God of Trash

It’s go time.

The needles in Rhys’s legs left a numb, tingling sensation there that he almost hadn’t felt at all through Trash Body. They were poisoned. No, not just poisoned—the entire needle was made of poison.

Or in other words: impurity.

Rhys released his cauldron’s Trash Intent and drew in strongly, and the needles sucked in through the holes in his legs. Florian stared in shock, and a few members of the audience sat forward, not that Rhys noticed. He was too busy dashing—not toward Florian, as the boy had expected, and thrown up his arms to block the surely-oncoming attack—but toward the other needles, scattered over the battlefield and mixed in with the shattered ice. His Trash Step activated, but that wasn’t his purpose. He slapped his hand down on the ice and drew it into his core along with the scattered needles. They’d been discarded in the battle; therefore, they were trash. The needles, too, were impurities, which made them doubly trash.

The debris on the field vanished. A single chain remained behind: the shield necklace Florian had discarded earlier. Rhys snatched it up and tried using Trash Intent to bring back the gem and its function. The gem reappeared, no problem at all, but when he tried activating the shield, mana vanished from his core at a terrifying rate. Startled, Rhys quickly deactivated the Trash Intent. Was it that the shield was too powerful for his Trash Intent to replicate, or was it that replicating magical effects of items through Trash Intent, as opposed to just replicating the item itself, was the prohibitively expensive part?

His mind flashed to the rusted sword in his storage ring, with the sunlight embedded in its blade, but he quickly dismissed the idea. The shield necklace was doubtlessly less powerful than that relic, not to mention that the relic was one of a kind. He wasn’t going to test whether he could reactivate that magical effect through Trash Intent until he was sure he could reactivate magical effects through Trash Intent.

Though, to be fair, the fact that Trash Intent had drawn on his mana at all when he’d tried to reactivate the magical effect suggested that Trash Intent had the capability to replicate magical effects. The real question was whether or not Rhys had the mana pool to support anything but the very weakest of those reactivations. Given how Florian had used the shield necklace without thought or effort, it definitely took a factor more effort to use Trash Intent to use a magical effect vice using the effect outright; on the other hand, it might be that he had to recreate the enchantment via Trash Intent, which cost more mana to start out with compared to activating the necklace, and that might be the bottleneck.

All this speculation takes some time to explain, but it all happened in the blinking of an eye. Rhys gripped the necklace tight, then absorbed it, opting to use it as trash rather than save it to try to reactivate the magical effect later. He wasn’t the poor scum Florian took him as, but instead, the nouveau-riche kind of trash. The price of a shield necklace was nothing to him. He only hadn’t bought one himself because the ones in the market seemed flimsy, unlike Florian’s, which stood up to his powerful attack. But for his current purposes, a flimsy shield necklace was more fitting than a powerful one, since he wanted to find out the mana cost of reactivating a magical effect through Trash Intent, and he simply couldn’t pay the cost at all for Florian’s. It did hurt his heart a little bit to abandon such a rare and useful piece of trash, but then his eyes fixed on Florian’s neck, and his heart hardened. It didn’t matter. Florian would surely discard yet another shield necklace by the time this battle was over.

The needles were full of powerful impurities, ones Rhys was unused to, and he could already sense they’d be interesting to ignite, but they weren’t enough for him to start burning them. He simply didn’t have enough trash, whether it was a trash star or a furnace he wanted. He tossed back his weak impurity potion, but that still wasn’t enough, though it was close. As a cheap person at heart, despite his nouveau-riche status, Rhys turned to Florian again. “Oh no, my legs, they feel so numb!”

Florian squinted at him, who’d just darted across the arena with the greatest of speed.

Rhys staggered across the arena, acting like he’d just stood up off the toilet after a particularly long shit. “Nooo, my legs! I’m so vulnerable!”

Suspicion still clouded Florian’s face, but he lifted the needle again. Another barrage shot Rhys’s way.