God of Trash-Chapter 127. Return

They took the long way back, taking their time to let Rhys sip his potion and recover, and tracing a long route away from their hideout to mislead anyone who tried to come after them before finally winding their way back to the hideout. Rhys wasn’t completely sure how mages tracked one another, or if there were tracking skills at all, but nonetheless, it was worth the effort to avoid getting followed home.

He felt a little uncomfortable about setting the re-cored mages free, but there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t know these mages; he didn’t know them at all. Not their personalities, their allegiances, their pasts and futures, what had happened within the farm, nothing. Inviting them back to the hideout would be an immense risk, when he didn’t know if he was inviting an Empire-favored narc directly into the heart of the operation. He pinched his chin, then sighed. He needed branch offices, or something. All kinds of things that got easier, once his junk food stores got off the ground, and he had money, access, inventory, all the things he needed to actually oppose the Empire. Right now… He sighed, putting his head in his hands. The flying sword glided on beneath him, supporting the weight he couldn’t support himself.

“Something troubling you?” Lira asked.

“Everything.”

She harrumphed, the sound almost like a laugh, and said nothing. They both had their own troubles to ponder, and neither could dismiss the other’s.

The biggest problem that bothered him was the classic serial killer’s problem—in other words, triangulation. Almost every armchair sleuth would tell you that one of the easiest ways to lock down a serial killer’s location was to track where they killed. They’d head out in all directions, sure, but they usually wouldn’t go further than a certain radius from their home, which made it possible to triangulate their general location. Not the most helpful for a serial killer, who might live in a major population center, but for a squad of insurgents living in the woods? A real problem.

Should we move bases? Or maybe… Maybe it was time to take the trucker approach. Returning to serial killers, it was postulated that the most successful, hardest to track serial killers were long-haul truckers, who could travel thousands of miles between each kill, and who spent all their time moving around on the road. It was impossible to triangulate a trucker-killer’s home base, because their true home base was their truck, and their truck was always on the move. An isolated kill a thousand miles from another isolated kill would almost never get connected, especially if the trucker-killer targeted those at the fringe of society, whom the police wouldn’t bother looking too hard into: poor people, homeless people, addicts and runaways. He couldn’t learn anything from ‘targeting those at the fringe of society,’ not that he wanted to—after all, his targets might be completely disregarded by the Empire, but the camps themselves were symbolic, political statements: herein lies the fate of anyone who opposes the Empire. Upending the camps meant opposing the Empress directly, and the Empire knew that as much as he did. He’d placed a giant target on his back just by acting against the camps at all, let alone overthrowing two of them.

No, he couldn’t learn that part, but he could learn the other part—wandering around, hundreds and thousands of piles at a time, and attacking randomly on the go. He nodded to himself, resolved. His next attack would be hundreds of miles away, on a camp further away from this one, not in another direction, but in the same direction; then, just when the Empire decided they had him dead to rights and reinforced another camp in that direction, he’d shoot off in the opposite direction, and start taking that line down. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ

He thumped his hand into his fist, enlightened. If that was his course of action, then he had a clear route ahead of him. He needed a movement technique, and not one like Trash Step, which activated in particular circumstances and gave him surefootedness and a stronger stance in trashy terrains, but one that allowed him to cross great distances at speed. He needed a movement technique that trivialized distances, one that ate up the miles like they were feet.

The problem was, that sounded like a profoundly un-trashy movement technique. And not only that, but he valued it, which made it even harder for him to learn. Rhys sighed again, exhausted. His path could be incredibly troublesome at times. Sure, it was nice to be able to take garbage techniques and refine them into something worthwhile, but it was frustrating to know that as soon as he set a goal, if he couldn’t see a trashy path there, then his goal was almost certainly cut off from him forever.

He rubbed his forehead. No, no. I’m thinking of this wrong. Rather than starting at the result he wanted, valuing something, and making it unobtainable to him, he needed to start from the technique, then refine it into what he wanted. That was the truth of his path, the deepest secret to his success—the ability to refine trash into what he wanted and needed.

But how? He wasn’t wrong about Trash Step. It wasn’t a speed- or distance-optimized movement technique. It was for power, for surefootedness, for trivializing the debuff inflicted by trashy terrain and allowing him to move at full speed and fight with full power no matter how bad the footing, but it wasn’t for crossing vast distances with lightning speed. He clenched his hand, then opened it, looking at the emptiness held within. How to refine that…? How to reforge it into something useful? Practice, maybe? But he didn’t have time. Every second he wasn’t breaking people out of camps was another second the Empire was harming them, inflicting real pain and danger upon them.

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Rhys grimaced, thinking, thinking, then abruptly sat up, so sharply the wound in his chest sent a jolt of pain through his body. “Ow, ow—” He sipped his potion, and the pain abated.

“Just drink it already,” Lira muttered, rolling her eyes at him. “What are you doing, anyways? Some sick form of training? Trying for Pain Resistance, or something?”

“No, it’s a skill,” Rhys didn’t explain, and went back to his thoughts.

“It doesn’t work if you’re enjoying it,” Lira shot back, ignoring his retort.

Rhys shot her a smile, not least because his troubles were fading away. Taking a moment from his thoughts, he nodded at her. “That kid I defeated… did he look like the man who threw you in the sewers?”

“Kid? He was older than you.”

“So? Did he?”

Lira thought for a second, then nodded. “Same pointy brows and wild red hair, yeah. His personality was different, but…”

“I’m not saying they’re the same person, don’t be ridiculous. No, that kid, his name was Feran, of House Infernon. If he looks like the guy who had you put in the sewers, isn’t it possible that the guy you’re looking for is from House Infernon, too?”

Lira raised her brows, then sighed. “Sure, it’s a good thought, but what does it get us? It’s not like we can go mingle with high society.”

“First off, never say never. By the time we’re done with the food, high society will be begging us to come to their fetes.”

“Uh huh.”

“Second off, the library opens directly to the sewers, doesn’t it? We can run that same route in reverse and borrow books on House Infernon whenever we want,” Rhys pointed out.

She raised her brows. “The library connects to the sewers?”

“Yeah, it—oh, right. You were in the sewers, so you never saw the library. Yeah, Mouse and I were coming back from the library when we found you. We can go to the library whenever we want.”

Lira blinked, staring at Rhys. She shook her head. “In that case, then, I suppose I’ll go read up on House Infernon… with the assistance of someone who doesn’t risk soaking the books on the way back?”

“Of course. No problem,” Rhys said with a beaming smile.

She made a face. “You’re looking forward to sucking up that filth, aren’t you?”

“Why would I be? What? Me? Don’t be ridiculous,” Rhys said, still smiling.

Lira rolled her eyes at him one last time and went back to walking on.

Rhys returned to his thoughts, and his solution. He had the horse bones in his core, the ones from the rider under the Impure Wells. That horse… wasn’t it possible that, if he summoned the curse, he could call forth the horse and ride it? He only had two bones, but maybe that would be enough, with Trash Intent, to summon just the horse? He lifted his hand and pushed curse power into the bones. They trembled, then burst out from his core, taking form into… larger versions of themselves. Two large bones hovered before Rhys in the air, radiating powerful curse power, an eerie aura emanating from them.

Lira blinked. “What?”

Rhys sighed. He snapped his fingers, dismissing the bones. “I made a mistake.” That wasn’t what he’d wanted, but in practice, he’d discovered a problem. It was hard to use curse power and mana at the same time, especially on the same thing. The curse power corrupted the mana as he tried to use it, so all he ended up doing was empowering the bones further rather than using Trash Intent on them to fill in the gaps. He twisted his lips. There had to be a solution to this, a way past it. He’d used curse power and mana before at the same time, he knew it. It wasn’t impossible. It was just that Trash Intent was such a power-intensive skill, such a focus-intensive skill, that he couldn’t easily keep the two separate in his mana passages, and the two ended up merging. The merged mana and curse power simply became curse power, and fed the curse, but didn’t create Trash Intent.

Really, I should look into that. As far as he could tell, aside from a dark energy of vengeance and filth, curse power was more or less equivalent to mana, in terms of being a form of energy which one could use to power spells. Curse power spells were called curses, and ordinary spells were called spells, but the principles were the same. Technically speaking, it should be possible to create a version of Trash Intent, or any other technique, using curse power. If it was, then he had a second version of Trash Intent to use; if it wasn’t, then looking into why not would help inform him on how curse power and mana both fundamentally worked, and the differences between the two of them.

Still, that wasn’t what he was here, trying to do, so he shook his head and snapped himself back into focus. He summoned forth the bones, then called forth his mana again. Once more, the two blurred together and merged into ordinary curse power. Rhys dismissed the bones again and took a sip of his potion, using the break to corral his thoughts. His brows furrowed. It seemed so simple, but… was it possible? Could he really separate the two through such a basic, nigh overly-simple, method?

He lifted his left hand and called forth curse power, pushing it into the bones in his core, then expressing it out in to the world through his left hand. In his right, he called forth mana, forming the mana into trash intent, then applying it to the bones.

This time, the two didn’t merge. He’d separated the streams across his two arms, and so he could use both powers without them corroding together. He almost laughed at how simple it was, except that the hard part laid before him. Trash Intent gripped the bones, bringing forth their intent, their objective. He pushed his mana into it, encouraging it to take form. The horse, the skeletal horse, in a form he could ride!

“Come forth, my skelly boy!” Rhys shouted, as the Trash Intent formed around the bones and took shape. The blue energy wobbled, translucent and shapeless, like a block of gelatin, then suddenly coalesced. Bright light flashed out. Rhys held his breath, excited, then blinked, startled.

Huh? That’s not… well, it is, but…

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