God of Trash

Rhys crouched in the woods, not far from the road. Not just one week had passed, but two. His kitchen was all but set up, now, cauldrons reforged and ready to go, bowls awaiting chips, tongs and forks waiting to be used. A pile of potatoes and tomatoes sat in the garbage pile, the tomatoes carefully reinforced with mana to keep them from spoiling, while the potatoes were stored in the cool dark to keep them from putting out eyes. Everything was ready to go. All they needed were those final ingredients: vinegar, salt, oil.

And on this road, on this day, in a few short moments, a caravan bearing all three of those vital ingredients would come rolling down.

Remember, take everything. We leave no hints. This caravan was hit by a bunch of random bandits, Rhys had reminded everyone. If they took the oil and salt and vinegar, and left everything else, and a mysterious shop showed up selling salted potatoes fried in oil with a tomato-vinegar sauce the next day, it wouldn’t take a genius to put two and two together; hence, take everything. There were bandits. The Empire was a monolith from the outside, and to the eyes of its believers, but it was rotten within. The Empress could strong-arm the majority of mages into obeying her rule, but not everyone, not even all of the nobles. Bandits were common; not only rogue mages from within the Empire, but from without, foreign mages who knew the Empire was a weak target, with all its mages consolidated to the military, and few on escort duty for low-level caravans. It was why merchants were allowed to have cores and mana, despite her rule; because otherwise no goods would flow through her country at all. Typical idealogue government: all talk, but no thought to the practical implementation. Still, he wasn’t going to complain too loud when it worked to his favor.

Besides, his ambitions were greater than a mere potato chip stand. Who knew what other foodstuffs this caravan would have, that he could transform into transcendent junk food? There was no such thing as useless food. Worst case, they would just have some variety to make their background as foreign food merchants bringing a mysterious new delicacy to town a little more believable.

Of course, it would be safer to transform anything before he sold it, since stealing everything just meant he disguised his true goal, but didn’t mean someone else couldn’t figure out that a caravan had been stolen from, and a bunch of foreign merchants had consequently showed up with everything in that caravan. But Rhys was a master of junk food. He knew it, had tasted it, experienced it, held it like a lover, had been so incredibly intimate with junk food that he was confident there wasn’t another human alive who knew it as well as he did. It wasn’t a tough competition in this world, true, but nonetheless, it was a competition he could win. If there was any way to turn this food into any sort of junk food, he would. There was no one better qualified than him.

Rhys yawned, deeply bored. Ambushing caravans turned out to be a lot of lying around and doing nothing. He could imagine it might be interesting for an ambush hunter, like a cat, but for him, it was a lot of boredom. Lira seemed well-suited to it. She’d been floating silently face-up in a puddle near the road for the last four hours, leaving Rhys to wonder exactly how water sprites went about their man-eating. He hadn’t expected an ambush, but when he thought about it, wasn’t that how alligators and crocodiles operated? And as a water-based predator who preyed on land-mammals, Lira was really just a prettier version of a crocodile, once he thought about it. So, at the end of the day, Lira being an ambush predator made perfect sense.

In the distance, something rattled. Wheels bumped over hard ground, and dust stormed up along the path. The clop of horses’ hooves grew steadily closer. Rhys put his hand on his sword, climbing from a flat lie to a kind of army-crouch. It was an awkward pose, but he had the strength of a mage, and it let him do weird poses like that with little difficulty. He leaned forward, watching the road from within his den of leaves.

Across the road, and all along it on this side, other piles of leaves shifted subtly. Everyone who’d learned a mana-disguising technique was there, who’d wanted to come, at least. Mouse, too, was present against her will, but mostly because Rhys wanted an absolute expert in the art in case things went bad.

He himself had a weak understanding of a mana-disguising technique, which showed up in his skills as Aura Obscuration, and was only level 3 or so. It turned out they were mostly considered useless, except for mages whose entire game was stealth, and as a mage who wasn’t exactly the most stealthy, it qualified as a trash technique for him. It wasn’t the most powerful justification, and as a result, he’d still struggled with it, but through hard work and determination, he’d managed to at least manage a basic version of the technique in time for the ambush. As for why he’d come, it was obvious—he wanted to. It sounded like great fun, and honestly, he wanted to work out some of the rage in his heart. These unsuspecting merchants weren’t the right target, but they weren’t the wrong target, either. Better to attack them than working it out on his allies, or some random citizen, both of which were too trashy a realm of behavior for even Rhys. This was just trashy enough for him.

There was a faint splash as Lira submerged. In the next moment, the caravan rattled into view. One wagon after another, each one laden with goods destined for the Empire’s newest city. It was a relatively small caravan, with three wagons in total, plus a smattering of merchant-bodyguards and the primary merchant, the highest-ranking mage here. Five mages total; the merchant-mage was Tier 3, and the other four were somewhere between 1 and 2.