As Duncan reached Tom and Eve, he froze at the sight in front of him. It was a sight that was becoming increasingly familiar, and people were bleeding all over the parking lot as officers and first responders were unloaded from the vehicles.
"Where the hell is Major Adams?" Tom called out as he moved towards the deluge of refugees. Duncan followed after him, preparing his own spells as he went.
"Help," some called out.
Tom blasted the man with a deluge of healing magic.
"Get up. You're fine," Tom said as he walked past the now-healthy man.
Tom didn't spare anyone an ounce of bedside manner, just blasting anyone who looked slightly injured with a heal spell.
There were gasps as people found their injuries closing up and their bodies restored. Duncan was a little jealous of that level of skill. His aura was passively healing everyone who came in range. Unfortunately, it was only general healing. Its range was just under a meter, and it wasn't focused. Duncan expected that he was doing little more than saving Tom and Eve some work. The [Meditation] skill he was handing out would be more useful in the long run.
"Adams?!" Tom called out.
"Over here!" someone called out.
Duncan turned and found a large Native American man racing up to Tom … Chester. He had to check his status to remember the man's name—or maybe he didn't know the man's name in the first place.
"Chester, what the fuck happened?!" Tom punctuated his question with another wave of healing. "What is this?!"
Chester came to a stop in front of him; he was covered in blood, but Duncan hadn't seen any injuries on his status.
"We tried to clear out the goblin base. We found trolls, and I think they have a blood mage."
"Yeah, I know. We called you guys about it yesterday," Tom said. We reached the North Newton Precinct."
"What?! We didn't hear anything about this!" Caset spat.
"Have you confirmed the presence of a blood mage?" Tom asked.
"Well, all of the blood on the ground rose up into a river of blood in the sky," Chester said pointedly.
"Yeah, that's a blood mage." Duncan agreed.
"Where is the Major? He didn't die?" Tom asked.
"Died on the way here," Chester admitted. "He was helping with the retreat when we got hit with a big blast of red light. I think he bleeds into his brain."
"Dammit," Tom muttered. "At least I can bring him back."
They spent the next two hours healing people. Eve had worked with Chester to set up a full triage station, and people were being attended to. Duncan had to remind her multiple times to use her magic instead of relying purely on her medical skills. Still, by the time it was almost 10 in the morning, things finally started to calm down, at which point Tom finally cornered him to ask some pointed questions about Kwantlin becoming a settlement.
"So you're telling me that the original boss was this Seraphel?" Tom asked.
"Yeah," Duncan nodded. Now I'm wondering if he didn't bring the bloodstone over with him."
"What good would that do?" Tom asked. "A bloodstone isn't very useful without a blood mage."
"True," Duncan said.
"I'm sensing a but coming," Tom said.
"But," Duncan said with a smile. "The bloodstone can be used as a power source for something like, say, a portal."
Tom swore. "Fuck, that makes too much sense. Seraphel wouldn't even need to understand what he was doing. A [Knowledge] skill would have allowed him to recreate a basic runic gateway and plug in the bloodstone. All they would have really needed was some way to draw in the gateway, some kind of targeting system on the other side, and they would have had thousands of shamans for that."
"At this point, they would have been sent through a vanguard to build the other side of a permanent gateway and collect more sacrifices on this side of the portal. All of which matches what Eve and I experienced." Duncan said.
"But why not just send the bloodstone with a [Bloodmage]?" Tom asked, then he froze. "In game balance, a [Bloodmage], even one with extensive soul damage, would be nearly unbeatable. So they sent someone who couldn't use the bloodstone. The stupid thing might even have been registered as loot."
"And now they can bring as many goblins over as the gate can handle, and since goblin hordes can be in the millions …" Duncan trailed off.
The goblin horde would have to kill everyone in the Vancouver area to bring their entire horde over. The system seemed to agree with their theorizing.
DING!!!
"Fuck" Tom said. "We need troops, weapons, supplies. None of which we have. We're basically a bunch of glorified babysitters."
Duncan shook his head.
"I can't help you with troops or supplies, but I can still help craft weapons and armor. I'm not that useful out here. I'm heading inside and getting us some proper crafters," Duncan said.
"Yeah, sure. I'm going to try to find the major in this mess. He might have some ideas," Tom said, stomping off.
Duncan didn't know why, but something caused him to speak up.
"If you could go back to the way things were, would you?" Duncan asked as Tom made to leave.
Duncan had considered that question on and off since the goblin attacks. Before the goblins, he would have said hell no, but now he was less sure. Tom smiled despite having his clothes covered in blood.
"Honestly, no. For all of the responsibility I have on my shoulders now, I don't think I would want to go back," Tom admitted.
"Well, you better enjoy it then," Duncan said, a little surprised by those words.
But he didn't let Tom see what he was feeling. Turning, he moved back into the school. He ended up going to the first floor, or maybe it was the first basement? It was hard to tell as the school was built into a hill, and since his workshop technically didn't have windows, he supposed it would be considered a basement.
He shrugged as he made his way down to where the craftsmen were supposed to wait for him. He had asked Tom for this job because he had been going to school to be an engineer. While he was primarily the group's healer, he had also done plenty of playthroughs as an artificer. But more than that, the first few days of fighting and fleeing from the goblins were haunting, and he wasn't ready to jump back into combat.
As he made his way to the doors of his workshop, his train of thought was banished as He found at least a couple hundred people milling around outside of the [Modular Workshop]. It would appear that a truly stupid number of people had wanted to at least try crafting, and he was expecting to lose at least half of the people here. But he was ok with that.
“Alright then, for those of you joining us today, you have decided to join the awoken myths crafting division. Congratulations on your fantastic choice. For those of you feeling sorry because you are incapable or unwilling to fight, don’t. This division will be the backbone of the guild, and if you can’t take some basic pride in your work, I’ll throw you out. Now saying that, let me make this clear: none of you have the skill levels needed to be useful at the moment, so don't worry about the string of failures we are about to make in order to help you grind your way into making common rarity items. We've got some people with experience in tailoring, smithing, alchemy, carpentry, jewelers, masonry, and runes. I recommend you learn a bit of everything before you specialize because, trust me, it will all come into play at some point.”
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"What about enchanting?" someone asked.
Duncan thought it looked like that guy Gareth, only a stranger. Duncan quickly double-checked. Not Gareth, but Issac, Gareth's brother? They had the same last name, so he assumed so.
"We have no soul stones, so we can't do any enchanting," Duncan said as he led the group inside the now massive workshop. The area had been extended under the road in front of the school to provide them with a truly enormous space. Now, Do you know what makes this workshop so useful?”
Everyone shook their heads.
Duncan commanded a section of the workshop to transform into the black stone of the [Foundry of Adamantine Torch Dragon], much to the shock of the gathered people. Then he commanded another section of [Cauldron of Molecular Wisdom]. Soon, the entire workshop became a patchwork of every other specialized crafting room in Hopkins.
“This workshop allows us to borrow the abilities and functions of the other rooms without directly affecting the room. On top of that, we can customize the layout to account for whatever project we are doing. Right now, we're going to be working on leatherworking, blacksmithing, and Caprety. We're going to be smelting ingots, working with leather, and making bunk beds. The first few are going to be failures, so don't worry about them. For those of you who have unassigned levels, pick the [Student] class and the [Eager Student] skill. It will make this go faster. Once you do that, grab a measuring tape, and let's get to work." Duncan said.
The first thing Duncan needed was to reduce the pelts and skins they had into raw leather, and then the raw leather needed to be further reduced into leather straps. Unfortunately, they didn't have a leather shop, so he altered the workshop into the [Weavers Den]. It would help them get started.
The learning curve was steep. They didn't have enough pelts for everyone, so they had to share, and most of the pelts were mangled. Alot of People didn't prepare them properly or sliced them into pieces. But Duncan considered the rewards worth the cost.
<[Leatherworking] has Reached Level 2>
<[Leatherworking] has Reached Level 3>
<[Upgrade] has Reached Level 2>
<[Upgrade] has Reached Level 3>
After they finished mangling the last pelt, Duncan altered the workshop to a foundry, and they got to work smelting scraps from cars, broken armor, and broken weapons. It was mainly car parts.
Fortunately, the Adamantine Dragon Foundry could separate different metals even if they were all chucked in at once despite the fact that they had steel, aluminum, chromium, and a dozen other trace metals. They ended up with hundreds of steel and aluminum ingots. All of these had to go right back in the foundry due to their inferior quality, and unlike the leather, they could practice. A few people burned themselves, but Duncan quickly healed them and allowed them to get back to work. Issac surprised him. The kid was a natural smith and was already creating Lesser rarity ingots. Of course, the vast majority of people ended up needing to resmelt their ingots at least six times before the quality got out of the trash rating. At that point the average blacksmithing skill rose high enough that he could start to shift people onto other tasks.
<….>
<[Upgrade] has Reached Level 4>
<[Upgrade] has Reached Level 5>
<...>
<[Upgrade] has Reached Level 7>
Within an hour, they had finished the first step of refining all of the gathered material and were ready to start on the next job.
Last night, Travis asked him to help him with his [Ritual Architect] Class. Travis had purchased two abilities; the first was [Construct], and the second was [Raze]. [Construct] allowed Travis to dump a bunch of raw materials and a blueprint into a ritual circle, and then a bunch of people with the right skills could just hammer on the circle like they were workers in an age of empire's game and the building would be constructed in minutes. Unfortunately, they learned that Travis needed at least one more ability called [Blueprint] to actually be able to make anything. There was a slight oversight on Travis's part. [Raze], on the other hand, dismantled a building and left it with the raw materials. That one cost a lot of mana upfront, but after razing a dozen of the abounding buildings in front of the school, they had gotten their hands on a good supply of construction materials. Travis was using a small portion to build the new watch tower.
The rest of the wood was going to Duncan's students. And he had plans for them.
"Alright, everyone. I'm happy to say I'm pleased with the work you've done so far. Our next project is going to be both a training exercise and an increase in the defenses of our school. We're going to be creating Cheval de Frise. Basically, we're going to be making two thick spears, tying them together in an X shape, and then we're going to be lashing those Xs together into walls to fortify the school further. Do you have any questions?" he asked.
"Are we really in that much danger?" Issac asked. "I thought we were safe here."
"Safety is an illusion. No defense is perfect. So we're going to add to our defenses while we train your carpentry skills. Let's get to work."
The excuse was the most successful out of everything he had them doing so far. It was hard to fuck up sharpening a piece of wood. The slightly harder part was grabbing a larger piece of wood, generally a log, and drilling a hole through the logs in order to place the spears in the log.
….
<[Upgrade] has Reached Level 8>
<[Upgrade] has Reached Level 9>
<[Upgrade] has Reached Level 10>
<[Fang of Man] has Reached Level 26>
<[Work Horse] has Reached Level 7>
<[Work Horse] has Reached Level 8>
<...>
<[Work Horse] has Reached Level 16>
<[Teacher] has Reached Level 17>
<[Foreman] has Reached Level 9>
<[Foreman] has Reached Level 10>
<...>
<[Foreman] has Reached Level 12>
When they got their skill level into the double digits, Duncan had them move on to furniture. They had enough beds for everyone, but a dozen beds in a single room didn't leave people with a lot of personal space, so they were going to work on creating bunk beds to help free up space. Most of the time, they took two pre-existing beds of the same size and made some minor changes to turn them into a single bunk bed. People with more experience worked on creating new beds from scratch.
Duncan was impressed that some of the people who had done Carpentry before the system were shooting up the levels. One guy was already at level 45 despite having only earned the skill an hour ago.
"Hey Duncan!!" someone called out.
Duncan turned around to find Gareth walking up to him.
"Have you seen my brother?" Gareth asked.
"Yeah, he's been working with me all day. He's average at carpentry and leatherworking and good at smithing." Duncan said, offering his honest praise.
"I'm about to head out with Luke, and I want to bring him with us," Gareth said.
Duncan frowned. "Are you sure about that?"
"You guys have been saying it since day one: We need levels. Issac is already three days behind everyone else," Gareth said as he walked off to his brother.
"Issac, come on, we're going hunting," Gareth said as he tapped Issac on the shoulder.
Issac waved him off.
"Give me a minute; I want to finish this," Issac said as he whittled down a spear point.
"You can do this later. There is only so much light in the day, and it's already snowing. We're heading out to get medicine in five minutes; it's time to go," Gareth said, picking up his younger brother in one hand.
"Hey," Issac swore as he dropped the tools he was working with. "Put me down!"
"You need to learn how to protect yourself," Gareth said. "If you don't like it, make me stop."
Gareth carried his brother by the scruff of his coat as he walked out of the workshop. Duncan signed. He wasn't sure if he should offer Isaac his help. He could see where Gareth was coming from. But he also knew that failure was often a better teacher than anything he could offer. So he kept silent. He just hoped he wouldn't come to regret that decision.
"Alright, everyone. We need to finish up the wood crafts, and then we can move on to some basic alchemy," Duncan called out as he resumed teaching.
You may skip to the next chapter.
Base
Personal:+4 DEX +3 STR +3 INT +2 PER +2 WILL
Racial: +3 CON +2 END +2 SPIRIT +1 EGO
Bloodline: +5 STR +5 INT
Skills: +4 AGIL
Level Bonus: +2 to all Stats
Mini-Character List
Casey: The Driver and Mechanic for Firehall 8
Duncan: Original member of Awoken Myths and the Head craftsman
Eve: The closest thing to a true doctor
Tom: The protagonist, the Leader, and the party healer
Chester: A large Native American man and a Paramedic
Issac: Gareth’s brother, part of the group joining the crafting division.
AN: