed, there was an inevitable influx of people.

  Five years, thirty-one total new citizens, for a grand total of forty-five citizens of Ehkorrus.

  It was…. Odd, to say the least, for Rory. He had been alone for many years, then accompanied only by Apostolos in a glorified campground. Now, Ehkorrus was becoming an actual city. The number of homes had increased, a dining lodge had been built, a bathhouse had been constructed, the campfire had been transformed into a proper community center, paths had been laid, and many other buildings had been erected, including an apothecary run by Mariah.

  With most of his mundane responsibilities shifted onto the newcomers, he'd only been left with one real responsibility that only he could do: pushing the walls outward. Assuming they didn’t want to rebuild them from scratch, it was only possible using the Sovereign interface and a substantial amount of Fabricate Material.

  Standing atop their wall, now thick enough to properly stand on, Rory took in the sight of the small city. Roads and paths were paved with Night Cobble; buildings were made of Star Blood Willows, which the nearby trees outside their walls had slowly mutated into due to exposure to the energies of their settlement. Where there weren’t roads and paths, the moss and clover underfoot had become either Star Blood Moss or Star Blood Clover, dark black like the depths of space with red speckles like bloody stars and stems and veins of a rich purple shade.

  It was no longer a tiny campsite, only a few dozen to a few hundred feet across. The burgeoning city was a little over a mile in any direction, growing each year.

  “Taking in the scenery?”

  Rory turned to see Apostolos approaching. With another five years of aging, Rory was finally confident in saying that the young man had lost the last vestiges of teenage youth in his face, a suitably early twenties adult.

  “You could say that,” Rory said with a sigh, crossing his arms. It was relatively early in the morning, and as far as he knew, no one was awake except for maybe Team MVM, given they weren’t currently within the city's bounds to begin with.

  “Enjoying it while you can?”

  “That too,” Rory confirmed, his interface appearing only to himself.

  Architect of the Precursors

  Tier: 6

  Level: 69

  Perhaps the most important thing of the last five years was that Rory was now on the brink of A7. Years of crafting, teaching, and even hunting with Apostolos had slowly but steadily advanced his progress to where he now stood, on the cusp.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to delay another two or three months? Apostolos questioned. “Violet should reach A6 shortly.

  “No,” Rory said, shaking his head. “It’s not her fight; frankly, I don’t want to drag her into the Lion’s Den. She works best with her teammates; she hardly ever goes hunting with us.”

  “So, just the three of us?”

  “We're already choosing not to bring Violet; no one else is close enough to A6 that it's worth waiting,” Rory confirmed. “Eia, you, and myself. We strike tomorrow morning, a day from now.”

  Originally, Rory had wanted to attack no later than four years after Apostolos had first tracked down the lair of the Architect’s Bane, but, as with life, things hadn’t gone as planned.

  Not that Rory would complain. It had been a productive, if fast, five years.

  I still can’t get over how fast it was.

  Rory wasn’t joking when he said it had felt like little more than a month or two.

  “By the way, I heard the newest settlers are settling in nicely.”

  “Good,” Rory said with a huff. They’d recently withstood their seventh Siege Wave, thus increasing the number of people. Seven years and seven siege waves, the most 'important' of the waves had been two years ago when they'd received a small bonus reward- a bonus Decree.

  As for what he’d used it for? Well, with a city filled chiefly with teenagers, only one thing made sense to him.

  Fertility tax until the age of twenty-one. The following decree will probably have to be a fertility credit for anyone seeking to have children, but that’s not for... maybe another three years.

  Yes, one of the sad realities of having a city of primarily teenage or teenage adjacent folks -Rory didn’t feel right calling those in their mid-twenties adults when they still clearly were physically that of a teenager- was that the Birds and the Bees talk was forced to be his job. Or it had been, but with his days numbered, Rory was planning to offload that responsibility onto Viviann.

  “Also, I received a message from Gil, Viviann, and their small team.” Apparently, ‘it’s’ done.”

  “Ahah, now you tell me!” Rory cheered, then winced, forgetting the time of day. “I was hoping it would have been ready a day or two ago, but I don’t mind cutting it close.”

  “Cutting what close, exactly?” Apostolos questioned.

  “Oh, come now. Do you think I intended to attack the base of operations of the Architect’s Bane with gear nearing ten years of age?”

  “Sort of? What was wrong with the stellarite?”

  “Nothing, but it was a tad basic, at least for me. You’ve got your fancy gear tailored for your skills-”

  “This feels more like a roundabout way of patting yourself on the back.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “-but I don’t have anything tailored toward me,” Rory said, ignoring Apostolos’s quip. “So, I assembled a team shortly after the second wave to brainstorm ideas with me.”

  “So, that’s what Gil, Mariah, and those others have been working so much on during their off hours? I tried asking, but they always avoided answering.”

  “Because I told them to,” Rory said smugly. “C’mon, I’ll show you.”

  Rory quickly crossed the small city, leading the way, with Apostolos following silently behind. Their destination was none other than the forge. In the last few years, it hadn’t changed drastically; more workbenches for the more populated facility now that more people were living in Ehkorrus, some extra grindstones and anvils, and other relatively mundane things one would expect from a forging facility. Aside from the standard forge equipment, there were several locked storage containers for anyone to store projects safely. Leading Apostolos to the largest container, Rory pressed his thumb against the chest as it popped open a moment later. The chest was deceptively large; the earth had been hollowed beneath it.

  “First, a weapon,” Rory announced.

  “A weapon? I thought you mostly rely on projections now.”

  “Oh c’mon, you know that won’t always work.” Rory tutted as if that were obvious.

  “I guess,” Apostolos mumbled.

  Reaching into the chest, Rory grabbed something, heaving it out with little effort.

  “Is that… a flag?” Apostolos questioned, clearly confused.

  “I think the technical term is a ‘Standard,’ but I could be wrong there.” Rory half-heartedly corrected.

  “How is that a weapon.”

  “Not going to examine it?”

  “Ruins the surprise,” Apostolos answered.

  “Fair enough.”

  Grinning at Apostolos, Rory gripped the flag's center, flaring a pulse of Pneuma and essence through the flag. For a moment, the flag seemed to shift, the flag portion streamlining into something close to a flowing ribbon as the dull butt of the weapon suddenly sprouted a curved blade of purple and black metal.

  “What in the world is that?” Apostolos stepped back instinctively, feeling uneasy around the metal.

  “Night Copper,” Rory said, his grin widening. “For someone like you, this shit probably feels like you’re staring down uranium from up close.”

  “Uranium?”

  “Poisonous metal,” Rory said off-handily, not bothering with a more thorough explanation.

  “So… what is this Night Copper, and how did it come to be?”

  “It was an attempt to recreate Banite, which itself was an attempt to recreate the material of your war scythe.”

  “Being told you couldn’t recreate it really did rub you the wrong way.”

  “You have no idea,” Rory confirmed. “But anyway, with as many people as we have now, and several specializing in their own fields, it became possible to conduct a more thorough research analysis of the materials involved and how to create something based on them. I’ve kept a small sample of material from the Architect’s Bane for years. Not enough to do anything with, but enough to research. First, I gave it to Mariah to look into.”

  “And?”

  “We discovered, to use some alchemy terms, it is neither cationic nor anionic. Yet, it’s not neutral, either. In the end, Mariah referred to it as Contron. It is the inverse of neutral charge.”

  “That… doesn’t make any sense.” Apostolos frowned, speaking slowly. “How can you have the opposite of something neutral.”

  “You can think of it as the reflection you see of yourself in a pond. It’s you but from a differing plane of perception.”

  “You know what, skip the theoretical explanation and stuff. There is a reason I chose not to walk that path.” Apostolos snorted.

  “You never were very good at it,” Rory admitted before continuing. “Mariah also tested Banite and discovered that it was similarly a Contron material. To avoid the complicated aspects, we eventually discovered that when you take a neutral material or something similar and expose it to extremely high energy, it inverts the conceptual nature, from both forward and backward and from left and right, a complete inversion and reflection. It wouldn't seem any different if you didn’t know any better.”

  “If you say so,” Apostolos said with a shrug.

  "The point is that when you take a neutral material and invert it, it has a rather profound tempering effect. We tried inverting Stabilized Steel, but it didn’t work; it degraded or exploded in less-than-stellar moments. So, we had to build it from the ground up. Start with Enriched Iron, then treat it with equal amounts of Liquid Fire and Running Ice to dissolve and break down any impurities, leaving a completely neutral, impurity-free sample. From there, we discovered that nothing seemed to work in alloying or any other method. That is, except for alloying with itself.”

  “Itself?”

  “Yeah. Back on Earth, there was something called Damascus steel, a metal made by forging and welding together different types of the same metal, or that’s how I understood it. We gathered enough of this Inversion Iron with slight deviations and then welded them together. It was still missing something, though, and what that something was was traces of the Architect Bane. Without any leftover Bane-warped monsters or the like, we could not gather that trace element… That is until I recalled how the Architect Bane altered our Null Window after the first Siege Wave, its essence or whatnot ‘contaminating’ it. With a full year of exposure, we produced some inert Night Copper.”

  “Inert? And where did the ‘Night’ part of the name come from?”

  “The Architect Bane seems to model itself after space themes, for whatever reason. And to ‘activate’ the inert Night Copper required forging it within the heart of a star and alloying it with the mass of a star, and not that low-grade one percent crap either. We needed five percent purity Stellar Mass.”

  Apostolos let out a low whistle, impressed. Five percent was the absolute maximum purity that the Stellar Forge could produce, and it required feeding the Forge Heart with copious amounts of high-quality, uncommon-grade materials, enough to have been entirely infeasible even a few years prior.

  “And how exactly did you figure all this stuff out?” Apostolos asked after a moment.

  “A fuck ton of trial and error and brainstorming from a dedicated team, and years spent in my Mind Palace brainstorming some more. But, it worked.”

  “So… Night Copper. You’ve beaten around the bush enough. What’s the quality?”

  Rory smirked, feeling proud of his work and even more so of those who had been part of the research team.

  “Rare,” Rory announced. You’re looking at the first Rare quality material that doesn’t require any exotic or finite materials to produce. Just, you know, a fuck ton of standard materials and a bite-sized star.”

  “Hot damn. Any special traits?”

  “None, aside from its really fucking sharp, as in it seems to sort of cleave space a little bit.”

  “It cleaves space!? I think that counts as a special trait!”

  “Oh, don’t get too excited. While we could determine some minimal spatial fluctuations, they are essentially only at the level of being a little better than an extra flavor of sharpness; it doesn’t care as much about physical defenses. But again, it is really minor.”

  Rory tried to temper Apostolos’s expectations of the metal so he wouldn’t be let down when the blade failed to cut through space or some equally fantastical idea the younger man might imagine.

  “Alright, so the blade is sharp.” Apostolos nodded to himself, digesting it far more easily when framed as such. “But why not just keep it a spear?”

  “Because of this.” Rory grinned as he waved the standard, the flowing ribbon appearing to double, then triple, before a headache-inducing array of colors seemed to flicker in and out of existence.

  “And that is?” Apostolos questioned as he purposely averted his eyes, waiting for the ribbon to return to normal.

  “Illusion Cloth. It’s a fabric treated with a hallugenic poison, once more thanks to a certain Ms. Mariah. Again, avoiding overly complicated details, we first created wool-like linen using the tail fur of a Forget-Me-Not Fox.”

  Apostolos winced at the mention of the monster. It was a tier-six beast-type monster with a particularly annoying ability to slip out of your memory when you took your eyes off it. Killing one required nearly constant visual awareness of the beast at all times lest the amnestic effect cause you to forget it was even there, to begin with.

  “Taking the woven wool, we soaked it in a hallucinogenic solution made from corpse mushrooms, liquid fire, twinkle spirit, and crushed crystal imbued with the essence of night. Treat it with tallow for a nice, glossy finish, and voilà, Illusion Cloth. It’s only uncommon quality, as the effect is more potent against intelligent beings, but it's still proven rather disarming against lesser intelligence as well.”

  “And the haft?”

  “A branch from my home,” Rory chuckled. “Aside from an aged bloodwood, which I didn’t intend to spend fifty years waiting for, it’s the strongest wood we’ve got. Now, I am not letting people take cuttings from my house willy-nilly, but since it's my house, I was allowed to cut a branch down.”

  “Effects?”

  "The entire thing is designed with my abilities in mind, so it's essentially an extension of my Banite ring. Okay, that’s not technically correct. The banite ring makes my projections easier to use. This bad boy? Makes things more real.”

  “Huh?”

  Stepping back, Rory thrust the weapon just past Apostolos’s cheek, barely grazing the younger man.

  “What was the point of tha-” Apostolos stopped, slowly reaching up to touch his cheek.

  It was moist and red with blood.

  “How the fuck?” Apostolos sputtered, staring at Rory in surprise. “I haven’t taken a physical injury in years.”

  “My ring makes projecting my reality easier. My standard makes my reality real. If I cut something and I think it should bleed-”

  “It will bleed,” Apostolos whispered.

  “Bingo. It’s a concept-core weapon, sort of like your gauntlets. Hell, it was your gauntlets from a few years back that inspired me. When you think about it, it doesn’t make sense that throwing a punch a million times can store that memory in the gauntlets themselves, but they do. With that sort of idea possible, and with Viviann’s help, we put together a rather extensive Inscription for forcing my reality onto actual reality.”

  “Weaponizing a concept. You could say the concept is the core of the weapon.” Apostolos said, understanding the name Rory had derived for the style of weapon

  “Bing-fucking-o.” Rory laughed.

  "Anything else fancy about it?"

  "Maybe," Rory answered, his eyes shifting about before glancing down at the next thing in the chest, his message clear.

  “So, a badass spear-flag thing. What about armor?” Apostolos questioned, changing the subject.

  “We went a slightly different direction than usual,” Rory answered as he drew something else out from his storage. While in the past Rory had often worn armor in the style of a knight, albeit not quite as heavily armored, now what he withdrew almost appeared like the gear of a ranger or modern military fatigues. It was an odd blend of fantastical archer or rogue themes and modern soldier, but Rory had no qualms.

  “So, the run down?” Apostolos waved at the near gear, waiting for Rory to launch into his spiel.

  “Examine it.”

  Doing so, Apostolos stared at it for a moment before narrowing his eyes.

  “How?”

  “Lots of hard work.”

  Custom-Fit Combat Weave Fatigues

  Grade: Rare

  Trading the benefits of wearing multiple individual armor pieces, the Custom-Fit Combat Weave Fatigues gain in quality for what they lose in diversity. Woven from individual fibers of well-nurtured bloodwood, Stabilized Steel wire threads, and runic leather, the Custom-Fit Combat Weave Fatigue is nearly immune to at-tier slashing damage and contains potent Pneuma diffusion capabilities.

  “How?” Apostolos repeated.

  “Fine, since you’re so impatient, I’ll explain. The bloodwood required using my Alchemical Transmutation skill; I could identify the ‘nature’ of the bloodweave and selectively remove it so that all that remained was the innate thirst for something, that something being Pneuma rather than blood or essence. The Stabilized Steel wires were just thin wires that lent physical integrity to the entire thing."

  Runic leather was something they’d discovered years back; taking monster leather and scrubbing it clean, you could inscribe runes of flexibility and strength into the material, and having come from a monster, the leather seemed to literally absorb the runes, making it one of the rare few materials that could potentially have both Inscription and an Akashic record if fortune favored you.

  “I’m assuming that it would only be an uncommon grade if you didn’t make it a single piece.”

  “Glad you can read,” Rory snorted, referring to the description. “Yes, designed as a single armor ‘piece’ that source of significance seemed to lend the entire thing more strength. Sure, I don’t have a large array of gear with many differing inscriptions and such, but I figured that going in to face the Architect Bane, a single piece of extremely potent gear would be more useful than a bunch of lower-grade but diverse gear.”

  “Fair enough,” Apostolos said. “Anything else?”

  “It took most of five damn years just to get these two things made,” Rory said with a snort.

  “That’s a no then.”

  “You’d be correct,” Rory answered. “Though, we do have some brews I can show you. Mostly, Steel Skin, Rejuvenation, Regeneration, and Minor Cognition.”

  “No, I’m familiar with them.” Apostolos waved the offer off. Steel Skin hardened the skin, Rejuvenation rejuvenated your Pneuma sensitivity, Regeneration was essentially a watered-down but universal version of his Ossifed Blood Gems, and Minor Cognition accelerated the mental processing speed, albeit only up to a certain level, they were useless for Rory, whose base Cognition already put him past the accelerated cognitive speed the brew granted.

  With nothing else to show or tell, the duo stood in comfortable silence for nearly a minute before Apostolos sighed.

  “It’s going to be weird without you.”

  “Getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we?” Rory teased, but Apostolos shook his head.

  “I know how it's going to go down once we win. You’ll be in a rush to handle any last-minute things, and then off you go in pursuit of some project that only you understand. You won’t sit and rest. For all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never sat and rested. Even when you seem to be lazing about, it’s usually because you’re working within your Mind Palace. You’ve always been deceptively motivated; it just took me years to understand.”

  “Eh, you’re overstating it.” Rory dismissed. “I just find I don’t like to sit idly. My time on Aelia has shown me that.”

  “And that’s not a common thing, you understand that, right?”

  Rory frowned at Apostolos. Logically, he did, but he didn’t feel like he was that much more motivated than others. Surely-

  “I can already tell what you’re thinking, and the answer is no. Pretty much everyone here, aside from you, takes time off to think about things other than their next project or whatnot. They have hobbies or idle moments. But your hobby is your work. That’s not a bad thing, by the way. I’m trying to say that once you break A7, I know you won’t be here for long — days, weeks if we’re lucky. I can’t remember my family, so all I’ve got is you.”

  Sticking his fist out, Apostolos waited for Rory to reciprocate as they bumped fists.

  “What I’m saying is, I’m going to miss the only brother I’ve known.”