The Lone Wanderer

“Wave begins. May your challenge be successful!”

Percy stared at the cylindrical piece of metal erected in the middle of the room. It was too short to be considered a pillar. A podium maybe?

Shrugging, he approached. In any case, the magiscript challenge wasn’t dangerous like the others. Just difficult. Hopefully, the first wave of the Red level would be manageable though.

Reaching the strange structure, he saw it descend slightly lower, seemingly adjusting itself to his own height. A second cylinder rose up from the ground behind him, reaching only about halfway to the first one. It was just tall enough to serve as a seat.

‘Huh. I guess they want us to be comfortable during the challenge.’

Next, he looked at the first podium. A few symbols had lit up. Percy only recognized two of them, still not as proficient in the Vault’s language as he would like. Luckily, the translation device took care of it.

‘Draw any rune 100 times, with at least a 90% success rate.’

‘Ok. It’s not that bad.’

Evidently, a single rune was enough to carry him through the first wave. It still meant the locals couldn’t make any progress in the magiscript challenge unless they earned some credits from the others first. Or did the cube give them a few credits to get them started? Or a free lesson? Percy would have to explore the system some more later. Perhaps there was some kind of starter pack he was missing out on.

***

‘Hmmm… This is annoying...’he frowned, staring at the results.

‘Enchantment: Concealment (General). Difficulty: 1. Runes drawn: 100. Time taken: 3192 rits. Success rate: 87%. Score adjusted due to difficulty: 87%. Wave failed. Try again?’

Percy was sure he was normally better than this. Evidently, the parrot’s lacking dexterity coupled with the unfamiliar affinity impacted him negatively, pulling his score down. The low difficulty of his chosen enchantment also meant he wasn’t eligible for any bonus points either.

Even worse, this was his fourth attempt already, each one having taken a little over an hour. It couldn’t be helped, as his mana tended to run out about 20 runes in, forcing him to take several breaks to refill his core during each attempt.

“No.”

Naturally, Percy wasn’t going to quit so easily, but his host had been bugging him to take a lunch break for a while now. Walking to a side of the challenge cube, Percy sat next to the coconut sack, picking a couple of them from the pile.

He’d been forced to bring his supplies inside, as somebody might try snatching some if he left them unattended. This wasn’t a big problem during the relatively peaceful magiscript challenge, though he wasn’t sure what to do when he started working on the combat ones.

‘If we’re lucky, the golems won’t touch the coconuts. Though I suppose I’ll have to live here for the foreseeable future.’ he chuckled. ‘Hopefully they don’t kick me out.’

Either way, that was a problem for later.

After finishing his meal, Percy returned to the centre of the room, restarting the wave. His host had no interest in the boring task, falling back to the recesses of his mind, waiting for all this nonsense to be over.

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In the end, it took Percy three more attempts to barely eek out the required 90% success rate. Spending about half a day on the first wave was definitely worse than he’d hoped. Still acceptable though, considering he’d given himself two weeks to get through all the challenges.

“Congratulations! Wave 1 has been cleared! Calculating rewards…” the soulless voice declared.

It wasn’t Percy’s first time hearing this, but clearing a wave all by himself hit a lot differently than when he was merely tagging alongside Gabe. He was finally going to earn his first credits!

“Awarded credits: 30. Current balance: 30.”

‘Is that it?’ he frowned.

Obviously, he’d known lower grade challenges gave out fewer credits, but this was still less than expected.

‘If my memory serves me, Gabe earned like 6000 from the sixth wave, and 3000 from the third one. So, it should be 1000 on the first…’

Extrapolating, he figured each grade roughly tripled the rewards – rounded for convenience. The first wave of the Orange grade would probably grant 100, while the one for Yellow should be at 300…

Honestly, it wasn’t so bad. A portion of sizian meat was valued at 1 credit, and its effect was pretty much on par with an elixir on Remior. Converted to contribution points, that meant Percy had just earned about 12000 of them!

‘It took me over a month of hunting to get that many back when I joined the Guild.’ he thought, feeling a little better.

Though the Red-borns of the Vault were still screwed if this was all they had to go by. Assuming they could clear the first three waves of each challenge – a rather generous assumption too, as not all of them had a bloodline or a blessing – they’d only get 540 portions of sizian meat in total. And that was without taking into account the cost of actually delving into runecrafting in the first place. This wouldn’t even last them two years – meaning they’d never make it to Orange.

‘I guess Gabe wasn’t kidding when he said the low-borns starve to make space for more people.’

Presumably, the system took care of the kids at least until they first awakened their core, so somewhere between the ages of 5 and 8. After all, they didn’t even know their grade before then, nor did they have the mental maturity to undertake any challenges.

After that, the Red-born children only survived a couple years at best – which was ample time for them to demonstrate any unique bloodline or talent they might have. Motivated by their empty bellies, they’d give it their all until their last breath, at which point the gods could pick out any occasional outlier with a promising bloodline, leaving the rest to die in their early teens.

‘And Metatron is probably wondering why I’m not taking his shitty deal.’ Percy felt the urge to laugh. ‘I’ll be damned if I ever work with that bastard.’

Orange-borns had it slightly better. The relatively talented ones could potentially earn around 1800 or so credits at Orange, barely giving them enough time to hit Yellow. At that point, they could earn another 5400 credits if they could maintain their momentum, living for another decade or two.

But that was it.

Only the most talented Yellow-borns who had both a higher starting point and the potential to go past the third wave actually stood a chance of making it to the higher grades. And even those people – people like Gabe – wouldn’t easily hit Violet or White.

‘No wonder the guy is so stingy with his money. The cutoffs are even steeper here than Remior.’

Had Gabe been born on Remior, he’d probably be on par with the most gifted members of the Divine Root – even before he obtained his second core. Here, his future wasn’t quite as secure. The realization exacerbated Percy’s guilt over all the things he’d made his friend buy him.

‘I swear I’ll make it up to him.’

In any case, he couldn’t do much as he was. There was only one path forward and he intended to see it through to the end.

The good news was that he had several advantages the locals didn’t. First, he didn’t need any sizian meat, which meant he could funnel all his credits into his studies. Second, he could earn credits from every grade, by coming here with various bodies. Obviously, the lower levels wouldn’t reward him as much, but every little bit helped. Percy fully intended to rob this place clean by the time he was done with it. Finally, his arrangement with Metatron would give him an edge, his second core making up for his lack of a blessing or a bloodline. Assuming the titan kept true to his word, of course.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Cube. Start the second wave of the magiscript challenge, Red level. User ID: WANDERER.”

“Authorization granted. Restarting ‘magiscript’ challenge, Red level, wave 2. Wave begins in 18 rits.”

Percy patiently waited for the podium to light up again, before checking the requirements.

‘Draw any rune 200 times, in under 5000 rits, with at least a 95% success rate.’

Naturally, the requirements had increased quite steeply, not only leaving him with much less room for errors, but also imposing a somewhat strict time limit. He’d have to pick up the pace and improve the quality of his runes to get through it. Still, this was good.

‘My proficiency should continue to go up as I acclimate to this body. As long as these waves don’t need more than one enchantment, I can keep going…’

In typical Percy fashion, however, he just had to go jinx himself. Getting through the second wave took him three more days. In theory, he still had plenty of time to attempt the third one.

That said, the requirements finally stumped him…