12

Today’s events showed Charles just what kind of messes could happen if he didn’t plan for every single possibility, since strange things seemed to keep happening to him. He was not aware of the fact that there was an item that could collapse a spatial ring, but now that he knew it he could start making plans for such a thing. And for so many others that if he really wanted to be able to ignore every possible threat he’d have to just die and stop worrying.

But, first things first, he needed electricity to recharge both his suit and his weapon. After that he had no specific plans other than becoming as strong as possible and trying to pave the way for the coming of the empire. Which itself required him to gain insights he did not yet have both in the fields of magic and science.

In the end, it all came back to the need to have some basic sort of power going in his base. To make electricity he needed copper wire and magnets, and the latter were a problem because he didn’t have any. He’d need to find them before even considering how to make the magnets spin inside the copper coil. Fortunately, all of his tools were out of the ring and inside his base along with most of the relevant materials, so he could still work even without his supplies. He only needed to acquire a magnet then, something that was not commonly found in the city and that indeed neither the blacksmith nor anyone else he asked had.

After dragging the last tree trunk inside his property, he entered the workshop and closed the newly made door behind him. The LAI warned him that there was a presence hidden among the treetops at the forest’s edge, at the outer limit of his property. A basic analysis of the presence showed that it was the same that the LAI spotted several hours ago. Another bothersome thing, he thought, and for a moment he wished that they could just stop coming. But in the end, he realized that after each encounter he came out either stronger or with more tools than before, starting from the ring he got after he was poisoned and then everything else.

For a moment he considered whether to shoot a warning bullet towards the forest, but then rationality prevailed. He didn’t want his new prey or better said his opportunity, he corrected himself, to run away. He sneakily left through the window on the city side of his base, hidden by the concrete walls and roof from the line of sight coming from the trees and circled back to the forest edge of his land while making sure not to be spotted or heard. It was time to catch the annoying shadow that had been following him ever since the incident at the city walls.

He got close to the tree where the presence was hiding, and looked up towards the canopy to take a better look at his newly acquired stalker. It was a humanoid silhouette, although that didn’t tell him much with all the different species he had already encountered, and the figure was clearly trying to see what was going on inside his base through the still empty windows. It was just a matter of time before it figured that there was nobody home, but he didn’t need much time to implement his plan.

The plan itself was rather simple, revolving around the one thing that set him apart from the common people of this world. He tried to take out the gun from the ring before remembering that he had no ring as of now, and that the gun was holstered at its usual place on his toolbelt. He raised the gun, aimed down at the base of the tree, set the power to maximum and squeezed the trigger.

It took one second for the gun to charge, during which it made an increasingly louder and stronger buzzing sound of power gathering. As soon as it fired, the now familiar boom shook the earth and the bullet immediately embedded itself several meters deep in the ground behind the tree. The tree itself was in the path of the rod of iron, of course, and it exploded in a shower of splinters and broken wood. The trunk groaned and broke under the weight of the rest of the tree before finally falling down slowly towards the empty grass plains of Charles’ place. The shadow froze in fear and then tried desperately to free itself from the tangle of moving branches and vines of the tree. It jumped down and landed on the open ground, just in front of Charles, just as he predicted.

A smirk crept on his face, the realization of a perfectly carried out hunt made him very happy. Even more so considering the awesome power of his gun, something he would never get sick of.

“Freeze!” He yelled at the figure, who was now lit by the light of the setting sun and revealed to be a young girl with a green hood and a longbow on her back. Her clothes looked worn and heavy, yet they conveyed the feeling of being warm and soft.

Her golden hair was flowing in the wind, and the falling leaves from the destroyed tree were dancing around her and brushing her face gently, making her look like a goddess of nature. Green, emerald eyes looked at Charles from under the hood, surrounded by exquisite feminine features of untold beauty.

She stood there in silence, unmoving. Her bow was still on her back along with a quiver full of colorful arrows, but she was making no movements to arm herself. She was just staring at Charles, unsure of what to do next. She had been caught off guard, not that she had a plan for when she actually met the man, or she’d just start acting and stop staring.

“Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in my property?” Charles asked, speaking slowly and with surprise in his voice. He expected everything else but a young girl that looked like it came out of a movie set. He reminded himself that in this world things such as this were normal and not only seen in movies.

“My name is Eereen.” The woman said, stuttering. She was also blushing a bit, and together with the orange light from the sun she looked like she was a living painting.

“That answers the first question, albeit just barely. Now, what are you doing here?” Charles pressed on, uncaring of the stunning beauty before his eyes. He had work to do and little time before inevitable complications would come knocking at his door. This was one such complication, but fortunately he handled it before it could turn into something really bothersome.

“I need your help.” The woman said timidly.

“No.”

“Please!” She begged, falling to her knees with eyes full of newly shed tears. “You are the only hope of my village!”

He frowned, puzzled at the fact that this girl was pretending to be so naïve. Who would even hope for a single person they didn’t know to save an entire village? This reeked of narrative exploits done either by the system or by a supernatural entity who wanted to have some fun. It was that, or the fact that he landed inside one of the very novels he read in the database.

“Get out of here. I don’t need any side quests from you right now.” He said coldly. Narrative, gods, systems or even transmigrations meant nothing to him. He would not follow anyone undeserving of his respect, which meant he would not follow anyone else but Eve. Here there was no Eve, therefore he was free to do as he pleased.

His words, however, sparked something inside of the girl. He was already past the point where he even remembered what he said, distracted as he was by his inner thoughts, that for a moment he wondered if she was sick in the head. After realizing that it was him who was wrong, he didn’t dare say anything.

“A quest?” Eereen’s eyes lit up, the girl completely oblivious to what Charles was thinking. “The system gave you a quest? Because of me? Please, if you help me out not only will my entire village forever be in your debt, but even the system will reward you.” She was pleading him now, trying to leverage his compassionate side.

He was about to send her away at first, even with force if necessary, but the new information changed his mind. She was being a nuisance and a bother to him, true, and she was preventing him from completing his plans for the immediate future. He needed to get his hands on some electricity or sooner rather than later he would find himself in deep trouble. This was his main quest, system issued ones be damned. Get electricity and the reward will be that he won’t die badly.

But. What she said was definitely an interesting development. If it was true, then the system actively issued quests based on the circumstances of the individual, quests that were probably made to further its own goals as well but that still could help Charles greatly in his own quest for more power. But the problem was that he did not have access to the system yet, so he had no way to know its inner mechanisms.

Until he could trick the system into believing that he had no LAI, he had no way to get direct information from it. She could be a valuable source of information about said system in the meantime, and even the idea of making friends with her village was not a bad one after all. He needed allies for when the empire would finally come, and he had to start from somewhere.

He was not a politician, nor a strategist. He was an engineer with a love for weapons of mass destruction. He was not so stupid, however, not to see that his relations with the city of Unica were not the best at the moment. The girl’s village was a fresh start on that front, one he could use. He was sure that if he managed to help that village overcome whatever stupid medieval issue it had; they would be forever in his debt.

He had centuries of scientific knowledge, a LAI and his own ingenuity to help him. He was sure that he would not fail. They probably only needed to get their hands on some real engineering and then they would be alright.

“I will help you. Come.” He said, and turned around towards his base.

Eereen followed meekly, the tears only now drying on her angelic face. “Thank you… my village is in trouble because-”

“Before that, though, I need to get my hands on some magnets.” He said, interrupting her before she could start off on an exposition tangent. His mind fixated on the issue of the magnets, he refused to let her speak. He knew these things very well from the novels the LAI provided him, and he didn’t want to start the quest chain just yet. “Until that is done, I’m not doing anything else.”

***

Eereen was unsure about how to feel right now. She knew that following this strange man through town and into the forest would be dangerous but she never expected him to obliterate the tree she was standing on with his strange weapon. She had thought that he’d kill her then and there, and she was aware that she could do nothing against the devastating power of his weapon.

But, by some stroke of luck the man decided to help her. He didn’t tell her his name nor was he listening to her request until he got what he needed, but at least he was not refusing her anymore like at the beginning. He led her inside the strangely smooth stone building with holes for windows, and made her sit on a wooden chair.

He started to tinker with some strange things, thin lines of various metals hammered and twisted in a circular fashion. Sometimes he put copper ingots in the forge and then casted even more of the metal lines, then wrapped them with other metals and kept winding them in a big circle. She had never seen something like that before, but she knew that it was the dwarves who usually made artifacts with their forges and anvils.

He didn’t look like a dwarf. He was tall and big, covered in a strange armor that perfectly fit his frame. Only his hands and head were left uncovered, while every other part of his body was hidden under that strange armor. Every time he hammered the metal, a hiss could be heard from the armor on his arms, and strange tubes of metal contracted and expanded at the rhythm of his movements.

At times, as he looked at the thing he was building, strange blue lines appeared before his eyes and arranged themselves as if they were alive. A square floated next to his head, full of dots and concentric lines that moved around, with a bigger dot in the center inside a square. There was another dot next to that black one, and it was yellow. The other dots were all red.

She knew that she could see all this only thanks to her eyes, and pretended to see nothing out of the ordinary. He was obviously taking steps to hide these strange magical lights, and she didn’t want to upset him again. She thought back to what he told her before, and how he needed magnets for the thing he was building.

“You said that you need magnets?” She asked, taking off her hood and revealing her long hair and ears.

The man looked at her ears with interest for a moment, but then his gaze returned to the item that he was building. She blushed as he looked at her, looking at him with a sweet smile, but then noticed sadly that he wasn’t looking anymore. She hoped to use her race as a tool to get him to help her more willingly, she was even prepared to use more extreme measures to get his favor, but he wasn’t showing any interest in her.

“Yes, magnets. See this coil here? If I put a magnet in the middle and spin it, it generates electricity.” He said enthusiastically, but most of the words just flew over her head. She knew of some of the things the fire elves made in their caves next to her village, but her people never bothered with such unnatural things. She felt useless right now, but she knew that her village was counting on her. Perhaps they didn’t know it yet, but as soon as she returned together with their savior, they will all understand why she left like that. She changed tactic.

“I never heard of magnets before.” Eereen said, looking down at the floor. She was wearing her best innocent face, pouting cutely just as her mother had taught her to do when dealing with humans. She was young and will look like a young girl to their eyes for centuries, and those tactics would come in handy she told her.

But the man in front of her just frowned and sighed, then looked at her as if he was dealing with a problematic child.

“You’re an elf, right?” He asked her. She remembered how he only gave her ears a cursory glance rather than a prolonged look like most other people. Had he dealt with elves already so much that he was used to their features? She knew that there were elves delving in this town’s dungeon, but she was considered a beauty even among her people. She nodded, keeping her thoughts to herself.

“A wood elf, yes.” She said. He smiled, a gesture so sudden and unexpected that it took her by surprise.

“It’s alright. If I remember correctly you people should not know too much about rocks after all.” He extended a hand towards her, and she braced herself because she was sure he was about to touch her ears. They were a sensitive spot, almost an erogenous zone, but she was willing to let herself be touched there in order to get his help.

Instead, he only ruffled her hair in an awkward gesture, initially with odd movements which then smoothed out after a bit. He retracted his hand and looked at it, then smiled to himself and returned to his work.

“Magnets are little rocks that attract iron. I just need a small one, then I can make my own magnets.”

Eereen thought for a while. “There is a skill that makes swords and armor move around.” She said to herself, while she thought.

The man stopped what he was doing, even dropping a hammer to the floor. “Really? Do you know it?” He asked with wide eyes and a new fervor in his voice that was not there before.

“I don’t know it, but I heard of a wizard who lived in the forest. He was among the few who still used to practice old magic.”

“Fucking exploration quests. The system better reward me even for already completed ones as soon as I activate it or else…” The man muttered angrily, then stared at her as if only now remembering that she was here. His face returned to neutrality. “Then let’s go. Take me there.”