Broken System Ch. 76-77 (Patreon)

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Ch. 76 - Set Up

When the time came that afternoon, they all went together. Benjamin had crafted a second ring of illusion for Emma and programmed it with Margerot’s image so that she could pass as the other woman when they reached their destination and more effectively frame the woman for what they were about to do next.

Lord Ruthrin was staying in another similar establishment on the far side of town, and he and his friends walked there. This time, there was one key difference. Benjamin walked as a dark-eyed version of himself for once, and Emma walked ahead of them as the Lady Thraxis. At least until they reached their destination, which was very much like the building they’d just left. This one had only four stories but better decor, which made Benjamin wonder about the pecking order of these things. He had yet to see so much as a single coin in all his interactions with the Rhulvinar and still didn’t have a clear idea of how all of this was being paid for or logged.

Was it a barter economy? Would they send Lord Darton’s house a bill? Perhaps they kept track of these things digitally inside their system, but if that was the case, wouldn’t he have a spot for Bitgold or some other weird reputational currency?

Benjamin wasn’t sure, but none of that mattered right now because they were on their way to kill a man. Though it might turn into a fair fight, he was fairly sure this was just going to be a cold-blooded murder, and no matter how good his moral justification for that was, Benjamin couldn’t help but feel a little bad about it, but he didn’t let that show on his face when he knocked at the door when he gestured for Emma to disable her disguise and he activated his before knocking on the door of the Summoner Lord.

A woman answered the door, but as soon as she went to fetch her master, Benjamin and his friends stepped inside.

This drew some suspicion from Lord Ruthrin, who appeared mostly dressed for the evening festivities that he’d no doubt be attending in an hour or two. “This is an unexpected surprise, Lord Darton,” he said, squinting slightly. “Not only do you appear on my doorstep, but you bring your men with you. Should I be concerned?”

“Not about me,” Benjamin lied. “After the things I’ve discovered, I’ll travel nowhere in this town alone, but worry not, my words are not for their ears or for those of your servants. I fear we must speak alone.”

Lord Ruthrin’s expression softened from suspicious to worried, but that didn’t stop him from inviting Benjamin into his private chambers as he finished adjusting his cravat. “So what’s all this about?” the dark-skinned man asked when the door was closed, and they were alone in the luxurious little room. “Last night, you seemed satisfied this was a political game; what changed?”

“Well, besides your efforts to bug me?” Benjamin asked, making the other man stiffen.

“You’ll forgive me such tricks surely, in the light of the threat we face,” Lord Ruthrin said, smiling tightly. “I meant no real harm.”

“Of course,” Benjamin said with a wave of his hand. “Such games are not my concern. It's our mutual friend, Lady Thraxis. The questions she asked me and the things she showed me last night after we were finished coupling were… most distressing, and I think it’s for the best that I leave this place at once. I will have a missive delivered to the Prince, but only once I have departed for the safety of somewhere where I have more allies.”

“That serious?” the Summoner Lord asked. “Should I be worried then?”

Benjamin was not a good liar, but it was easy to lie about what you were afraid of when the fear was real, and he’d been terrified for days that the mages would discover him in their midst. So, it was the easiest thing in the world to look to the other man with fear in his eyes and say, “I’ll show you what Margerot showed me and leave you to judge for yourself.”

Benjamin sent the file at that moment. It was just the picture that Lord Ruthrin had sent him last night, only it had been renamed. However, instead of a tiny piece of spyware, it had an even smaller command that should prove lethal or at least debilitating to the man.

The major rune he’d long since designated Alpha was responsible for accessing and regulating the mana of a spell. It was literally the wellspring of magic as far as the systems were concerned, and the short line of code he’d created did nothing but short-circuit a mage’s mana.

Benjamin had gotten the idea from his mana burn spell as much as from the worm. A mage might be able to channel a fair amount of mana through them, and even cast most of it in a single burst. That mana was being expelled from their body and given shape to work magic, though. What would happen if all of it detonated inside the caster like a car bomb or a cell phone with an exploding battery?

He didn’t know, but Lord Ruthrin was going to be the first to find out. The man looked at the final suspiciously for a moment, and then, letting his curiosity over Benjamin’s charade get the better of him, he opened it. Why wouldn’t he? The man's spyware had been over a hundred runes long and bigger than the image file itself. Even a blind man could see there was a problem, but Benjamin’s code was only 9 runes long, and it was hidden in the execution string of the heliograph itself, where it would be difficult for even an expert to see it.

“Isn’t this just the same…” Lord Ruthrin asked as his words began to trail off, and his eyes widened in horror.

Benjamin had no idea what to expect next, and he cast arcane armor on himself at level 3 to absorb whatever fireball might result from this. He’d warned his friends to be ready for anything, and he’d shown Matt how to use the passwords he’d already collected to gain control of the mage’s slaves so that they wouldn’t run to their master’s aid.

Part of Benjamin thought that the man in front of him would burst into flames and die. Another part thought that he’d live but that he wouldn’t be much of a threat given that his mana had been effectively eliminated. Neither of those outcomes occurred.

Instead, after another second, Lord Ruthrin’s eyes began to bulge, and a hydra made out of thorny vines and shadows began to manifest around the man as he frothed at the mouth. For a second, Benjamin thought that he was fucked. He’d kicked off some kind of contingency that he hadn’t fully understood, and this growing monster would rip him to pieces before anyone could save him.

Before Benjamin could even move into a defensive crouch or back away, the Summoner’s clothes and jewelry burst briefly into green flames even as the rest of him exploded into a fine red mist, and his pet dissipated just as quickly as it had sprung into existence without any mana to support it. Benjamin didn’t know how powerful Lord Ruthrin had been, but it could have been ten times his own paltry mana pool of 15. The mage didn’t explode into pieces or fly apart at the seams. Instead, he simply atomized, painting the walls red in every direction besides the area immediately behind Benjamin in a blast wave of blood that reduced the man to nothing besides the melted debris of his belongings smoldering on the floor.

It was horrifying. For a moment, he had to repress the wave of nausea. Even though the wavering energy field of the arcane armor kept him from being doused in blood, he certainly felt as though he had been and moved immediately for the door. He’d wanted to kill the mage, not turn him into an art project. It was only as he came to grips with what he'd done and backed toward the door that he noted that he'd leveled up to level 6 thanks to the 315 experience points he'd gotten for detonating a higher-level mage.

“My God, Benji,” Matt said as Benjamin slammed the door behind him. “What did you do?”

“Later,” Benjamin promised, noting the way that Emma’s eyes lit up as she saw the room. He then turned his attention to slaves and said, “Listen, I know this is awful, and we’ll make it right when we free you soon, but you need to tell anyone that asks that this was the work of Lady Margerot Thraxis. You understand? She was the one that killed your master.”

Lord Ruthrin’s four personal slaves looked at him blankly with their dark eyes and nodded. It hurt Benjamin to be using them like this - like they were nothing but automatons. However, that still didn’t change the plan, as he handed the letter he’d written earlier to Lord Ruthrin’s footman and told the man, “Stamp this with your master’s seal and then deliver it to the Prince’s court. The rest of you wait twenty minutes before you open this door and report the murder, but leave all this out; you’ve got it? This never happened. Lady Thraxis came for a visit, and when she left, you found your master dead, understand?”

“You know that might not be enough,” Emma whispered, “They know the truth. Just because you’ve told them to lie doesn’t mean someone else won’t order them to tell the truth.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Benjamin hissed. “But the other option is killing them, and we aren’t doing that, okay? Now put your mask back on, and let’s get out of here.”

They left as quickly as they could. Benjamin briefly considered stealing the amulet that all of the Rhulvarins seemed to wear as a backup to their soul and finding a way to tuck it into Margerot’s chambers to be discovered later so that he could further incriminate her, but decided against it. The thing had been completely ruined by the explosion.

Instead, as soon as they got back to the room, they began to pack. It had been a nice couple of days, but now that they’d kicked the hornet’s nest, they needed to disappear, and that blending in among the slave population that tirelessly ran the city while the nobles above them played games in their own world was the best way to do that as Raja had suggested before.

“Make sure that if you leave any clues behind, they don’t point back to us,” Benjamin said, even though everyone already knew that. He doubted that the Summoner Lords had forensic magic, but really, there was no reason they shouldn’t, honestly. If he was an evil despot, then what they were doing right now wouldn’t have even been possible. There would be little magic items on every street corner tracking the populace. They would record all the patterns and alert the secret police whenever someone deviated or failed to meet their quota.

They would… Benjamin shook his head to clear it. He was letting his fear of what might happen next cloud his mind. There was no doubt that the Summoner Lords still had tricks up their sleeve that he wasn’t privy to yet, but given the sloppiness in all manner of their systems to date, he felt sure that any problems they ran into could be resolved.

Twenty minutes after they’d arrived, they were gone again, with everything that might have given away who they were. The horse was the only evidence that Lord Darton had ever stayed here at all. He hadn’t, though. He’d died weeks ago, and Benjamin wondered how long it would be until someone figured that out.

Ch. 77 - Hiding in Plain Sight

They disappeared to the docks first. There were always new people coming and going there, both from the river and the rest of Arden, as cargos were loaded and unloaded. It was an easy place for anyone to get lost, but they never planned to stay there. Not only was it hard for the four of them to stay together, but the labor was difficult, and getting even a little privacy to allow Benjamin to dive into his system or codex to work on things was quite impossible.

Still, it was a good place to see when the powers that be started to lock down the city. They’d only been away from The Refuge for a couple of hours and were getting ready to go find somewhere to hide off-shift when the word came down to seal the city. In any normal place, that would have involved town criers or at least church bells. Here, it was just a simple command repeated by a single Summoner Lord surrounded by half a dozen well-armed warriors. It was a little thing, but it spread quickly, and soon, all the gates that led into Arden were shut, and the streets began to thin out as more people were placed on guard duty on the walls.

The threat was real now. They knew that. They just didn’t know what it was or where it was lurking. Even as Benjamin’s heart raced and he was forced to communicate silently with his friends via the text-based visual keyboard that Raja had relied on, it was still thrilling.

‘They’re afraid,’ he told his friends as they lugged yet another wagon load of goods from the warehouse to the basement of the citadel that stood at the center of the city.

‘Wouldn’t you be?’ Emma asked. ‘Blood. Everywhere. Who does that?’

‘Can you do that to all of them?’ Raja asked, ‘It would be a fitting end for these assholes.’

‘I wish,’ Benjamin replied.

He did wish. If the systems of the summoners were set up the same as the men and women they lorded over, then he might have already won the secret war they were waging single-handedly, but the traffic was very clearly one way. There was simply no way for him to send the command to one of the Mages. The Rhulvarians could certainly be tricked into activating the horrible little feature he’d created, but until he figured out a way past their defenses, it wasn’t something he was going to be able to inflict on them like he could with their dark-eyed slaves.

‘We need to get in that fortress,’ Matt said as they approached it.

‘We need to figure out how to blow it up from as far away as possible,’ Benjamin corrected his friend. ‘But if that’s not an option, then yeah, we probably need to go in.’

Either way, they’d have to go in to deliver the crates of wine that had been brought to the city from downstream into the wine cellars. That detail was funny to him; the whole city was on lockdown, and someone was killing mages. So, what should the biggest priority be? To make sure they had enough alcohol to get through the next night or two.

It was almost funny enough for him to laugh, but he resisted. That would have drawn attention they did not need right now. Still, after the four of them were finished unloading the cart, they decided that the wine cellars made a fine place to hide out for a while, and Benjamin used his collection of passwords to convince most of the rest of the people that worked there that their shift was over and they should go find a bed to sleep in.

“I expected more panic, to be honest,” Matt said when they were finally alone, and it was safe to talk.

“Maybe they are?” Benjamin shrugged, “How would we know? If I had any spying magic, I could look, but I imagine the people that matter have wards against those sorts of things.”

“Can you get any spying magic?” Emma asked, “Because that would be super helpful right about now.”

“I wish,” Benjamin smiled. “I think I must have gotten too many elemental spells because at this point, that’s basically all my system offers me. I could probably code one, but I’ve never seen one to use as a template, and making one from scratch would take longer than we have. We will probably have to decide the next move with less information than we would like.”

“So then, what do we do next?” Emma said as she started counting off the options on her fingers. “We could try to burn the place down, Raja could lob a bomb in and see them all kill each other, or we could just wait until they’re all wasted at 2 am and then start the revolution without them.”

Benjamin was about to suggest they give him a minute to focus on leveling up before they figure that out when Matt said, “We could poison them.”

‘Poison?’ Raja typed. ‘WTF. How?’

“Yeah, I’m kind of with Raja on this one - how do you poison all the mages without some kind of… I don’t know arsenic? Cyanide?” Benjamin had no idea. Really, the whole thing was a blank spot in his mind. He knew that lots of animals had poisons and that people could be poisoned, but that was about it, and until that moment, he hadn't given much thought to the almost certainly system related gap in his knowledge.

“Simple. They like to drink, and they like to smoke. Nicotine is soluble in alcohol,” he said like he was reading a textbook. Benjamin figured this had to be from his medicine skill, which was getting pretty high by now. “So we make some poison, we add it to some booze, we serve it at their party, and then they all drop dead.”

“I mean, in a perfect world, maybe,” Benjamin said, mulling the idea over. Poisoning his enemy didn’t sound right, but it would theoretically limit collateral damage. “Couldn’t they just heal it, though? You have a spell to heal poison. Why shouldn’t they?”

“Some of them might,” Matt said with a shrug, “But I have a feeling that most of them consider healing to be beneath them. We’ve freed plenty of slaves that have been given healing powers, and I think they have those to take care of their Masters as much as anything. Besides - even if we don't kill them all, we kill some and make the rest paranoid as hell.”

It was a compelling argument, and after they talked about it for a while longer, Benjamin agreed that it was worth a shot. It felt dishonorable, but ultimately, his main concern was that they’d have to free everyone from their systems almost at the same time because a desperate, dying leader might decide to push the button and take everyone else with him.

He let them deal with the logistics of finding tobacco and brandy that was strong enough to distill it, though, while he focused on his level up. This time, for the first time since he’d been in this strange world, he did something he never thought he’d do and focused on his social skills.

He did so for two reasons. The first was that he’d been using them so much recently that they dominated his list of optimal skills, and the second was because he knew how close he’d come to getting caught so many times. If they didn’t have someone else’s face to hide behind and his strange stories to distract them, Benjamin was sure the the Summoner Lords he’d been dining with would have seen right through him long ago, and he needed to fix that.

His job wasn’t to be a warrior. It was to be a coder and a leader, and though he had the skills for the former, he was running behind on the other half of his responsibilities, and he needed to fix that. Intellect, he bumped up again, too, of course. He was tired of making so many dumb mistakes, but just like his brief glimpse of divine intelligence, no matter how many times he moved that stat up, he never really felt smarter, and that frustrated him.

Intelligence wouldn’t have done much to improve their current circumstances, anyway. So much of what they’d done lately had been opportunity, not planning, and to him it felt like they were just sort of making it up as they went along, and he doubted that could end well.

NAME: Benjamin Newsome

RACE: Human

CLASS: Mage(Blood Mage)

LVL: 6

EXP: 12,239/14,000

BPs: 4

Mind

INTELLECT

15

WILL

11

MANIPULATE

6 (5)

Body

AGILITY

6

STRENGTH

11

APPEARANCE

7 (8)

Soul

ANIMA

7

SPIRIT

12

CHARM

8

RESOLVE:  55/55

HEALTH: 55/55

MANA: 14/15

STATUS EFFECTS:

Soul Scar (major): -5 to all actions,-50% mana, No natural recovery of health or mana.

SKILLS

Knowledge (academics): 35

Craft (programming): 55

Knowledge (internet): 25

Magic (Runic): 70

Dodge: 25

Team Work: 40

Diplomacy 55

Leadership: 10

Awareness: 35

Resist (Social): 35

Survival: 20

Athletics: 15

Craft (primitive): 10

ABILITIES

Obstinate: +20% resistance to social attacks and charm magics

Blood Mage: Reduce Mana by half. Mana may be freely refilled at the cost of one health per mana. Immunity to life drain effects.

Optimized Mage: All spells cost 1 less mana

Elemental Attunement: +10% effect to all elemental spells

When all was said and done, he liked the way his sheet was looking, except for the soul scar. He wished he’d known more when he started down this path. When he thought about how much flame spray and spells like that had limited his choices as he went further and further down the path, it gave him a headache.

There was no fixing it now, though. At least, he didn’t think there was. So he was stuck with choices like magma strike and typhoon, which other mages his level could probably cast, but he doubted he’d be able to afford any time soon, or unnatural growth and strength of stone, which seemed great, but so situational that he doubted they’d be worth it have the time.

Magma Strike (30 mana/level): Concentrate the strength of fire and stone from the deeps and use it to deal 100 damage/level in a small area, penetrating armor and causing heavy damage to structures and fortifications.

Typhoon (50 mana): Deal 10 damage per second for the next minute as wind and lightning cut a wide swath through your opponents. This spell limits visibility and makes ranged combat impossible.

Unnatural Growth (8 mana/hour): Your flesh takes on the strength of wood, granting additional armor and armament options. It also allows you to heal and regain mana much more quickly than usual by rooting yourself into place.

Strength of Stone (10 mana/hour): Increases your armor by 50 and your strength by 20. By harnessing the strength of stone, this spell will let you shrug off most types of damage for the duration.

Honestly, even though he had dozens of choices, none of them seemed that compelling. Plus, thanks to all of his coding and hacking efforts, he was completely spoiled. When it came to his Codex, he could simply make exactly what he wanted, but when it came to spells, he was stuck with some truly bizarre choices.

Of course, he’d love to see what made some of the more interesting spells tick to give him some coding ideas, but he hadn’t been able to freely browse the rune configurations since he’d locked his system into place, rendering the whole point moot.

Benjamin smiled as the spell Earthquake caught his eye. It would have been really easy to solve this whole situation if he had a hundred mana lying around. He could just have everyone who mattered flee the city and then raze their little fortress into the ground. Sadly, unless Benjamin ever managed to fix his soul scar, he didn’t think he’d be doing that, no matter what level he got to.