Blood Shaper

Book 3: Chapter 25

“Murunel?” Kay stuck his head inside his office and saw her sitting in his chair, looking out the window.

“Huh?” Her head shot up as she spun to face him. She smiled at him as he walked in. “Hey! Done with your meeting?”

“Yeah, we just finished up.” He grabbed a chair and dragged it around to sit next to her.

Murunel turned back to look out over the village with a big grin on her face. “You guys have done so much while I was gone!”

“Yeah,” He laughed, “And we’re just getting started. Everyone thinks tons of people are going to come once word spreads about my title.”

She looked over with a shocked expression, “You talked about it?”

“Made a big announcement in the main square and let the news spread.” He saw her surprise and shrugged, “It was going to get out eventually. I just chose the moment that worked for us.”

“Wow.”

He shrugged again. “It is what it is.” Kay turned to look directly at her. “Hey.”

“Hmm? What’s up?”

“What… No, that makes me sound like a dick…” He looked away as he thought about his wording.

“What?”

“I’m thinking of the right way to say something.”

“Okay…?”

After a moment, Kay nodded and looked back at her, “Right. The way you were acting when I invited you to the meeting got me a little worried. It wasn’t anything like I’ve seen you act before, so I was wondering if you would talk to me about it.”

“Oh.” Murunel’s worried expression dropped away, replaced with one of slight exasperation. “It’s not really a big deal, but sure. The short version is that I’m not comfortable being in a leadership or decision-making position. I tried it once when my parents tried to teach me about their positions, and… well, it didn’t go well.”

“Yeah, alright.” Kay leaned back, tilting his chair to rest against his desk, “You’re right. That’s not really a big deal, especially since we won’t be forcing anyone into a job they don’t want to do.”

Murunel shrugged, “It’s not like I’d run screaming if people were suddenly looking to me for direction; I just prefer to deal with my own specialty when it comes to leading anyone. If I have to make decisions about stuff I don’t know that much about, I start getting anxious about what could happen. So yeah, we’re fine as long as no one is pushing me into situations like that.”

“What is your specialty?” Kay asked, “I don’t think we ever talked about it.”

“Talking about it while I was stuck in that damn ball would have just made me more depressed.” Her frown quickly turned into a grin, “But I’m free now, and I get to go back to work!” She stood up and dramatically pointed at herself with a thumb. “I’m a miner!”

Kay imaged her in her giant golden dragon shape with a massive pickaxe tearing a mountain apart and started laughing.

Murunel leaned back from his laughter with a frown. “What’s funny?”

He explained himself, and she ended up giggling too.

“No, I do most of it in this shape, although I do sometimes use my other shape to move big rocks or other obstacles, so I don’t have to spend time breaking them up.” She sat back down in her chair before continuing. “My tier five Class combined a few mining and prospecting Classes together, so I’m good at both finding useful materials and digging them up.”

“That’s great! We’ve got a couple of teams looking for materials in the area, although only one of them is really dedicated to it. Cindy sometimes uses her clairvoyance to find stuff and earn bonuses for her party. You can supplement them or work alone or whatever you want.”

“Eh, we’ll figure it out.”

“What’s your Class called if you don’t mind?”

“It’s fine. I’m a Valuable Material Excavator!”

“Huh. What’s your Class Skill?”

“Oh,” She smirked at him, “You want to know all my secrets? You’ll have to share yours too…”

Kay tilted his head back and laughed. “Sure, once I’m tier five, I’ll tell you all the details.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “You’re no fun, just agreeing like that.”

“What, am I supposed to do something else?” He jumped up from his seat and loomed over her with a wicked grin. “Something like threaten you with some kind of perilous torture if you fail to give up your secrets?” He inched closer with his hands held out, fingers curled into claws.

“Nooo!” She tried ineffectually scooting her chair away from him, “I told you I was ticklish in confidence!” She batted his hands away from her.

He pulled back and sat down. “No, it’s fine. We already agreed to a good deal.”

Murunel glared at him, panting as she got her breath back. “You’re terrible.”

“So what’s your Class Skill?”

“Terrible!”

He just grinned at her as she pulled her chair back to its original spot. “My Class has two Class Skills, thank you!” She said with a dramatic sniff. “The first is Pinpoint Valuable Materials. It works best with maps, but it lets me figure out the general location of valuable materials in an area that I’m in.”

Kay’s eyes got wide as an excited grin spread across his face. “Seriously?” He stood up and grabbed a map he was making of Avalon and the surrounding area, centered on the village with a roughly fifteen-mile radius. He hadn’t done all of the scouting personally, but he was working on seeing it all himself to add better detail to the map. He spread it out over his desk. “How does it define ‘valuable materials’?”

She came over next to him and watched as he pinned the map down. “It only works with metals, minerals, and gemstones, since it’s a Miner path Class, but it really just finds anything that isn’t rock.” She shrugged, “Everything can be valuable to someone, I guess.”

“What’s the other Skill?” He asked as he looked for something to hold the last corner down.

“Separate Valuable Material. Once I actually find a vein or ore or something, I can touch it and use that Skill to separate part or all of the material from the surrounding rock. It makes it easier to dig out and lets me bring out cleaner bits of ore that don’t need to have as much work done to pull them out of whatever bits of rock a normal Miner would pull out. It also helps keep gemstones intact since I just have to break the rock surrounding them; I don’t actually have to break them from the rock itself.”

“That is so cool.” Kay breathed out.

She grinned back at him, “Yeah, it’s pretty awesome, isn’t it?” She nodded down at the map. “The skill shows physical markers on the map, but they fade after a few minutes, so you’ll want to remember them or write it down or something.”

Kay grabbed his cartography kit and pulled out one of his pens. “I’ll just mark them on here. I can always make another copy of this map without the marks.”

“Ready?”

“Go ahead.”

Murunel touched a finger to the center of the map. She took a breath, then spoke. “[Pinpoint Valuable Materials]”

Kay didn’t expect her to use the Voice of the World, but he was much higher tier than the last time he’d heard it and barely flinched as the unique feeling hit him. Small golden spikes of energy started appearing over the map, starting near Murunel’s finger and spreading out in a circular pattern from there. After a moment, the spikes stopped appearing.

“If I move my finger, the Skill stops early, so you’ll need to work around me.”

Kay started putting down little marks underneath each of the floating spikes. The tips of them all touched the map, but they were intangible, so he just stuck his pen inside them and drew quick star shapes where each one touched. He circled the desk, leaning over to reach some of the spots so that he didn’t bump into Murunel. He made it to the last one, which hovered right over the edge of the map, right as the skill ended and the spikes vanished. He made the last mark and looked up at Murunel.

She stepped back and let out a deep breath. “That takes a lot of mana.”

He looked from her to the map and back a few times. With a spring in his step, he came up to her and grabbed her up in a giant hug. “You are fantastic!”

She flailed in his arms for a second as he lifted her in his arms, then she relaxed and hugged him back with a laugh. “Thanks, I’m happy to help.”

“This is great! It cuts down on so much work! We can have solid jobs for people when the crowds start showing up, which will be a big part of keeping the people we want and cutting down on stupid shit.” He set her down and whirled back to the map. “The people we’ve got searching for stuff can shift their focus to other kinds of materials, and the ones that are prospectors or miners can get start mining now!” He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you so much!”

She blushed and took a step away from him. “It’s no problem. This is my new home too, so I have to pull my own weight.”

He looked over with a smile, then focused back on the map. “How accurate are these marks?”

“Each one is the center of a circle that the resource is somewhere inside of.”

“How big are the circles?”

“Half-mile radius.”

Kay pulled out a piece of string and a pin that he used to draw circles around each of the points. “I need to copy this and start getting it to people so we can capitalize on this.” He paused, then reached up to gently hit himself on the forehead. “Dammit, no. I have to meet with the other person the Adventurer’s Guild found for us.”

“Don’t you have someone to delegate this to?”

“Honestly, no. We’ve got some scouts, but I’m the only person with an actual map-making Class in all of Avalon. For now, at least.”

“Huh.” Murunel frowned for a second. “That’s kind of surprising.”

“Right?” Kay sighed and started tolling up the map. “It can wait a little while. It’s not like I could actually get people to start looking in the areas until tomorrow at the earliest. There’s all kinds of prep they’d have to do.” He sighed again, “And we’ll need to arrange someone to act as guards for any groups we send out. A bunch of monsters are flooding back into the area since we killed the eldritch being. There’s even some kind of rock-eating flightless bird that’s shown up on top of the plateau.”

“I’m sorry, but what eldritch being?”

Kay frowned. “What do you mean… Wait, that’s right, you left before we figured everything out.” He out the window. “C’mon, walk with me while I track down Meten and our new candidate. I’ll tell you the whole story on the way.”

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