The Legend of William Oh

One may be excused for believing that William Oh can see the future: He can’t. He has an outstanding capacity to recognize patterns, which, to the untrained eye may SEEM like he is predicting the future.

He has however, on occasion, been documented telling the future what to do, which is totally different.

• Jason Salazar

“May I?” The Artificer Archetype asked, his bushy white brows cocked as he glanced up at Will.

“Go ahead,” Will gestured to the jar of Relic Dust.

To Will’s surprise, the old man dipped his pinky in the jar then put it in his mouth, his face becoming contemplative.

“Psychic….debuff…contract…and a bit of dirt,” He said, smacking his lips together and spitting.

“Sorry,” Will said, shrugging.

“Oh, no, for an unplanned Relic Loss, this dust is about as clean as you could possibly get it, which is good, drives cost down. I’ve had to filter out blood and saltwater and soil before so…”

“You want the good news or the bad news first?” He asked, glancing up at Will.

“The bad news is that your weapon is going to be very difficult to recreate. Large amounts of time and money difficult. To the point where you may decide that it doesn’t suit your plans going forward. If you’re planning on going above the tenth floor, there’s a better chance of finding something better than this, and faster than it’d be done. Assuming you don’t die.”

“I’d have to get an artisan to create a blank relic that matches your previous one perfectly, which is a tall order and would require you to be on hand for it’s creation since you don’t have a charcoal imprint. After that I’ve got to apply your Relic dust there to it.

“While he’s doing that’ I’ll be carefully sifting the dirt out of your Relic Dust.”

“Once we’ve got the blank, it’s going to absorb one to three of the dust’s affixes. Now we might get lucky and get all three but it’s more likely we only get two, and even more likely I only get one.”

“Then, if only one or two affixes land, I’ve got to go buy up some Relic dust from relics which only had one affix of the appropriate type. Which isn’t cheap. Then I’ve got to bake the affixes in one at a time in a time-consuming ritual.

And after all that’s said and done, you might get a weapon kinda-sorta like the one you lost.” The Artificier said, handing Will back the jar of dust.

“What’s the good news?”

“The good news is that that particular combination of affixes is rare and valuable, so the value of the relic, once It’s done being re-created, would be worth the effort.”

Hmm…

“I could also buy the dust off you for a good price,” the Artificier said with a shrug before glancing down at Will’s missing hand. “But you seem like the type to stick to something even if it’s hard.”

“That is the case,” Will said with a smile, glad to know that it was possible.

I’d rather do it myself, though.

Now that he knew what was needed, he was confident he could use a modified Sourdough to imprint the tomahawk’s affixes on something else.

Just gotta hit level 30 first, Will thought.

And spend a few hours scrolling through potential upgrades.

There were as many potential upgrades as there were monsters, which was to say…an infinite amount. But Will could narrow it down a bit by checking potential suspects first.

Just from what he’d heard, the process of recreating the axe wouldn’t be too dissimilar from how Will imagined Sourdough functioned.

Will thanked the aged artificer for his time and took his jar of iridescent dust for a walk.

The only artificer in the city.

At least, the only one who wasn’t under some kind of contract with a Lord or a major crime syndicate.

2 more fights.

Will had been through four rounds and was now in the semifinal. Once this was done, he would have a free pass up to the 6th Floor.

You know…assuming baron Akul keeps his word.

There was nothing protecting Will from a double-cross aside from the Baron’s regard for his own reputation. That might be enough by itself. Will had spotted several other interesting looking figures in the box today with the Baron.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

He couldn’t hear what they were saying over the roar of the crowd, but he could see pretty damned well.

Mark Wyrd sitting next to the baron, and someone who looked suspiciously like Mark was sitting in the big seat that was normally reserved for the Baron.

‘How much for that one?’ the man’s mouth had seemed to say.

If the Wyrd patriarch knew exactly what Will had done in Oilton, he would probably be a bit more pissed, but even if he didn’t know Will was responsible for that debacle, he already knew that Will had slipped his mercs once before, and now he saw him carving his way through the ranks of a tournament meant select potential Lords.

The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

No…there might even be more going on here than just Will.

The mercs were in town. The Wyrds were in town…the Tangled were in town.

There was already one Tangled in the city that Will had personally witnessed. Five, actually, Will corrected, thinking of the Baker Girls. What was the chance that in a city this big, in only a matter of days, he had run into every single one? there must be a high density of them to allow that to happen…

Right?

That brought Will back to Oilton. The dead city they’d discovered on the Third Floor.

It had been flooded by a single Tangled that had self-replicated.

If there were even only a dozen or so, it would a major problem for the city guard, given how strong they were. The Class was pure melee aggression with serious disdain for personal safety given their regeneration and self-replication.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Still, is that enough to take the whole city? People on this floor cluster around level 20-25. Third floor it was 10-15, much easier to subdue.

If the Wyrd Patriarch was planning on taking out Akul, there had to be some kind of unknown factor that would disrupt the city’s functions drastically enough that the Tangled could begin to grow and spread through the city, establishing a foothold before the citizenry could stop them.

A kaiju attack might do it.

But…Will’s experience with stealing someone’s slot on a kaiju hunt revealed to him that there were hundreds of mercenaries on this floor with expertise in subduing the monsters.

It seemed improbable that Frederick Wyrd could take out the Baron, the Kaiju Force, and the mercenaries who made their living killing kaiju.

But if he did…then we would have a problem.

In Will’s imagination, mindless Tangled spread rapidly through the streets, attacking anything that they possibly could, while kaiju loomed above the city, crushing homes and businesses as they tore through the flimsy human constructions.

It was so vivid, Will might’ve mistaken it for a memory.

What would have to happen for that to take place?

The Baron would have to die, of course.

The kaiju force would have to be taken out simultaneously. By…Tangled?Or more mercs like Void and Arms?

And finally there would have to be more Tangled and Kaiju than the mercs could handle at once. They’re specialized in subduing one at a time, in pre-arranged ways, with pre-arranged battlefields and tools. They would have a hard time doing it in the middle of the city while being assaulted by Tangled.

They might not even make it into the city in time. They live and work quite a ways outside of it.

Still, just one kaiju might be able to be handled by the city guard and citizens. For that to be a solid tactic, there would have to be more than one at once. Several, even.

So in will’s imaginary scenario, Frederick Wyrd would kill the Baron and unleash multiple Kaiju on the city as well as dozens of Tangled that he’d smuggled in over time.

There was just one major issue with Will’s hypothetical plan to destroy Akul.

Where in the Abyss would he get multiple Kaiju from? It wasn’t like they grew on trees. they spawned incredibly slowly, and didn’t spawn inside city limits at all.

…Why is that? there was nothing special about the man-defined walls of the city that prevented the tower from doing its worst.

Will tried slotting that puzzle piece together, trying magical Abilities, good fortune, low-miasma, divine favor, but none of them fit perfectly with what he knew already to explain why there were no kaiju spawns inside city limits.

Will thought back to his conversation with the Baron. The revelation that the number of Lords and their Strongholds on the floors above them had an effect on spawn rates was eye-opening.

Didn’t he say something about kaiju farming?

That got will thinking.

Spawn rates…farming….OHHHH….there’s kaiju under the city.

The baron was using a technique whereby a farmer pruned one branch to make the fruit that grew on the others more plump and juicy.

If Kaiju couldn’t spawn within a certain distance of each other…then the Baron could’ve restrained them under the city to prevent spawning inside the city for decades, which would be vital to creating such a large settlement…this had the added benefit of causing that extra unused miasma to divert to spawn kaiju outside the city at a higher rate, where they were caught and harvested.

Will didn’t know all the facts, and it was nothing more than a guess, but that fit everything he did know perfectly.

Well, how can I exploit this?What could I do that would bring the Wyrd’s hypothetical plan for mass murder crashing to the ground?

After a few minutes of thinking, Will hit on the vague memory of nearly dying because of the berserk debuffs they’d been hit by when they first arrived on the Fourth Floor, causing them to fight each other.

Loth had been particularly hard hit by it as all her bugs had succumbed completely, killing each other in a matter of seconds and devastating their numbers before she got them back under control.

Then he thought of the cursemage who’d been able to direct Ear Collector to attack other people and leave Will hanging…

As a plan began to come together, Will found himself wondering about the timing.

When is it gonna happen? Tonight? Tomorrow? A week from now?

Will would’ve guessed today, when the Wyrd Patriarch could’ve caught all the Lords in one place with their metaphorical pants down.

Why not today? Maybe he plans on making some of them an offer? Maybe they were armed?

Will didn’t know enough to even guess about who might be betraying who, but if not today…

The only other time that the visiting Lords will all be in one place at one time will be…the auction, when the rarest Relics and sacrifices in the city will all be in the same place.

Will thought back to the missing item from the Oilton Patriarch’s office.

Wyrd wasn’t above a little petty robbery, but it had to be really good.

And if it was really good, chances were it would be at that auction.

Or maybe it’s just my paranoia making all this up.

…Nah. There’s been way too many Tangled in the city for it to be just paranoia.

Something was about to happen, and Will was sure it wouldn’t be good.

Once Will got back to the inn, he took Loth and Travis to the side. Neither of them were currently in the tournament, they had more ability to move freely, and they had the skillsets that he believed could ruin the Wyrd’s plans for the city.

Akul is going to turn out differently than Oilton. I’m going to make sure of it.

“There’s something I’d like the two of you to do.”

Loth cocked her head as Will began to explain what he wanted, while Travis’s jaw slowly went slack.