The Duke of Ashes: Chapter 31 - Payouts and Progress (Patreon)

"I would gladly trade every statue in the capital for a single functional shield."

- Apocryphal final words of Archmage Jory the Mostly Unburnt, recorded seconds before the Collapse of the High Spires.

MASON

The midday crowd in the Carriston Guild Hall parted as I entered, probably put off by the stench. I knew I looked a sight, covered in blood from head to toe, my face dirt-caked and hair still wet with rat guts.

A day ago, I was a one-armed vagrant with a surprisingly deft touch on the alchemy table, but today, covered in a fresh layer of grime and the unmistakable stench of the rat warrens, I was a spectacle. Caden Gray was starting to gain a reputation.

I walked straight to the bar, my new hand-pick swinging from my belt, its dwarven runes catching the tavern’s dim light. I ignored the stares, my focus locked on the grizzled, sour-faced quartermaster who was busy wiping down the counter. Without a word I lifted the dripping sack from my inventory and dropped it onto the polished wood with a wet thud.

The sack bulged, leaking a foul-smelling puddle onto the bar. Through the rough stitching, the severed tails of dozens of the cable rats were visible.

"One hundred and four," I said flatly to a stunned Grimwald. "Plus the Den Mother."

The tavern, never truly quiet, fell into a hushed murmur. The handful of adventurers who had watched my audacious alchemy trial now stared openly, their expressions a mixture of disbelief and grudging respect. A day’s work for an F-Ranker might yield a dozen tails if they were lucky.

Grimwald looked from the grotesque sack to my shattered shield arm, then back again, his mind clearly struggling to reconcile the two. He recovered quickly, his professional detachment snapping back into place.

"One hundred and four," he repeated. He grabbed a pair of iron tongs. "You count 'em?"

"Every one."

He let out a heavy sigh as if I had just created a mountain of work for him. "Right. Wait here." He laboriously dragged the sack off the bar, leaving a foul smear behind, and lumbered toward a side door that led to the Mining Consortium's local office. "And clean that up!" He barked at a passing barmaid, who wrinkled her nose in disgust.

As I waited, nursing a cheap ale I had already decided I could now afford, my System interface lit up with a series of satisfying notifications. The chaotic mess of a battle log resolved into the final, official summary. Grimwald must have entered the confirmation.

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: All objectives of [Pest Control: Cable Rat Infestation] have been successfully met.Verification provided by Client: Carriston Mining Consortium.

+150 Renown with Carriston Adventurer's Guild.CURRENT RENOWN: Friendly (150/500).

+50 Renown with Carriston Mining Consortium.CURRENT RENOWN: Neutral (50/250).

A Friendly designation hardly did much within Caldera's many factional hierarchies - renown functioning as a sort of credit system - but it was a necessary step on the path to the next tier, Honored, which would allow me to undertake Adventurer's Guild Advancement Exams.

Grimwald returned a few minutes later, his expression even more sour than usual, which I took as a sign of grudging admiration. He didn't speak, just slid a worn ledger across the bar and spun it to face me, his thick finger jabbing at the final tally.

CONTRACT PAYOUT: Caden Gray, Rank F.

Primary Objective: 104 tails x 25 copper = 2600 copper = 26 silver.

Secondary Objective (Den Mother): 50 silver.

TOTAL REWARD: 76 silver.

Gear Loan (20%): -15.2 silver.

GUILD TITHE (10%): -7.6 silver.

I fixed my attention on the deductions. I'd definitely gotten the raw end of that deal; the sword and leather jerkin wouldn't have cost that much if I'd bought them new. A lesson for the future. He shoved a heavy purse across the bar and it landed with a clink. I transferred it to my inventory, the currency total ticking up on my interface: 77 silver, 20 copper.

It was a lot more money than I’d had to my name since arriving in this world, but a quick mental check of the market interface for the Crystalized Mana Mote was a sobering splash of cold water. 

Even with the advantages afforded by the Athenaeum, I was still too far behind and the clock was only growing louder in my head. I needed to redouble my efforts, it was time for the riskiest options.

"Not a bad haul for a day's work, Caden," Grimwald admitted, starting to wipe down the foul spot the sack had left. "You’ve earned your keep." He slid my newly minted official Guild registration card across the bar. A simple piece of tin. "You're a Friendly now, ten percent discount on room and board."

He paused, then leaned in, his volume dropping. "Word of advice, don't let the Consortium boss see you, he's furious. Apparently expected you to clear a few scouts and get chased out. The cheap bastard was hoping the infestation would give him an excuse to declare the sector a total loss and collect on the insurance."

I looked from Grimwald's serious face to the smiling dwarven foreman in the Consortium's promotional murals. Corruption, it seemed, was a universal constant. I took the card with an acknowledging nod and it dissolved in my hand, a new icon appearing in my Guild market menu to denote the discount.

I returned to my cheap mug of ale, the roar of the tavern a dull buzz as I ran a quick cost-benefit analysis. I needed to get stronger, but to do that I needed to get richer. The two were inextricably linked, but which path would get me there faster. Intelligence-driven calculations were only as useful as the data I had to work with, and there were just too many unknowns.

The [Efficient Concoction] evolution was the key to turning my small-scale brewing into a real enterprise, but the Crystalized Mana Mote was a wall I couldn't yet climb. I could continue taking on dirt-tier F-Rank quests but it was unlikely I'd get another as rewarding as the first had proved to be. The risk was low, but the payout was lower, and time was a resource I didn't have in abundance.

I looked down at my simple wooden prosthetic, at the splintered remains of the shield I'd strapped to it. My victory in the quarry hadn't been clean. My gear had failed and my defense had been inadequate. If I'd taken any longer, the limited protection of my leather hand-me-downs would have gotten me killed. Better gear meant access to better, more lucrative contracts. It also meant surviving encounters that would kill me in my current state.

The path to wealth was paved with risk, and to mitigate risk, I needed better equipment. My decision made, I finished my ale and stepped back out into the daily mill of Carriston's bustling commerce sector.

The clang of a hammer on steel led me to the town's main smithy, Ironhand Forgeworks, the very same Clan Ironhand whose Kaz-Varr forge had been destroyed in Perrin Flinkgear's legendary disaster. The air here was oppressively hot. A shapely dwarf with long red hair, braided into a complex pattern of rings and jewels, hammered a glowing ingot on an anvil, her biceps thicker than my thigh.

The walls were lined with finished goods, a deadly arsenal of swords, axes, and maces. As I waited for the smith to finish, I watched a young, eager adventurer attempt to purchase a massive two-handed dwarven war axe.

"Let's see your card, lad," another smith grunted, barely pausing his work. The adventurer proudly presented his Guild tin. The smith glanced at it. "Iron-Rank [Axe Proficiency]. Can't sell it to you. You don't have the [Great Weapon Mastery] passive to wield it without crippling yourself. Come back when you're a proper warrior, not a boy playing at one." The adventurer flushed with embarrassment and slunk out of the forge.

Another customer, a seasoned veteran in scarred plate armor, was arguing over a different blade with the smithy's shop keeper. "Look at the edge!" The shopkeeper beamed, holding up a beautifully crafted longsword that reflected the forge's light like polished chrome. "This is a Superior quality blade! The resonance is perfect. That's +7 to slashing damage, not the +5 you'd get from some apprentice's knock-off. If you want the quality, you pay the price!"

I thought of the Master's Draught quality I had produced by accident, and a flicker of a plan began to form. My gaze fell upon the chipped sword Grimwald had loaned me, now sitting on the repair rack. It looked like a child's toy next to the masterwork blades on the wall. Investing in repairing common-rank gear was clearly not worth the effort.

The blacksmith finally finished, plunging her glowing steel into a trough of steaming oil with bubbling hiss. She turned to me, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of a calloused hand. She had an impressively powerful build, her expression as hard as the anvil she worked.

"Well?" she said, her voice unexpectedly high-pitched and soft, almost dulcet. "You here to buy or just to look?"

"Neither," I said, meeting her intense gaze. "I'm here to commission a piece."

She snorted, her eyes immediately going to my ruined wooden arm, then to my ratty hair and beard covered in rat guts, and finally to the F-Rank pin on my chest. "I don't do charity work, human, and I don't build custom pieces for novices who'll just get themselves killed and sully my craftsmanship. Come back when you're at least a C-Rank."

"My rank may be unimpressive," I said calmly. "But my designs are not."

I pulled a detailed diagram from my inventory, placing it on the table between us. It wasn't the impossible Star-Iron arm from the Design Forge which had taken a decade to perfect, but a more pragmatic immediate option that I had spent two days in the Athenaeum throwing together.

It was a purely mechanical design, interlocking plates of steel for the forearm, a spring-loaded locking elbow joint based on pre-industrial clockwork escapements, articulating fingers, and a specialized anchor on the forearm with a universal locking mechanism designed to perfectly secure a shield's straps or other piece of modular equipment.

I had added tiny channels latticed across its entire surface that looked like an ostentatious flourish but were actually threads I would later fill with intricate rune patterns to channel mana through, creating a means of directly controlling the articulating joints and fingers with magic.

The blacksmith fell silent, her professional incredulity turning quickly to a focused curiosity. She walked around the diagram, her expert eyes tracing every joint, every plate, every rivet. She pointed a finger at the elbow joint.

"That spring mechanism," she said, no longer sounding dismissive. "It's got a triple-redundancy lock. Over-engineered for a simple shield arm. Why?"

"Because one day it won't be a shield arm." It was perhaps the most elegant part of the design, a functionally limitless swappable part. "It's a modular chassis, this is just the first component. With the right attachments, that joint can serve as the anchor for a grappling winch, a deployment mechanism, a piston, or many other things besides."

It may have been a simple design by the standards of Exaltian magitek, but here it was a revolutionary piece of modular technology. She looked from the brilliant design back to me, a one-armed F-ranker in mismatched, blood-stained gear. The cognitive dissonance was plain on her face.

"You... you designed this?"

"I did," I said. "And I don't have the silver to pay you to build it, nor the skill to build it myself, but the diagram and resulting Blueprints? Now that I might be willing to part with."

A satisfied grin split her face, she understood immediately. "The rights to the Blueprints." She circled it again, examining the specially designed fingers, tabulating the profit she could make selling even just the modular locking mechanism. "Exclusive rights."

"For the first two years," I insisted, my own poker face learned in the underground fighting pits of New York. "And you build this first prototype for me, to my exact specifications. Masterwork quality steel, not the common junk you sell to F-rankers."

She let out a girlish laugh, white teeth sparkling. "You've got the spirit of a dragonslayer, I'll give you that." She held out a calloused hand. "I am Frida of Clan Ironhand and you have yourself a deal. I will build your arm, and I will enjoy selling the parts for a king's ransom."

I took her hand, the first touch I'd felt since leaving Peristonia, though I did my best not to dwell on the isolation.

I had traded a piece of my mind, a piece of the Athenaeum's power. Fenris and I had often discussed the danger of bringing Earth or Exaltian technology into Caldera. Introduce the wrong concept - combustion, advanced ballistics, industrial manufacturing - and you might win a war, but you hand a loaded gun to a society built on tyranny and power struggle, breaking the world in the process. I couldn't risk starting a cycle of destruction that would burn my kingdom to the ground before I even had it.

But I had a deadline, and compromises had to be made. The System chimed with a contract, sealing our verbal agreement in an unbreakable magical ledger.

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: Guild Artisan Contract Registered.

Parties: Caden Gray (Client), Frida Ironhand (Artisan).Terms:

Client (Caden) provides one (1) exclusive, two-year commercial license for the Blueprints extracted from Articulated Shielding Arm diagram, all-inclusive, to the Artisan.

Artisan (Frida Ironhand) will craft one (1) Masterwork-quality version of the complete item for the Client at no material or labor cost.

Delivery Date: Within seven (7) business days.

Penalty for Breach: System-enforced fine of 50 Gold and a temporary -1000 Renown penalty with the Smith's Union.

Caden Gray appeared on the contract rather than Mason or Cassius, almost as if the System was helping me avoid detection. I filed that away, uncertain what it meant.

Seven days. I had a week to kill and a purse full of silver. My first stop after leaving the smithy was back at the Guild Hall, this time at the general store counter that Grimwald also managed with his usual surly efficiency.

"Back so soon?" he grunted, not looking up from his ledger. "Come to spend your life's savings already?"

"Just investing in my future." I scanned the racks of well-used but functional gear. I still had the short sword and jerkin, but I'd seen how poorly they performed. I needed an upgrade, equipment I could rely on once my new arm was finished.

My funds were still limited, so I had to prioritize. A [Sturdy Iron Shield], its face dented but its structure sound. A new [Reinforced Leather Jerkin] that had fewer mysterious stains than my current one and an extra +3 to defense.

The [Dwarven Prospector's Pick] I'd found in the rat's nest was already a far better weapon than the chipped short sword I was carrying, and though its [Stonebreaker] property would be useless against flesh-and-blood, against the armored hides of the creatures in these mountains it could be the advantage I needed. I added a [Throwing Dagger] and a simple [Leather Helmet] that I hoped would at least keep my head from caving in.

My purse was significantly lighter when I left, but the weight of the new gear was a comforting reassurance. For the next seven days, as Frida hammered and forged my future, I would not be idle.

+++

The week that followed was a blur of relentless activity. I became a fixture in the quarries and the lower mountain trails, a one-armed machine moving with a singular, grisly purpose. Each day was a cycle of monster hunts, material gathering, potion brewing, and reflective study.

I would take on the dirtiest E-rank contracts Grimwald had, the ones no one else wanted, tolerable risk and in areas that held alchemical ingredients I could harvest. I cleared nests of crystal-backed spiders, their chitinous hides proving my new pickaxe to be an inspired choice, and hunted packs of screech-wing bats in lightless caves, their erratic flight patterns forcing me to level my [Ballistic Calculation] skill with a punishing speed.

I used my [Tactical Analysis] to find enemy weaknesses and to learn their patterns and abilities, my proficiency fighting monsters growing with each encounter.

By night, my cramped inn room became an alchemical laboratory. The monster parts, mined minerals, and rare herbs I gathered on my hunts were ground down, distilled, and synthesized, the rarer drops sold for coin. I filled Grimwald's standing order for healing draughts with a speed that baffled him and then began to diversify. Stamina Potions made from the hearts of mountain goats. Antitoxin Elixirs brewed from the venom sacs of the spiders I'd slain. Silver flowed into my inventory in a modest but steady stream.

One evening about four days in, I came back to find a note slipped under my door. Frida's handwriting, blocky and precise: "Elbow joint is giving me trouble. The tolerances on your spring mechanism are inhuman. Fortunately, I'm a dwarf. Stop worrying."

I hadn't actually asked for an update. I sat on the edge of the mattress, turning the note over in my hands. Someone thinking of me without being asked to, anticipating a worry I hadn't voiced - I couldn't remember the last time that had happened. Fenris, probably, reminding me to eat when I'd been gone in the construct for too long and sometimes forgetting I still had a body.

I pinned the note to the wall above my bed, next to the tally marks I'd been scratching to track my potion brewing progress, a reminder that there was life outside the grind.

After rent, after food, after the exorbitant cost of potion vials, every spare coin was poured back into my own progression. Most nights I would spend roughly a week in the Athenaeum before allowing myself to sleep, walking the many paths to power that laid out before me, committing them to memory.

With my [Scholarly Acumen] perk triggering on skill after skill, years of theory and practice in the construct were distilled into days of dedicated effort that paid off in rapid growth. Soon I'd have the income stream to start evolving my skills, inching closer to the build that would define my true fighting prowess.

I was no longer the scrawny, half-dead man who had crawled out of the sea, shaking with every step. My clothes still hung a bit loose, but beneath the stained leather, the muscle was finally returning. The magic-enhanced recovery, fueled by actual food and endless combat drills in the dark, was knitting me back together.

On the seventh day, I returned to the Ironhand Forgeworks where Frida was waiting. My new arm sat on a wooden stand, a beautiful, brutalist piece of engineering. Masterwork steel plates, polished to a dark smoky grey, were joined by a series of complex articulated joints. It was heavy, functional, and powerful.

I spent several minutes just strapping it on, the leather harness creaking as I pulled it tight. Frida watched uncomfortably, offering to help. I insisted on doing it myself, she wouldn't be there the next time, I reminded her curtly. It settled onto my shoulder, its weight significant but balanced. I'd need to add the intricate runes that would make it truly special, but I could already tell it was a masterwork.

"It's a marvel, Caden," Frida said, her voice full of a genuine respect. "In thirty years at this forge, I've never built anything quite like it. It's an honor to have been the one to give it form."

"The honor is mine." I flexed the metal fingers manually with my other hand to feel how smoothly they moved. It was not the star-iron arm of my dreams, but it was a triumph in its own way. I'd overpaid for it considerably, we both knew that, but feeling the machine's smooth gears as I manually adjusted the elbow felt worth it.

That evening I did not hunt or brew but walked back to the Guild Hall, to the market counter where Grimwald sold his wares. I placed a heavy, clinking bag silver coins on the counter, a large chunk of my profit from a week of relentless work.

"I need more ingredients, Grimwald," I said, the light glinting off a coin that spilled out of the overstuffed sack.

"Brewing another batch? Good. That last shipment of Antitoxins sold out in an hour."

"Not this time." I perused the merchant window of my interface. "Tonight, I'm brewing for myself."