Inflame (The Completionist Chronicles Book 6) Dakota Krout (sci fi books to read TXT) 📖

big pauses when you speak. Are you sure you aren't an actor or something?”

“Hubris.” Joe answered grimly, ignoring the slight taunt. “I kept making one mistake after another. I knew that there was a big baddie down there, but I got way too involved in collecting aspects. At one point, I dropped a bunch of acid on the garbage, got pulled into the collapse, and I thought it was over. Nope! As soon as I dug my way out, I found an absolute treasure trove of things to break down. I kept going, going, going. Dropping my shields so I would have just a little more power, taking chances that I really shouldn't have, but I was gaining so much.”

Havoc waved for him to continue, and Joe launched back into his story. “I found an Artifact down there, Havoc. An Artifact. I was so excited that I went over and tried to check it out. Don't worry, I wasn't dumb enough to attempt to break it down without a lot more power to draw on. It gave me a warning I had never seen before: ‘You can’t reduce living things’. I thought it was just talking about… you know… how enchanted things are ‘living’… but then it stood up.”

“Hidden Guardian, Havoc.” Joe’s eyes were burning with a combination of indignation and excitement. “There's a malfunctioning Guardian down there, and it's a big one. I thought I was just walking over to break down a boulder that had somehow become an Artifact; turns out it was a fingertip. It was not happy that I had grabbed it. Apparently, that counted as me starting combat. I didn't even see it move, Havoc. I only know how it killed me because of my combat logs.”

“How are you so happy about this?” Havoc wondered the question aloud.

“Hidden. Guardian.” Joe’s eyes were shining with a manic light. “I'm not telling you that it is the boss of a dungeon, I'm telling you that it is the name of a quest. If I can fix up the area around it and convince people to stop using that space as a landfill, I can reclaim that Guardian as a second protector of the capital. How does that sound?”

Havoc blew a cloud of smoke out of his nose, deliberating over the details and Logistics that would go into not only cleaning out the garbage and the monsters, but also convincing an entire city to stop putting their garbage in the place they had dumped it for generations. He decided to give Joe an honest answer.

“Hard.”

Chapter Nineteen

Joe didn't go over the majority of his experience with Havoc, but the details were certainly on his mind. He had learned a few interesting things while he'd been in the landfill, and while the hidden Guardian was certainly the most interesting, it certainly wasn't the only information he had found.

At one point, he had nearly died because he tried to rely on an old gaming trope he had heard about over and over. He cast ‘Mend’ on a zombie as it was coming at him, expecting that the healing of the spell would damage the undead creature. Unfortunately, he had forgotten that Mend was a dark spell. In practically no time flat, the zombie had gone from jogging at him to sprinting at him. He wouldn't be doing that again.

When he had managed to return to Havoc, Joe had been on his last legs. He wanted to hear the Dwarf out, but instead found a bed and slept for nearly twelve hours. The rewards will be there after he woke up, after all. Once he regained consciousness, he decided that he should take stock of the changes over the last week or so. First, he browsed through his spatial devices.

“Eighteen Trash-ranked Cores, some Unique garbage that I need to break down; I have my ritual and spell books, ritual papers, and… that’s about it. What about aspects? I feel like I made a good haul…”

Aspects gathered

Trash: 10,253

Damaged: 8,312

Common: 5,951

Uncommon: 2,983

Rare: 1,132

Special (Zombified): 323

Unique: 735

Artifact: 0

Legendary: 0

Mythical: 0

Core energy: 81/81 (Trash)

“I…” Joe stared at the numbers, “…really want to make this into a ritual that I can use on large chunks at a time.”

Pulling out a small chunk of garbage, Joe tried to reduce it at the same time as studying the ritual on his body. He saw the glowing lines appear again, but they did not mean anything to him when he saw them. A couple more attempts, and he’d made no progress whatsoever. He rubbed his eyes, then paused as he had an idea. He activated Essence Cycle, then reduced the-

“Wow.”

The ritual within him lit up, shining lines radiating out from his spine until they reached his skin. It was… beautiful to the extreme, but also incredibly abstruse. The only thing that Joe could really compare the lines to would be a spatial device. There was no way that the sheer size of the ritual should have been contained within a fleshy body; it was within him, it was him. “Is this what a class looks like?”

It was not just the energy within him that was impacted. With Essence Cycle, he could see that all of the floating energies in the air were being condensed, swirled, pulled to enter him. The energy that was taken in flowed along his skin, intermingled with his mana, and exited the ritual that was Joe, the Ritual of Reduction. The power flowed back out of him, and for the first time, Joe was able to see a physical object being reduced into aspects.

Caution! You are attempting to see into the inner workings of Sage-ranked spellwork! Calculating… intelligence threshold far too low!

Joe's eyes bulged, his mana backlashed, and his head exploded with a retort like a grenade detonating.

He ignored the message that appeared to him when he was in his respawn room. He had died twice in the last day, and Joe had a fleeting thought that he should be upset at this point. However,