Probably one more chapter this week before the weekend. Playing in a 40k Tournament this weekend with some Night Lords i've been painting. Probably will need to push back the release date for book 2 since the people doing the cover havent gotten it back to me yet. Enjoy! Large power scaling for Harold in this part. _____________________________________________________________________
Harold's boots came down on the corridor stone, and the city took a little more of him with every step.
Authority bled off him steady as a slow leak — the toll the System charged a mortal for standing in a place that had never been built with him in mind — and the further the passage carried him from his own gallery, the harder the floor pulled at it. So he leaned into the drain and kept walking.
He rounded the curve of the hall and pulled up short.
A thing stood in the passage, waiting for him. Tall — half again his height — and gray as wet slate, its four arms folded in two pairs across a dark livery, and on its breast a sigil burned.
"I am here to guide you towards the System Store." The sigil pulsed once. "Please follow me, Count Harold."
"Thank you." He gave it a nod. "And the System. For the access."
It turned without answering and set off, and Harold went after it. The walk was long, and it did not run in straight lines.
They climbed a stair that arrived somewhere below where it had started. They crossed a bridge over a well of gold light with no bottom he could find, and a colonnade where the pillars leaned out over the drop and did not fall, each one carved from base to vanishing point with a story he didn't have the time to understand. He had never been to this part, and it was just as beautiful as the rest. A man could go blind in a place like this, staring at the sun.
Then he came around the base of a column, and a statue stopped him.
A dwarf. Squat, broad, both hands folded on the head of a hammer set point-down between his boots, and a face on him carved so patient and so stubborn that Harold stood in front of it a moment longer than the clock allowed.
He knew that face. He was certain he knew it. He was certain it was one of the six who'd stood in his keep. But what was their statue doing in this place? How could it be here?
The guide had stopped four paces on and was waiting.
Harold shook his head and hurried to catch up. It didn’t make sense why the system would allow their image here.
They came out of the colonnade into a gallery with one wall gone — not open to the hall now, but to the dark — and Harold's next step slowed to nothing on its own.
He was in orbit. Below the rail and a long, long way down, the world turned. He could see the curve of it, the white weather wheeling slow across a sea gone to hammered pewter, the ragged brown spine of the mountains, the line where the day gave over to the night dragged across the sky. The cold of space pressed against the glass that wasn't there.
He had seen a sight like this before, but it wasn’t anywhere as good as this. At the very beginning, when the System had held the whole of Gravesend up in front of him and told him to choose where he would spawn.
He stood at the rail and just…stared at it. Not often would he ever get a sight like this.
In the back of his skull Bethel's voice turned over, worn smooth from a dozen sessions — all things end, Harold; take the small moments — and for once he didn't argue with her.
He sighed as he looked for the basin and couldn't find it. Still…the world looked so small from here. “Power trumps all,” he whispered. Then he took his hand off the rail and caught up with the guide who had stopped to wait for him again.As he turned the corner, he saw the entry to the store.
The store threshold was an arch, and inside he could see the familiar store.
"Your access is level one." The guide's sigil had gone still. "You will have ten minutes within, beginning when you cross. Restock is instantaneous. Haggling is not enabled. Retrieve what you require and return to me."
"Got it."
Harold moved to go in, and the guide's upper pair of arms came apart, and one of them held a tablet Harold hadn't seen it carrying.
It looked at the tablet a long moment. Then it turned its head down and to the side, into its own collar, and the sigil on its breast dimmed and flared.
"There is an irregularity." The head came back up. "You hold a balance of seventy-eight Merits. The Merit system was not scheduled to activate until after the solstice. I must deconflict before you may spend against it."
Harold went still. He was confused about the balance too. He had gotten no notifications about earning merits. He couldn't give them up though; those merits would allow him to buy things he needed now
"Deconflict it, then," he said, even. "But those are mine."
The guide didn't answer. It froze, the sigil holding at a single steady burn, a machine mid-instruction from somewhere he couldn't see. Three seconds. Five.
"You are vouched for," it said, "by a System moderator."
Harold breathed out through his nose.
"The balance stands. The irregularity is noted and permitted." The tablet folded back out of sight. "You have been delayed. Two minutes will be added to compensate. Enjoy the store, Count Harold."
He didn't wait to be told twice. He went in.
Just past the arch a low shelf ran the length of the wall, and he slowed for it out of pure appetite — small stones, each one on its own square of cloth, each labeled: a one-time buff that could be applied to a stele that cascaded outward down the line, It would be full strength at the source and less at every step, to the steles of his sworn lords and their villages after them. They were temporary buffs like the Cascading Seal relic he had acquired. But where his allowed his perks to propagate further. These ones would allow one buff to propagate down his chain of steles. Very useful items to have.
Needs first, and he made himself walk onto the counter.
The clerk behind it had the four arms and the gray and the coal at its breast, and it set both lower hands flat on the stone when he arrived.
"The stele relocation token," Harold said. "What do you carry?"
Two hands moved, and two tokens sat on the counter, a dull bronze and a bright silver. "Bronze relocates a home stele once, to any surveyed point within a holding. Five hundred gold." The silver turned under a gray finger. "Silver relocates and lays a mana shield across the stele that accrues to a certain threshold. Five thousand gold."
His stele stood in the middle of the town square, in the open, where anyone could put a hand on it. He needed to move the stele to a more secure location where he could prevent infiltrators from getting to it.
"Silver."
"Silver." The bronze went away.
"I need a blueprint next for an Illusion chamber. Something I can build onto later."
The clerk considered him, or gave the impression of it. "You are allowed a Bronze-tier chamber; the schematic can be upgraded as you buy the next level of the blueprint. Four thousand five hundred gold."
"That one."
He was near ten thousand gone, and he hadn't felt it. That was the danger of a place like this. He set his teeth against the shelves he wanted and asked for the last of the list.
"A perk-combination token."
"We hold them singly." A small token came up, the least of the three, and the clerk named a price that covered the remainder of what he had left. "One token."
"Done. Thank you for the assistance."
The counter clerk gathered his purchases into a case that folded itself shut, and pointed him on with a lower arm toward a desk further in, and Harold went, the clock ticking behind his ribs.
The merit desk had a different clerk, and this one didn't put its hands down. It laid all four, along the edge of the stone and waited.
"I want a perk," Harold said. "Best you've got at my access for mental resilience. Emotional control. I need something that will allow me to maintain my mind."
Three cards rose from the desk and turned face up toward him.
Soldier's Resilience. Uncommon. Five Merits.
Steadies the mind against fear, shock, and horror originating outside the self.
"No." He didn't have to think about it. That one only helped resist effects that happened outside his body. "Next."
Castle Mind. Rare. Ten Merits.
A fortified interior — intrusion, compulsion, and drift are met with a fortress you construct.
That was the one he'd walked in expecting to buy, and his hand was already moving toward it when the third card finished turning.
Mens Perfecta. Epic. Fifteen Merits. Altered.
Harold stopped.
He didn't know that perk. He knew most of the best perks at this store, and that was not one of them. And it was epic? He shouldn't even have access to epic perks at his access level. And it wore the same tag the System had stamped on his Grail quest.
“What is going on,” He whispered to himself. “Someone is helping me now?”
He didn't let himself believe it. The hand that Altered things had never once done it to help him.
"That one," he said. "Mens Perfecta."
"Fifteen Merits." The card sank into his chest without ceremony, cold going through and then gone. "Balance, sixty-three."
He rolled his shoulders. "You carry a perk. Savant.”
"We do."
"Show me."
"The perk you describe is beyond your level of access." The clerk's tone was even. "It is available at the rank of prince, or above."
"Of course it is." Harold breathed.
"You are a count."
"I'm aware of what I am. Thank you." He set his jaw. Something else, then. "My mana body is Perfect tier. I've never had anyone I trusted to tell me how far I'm actually pushing it. What's your read?"
The clerk was quiet for a moment, and when it spoke, there was a note of curiosity. Knowledge volunteered, where nothing so far had been.
"Your control," it said, "is adequate. For your level of existence."
Harold looked at it askance. "Adequate?"
"For your level of existence."
"All right. I need a way to train my control and mana."
Something moved in the suggestion of the clerk's face. It wasn't a smile but it was a near thing.
A book came up out of the desk.
"Guide to Mana Control and Cultivation. Rare. Thirty Merits." Two lower hands slid it across the stone toward him, and the voice dropped, procedural again, but careful. "It is legible to you alone. Its contents may not be disclosed to another. Disclosure will draw a reprimand from the System." A pause, and the near-smile held. "It opens a slow road.”
Thirty Merits was more than he'd spent on anything, and it was the easiest yes of the day.
"Sold."
"Thirty Merits. Balance, thirty-three." The book was warm when he took it, and he tucked it away inside his coat against his ribs before the clerk had finished speaking.
He had minutes now.
The consumable racks were deep, and he went down them fast, reading and grabbing. Construction-speed stones — he took two without slowing, a one-week and a three-day, seven Merits gone. Twenty-six left.
Then he found the one he'd been hoping was real.
"Ha." He had it in his hand before he'd decided to. "Found it."
The rack held another stone, blue-cored, and the card read Rechargeable Battlefield Simulation Stone. Rare. Twenty Merits.
These stones had been famous before. They would allow him to apply an effect to his men, enabling them to fight with phantom weapons. However, when they struck someone, they would feel real. And that wasn’t even the best part. His people would gain perks for their accomplishments while under the effect, even though it wasn’t real. The pain if they were struck would be real. Cut limbs would go limp and the pain would drop them as if it was cut off for real but it was a way to train his people for war.
He took the simulation stone. Six Merits left.
He walked out of the racks and back toward the arch, past the rest of the temporary buff shelf he'd wanted at the start, without stopping for it.
The checkout clerk stood at the threshold with a hand out, and Harold set the folded case and the stones into it, and it counted the whole of it in a single unbroken pass — five thousand, four thousand five hundred, the combination token, seventy-two Merits spent of seventy-eight — and something in the walls chimed low, a clock closing on its last quarter-minute.
Under the buzzer. He'd walked in with twelve thousand gold and seventy-eight Merits, and he was walking out far better items than he expected. His timelines could be accelerated. The Landing needed time to consolidate its position. These items would help.
"OK," Harold said. "I'm ready to return."
The guide was where he'd left it, past the arch, and it fell in beside him without a word and started the long climb back.
The city began to pull at his Authority the moment he crossed out, the same slow leak, the floor drinking him as he walked, but it wasn’t terrible. He had greater reserves than a lesser noble.
Behind him the store arch shrank down the length of the hall and went dark. Harold pressed his forearm flat against his coat, feeling for the shape of the book against his ribs, and settled his hand over it, and kept walking toward his gallery. He couldn’t wait to show Josh. And Hale was going to love the stone.