Chapter 76: Hypothetical Countermeasures

One may be excused for believing that William Oh can see the future: He can’t. He has an outstanding capacity to recognize patterns, which, to the untrained eye may SEEM like he is predicting the future.

He has however, on occasion, been documented telling the future what to do, which is totally different.

• Jason Salazar

“May I?” The Artificer Archetype asked, his bushy white brows cocked as he glanced up at Will.

“Go ahead,” Will gestured to the jar of Relic Dust.

To Will’s surprise, the old man dipped his pinky in the jar then put it in his mouth, his face becoming contemplative.

“Psychic….debuff…contract…and a bit of dirt,” He said, smacking his lips together and spitting.

“Sorry,” Will said, shrugging.

“Oh, no, for an unplanned Relic Loss, this dust is about as clean as you could possibly get it, which is good, drives cost down. I’ve had to filter out blood and saltwater and soil before so…”

“You want the good news or the bad news first?” He asked, glancing up at Will.

“Bad.”

“The bad news is that your weapon is going to be very difficult to recreate. Large amounts of time and money difficult. To the point where you may decide that it doesn’t suit your plans going forward. If you’re planning on going above the tenth floor, there’s a better chance of finding something better than this, and faster than it’d be done. Assuming you don’t die.”

“I’d have to get an artisan to create a blank relic that matches your previous one perfectly, which is a tall order and would require you to be on hand for it’s creation since you don’t have a charcoal imprint. After that I’ve got to apply your Relic dust there to it.

“While he’s doing that’ I’ll be carefully sifting the dirt out of your Relic Dust.”

“Once we’ve got the blank, it’s going to absorb one to three of the dust’s affixes. Now we might get lucky and get all three but it’s more likely we only get two, and even more likely I only get one.”

“Then, if only one or two affixes land, I’ve got to go buy up some Relic dust from relics which only had one affix of the appropriate type. Which isn’t cheap. Then I’ve got to bake the affixes in one at a time in a time-consuming ritual.

And after all that’s said and done, you might get a weapon kinda-sorta like the one you lost.” The Artificier said, handing Will back the jar of dust.

“What’s the good news?”

“The good news is that that particular combination of affixes is rare and valuable, so the value of the relic, once It’s done being re-created, would be worth the effort.”

Hmm…

“I could also buy the dust off you for a good price,” the Artificier said with a shrug before glancing down at Will’s missing hand. “But you seem like the type to stick to something even if it’s hard.”

“That is the case,” Will said with a smile, glad to know that it was possible.

I’d rather do it myself, though.

Now that he knew what was needed, he was confident he could use a modified Sourdough to imprint the tomahawk’s affixes on something else.

Just gotta hit level 30 first, Will thought.

And spend a few hours scrolling through potential upgrades.

There were as many potential upgrades as there were monsters, which was to say…an infinite amount. But Will could narrow it down a bit by checking potential suspects first.

Just from what he’d heard, the process of recreating the axe wouldn’t be too dissimilar from how Will imagined Sourdough functioned.

Will thanked the aged artificer for his time and took his jar of iridescent dust for a walk.

The only artificer in the city.

At least, the only one who wasn’t under some kind of contract with a Lord or a major crime syndicate.

2 more fights.

Will had been through four rounds and was now in the semifinal. Once this was done, he would have a free pass up to the 6^th Floor.

You know…assuming baron Akul keeps his word.

There was nothing protecting Will from a double-cross aside from the Baron’s regard for his own reputation. That might be enough by itself. Will had spotted several other interesting looking figures in the box today with the Baron.

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He couldn’t hear what they were saying over the roar of the crowd, but he could see pretty damned well.

Mark Wyrd sitting next to the baron, and someone who looked suspiciously like Mark was sitting in the big seat that was normally reserved for the Baron.

‘How much for that one?’ the man’s mouth had seemed to say.

If the Wyrd patriarch knew exactly what Will had done in Oilton, he would probably be a bit more pissed, but even if he didn’t know Will was responsible for that debacle, he already knew that Will had slipped his mercs once before, and now he saw him carving his way through the ranks of a tournament meant select potential Lords.

The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

No…there might even be more going on here than just Will.

The mercs were in town. The Wyrds were in town…the Tangled were in town.

There was already one Tangled in the city that Will had personally witnessed. Five, actually, Will corrected, thinking of the Baker Girls. What was the chance that in a city this big, in only a matter of days, he had run into every single one? there must be a high density of them to allow that to happen…

Right?

That brought Will back to Oilton. The dead city they’d discovered on the Third Floor.

It had been flooded by a single Tangled that had self-replicated.