Downstairs, Rhys immediately got to work. Their new influx of workers needed to be familiarized and put to work on the farms, or in the shops. Unfortunately, they all had to be back-of-shop workers; his efforts were too flashy this time to risk sh...
2025-07-19 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostSun filtered in the window. Birdsong filled the air. Rhys opened his eyes and breathed deep, enjoying the pale light of early morning. He felt wildly refreshed, far more comfortable than he had last night. It wasn’t that he’d had no pain, he r...
2025-07-18 14:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostOf course, now that they had people, what they needed the most were cores. With about forty left, and a conversion rate of 3-ish kills to one core (assuming a Tier 1 core—the price was lowered by obtaining higher-power energy), that meant he had...
2025-07-17 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostMouse fought the mages in the forest; or rather, it looked far more like an elaborate game of backwards hide-and-seek was going on in the forest, with all the low-tier mages as the seekers and Mouse as the single hider. Occasionally, a blade leape...
2025-07-16 14:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostThe fireball flew forth. It loomed large in Rhys’s vision, eclipsing the moon, then the sky, then everything. He reached into his trash star, and called back to his earliest days. It was time to pull out an old classic. He threw piece after piec...
2025-07-15 14:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostRhys finished up at that camp, wiping out the Tier 1s and 2s with ease. Several of the mages wanted to join them, though a few only wanted to escape and simply leave the Empire forever. Rhys restored one or two cores, then rushed off to the next b...
2025-07-14 14:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostRhys crouched at the edge of his camp, or rather, the one he’d assigned to himself. It was the most hazardous of all of them: a filthy mine that handled stones that exploded, sometimes, leaving the whole thing cloaked in ash and stone shards. Ev...
2025-07-13 14:09:00 +0000 UTC View PostThey arrived back at the base in record time. Lira, who’d taken a different route that involved more water, had gotten back first, and Sable wasn’t long behind them. Rhys gathered all his fighters, all the original mages who’d been freed wit...
2025-07-12 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostHonestly, he should’ve seen it coming. The void wasn’t somewhere people were supposed to be. It was most akin to outer space. When he was a soul-slash-mana-construct, that didn’t matter. He was pure energy, and safe from environmental hazard...
2025-07-11 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Come here, you!”
The curse scudded away from him, as if it knew what he was going to do to it. He chased it down, refusing to let it escape. Gripping the lump of trash and impurities that surrounded the skeleton hands curse in one hand,...
2025-07-10 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostIt was frustrating that the solution was right before his eyes. If his core wasn’t broken, he would have no problem compressing his mana. He could cultivate this energy like normal, and everything would flow on down the line. Instead, he had to ...
2025-07-09 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostRhys rushed into the sunlight. Thanks to Mouse’s warning, he was braced for an attack, but none came. Instead, he found himself at the end of a short path. At the other end, three mages stood around a boiling pot and chatted about something he c...
2025-07-08 14:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostA/N: Realized I made a mistake RE: the Warden's tier last chapter, and adjusted some of Rhys's internal thoughts to match. Sorry about that, folks! Thanks for letting me know. Better I fix it now than miss it and keep trucking without real...
2025-07-07 14:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostThe place the woman had led them was in the next city, Anabita. It was an old, decrepit-looking two story tavern at the very edge of what could be considered the city proper, and as she pointed it out, she indicated its sign. The severed head of a...
2025-07-06 14:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostLira, Mouse, and Sable caught up with him halfway to the nearest criminal-run farm. Rhys was so lost in his thoughts, working out his plans, that he barely noticed, even with the clatter of Sable’s bone-limbs and the pitter-patter of Lira’s um...
2025-07-05 14:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostOne cursed bone and a well-load of trash and impurities later, Rhys raced home in the skeleton rider’s grasp, urging the rider on faster and faster, to higher and higher speeds. Someone might be dead. A mysterious man whose power he couldn’t g...
2025-07-04 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostThey marched on. Or rather, the skelly boy marched, while Rhys lounged in its arms like some lazy waste of space. He’d stopped pondering the new technique a while ago when the cursed energy seemed like it was about to hit critical mass, and the ...
2025-06-27 14:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostTrash can distribution was easier than Rhys had expected, but then, perhaps he should have expected it to be easy, when he’d already taken control of a multi-city criminal logistics network. The greatest portion of effort went into crafting the ...
2025-06-26 14:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostRhys charged into the void before he could think about it any longer. He burst out of the confines of his core into a by-now-familiar darkness and immediately stopped. There were things in the void that he didn’t want to encounter—no, he didn...
2025-06-25 14:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostHe spent some time explaining to the Water Syndicate the basics of what he expected from them. The general mood in the camp went from tense, to confused, to totally lost. He hadn’t expected them to get it right away, so he wasn’t too bothered,...
2025-06-24 14:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostTwo Tier 3 mana signatures closed in on them, looping toward them from either side. Rhys devoured another tomato and pulled out a third, eating it so fast that tomato juices ran down his face, mingling with the red facepaint. He still wasn’t a h...
2025-06-23 14:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostRhys leaped away. His bones creaked and his joints ached, but the quick patch-job he’d done to heal his legs held for now. He needed more time to let Self-Regeneration properly patch him up, but right now, between Trash Body and the vitality he ...
2025-06-22 14:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostRhys would have liked to keep the banter up for a little while longer, personally, but there was no time. The other high-Tier signatures were rapidly approaching. If he waited any longer, he’d be fighting not one, but three Tier 3 fighters. It l...
2025-06-21 14:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post“Stop.”
Rhys stopped obediently, always a rule follower when it was convenient for him, anyways. A figure approached him from dead on, a slender woman who narrowed her eyes at him. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
He tho...
2025-06-20 14:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostSnake Robes reached into one of his sleeves and withdrew a long, coiled whip. He released it, and the coils smacked the ground one after another with more weight and heft than a whip that size should have. Rhys faced him in an approximation of the...
2025-06-19 14:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostMouse 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 o...
2025-06-18 14:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostRhys didn’t hesitate. He’d already made up his mind, so he had to move immediately. After all, there were two options: he waited until they forgot about Lira, then attacked, or he attacked immediately, before they had a chance to move Lira aro...
2025-06-17 14:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostRhys hovered in his core, contemplating the void. He thought he had a good enough comprehension of it to manipulate it, but that clearly wasn’t the case, when it refused to so much as come when he called. He didn’t understand it at all, or may...
2025-06-16 14:00:10 +0000 UTC View PostRhys wandered through the sewers, absorbing trash as he went. This was close enough that he could return in a flash, but not so far that he had to worry about the others handling a member of the Water Syndicate alone. He sighed, a little frustrate...
2025-06-15 14:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post“To the northeast!” Leonard burst out.
Rhys blinked. He hadn’t expected it to be this easy. Was Leonard lying? Well, it doesn’t matter. I have enough men to verify without going myself. Rhys reached into his robes and drew o...
2025-06-14 14:00:13 +0000 UTC View Post