The Forge

The Storm-Tusk Chimera had three heads, and in the end that was what killed it.

Twelve feet at the shoulder, three Yellow Shards set along its spine, and a boar's head, an eagle's head and a serpent's head all attached to the same body and all convinced they were in charge of it. The fight took twenty minutes. For most of them Gesbiek did nothing but move, reading the gaps where none of the three could see him and letting the animal argue with itself about which way to lunge.

Then he found a moment where the serpent had committed and the boar had not, and he went in through it.

[TARGET DESTROYED: STORM-TUSK CHIMERA]
[XP: +46%]
[LEVEL 77 > 78]

Gesbiek stood on the ribs of the thing and got his breathing back and looked at the number.

Seventy-eight. One rung, for the largest thing in the Darkwood.

It had taken two years. The three weeks of beetles in the Green Zone now looked, from here, like a child arranging pebbles. Every tier since had been the same shape: terrifying, then difficult, then routine, then not worth the walk.

He had eaten the Chimera's three Yellow cores raw, standing over the body, because he could not merge them and would not risk carrying them.

And the Chimera had been the last one.

He had checked. Two weeks of sweeping every sector of the Darkwood with the Analytical Sight open, and there was nothing left in it above this. He had hunted the forest into a shape that could no longer feed him.

Fifty more of these to reach a hundred, and there were no more of these.

Another wall. He was beginning to suspect walls were the System's preferred form of architecture.

* * * *

He crossed the Darkwood at Level 78 speed, which put miles behind him in the time it had once taken to cross a clearing, and came out at the outer rim where the trees were young and the mana was thin.

The Processing Station was still there.

The hollow under the ancient oak, roots making walls on three sides, dirt still dry. Somebody's sorted carapaces in one corner, going to powder now. Root hooks with two flint blades still hanging on them.

Gesbiek stood in the entrance and had to stoop.

He dug under the flat marker stone with one hand, and his claws went through packed earth as though it were water, and he remembered digging this hole over an evening and having to stop twice.

Fifty 1-Green Shards came out of the ground and spilled across the dirt, muddy and weakly glowing.

He had buried them as a fortune. Five and a half days of eating, insurance against the week the traps failed, the single most valuable thing he had ever owned.

Worth about a tenth of a percent each, now.

But he had a menu they had not been designed for.

[MERGE: COOLDOWN 00:00:15]
[FORGE: AVAILABLE]

Fifteen seconds. He had used Merge already that morning, which was why the Chimera cores had gone down his throat as they were.

He emptied the pouch at his hip out onto the dirt alongside them. Five Blue cores, kept and not swallowed, because a Blue had stopped being worth the trouble of eating somewhere in the sixties and he had gone on pocketing them anyway, in the way of a goblin who had spent five years unable to walk past anything.

Merge did not count stones. It counted what was in them.

Fifty Greens were five Blues. Five Blues and five Blues were ten.

He crouched in the dirt of his old home and watched a timer, and found it lasted noticeably longer than the Chimera fight had.

Then it cleared, and he executed.

A wireframe sphere came down around the whole pile and began to close, and the stones dragged toward one another across the dirt as though the ground had tilted. They screeched as they came together, a sound like a claw down glass, and then they started to fracture under the pressure and the light came up so hard he had to look away.

THUD.

The light went inward all at once, with a sound like a heavy book shutting.

Where fifty-five stones had been there was one.

[ITEM CREATED: 1-YELLOW SHARD]
[TIER 3 | PURITY: 87.2%]
[ESTIMATED XP: 8%]

Gesbiek picked it up. It was warm and heavier than its size allowed and it thrummed against his palm with everything fifty-five lesser cores had contained.

Eight percent.

Everything he had owned in the world at the beginning, compressed into a single perfect stone, and it was not enough to move him from 78 to 79.

He sat back on his heels with it in his hand and felt something that he had never once had the leisure to feel while he was starving.

Boredom.

* * * *

The other skill sat at the bottom of the menu with red on it.

[FORGE: INJECT RAW MANA TO FORCE TIER INCREASE]
[WARNING: EXPERIMENTAL]

He focused, and it opened further.

[FORGE ATTEMPT: YELLOW > ORANGE]
[SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 10%]
[FAILURE: COMPLETE ITEM DESTRUCTION]

One in ten.

Gesbiek set the shard down on the flat stone he had cracked a thousand beetles open on, and looked at it.

Nine times out of ten, the whole cache went to dust. Fifty cores, three weeks of pits and flint and measuring beetle strides, an entire earlier life. Gone in thirty seconds for nothing.

He noticed that his hand was not steady, and took a moment to work out why, and the answer was not fear.

He had spent five years keeping things back. A crust of bread hidden under a stone. A rag saved because it might be needed. Fifty shards buried under a marker for a hungry week that never quite arrived. That was scavenger arithmetic, and it had kept him alive, and it had also kept him exactly where he was for as long as he had practised it.

The forest had nothing left to give him. Grinding the remaining slope on 1-Greens would take him years, and he had already been shown, in a white room, precisely how uninterested the System was in effort.

"All or nothing," Gesbiek said, in goblin, to a hole in a tree where he used to live.

He hit the button.

* * * *

The shard went up inside a sphere of red lightning that crackled wrong, and the sound that came out of the stone was metal tearing and something else underneath it that had no physical source at all.

[REWRITING DENSITY]
[PROGRESS: 7%]

The bar moved as though it were being dragged.

Cracks opened across the gem and black smoke came out of them. The lightning went from red to purple and then to a black that was not a colour, and around the altar the world began to fail: floating pixels, a patch of missing ground, a fern rendering as wireframe and then correcting itself.

[PROGRESS: 34%]

The shard was screaming. It had begun to vibrate hard enough to bore down into the stone beneath it, grinding a hole for itself.

[PROGRESS: 61%]

Gesbiek's own core answered it, humming in his chest hard enough to hurt. The mana density in the clearing climbed until his skin crawled. Birds came out of the canopy in every direction at once. The insects stopped.

[PROGRESS: 89%]

The gem looked like it was going. Black dust streaming off it in a thin continuous line, the shape of it visibly smaller than it had been.

He had never been lucky. His entire existence to date was, considered statistically, a long run of unfavourable outcomes.

On the other hand, nobody had ever given him anything worth gambling on before.

[97%. 98%. 99%.]

BOOM.

The lightning collapsed into the stone and the shockwave took Gesbiek off his feet and put him on his back six feet away with no air in him.

He got up coughing, and the dust cleared.

The yellow was gone.

What sat on the stone was the colour of something coming out of a volcano, and the air above it was rippling with heat.

[SUCCESS: CRITICAL FORGE]
[VOLATILE ORANGE CORE | TIER 4 | PURITY: 94.8%]
[UNSTABLE, CONSUME IMMEDIATELY]
[ESTIMATED XP: 410%]

Gesbiek went forward on his hands and knees, laughing, which was not a sound he made often.

Ten percent. He had won on ten percent.

He had made a Tier-4 core in a forest that had never produced one, out of fifty pieces of rubbish he had buried when a fish head was a good day.

It was bleeding energy as he watched. Every second it sat there was power going into the air.

He grabbed it, and it burned his palm on contact, green blood hissing where the skin met it, and he put it in his mouth and bit.

* * * *

It was like biting a lit thing.

The energy came out and took his head back and arched his spine, and his jaw slammed shut and cracked straight through the core, and what went into him was not food and had never been food.

[MASSIVE ENERGY INTAKE]
[CORE EXPANSION FORCED]

Gesbiek screamed into the clearing.

His veins came up orange under the skin, rivers of it running from his chest outward. The Silver Core in him was forced open wider to take it, and he could feel that happening, and it was not a metaphor.

Muscle tore and reknit in the same second, denser than it had been. His skin went from olive to a deep plated emerald, thicker across the shoulders and forearms. His bones took on weight. His heart went to three times its rate and stayed there for long enough that he wondered, distantly, whether this was the failure and it had simply been delayed.

[LEVEL 79]
[LEVEL 80]
[LEVEL 81]
[LEVEL 82]

[STR 44 > 48 | AGI 72 > 75 | VIT 54 > 58 | INT 80 > 81]

Then it stopped, and he was standing without remembering having stood, steaming faintly in the cool air.

Four levels. From one stone he had made himself, out of things he had thrown in a hole.

He checked his status and found something new on it.

[CORE SATURATION: 50%]

Gesbiek looked at that for a long moment.

Half. There was room in him for as much again, and nothing in the Darkwood to put in it. He could spend a year filling that with beetles, a tenth of a percent at a time.

He had tasted what came off a Tier-4 core, and the prospect of going back to dirt held no appeal whatsoever.

* * * *

He knew where there was better.

The Ancestral Totem stood in the Throne Room of the Red-Tooth Clan: a wooden pillar with five Red Shards set into it, Tier-5, every one of them burning.

One Orange core had bought four levels. Five Reds would not buy four each. They would go past the arithmetic entirely, the way the first Blue had gone past the saturation lock, because that was what happened every single time he jumped a tier.

Past one hundred. Straight to the console. Full access.

And the clan was not using them. That was the part his mind kept returning to, turning over and putting down and picking up again. The Totem sat in a cavern being venerated by a chief who was starving his own people, and it did nothing, and it had done nothing for generations.

He was aware that this was the reasoning of somebody who wanted a thing and had located a justification for it afterwards.

He kept walking anyway.

Not skirting the trail. Down the middle of it, upright, at a pace that suited him.

A pack of 3-Green wolves came out of the underbrush ahead, moss in their hides and bark across the flanks, and spread into the flanking pattern he had watched from twenty feet up in a tree while his hands shook.

Gesbiek did not slow down. He let the pressure off his core go out ahead of him.

The Alpha stopped mid-stride. All three of them read whatever it is that animals read, and understood that the thing coming up the trail was not on the same scale as themselves, and went into the trees at a speed that took down ferns.

He did not look after them. They were worth nothing now, and it was strange, in a flat sort of way, to remember that a pack exactly like that one had been the most frightening thing in his world.

At the tree line he stopped.

The Red-Tooth Clan lay below him in the evening: bone barricades, mud huts, cooking fires burned down low.

He opened the Sight and looked properly, and what he saw was worse than he remembered.

Every health readout in the camp was amber or red. The mud was deeper. Half the fires were out. Goblins sat outside their huts doing nothing at all, which was what goblins did when there was no food to prepare and no strength for anything else.

Grolm had eaten the clan down to the bone in the time Gesbiek had been gone.

He swept the grid for one signature out of habit. Blue Shard, Level 15, a frequency he could have picked out of a thousand.

It was not there. He went through every tent, every patrol line, every corner of the camp, and there was no trace of it anywhere.

The bear had been thorough.

Gesbiek found that he had expected to feel something and did not, particularly, and moved on.

He turned his attention to the middle of the camp, where the drake ribs curved black over the mouth of the cavern and the heat came out of it and made the entrance look like it was breathing.

He had been dragged in there once by the scruff of the neck and thrown across the floor.

Gesbiek came down out of the tree line and started walking toward the camp he had been exiled from, and he did not bother going round to the back gate.