Chapter 92: Classbreaker

All the pieces were falling in place for the night of fire. I didn’t see it, and Sean didn’t see it. None of the offworlders saw it. I’m not sure that, for all of its wisdom, the system even saw it. But it was coming like a freight train.

I’m not going to say it didn’t have benefits because, obviously, it did. If I had the chance to change it, probably wouldn’t. I have no idea how things would have turned out if it didn’t happen.

Sean was already on a weird path but he had the option to leave it. If he had gone to some minor offworlder planet, he might have still recovered into being a lot like the person he was before he came to us from the past. He might have still been normal, in some ways. Lots of stuff might have happened. It probably wouldn’t have, but it was a possibility.

After that, he couldn’t see any other choices, anymore. He could only see one path after that, stretched out before him. It went straight to one goal and no others. He was changed, not necessarily for the better, but permanently in a way that blinded him to any thought of quitting. He never talked about it, but you could see it in his eyes. He was ride or die.

Which meant that so was I, whether I liked it or not.

The Big Book of Brett, Page 101

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“So what’s this one? The one that looks like a spear for people with huge hands?” Sean asked, pointing at a weapon that looked like a normal-sized spearhead protruding out of a 4” diameter log.

“That’s a throwing bolt. There are lots of builds that emphasize strength to a stupid degree who use stuff like that.”

“They use it without high SAV? How do they hit anything?”

“Skills, sometimes. Most of the time, they only use it on things that aren’t all that hard to hit in the first place. It’s a situational weapon.”

Sean could understand that. Now that he had his pouch, he was fully armed again, having put the Trash Compactor and some bottles of newly brewed sticky apple glue back in the rotation. He didn’t need a pack, now, and all his weapons were stored in the pouch. Brett had rendered the thing theft-proof by more or less encasing it in leather sewn to his suit. He felt light as a feather but a little paranoid without the feeling of the weight of all his dangerous forms of safety generation. He’d get used to it, he thought.

“And this?”

“A scythe. Not a lot of people use those. It’s for specialized classes who can only use scythes. Some enchantments to make it a bit sharper and to keep it from breaking, but nothing crazy.”

With 5,000 credits burning a hole in his pocket, Sean was shopping. The rest of the team had decided on the next morning for dungeon clearing and Brett didn’t need him. He figured it was as good of a time as any to take a comprehensive look of what the weapon vendor had in stock. If the last battle had taught him anything, it was that he could always use more options to choose from in terms of how he fought.

Normally, these weapons wouldn’t be the answer. Today, they might.

“Listen, Sean,” the shopkeeper said. “I like you, you obviously like weapons, and it’s fun to have you here, but I wasn’t kidding when I said I can’t do this all the time. With you in the shop, no offworlders are going to buy anything. And you can’t buy anything. It puts me in a tough spot.”

Sean grinned. “Oh, I didn’t mention this? I can buy something. I’m probably going to buy something. Thousands and thousands of credits, all yours. I just need to figure out what.”

The shopkeeper’s eyes went slightly wide at the mention of thousands of credits. “No shit? That’s a big sale for me.”

“No shit. But I’m going to need to see your weirder stuff. I’m pretty sure that shape doesn’t matter, but handling characteristics might. Enchantments and damage type absolutely do.”

“Sounds like system shenanigans.”

“Absolutely. Weird stuff, but I need something really cool to justify it.”

The red blacksmith girl thought for a second, then nodded. “Okay, give me a second. I have some stuff in the back that might do.”

The shop filled with clangs and crashes as she dug through her various crates before coming back with an armful of weird like Sean had never seen before. She dumped them unceremoniously on the table.

“Take a look.”

“What is this stuff?”

“Experiments. Special orders people never picked up that I have no chance of selling here. If what you have is anything like what I’m guessing, this is what you want to look at.”

Sean obeyed. He hovered his hand over a bizarre cat ‘o ninetails looking whip, sans the handle, essentially just a bundle of eight tiny rope whips with little metal balls tied at the ends.

Aanoranth Finger Flails

Built specifically for the Ti’wwa warriors to hunt Aanoranth with, these flails each pack an enhanced kinetic force within them. They hit with all the speed of an unloaded arm swiping at an enemy, but all the power of a sledgehammer. Better yet, all that power is focused on smaller points of impact, slightly improving penetration over a flat hammerhead.

The Aanoranth are long gone, but the utility of this weapon remains even now, countless eras after its original relevance. Still, for old time’s sake: Fight the Scourge. Free the Universe.

“Neat. What’s an Aanoranth, though?”

The red girl shrugged. “Nobody knows. Some weirdos still like this weapon anyway, mostly people with claws who want the option to do blunt force damage with the same hit.”

Sean liked the idea, but was pretty set for blunt force damage already. Two of his weapons did only that, in slightly different ways. He moved on to the next weapon, which looked much more promising.

Molten Spear

This spear is made of metals that never fully solidify, flowing based on the user’s will to be longer, shorter, sturdier, or sharper. In addition to that, the spear remembers the heat of its forging process, imparting fire damage to targets in proportion to how hard it hits.

If the molten spear has a downside, it’s that its malleability makes it worse at deflecting powerful strikes. A sufficiently heavy blow will bend it in half. While it can recover from this, beware of the openings this might create.

“Huh. More promising.” Sean didn’t use his current Mystereamer for blocking, in fact, none of his build was for blocking. The rest of the effects sounded neat. “Why didn’t this get picked up?”

“Some people are just assholes. This was expensive as hell to make, and the guy ended up skipping offworld after getting a lucky drop in the dungeons he liked better. Now it just sits. It takes a special spear user to be okay with not being able to block.”

Sean filtered through two more weapons, a large sledgehammer that said it did gravity damage and what looked like a plain bar of steel that carried bizarre morphing capabilities that seemed like a shitty, generalized version of his current ability to use multiple weapons as the situation called for them. He wasn’t incredibly interested in either. That left one weapon.

The last of the blacksmith’s weird stock was an almost absurdly long, almost conventional looking longsword made of a shock-white metal. On either side, it had a pattern of serration Sean had never seen before, with rough, large teeth near the base tapering to much finer teeth midway through and then terminating in a foot or so of conventional blade.

Exquisite Journeyman Smith’s Test Blade

Made by a promising apprentice smith under the supervision of a true master, this blade is meant to be a demonstration of competence as opposed to something made with a specific use case in mind.

Made of Sublime Snow Steel, every aspect of this blade is refined and re-refined. The edge is perfect. The serrations are perfectly sized at each interval to enable cutting of different materials. The balance is perfect, due to a handle that utilizes a variety of special materials to get the weight correct down to a tiny fraction of a gram.

It carries no significant enchantments or magic qualities. It’s just a sword made with significant skill, unbelievable attention to detail, and a motivation to create something as perfect as possible.

“This one. This is it.”

“Actually, huh.” The blacksmith looked conflicted. “I wasn’t necessarily actually planning on selling that. It’s my test blade, something I made to more or less graduate from my apprenticeship. Sentimental value and all that.”

“Ah,” Sean said. “I guess people don’t sell those.”

“No, they do. They are supposed to, actually.” The smith scratched her face. “It’s supposed to be bad luck to keep them. I just got attached to it. My teacher said some nice things about it.”

She put her hand on the handle of the sword, lovingly. “But it sits in a box, doing nothing. And that’s not right. It goes against the spirit of the craft.”

“Well, it’s up to you.” Sean wanted it. He wanted it very badly. He knew the moment he read the description. If there was one thing that his weapons didn’t have, it was refinement. The system would, for the most part, only let him make things that were janky, that lacked quality and made up for it in other ways. His dagger didn’t cut that well, but had weird elemental damage. His spears weren’t that long or sharp, but pierced armor.

This might be his only chance to actually fix. The weapon combination token was meant to let him mess with the parameters of his class, and this was as close as he’d get to something that was the exact opposite of what the system intended him to have.

I think it’s time to show my cards. It’s at least the decent thing to do.

Sean took the Classbreaker Weapon Absorption Token from his bag and set it on the counter.

“Inspect that. I want you to know what’s up.”

The blacksmith took a drink of water, then promptly spit it out as she took a look at the token.

“Holy shit. You should have lead with this, Sean.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, you dumbass. Valued customer. Whatever. This is System Smithing, you idiot. It’s something you can watch and learn from. What are you planning on using this on?”

There was only one real choice. Sean took out the Mystereamer, setting it next to the token. The smith ran her fingers over it, doing a quick merchant inspection with Sean’s blessing, then eyeing him suspiciously.

“All your weapons are janky like this?”

“Every single one. Guess why.”

She got it. Sean could see it. She understood the potential.

“Fine. 10,000 credits, but fine. I can’t think of a better use for the thing. It’s flattering, really.”

“Ah, gotcha,” Sean said. “I don’t have that much, though. I think the best I could do is about 4,700-ish. I need to keep a few credits back for food.”

“4800,” the girl said. Sean tried to ignore how quickly she had come down on price. “And I get to watch.”

“Deal.”

A few moments later, the doors to the shop were locked, the shutters were pulled, the counter was clean besides the two weapons and the token, and the blacksmith had pulled out what she called an Observation Glass, a sort of absurdly large magnifying glass that brought all the items into an insane level of clear focus.

“You should watch this too, if you have any crafting abilities. Might help you.”

Sean nodded, and moved into position. At the blacksmith’s signal, he set the token between the two weapons and willed it to activate.

It wasn’t as flashy as he expected. If anything, it was hard to tell anything was happening at all for a few moments. The Mystereamer seemed to solidify a bit, becoming a bit more shiny, changing color slightly, and perhaps looking a little bit more sharp. At the same time, The smith’s piece started to look a bit duller, going from an obviously dangerous piece of metal that anyone would instinctively want to hold to something that looked less in a way that Sean couldn’t quite describe.

By the time the sword crumbled to dust, the Mystereamer was entirely different. It still looked about the same, at least in the sense that Sean would have used about the same words to describe it. But where it was still janky, now that jankyness seemed planned, somehow. Designed into it with purpose.

It looked, for lack of a better word, deadly. Dangerous in a way it hadn’t before, like it had leeched all the dangerous qualities out of the sword into itself.

Sean reached out his hand for the dagger, feeling a slightly different weight and balance as his fingers closed around the handle.

“Listen, I…”

“You have to go test it. I’ve seen that look in a lot of eyes. Don’t worry about it.” She waved him off, dismissing him from any further obligation to talk. “Go kill some stuff. I have to think about what I just saw, anyway.”

Sean nodded at her, thankfully. Grabbing his new weapon, he ran out to meet the others. It was time to do some hunting.