CC5 ~ 18!

18

Havoc paused from tinkering with his new super weapon, a mana-magnetic meteor mitigator. He tapped one large finger against his lab table, wondering what was bothering him. “Those Elves have been using meteors as their main weapon for the past six months; this needs to be my main focus. If I can use their blasted spells against them, we won't have to worry about them taking out large contingents of our troops. Oh?”

He was getting a notification? Someone had completed a quest he had sent them on? How? No one ever completed his quests, since practically everyone was entirely incompetent. Havoc lifted the corner of his mouth, allowing an open gap. A tiny rocket attached to his cigar on the table fired up, launching his main vice into his mouth at the same time as lighting the cigar itself.

“Huh. The scavenger-classed human actually pulled it off?” The Major General grumbled deep in his chest. He had been certain that particular Candidate would kick the bucket on the first day. In fact, he was so sure that he hadn’t bothered to do any of the work he had promised the lad. No matter; Havoc was a resourceful Dwarf. “He might be worth something,after all. At least he's not here demanding payment yet. Let’s go see some old friends.”

Havoc started walking, leaving behind the temporary lab that he had set up in the capital city, a personal estate that he kept for the rare occasions when he was allowed to come back. With every step he took, other Dwarves dove out of the way, scrambling to avoid garnering his attention. Weak-willed, the lot of them. He was the last person still living to achieve nobility during his time in the Legion, which just went to show how far their race had descended into passivity. At this very moment, the Elves were likely planning to storm one of their forts, and his own people couldn’t look him in the eye!

“Have you all no shame?” Havoc snarled, causing the people that had stepped aside to flee to safer areas. His hand twitched and dropped toward his pocket, and he barely stopped himself from activating his ‘personal safety’ device. No… no, that was what had gotten him banished to that empty laboratory on the border. The council had warned him: any more collateral damage, ‘accidental’ or not, and he would lose his funding.

“Hypocritical wastes of space don’t deserve to… no… deep breaths, Havoc,” he reminded himself, letting go of the orb that had mysteriously appeared in his hand. As far as he could remember, he hadn’t intentionally pulled out the device. “Old McPoundy should have everything I need for this. Easy-peasy, Elf-neck squeezy.”

Hurling himself through the crowds at breakneck speed, he soon arrived at the forge closest to the castle: the smithy of Grandmaster Iron McPoundy. Havoc wasted no time with pleasantries, kicking the door off the hinges instead of taking the time to twist the intricate metal doorknob. If there was only one thing that Havoc could complain about when it came to foremost Smith in the nation, it would be that he spent far too much time on making things ‘pretty’. Functionality was king.

However, he had plenty more than just a single thing to gripe about. The Dwarf had an entire list of grievances when it came to the metal-shaper. The main one, the big one, was that the Grandmaster always tried to play up an air of mystery and untouchableness. Havoc peered around the room, observing dozens of weapons appearing in the hands of the Smiths that had been training when he entered. Currently, the room was entirely silent.

“Hanger-ons!” Havoc bellowed to the room full of people that had only become more nervous when they realized who had entered the workshop. “Where is my little brother? McPoundy! You have five seconds to get out here before I start breaking things! I don't care how far in ‘seclusion’ you are; I don't care one whit about giving you ‘face’, or any of this other garbage that you have been picking up from hearing Elves talk! First thing I break is your anvil; next thing is your trainees! We're in the Capital! They’ll revive tomorrow, but how much time will you need to spend training them back to-”

“Hold on a moment, will ya? Murderous degenerate…” Havoc crashed into a wall as a metal-shod boot tried and failed to cave in his sternum. A bearded Dwarf built like a short defensive wall strode heavily toward Havoc, even as the latter calmly stepped forward out of the crumbling mortar he had been embedded in. “What did I warn you about the last time I saw ye, Hank? Why do you always barge in here, insult me, insult my employees?”

“Hello, little bro. I go by ‘Havoc’ these days.” The mad-scientist Dwarf cracked a wide smile, and smoke released from his mouth, even though there was no cigar on his lips. “I need a favor from ya. Need a custom weapon; I got a magic-type human mentee assigned to me, if you would believe it. Joined the Legion not long back, currently in Officer selection.”

“How is that my problem?” The burly Dwarf demanded, stalking closer and closer toward Havoc until the shorter Dwarf needed to back away to be able to see his face. The smith was clearly trying to edge the scientist out of the forge.

“Hey. Let me say it again, McPoundy. He’s been assigned to me.” Havoc let a little smile show when his brother’s face contorted. “That's right, someone wants him to fail. Someone took an actual, promising Candidate, and gave them to me. I'll tell you right now… the human passed my first quest.”

“Hortatory.” McPoundy sighed as his arms dropped from a defensive position in front of his chest. “It always comes back to that. You come in here, a man that I'm sick of seeing, extort me, and depend on my voluntary compliance. You listen here… just because someone can complete one of your inane quests doesn't mean they are someone deserving of my work. If you want me to make something for them, Candidate or not, I'll be judging them for myself. I will hear nothing else about it. I’ll give them a fair chance, and you will leave. Now.”

“Happily.” Havoc turned on his heel and stormed out of his brother’s forge, trying not to show his true, seething rage. This meeting, in fact, had been one of the most cheerful reunions with one of his previous contemporaries. The fact that he was not outright attacked was likely due to their relation more than anything else. Certainly more than respect for Havoc’s position or threat level. “Now who to see…”

“Human’s weapon is taken care of… I need to find him trainers, put together a squad that he can't boss around… scratch that. I think he is going to need to be a lone agent like I am. We’ll call him a consultant.” Havoc browsed the various shop fronts and work areas. “Armor? Yes… who do I know that can stitch together some good Mage gear? Potions? Components should be taken care of… Cores?”

“Hocus-pocus always takes so much effort.” Havoc muttered as he went from shop to shop, acquiring things in Joe’s name, shamelessly using his Candidacy instead of paying for services. By the end of the day, Havoc had created a full suite of options for Joe, ranging from high-end teachers that could start in a few weeks, to gear that would be perfect for supplementing his abilities and playing to his strengths.

“Heh.” Havoc chuckled as he looked at the total reputation bill for the services. “Never say I don’t do right by the people assigned by me. Least not the ones that prove themselves. Where is that human, anyway? I can’t imagine that he stayed in the dump longer than he needed to. I’m betting he hunkered down near an exit and got out as soon as the quest completed.”

Hours passed, and eventually the Dwarf went to bed. Nothing. No sign of the human. Rather than becoming impressed, Havoc was faintly disgruntled. “There's no chance that being down there is actually useful to him, right? Or maybe he just got trapped in the garbage? Well… then he should show up sometime soon; the debuffs down there are enough to kill a Major, and getting buried is a death sentence.”

Havoc arose the next morning and waited longer, becoming increasingly impatient, until the human finally appeared. Still, it had been over a day since the quest was complete, and the Dwarf wanted answers. Trying to remain calm, he adjusted his goggles and gave Joe a stare-down. “You're late.”

“Hmm?” Joe unenthusiastically replied. The Dwarf observed the man, noting the extreme fatigue apparent on his face. Havoc knew that going into the landfill created long-lasting debuffs if you lived long enough to face them, but he could tell with a sniff that this human didn't even have ‘Stinky I’ on him. “I have… just so much to talk to you about.”

“Hold up.” Havoc’s notification was flashing at him like a strobe light, indicating that he was going to start getting punished if he did not pay out the quest rewards immediately. “Before you say anything else, I'm going to let you know that you passed my quest. I have a whole bunch of things for you to look over, and we have figured out some directions that we can go. Just had to let you know before the world started chucking lightning bolts at me.”

“Has… that happened to you before?” Joe glanced at the Dwarf sidelong.

“Hasn’t happened in the last couple a’ months.” Havoc shrugged, calming down now that the system knew that he would be fulfilling his oaths. “What took you so long to get back here?”

“Horde of Dwarven zombies down there.” Joe’s statement was casual, but it made Havoc freeze in concern. “Got a quest to clean them out; couldn’t manage to finish it before I died. Still, that's not what got me in the end.”

Havoc took a long draw on his cigar to hide his shaking fingers. He couldn’t offer a quest to take out the zombies down there; no one really could. There was no reward that could match the danger. The landfill was pretty much death for anyone who entered it. Frankly Joe should never have been able to survive that quest. There was a reason that Havoc was going all-out on making sure he fulfilled his promises; he didn't want to end up as the ‘boss’ of an instant dungeon beneath the city. “So… what eventually gotcha? You really like to leave big pauses when you speak. Are you sure you aren't an actor or something?”

“Hubris.” Joe answered grimly, ignoring the slight taunt. “I kept making one mistake after another. I knew that there was a big baddie down there, but I got way too involved in collecting aspects. At one point, I dropped a bunch of acid on the garbage, got pulled into the collapse, and I thought it was over. Nope! As soon as I dug my way out, I found an absolute treasure trove of things to break down. I kept going, going, going. Dropping my shields so I would have just a little more power, taking chances that I really shouldn't have, but I was gaining so much.”

Havoc waved for him to continue, and Joe launched back into his story. “I found an Artifact down there, Havoc. An Artifact. I was so excited that I went over and tried to check it out. Don't worry, I wasn't dumb enough to attempt to break it down without a lot more power to draw on. It gave me a warning I had never seen before: ‘You can’t reduce living things’. I thought it was just talking about… you know… how enchanted things are ‘living’… but then it stood up.”

“Hidden Guardian, Havoc.” Joe’s eyes were burning with a combination of indignation and excitement. “There's a malfunctioning Guardian down there, and it's a big one. I thought I was just walking over to break down a boulder that had somehow become an Artifact; turns out it was a fingertip. It was not happy that I had grabbed it. Apparently, that counted as me starting combat. I didn't even see it move, Havoc. I only know how it killed me because of my combat logs.”

“How are you so happy about this?” Havoc wondered the question aloud.

“Hidden. Guardian.” Joe’s eyes were shining with a manic light. “I'm not telling you that it is the boss of a dungeon, I'm telling you that it is the name of a quest. If I can fix up the area around it and convince people to stop using that space as a landfill, I can reclaim that Guardian as a second protector of the capital. How does that sound?”

Havoc blew a cloud of smoke out of his nose, deliberating over the details and Logistics that would go into not only cleaning out the garbage and the monsters, but also convincing an entire city to stop putting their garbage in the place they had dumped it for generations. He decided to give Joe an honest answer.

“Hard.”