Chapter 12 – Hallway at the edge of nowhere.

“This passage between worlds is different than the last one,” I commented.  There was an odd echo surrounding us.  It was like I was in a long concrete hallway rather than the mostly empty room I was standing in.

“The last one was a Demon Door transfer through the tower,” explained Shart.  “This is <admin> architecture.”

The <admins> were not very creative.  I’d have expected some neat visuals floating around, or, at the very least, a bit of color.  This was nothing more than a dull, drab, empty room.

“Can we access our storages here?” I asked, gesturing to the ground in front of me. A large anvil appeared.

“Obviously, Dum Dum,” replied Shart suspiciously.

I pulled out the whip and examined it.

· Flaming Whip of Agony:  3-18 base Damage, 3-18 Flaming Damage, Advanced Binding.

“Not useful,” I said, deciding to check Doug's sword.  It was equally impressive, but also equally useless in the present situation.  “I’m guessing that most of these Damage properties aren’t going to help in the Shadow Realm.”

“Um, no,” confirmed the demon. Badgelor opened his storage and started dumping out body parts, and, in some cases, entire corpses.

“You left me some guts, right?” I asked.

“There wasn’t much, but we had a deal,” grumbled Badgelor. He pulled out a few feet of badly chewed intestines.

“You were robbing the demons?” gasped Shart.

“Hey, a lot of those guys were dead!  We simply looted them,” I corrected.

“Some were already dead,” Badgelor double corrected.  “Some were made dead while I was looting them. . .in their workshops. . .which I then robbed.”

“Ashes and Fire, no wonder they were so much more pissed than last time. How much did you get?” asked Shart.

“Everything that wasn’t nailed down,” replied Badgelor, pulling out more rare, magical components. “Well, I got some of the stuff that was nailed down, too. There were only a few things I couldn’t pull up.”  The badger pulled out a horrible flesh-shaping table and a magical forge.

“I’m trying to save the world, and you demons are greedy assholes,” I said, glancing over at Shart.  “Do you think they would have just given this stuff to me?”

Demons were like NPC’s in any JRPG.  It didn’t matter that it was the end of the world, and everyone was counting on the hero to save the day. Everything was selling at full price.

Shart frowned. “Of course not, but I don’t know why you think you need some of this stuff.”

Down here, I could steal things that I was sure would make all the difference.  The demons simply had to be in possession of some truly gnarly stuff. Badgelor had been running all over the demon city, stealing everything he could get his grubby little paws on. My little racoon of holding.

“Where did you put all this stuff?” asked Shart. “Badgelor’s storage isn’t that big.”

Badgelor pulled out the Walker orb and pointed it toward a corner. “Get ready.”

“Crap,” said Shart. The entire chamber was suddenly filled with the combined contents of dozens of demon workshops.

· Demonic Chitin: 452 units.  Demonic Chitin is a highly refined form of demon skin that is highly resistant to all attack types.  Tier 5.

· Sun-Touched Orichalcum: 22 bars.  Sun-Touched Orichalcum is refined Orichalcum. Tier 5 enchanting material.

· Black Cauldron Steel: 1227 units.  Cauldron Steel is steel refined from the remains of enchantment cauldrons.  It is the hardest known metal.  Black Cauldron Steel is the hardest kind of Cauldron Steel.  Tier 5

I whistled at the bulk of the material.  Badgelor had also stolen hundreds of hard to produce runic enchantments, each designed for crafters to make some really high-level equipment.  While my Crafter Needs No Tools perk allowed me to bypass tool requirements, it did not allow me to repair my armor with hopes and dreams.  I couldn’t even just use Mana and Stamina.

“First things first,” I said, activating my Salvage skill on the Crown of Windfall.

“How are you planning on doing that?” asked Shart.  “It's an artifact.”

“Remember when we got here? I earned the Master Salvage skill,” I answered.

“Finally assigned the perk?” questioned Badgelor.

· Perk Selected: Artifact Salvage! You can use the Salvage skill on Artifact tier equipment that is attuned to you.

“I hate you so much,” said Shart.  “Wait, you can’t just break down an artifact into materials.”

“No, most artifacts are made up of several components that are merged together,” I said holding up the pieces of the crown. “I can’t break down the points of the crown, but I can remove the living metal used. Then, I can reform the crown so it doesn’t look like something out of a fast food restaurant.”

“And you have to actually attune the item,” said Shart.

Attunement meant that I had to have the item in my possession for enough time to connect it to my mana network. I couldn’t just grab something and do that, and it took longer for more powerful items to attune. I could do a wand in a few seconds, but the crown had taken hours.

“That perk is flat out broken,” grumbled Shart as we waited.  While I typically glossed over it, Salvaging items took a while if the items were worth anything.  The crown took over 10 minutes, and some of my perks in Salvaging were designed to increase my Salvage speed.

I could do a coat rack in less than a second.

Normally the Salvage system on Ordinal was total bullshit.  No getting around that.  A bar of iron weighed more than the dagger you could craft out of it, and also if you salvaged that dagger the bar would be restored and keep weighing more than the dagger had.

Regardless, when you tried to salvage more expensive materials Ordinal had a way of just disappearing some of them into the void.  What you were supposed to do was use tools that would augment your salvage skill in order to recover more materials than normal.  For Tier 1 materials, that was less important.  Anyone with the salvage skill could recover all of tier 1 steel in a dagger.

The ratios got worse the further up the chain you got though.  Tier 2’s base allotment was 25% of the normal material, while Tier 5 was 1/25th.  However, you could build tools that would allow you to recover more of the material while salvaging.   The success of those tools depended highly on their quality and many of the tools were expensive to build or maintain.

For HIgh Steel, the Tier 2 variant of steel, you needed to have a Mana Furnace to melt the metal down.  That was a relatively simple contraption that stored and burned Mana to melt metals more efficiently.  It could be powered by your own personal mana or by pouring in a mana potion.

A Mana Furnace was 100% efficient at recovering Tier 2 metals, and zero percent efficient at recovering Tier 2 wood.  The furnace would even work with tier 3 metals, but it was significantly less efficient.  Someone attempting that would have to spend considerably more resources to build a Mana Blast Furnace which could melt tier 3 metals efficiently.

HankAlvin, Windfall’s premier metal worker, actually had a Mana Blast Furnace mainly because we needed it for the army.  The difference in both terms of gold and resources between the two furnaces was staggering, but then again so was the cost between tier 2 and 3 metals.

I had two critical advantages.  I had a Crafting perk called Craftsman Needs no Tools.  It allowed me to function as if I had whatever tool was necessary to perform an action.  That meant I could salvage artifact tier equipment, presuming I had it in my possession and had enough uninterrupted time to activate the skill.

So while you’d normally need a host of increasingly expensive magical tools specifically designed to break down an artifact, I didn’t need any.

The other advantage was how UnBound affected my skill level ups.  Normally salvaging an artifact would require a very high level person just to have a suitable rank of the Salvage skill.  I was able to take the Salvage Artifact perk from level one.  After that it was just a matter of actually grabbing an artifact.

What the <System> assumed was going to be a massive ordeal involving many single use tools that could only be replaced at tremendous expense was just something I could do off hand should an artifact present itself.

I did not have a chance to try my new perks out because Artifacts were so rare. Most people went their entire lives without even seeing one.

A mental image flashed up of the Dark Overlord, his amulet shining in his mass of shadows supported by a simple leather cord as Charles and Badgelor battled him.

“Wait, the Amulet of the Dark Overlord, has that ever changed,” I asked.

“Not the amulet obviously,” said Shart.

“But, what did it look like during Grebthar’s time,” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Shart. “Like an amulet?”

“You both suck,” said Badgelor reaching into his storage and pulling out a large book. It was first edition Book of Grebthar, signed by Charles. It was the equivalent of a Bible signed by Jesus. I didn’t even want to think what this would have been worth in Falcon.

Why in the hell would Badgelor have that book?

“Wait, I remember that book. That’s Filly’s book, he uses it for research,” said Shart in shock, looking Badgelor dead in the eyes.

“Oops,” I said.

“Oops is right,” yelled Shart, glaring at Badgelor. “He stole it! The furry bandit must have taken it from Filly’s office, and now that Filly is recovered you are in so much trouble!”

“That’s your conclusion,” I said flipping through several pages.

“Yes,” replied an angry Shart. “I don’t see what other conclusion could be drawn from the pile of evidence before me.”

Badgelor rolled his eyes, but I’d already found a half dozen artistic interpretations of the Dark Overlord. In each one the collar was supported by a simple leather strap. The leather was dragon skin or something else that was utterly unbreakable, but still.

“It was different,” said Badgelor.

“Yeah, looked like a solid metal collar this time,” I replied, flipping through a passage from Badgelor about fighting the last battle to end all battles, for the third time. “You said golly gee a lot.”

“I was a cub for the first few fights, and back then everyone expected me to talk like that,’ said Badgelor. “Golly gee, Grebthar, it looks like the Dark Overlord is going to destroy the world!”

“Ouch,” I said as Shart continued ranting about the sanctity of Filly’s stuff.

“Problem is that people still expect me to talk like that, Julia dies a bit every time I open my mouth,” grumbled the badger.

“Well, I prefer that you talk whatever way you like best,” I said.

“Of course you do ye brown noser,” said the badger.

“Any idea on the collar,” I asked.

“It wasn’t like that the last time we killed the Dark Overlord, which was right before when Charles went to the dungeon,” said Badgelor. “Do you think it is significant?”

“You cannot corrupt a god, yet Charles is clearly corrupted,” I said. “So the collar logically must have something to do with that.”

Badgelor examined the collar and shook his head. “Yo, zit, I’ll give you the book if you tell me what’s up with the Dark Overlord’s amulet.”

Shart’s rant ended instantly as he grabbed the book, glaring at Badgelor all the while. He noticed the image of the Dark Overlord and pused, “That’s different. I didn’t realize the amulet had a leather strap. The one I’ve seen looks like the amulet is attached to a part right out of the Soul Sucker.”

“What,” I asked glancing at the collar curiously. I’d just spent hours getting a tour of the soul sucker and I didn’t quite recognize it.

“That’s a standard mana configuration harness, parts like that are all over,” said Shart. “They can be configured for a million purposes.”

“Could they be used to corrupt a godling’s mana,” I asked.

“I don’t think so, they are supposed to be on an independent loop,” said Shart.

“Supposed to be,” I asked.

Shart considered, “Well, if it wasn’t then the mana could be corrupted and the Dark Overlord might be able to overpower one.”

I blinked, that was it. “The Dark Overlord knew Grebthar was coming and so he modified his own collar so that when Charles put it on he was corrupted,” I said.

“And Badgelor wasn’t there, because he would have recognized the change instantly,” said Shart.

Badgelor sat quietly for a moment before slumping, “I knew it was my fault.”

“You couldn’t have known,” I said.

“Well, it was my job to protect him, and I failed,” said Badgelor before he whispered. "Badger's promise."

I went to say something, but Badgelor stepped way wallowing in his own guilt and regrets. He needed time to process what we’d just discovered, and so did I. Times like this I worked.

· Tony’s Anvil: The Anvil of Creation can be used to make any crafted item up to artifact tier.  Crafting checks on the anvil have a doubled chance of success and minor mistakes are automatically repaired.

The automatic fixing of minor mistakes translated to failure results would be treated as limited successes instead, which was a vastly preferable situation.  The Anvil was also manifestly better than just crafting using my perk.  While Craftsman needs no Tools provided any tool I needed, none of those tools provided me any bonuses to skill checks and I was going to need some pretty substantial bonuses to my crafting skills to do what needed to be done.

With this Anvil I would make something truly impressive, and as I reached down to actually use it for the first time a red spark of energy flashed into my palm.

“Ouch,” I said, pulling back my hand which bore a smoking black hole in the palm. I began healing it.

“Oh, that’s a ward,” said Shart brining it up on my interface.

“He used those all the time. Charles didn’t like other people playing with his stuff,” said Badgelor, while he gnawed on some dragon bits. The irreplaceable draconic parts so much comfort food to the badger.

“That’s not even a conventional ward,” said Shart eying the vicious thing. “It is a Deadman’s curse, it will be incredibly difficult to remove as long as Charles is alive. Fortunately, you have the big dog and I’ll get that off for you using the power of…”

“Got it,” I said, disarming the spell.

Shart glared at me, “You know, you aren’t supposed to have menutime.”

“But it makes things so much easier,” I said. The actual ward was a series of vibrating runes that needed to be aligned in a special pattern while they jerked around. I’d seen one just like it before back in the Maze of Mystery, when Han So, Triblade and…

I shook my head as the memory dissipated. That was troubling, but I didn’t have time to think about it. Taking several chunks of Cauldron Steel, I brought down my fist on my first project.  A fecking hammer so I could hit things.