Chapter 143. The Creative Application of Force
Rhys blinked awake, then sat up. He laid on the floor of the second story of the tavern, in someone’s bedroll. As mages, they didn’t really need to sleep, and as a result, they didn’t have beds; it was an expense they could afford to skip. The bedroll he laid in smelled strongly of must and mildew, as if it hadn’t seen the sun in a long time, and instead spent a long time in the bottom of someone’s storage ring, or maybe in a garbage pit. Rhys idly sucked in all the impurities on the bedroll, then climbed to his feet, brushing down his robes. He looked around. What am I doing here? What’s going on?
He thought back. The last thing he remembered was the coffee… no, that wasn’t it! He’d run to the tunnel, and the battle, Larry and Leonard…
Rhys patted down his robes, then checked his storage ring. A fancy new fan sat there, ready for him to use it, sell it, or throw it away. He breathed a sigh of relief. If nothing else, at least he’d stripped Leonard of his weapon before passing out. He drew the fan out and fanned himself idly, not activating the spell on it, least of all because he wasn’t sure his trash star could handle another usage.
He hadn’t really used magical artifacts until this moment. He hadn’t had the chance to. The few he’d found in the trash were, well, trash. A thrown-away storage ring. Items of that magnitude, that took so little mana to activate that almost every Tier 1 mage from a reasonable background would have one from childhood. Today, for the first time, he’d used a high-level, complex, powerful magical artifact. The kind a criminal syndicate would prize and give to its higher command. And it had nearly wiped him out.
The trash star was still burning, but weakly. It was on its last legs, desperately in need of an infusion of trash. He was pretty sure the fan wasn’t supposed to take that much mana; it was just that his talent at handling magical artifacts was so trash that it took such a huge toll on him in particular.
The Crimson Flare Orb hadn’t taken so much mana to activate, but then, it was essentially a mana battery for a big weapon he didn’t own. Of course it didn’t take much mana to activate; it was a thing that held mana, not a thing that required mana to activate. From a way of looking at it, the fan was the weapon that the battery (the orb) was supposed to slot into. It wasn’t, but that was the difference in the two artifacts. One held mana that was supposed to be supplied to something else, which was currently powering his oil pots, and the other was the thing that mana was supposed to be supplied to. The two weren’t compatible, because the fan didn’t take fire mana, and the Crimson Flare Orb wasn’t subtle enough to change its output to match what the fan desired, but hypothetically, as he’d touched on earlier, the two were the two pieces to the puzzle. The AA battery and the toy dog, except one of them was a D battery and the other was a drawing pen that required AAAA batteries.
After all, if the Crimson Flare Orb didn’t output power, Logan couldn’t have used it to pretend to be Tier 2. The fan, on the other hand, had been used by a proper Tier 2. That was the most critical difference; the most important thing about the two of them.
He gave the fan a wistful look, then hung it on his belt with a sigh. He could always give it to someone more suited to it. It was a pity that using magical artifacts on his tier or higher wasn’t in his immediate future, at least as long as they weren’t trash, but he had plenty of subordinates who could use a powerful weapon or two. For now, he needed to go find whatever his underlings had done to Leonard. He had a few questions for the guy, and some creative force to apply.
Rhys climbed down from the loft-slash-second-floor where they slept-slash-meditated when it was nighttime and they decided to rest, rather than keep going, because at their core they were still monkeys with circadian rhythms, and found the kitchen bustling with motion. Even without him there, everything continued to move. Chips got cooked. Fries got fried. One particularly industrious mage was even attempting to make his ‘coffee,’ and the attempt… wasn’t bad. It wasn’t perfect, and it wouldn’t have the same magic (informal) without Less is More, but it should do the trick in a pinch. Lira and Sable looked up as he walked in, Lira chuckling and Sable turning away as if she didn’t care.
“Good morning, princess,” Lira greeted him. She thumbed over her shoulder at the rapidly-vanishing Sable. “She was all worried about you, you know. Wouldn’t leave your side. I had to go and just about pull her away from your side just to get her in the kitchen, and you know Sable never goes to the kitchen.”