Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

I saluted Arachne.

“Forgive me, I haven’t been sent on a mission before. Just, the entire situation feels a little unusual. A message through Night, instead of a courier? Directly to me, and not something with the Sixth?”

Arachne gave me a small smile.

“Good, you did notice. Yes, this one is unusual, even by Sentinel standards. Normally, what I’ve got here is a job for a Ranger team. Specifically, Ranger Team Gale.”

She gave me a pointed look at that.

Ah. The very same Ranger team I’d tied up - perfectly correctly and legitimately - on a corruption investigation. It was still ongoing, although the message had been heard loud and clear - don’t fuck with Dawn’s clinic.

At the same time, I happily dodged all responsibility for tying the team up. Arachne knew about it. Arache left it there for the Right People to eventually discover and handle the problem.

The Right People were now handling the problem, and going to level from it.

“I wouldn’t normally tap you, but you’ve previously expressed a strong interest in the topic, and the risks are extremely low. I believe this will be a good mission to shakedown your equipment and team. Congratulations to Nina on resetting her classes, but the timing is awkward.” Arachne winced at the last part. “That is partially on me.”

“What’s the mission?” I asked.

“You mentioned the [Playwright] of Taketori Monogatari might be from your world, and we’ve found where he’s going to be for the winter. His name appears to be Narukami Akamaru. He’s at the city of Kuri in Nippon-Koku. Given the significant impacts you have had on Pallos, we are most interested in recruiting him to Exterreri, on the off chance that he’s able to replicate a small fraction of your success.”

I crossed my arms at Arachne.

“Is this a euphemism for kidnapping? It sounds like a euphemism for kidnapping.”

Arachne laughed at me.

“No, my dear Dawn, no euphemisms with you. I have taken to heart your direct methods and way of speaking. When I say recruit, I truly mean recruit. I have seen what happens when kidnapping and coercion is applied. It works - briefly. A hundred years or so, tops. Without sufficient leverage, it is impossible to make a craftsman perform to the best of their ability. Paintings are muted and dull. Rebellion is fomented, morale is destroyed, and a rot sets in from within. No, kidnapping and coercion is for only the most dire of straits, which this is not.”

Sometimes, things were all nice, and then I was reminded that Arachne and Night had founded and kept an empire together thousands of years, helping rebuild it from the ashes each time it was knocked down. That often included doing not nice things.

I was reserving judgment. Night and Arachne had earned the benefit of doubt, and had demonstrated that they were remarkably hands-off in most situations. For all I knew, the last kidnapping had been centuries ago.

“You are authorized to offer almost anything within mortal means to draw him to our cause. Land, money, citizenship, protection, skills, resources. If he is truly from your world, you have a stronger cultural background to understand what will make him tick, what offers could be enticing. Offering to turn him into a vampire is the only matter in which you are not authorized to offer. This does not extend to your own, personal Immortality skill, should you choose to share it.”

I gave Arachne a flat look, silently communicating how I felt about that. She immediately interpreted my concern.

“If you happen to turn him Immortal, we will compensate you properly. Is the average price that your Immortality gems sold for at auction, with a 20% premium for your service, sufficient? That comes out to approximately 320,000 arcs.”

I did a double take at that.

“Hang on, how did you know-” I cut myself off and facepalmed. It was literally Arachne’s job to know stuff, even though Amber hadn’t made it back and finished the transaction yet. Nice to get an update on how she was doing.

Arachne gave me her patented all-knowing smirk. I shook my head, focusing on the issue at hand.

“Right! Mission! Go recruit the potential dude from Earth. Hit me with all the details, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Arachne held up a hand.

“Before I give you all the details, just checking one last time. This is purely optional. If you want to decline, that’s fine, I’ll happily send it over to a Ranger team. I’m only asking you because of your stated desire to look into this.”

I eagerly nodded and held out my hand.

“Yup! Plus, there’s a big mystery, something I can’t figure out and I’d like to ask about. The tale in question that made me think something was up? It’s not exactly huge and famous. Yet, it’s been almost 25,000 years since I came to Pallos. There’s a certain implication that they’re from a similar time period as me. What’s going on with that!?”

Arachne looked thoughtful.

“I have some theories of my own.”

I perked up at that. She gave me the same all-knowing smile.

“Which I will be happy to share with you after this mission, as to not taint your own analysis.”

I mimed my heart being stabbed.

“Cruel! So cruel!” I complained.

“Speaking of cruel…” Arachne said, clearly enjoying my distress. “It’d be far too cruel of you to leave on a mission, and not even have a home to come back to! Your new home should be built tomorrow.”

I spun off one thought process to analyze what she said about not coercing people, how this whole mission was basically endless bribes to get a potentially valuable person to come to Exterreri, and Arachne making sure I was putting down roots. There was something there…

Eh, maybe I’d just make Iona analyze it.

Another train of thought continued the conversation.

“Wow, thank you! How’d you manage that?” I asked, immediately knowing I’d fallen for her trap.

Arachne winked at me.

“Oh, I pulled a few strings.”

“What did Arachne want?” Iona asked as I made it back to the inn.

I plopped down gratefully onto the bed, leaning into Iona as she started to work on my knotted muscles with her rough, calloused hands. They smoothly -

I killed that train of thought. I knew exactly where it led, and I wanted to talk business first.

“Hey Auri!” I called out. The little hummingbird peeked cautiously inside.

“Yes, it’s all safe, come on in.” I said. The little hummingbird darted over, nestling in my hair.

“Two things.” I answered. “First, we’ve got a mission. I know Nina just reset her classes, which is less than optimal. If you want to stay behind, I’ll totally get it. It’s a weird one. A recruiting mission in Nippon-Koku.”

Iona looked unimpressed.

“Yes, nobody better to send than someone breaking at least two provisions of the Treaty of Kyowa, and probably half a dozen minor agreements on top of that.”

She had a point. Auri was nodding along.

“It’s the person I think might be from Earth.” I hurriedly added. “Arachne wants me to go, due to my own stated interest in the topic. If they are from Earth, well, they’re not exactly a native of Nippon-Koku. It’s not a big, flashy mission of any sort. Just, go in, poke around, see if they’re willing to take a stupid amount of money to move back here, and come back. Maybe see the sights a bit. No violence, no blood, no problems.”

Iona picked me up, turned me around, and put me on her lap. She stared deep into my eyes, and without breaking contact, knocked on the wooden walls of the inn.

“Brrrpt!” Auri pecked my head.

I rolled my eyes at her.

“Yeah, yeah, point taken. I’d want to go, regardless if the Sentinels officially sanction a mission or not. I suspect Arachne is doing me something of a favor.”

“She also wants to know everything you can get. It’s not entirely altruistic.” Iona pointed out.

“Brrpt brrrpt!” Auri chimed in.

“True.” I admitted. “But it’s something I want to do.”

Iona shifted, her stern look becoming much happier.

“Well! Something you want to do is an entirely different story.” She frowned. “Nina resetting is poor timing. I don’t want to take her, and we can’t leave her here.”

I grinned.

“Well! That brings us to the next point! Arachne pulled some strings, and our house is getting built tomorrow!”

Iona groaned at the terrible pun that I’d shamelessly reused, then grinned and pumped her fist.

“FUCK yeah!” She grabbed me and kissed me, and I loved it.

“BRRRRRRRRRRPTT!!” Auri shrieked her approval, then started worrying. “Brrpt, brrrrpt? Brrrpt? BRPT!!!”

Three seconds later, she was shooting out the still-closed window, smoldering embers in the outline of a hummingbird ‘improving’ the room’s airflow.

“That’s really nice of Auri to want to make food for everyone. We’re kinda in the middle of nowhere. What else can we add in?” I asked.

Iona had an evil look on her face. It was entirely unnatural, and struck fear into my heart.

“Help me get a barrel! It’s water hauling time!”

The next morning was a flurry of communication and coordination, before the main event.

Turned out with magic and skills being a thing, the biggest issue in building a house was getting all the material in position. The second biggest issue was getting all the right people at the right place at the right time.

Fortunately, not my headache. The builders - Casa Pernoctare - had 95% of that figured themselves, and the last hurdle was showing them where, roughly, we wanted the house built. They’d do a little bit of shifting on their own, for esoteric building reasons.

Hey, people didn’t tell me how to set a bone, I didn’t tell builders what the best place to make a house was.

Iona was on the ground, the Valkyrie being much better at discussion, communication, and coordination than I was. I was high up in the sky, giving the hybrid tiger-eagle-butterfly eye of things. Nina was down with Iona, acting as her runner and general errand girl.

Hey, it was literally what her class wanted her to do. In a twist, she’d only come out with one [Page] class - she hadn’t really had the proper prerequisites when classing up the first time, and didn’t have a Wind [Page] class available, with her second class being the all-round [Apprentice] class. She’d get double [Squire] at 32, no trouble.

Casa Pernoctare was impressive. They’d basically hijacked the entire road with wagon after wagon of stones in large blocks, piles of gravel, bags of pebbles, mounds of rocks, smooth polished marble slabs, unfired clay, planks of wood, rods of steel, and the thousand other materials needed to build a home, pulled by a mix of mules and nodosauruses. [Wagon Drivers] looked bored in the mix, a [Foreman] was shouting directions, and a veritable army of [Builders] were wielding shovels and pastries that Auri was dishing out as fast as she could.

Fenrir was deeply amused by the whole thing, saddled to the fangs with slightly squashed bread and cake. In an unexpected twist, seeing him had calmed people down. Maybe their logic was something this big and scary would stop anything else from harassing them? We were a little in the middle of nowhere, and even now the wilderness pressed in on the roads, the grasping tendrils of life trying to crumble and erode civilization’s roads.

Iona waved to me, and I dove down.

“Can you mark our proposed road again?” She asked. “It’ll be easier and faster than the [Surveyor] working out her own path.”

I flew up again, checking one last time the path we wanted the road to take. There was a nasty little cliff between our proposed spot and the nearest road, and it was far cheaper to simply go around it.

With two fingers firing [Nova Lance], two paths of blazing Radiance, I traced the outline of the road from the easiest intersection, up the mountain, and right to the base of our home. We’d already chopped down the offending trees, but nature was undeterred. In just a few short weeks brush had sprung up, ferns had exploded into the light like they’d always belonged.

My magic seared a path through them, marking the edges of where we wanted things to go. I flew back up, and got to watch the magic happen.

I had to remind myself that this was almost pure physical stats. I could perform brief miracles, but hours long marathons of superhuman efforts like I was watching were the miracle of the physical side of the System.

A few of the [Builders], perhaps [Woodcutters] or [Clearers], advanced forward with axes and machetes. They hacked and sliced away at the foliage, killing bushes and hauling large sticks out of the way. One fellow followed a little behind with a pickaxe, looking a little bored. Given what the others were doing, maybe he was supposed to smash large rocks?

We’d already cleared those out. I guess they didn’t believe us when we said we had, but then again, I couldn’t blame them.

One of their only [Mages] walked a good distance away from them, and when they were far enough, a small lick of controlled flame went up as he cleanly burned away the debris.

“Brrrrrrrpt!” Auri’s shriek of excitement heralded the little phoenix shooting over like a comet. I saw the issue, and dove down to intercept her, glorying as the wind gently held me.

In a beautiful display I hoped Iona had caught and would draw, I managed to catch Auri like a flaming ball before she could make trouble.

“Auri.” I lifted her up to eye level and stared at her. “No. We all have a job to do. Right now, yours is baking and giving people food, right?”

“Brrrpt!”

“And his job is to cleanly burn things. Remember, other people are allowed to burn stuff as well, and they might be doing something besides just burning. Come on. If you want to participate, ask to learn, instead of taking over.”

“BRRRRRPT!!” Auri shrieked in protest that’s exactly what she was doing!! It was terribly unfair for me to make assumptions about her like that, and it wasn’t lunchtime yet! The snacks had all been distributed!

“Ooops. Sorry! My bad!” I apologized and let her go. Iona laughed at the whole thing - not in a mean way.

“You good?” She called out across the field.

“I’m good!” I yelled back, taking once again to the air.

The burning mage was an interesting look at a number of my old Fire lessons. He didn’t endlessly conjure flames up. No, after a little spark to get started, he was carefully herding the flames down the path, keeping them under control while getting a whole road’s worth of greenery burned. It was an excellent display of mana conservation, one I could’ve taken lessons from in another life.

Then the army of diggers descended, with three shovels to every pickaxe, with the occasional exotic tool mixed in. They broke stones, then dug deep with their shovels, going through ground far easier than they had any right to, moving more with each haul than would ordinarily be possible. A deep trench that would be filled in to make the road appeared at record speed, five [Mages] stomping along behind them.

There were no clever tricks here. Stone and dirt were heavy, and even with the shovel army doing a fine job of things, the process of making things just right took lots of mana.

Once they’d gotten a distance away from the road, the first cart moved into position. A layer of mortar was poured, and more [Builders] with rakes jumped in, smoothing it down. No [Mage] this time, but I did spot the mortar moving in ways that suggested the [Builders] had several related skills.

The moment it was in place, it hardened, and by the time the cutting wave made it to the clearing where we hoped to place the villa, the first layer of stones were being physically hauled into the road, carelessly dumped on top of the hardened mortar.

No skills here, it wasn’t needed. Just move rocks from A to B, and it didn’t quite matter how they ended.

Precut stones for drainage were slotted in next, and nearly all the people working on that were tagged as [Artisans]. It was fascinating that they just needed to hammer things close enough, and the stones would snap to each other.

Bags of pebbles were upended onto the stones, and things slowed down for a few hours. The caravan started to slowly move up the road, each emptied wagon cutting through the wilderness to get back to the main road. The cutting crews helped with that, chopping a path through the trees and helping guide the animals down the treacherous terrain.

The caravan made it to the clearing where our home would go, and broke for lunch.

Auri’s baked goods entirely vanished, and she and Fenrir went on a supply run back to Sanguino to get more. Not that it was entirely needed - one of the supply wagons was packed with the [Laborer’s] meals.

Nobody was turning down free cookies.

Iona, the [Foreman], and a few other people put their heads together as she shared the blueprints that Vitruvius had made for us once again. Layer by layer, she went over the diagrams again, and an illusion started to form in the clearing.

A translucent image of what needed to go where, a handy, almost-impossible to screw up guide to where the [Builders] needed to put materials for the [Artisans] to work on, and the final location for everything.

Then he snapped the full illusion of what the place should look like over it all, and Iona beckoned me down.

“Check if this looks right.” She said.

“On it!” I flew back up into the air, frowning at the awkward way two rooms didn’t join together properly. I flitted back down.

“Check how the bathhouse is meeting the master bedroom.” I told the [Foreman]. “It doesn’t look right to me.”

He looked like he wanted to argue for a moment, but I guess having the bird’s eye view of things, and being vaguely polite about it got him to double check things, stomping through his own illusions.

I chuckled quietly to myself as he stumbled on a stray rock he’d accidentally masked. Whoops!

At the spot in question he flickered back through the diagrams Vitruvius made, scowling, and correcting himself.

Which of course meant I had to run back through the entire illusionary diagram, checking every room. This was the final chance to find and fix anything, before it became permanent.

I consulted with Iona on a few minor things, and some of them had to be that way due to the piping in the walls or floor, and a few were just misunderstandings due to how complex the entire diagram was.

We signed off our approval on the plans, and the [Builders] got to work, having finished off lunch in the time we were confirming the plans.

A small army of shovels went back to work on the ground, a couple of [Laborers] started grabbing bags of sand and upending them over the pebbled road, and stacks upon stacks of fitted stones were laid down on the road, completing the construction. It was slow, tedious work, but the [Artisans] - same ones who’d put down the drainage stones on the side - had time.

Everyone else was building an entire house.

The illusion of the villa went almost entirely transparent. The brightest and most visible items were the piles of wood, stone, marble, iron, and all the other resources that were needed. The crew wasn’t exactly a perfectly well-oiled machine - people got in each other’s way, tempers flared, and a fistfight almost broke out - but I wouldn’t believe things going perfectly smoothly on a construction site anyway. People swore, cursed, and the perimeter line for the house clearly marked that the rest of the mountain was obviously a latrine. Nevermind the real one that was dug and clearly marked.

Hey, how the sausage got made was never pleasant. Such was life.

Stage by stage, shout by shout, dispute by dispute, the place rapidly came to life. Trenches were dug, foundation and piping was laid, [Mages] and [Artisans] walked along them, automatically fixing and adjusting a thousand tiny things with their skills. Then the ground was leveled by hand, shovel, and skill, then the frame was erected. The bare bones of the house were complete.

I started to recognize a few people who simply patrolled around, checking that an area was good before reporting back to the [Foreman]. Then the area would shimmer with the next stage of construction. Nice to know there were quality controls.

The water cistern went up, along with the physical and magical filtration, and Iona helped Nina strap an empty barrel to her back, pointing in the direction of the nearest river.

I flew up as high as I could, keeping a careful watch over Nina on her first trip. She barely had any levels, and right now could use some cautious oversight. Just in case. The place wasn’t completely tamed, no matter that all the bustle and activity had scared everything off.

She made it down the mountain easily enough, quickly overtaking the people laying the road tiles and the sand. She got a little lost finding the river - it wasn’t obvious - but her ears twitched at the sound of running water about a minute before I was going to dive down and give her a tip.

I watched with amusement and a faint sense of nostalgia as she wrestled with the barrel and the river. There was a whole epic tale to be sung there, one girl’s battle against the raging river in a bid to appease her demanding and exacting master. It had failures and triumphs, struggles and joy as the barrel resisted attempts to be easily manipulated, got ripped out of her hands at one point, she ended up almost getting swept away, managed to grab it and swim back to shore, found out she was on the wrong side of the river, worked her way back, and finally, finally, had a half-full barrel. She slung the straps over her shoulder, and started finding the road again, then following the long path back up the mountain.

I almost dropped in when she lost the barrel, but was pleased I didn’t when I saw her gaining 4 levels when she finished her first run.

She looked like she was going to cry after climbing up the cistern ladder, emptying the barrel in, and seeing just how little it did to the total volume we needed.

I came in then.

“Hey! Good job!” I told her. “Let’s do the next run together!”

I scrounged up another barrel, then we did another water run together. After getting reassured that she could do this safely without my supervision, I picked up the pace, bouncing back and forth between the river and our steadily growing home.

Goddesses, this was going to take forever. The water level was barely moving.

Fenrir, of all people, noticed the issue, and poked his snout in.

“No conjured water or ice.” I reminded him. “It’s not good.”

He snorted a great draconic snort, and took off with a flap of his wings. I watched him go over to the river, and utterly blast the hell out of it with his [Ice Beam] skill. He then grabbed the floating iceberg in his talons, picked it up, and flew it back over.

Iona noticed, and did a single bounding leap over to the tower.

“Go!” She shouted, and Fenrir dropped the icecube from as low as he could. Iona and I applied ourselves, getting the ice in the cistern, and not breaking the whole thing as it landed.

I had a fleeting moment of pride, before the reality of what I’d done crashed over me, all the implications of my actions catching up with me. I shivered and rubbed my arms.

“Fuck. The bath is going to be so fucking cold.”

“Brrrpt!”

Or not.

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