HC: Handyman | Ch. 225 - Overtones

Jack sat on the battlement of the South Wall, overlooking the empty void. Clouds drifted thick below, hiding whatever landscape stretched beyond the mountain’s base.

“Overtones… overtones…” he muttered, scanning through search results.

He’d only read about them in passing when preparing to craft the horn. In his notes, he’d written that longer horns could produce more overtones.

But knowing this didn’t help him here. Not now that he had to actually play.

He tried different search terms, but still came up with irrelevant results. “Nothing? Seriously?” he said aloud. How was it possible that on a planet with 10 billion people, no one had posted a video of someone playing a carved bone horn? All he could find were French horn tutorials.

He gave up on finding a perfect match and clicked one.

The man in the video wore a black three-piece suit and stood with military posture in a softly lit room. Pale skin, high forehead, and neatly combed gray hair gave him the look of a manor butler.

“Greetings, French horn players,” the man began. “Today, we shall examine a principle most fundamental to any serious practitioner of the horn: the harmonic series—also known as overtones.”

He adjusted a cufflink, then gestured toward the instrument.

“In simplest terms, the harmonic series is the natural ladder of pitches produced by vibrating air within a tube. The horn, being just such a tube, can create these tones without valves. Observe.”

He lifted his left hand toward the camera, untouched valves on display, and raised the horn to his lips. After a breath, he launched into a clean, rapid-fire series of fifteen notes, climbing higher and higher.

Jack’s jaw dropped. Fifteen notes—without even touching the valves?!

He scrubbed back and watched again. No fingers. Just slight shifts in lip tension and airflow. 

“The horn is, at its core, a long, coiled tube,” the man continued. “Air flows. Vibrations form. Faster air, higher pitch. Thus: your first overtone, and so on.”

“To play them, you must master your embouchure—the lip tension—and your airspeed. For lower tones, relaxed lips, and warm air. For higher notes, firmer lips, and faster flow. Imagine blowing through a straw, then blowing out a candle.”

He gave a brief, knowing smile, the kind that suggested he’d seen every mistake a student could make—and fully expected you to make them too. “One must never pinch the lips too tightly, nor force the air. It is finesse, not brute force, that wins the day.”

Jack paused the video just as the man demonstrated playing fourteen overtones, this time at a slower pace.

I doubt I’ll be able to get that many notes out of a cow horn.

His blowing horn was short. The French horn’s coils stretched its tubing out five times longer. That mattered to produce overtones. Even the system had said it—at most, he could squeeze out two overtones from this instrument.

Still, the principle should hold: tense the lips, push the air faster.

Jack adjusted his embouchure. “Blowing through a straw, then blowing off a candle. OK.” He tightened his core and blew.

The note cracked, slipped, then jerked upward—shrill and unsteady. Jack winced.

He reset. Took another breath. Tried again.

Too flat. Then too sharp. Then just a wheeze.

It couldn’t be about force. He had to find the balance—the tension, the airflow, the feel.

Jack narrowed his eyes, steadied himself, and buzzed his lips again, tighter this time. The horn responded. The note jumped—a full octave above the first. He tried to hold it, but it wobbled like a tightrope walker teetering step by step… and then tumbling off.

“I did it! That was very close!” he said, grinning. He doubted the gentleman in the video would have called it a success, but to him, it counted.

He exhaled, rolled his shoulders, and took a few calming breaths.

Then one more time. Squeeze tighter. Push from the core—and blow.

The horn shrieked, overshooting the note. A cracked, warbling screech tore out. He tried to rein it in, and for a heartbeat, he found the pitch—but it cracked again before he could hold it.

His cheeks flushed. His breath came harder.

“It’s harder than it looks. But I’m starting to get it.”

He kept going. Each bad note grated against his ears—sharp, nasal, unpredictable. It was a good thing he’d climbed up here alone. The One-Eyes would’ve thrown him off the wall if they had to listen to this for long.

A few minutes later, he was hearing improvements.

He blew into the horn and found the overtone again. His lips buzzed with the effort, ticklish from the speed. A slight adjustment, a bit more drive from the diaphragm—and the note jumped. Clean. Controlled. He held it a full second before cutting off.

A chime rang in his mind.

+2 XP in Bard

“Finally! The system recognized it!” Jack exclaimed. This was it. He was on the right track.

Emboldened, he kept going. Switching between the base note and the higher octave, over and over. Each attempt came more easily. The flush in his face faded. His cheeks stopped aching. His body stopped fighting him.

He was learning which muscles to use—and which to let go.

A few more repetitions, and the horn felt different. Responsive. No longer a stubborn block of bone—almost a real instrument now.

His fingers itched to go further, to try for the next overtone. He could feel it, just at the edge of his breath. One more push, and he’d have it...

But a message alert flashed and interrupted him.

“Hi, Jack! Boss in 15,” Amari wrote.

He sighed, lips still tingling from the vibrations.

“Coming,” he replied, putting the horn away.

He gave one last look at the clouds below, thick and silent. Despite spending all this time practicing, he hadn’t unlocked a single skill or song that might help the others.

He was starting to think that this might not be the best way to spend his time. Would this even make any difference in these last waves?

He shook his head.

I just need a little more time, he told himself.

Then he turned and jogged down the battlement stairs.

*

Everyone was fed and in position, waiting for the last seconds of the clock to tick down.

Jack glanced at the soldiers. Each of them now had a few javelins sticking into the ground near their positions. Horace had spent the last two hours crafting them so that “the marabou disaster wouldn’t repeat itself.” That was in between his pranks on Marie, of course. 

What he hadn’t imagined was that Marie would use this as an excuse to get back at him.

“I’m telling you, just because they have javelins doesn’t mean they’re in your unit now,” Horace said to Marie.

“Wake up, idiot. They’re ranged now!”

“That’s just for emergencies,” he countered.

“Amari, talk some sense into Horace! Tell him that from now on, his group of toy soldiers will be under my command.”

Amari chuckled—and then did something Jack rarely saw him do: he settled the matter.

“Horace is right.”

“O-OK, then,” Marie replied, caught off guard. She opened her mouth to argue, then shut it with a glare and stormed off. “Whatever,” she muttered. 

Horace beamed like he’d just won a PvP tournament. “Haha! That’ll show her,” he said, grinning. He looked over at Jack and approached.

Jack had expected him to come over to gloat, but instead, he changed the subject.

“Hi, Jackie! How’d your practice go?”

“Fine. Even though it was a little short.”

“We could hear you practicing from over the courtyard, you know. That thing’s got range, huh?”

“Seems like it.”

“What can you do with that horn anyway?” he asked.

“Uh… nothing at the moment?”

“Nothing?! No skill? No song?”

“Squat,” Jack said, deadpan. “Just noise and sore cheeks so far.”

“I just don’t get it,” he said. “Why spend time playing that thing if you haven’t even unlocked anything from it?”

Jack sighed. “I have a skill called [Self-Taught]. I have to keep practicing on an instrument to unlock mastery and then get access to skills.”

“Oh. Are you nearly there yet?”

That was a good question. According to the [Self-Taught] skill, he had to play one hundred major scales on an instrument to unlock mastery and gain access to instrument-specific skills.

But there was a problem.

He couldn’t play a major scale. Not on this horn. At least if [Self-Taught]’s skill text was to be taken literally.

Self-Taught (Uncommon)

Skill Level: 1

Practice makes perfect. You can learn to play any instrument by spending a little time on it.

Effect: Complete 100 major scales on an instrument to unlock its mastery and instrument-specific skills.

If the horn couldn’t play a scale, then would the skill even trigger?

“So?” Horace asked after Jack stayed silent for a few moments.

“Honestly? I don’t know.”

Horace blinked a few times and shrugged, looking toward the horizon. 

Wave 45 comes. Beware.

A gust of tramontane swept through the canyon, dropping the temperature in an instant. The wave was coming.

Jack kept his eyes peeled for flyers. If there had been one aerial wave, chances were there’d be more. But moments later, a long, rising howl echoed across the canyon. The sound scraped against the stone and carved its way into their bones. Jack’s breath caught. The air felt thinner, colder.

“Wolves!” Marie shouted.

“Or wolf,” Amari corrected. “Alright, from now on, we’re keeping the turrets on every wave. I don’t care if it costs us gold.”

He opened the interface, and one by one, the six turrets powered up. Gears clicked and turned with a steady rhythm as the mechanisms locked into firing mode.

Jack nodded approvingly. The turrets were OP. And while ten gold sounded steep, it was less than ten credits in the real world. Split five ways, that was just ten bucks each. Why take chances? That’s why they’d spent the 70 Breach points on this package anyway.

Moments later, all six turrets swiveled in unison, locking onto the target. The boss had emerged.

Amari had been right. It was just the one wolf.

The creature was massive—its shoulders nearly brushing the rock wall as it slipped through the gap beside the dandelion tree. Its fur was a mottled gray, thick and coarse, like smoke given muscle. 

It lifted its head and howled again.

You’ve been afflicted with the [Dire Straits] debuff.

-10% to all stats.

“It’s a gray dire wolf!" Horace shouted.

"What a powerful debuff," Rob said.

Then the wolf charged.

Before Marie could even throw her first grenade, the Star Towers opened fire. A chorus of sharp whistles tore through the air as arrows streaked across the field and struck the wolf. Numbers exploded over its health bar in bursts of yellow and orange. Combined with the ticking damage from the tramontane, it looked like a digital fountain of pain.

Still, the wolf didn’t falter.

Then came the snap of tensioned ropes—and two thunderous impacts.

TWANG!

PAH!

Two massive iron javelins sliced through the wind. They didn’t whistle like the bolts—they roared, swooshing overhead with weight and speed.

When they struck, two large red numbers burst into the air:

-214

-217

The wolf staggered.

Jack blinked. After seeing the Star Towers in action in the wave before, he thought he wouldn’t be surprised anymore. But he hadn’t expected that kind of power from the Moon Towers. Judging by the silence, no one else had either.

As the Moon Towers reset, the Star Towers kept up their relentless assault. Arrows continued to slam into the wolf, each hit landing with a thud and a fresh burst of red numbers. By the time it came into range of Marie’s grenades, it had already lost a third of its health.

“Fire at will!” Marie shouted, pulling the pin on one of her grenades.

She timed the throw perfectly—just a step ahead of the wolf’s charge. The explosion burst in a tight radius, kicking up flame and metal shards. It was a specialized grenade, built for maximum damage to a single target. The blast slowed the creature’s advance, just barely.

Christoff and the One-Eyes joined in, their arrows and dart-blowers hissing as they added their own stream of damage.

The Moon Towers fired again—another twin volley of javelins that hammered into the wolf. Its stride faltered as it pushed on, stubborn and silent.

Watching the sheer number of projectiles flying toward the boss, Jack couldn’t help but think of those sci-fi movies where fleets of ships focused all their fire on a single target. 

The wolf pressed forward, braving the wind and the storm of steel. But a third volley from the Moon Towers sealed its fate.

It collapsed before it even reached the first ditch.

Wave 45 cleared.

Jack barely stopped himself from saying aloud what he could already read on everyone’s faces.

That was almost too easy.

Ch. 224 - Field Remedy

INDEX

Ch. 226 – Calls