The Dark Lord of Crafting

The griffin, Alloces, inclined its head. “There is much to be discussed.” His golden eyes narrowed as I stepped closer to the covered vehicle and a red cylinder appeared in my right hand and I tossed it to my left.

“First,” I said, “an offering.” An arrow popped out of my inventory. The Flaming variety had come in hand on a few occasions, but they wouldn’t have been any use against a party of demons. The griffin squawked, and one of the lions growled as they rose from their seats. Their hands twisted in arcane gestures, and I felt the pull on the aura and essence of the world around me as they called upon their affinities.

Using flint and steel to light the bomb would have been awkward, and too slow. When I jabbed the arrowhead into the side of the cylinder, its enchantment activated.

It was just a firework, except I’d added extra powder and the broken shards of atreanum from the daggers I’d used and lost in previous fights.

The explosion wasn’t huge, less of a blast than a single block of TNT, but it carried the fragments with it. My heart bar flashed, I’d been holding it, after all, but Jason’s armor, along with a potion of Fire Resist, absorbed all but half a heart of damage. It didn’t even rock me on my heels.

The sound echoed in the evening air, mingling with the cries of the demons. It wouldn’t have done more than annoy them apart from the tiny shards of dark metal that had lodged in their skin. Alloces fell back, his hands going to his face, and the lions roared in pain and anger, tearing through the fabric covering the other sides of the vehicle to take cover behind it.

Furcas spat a demonic word as he stepped away from me, and flames leaped from his hands. His position relative to me had shielded him from the shrapnel, and his spell washed over me. The heat made me grit my teeth, but I would have to have stood still in the cone for long seconds before it was enough to deal damage through the layers of my protection.

I lunged forward, a black-bladed dagger appearing in my hand, and thrust it into his chest. The demon wearing the face of an old man coughed blood, then collapsed.

As I turned, my armor resisted me. One of the metal workers was trying to freeze me in place. With a swell of my Presence, I shrugged off his influence. It was similar to when Berith had tried to drown me, my will against his, and the eye made it easy.

The green screen informed me that it was Sabnock I stabbed in the neck as I stepped around the now smoldering vehicle. Its curtains had caught, from Furcas’s onslaught, if not the bomb. My dagger gave out, snapping as the lion twisted away, but two for one wasn’t bad. The demon stumbled away, falling to his knees. There would be more than enough atreanum to cleanse the world if things kept us this way.

Three left.

I jumped over the canopy, the Potion of Leaping giving me plenty of clearance, and came down Smaragdine in my hand. The blade whose full name would not be spoken. My elytron slowed my fall, an automatic effect that I hadn’t counted on, and the two remaining lions had an extra breath to prepare as I descended. One, Murmur, was dressed like a soldier. He wore a breastplate with oversized pauldrons along with chain leggings.

His armor had allowed him to take the least damage from the shrapnel, there was only a single line of blood dripping down his furry cheek. His mane was dark and stringy, and he held a sword that rippled like water as it extended to nearly seven feet in length.

It clashed against Smaragdine as I fell, the force of the blow pushing me into the through the ripped curtain of the carriage. Fabric tangled around me as I rolled into a shrieking demon. Alloces's beak was wide as he snapped at me. He had taken the worst of the atreanum, his face and bare body were peppered with it. No armor, not even a shirt. His heavily muscled chest was dusted with feathers.

A slash across his stomach left him scrambling away from me just as Murmur’s oversized blade jabbed into my back. The force was more than I was expecting, and if I hadn’t already been on one knee, it would have knocked me off my feet.

The lion’s next chop severed one of the struts holding up the smoking canopy, and I launched myself forward to get out before I found myself under a canvas blanket.

Alloces shrieked, the wound on his belly knitting together as wicked talons extended from his hands. Tiny fragments, like black glass, popped out of the smaller wounds across his abdomen. Flesh affinity, like the owl that had killed me. The lions were on the far side of the carriage. Murmur was stalking around it to get to me, while the other, Vine, was pouring out a pouch of what looked like glitter.

He had a canary yellow robe spotted with holes and a nearly white mane. A little less lion-like than his partner, Vine could have been mistaken for a human at a distance.

Murmur and Alloces attacked together. The griffin was getting bigger, and even so, he was faster than me. He darted in and out, his claws scratching orichalcum plates, narrowly avoiding my sword. Even so, with the boost to my Might and Speed that came with potions, I could have cut him down with relative ease, except that I was forced to divide my attention.

The lion battered me, and our blades clashed. His magic reinforced his weapon, which was improbably thin and should have been as malleable as sheet metal, as well as his armor. As he closed the distance, his sword shrank, becoming liquid for an instant, then congealing into a dense bar that ended on a spiked head.

I swiped at Alloces to keep him back, then raised my free arm as the fresh mace came down. My new shield popped into existence, and the mace bounced off as the barrier bound in the Durak shell activated. Murmur snarled, and the Griffin tackled me from behind, making me miss the plentiful thorns that came with my other set of armor.

We went down together, and Smaragdine jabbed into the dirt, then went boom.

It wasn’t as bad as when a Thermit went off, but the blast threw all three of us and sent the sword spinning into the sky.

Random discharge. Hopefully, the weapon’s evolution would give me some control over that, but I was grateful to be out of the griffin’s grasp.

As Alloces came at me again, I called another dagger from the stack in my inventory and thrust it up under his ribs. Rippling abs or not, the blade sank easily, and the demon jerked away with an earsplitting shriek.

The fading light reflected off Murmur’s mace as he tried to brain me. Blocking, I barely felt the impact through my shield. My breath came out in a harsh gasp as I slammed the heavy shell into the lion’s soft nose, and he yowled in surprise. Any atreanum weapon would break before it got through that armor, and as we fought, his breastplate was growing slats to protect his head with a metal cage.

Slipping forward, I placed one of my heels behind one of his and bashed him with the shield again. He fell back, and before he could recover, I called a bucket from my inventory and doused him with its contents.

The abrupt rush of heat from a cubic foot of lava that hadn’t been there a moment before was sufficient to sear me through my resistance. A gold-orange molten mass splattered across Murmur’s chestplate, and the lion roared in pain and surprise as his mane and fur burst into flame from proximity to the superheated stone.

He rolled, and somehow still in control of his magic, caused his armor, along with the globs of lava attached to it, to slough off of him. At which point I was able to drop my steaming bucket, produce another dagger, and stab him in the back.

One more, I thought, looking for the last lion, but he and his bright yellow robe were already down. Arrow shafts stood out from his prone form, one shaft still quivering.

Four templars, along with one visibly incensed little woman, had ridden from the gates of the fortress. Two of them had crossbows readied, but Esmelda had her bow in hand and was clutching an atreanum arrow like she was considering whether or not to use it on me.

“We need to check them,” I said. “They aren’t all dead.” Furcas and Alloces were both holding on, their essence weak but present.

Esmelda didn’t respond other than to instruct the templars to finish the demons with atreanum. Her mouth was a flat line, and there were storms in her eyes as I retrieved my viridium sword. Though I’d expected it to be marred by the explosive energy it had released, it was undamaged. After beheading the demons, we returned to the walls with the carriage still smoldering behind us.

“Thank you for your assistance,” Esmelda told our escort. “The Lord of Dargoth and I need to speak privately to discuss the safety of the fortress, so I’m afraid our excursion in the pens will be delayed.”

She accepted their salutes, and instead of heading for our suite, Esmelda led the way to the war room. It was one of the few areas in the fortress that was properly spawnproofed. Not just in itself, but with every space where a monster could spawn within one hundred yards of the room either being fully lit, blocked, or reinforced with warpstone.

We dismissed the guards stationed at the entrance, and Esmelda asked one of them to fetch Zareth.

“I know what you’re going to say—”

“Do you?” Esmelda spun, resting one hand on the massive map of the continent. Her chestnut hair was already in a braid, and she wore the chain shirt I had made for her, ready for battle.

“That I took an unnecessary risk, and my judgment may be influenced by what Calcion did to me in ways I don’t realize.”

“What happened outside does upset me.” She closed her eyes for a moment, seeming to settle herself. “But it’s hardly new behavior. I want you to respect me enough to not do dangerous things without consulting me because you think I’ll try to stop you. For better or for worse, we rule a nation together. We have to make choices together.”

“I do respect you, and your judgment, it’s just…” I trailed off. What was I even trying to say here? There hadn’t been any overriding urgency to deal with the visiting demons that required me to leave her out of it. I couldn’t pretend I’d been trying to protect her. As odd as it seemed to me, she fought monsters every night. Maybe I wasn’t used to thinking of her as an asset in battle, though she had undeniably become one.

“Just what?” She said, exasperated.

“I don’t know.”

Her face softened. “This is less about the kingdom than about us. I’ve accepted responsibility for the people under our banner just as you have, and the bond I made with you, under Mizu’s name, is not something I would ever willingly dissever. But I can’t…I can’t accept this. I wasn’t happy about you returning to Bedlam, but at least it was something we discussed. You are my husband, and I know you well enough to know that when your mind is truly set, there is little I can do to change it. Still, if we are to be partners, we must be partners. You can’t treat me as an obstacle.”

I felt a tiny spark of annoyance. I was a king, I could do whatever I wanted, and my decisions were my own. Reality shifted in front of my eyes, and suddenly, I wasn’t looking at Esmelda, the woman I loved, I was looking at an E-Rank entity. I could see the essence accumulating in her body, the bright influence of the goddess in the mark on her hand. Unbidden, the green status screen appeared behind her head.

Entity Rank: E

Alignment: Harmony

Affinity: Pending

Warning - The subject’s Presence presents a risk of entanglement likely to dampen your evolution. Consider elimination.

My jaw tightened, and I glanced away, willing the screen out of existence. Looking back, my vision had returned to normal. Essence was just a background sensation again, not something I could see, and my feelings for Esmelda welled up in a tide so strong I had trouble speaking.

“William,” she stepped closer. “What’s wrong?”

“I think I’m not used to having a partner, a family.” I shook my head. “The timeline from my perspective has been really disjointed. And I’m still making choices like I’m alone. I’m sorry.”

“Is that all there is?”

“No,” I took a deep breath. “The System that came with the eye just suggested you're a threat I should consider getting rid of.”

“Ah.” She didn’t shy away, didn’t so much as look surprised.

“It’s never offered an opinion before. Well, not directly. It doesn’t exactly have a neutral tone when it provides me with information, but it’s never suggested a course of action.”

“Was it only words, or can it influence you in other ways?”

“What Kevin said about seeing people as NPCs, I haven’t experienced that. But I think I just got a taste of it.”

“Well, that is a problem.”

“Yeah.” I looked at an old banner hanging on the wall, something abstract and ominous, and then the world laid out before us on the table. The forces gathering here and in Nargul. The positions of the troops and strongholds of our enemies around Gundurgon as best we could piece them together from what the harpy scouts brought us. Anything but her.

“If we had been able to talk about me accepting Calcion’s deal, what would you have said?”

I felt the warmth of her hand against my cheek. “I would have said that I don’t want to lose you, and that you should do whatever you must to come home.”

“I’m sorry.” I hugged her.

“About what?”

“Everything.”

“Not everything is your fault. Only some things.”

“It feels like that sometimes.”

Her answer was quiet. “I know.”

“Pardon the intrusion,” Zareth said from the doorway. “Was I not called for?”

I’d closed off my extrasensory impressions somewhat when I’d banished the screen, so his approach had gone unnoticed. Esmelda shifted out of my embrace, remaining at my side.

“You were,” she said, suddenly all business. “We need to talk about Gundurgon.”