The next morning, I kept Constans back from her schooling since I would need her help for the day. I gave her my amulet that let her see in the dark and a bunch of ammunition I had been crafting for her. She squealed in excitement at receiving her first magical item and more bullets, something she had been forced to carefully recover after every fight while I was gone.
“I need to start several projects today. I’m going to send you to take care of a few of them,” I told her. “For this morning, find me another warehouse near where our legion is staying. Find the most secure one you can get. Location and security are more important than price. After that, come back here and we will meet up and head over to Perama for a bit. Sound good?”
She nodded with a serious look on her face.
“Great,” I said, smiling at her. “Let’s get to it!”
She ran off and I followed in the same direction at a slower pace. Once I was near the water, I dashed upward and shot over the channel to the other side of the city with ease. Once there, I found my way back to the passageway to the underdark, just to make sure I could find it again, and then I began scouting the abandoned warehouses all along the docks for materials that I would need. As I worked, I marked everything of interest in my mental map of the city. I also looted some more iron and some fine wood and then put my nanobots to work crafting more bullets and more revolvers in my backpack.
As the noon hour approached, I made my way back to Sycae and waited for Constans in the inn. She returned a couple of hours later. She ordered lunch, and once it was delivered, she began eating like she was seconds away from starving to death. It was almost comforting to see how little she had changed while I was gone. Once she was finished, she updated me on her day’s progress.
“Got us the warehouse,” she said, “but it cost a fair amount of orbs. Ownership is signed in our names and registered. Do you want to check over everything?”
“No,” I said, not wanting to get into the nitty-gritty of how people bought property in a city that was dying. “I trust you. Let’s go see the warehouse.”
She quickly ate the last few crumbs from her plate before jumping up and leading me back to the waterfront. There, she took us to another warehouse that was kitty-corner to the one our legion was staying in. It had one entrance made of two doors wide enough for a large wagon to pass through. There were no windows or other entrances.
Inside, there were shelves everywhere and the blue glow of magical lighting. A basement held more room below, and thankfully no dungeon had formed in it. The warehouse must have once been used to store valuable goods, because it was very secure.
“Perfect,” I told Constans after our tour. “Great job as usual.”
There was a large wooden bar that could be lowered behind the two doors to stop them from being opened. I asked Constans to organize a guard of the warehouse with Basil to make sure two of our legionnaires slept inside and kept the door locked unless one of us was entering.
After that, we made our way over to Perama. Our first stop was the bar where I had met Nikephoros, the veteran adventurer and former legionnaire. He wasn’t there, but the bartender Mehmet said he would let him know I was looking for him when he showed up that evening. After that, we visited Momma Lena, who was yet again surprised to find I was still alive and kicking.
“And you have little Constans all cleaned up, I see,” she told me, giving Constans a hug. I saw Constans blush as she returned the hug.
“She’s been a great help to me,” I told Momma Lena.
“Yeah!” Constans said. “I am a merchant now and I’m making all kinds of money over in Sycae and organizing—”
“Okay, okay,” I said, cutting her off. “No need to go into the details, right?”
“Oh, right,” she said, reining herself in a bit. “Sorry, got excited!”
I laughed. “Sorry,” I told Momma Lena, “just a lot of stuff we are working on.”
“Are you keeping her safe and treating her okay? ’Cause if not, I will hear about it, you know.”
I put my hand on my heart. “She is becoming something like a little sister to me,” I said, surprised by how true it was. “I’m trying my best to help her grow into the dangerous and powerful adult I think she will be.”
Constans definitely blushed at that and swatted at me, hitting me lightly on the arm.
“Good,” Momma Lena said, smiling at Constans in a motherly way. “So what can I do for you, then?”
“Can someone get a second basic class and level it to try to evolve it? For instance, I leveled and evolved my Warrior class already, but I have an idea for another Warrior class I want to evolve. Is that possible?”
“You’ve already leveled and evolved your Warrior class?” Momma Lena said, shocked. “I thought you were focusing on your Archer class!” She looked between me and Constans, seemingly concerned about what we were really getting up to. After a moment of staring at us, she finally responded. “But yes, if someone is crazy enough to waste the experience and money to buy a class again, you can level it all over again and potentially evolve it. But you know how rare it is that anyone can level a class that high, let alone get an evolution, right?”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “It’s rare for most people these days. So if I buy a Warrior class from you, I can level it again and potentially evolve it?”
“Yes,” she said, “but you don’t get the attributes a second time or the skills from the base class. You can only get those once. So you would be leveling it all the way to twenty and gain nothing from it.”
“Understood. Thank you, Momma Lena,” I told her. “Constans, can you buy us a Warrior class? Bargain for the best deal you can get.”
I smiled over at Momma Lena and she looked at Constans with a slight grimace.
“You’re a monster,” Momma Lena told me, realizing I was using Constans’s Merchant class against her.
“Just helping her get experience,” I replied with a cheeky grin.
The two of them bargained and we left the shop with a Warrior class book for me and some experience for Constans. I also gave her the majority of my coin and orbs, saving just a bit for personal spending money. I told her she was in charge of the legion’s finances now. It would help her get experience, and she was proving to be deft at it.
Next, we made our way to the docks, where she introduced me to a few of the fishermen that weren’t working out on the boats. I asked around about larger sailing ships and got some useful information. One of the oldest men that we talked to had been the second mate on a merchant ship and he gave us plenty of practical advice. He was wrinkled and deeply tanned, as if he had spent his life on the open sea under the Mediterranean sun. He was well into his later years but still spry and sharp-witted. He went by the name Theo, short for Theodosius.
“The biggest problem you’d have finding a workable ship these days is rot,” he told us. “These old boats needed work every few years because the bottoms would rot away. Anything you found sitting in the water would be useless now, barely able to leave dock, if you ask me. You’d need to find something in dry dock if you wanted a real ship worth sailing anymore, and the chances of that are slim to none.”
I was aware, intellectually, of the various writings and information from my Earth about ships of this era, but I hadn’t connected it to how problems like rot and years of sitting idle in dock would impact my plans.
“If you wanted to try to find a ship in dry dock, where would you go? Did the empire have a place that they made their ships, back before everything fell apart?”
“Welllllll,” he said, drawing out the word and looking out to the water nearby. “Your best bet would be Thessaloniki, if you could get that far. It was where many of our best ships were coming from, there at the end. Or if you could go further, some of the city-states like Venice or Genoa, which were famous for their ships. You might get lucky and find something there, but I hear it’s all lost to the wild these days.”
I knew where those cities were since they had been major cities in my world as well. The only issue was that they were a fair distance away, but I could reach them now that I had learned how to safely travel outside of Nova Roma. I wasn’t sure about bringing a crew through the wilds, though, and then trusting them to man a ship and bring it back here.
“What about building a ship?” I asked. “Is that even possible anymore?”
“Not around these parts,” Theo replied definitively. “Unless you got fine, aged lumber hidden around here I ain’t seen. And the skills are long gone. Nobody with a ship-building class been seen in the city for a generation, I’d say.”
“Hmm,” I replied, thinking. “What about repairing a ship that has rot? If I found one of those, do you know anyone that could fix it?”
He sucked his teeth, considering what I was asking. “I don’t know about that. I guess it would depend on the damage and if you had the proper lumber. It might be possible for some carpenters to make it work. I don’t know. Would cost you a pretty penny, and I’d wager high that the Emperor would have something to say about seeing you repairing a ship here in Sycae. You gotta watch out for him and his cronies.”
We talked a bit more and I thanked him for his information. He was happy to talk and I enjoyed picking his brain about some of my ideas. He didn’t seem surprised or doubtful about what I was asking, seemingly content to just chat with us and consider the questions I asked him.
After that was over, Constans and I retired to the bar, where we found Nikephoros sipping a drink at one of the tables. I ordered another round and we joined him.
“We spoke before, yeah?” he said as I sat down with Constans and slid another mug in front of him.
“Yeah,” I replied. “You helped me learn a bit about dungeons and hunting in the city. I appreciate the information you shared. It helped me survive out there.”
“Mmm,” he replied, unmoved by my thanks.
“I have a proposal for you,” I told him after an awkward moment passed, “if you are interested in some work.”
“What kinda work? I’m not going back to the adventuring life, if that’s what you’re after. That’s a young man’s game.”
“No,” I said, “nothing like that. But I have a group of young men and women that need training. I heard you used to be in the legion, and I wanted to see if you were interested in training up a group of people for me. I’d pay well.”
He eyed me skeptically, clearly thinking I was disturbed in some way, but after a moment of consideration, he replied, “What’s the pay?”
“Constans here will work out a salary for you,” I told him, “but it will be fair and include room and board over in Sycae. We would need you to travel a bit, so we could train in private, but you would not need to fight if we encountered any problems. We would protect you. You would also be expected to remain silent about what you learn about us, even if you leave our employment.”
“I’m not worried about needing protection,” he said, “but I want to know my pay and how long you’d be hiring me for.”
“We’ll start with six months,” I told him, “and if I like your work and you want to continue with us, we can renew for longer the next time. Constans and you can discuss the salary.”
I let her talk to him about the details, surprised by how capable she was even when dealing with an old veteran like Nikephoros. She also knew him, which might have intimidated her, but instead, it just gave her ammunition; she pointed out what a layabout he had become and how he was always grumbling about how soft the youngsters were these days. I had to look away to hide my smile as she laid into him.
Afterward, he shook her hand, looking almost embarrassed by how she had called him out, and she turned to me with a serious look on her face.
“He agrees,” she said, a mischievous smile peeking through her serious expression when she caught my eye.
“That is wonderful,” I told him. “I have a skill that will capture our agreement. Please review what you see and let me know if you have any questions.”
I summoned the contract between us, making sure to include the portion about him remaining silent even if he left our employment.
Nikephoros reviewed the contract and signed with a grunt. “Now what?” he said, finishing off the drink I had bought for him.
“You need to gather anything before we go to Sycae? We can come back for you tomorrow if you need some time.”
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“Achh, no,” he said. “Sold everything I own a long time ago. What you see is what you get.”
He looked at me as if daring me to take back our deal, but I just nodded politely.
“Perfect, then,” I said. “Let’s get going.”
I let Constans guide us through Perama, Nikephoros following steadily despite having a few drinks in him already. I dashed us across the water—Nikephoros did not enjoy the experience in the slightest—and then put him up in the same inn as us and let the innkeeper know food and two drinks a night were on me.
I gave Constans some orders for the next day, primarily to get Nikephoros cleaned up and get him some new clothes. She had already purchased new clothes for the others when she recruited them, so I told her to just get some more of those so everyone looked similar for now. We didn’t quite have a uniform yet, although I hoped to change that at some point. After that, I left Constans at the inn and went out just as the sun was setting.
I had a few more things to do and wasn’t feeling tired, so I went north and convinced the guards to let me out of the city before night fell completely. I could tell they thought I was going to get myself killed, but they didn’t protest too much when I insisted.
Once clear of the city, I pulled the Warrior book from my backpack and learned the class for the second time.
Class reset: Warrior. Your Warrior class is now at level 0.
I kept my Spirit Breaker class active, wanting to get it to level 10, but left my Gunslinger and Duelist classes inactive. Once I learned the class, I sensed around me for the nearest monsters and began to hunt.
The night was cold but clear, the moon above giving plenty of light. My enhanced vision made it seem like the middle of a sunny day to my eyes, especially after months of hunting in absolute darkness underground. My ability to detect monsters made it easy to hunt, and unlike in the city, there weren’t so many monsters out here that I could get swarmed and overwhelmed. It was actually easier to kill monsters outside of the city, even if they were stronger, because they mostly kept to themselves. I was able to pick my prey and track it down easily, ambushing it and killing it with either my revolver or my sword with relative ease.
I spent the night hunting and harvesting all of the monsters near the city. I didn’t try to be fancy with my hunting or push myself or test my skill. I went on a purely utilitarian hunting spree, killing anything and everything I could find in the most efficient way possible. Using my revolver while stealthed, I managed to kill most of the lesser monsters I encountered. If anything could survive my opening salvo, I followed up with my sword and fought the monster long enough for my attributes to soar with If It’s a Fight You Want, It’s a Fight You’ll Get and Leeching Strike, with a few grenades or shots from my reloaded revolver as needed.
By the end of the night, I had a pile of monster corpses stashed in a building near the city gate and had leveled my Warrior class back up to level 1. It still struck me as notable how little experience the general monsters gave, even the larger ones outside the city. The system pretty heavily favored clearing dungeons and completing quests, it seemed to me. And most people didn’t even know how to do that anymore, leaving the slow grind of killing monsters as their only way to level.
As the sun rose, I returned to the city. I found Constans before she could start on getting Nikephoros all cleaned up.
“Can you hire me a wagon for the day? And run and tell Basil to bring everyone to meet me here?”
“Sure!” she said, grabbing the breakfast pastry she had been eating off her plate and running off to do what I asked. I shook my head, as disgusted as I was amused by her obsession with food.
“Oh, and buy several large tarps or blankets for me!” I yelled after her. She threw her hand in the air in acknowledgment as she raced down the street.
I waited at the inn until Basil showed up with the other legionnaires. Constans returned with them to let me know she just ended up buying the biggest wagon outright, not seeing the point of renting anything when we might use it again. The only issue was that nobody in Sycae had livestock or draft animals for pulling wagons; most of the work was done by laborers around the city. Only the richest merchants had horses to pull their wagons, and those were all loaned to them by the army and could only be used for trading with the other enclaves.
I led Basil and the legion to collect the wagon. It was a monster of a wagon, bigger than the ones used by the dark elves, as if it had once been used to haul lumber to the city. It would work perfectly. I got in front of the wagon and placed the harness around my neck. With a surge of strength, I easily got the wagon moving. Basil and several of the others jumped in to help me by pushing the wagon, but I felt little actual strain from the work; my attributes and my Ant’s Strength perk made it more than easy.
We drew quite a lot of eyes as we made our way through the city. The sight of me pulling the wagon was only part of it. The other part, I noticed, was the number of people with me. Not many people traveled in groups as large as ours, unless they were up to no good or protecting a rich merchant. I heard a number of people speculating on who we were and what we were up to. I should have considered the attention we would draw by traveling in such a large group and had some of the legionnaires stay at the inn and travel separately. It was too late now, but hopefully nobody in power would bother to investigate what we were up to.
After a tense exchange with the gate guards, we were allowed outside the city. The young men and women around me whispered excitedly among themselves, staring at the ruined buildings and streets that filled the area. The guards watched us as we pulled away from the gate, clearly convinced we were all insane but not concerned enough to try to stop us.
Outside the city, I pulled the wagon over to the remnants of a house I had stashed the monsters’ corpses in the night before. I gestured for Basil to come over.
“Inside here are a number of corpses we need to bring back to the city. Can you get your people to load everything up and then cover it with the blankets Constans bought for us?”
“Yes, sir!”
I let him give the orders, wanting everyone to get used to seeing him in charge. The men and women worked quickly, only complaining slightly about the blood and smell coming from the bodies of the monsters. Once everything was loaded up, we pulled the covered wagon back into the city, the guards now staring at us in shock. My legionnaires smirked back proudly, holding their heads high. We took a few of the less popular roads down to the docks and then pulled the wagon into the new, secure warehouse Constans had bought for us.
I had Basil get everyone to carry the corpses down into the basement and pile them on the floor. There was plenty of room, although little fresh air, but it would serve the purpose for what I had in mind.
“What do you need all this for?” Basil asked me after we finished.
“I need the raw materials to start working on some projects for us,” I told him, not willing to go into details. He just stared at the pile of monsters and shook his head, already resigned to putting up with my strangeness, which I thought was a good sign for our future together.
I instructed Basil to have the others clean up the blood while I sent Constans off to get Nikephoros squared away.
I separated the monsters into three piles spaced around the basement. Once I had three equal-sized piles, I injected some custom nanobots into each one, something I had been designing as I traveled back from the dark elf city. Each nanobot sacrificed diversity for production speed, something I couldn’t do with my other nanobots without sacrificing too much utility. These nanobots only had two functions: reproduce and craft the very specific blueprints I had programmed into them. I left them in each pile to begin consuming the resources so they could mass-produce themselves.
I could have used any material for them to consume, but monsters were actually the only truly abundant resource in the city these days. If I were to buy enough metal or wood for my nanobots to consume, I would quickly bankrupt myself and deny the city a much-needed resource for people’s survival. Monsters, while inconvenient to kill, both fueled my nanobots and gave me experience, so they were the ideal resource for now. Of course, my nanobots would rapidly burn through the piles of corpses, so I would have to spend a significant amount of my time hunting for more, which would be quite time-consuming. Hopefully I could get Basil and the others to do some of it once I was confident they wouldn’t get themselves killed.
Back upstairs, I told everyone to stay out of the basement for now and to finish cleaning up here and then wait for me to return. I left them to it while I went and found Constans and a cleaned-up Nikephoros and led them back to the warehouse. Nikephoros grumbled as we walked, complaining under his breath about the mandatory bath and clean clothes. I politely ignored him, while Constans poked him every time his complaints got a bit too loud.
“Everyone,” I said, getting the young men and women’s attention as we closed the warehouse doors behind us. “This is Nikephoros. He used to be a legionnaire. I’ve hired him to start training you. He is only with us for a short time, but as he trains you, I expect you all to respect his authority. He knows the methods used to train legionnaires in the army, and you all will benefit from his training.”
Everyone perked up, looking at Nikephoros with interest.
“Nikephoros,” I said, turning to him. “Basil here is the centurion for what will become our legion. You will act as prefect. Train them however you see fit, and Constans will get anything you need. Don’t worry about weapons for now. I’m working on those. The main thing I want you to focus on is training them to work as a unit and learn the discipline that distinguished the legion from the rest of the world.”
I could tell he thought I was crazy, a recurring theme for the day, apparently, but he didn’t say anything. I left him standing awkwardly in front of the eager young legionnaires, looking a bit lost on what to do first, but I took Constans and left, closing the doors behind us. Before we got more than a couple of steps, I heard him start yelling orders.
“Sounds like he remembers what to do just fine,” I told Constans as she looked behind us in concern. “Constans, find me some work benches, stools, a few desks, and anything you can think would be needed in a workshop. Paper, blank books, things to write with, stuff like that. The only thing I won’t need is tools. Don’t worry about those. I’m going to turn this warehouse into my work area. Have them delivered here, if possible, but don’t let anyone inside that isn’t a part of our organization.”
“Got it!”
Once she took off, I dashed back over the water and began collecting all of the resources I had marked the other day and what I had found so long ago in some of the warehouses near the ancient harbors. I made trip after trip, ushering it all back over to the new warehouse. I considered having Basil and his team help, but trying to get everything back over to Sycae by boat would be more trouble than it was worth. With my Ant’s Strength perk, I could carry a significant amount of weight and still use Trickster’s Dash to get me across the water, so it was faster for me to do it by myself.
Even with my speed and the amount I could carry, it took me several days to transfer everything to the warehouse. During that time, I sent Constans back to her tutoring and training and ignored Nikephoros, who clearly felt none of the teenagers were in good enough shape to serve as proper legionnaires. I did not envy them, considering the workout he was giving them. Their once-eager smiles had significantly dimmed, but none of them slacked off or dragged their feet. Every time I stopped in with another load of goods, they were doing some exercise or another while he yelled at them to push themselves harder. The yelling was interspersed with lectures about how important your body was for magnifying the attributes you received from your classes.
I filled my workshop with the goods I had salvaged, organizing everything onto shelves I had dragged down into the basement. My three piles of nanobots were progressing well, slowly consuming the raw materials they would use to reproduce themselves. The smell was revolting, but there wasn’t much I could do about it, so I tried my best to ignore it.
Once Constans had all my furniture and supplies delivered, I organized the basement into three separate workstations. Each group of nanobots had a workbench next to it, and I placed the iron that I had salvaged around each station to make it easier for the nanobots to work the iron.
By the time I finished setting up the workstations and brought over the last of the goods I had found, my nanobots had finished consuming all of the monsters’ bodies. I gathered the specialized nanobots together and placed each of them on its respective workstation. They would need a ton of resources for what I had planned, but I was excited about the potential of my little specialized machines.
The first group of nanobots was programmed to make Penetration Bullets. They would take the iron and scrap steel I had provided them, turn it into fine steel, form it into the shape of a standardized bullet, and then carve out the three runes required to make the bullet fly. It was still going to be a slow process, even with the specialized nanobots, and would take a lot of resources, but making the bullets wouldn’t require my constant attention once I provided the necessary resources.
The second group of nanobots was programmed to make my revolvers, each one with a Durability rune on the handle to match the revolver I carried. The third group of nanobots was programmed to make nothing but Explosive Grenades. I would eventually have to salvage more pottery to make the grenades and more iron to form the revolvers and bullets, but for now, I should hopefully have enough to outfit my legionnaires before I ran out.
I watched as the specialized nanobots began to work, but they quickly ran out of material to consume and could no longer power themselves. I sighed and left the workshop, making my way north to the enclave’s wall. It was time to hunt once again.
Several days later, I settled back into my workshop. The specialized nanobots greedily consumed the many monsters I fed them, so I began work on a separate project of my own. I gathered some of the iron and wood and settled down in a nearby chair, humming a bit as I watched my nanobots working nearby. During my time with the dark elves, I had been thinking a lot about what I wanted to do once I got back to the city. One of the projects was to design something that had more range and power than my revolver. I carefully reviewed the blueprints I had designed as I traveled through the underdark until I was sure of exactly how I wanted the design to work.
Even with months of theory-crafting, I ended up working through the night and the next day, making prototypes and reworking them over and over whenever I found an inefficiency or flaw in the design.
When I was finally done, I was exhausted but pleased with my creation. On my Earth, it would have been called a carbine. It had a pump-action lever under the barrel, which would draw from a small magazine that held the same ammunition as my revolver to avoid having to produce two different kinds of bullets. The magazine could hold twenty bullets before it had to be replaced.
The rate of fire was slower than that of the revolver, but it could still be fired just as fast or faster than a bow and significantly faster than a crossbow. A person could aim and fire, pump the lever on the bottom of the rifle to reload, and fire again within a second. With twenty deadly Penetration Bullets being fired every twenty to thirty seconds, each one accurate up to a thousand feet or more, my legionnaires should be able to devastate most things in this world. It was hard to imagine what could stand up to a line of properly trained legionnaires armed with such weapons. And when the first magazine ran out of bullets, it only took a matter of seconds to reload the rifle.
It was, in many ways, a savage weapon. The people of this world were used to honorable warfare, but the rifle refused to play their games. There would no longer be honorable duels or carefully orchestrated battles where the skills of the soldiers or an individual fighter won the day. I knew I was ushering in a new era, one that could be even more brutal and oppressive than the one that existed now, but I couldn’t see another way that gave humanity a chance to survive. The class system favored individual strength and courage, but if people didn’t step forward to do their part, the whole system fell apart. When people selfishly hoarded their classes, their skill stones, and their knowledge, the common people paid the price. Guns were the great equalizer, even though they came with their own dangers. I just had to hope the good would outweigh the bad in the long run. Maybe someday I would be cursed for introducing such weapons to the world, but as it was right now, I wasn’t sure humanity was going to survive much longer. If people were still around in the future to curse me, I would take that as a success.
I grabbed twenty of my own Penetration Bullets and loaded a magazine, slotting it into the rifle with ease. I had used some of the cloth I had looted to make a strap from the bottom of the barrel to the stock so it could be thrown over a shoulder or across a person’s chest. I also made a larger satchel that would hold several magazines on a person’s belt. I primed the rifle, loading the first bullet into the chamber with a single pump of the lever, and then tossed the rifle over one shoulder. I strapped the satchel full of magazines to my belt and then looked around my workshop.
I was tired, but excitement burned in me; I was looking forward to testing out my newest creation. My nanobots had already burned through the corpses I had given them, days’ worth of hunting gone overnight, but there wasn’t much I could do about the enormous resource drain right now, other than go hunting once again. With my rifle over one shoulder, my revolver under my arm, and my sword on my hip, I left the warehouse to go kill some more monsters.
