noct

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, let alone fatal. Still, the annoying strikes were enough to keep the finders on their toes, and they did slowly sap their attention, strength, and s...

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 hands moved at lightning speeds, so fast they seemed to blur. Faster and faster, throwing more and more garbage, until he created a trash ball of equ...

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 regrouped at the trash can, awaiting teleportation. He told them to stay, and if they ran, to take the trash can, before he left. As long as the trash can was...

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 counted down the final seconds, his eyes on the guards. Tier 1. A joke, honestly. The Empire really had forgotten about their attacks, all those months a...

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 verge of breaking through to Tier 2 again; since they’d already ranked up past 2, it was just a matter of accumulating mana and recalling their insights...

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 when he was human, in his body and not a being of pure energy, it hurt like hell.

His eyes felt like they were trying to squeeze out of his hea...

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 the curse activate, but simply forced the energy through it.

He wasn’t converting the mana to curse power; not all of it, anyways. The nature of...

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 the void like he was squeezing mayonnaise onto a burger. It simply wouldn’t work.

He could try repairing the hole in his core and then go from ...

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-take and drew his weapon. In response, Rhys simply closed in silently, scanning the three of them with his mana as he did.

The one furthest from ...

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 turned and fled. The wood floor grew slick under his feet, and if not for the timely activation of Trash Step, Rhys might have slipped. Instead, he ran fa...

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’s their sign.”

Subtle, it isn’t. Rhys looked at it for a moment, then turned toward the woman. “Are they all that obvious?” 2025-07-06 14:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post

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, this is going to escalate. I think we’ll end up at full-on crime war.”

“Is that bad?” Lira asked.

Rhys shrugged. “It means the Empi...

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 anyways. This was exactly the kind of world where someone who appeared out of nowhere in the woods might actually know someone you knew had been killed....

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 and was in a safe place, not while he was being carried around by a curse he was deliberately misusing on his way to pick up more filth and another curs...

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 to be meaningful. Rhys went from having the same joking opinion about Underwater Basketweaving classes as everyone else did, to being of the impressi...

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 meant he could beat a quick retreat from the void if that being decided to take interest in him, especially an aggressive interest.

The instant he ...

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 time yet, given how long it would take for profits to filter down. Still, at this level of parallelization, he could—no, he had to spread to t...

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, regenerative power of Self-Regeneration to set everything right. The tomatoes were just patching him up, lessening his pain as much as possible and keeping his...

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 later. Earth flew, stones peppering the back of Rhys’s legs and pinging a few tender spots he hadn’t known he’d had. He’d given up on plucking ...

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 preventable. So he charged, closing the gap between him and Landon as fast as possible.

Landon was huge. Enormous. Eight-foot-nothing and at least si...

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 obvious a need to question him. Snake Robes had run off. Maybe he could bluff? It wouldn’t make sense with his backstory, but… eh, whatever, he de...

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 had fought. Hopefully Laurent’s form was standard, because if he’d made any variations, then Rhys would be making them too. Not that Laurent struc...

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. Her notes included a bunch of circles around the particular ravine and an extra set of red lines around the upper edges of the ravine along with the wo...

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. If they’d known for sure that Lira was sent here, or that she had backing, then it made more sense to wait, and act as if she was low-value, but they...

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 space that held garbage, and it had been thrown away by the Empire, at least, so it should qualify as garbage or garbage-related, in Rhys’s opinion. St...

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 protect it, too.

This is annoying. I need a better solution.

He lifted his head, looking at the filth he sucked in. The sewers w...

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 end of the book—and a pen. “A map, please.”

“Is this all you need? Am I free to go?” Leonard asked, accepting both.

Rhys shrugge...