noct

203. Wake Up!

Rhys snapped awake with a jolt and immediately sat upright before he even comprehended where he was or what his eyes saw. For a second, he sat there dazedly, gazing into the middle distance, and then his brain slowly kicked in, and his eyes narrowed to a squint. I’m outside… in a field… a few hills… the weird feeling of the void nearby… I’m in the secret realm that was full of trash! Why?

A second later, the memory hit him. Stealing the secret realm. Pulling it thro...

202. Secret Time

Rhys poured his mana into the small secret realm. It had been used as a trash heap for so many years that it bore the essence of trash, that it had, itself, acknowledged that it was a place for trash, a place trash belonged, and therefore, by being so worthless as to be a home for trash, had become trash itself. It spread from his feet outward, staining the earth with a filthy green-brown tinge as it passed, quickly at first, but slowing as it stretched further and further—not only because ...

201. Touching Me (Touching You)

Daran stared at Rhys’s hand, and Rhys stared at Daran. Slowly, he reached out and swiped at Daran’s shoulder. His hand passed right through, as he’d expect. The man was still just as immaterial as ever. Frowning, Rhys looked Daran over. “Why could I touch you?”

“I don’t know. Don’t ask me,” Daran snapped, in what Rhys was learning was Daran’s defensive tone. The man really didn’t like when he didn’t know something, and his first reaction was always to go...

200. Myriad Realms in the Dark

Rhys stared at the mana battery. Thoughts whirled through his head. Other realms. This delicate battery. The Empress, stealing peoples’ cores. The mana battery, which was the closest thing magic gear had to a core, which Logan had even used as a sort of pseudo-core, but which the Empress apparently couldn’t grasp.

Why?

She’d come close. He could feel it. The mana battery was so delicate, with such a tenuous surface, like a Christmas bauble, as if a mortal could clos...

199. I Get Why They Defeated You

“You are insufferable,” Daran grumbled.

“Yeah, but I’m not insufferable enough to get an entire nation to band together to overthrow me, so you’ve got me beat there,” Rhys returned.

Daran laughed darkly. “Do you honestly think that is why they overthrew me?”

“Yes.”

A dead stare.

“It’s why I’d join the overthrow-Daran crew, anyways,” he clarified.

“Did you consider that every person in a country might not be as...

198. Alone in a Pocket Trash Dimension

Rhys wandered around the heap, picking things up, then putting them down. The more he inspected, the deeper the frown on his face grew. This stuff was trash.

That was fine, of course. He loved trash. No problem with that. But the problem was, he’d been promised fine artifacts that were treated as trash, not actual pure trash. This… this was just trash.

There were priceless artifacts, sure. Or rather… the remains of what had once been priceless artifacts. There were shards of...

197. Into the Darkness

Rhys had to duck to fit through the opening in the hut. His vision went pitch black the second he edged inside. He walked hunched for a few moments, then stood a little and realized there was nothing over his head. Cautiously, he stood, and struck nothing all the way up. The hut had only been about four, maybe five feet tall, but he was able to stand; wherever this was, it wasn’t physically inside the hut anymore. He walked forward, taking one step after another, though he wasn’t sure tha...

196. The Assault Begins

Rhys kept all his attention trained on the gas ball. It was the only way he could keep from losing track of it with Mouse’s influence on it, and that was with her trying to let him in particular be aware of the gas ball under his own influence. Slowly, with Mouse’s constant feedback, he stretched the gas over the sky. It blocked out the sun and colored the light pouring down from above, but none of the soldiers reacted. Sweat poured off Rhys and Mouse alike as the two of them both focused...

195. Arrival at the Heap

A/N: Good news! The laptop survived! We're back in business! And I've also backed up everything so I won't lose it all like an idiot if it goes down again. Thanks so much for all your support and nice comments!

The forest fell away before them. They paused at the edge of the treeline, all of them gathered around Mouse so that her invisibility aura encapsulated all of them. A hundred meters of nothing stretched before them, a hundred meters of empty land devoid of trees, undergrowth, or...

194. Off To See The Trash Heap

Rhys felt like a man finally facing his truth, as if he were achieving a great thing that he had desired after for a long time. In reality, he’d just forgotten about the trash dumps for a long time and gotten distracted by a lot of other very important work, and they’d ended up falling by the wayside while he worked on all the other higher-priority stuff. It was more akin to someone with a lot of projects continuously working on the most important stuff while the slightly less important p...

193. Counterattack Thoughts

He couldn’t help but think about the counterattack, now that he knew there was a counterattack on the horizon. It lived in his head rent-free, whether he wanted it to or not, lurked in his mind like a virus, like a parasite, something he couldn’t break out of his thoughts or dig out of his brain. He spent all morning looking over his shoulder, then had to retire into the back room because it was too stressful to be in public.

It was ridiculous. He recognized that. Ridiculous that h...

192. Hello Again

A/N: fair warning: my cat just decided to water my computer. I don't know that it's dead, but I haven't checked if it's alive either--most online guides say to wait 48 hrs to a week to allow it to fully dry before turning it on. If it's gone, then please cry deeply for my bad data practices, but all my manuscripts are gone. If it isn't gone, then we're good!

A/N: but the real problem is that I've lost all the progress I didn't have saved to Patreon. Which is this chapter. So if tomorrow...

191. Criminals Cleared

Once the camp had been sorted, Rhys led their new recruits back home. There were too many to teleport, and anyways, he wanted to keep that kind of on the down low, if at all possible, so they had to take things the slow way. Rhys had more important things to do than cart a campfull of mortals across the country, so after he helped ferry everyone through the portal, he left the rest of it up to Lira, who was uniquely skilled at managing, acquiring, and handling water-based transport.

He ...

190. Rushing Into Danger

It only took Rhys a few moments to clear out the cave, mostly because he stood in the middle of it and sucked it all into his core like he was a giant vacuum. He could sort the contents out later, when his friends weren’t in danger.

There wasn’t much they could do about the camp. With the call from Mouse, they had to rush back. At least they could always step back through the portal after they figured out whatever was going on with Mouse, but first, they needed to sort out whatever ...

189. Misunderstandings

The snakes, too, were sucked into the figure, and within the cave, Madame Quast frowned. If he was a weak damage sponge, faking his tier, he shouldn’t have been able to do that. Or… was he some kind of doll or hollow figure, whose whole purpose was to absorb poison? No—that explained everything! How he’d so easily dispelled her aphrodisiac, how he could endlessly absorb her potion… he was a doll, like the Strawman, but one that sucked up poison instead of curse energy. She cackled. ...

188. From One Poison Master to Another

He bounded through the forest, closing in on the Tier 4 signature. Sable caught up with him, clawing from tree to tree with her bonus limbs, and followed along, easily matching his pace. They cleared the forest without any further attacks and found themselves on a great plains. Semi-permanent huts and tents were arrayed over the plains, and from a quick scan, some Tier 1 and mortal chaff was arrayed across the tents. Rhys made a mental note to double back and make sure no one was being held a...

187. New Sword, Who Dis?

They’d been in the woods all morning, waiting in their predetermined spots for the ambushees to show up. Most of them had thought it was somewhat stupid to try and enact an ambush, with no ability to disguise their auras, but when Madame Quast asked for an ambush, you complied, you didn’t ask why or tell her she had a bad idea. Since she’d started following that sketchy alchemical manual, her power had skyrocketed, but her brainpower and sanity had plummeted. She’d transformed from th...

186. Magical Engineering

Mouse knelt at the magical circle, tilting her head left and right as she got a closer look. “It really is a portal… but if you’re asking me if there’s something else attached…”

“Yeah. Or if it goes somewhere bad,” Rhys added.

The female voice was thoughtfully silent.

“Well, I can’t tell you that. A portal is a portal, so unless you’re getting vibes from the portal, there’s no way to say what’s on the other side. But if there’s something that lets...

185. Searching the Brothel

They proceeded deeper into the brothel. Further—further, Rhys corrected himself. There was a lot of ‘deeper’ going on around them, and it made it hard to keep the word out of his mind. Still no attendant, which he was starting to take as the way this place operated. He wasn’t sure how you booked services or paid for them, but everyone else seemed to have it all figured out, and it wasn’t as though he actually was a client, so it all worked out.

Based on his previous e...

184. Criminal Cores

As Rhys had predicted, the Empire immediately leaped to Lord Estos’s assistance. The hunt for the camp escapees died down with the arrest of a few known criminals and familiar dissidents, leaving Rhys free to act once more. One quick trip to the local stream, and he reset his bone structure back to its usual settings, only barely resisting the urge to get a little experimental. Now wasn’t the time to fuck around, notwithstanding his latest round of fucking around as Adelise, which hadn’...

183. The Time Has Come

Lord Estos strode to the head of the ballroom, a confident smile on his face. No troublemakers had showed up to his ball—in fact, according to the guards, they hadn’t even sensed an attempt on the defenses, and everything was moving along smoothly. Drink flowed, snacks were eaten, and couples danced upon the ballroom floor with all the careless wonder and abandon they usually did. Not a single ghost to be seen, not that ghosts were real; but he’d kept that ne’er-do-well who was tastel...

182. Why're We All Wearing Masks, Anyways?

A second before he panicked, Rhys took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. It was okay. He was in disguise and wearing a mask. Laurent hadn’t necessarily recognized him. He was just the average man, looking for a lady to dance with. He’d seen someone on the edge of the ball with no partner, and decided to take his chances… or thought he was offering charity, which honestly seemed more likely to Rhys, given Laurent’s personality and general aura of do-goodyness. The...

181. The Ball Begins

Rhys yawned, then finally lowered his book. By the volume alone, the ball was well and truly going by now, not to mention the smell of delicious food and the delicate music wafting on the breeze.  He nodded at Mouse. “Shall we?”

“H-huh? N-now? Just like that?” she asked, startled.

Rhys blinked. “Yeah? The ball’s going. We can slide into the guests without being noticed. No need to hold out any longer.”

“Oh! Oh. Yes. Right.” For some reason, a blush cre...

180. The Pivotal Moment

Lord Estos, the lord holding the ball, had added special precautions to ensure no one undesirable arrived at the ball, such as, for example, Adelise Infernon’s ghost, or, according to him, the ne’er-do-well who was masquerading as Adelise Infernon’s ghost, whom Rhys firmly condemned, and definitely had no idea who that person could be, if they existed at all. There was a barrier that tracked the number of carriages arriving, and guards wandering the entire perimeter. If anyone entered w...

179. Could It Be You?

The sharp tap-tap of jackboots sounded close on Rhys’s heels as he powerwalked away at top speed. “It’s you, isn’t it? R…Rhys?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Rhys rumbled in his best gruff voice. Fuck. I knew Laurent came by Purple Dawn once-or-so a year, but I didn’t know he lurked around town—no, dammit, that’s on me. It’s obvious he’d use this city as his base if he was heading to Purple Dawn.

Mana rushed toward his back. Rhys d...

178. Offloading

They lurked home from the ball, wandering naturally out into the surrounding yard, then sprinting home through the trees. The servants were already kicking up a fuss about the empty carriage, the absence of Lord DeVeers had been noticed, and most importantly of all, Rhys had sampled all the delicacies at the buffet table. He hadn’t found his pivotal moment, but he was pretty sure Mouse was right, there, that he should play it subtle at first, even if his trashy sensibilities screamed for hi...

177. Ball Organizers Hate This One Neat Trick!

In the back of the carriage, Rhys quickly drew all the curtains and pulled all the slots shut. He was very clearly not Lord DeVeers, and didn’t want to get called out on it, but based on the man’s lazy demeanor, he might just be able to get away with it this way. They slowed down, and Rhys heard a voice from outside the carriage:

“Invitation, please?”

“Uh, um…”

Rhys slid open the slit between him and the driver and pushed the invitation through, nudging Mouse w...

176. Party Time

At last, the time was upon them. The day had come. The dawn broke, and the sun shone upon a new day. The day… of the ball.

He’d found one. It was in a little city far from the capital, not far from the city he’d started in—but not the actual city he’d started in, in case the Empire was tracking that, on the off chance they connected the mysterious ball ghost he was about to be, and the revolution. They were still looking for the revolution, and patrols prowled all the cities n...

175. Everything's Softer When It's Wet

Lira splashed down into the river, laying back and splaying in the water. Her hair and clothes flowed around her, pitch black hair billowing around the white cloth as it welled up like the water that supported it, her pale skin barely a shade darker, her lips like a smear of lurid blood. Rhys froze where he stood, struck by the urge to freeze the moment, immortalize it somehow, but then she sat up and gave him a look. “What? Get in the water already. Gods know you could use a bath.”

174. Crashing a Ball for Fun and Profit

It was shockingly easy to obtain information about the nobles, once Rhys started trying. He took a slot as a front man, and rotated through a few of his shops, listening to the people coming by to get their snacks and asking a few obtuse questions. People loved to gossip, and in this world, nobles were the equivalent of celebrities, so he heard so much gossip about them. With a few simple questions, he learned that Adelise was presumed dead, but that some people still thought she might be ali...