An Unwavering Craftsman

Damien awoke the next morning feeling better, but, after the night-time interruption, not completely refreshed. A bright light shone around his curtains, though, indicating that he'd already overslept. Wanting to get himself some breakfast before Shigeo ate it all, he dragged himself out of bed and into his clothes, wandering downstairs, where he found a stranger in his seat at the breakfast table, with a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her.

Right, the night time interruption had included her, hadn't it... Able to inspect their visitor under better light, he took in her straight, black hair and light blue eyes. She was wearing a shirt and trousers, rather than the more traditional dress or skirt that most girls her age would wear, probably for practicality, if she'd been helping out around a forge. A bruise on her face, obviously from a heavy slap or punch, was her only visible injury, but with her body covered, there could easily be plenty more hidden away. Fleta would have checked last night, but Damien assumed there wouldn't be; she looked healthy, not malnourished or neglected, and the bruise was less than a day old. It came after the ceremony.

It was a sad fact, but some parents saw the act of raising children as an investment. She would have been raised up to take over the forge, or at least to work in it if she had any older siblings, and when it turned out she couldn't, and seventeen years of expenses by her parents had been 'wasted', her father had snapped and lashed out. Better than her having been the victim of long-term abuse, but only in the way that being covered in boiling oil was better than being covered in boiling lead. Damien would rather not experience either.

"Good morning," said Damien, taking a different seat.

"Morning," Lana said with a smile. "Sorry for scaring you last night."

"Apology accepted, but given your situation, we wouldn't have minded if you'd knocked."

The smile dropped for a moment, and Damien saw Fleta watching intently. He knew she was on the lookout for any hints that Lana had lied, or hadn't told the entire truth.

"I didn't want to disturb you. I didn't want to risk you getting angry and sending me away."

"This family isn't like that. You don't need to worry while you're here."

"Indeed, they are not. Hence why they employ someone like me to set fire to their food each morning," said Grace as she set a plate in front of Damien and another three in front of Shigeo.

Damien peered at his plate, but didn't see any signs of charcoal, or smell anything burnt. He decided she was probably joking. Hopefully.

"Umm... If you don't mind me asking... Why are you looking to employ a tier one smith? What possible use could you have for me?"

Lana looked worried, as if she was concerned they were about to realise some horrible mistake. That the guild had misread a seven as a one or something, and she was about to get kicked out.

"I think Damien here should answer that," said Fleta. "He's a [Neophyte Tailor]."

Lana stared at Damien with wide eyes. "You're tier one too?!" she gasped.

"Yup. And whatever your dad might think, there's nothing shameful about it. As for what we want you to do, we're carrying out an experiment that requires the use of [Runic Engraving]. You'll need to take the feat and perks I tell you to, and in return, we'll help you level and give you a place to live."

"You'll help me level?! But... isn't [Runic Engraving] a feat? I'd have to get all the way to level fifty!"

"Eighty, actually," corrected Damien, explaining the full details to Lana, her eyes swimming as she tried to follow the maths, and her mouth gaping when she found they wanted to power-level her to level eighty.

"Right," said Shigeo, attracting attention with a clap of his hands. "Plans for the day. Lana, given the suddenness with which you ran away from home, and that you don't seem to have anything with you, I assume you're going to need some necessities."

"Yes..." she admitted, in a small voice.

"Okay. Grace, you take her out and buy what she needs. A few changes of clothes and the like. Fleta will run to Hrellisti and get equipment ordered for a tailor, smith and alchemist. Damien, hit the library. I'm going to talk to some people."

The first of which would be Lana's family, if Damien was any judge. "Equipment for a smith? That's going to take a lot of space," he commented.

"We can use the potato patch out back. Easier to set up here than try to use someone else's place long-term. Frankly, I'm more concerned about the alchemist. Have you any idea how awful those places smell?"

Damien didn't, having never visited an alchemist. He'd bought a potion on occasion, but only the sort of mass-produced things that were shipped to general stores for sale, and nothing he'd ever needed to put in a bespoke order for. Something else to worry about then; soon their house would smell worse than Shigeo when he got back from a particularly lengthy mission, and hadn't had time for a bath.

If everything worked, and he didn't get struck down by the Five or driven mad by some alien voice, it would be totally worth it.

"You're running this like some sort of military operation," grinned Damien, slicing his bacon.

"Hah. I may not be military, but adventuring needs the same organisation," replied Shigeo, all three plates having somehow lost their contents in the time it had taken Damien to think. "Speaking of which, we've already been off for over a week. The guild asked us to take care of a nest of orgwölds when Fleta was there yesterday, and the longer we leave them, the bigger the pain they're going to be when we try to clear them. The rate the nest is growing, the latest we can get there is four days' time."

"What's..." started Lana, flinching when everyone turned to look at her. "What's an orgwöld?" she finished, in a smaller voice.

"Start with a hairless human baby, distort it until the head is the size of the body and the eyes take up half the head, then flatten the nose, widen the mouth and remove the skin. They crawl around slowly on hands and knees, leaving bloody trails wherever they go, looking half-dead. That lasts until they attack, when they stand up and charge, faster than any human can run without perks or class boosts. They'll bite onto their prey with a mouth full of spiky teeth and tear off their skin to add to their nests. Not particularly dangerous to a trained fighter, unless the nest gets too big. This one formed in the middle of a forest, well away from any villages, and grew far too large by the time it was discovered. A threat to the local deer population, but not currently to any humans, thank goodness."

Lana pushed away her plate, suddenly no longer hungry and obviously regretting having asked. Damien didn't entirely blame her; he'd been brought up on tales of monsters, but to someone living in a safe town, who had only seen more natural wildlife, the twisted and biologically impossible monsters were things straight out of nightmares.

As far as Damien knew, it was a complete mystery where they came from. They just appeared from nowhere, usually far from civilization, but the first would soon attract more. One orgwöld would spawn at random, then, a few days later, there was a nest crawling with them. A few more weeks, and they'd start overflowing and spreading around. Adventurers with scouting and scrying classes were constantly searching remote forests or inaccessible terrain, trying to catch monster outbreaks before they became a problem. It sounded like they'd stumbled on this particular nest quite late, but still in time to prevent them spilling out.

Empirically, it had been observed they didn't spawn in the vicinity of the Five's shrines, but the Five had never declared monsters some sort of global enemy or ordered their followers to hunt them, so the direction of cause and effect wasn't obvious. Maybe the Five saw monsters as a vital part of the ecosystem, but monsters didn't like the Five and stayed away. Maybe people just built shrines in safe areas that had never had monsters.

With everyone having finished eating, the group set about their respective tasks. Damien left the house with more confidence than the previous day, heading to the town library. Skipping the first floor, which contained only fiction, he browsed the second, which held reference material. The books were kept on spatially expanded shelving, the enchantments a century old but still holding. It was surprisingly busy, filled with people who'd undergone the ceremony of paths the day before, looking up information on their new classes. Despite the crowd, a reference manual of different creations recognised by the [Tailoring] skill wasn't difficult to find, and Damien soon found himself staring at something that looked like an entire ship of sailors decided to hold a nautical knot tying competition with the same length of rope.

"No wonder it's tier seven," he muttered to himself, looking through the instructions, some of which didn't even look possible within the usual set of three dimensions. Perhaps his analogy needed correction; replace those sailors with a party of spatial mages.

"Tier seven?" asked a second voice from behind him.

Damien spun around, finding another recent adult of his age looking down at the book with interest.

"Jason? I didn't hear you?" said Damien, surprised to see his friend in the library. As fellow children of adventuring parents, there had been plenty of sleepovers when one set of parents was on a long-term mission. "No, wait, I really didn't hear you..."

The library was infamously old and creaky. Yes, it was busy, but surely Damien would have noticed someone standing right behind him.

"Hehe. I'm a [Padfoot]. I got [Sneak] as a skill! Probably gained a level in it, too, sneaking up on you of all people."

"Oh? No wonder you're up here then," answered Damien. Jason's parents were front-line warriors, like his own, so they'd have no experience of scouting skills. Although, [Padfoot] sounded suspiciously close to a thief class. Given that he was here and not imprisoned, it can't have been illegal, but surely a class with a name like that would at least get lockpicking as a feat?

"Meh. Sneaking is easy. I don't need a book to tell me how to do it; I'm only here because dad pushed me through the door and told me not to come back till evening. But that's enough about me. What about you? Why're you reading about Erglandish fashion?"

"I'm even more detached from my parents than you are; I got a crafting class. Trying to figure out the best items to grind [Tailoring] with."

Jason gave the traditional reaction of someone who knew Damien's family discovering he had a crafting class, which was to boggle wordlessly for a few seconds. "Wow. So you're going to be a tailor?" he asked once he'd recovered.

"Looks like," Damien answered as he took out some paper to copy down the page. Jason, picking up that Damien wasn't going to be available for conversation for a while, took another book from the shelves and started reading.

"Sheesh, I could use some four-dimensional paper just to copy out the pattern, never mind to make one," muttered Damien eventually, finally done. He flipped over to the page about a 'simple dress', not copying anything down, but just memorising the minimum required for [Tailoring] to pick it up.

"Can't be as bad as these feat and perk trees," moaned Jason, triggering Damien to glance at the page he was reading.

"Wait, you do get lock-picking? How is that class not illegal?"

"It is," snorted Jason. "Damn barrier electrocuted me when I tried to leave yesterday. I was terrified! Luckily, I didn't get anything dodgy as a skill, so they didn't lock me up and I simply need to report for appraisal every six months to prove I haven't taken any forbidden feats. Stupid bureaucrats. If this is the class the Five saw fit to grant me, who are they to complain about it? I'm surprised the priests aren't up in arms about the whole idea of forbidden classes."

Damien pondered that. It did seem strange that the various temples didn't kick up a fuss. The Five wouldn't give people classes they didn't agree with, would they? Then again, Damien had thought that classes were always forbidden or not, and illegal classes always led to a one-way ticket to the local dungeon. This was his first time hearing about nuance. Feats could be illegal, but the class itself wasn't?

How far did that nuance extend? Was the entire forbidden class system just a way to keep people under watch? Or under control? Maybe a [Necromancer] wouldn't need Damien's parents to receive an offer to join the army, rather than languishing in a dungeon? If nothing else, it wouldn't need a very high percentage of the population to get a forbidden class for the dungeons to fill up, if they locked up everyone.

"Well, it could be worse. I bet it makes moving or long-term adventuring missions complicated, though."

"Nah, the guild can do the appraisals. They're used to dealing with it."

That was another mark against them throwing everyone in dungeons, then, if there were enough people affected for the guild to have a procedure for it. Despite the comment about skills, they could likely be handled the same way, with the appraiser checking they hadn't gained any levels.

"Well, sorry to leave you, but I have some more information to find," said Damien, standing up to return his book and start hunting for information on any tier one users of [Runic Embroidery]. Despite his interest in Jason's skills and future plans, he didn't want to start asking questions in case Jason reciprocated. He wasn't quite ready to admit being tier one to his friends.

He found what he was looking for in an annual report from the University of Illuganasis. It was listed under abandoned projects, and hadn't resulted in the publication of any papers. A fellow of the university had, by chance, stumbled on the quirk of the tier one classes, and had quickly applied for a grant, easily justifying it with the promise of more powerful potions.

The project had shown some promise, raising a trio of craftsmen to level fifty over the course of two years, and everything had worked as planned up to that point. It had, alas, been abandoned after the fellow and three subordinate researchers—all aged nineteen and hence presumably the tier one craftsmen—died in a freak monster attack within spitting distance of Illuganasis, where no monsters should have been.