God of Trash

Mouse had given him a map and a very detailed rundown on how to reach the Water Syndicate, and it wasn’t hard for him to locate it with her map and description. He wasn’t directionally gifted himself, but he wasn’t challenged either, so he only got lost once or twice before he encountered one of her landmarks and knew to adjust his path. Her notes included a bunch of circles around the particular ravine and an extra set of red lines around the upper edges of the ravine along with the words EXTREME DANGER!!!, which would have been funny if Lira’s life wasn’t on the line. As it was, he took her words to heart and did exactly what the Water Syndicate wanted him to do. Without hesitation, he marched directly into the ravine’s mouth, throwing himself to the belly of the stone beast.

This was not going to be subtle or stealthy. He was charging in, and he was doing it head-on. They were getting the full frontal, whether they wanted it or not.

I should’ve worn a trench coat, he noted amusedly, not that this world had something like that. The secondary implications of that thought hit him like a train, and he laughed again, more darkly. Oh, yeah. This was definitely trench coat territory.

Since he was in his villain era, he had decided to dress the part. He’d borrowed some black robes and red face paint, smearing the latter across his forehead and letting it drip all the way down his face and dry in globs. It ran down his face in rivulets, collecting in his eyelids, then dripping down again, as though he was crying blood. His fingers had been dyed crimson by the effort, and he left them that way. A wide-brimmed, dark hat with hanging veils finished the look. It obscured the facepaint for now, but sometimes, the most important part of a costume was the moment of reveal. Being able to easily remove some small component to show someone a surprise, even in a passing moment where someone called his character’s name in a hallway, was something he’d done a few times to great effect back in his cosplay days, and when he was going for dramatic effect, there was nothing wrong with leaning on those days a little more than usual. It wasn’t as though he thought the surprise would make anyone pause in battle—though he wouldn’t mind if they did—but rather, his character motive today was the battle-frenzied madman.

It wasn’t his actual motive, but since he’d realized he had dangerous levers, he’d also realized he needed to hide them. If he came here as Lira’s vengeful boss and failed, lost, or otherwise had to retreat before he found Lira, Lira would be in danger, and far more danger than she’d been when he’d started, at that. No. Especially if the Water Syndicate was larger than he’d thought, he wanted to rescue her while giving the minimal information about himself away. Therefore, he was a battle-crazed madman who’d come here to test his skills. His sword skills were enough, from his days with Bast and Straw, to manage to appear that way against the low-level members of their group, and if he started pulling out esoteric skills later, then the Water Syndicate would simply assume he’d gotten serious and been forced to actually fight with all he had, including his dirty tricks, when in reality Rhys was nothing but a box of dirty tricks.

He was using this world’s philosophy of ‘hold some skills back to disguise your true strength until you’re pushed to your limits’ against it, and he wasn’t afraid to admit it. Besides, it really made more sense than a lot of armchair fighters thought it did. Sure, in a world with guns, why worry about ‘concealing skills’ when one bullet ended the conversation regardless? But in a world with magic, if he one-shot every low-tier mage with his highest-power skill, not only did he waste mana and trash, but he also revealed his strongest attack right out the gate. Other mages could watch him fight and learn how to counter his strongest move. When he fought those mages, who were at his power level, later, their ability to counter his strongest move, his ace, without revealing or using their own ace, would leave him at a significant disadvantage, and could even be the difference between life and death.

Now, a slow battle of escalation was ridiculous, too; there was no reason for every battle between Tier 3 mages to start with Tier 1 swordplay and a slow escalation through the ranks of Tier 2 before finally hitting Tier 3. Although Rhys did enjoy reading those battles, he had to admit, yeah, real battles didn’t work like that; unless there was an extreme need to conserve mana, they’d simply start by striking one another with their Tier 3 moves and escalate from there, and even in a situation where they needed to conserve mana, it might earnestly be cheaper in mana to start from Tier 3 skills. But still; spells weren’t bullets, and magic wasn’t a gun. There was a reason aces were left in the hole, rather than being fired off right off the bat.

Of course, if he saw an opportunity to decapitate the head of the Water Syndicate with a quickshot from his ace skill, would he hold back? Probably not, but it really would depend on the situation. If there were a dozen other powerful mages around who he’d have to fight afterwards, it would depend on whether he could defeat all of them without his ace, too, since they’d have seen it and have a chance to counter it.

Not that Rhys was going to complain too loudly. If most people thought it was a trashy way to fight, then who was he to argue it wasn’t? He wasn’t a hundred percent sure how his trash path interacted with abstract concepts like that, but if he could eke a boost out of it, he wouldn’t complain. Of course, he was talking about a complex, abstract concept that had mostly been perceived as trash back on his homeworld, while it was generally accepted as a fact of life here, so who knew if he could boost it with his path or not?

Future considerations. For now, he’d rescue Lira, crush the Water Syndicate, then subsume it, then go ponder the void until he could make his trash cans.