(Book One Complete!) Friendly Neighbourhood Goblin (Mercenary Company LitRPG)

"Lumenurgy," Wasptongue was saying, "Is the art of manipulating light. You may say to yourself, well I bloody already knew that, you senile old hag."

She paced from side to side, spearing the ground with her cane after each step. She stopped abruptly and turned to Stump, one accusatory white eye peering through ropes of grey hair. "Are you saying that?"

Stump fumbled for words. "No," he managed. "No, of course not." The old lady had a way of making you feel as though you were always a misstep away from igniting her goblin rage.

She studied him with those small elder eyes for an uncomfortable stretch of time. "Good. You'd be gravely mistaken. There are those who devote their lives to Lumenurgy and never fully uncover its secrets."

She started towards him with a slow, deliberate hobble. "The manipulation of light. Simple enough to understand. But what is light? What does it do?"

The pause that followed convinced Stump it was not a rhetorical question. "Uh… light illuminates—"

"Shut up," she hissed. "I haven't finished. Light reveals, it uncovers, what have you. But it does much, much more if you learn the language of Lumensa, if you speak her words and sing her music." She stopped several paces in front of him and rubbed her gums together thoughtfully. "Create a light."

He stretched out his arms and found his palms to be sweaty. His heart was beating a little faster than normal, but he knew it was because he still saw her the same way his tribesmen saw their matrons.

A moment later a lumen flickered where he directed. Stump squinted at it. Wasptongue was unbothered. "Good," she said. "The most basic form of Lumenurgy, the focus tree all students can manage. Illumomancy. All magical skills come with some form or other of its most elementary manipulation. Now turn it into a sword."

Stump, who was focused on sustaining the globule's existence, blinked. "What?"

She jabbed her cane in the air impatiently. "The form of a sword. Go."

He moved his hands like he was molding a piece of clay. The globe bubbled and stretched into a vaguely rectangular shape. He squeezed it down with great effort, sharpening one end and crafting something of a hilt on the other. It shifted and fought his will, trying to return to its natural shape.

She acknowledged it like an undesirable growth in a sack of grain. "Well… it'll do. Now make it look like a sword. I want to see the glint of its metal and the handiwork of its pommel."

"I… can't," he said, fighting hard to maintain the loose appearance of something vaguely stabby.

"Then hit me with it."

"I can't," he repeated. "It's just light."

"No, no, it is not just light, it is light," she explained. A second ball appeared next to the first. It swiftly took the shape of a sword. The blade came into focus, a silver metal that shimmered in the light of Stump's inferior creation. The hilt flashed gold and was adorned with ruby and sapphire.

"Light determines not just if we see," she said, "but what we see. There are those more accomplished than I who can condense the light into something solid. And others still who can bestow it with sound. A real sword, you see, out of nothing but magic."

Stump dropped his concentration at her direction.

"Bending light around yourself to become unseen, colouring it to form illusory figures, communicating, seeing, travelling great distances, harnessing the power of the sun in all its life giving heat. The library of Lumensa is an extensive one. But the gods were smart—apart from getting killed by Jaessun. No single deity could have claimed ultimate power when they were alive. They must work together, in concert. Perhaps it was their strength, but it may have been their undoing."

Stump watched her speak as she hobbled around him. "What was Grumul's power?" he asked. Ever since Morg had told him about the death of Lumensa, he couldn't rid himself of the thought of their great goblin overlord, splayed out in some field or forest, being gnawed at by rats and the slow advance of nature.

She shot him an annoyed look. "Grumul is Thermanus, lord of Thermalurgy. It is his goblin aspect," she said. "You are level four, yes? A fortuitous level, as it happens. You must now allocate your focus point. If you were to reach out to Grumul, to Thermanus, you could bridge the gap between he and Lumensa, unlocking the synergistic skill of Solarmancy. The power of light and heat."

She paused and stared at him, uncomfortably close.

He remembered the roiling, burning ball of light the cultist had summoned and Stump had taken control of. The power of the sun, he thought.

"And if I stay within the skill of Lumenurgy?" he said.

"Yes, well, there are a few options there. You could harness the powers of bending light, or of mastering colour, or of combining the two and becoming a practiced Illusionist, as I have," she went on. "You could put another point in a tree you already have unlocked, decreasing the cost of its enhancements. But there are other, darker paths to walk. You know of Umbralanus, yes?"

Stump nodded. "An aspect of Lumensa."

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"He is frowned upon nowadays, though you could spend your point to follow the ways of the Umbramancers, if you like. Manipulation of shadow is a manipulation of light, though many would disagree. Just like the Cryomancers who worship the cold aspect of Thermanus."

The names and connections swirled in Stump's mind. He was dizzy with all the information, all the unknowns, all the things he was never taught by his tribe as a young goblin. Grumul was all there ever was to him. "It's a lot to think about," he admitted.

And it was exciting. None of the storybooks he'd read by the dim firelight of the cave could have prepared him for how vast the world of the tall men really was. The bloodlust bubbled in his belly. His cheeks warmed. He tried to blink away the buzzing in his skull.

She chuckled drily. "The gods were complex beings. No less so now that they're all dead. The powers they offer are a web—no, a constellation of configurations. And they all have their desires, their wants, their expectations." She stopped, and looked him up and down with a sideways glare. "You're learning, are you not?"

Sweat was dripping down his forehead, driven by an undercurrent of bloodlust. Grumul's—Thermanus' curse was always a part of him, stirred by almost any strong emotion. Anger? Kill. Sadness? Kill. Excitement brought on by learning the subtle intricacies of a system of magical god-given powers? Kill.

"I am, it's just the bloodlust," he said.

She watched him struggle with his ancestral rage for a long moment. "You know, you remind me of myself," she finally said, wagging a bony finger in his face. "I too turned away from the anger. From the rage. From the power. I hated it. I cursed it. I swore to kill Grumul myself when I finally met him in the afterworld. But now? Now I embrace it, I let it course through me. Don't let my peachy disposition fool you."

Stump chuckled.

Her lips pursed. "What's funny?"

"Oh… uh, nothing," he said. "It just, yes, it reminds me of me."

"All the gods have their desires, as I said. And they bestow their gifts to those who uphold their tenets. Even now that they are gone the laws they proscribed remain," she explained. "For Lumensa it is coming to understand something about yourself, or to realize something important to you, or helping another do the same. It's helping those who have lost their way to find it again, or uncovering hidden knowledge. Have you wondered how you did what you did during our first encounter?"

"With the lights? Of course. I did the same thing at the temple. And… something else happened, too. I don't know how I did it, but I created a pillar of light that reached the sky. I looked in the system but I couldn't find an enhancement for that."

She smiled knowingly. "You had a surge of virtue beyond what is normally allocated for your level, and used it to channel the power of Lumensa. Her real power, once normally locked behind a divine gate and guarded by her Clerics. If you balance this surge correctly you can reach into the weave of light that surrounds us. You can harness the fabric of all light, even that under the control of another. Normally such a talent is nearly impossible without some degree of severe focus and intent, and doing so well beyond your limits while her light is eating away at you is more difficult still."

"But how did I do that?"

She edged closer and placed a shaking hand on his shoulder and gazed into his eyes. "Rage is only a narrow part of the bloodlust. You turn away from it, as I did, because that is all you've ever seen of it. But there is more. You are not cursed, young one. It's not anger, it's focus. It's power. The bloodlust is your birthright. It is Grumul's desire, and it is his gift. Embrace it. Use it."

Her hand was cold, or maybe it was his skin that was hot. But this time he didn't fight it. Boiling currents of blood rushed from his toes to his fingers, and his chest drummed a steady rhythm. He breathed, and the queasiness ebbed.

Tenet of Lumensa Fulfilled - Virtue +1 (8/8)

"Good," said Wasptongue, releasing him. She turned and shuffled several feet away. "Now, create another light. We'll work on your concentration."

Her blade hissed out of its cane.

Stump limped back to the makeshift infirmary, his limbs burning with cuts and scratches. He sank into a chair next to Morg's bed and watched the slow rise and fall of his friend's round belly.

Stump tilted his head back and let the system drown out the world around him. His virtue had fallen to five by the end of their training.

He homed in on his floating focus point, and sprawling across the ceiling were the many interconnected domains of magic. Under the heading of Lumenurgy (Level 5)—Wasptongue had kept him in training until he levelled up again—was the thin line leading down to Illumomancy and its various enhancements.

Beneath that a second line forked into several, with each branch leading to another focus tree locked by a "II". The last time he had delved into the cascading tributaries of Lumenurgy, it had all been blurred beneath Illumomancy, but now the "II" glistened like gold coins.

He saw the tree marked Umbramancy first, and its description spilled out before him. "Gain the abilities of Umbralanus. You can slightly alter the features of existing shadows. You can also create an umbral, a small sphere of darkness impenetrable to natural light, which remains until you lose concentration on it," it read.

The enhancements beneath it offered additional effects, like Darkness, which allowed your umbral to be completely impenetrable to magical light. Expand granted you the talent of spreading shadows far beyond their natural reach, and Cloak, a more expensive enhancement, allowed minor invisibility in low light, like Germott at the tank or Bubbles back at the Knight Inn.

Chromomancy was the next tree over. "Gain the ability to precisely manipulate the colour and texture of your lumen or an existing source of light without your concentration." Its enhancements all gave some manner of control over what light would allow you to see in other objects and people.

Flectomancy was the last of the highlighted trees. "Gain the ability to bend your lumen or an existing source of light into a desired shape without your concentration," was the inherent effect—Wasptongue's sword demonstration. Invisiblity was the most obvious application of it, but also the most expensive. It cost one virtue per minute to maintain and required your concentration. Magnify granted the power to pull light towards you from distant places, and Foresight enhanced that further still, bending light around corners and objects to see the unseen.

Despite the dizzying array of choice given to Stump by the focus trees beneath his own, Illumomancy speared out in more directions, connecting it via silvery thread to the greater weave of godlike powers. It met the skill of Thermalurgy halfway, where its synergistic tree of Solarmancy glimmered enticingly, giving him the option of spending his point to dip his little goblin toe in the domain of Grumul if he wished.

There was so much to look at. So much to choose…

Where do I focus?

A shuffling of blankets tugged his attention back to the cramped room. Morg struggled in his bed. He groaned, eyes squeezed shut, and then blinked open. "Stump…" he rasped.