After a fruitful morning of hunting, Will and Jorn had some notes about Jorn’s class.

A riding secondary (if they could find one) would be welcome. A way to increase the potency of the bone arrow would be nice.

The only monsters that caused Jorn any problems were the ones who needed overwhelming firepower to put down. Anything less could simply be torn apart by the pack tactics of a swarm of razor-lizards.

They got twenty totems before Jorn ran out of charge. Each totem was about the size of a man’s fist, so Will was considering having a custom satchel made for Jorn. The size of dozens of totems added up quickly and became rather clumsy.

Maybe we can get an enchanted bag with dimensional properties?

Will was a little concerned that maybe Jorn would have to kill all the enemies with a direct attack, but his Totem Ability counted any kill by his summons as a kill by him.

As long as he had line of sight on the creature in question, he could make a totem of it.

They experimented with Will killing monsters, both by hand and with his Abilities, and neither worked, which was about as expected.

When they got back in the afternoon, Will sent Jorn off into the Sacrifice warehouse by himself to grab ones he thought would improve his hunting rate and report back to Will. They could discuss the pros and cons over dinner.

In the meantime, Will visited the giants.

The giants had begun their own settlement miles away from Will’s Burned Stronghold, on the other side of a mountain range.

Since they were about a hundred feet tall, if they lived on this side of the mountain, Will was concerned Climbers would see them moving about their daily lives every day and get weird about it.

They were adapting well to the outside world after being forced out of their safe haven inside Steve. Their only complaint was how hot it was, but aside from being uncomfortable, they didn’t seem to have any health problems.

They were currently carving a massive city out of stone, making pottery, and a couple of them were a few miles distant, wrangling an oasis out of the ground. The flatfish made excellent food for Will’s enormous guests.

Gods I hope they don’t run out of flatfish.

How much wheat would it take to feed even one of these titans?

Well, I suppose that’s why I made the experimental farmer Classes.

Will visited where Anna was working with the farmer kids. The ground was covered in a mishmash of fallen trees and crushed wheat from where the kids had been fireing off their abilities willy-nilly, more interested in practice than production.

“Mr. Oh, Mr. Oh, check this out!” A slender, light-haired pipsqueak said as he arrived, raising her hands to the sky.

RRRRRRR

The ground shook, and an instant later, an old-growth forest sprung up around them in the middle of the desert. Will could see the edge of the forest was about a hundred feet out in every direction.

With no kit on either? Will thought, studying the girl. That was several months work with a single Ability activation. With kit on, she might only have to trigger her primary ability once in her entire stay.

I suppose we could get some support upgrades that make logging easier so she’s not wasting her time waiting for everyone to deal with the wood.

“Whaddya think?”

“Awesome.” Will said, picturing valuable lumber, or an endless orchard of fruit trees in the future once they figured out the right upgrades.

“No, check this out!”

A wave of grass erupted outward from a boy and spread in every direction, blooming and withering in a matter of seconds. Once they got it to stick around, and the right kind of grass, then it would be remarkably helpful for beer and bread.

“You guys are gonna be the backbone of this Stronghold.” Will said with a nod, prompting a cheer from the farmers.

Will sat in on a class about breeding steak-bugs, which a few of the kids had Abilities for, care of Attrition. After that, he went back to his tower. Along the way, he spotted Ria teaching the new guardsmen about proper procedure, which amounted to a class in when to knock heads and when to de-escalate.

The only problem…

“Check this out.”

One of Will’s guardsman was whipping a ball of liquid metal around himself, changing its shape as he went to pull off tricks. The ball of metal was seemingly only loosely controlled, and it was whipping past other guardsmen.

He wasn’t the only one. Another pair near the back were chatting with each other while others were kicking each other where they thought Ria couldn’t see.

Will pointed at the kid playing with his Ability dangerously close to other’s heads and glanced at Anna beside him.

“…Why?”

“I made sure that all the boys I grabbed for the guardsmen were responsible older brother types, like Jorn.” Anna said with a sigh. “But that was back when they were in their own orphanages, now they’re crammed together with a bunch of other boys the same age. My mistake.”

“So their environment changed,” Will mused. “The solution then is to change the environment back. Make them care about something and then make them responsible for it. Like a building, festival, mascot, pet, or a particularly helpless selection of the farming group. It’s going to be tough because they haven’t put down roots yet. It would also be easier if you broke them up, but see if you can figure out something that motivates all of them. I don’t want rivalries among the guard.”

“I’ll see what I can do, milord.” Brianna said with a bow.

“I saw him earlier. Is that our Lord?” One of the taller boys asked one of his friends, tapping the other kid on the shoulder and craning his neck to watch Will and Brianna when he should’ve been listening to Ria’s lecture.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“He literally introduced himself.” His friend replied.

“Yeah but this guy has a hand.”

“Doesn’t look like much.” A third kid chimed in.

That’s another problem. Maybe it will rear its head soon. Will’s ‘guards’ would have Builds more tailored towards fighting Climbers than fighting monsters. That was one of the most basic requirements of being a Lord. They would eventually grasp that fact, consciously or unconsciously.

There was a good chance these young men would get a big head over the next few years when they realized they were more dangerous than most Climbers who came through Will’s Stronghold.

“When they start getting real cocky, arrange for me to fight them in front of their peers.” Will said.

“You got it,” Brianna said.

“Or Loth if she’s in town.” Will mused.

“I want them humble, not dead.” Brianna replied.

“There’s some overlap, right?” Will asked.

Afterwards, Will visited Badur and his Logistician group. Badur had sent the craftsmen off to apprentice under the Climbers that were working in those roles, and only had three actual logisticians working under him now, two girls and a boy who were feverishly scribbling in ledgers as they worked.

Naturally, they were accommodating to their roles the fastest, as organization was the exact reason they’d been chosen.

Having visited all the different groups, Will went back to his tower and sat down with the objects of his current study.

Choker of the Stolen Voice

+2 Strength

+12 Resistance

+2 Kinesthetics

+4 Acuity

+7 Focus

User’s voice-based Abilities no longer register as being caused by the User.

Trace-back effects register the Choker of the Stolen Voice as the origin of the Ability. XP for kills made with voice-based Abilities is negated.

The Tower had some way of knowing who did what at any given time. Matter of fact, the reason why Jorn’s summon kills counted as his own was because of this.

Years ago, The Tower even knew that Loth set the trap for Mark Wyrd and allowed the young Lord’s Ability to trace back to her and cause damage…likely because her ‘trap savant’ Ability put some kind of signature unique to her on any trap she made.

If Will could figure out how to remove any kind of signature from his own Abilities, then he might be able to trick The Tower.

And that was something that was looking more and more appealing.

His other objects of study:

The pod made to infuse bone with Abilities, and the crystal snake egg, both gained from his time on the 11th Floor.

Will didn’t miss the connection between the random snippets of Abilities present in the crystalline giant bones and the fact that there was an ancient ruin with a machine designed to impregnate a human’s bones with Abilities.

Will’s rough guess was that the giants had been humans many coils ago, and a section of them had chosen to change their bodies to adapt to the higher Miasma rather than migrate downwards with the rest of humanity.

Will’s current problem was that the pod itself had tons of wires and tubes hanging off of it, connected to unknown supplies and control mechanisms that would likely never be reproduced in this Coil.

There was no way to use the pod for its intended purpose as things stood, so instead Will carefully disassembled the pod into its components and tried various things to get each tiny piece to work.

Eventually, Will stumbled across a little metal plate that shot out a beam of wobbly-looking miasma structures when supplied with miasma and a tiny amount of lightning.

When used on the giant bone, it made them semi-permeable to miasmatic structures, allowing Will to impregnate them with-

“WILL!” Brianna’s voice cut through Will’s focus.

“What? I just got started,” Will said, pulling the nerve-destroying glasses off his face.

“It’s eleven-o-clock in the morning.” Brianna said. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

“I thought it was three P.M.” Will muttered.

“It’s eleven the next day.” Brianna reminded him.

“I was supposed to have dinner with Jorn!” Will said, eyes wide.

“I told him something super important and Lord-ly came up.” Brianna said.

“You should have told me. I would have stopped.”

“I did tell you and you said, and I quote: ‘I’ve almost got it’.” Brianna said, scanning the room.

Will’s lab room was covered in scattered parts from the pod and sketches from his map pinned to the walls above individual projects he’d been working on. There was even a bard sleeping in the corner wearing the choker of the stolen voice.

“I don’t remember that.” Will muttered.

“Anyway, noon today is when the new vassals swear in, so you actually can’t miss this,” Brianna grabbed him by the hand and dragged him to the shower, getting him clean before stuffing him in a respectable outfit that wasn’t covered in grease stains.

Only a handful of the orphans they’d brought up had decided to reject the offer and gone back down. The remaining children were assembled in front of the stage in the center of town.

Come to think of it, this is where Caddock tried to execute me, Will thought, his gaze moving from the assembly of prospective Vassals to the walls beyond.

Brianna staged him right where he was supposed to stand, discretely slipped him his speech, and Will did a halfway decent job of reading from the notecards without looking too awkward.

Once he was done, the thirty-six children whose lives he had purchased knelt.

“We pledge our life to your service as Vassals, as witnessed by The Tower.” They said as one.

Will had a few Vassals in town already, but the number more than doubled from that one exchange.

Vassals 26 -> 62

Will gave the customary response, taking responsibility for their well-being, then then he excused himself from the festivities and escaped to the bar, where he ordered three shots of Tank Slayer and melted into a puddle in the booth.

“Good ceremony, milord,” Climbers said as they passed by, clapping Will on the shoulder.

Will wasn’t sure what was good about it. He hadn’t organized it, he’d just showed up, read the words and waited for the applause to die down.

It was his people who had made everything go off without a hitch. Made it look like he knew what he was doing.

Will chuckled. Your job as a leader is to pile up advantages for your people. You set a destination and they steer.

Things were starting to spin along without his direct supervision. Soon the outskirts would be safe because of Jorn, the food problem would be handled thanks to their commissioned farmers, and the streets would be safe thanks to their guards.

That meant that soon it would be time to leave everything behind and start Climbing again.

Will now knew that his original goal of establishing a Stronghold every ten Floors was incredibly naïve, but he still needed to climb.

The end of the world was coming and he needed to be there to witness it.

“Milord?” Jorn asked, sliding into the booth beside him. “You wanted to go over the Sacrifices I picked?”

Will ordered them some lunch and got to work.

In the end, they settled on a Sacrifice for Totem Guardian that uncapped the strength of Jorn’s summons. For Bone Arrow, they used three Sacrifices. One increased the debuff potency, the second stripped the same-species requirement for Resistance penetration and the last allowed him to control the arrows with his mind, making the Ability more of a direct attack rather than a creation one. This also allowed him to use things other than bows.

For his secondary, they purchased a passive called Scrimshaw, which enhanced his ability to make bone tools and art, and increased their durability and effectiveness while he used them. They gave it an upgrade that allowed it to apply to his Primary Abilities.

The other secondary was a Leech Ability that allowed him to drain health. They purchased an upgrade that bound him tight to the target, jury-rigging it into a Riding Ability. He used it to latch on to the summon he was planning on riding and he could heal himself in flight by sacrificing his mount. Since he could make as many mounts as he wanted…why not?

In the future they could get upgrades that made the summons more lively and regenerate so the leech effect was more sustainable, but for now, it was good enough.

After that, they were out of secondary upgrades, but further improvements to Leech might allow him to apply shared buffs through the connection, making it even more of a riding Ability.

For Jorn’s tertiary, they chose a simple passive called Sense Aggression, likely from Attrition. It allowed him to detect hostiles in a large radius. Since monsters were universally hostile, this worked very well for him.

The next day, Will watched as Jorn rode off on a flying monster, his horde of totem spirits spreading out beneath him to clear vast swaths of land below.

Felt longer than five seconds, but it was over pretty quick. Will thought as the Influence began rolling in.

Now it was time to turn his attention back to himself.