Tyrants of Earth - The Legend of Artigan

They didn’t immediately hop on to the road trip straight away. First, Clara said she needed a day off for work, which somehow conveniently lined up with Ryan getting a phone call from his mom to come over or she’d come to his house herself. Naturally this led to him being forced to have dinner with his parents while they pestered him over his weird new arm and what he thought of Seffara’s recent triumphant return.

At least Ryan was saved from that conversation when his parents quickly picked up on his mood.

All that was to say, Ryan spent half a day with his parents then fled back to his own house, where he spent the other half of the day, half meditating, half brooding with Barry.

One accomplishment at least was that he had managed to force Milock into a room without electronics and made him get a full eight hours of sleep.

Or rather, six hours of sleep and two hours of Milo banging the door, demanding to be let out. Ryan noted to himself to keep this routine up with Milo every day.

The next day, Clara came back.

“Thanks for waiting by the way.”

“Calling my parents was sly.”

“Unlike you, your mom can actually hurt me physically.”

After a bit of banter, they shuffled into Milock’s brand new Tempest. Barry taking the front passenger seat and daring anyone to challenge him. Nobody wanted to contest with the moody orc and Ryan and Clara sat in the back. He tried to meditate, home in on the class that surrounded his body and soul. The Quasi-Legendary should have been a colossal presence so why couldn’t he feel any—

“Oh I’m so excited! San Kingsgrove with money and adventurers. Ryan you don’t mind if I spend some right? I mean, Milo got his play money to make more of and wellll if you think about how much time I spent decorating your house then surely you can share it with your good friend Clara.”

Ryan gave Clara a disapproving shake of his head. Of course he’d let her use his money if she wanted it, he just wanted to see her be a little disappointed for her trick with his parents.

“I’m going to The Realm. Open the window if my arm leaks too much.”

[Return to The Realm]

“Wait, what’s the point in a road trip if you’re just—damn it, he’s gone. Did someone bring the marker?”

–

Sector Five.

While Sector Four had been death and desolation. Sector Five was the first sector that truly felt alien. For one thing, the sun was tinted red. Only in Sector Five would the sun in The Realm be permanently shining down red rays onto the ground.

And that single thing changed everything.

The plants and creatures had adapted. Most of the flora here were black and purple, and they didn’t look like normal plants either. Winding spreading leaves surrounded him, if you followed the stems, you’d realize that the entire field of weird black leaves was one enormous singular plant. This particular variety was the most common and spread spores that made even his fifth realm body a little drowsy.

That was just the plants.

Great spiral structures spiked into the sky, too narrow for a mountain, but too large to be manmade. Each spiral looked as if someone had pinched the ground and twisted it all the way up. Holes littered every single one of them, causing those with trypophobia to become dizzy and lost. The closest spiral mountain had a diverse range of nasty monsters crawling in and out of it.

Though that meant that it was one of the less dangerous mountains.

The most dangerous spiral mountains were where every single monster didn’t dare to make their nest.

Not that Ryan was that interested in picking a fight with anything right now. He was more interested in the lone robed figure staring into the distance, lost and uncertain about what she was supposed to do. Motes of golden light would appear sporadically around her and would be promptly shot down by a [Mage Bolt].

“Hey Gami—”

“BRRRRREEEEE!”

Cerul the cerulean crow screeched in his direction, stopping everything he had prepared. Ryan turned, more than a little exasperated by the little flying shitcrow.

“What do you want, Cerul? I kind of have important business at the moment.”

Cerul stomped on the dirt and cleared the area of black grass. It drew out the number 5 and then drew a circle around it, then it pointed a wing at Ryan and then pointed it back on the circle.

“I’m going to need a little more than that.”

“Brrpt!”

It pointed a wing at him, then at itself, then pointed at the circle. It then snapped its beak, miming eating the five and the circle.

“Oh right, I made a deal to feed you more system portals.” He took a moment to think. “I’ll need to go back to Earth in like five hours and research things, but we’ll see if there’s a reported enhanced monster nearby.”

Cerul squawked at him, then pointed towards a smallish spire in the distance. Ryan squinted, he saw no monsters even daring to fly near it.

“You’re saying there’s a system enhanced monster in there?”

It was said that system enhanced monsters could better detect the location of other System Portals. Cerul nodded in confirmation.

“I’m not so sure about going in blind.”

“BREEEEE.”

After screeching at him, it pointed at its scarred wings and back, exposed flesh where Pinkie’s dragon claws had torn through his feathers and bit in deep.

“Hey, I didn’t say no. I said I don’t want to go in blind. I’ll go back to Earth and check the realmnet first. Then we’ll have a proper plan? Does that sound fair?”

Cerul narrowed its eyes at him, after a moment, it nodded, then flew off, likely looking for a target for its droppings.

Now that he had gotten the shitcrow out of the way, it was time to talk to a brooding Gamielle. She absently flicked away a mote of light, scattering the energy into the air. Though unlike mana it didn’t dissipate, it just hung around her.

“Hey Gamielle, I’ve got some questions for you.”

“Go ahead.”

“I can’t seem to resonate with my new class at all. Do you have any tips?”

Before Gamielle had first found him, he had spent an entire day trying to resonate with his new class. While a day really wasn’t much time, he never had trouble with either of his arms’ classes before. Along with the experience of the class orb, he felt like he should have at least made some progress.

He had refreshed his knowledge from the realmnet and learned that classes you took for yourself were easier to resonate. It explained why all of his skill upgrades had been around the concepts that made up the classes of his arms.

Gamielle rolled her eyes, “That’s normal for a class grafted by the Trial System, especially since it’s a specialized Epic. If it was so easy to resonate with a class, then everyone would be out there doing it. Complaining because you didn’t make progress in a single day is stupid.”

“Sucks, thought the Witch Tyrant’s daughter would have more knowledge than the realmnet.”

She glared at him, “Why don’t you do what the dragonslayers did with Pinkie? Go find a veil and assassinate it, Mr.[Veilpiercer Assassin].”

Ryan eyed the girl made out of a Legend, he brandished a knife. Gamielle’s head turned and glared at him.

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“Hey! Why are you looking at me like that? You think I’m going to just stand there and let you stab me? I’m not actually an illusion, remember?”

“I mean, veils don’t have to be magical, it can be about piercing through secrets, you know. Like the Legendary skill that keeps the world thinking a lot of adventurers are alive when they’re dead?”

Gamielle stood up and spread her arms angrily. “Come on then, stab me! Let’s see if your new class can put an end to all of this!”

Ryan took a step back from the crazed girl. That was one escalation too many, he had been thinking some dark humor would help both him and the depressed girl.

“Yeesh, and I thought I was down in the dumps. You okay Gamielle?”

She kicked at the air, then plopped back down onto the black plant. Gamielle started pulling up the leaves, spreading spores into the air. Though those spores weren’t what she was staring at, she instead pointed at the golden orb that appeared in front of her.

“No, I'm not okay. I found out that the other Fallen aren’t having this issue at all. I thought the Legend was just getting the excess and it would spread to the others but they don’t have a single bit of faith gathering around them.”

“Meaning…?”

“Think about it, dummy! Faith requires other people to believe in something. If this energy is gathering to me and only me, it means a bunch of people are worshiping one thing, me!”

“Oh. That doesn’t sound too bad. Would that make you into some sort of guardian deity?”

“Ryan, faith isn’t a stable or reliable source of power at all. Without someone to control it or guide it, it warps the laws of reality, making it more malleable. That’s a one way ticket to a complete reality meltdown when the Trial System leaves.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

Gamielle started whizzing a [Mana Bolt] around her, dispersing the orbs of light before they formed.

“While it’s the first time I’ve seen it on such a scale, it’s not an uncommon thing in the greater cosmos. Most of them get destroyed before a proper god rises. Even then, many of those worlds end up destroyed because the godling was too weak or had no idea what they were doing. My mom’s basically accelerating that process while gambling on me to become a goddess before excess faith destabilizes the laws of reality and kills everyone, or worse.”

That took a sudden unexpected turn for the worst.

“How does excess faith do that? Isn’t it just another energy source? Like magic or qi?”

“How dare you. Faith is not magic. Excess mana disperses and sometimes forms into natural structures. Qi can overwhelm but it always has its own flow. Faith gathers and gathers without need of structure or reason. When it’s sufficient enough, it becomes the reason itself.”

The little strands of faith that had been scattered by Gamielle’s magic were indeed trying to gather back together, gravitating towards each other. Trying to form into bigger and bigger clumps.

Ryan tried to understand that and put it into context with the reports from adventurers about Sector Thirteen.

“Adventurers have been saying they feel like Sector Thirteen seems to cause more class resonations. Is that because of reality being more malleable?”

Gamielle nodded. “I’m not sure if that’s even a benefit in the long run. Either way, the true problem is the feedback loop. The more people that believe in the power of faith, the more effective it becomes. The more effective it becomes, the more that people will turn towards it. Rapidly increasing faith until it’s the most dominating power in The Realm.”

“Honestly, it still doesn’t sound too bad. When I met the Manager it made it sound like your mother was going to kill everyone in a ritual or something. If everyone’s faith becomes stronger and it’s heading towards making you a goddess that doesn’t sound… too bad?”

Gamielle’s face darkened, she was changing her [Mana Bolts] into different colors and imbuing them with different elements and structures. Trying to figure out which ones could cause the most damage to the gathering faith energy.

“Faith doesn’t always go the way you want it to. The more malleable a world, the easier it is for stray beliefs to create new things. Think about superstitions or horror adventurers tell each other. Actually, think about some of the horrific monsters people theorize over the realmnet. Some of those stories about things that go bump in the dark? Written as if it was something real and that they’d encountered? Blind faith doesn’t make distinctions Ryan.”

“Oh, oh no.”

Suddenly the darkened mood and Gamielle’s attempt at figuring out how to properly disperse faith was making more sense. The gathering golden orbs of light took a sudden, darker tone.

Gamielle continued. “Ninety nine percent of the time, when faith takes a dominant role, the worlds go into a spiral and end up destroyed. In the worst case scenario? A fucked up nightmare rises that threatens even the great civilizations.”

The scale suddenly became worse than he’d ever imagined. The Witch Tyrant wasn’t just riskingThe Realm. She was willing to endanger the entire cosmos for her gambit.

It was especially easy for Ryan to imagine. He who had grown up with the realmnet had seen some truly horrific things. Leaked footage from adventurers could be horrific but nothing was worse than the undocumented or imagined horrors. Not only that, adventurers loved to exaggerate, to make threats seem larger than they were so they could brag to their audience.

He quickly connected the dots.

“Are those what the roaming spirits are? Faith turned into horror?”

Only two classifications of creatures kept popping up in Realm-wide quest notifications. The slaying of Guardian Deities and Roaming Spirits. The problem was that, from the three adventurers who had reported back about them, there was nothing that seemed to connect these strange creatures. Only that the System kept calling them ‘Roaming Spirits’.

Gamielle bit her lip, a little uncertain herself. “They’re not quite there yet. Or at least the ones that have passed the border aren’t. They still have strict rules they follow and they’re weakened the further they get from Sector Thirteen. They’re more like manifestations of concepts bound by stories. Not that all of them are horrors.”

Ryan paused at the mention of concepts. He had a thought.

“...Theoretically, if someone had a class that specialized in stealing and devouring concepts—do you uhh, think they could defeat these spirits easily?”

Gamielle frowned, then shook her head. “Probably, but a class like that would be insane. It would have to be Quasi-Legendary at minimum. I can’t even imagine the requirements for unlocking such a class…”

Ryan did not have a good poker face at this moment, he was suffering too much from buyer’s remorse. Gamielle, noticing something was up, tilted her head, then she laser focused on his left arm. He had told her about what had happened in the Cataclysm Abyss and with One-Eyed Rick. She had just shaken her head at the antics at the time. Exasperated that he had managed to rip apart Rick’s class.

She wasn’t exasperated anymore. Her eye was twitching.

“ARE YOU STUPID?!”

“The class was a trap! It was straight up evil!”

“AND AN [AURA TYRANT] ISN’T? DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW INSANE A CLASS THAT TAPS INTO CONCEPTS IS?! THAT’S THE DOMAIN OF THE DIVINE. WITHOUT ALL THE PROBLEMS OF FAITH. AHHHH.”

Ironically, that speech made him feel a little better about his choice. [Conceptual Metamorph] was probably a good class, it just had a learning curve, that was all.

Gamielle rubbed her forehead, then sighed.

“It was probably a good idea not to pick it.”

“Wait really?”

“Yes. Devouring these spirits will throw you left and right with their alien concepts, making it impossible to center yourself while the actual class itself eats you alive. I can’t imagine a world where you come out of that with your mind intact.” Gamielle nodded, perhaps convincing herself more than him. “No, it’s always better to specialize and master a single concept that you yourself truly own. You don’t stand against the ocean with another ocean, you stand against it with a diamond you’ve polished and made your own.”

Gamielle now had a string of mana threads crossing each other, going back and forth around her in automatic sequence, keeping the gathering faith scattered.

Ryan made an observation about her comment. “I don’t think a polished diamond beats the ocean, Gamielle.”

She ignored him, continuously upgrading her automatic mana constructs to efficiently disperse the gathering faith. Meanwhile, Ryan contemplated what she had said. The [Conceptual Metamorph] was in a unique place for him to do both. Master his concepts.

And the [Conceptual Metamorph] in the class orb had hinted that it could do more than just pretend to be one class. I looked up what Metamorph meant. Meta means either change or beyond, morph can also be change but it comes from the greek word form.

A combination class? Or maybe even a melded one? Is that even possible?

Gamielle snapped him out of his thoughts.

“Well, at least it seems like my mother’s not going to force you to speed through the realms and pick that class. Either she’s really busy, or she still has faith that the Manager knows what it’s doing.”

Ryan worked hard to show no reaction to that comment. He still hadn’t told anyone about his encounter with the Manager. The secret was far, far too dangerous to share without being absolutely certain it wouldn’t leak to the Witch Tyrant. Part of the reason why she was being so lenient with him was because she believed that the Manager was still in control and had the same goals as she did. If at all she found out that it wanted him to pick [Conceptual Reaver].

Well… Ryan wasn’t sure how she would force him to take the class without ruining his achievements but he knew she would try.

He decided to throw a wrench into the Manager’s face before it sent the Witch Tyrant a polite letter.

“Hey Gamielle, I came up with an idea to mess with the Manager’s prediction ability.”

Gamielle frowned. “You know how it works?”

“Wait, you don’t know?”

“No, I mean yes, but it’s never shown its predictive abilities to anyone other than me before.”

For some reason, he felt a bit of dread hit the bottom of his stomach. The Manager had said that it made sure Gamielle’s death would be inevitable. Ryan doubted that the entity showed her its capability for any other reason than to ensure Gamielle’s death.

“What did it show you?”

Gamielle shook her head. “Just stories, nothing important. What was your idea?”

Ryan let that hang in the air and moved on, he tried to give her a smile. After all, this was something he’d come up with purely to spite the Manager’s decision making capability.

“Well, it’s pretty simple actually. It makes predictions with every single possibility in mind right?”

Ryan explained his devastating plot. Becoming more animated as he explained his idea. The more he thought about it the more dastardly it became. With Gamielle involved, it would compound exponentially.

Gamielle chuckled. “That’s so petty Ryan. It has a near infinite amount of time. All this will do is just make the Manager take more time, which it really doesn’t care about using.”

Naturally, she didn’t know about the doubt he had sown into the Manager’s mind. He refused to believe that even the entity could easily ignore the doubt in its mind while it kept simulating different probable alternatives caused purposefully by him.

Ryan shrugged exaggeratedly, his palms facing up. “Hey, if I’m going to be a rat running a maze, the least I’m going to do is shit everywhere and make it spend more time cleaning it up.”

For the first time since the Thirteenth Trial had been challenged, Gamielle giggled.

They spent the rest of the time with more simple problems. Like trying to figure out how to make volatile antimagic mana work like regular mana.

By the time he used [Return to Earth], the road trip was pretty much over. Ryan hadn’t made visible progress, but he did feel a lot better.

In the distance the a city of both magical and mundane lights greeted them.

One of the three greatest cities on Earth.

San Kingsgrove.