The Legend of the Meta-Defying Smith Who Saved the Kingdom

The Smith flew down like a flaming cannonball, trailing light as he went.

The magic bombardment began immediately.

The Greatshield, held forward in the Smith's hand like a battering ram, absorbed all shots and just like the Legends describe, lances of golden-white light formed above the spellcasters launching their spells and blasted them to bits.

It was a harrowing minute's flight, even knowing I was perfectly safe. Merely observing. Not changing anything.

The Smith landed hard, kicking up a spray of dirt and forming a small crater. The sound of his landing was lost in the continued magical bombardment.

Eventually the demons figured out that direct spells were causing the retribution, so they switched to mundane missiles magically accelerated.

The Smith merely stood tall and allowed the first to bounce harmlessly off his mythril chestpiece.

The next two he dodged.

After that he started parrying the shots.

I could barely even see it, but he was moving around incredibly fast, I couldn't even see his arm and hammer moving, but I could see the missiles being hit back towards various parts of the Army.

Eventually, that, too, stopped.

Once things had settled for a minute, the Army glaring at the Smith and the Smith… well, I couldn't see his face under his helmet, there wasn't even eyeholes, but he stood still a minute and then shouted, "Bring me your leader!"

A warp in space opened before him, and then there was the Demon Lord.

He was incredibly beautiful. Just an absolute stunner. His features were perfectly symmetrical, and his body rippled with lean muscle. He did carry a sword and short spear, and wore only some kind of long skirt thing fashioned from some animal's hide.

Even his voice was gorgeous, words falling from his lips like a song with the catchiest melody.

"You must be the Smith James my heralds reported on. Interesting. Have you resisted the Class Canceling?"

"'Course not," James said, voice echoing through his helmet. "Can't very well block a Blessing, now can I?"

The Demon Lord smiled, looking very pleased, and nodded. "Good."

"What I can't figure out, is why Class Canceling would be considered a Blessing. Seems to me it's much more like a Curse."

"Oh, is that how you see it?"

"Well the blasted Irregulars were mum about it, too."

"I imagine they found it hard to talk about, with one who already Chose Classes."

"And I don't reckon yer gonna explain either, huh?"

"I have no such soft feelings for you humans."

The Smith froze a moment, and the Demon Lord continued.

"You scum, several hundred years ago, cast this curse on yourselves and on your progeny. It's a pity for you, because if we Elves had been in contact at the time, we could have rooted out the curse early. Now? The curse has spread to nearly every human, save your Irregulars: the only humans who don't have Classes."

"Wait," James raised a hand and paused a moment. "What?"

"And then you blithering short-lived idiots forgot what you had done. And then your fellow humans who wisely avoided the curse were too soft to just explain what had happened. Your Wizard, for instance, he surely knew the truth, for when we explained to the rest of the Irregulars, he showed no surprise.

This really stunned the Smith, and they went back and forth for some time discussing this 'curse.'

It stunned me, too. Nearly knocked me right out of the remote viewing. Apparently, some magician a long time ago, long before the Smith was born, had created a spell to crystallize talent in a person's soul, and after experimentation, managed to get the spell to focus on two separate talents in the same person and then perpetuate itself, spreading to other humans.

Or, that was how it was supposed to go.

I don't know if I'll ever have the levels to go that far back in time.

"On some level even you humans realized your mistake: why do you think there is such a proscription on magic that affects the soul? Why do you think there is such a proscription on magic that perpetuates itself infinitely? But even that is not why we must exterminate all you humans bearing the system curse."

The Smith had been reeling from the revelations, much as I was, but now he focused himself.

"No, the problem is that your stupid curse started spreading to us Elves! It's bloody contagious! We've spent the last fifty years researching how to stop the spread of the damn thing, and nothing's worked!"

The Demon Lord was starting to get really worked up. Yelling and waving his hands.

"It spread first among our children! Do you know how sickening it is, to watch your children throw away everything they could be, just so they could have two specialties? To pigeonhole themselves like that? They might as well cut off all their other limbs to improve at one handed pullups! Or pluck out their eyes to improve their hearing! It is a mutilation, and a contagious one at that!"

He was screaming now. No, he was sobbing.

"We had no choice. The adults were safe. But the children, those younger than eighteen years old, mere babes, they couldn't resist. That damn siren song in their minds, calling them to ruin. And the curse is permanent. That is why the Canceling is a Blessing! Because your damned system is a Curse!"

I looked this up later, and the very oldest definitions of 'curse' include technical definitions related to self-perpetuating spells.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Huh. Who knew?

The demons, I guess.

"We had to put them down. All of them. With our own hands. And half our adults, as well, who were too weak to see what must be done."

"And what's that?" the Smith asked, the first words he'd spoken in a while.

"The only way to break this curse is to kill all its hosts. If even a single elf had been present when this damn curse started, the casualties could have been limited. But now? The curse has spread to nearly every human. Only the most Irregular amongst you reject the curse for the full three years it requires to avoid it."

Apparently, that's part of the Class Choosing system. If you don't Choose for a full three years, it just goes away, and that's how one becomes an Irregular. I can't imagine it, though. I barely managed six months myself before I got the Time Mage Class I wanted. It was torture. Everyone else I know Chose on their Choosing Day.

"Let me get this straight," the Smith said, "you killed all your youth, you killed half your adults, and now you zealots are here to kill every human to root out this curse?"

"Yes." The Demon Lord's conviction was absolute.

"You're insane." The Smith spoke flatly. I don't think he had any real hope of convincing the Demons to stop.

"No, you're insane. You humans are evil. If you had any morality at all, you'd kill yourselves. You'd do what needs to be done to prevent the spread of this curse. Especially now, now that you know the curse is spreading to other sentients. But for fifty years you devils have been here, on this continent, breeding and mucking about in your own filth as it overflows into the wider world."

I wrote down all these notes after the fact, and it didn't really sink in at the time.

The Demons discovered that the system was actually a curse, a self-perpetuating soul magic.

They discovered that it had spread to their own race, starting with their youth.

Then they had some big argument about what to do, and a civil war where the zealots killed all the moderates.

And then they killed all their young, every last one, to prevent the curse spreading.

It's extreme. On the face of it, it's evil. But… Sometimes I wonder, was there any other way? I'm not an expert on curses or the system. But thinking about it myself, I can't really see any other way to end the 'curse.' Not from what I've learned about self-perpetuating magics.

In any case, as a human myself, and as someone who wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for the Smith, I have to take his side. But I do lament the demons, or the elves as they called themselves.

They found themselves between the anvil and the Smith's hammer.

That's all there was to it.

Just an unavoidable tragedy because some mage hundreds or thousands of years ago had a bright idea and didn't think of the consequences.

"If you'd like, and you kill yourself now, we'll find your children and take them as test subjects, see if we can't yet strip the curse from their young souls. Though I doubt we'll be successful."

"I won't let you do that, and if it comes down to it, I'll fight to defend my family," the Smith said as he readied his shield and hammer. It was a big one, probably the Orichalcum Meteor Strike Hammer.

"Foolish human. No matter how you struggle, you're up against the entire Elven horde. We will sweep through your lands like a cleansing flood, exterminate you vermin, and free the world from your taint."

And then the Demon Lord did some magic, and the Smith was instantly encased in a barrier, and for a moment his armor slumped. The Demon Lord vanished back into some fold of space, and a moment later the armor moved again. The Smith dropped the hammer with a thud, and pulled out a tiny little hammer, and after a few taps, smashed the barrier to pieces.

In the next instant, he activated his [Spell Jamming], and my remote viewing was nearly disrupted. It took me a minute to stabilize my own spell, by which point he had spread his ward around the entire Plains. Fortunately, taking to the air was enough to get away from the ward, so I was able to observe the battle in its entirety.

It was a slaughter.

The Smith went wild with the Meteor Strike hammer, which was even more powerful than the Legends describe. But soon enough, the demons realized what was going on, and pressed in to try to stop the Smith.

The Legends say they used poison.

The Legends are wrong.

I was most disturbed to see the Smith himself spreading clouds of poison about the battlefield, and the horrible and immediate effects the poison had on the demons.

I researched this, later.

Poison is one of those magical aspects that disproves symmetry theory.

The opposite of Poison is, in fact, Poison. Or, rather, Poison contains within itself Antidotes, depending on the particular kind of poison used.

It's all a bit confusing. The books on Poison Ethics were actually more helpful. Because what the Smith did is in my own time considered a terrible warcrime.

I will now explain how it works here.

Basically, when Person A uses poison against Person B, Person B doesn't know exactly what kind of poison it is, and so he doesn't know how to precisely counter it. Unlike, say, countering a Dark spell with a Light spell.

But Person A does know exactly what kind of poison he's using, and so he can spread it willy-nilly, because he can protect himself from that poison.

So what the Smith did was find the nastiest poison he could, ensure his armor would neutralize or block it, and then he spread it everywhere he went across the battlefield.

It was horrifying, and worse, it was horrifyingly effective.

I think the Smith might have come out of the Dungeon more damaged than anyone realizes today.

So the slaughter continued, and the Smith's armor and weapons were as incredible as the Legends say. The rituals to summon the Great Spirits happened as described, although I didn't get a good enough look to record the ritual preparations and ceremony myself.

I personally felt the chills as the Absolute Zero hammer struck Salamander directly.

The [Howling Shriek] enchantments were also far worse than the Legends describe, especially up close. They weren't merely disturbing, not at close range. They were pure concentrated Sound damage. I nearly deafened myself through my remote viewing until I stopped channeling the sound.

It sort of ruined the experience, to watch the Smith hunting down scouts and assassins in the dark without being able to hear it, but better than being deafened.

The next day the Demon Lord appeared again, but he merely ranted at the Smith, blaming him for ruining the world, for ruining the elves, for messing up their plans, and then he said quite a lot of hurtful and threatening things towards the Smith's family.

And I think the Smith took all that personally.

Because he just dashed forward and smashed the Demon Lord's head in.

And then he dashed off to finish the Demon Army.

But it wasn't a funnel, and the demons didn't blindly charge into the Smith's killzone for an entire day.

No, the Smith somehow summoned a full four layer encirclement of fire, wind, ice, and stone, going from inner ring to outer ring, and he then spent the next day and night slaying every last demon inside.

He, uh, I think he really took what the Demon Lord said personally.

He wasn't even using any enchantments most of the time. Just his hammers and his [Haste]. The blood was so thick on the ground it flowed to the ring of fire, and trust me, burning and boiling blood smells nasty.

It was on the morning of the third day that the Smith finally slayed the last demon. The demon, last of his kind, attempted to curse the Smith.

The Smith who was wielding the Greatshield of Divine Retribution.

Basically, the spell rebounded, and the demon killed himself.

Suicide by Smith.