“Not so fast, future husband.” Vex shook her head and then glanced at the door’s direction. “You see, Lady Black Fang decided to provide you with a sign-up bonus of sorts. Consider it her token of goodwill. I think you will love it.”
I curiously followed her example, and raised an eyebrow when it burst open with a thundering *Crash!* The wooden frame splintered as if it had been struck by a battering ram.
Except, it wasn’t a ram but Raika. Draped over her shoulder like a sack of grain was a man, bound and unconscious, with his arms dangling limply.
She strode into the room with the grace of an agitated rhino. Once she reached Vex, she unceremoniously dumped the man onto the floor with a resounding thud. The impact was enough to make him groan in pain as he began to stir.
Raika didn’t even spare him a glance. Instead, she expectantly turned toward Vex with her arms crossing as she raised an eyebrow. “How was it?” Vex asked. Her tone and facial features spoke of her immense amusement.
“Boring. No challenge whatsoever.” Raika replied flatly and her voice was dripping with contempt as her sharp glare shot toward the man. She looked at him like he was a worm writhing in the mud, a human scum who was unworthy of her attention.
Perhaps just to vent a bit of her annoyance, she spat “Pathetic…” before delivering a kick to his ribs, sending him rolling across the floor like a ball. The man gasped and coughed violently as he came to.
I couldn’t help but chuckle inwardly. Her epithet of ‘Brutalizer’ was very fitting, and I also understood why Vex said that if I wanted to tame her, I’d have to beat obedience into her over multiple duels until she understood my supremacy without a shred of a doubt. She was truly like a wild animal.
I also elected to listen to Vex by deciding not to give Raika any prank calls with my communication artifact. I didn’t feel like being on the receiving end of the rage of a furious lioness.
“Raika, you’d already met them during the second event of the Trials, but let me introduce Devil and Ambition to you properly. They became Vesper Phenoms just today under master’s sponsorship, so you might have to work with them in the future.”
Vex’s declaration forced the black-haired, utterly gorgeous woman to at long last recognize my presence. I’m sure she was aware of it already, but she completely ignored me thus far.
She eyed me for just just a second before scoffing, “Way too weak…” and then began to walk out of the room.
A very annoyed vein popped on my forehead. I didn’t expect her to show me respect, but this… It seemed that I’d have to put some bratty behavior correction measures in place once I became strong enough to do so. A firm spanking session was in order.
If your future wives were lacking, it was on you to educate them of the errors of their ways.
Once Raika left the room, I turned toward the still-giggling Vex. She must’ve found this interaction of ours rather comical. “Is this man my sign-up bonus?”
“Hehe, that he is. Don’t worry, I know you prefer your partners to be a bit more on the feminine side of things, he has other uses. Namely, he is the Volt, a mage in the service of the Greenvale Duke. When Lady Black Fang saw your fight with Kael, she sent Raika to kidnap him.”
There were so many questions swirling in my mind about this abrupt revelation, but on the forefront of them all was: “why give him to me?”
“She’s only loaning him to you, not gifting permanently. As you can see, he’d been enslaved so he can’t resist, but she plans to give him back to the Duke alongside a kindly worded apology letter, so treat him well. As for why give him to you in specific, that’s because he is an Electromancer. You learned magma from fighting a deviant mancer, so she thought that you would appreciate this little gesture from us.”
My lips immediately curled upwards into a twisted smile.
A sign-up bonus, huh…
This woman called Black fang certainly knew how to warm herself up to my heart without even meeting me once. I suddenly had a lot more positive image of her in my head than I did a moment ago.
…
I took temporary ownership of the Electromancer called Volt and soon found myself back at home. Naturally, I didn’t bring him to my home, because I had to give him back in the future and if he saw my [Warp Gate], that would make life ‘a bit’ harder for me. I also couldn’t [Subjugate] him because he was already enslaved. My [Subjugation] would overwrite the contract, letting Black Fang or whoever was behind his enslavement know that something was up. Therefore, I tasked Kaelira and her team with taking him to a location on foot.
Before I could decide where exactly he should be taken to for me to learn the element from him, I rushed to my room, took a seat on my favorite sofa, and brought my saber out.
I wanted to study it immediately, but I couldn’t do so in front of the large crowd of the arena or some secret of mine might end up getting spilled.
I didn’t even need to touch my storage ring to take it out, simply willing it to emerge was enough.
The saber appeared accompanied by an audible hiss as a gust of blue smoke emerged out of my storage ring.
Then, like a ghostly entity, the weapon floated in midair before me, where it continued hovering, waiting for my next move.
The lingering smoke slowly dissipated, leaving only the weapon suspended before me.
[Name: Soul Reaper]
[Rarity: Mythical]
[Skills: Eternal Damnation, ???, ???]
[Owner: Quinlan Noir]
Let’s dissect this one by one. The name was ultra badass, but it didn’t do much beyond giving it flair. However, I had a faint idea tugging in my mind that the name was not given by Björn, the primordial who crafted it, at least not in the traditional sense.
Mythical rarity was a giant shocker. Thus far, Legendary rarity was the most acclaimed artifact rarity I’d ever heard about. The veiling artifact we stole from the kingdom’s outpost was of the Legendary rarity, and it was treated like a national treasure.
This was one step above that one, if not more. I didn’t know if there was anything between Legendary and Mythical, because I’d never heard of anything being rarer than Legendary.
Of course, Unique-rarity was the exception, but that seemed to be only given by the Soul Records. If I crafted a random shitty weapon it would be Junk rarity, not Unique, even if no other replicas of it existed in the whole world. Rarity represented its might, excellence, and value, not how rare an artifact or gear was, because most hand-crafted items would be Unique otherwise.
Mythical was likely the highest rarity a crafter could produce.
Next up was the imbued skill, Eternal Damnation. This was the reason why I thought that the blade might’ve not been named by Björn, because it just fit my needs so perfectly. It allowed me to store the souls of the slain, letting me progress on the requirements of the Necromancer class. There was no limit on how many souls I could store, the only limitation was that I had to be the one who killed the enemy. Storing souls by itself didn’t seem to do much, though. Well, I’ll know once I capture one.
Anyways, either I got extremely lucky and happened to receive a sealed weapon that would turn out to be perfect for my current needs months after acquiring it, or Björn was on the level where he could make weapons capable of adaptation and evolution. I leaned towards the latter.
It made some sense at least, because primordials were said to be the masters of adaptation and he was the greatest craftsman in Thalorind. If someone could achieve this feat, it would be him.
The last part, the [Owner: Quinlan Noir], meant that only I could wield it. The Soul Reaper would refuse if someone other than me tried to do so.
It was a banger of a weapon, let’s just leave it at that.
…