noct

173. Back on the Grind

Downstairs, Rhys immediately got to work. Their new influx of workers needed to be familiarized and put to work on the farms, or in the shops. Unfortunately, they all had to be back-of-shop workers; his efforts were too flashy this time to risk showing their faces around random Empire cities, when he couldn’t be there to protect them or turn a...

172. Who Are You?

Sun filtered in the window. Birdsong filled the air. Rhys opened his eyes and breathed deep, enjoying the pale light of early morning. He felt wildly refreshed, far more comfortable than he had last night. It wasn’t that he’d had no pain, he realized now, it was just that he had gotten so used to being in constant, low-level pain that he’d...

171. It's Happening

Of course, now that they had people, what they needed the most were cores. With about forty left, and a conversion rate of 3-ish kills to one core (assuming a Tier 1 core—the price was lowered by obtaining higher-power energy), that meant he had to kill somewhere in the range of 60 to 120 more mages. It was something of a staggering number to ...

170. Finishing Up

Mouse fought the mages in the forest; or rather, it looked far more like an elaborate game of backwards hide-and-seek was going on in the forest, with all the low-tier mages as the seekers and Mouse as the single hider. Occasionally, a blade leaped out of a bush or a shadow to strike an unsuspecting searcher, though the strikes were rarely vital...

169. Adelise Infernon

The fireball flew forth. It loomed large in Rhys’s vision, eclipsing the moon, then the sky, then everything. He reached into his trash star, and called back to his earliest days. It was time to pull out an old classic. He threw piece after piece of garbage at the impending fireball, using Trash Manipulation to hold all the trash together. His...

168. Camp Battling

Rhys finished up at that camp, wiping out the Tier 1s and 2s with ease. Several of the mages wanted to join them, though a few only wanted to escape and simply leave the Empire forever. Rhys restored one or two cores, then rushed off to the next battle while the weakest member of their team escorted their new comrades home, and the rest regroupe...

167. The Moment

Rhys crouched at the edge of his camp, or rather, the one he’d assigned to himself. It was the most hazardous of all of them: a filthy mine that handled stones that exploded, sometimes, leaving the whole thing cloaked in ash and stone shards. Even where he crouched, he could suck mounds of trash into himself from simply breathing.

He cou...

166. Camping and Glamping

They arrived back at the base in record time. Lira, who’d taken a different route that involved more water, had gotten back first, and Sable wasn’t long behind them. Rhys gathered all his fighters, all the original mages who’d been freed with him. Since they’d been freed, several months had passed, and one or two of them were on the verg...

165. Whoops

Honestly, he should’ve seen it coming. The void wasn’t somewhere people were supposed to be. It was most akin to outer space. When he was a soul-slash-mana-construct, that didn’t matter. He was pure energy, and safe from environmental hazards… or rather, he had no body, and consequently, nothing to get harmed by the environment with. But...

164. Turning Mana into Trash

“Come here, you!”

The curse scudded away from him, as if it knew what he was going to do to it. He chased it down, refusing to let it escape. Gripping the lump of trash and impurities that surrounded the skeleton hands curse in one hand, Rhys grabbed the free energy in his other and forcibly poured it into the curse. He didn’t let th...

163. Broken Core

It was frustrating that the solution was right before his eyes. If his core wasn’t broken, he would have no problem compressing his mana. He could cultivate this energy like normal, and everything would flow on down the line. Instead, he had to figure out some alternative route, because if he squeezed down he squeezed all the energy out into t...

162. Peer Battle

Rhys rushed into the sunlight. Thanks to Mouse’s warning, he was braced for an attack, but none came. Instead, he found himself at the end of a short path. At the other end, three mages stood around a boiling pot and chatted about something he couldn’t quite make out. As he emerged from the tunnel, one of them glanced up, then did a double-t...

161. Are You a Criminal?

A/N: Realized I made a mistake RE: the Warden's tier last chapter, and adjusted some of Rhys's internal thoughts to match. Sorry about that, folks! Thanks for letting me know. Better I fix it now than miss it and keep trucking without realizing my mistakes.

Rhys charged into the kitchen, chasing cleaverman as the man turn...

160. Tossing Tension

The place the woman had led them was in the next city, Anabita. It was an old, decrepit-looking two story tavern at the very edge of what could be considered the city proper, and as she pointed it out, she indicated its sign. The severed head of a wolf was painted on the wooden board in gory, graphic detail. “That’s what you look for. That�...

159. Warpath

Lira, Mouse, and Sable caught up with him halfway to the nearest criminal-run farm. Rhys was so lost in his thoughts, working out his plans, that he barely noticed, even with the clatter of Sable’s bone-limbs and the pitter-patter of Lira’s umbrella. He glanced up as they approached. “If the criminal element isn’t going to ignore us, thi...

Book 4 Start! 158. Back Home

One cursed bone and a well-load of trash and impurities later, Rhys raced home in the skeleton rider’s grasp, urging the rider on faster and faster, to higher and higher speeds. Someone might be dead. A mysterious man whose power he couldn’t gauge had said so. It was a ridiculous reason for him to speed up, but he couldn’t help but rush an...

157. Curses and Impurity

They marched on. Or rather, the skelly boy marched, while Rhys lounged in its arms like some lazy waste of space. He’d stopped pondering the new technique a while ago when the cursed energy seemed like it was about to hit critical mass, and the skelly boy had stopped moving as a result. That was something to explore when he had lots of mana an...

156. Normalizing Garbage

Trash can distribution was easier than Rhys had expected, but then, perhaps he should have expected it to be easy, when he’d already taken control of a multi-city criminal logistics network. The greatest portion of effort went into crafting the baskets, since he had to do that manually, and trash baskets had to be as large as public trash cans...

155. Once More Into the Void

Rhys charged into the void before he could think about it any longer. He burst out of the confines of his core into a by-now-familiar darkness and immediately stopped. There were things in the void that he didn’t want to encounter—no, he didn’t even want to risk drawing their attention too hard. Staying close to the comfort of his core mea...

154. Farming Should Be Criminal

He spent some time explaining to the Water Syndicate the basics of what he expected from them. The general mood in the camp went from tense, to confused, to totally lost. He hadn’t expected them to get it right away, so he wasn’t too bothered, though he was a little worried that they wouldn’t be able to understand his vision for a long tim...

153. The Final Two

Two Tier 3 mana signatures closed in on them, looping toward them from either side. Rhys devoured another tomato and pulled out a third, eating it so fast that tomato juices ran down his face, mingling with the red facepaint. He still wasn’t a hundred percent, and even if he ate all the tomatoes, he wouldn’t be. He needed the slow, regenerat...

152. Come And Get Me

Rhys leaped away. His bones creaked and his joints ached, but the quick patch-job he’d done to heal his legs held for now. He needed more time to let Self-Regeneration properly patch him up, but right now, between Trash Body and the vitality he was stealing from Landon, it would have to do.

Landon smashed down where he’d been seconds l...

151. There's More Than One

Rhys would have liked to keep the banter up for a little while longer, personally, but there was no time. The other high-Tier signatures were rapidly approaching. If he waited any longer, he’d be fighting not one, but three Tier 3 fighters. It looked like two at once was inevitable, but if he and Landon fought now, three on one should be preve...

150. I'm Supposed to Be Here

“Stop.”

Rhys stopped obediently, always a rule follower when it was convenient for him, anyways. A figure approached him from dead on, a slender woman who narrowed her eyes at him. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

He thought for a moment. This was a unique opportunity. He was already in the camp, and there wasn’t as ...

149. Evil Laurent

Snake Robes reached into one of his sleeves and withdrew a long, coiled whip. He released it, and the coils smacked the ground one after another with more weight and heft than a whip that size should have. Rhys faced him in an approximation of the Empire’s stiff sword form, based on foggy three-year-old memories of the one time he and Laurent ...

148. Full Frontal

Mouse had given him a map and a very detailed rundown on how to reach the Water Syndicate, and it wasn’t hard for him to locate it with her map and description. He wasn’t directionally gifted himself, but he wasn’t challenged either, so he only got lost once or twice before he encountered one of her landmarks and knew to adjust his path. H...

147. Dangerous Levers

Rhys didn’t hesitate. He’d already made up his mind, so he had to move immediately. After all, there were two options: he waited until they forgot about Lira, then attacked, or he attacked immediately, before they had a chance to move Lira around or seriously injure her. From Mouse’s telling of the situation, he chose to act immediately. I...

146. Emergency

Rhys hovered in his core, contemplating the void. He thought he had a good enough comprehension of it to manipulate it, but that clearly wasn’t the case, when it refused to so much as come when he called. He didn’t understand it at all, or maybe, his understanding was so mistaken that he couldn’t correctly call it.

The void was a spa...

145. Trash for the Trash God

Rhys wandered through the sewers, absorbing trash as he went. This was close enough that he could return in a flash, but not so far that he had to worry about the others handling a member of the Water Syndicate alone. He sighed, a little frustrated. He wanted to go search for the Syndicate himself, but now that he had an establishment, he had to...

144. It's All Up to You

“To the northeast!” Leonard burst out.

Rhys blinked. He hadn’t expected it to be this easy. Was Leonard lying? Well, it doesn’t matter. I have enough men to verify without going myself. Rhys reached into his robes and drew out a trashy book he’d been reading, presenting the rear leaves—the empty pieces of paper at the ...