Path of the Slayer B3 24. Clean Up & Setup

The spell scroll wasn’t a delicate thing in my hands.

The single rolled-up sheet was thick and made of leather from the flesh of some powerful Rank 5 creature. The rawhide string keeping it bound was nearly the width of my pinkie on my fleshy left.

When I gripped the three-foot-long item, an Epic power emanated from it, giving me chills along my spine. All it would take to unleash its power was for me to untie it and inject my Path Energy.

So, I did just that, while standing on top of a tall pile of rubble in the middle of the defeated cultist fortress. Thumper was beside me while Wolfie and Sabretooth did wheelies around the V’s big feet, the Rex standing watch.

Everybody stopped to look as the unrolled scroll slipped from my grasp and hovered in front of me. The spell diagram and the runes inscribed on its interior intensified before releasing a large pulse of white magic.

The rapidly spreading wave rolled over me, Thumper, and our summons with little to no effect on us. We weren’t the spell scroll’s desired targets.

I turned to watch when the white wave struck a puddle of blood on the floor and wiped it away. When I glanced down, I noticed the soot, scorch marks, and the lesser remains of destructive fighting were gone. The spell left behind the more overt damage that it couldn’t cleanse, mostly inorganic material such as stone, metal, and wood.

The corpses Sabretooth didn’t bother eating were wiped out as intended. The mass cleaning spell even did me a favor by tidying up the robes, clothing, and dropped weapons I hadn’t picked up yet. Then it reached beyond the fortress walls before fading away.

The defilement in the air was nearly all gone now.

“You got enough of those to clear out the floors below?” Thumper asked.

I nodded. “Syleth didn’t spare any credit.”

The Perfect Rogue tilted his head. “She’s not going to break Merlin’s heart, is she?”

“Maybe a little. I don’t think she’s going to be malicious about it. But Syleth strikes me as someone who’s here for the moment while also opportunistic. It’s really up to Merlin if he’ll understand that it’s all fun and flash, nothing truly permanent unless proven otherwise.”

Thumper sighed. “Eh. I rather not leave it up to chance. I got nothing against Syleth, but Merlin’s our boy.”

I nodded at that. “Be there for him while he’s looking like the biggest badass at the tournament. That’s probably the time Merlin might lose himself and go too far. It’s more than just wizard madness with him, y’know?”

“Will do after I eat and meditate. Before then, want to go over gains? Or should we wait until we’re all gathered up ten days from now?”

I paused to think about it. Anything gained within the System Logs wouldn’t become official until the gains were acknowledged. There was a case that by delaying that acknowledgement, growth could increase further, but up to a limit.

Of course, we’d risked delaying a power that might come in handy – having something like Slaughterhouse Avatar was a huge game changer I wouldn’t want to delay. But at this stage, squeezing out a growth advantage for the next nine to ten days might be more important.

There was also the quick stop at the Slayer Sanctum I needed to make after the tournament and before the Embassy of Defilement. I had no plans to delay that. It would be a key part of my growth before becoming a Veteran.

“Until after the tournament. Us and our squad. We’ll see how everybody stacks up.” With the first spell scroll having faded from being spent, I reached down into a pouch on my Epic belt and pulled out another copy. “Is it bad of me to say I’m most excited to see how Grimmy grows? Her talent and focus and sheer desire to improve is impressive.”

I sensed Thumper smirking even without looking at him. “The way you dote on her is like a big brother who suddenly discovered his long lost little sister. The two of you are scarily alike, too.”

I was making my way to the lower floors when Thumper’s comparison stopped me cold. Turning around, I shot him a glare. “There’s no way we’re that alike.”

The moment the words left my mouth, a shiver passed through my spine. Knowing I made a huge mistake, I turned and ran, but Thumper was already running along. With the enthusiasm of an overly large child, he made comparisons between me and Grimmy.

Chief among those comparisons was that we both had ‘anime protagonist energy.’ But I had the big, edgy version while Grimmy had the small, cute version. At the very least, I’d improved from having energy for attracting ex girlfriends.

Still, there would come a day I’d watch these anime motion pictures they keep referencing. Then I would finally understand a fraction of the Modern Earth Realm lingo and stop feeling so ignorant.

***

One-and-a-half days later, day three out of ten arrived.

I’d finally finished reading through the manuals Syleth had bought from my list. Some were based strictly in magic and craft amid Pathwalker society. Others were based on mechanical engineering from Modern Earth Realms.

I’d also finished destroying as many enchanted items I could afford to lose while studying their runic secrets.

Thumper had already gone away after we had a big feast and meditated. The only ones keeping me company were Hellion, Sabretooth, and V.

Hellion had done the service of retelling all that happened that V missed. Sabretooth would sometimes go out into the wilds to hunt and feed herself before coming back to help me top off on Path Energy. And V mostly had nothing to do but watch over me as I worked.

With V being more present, I realized I couldn’t work down on the bottom floors, so I left those alone even after cleaning them of defilement.

Instead, I’d turned two corners of the former cultist fortress into my crafting dens while keeping them far from each other. One corner was for everything without cursed corruption. The other corner was for everything with cursed corruption.

“It’s strange just … laying here,” V grumbled from the middle of the fortress.

Turning away from the white-hot and radiant Rank 5 forge, I wiped the sweat and smoke from my brow, my Path Energy remaining inside. With a pair of Rank 5 tongs in hand, I dropped the orange-hot metal ore back into the large and boxy melter to avoid premature cooling.

I’d convinced myself to use more proper crafting tools, especially for blacksmithing, instead of gripping things with Hellion when in the non-cursed area. It mattered a lot that I reduced cursed energy exposure to non-cursed items, forcing me to be a bit more traditional.

The same limits went for electromagnetism – the higher the crafting Rank, the more sensitive enchanted items became.

Electromagnetism from me contained my magic and energy, and those trace amounts could foul the process when crafting for other elemental effects.

In other words, I couldn’t cheat my way forward as easily as before unless I was dealing with something that matched my elemental powers. Then, I could play with electromagnetism in a way that was more novel than before.

The traditional practice wasn’t a bad one, though. My Great Skill, Magic Engineer Versatility, was pulsating through me in the best way possible. Being that it was a passive, it felt like I was cheating as I found solutions to most problems while expending less Path Energy.

If there was ever a problem that was bigger than my passive, I gladly spent Path Energy to exploit another Great Skill, Golden Hound Fortune. Any issue reasonably within Rank 5, even if it should be beyond the reach of an artificer generalist, became easier to resolve with a little supernatural twist of probability.

If that wasn’t a lot in my favor already, my Rank 5 crafting equipment was far more advanced than the prior Ranks.

The forges, grinders, quenching tanks were works of enchanted art. The mold-shifters were by far the most mystical thing I’d ever seen. As long as I had a schematic in mind, all I had to do was fiddle with the runic controls and shift the enchanted sands into the shapes I wanted.

My mind was abuzz with possibilities, but I sensed my Veteran Rex needed some attention even if he wouldn’t admit it.

With the metal ore placed back into the forge, I only needed to use my fleshy left hand to touch the forge’s corner and adjust the bright blue runic controls. The heat immediately dialed to a moderate tier, the enchantments doing some of the work for me without constant input.

It was almost like an artificing device, but still heavily magic based, which had its own host of issues to overcome that were expensive. If it weren’t for my new existence as a trillionaire, these sorts of items would’ve been far out of my reach.

The excitement I felt was palpable. But I held back from diving fully. I would soon enough after a check with V.