NOVEL NEXT 156. Normalizing Garbage
Trash can distribution was easier than Rhys had expected, but then, perhaps he should have expected it to be easy, when he'd already taken control of a multi-city criminal logistics network. The greatest portion of effort went into crafting the baskets, since he had to do that manually, and trash baskets had to be as large as public trash cans to be meaningful. Rhys went from having the same joking opinion about Underwater Basketweaving classes as everyone else did, to being of the impression that they should be mandatory for all college, if not high school students. Luckily, several of the mages in his repertoire, especially the ex-criminal kind, had basketweaving backgrounds due to having grown up as mortals in a medieval world, and once he pointed them at using materials from the trash, they were able to rapidly accelerate his basketmaking efforts. He still had to add the void to the baskets, but that limited his efforts in the process to the very final step, so that Rhys could put all his effort into adding void, rather than building the entire basket from scratch.
The chips, fries, and soda were mostly enchanted-slash-enpotionated by people who weren't Rhys nowadays. He still stepped in to make a personal effort on the snacks associated with new cities, to make sure they got the good stuff for long enough for his brand to spread its name and get people hooked, but once he got them started, he could count on others to imbue them with the sense of enlightenment or whatever other magical qualities he required. After all, the whole point of the sense of magicality imbued in the snacks was that it was only a sense of magicality, not actual magicality, so it being Trash Intent or Trash Enlightenment wasn't important, nor did anyone else have to worry about imbuing their path and accidentally giving other mages access to their enlightenment; the chips never enlightened anyone, and it was all nothing but smoke and mirrors, so it was safe for anyone to 'share their path' through Rhys's techniques.
The void baskets were different. No one else had access to the void like Rhys did, and the few who even noticed there was magic on the baskets couldn't quite describe what Rhys had done to them, just that he'd certainly done something, so Rhys had to manually en-void the baskets. He didn't mind. It was something to keep him occupied, and the fact that he had to do something gave him an excuse not to do the thousand other things he could be doing, that were always nagging at the back of his mind. Like rescuing other people from the camps.
I'm going to do it. I have to. I want to. But I couldn't do it too quick in succession. Too quick, one after another, and conditions would get worse, not to mention the Empire would lock them down far worse. It would happen eventually anyways, but he wanted to control it. Control how and when it happened.
Now that he had bases in several cities, he could launch simultaneous attacks in a way he never could before. On top of that, he had manpower that he hadn't had before. True, he couldn't use all the criminals, but some of them were trustworthy enough, or hated the Empire enough individually that he could count on them for raiding the camps. Everything he'd done, including the trash baskets, was for the sake of fighting the Empire and freeing mages from the camps. He felt like he hadn't done enough because he hadn't directly gone to camps and fought to free them, but that wasn't it at all. He'd only been playing the long game. Building up his manpower, strength, and location so that he could attack more effectively wasn't a waste of time, and it wasn't a wrong decision to make. So why did he feel so guilty about it?
Rhys sighed and rubbed his forehead, looking down at the void basket in front of him. He hadn't started feeling so weird about it until the curse backlash… or maybe until he'd started playing with the void? He couldn't be sure. He'd done them both at about the same time, so it was hard to untangle the effects of the two weird things he'd done that might mess with his mental state.
On the other hand, I'm in prime shape to attempt that new mind attack technique! Rhys smiled, glad he'd been able to find the good in it all. Sure, it was a strange kind of 'good,' but he'd take it. Who would expect a mental attack from a guy who mostly fought in melee, anyways? He knew he wouldn't. And an unexpected attack on a front where someone expected no attack was even better than an ordinary sneak attack.
He had no illusions about the technique. It wouldn't be mind control, or mind influence, or anything even close to it. If it worked half as well ash e hoped it would, it would essentially be like spam-mailing someone's brain. Or maybe forcibly making someone relive their own trauma, or maybe forcing them to live his? Whatever it was, it would be a blunt instrument. A momentary attack, no more, and no less. He didn't know if he was relieved or annoyed that his mind attack was kind of trash. No, he knew the answer, he thought, smiling to himself.
Pleased. Very pleased.
Who needed some difficult, finesse-based, ultra-detailed mind manipulation skill when he could just slap his opponents with trauma instead? Who needed to coerce an enemy into walking closer to a cliff when he could just trauma-dump them and attack them in the momentary opening trauma-dumping gave him? Who needed the moral quandaries of mind control when you could just mind-punch someone instead, with no more worries than punching them in the face instead of the brain? It was the perfect kind of mental attack for a trashy guy like him.
Plus, it eliminated the need for therapy! Why waste time and money on therapy when you could just toss your trauma at someone else instead? Quick, safe, and effective!
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Safe for me, anyways. And who else matters?
There was one last thing that he was waiting for before he launched his multi-part attack on the camps, and that was his own weakness. He was low on trash. Had been for a while, and making the void baskets, while not mana-intensive, exactly, they still used mana. Mana he had to burn trash to generate. The trash bins were coming online one after another, and the people of the cities were slowly growing used to using them, which gave Rhys that slow, steady stream of garbage he'd been hoping for, but the thing about the slow, steady stream was that it was slow. He needed time to let it pile up and refill the trash star. It was enough that he was coming out positive, gaining more trash than he lost to just live as a mage or create the void baskets, but it was still slower than if he ran around sucking up Impure Wells, or whatever else.
Not one to rest on his laurels, he summoned his mount, aka the skeletal rider, and hopped into the guy's arms, then let the skeleton wander the forest in search of Impure Wells while he focused on building his trauma-dumping attack. It wasn't hard to call forth trauma. He'd endured a lot in the last three years, and there was plenty to stew on. He'd been trying not to, so this new approach was the hardest part for him. On the other hand, turning it into magic was surprisingly easy. His thoughts were trash. He wanted to be rid of them, and the memories themselves were shitty enough that the world agreed that they were filth. He couldn't manipulate his own mind and memories with magic—his own fears and self-worth kept him from doing that, even with his self-worth being what it was—but he could wrap those memories up and project them outward easily enough. He wasn't sure if he was relieved or disappointed when the memories didn't actually leave his mind. It wouldn't have made sense if they did, since he could think about something a near infinite number of times without forgetting about it—and in fact, the more he thought about it, the easier it became to recall it—but a small part of him had been hoping that this attack would steal his bad memories away from him. That it really would serve as cheap therapy.
Ah, well, I guess it can't be perfect. His techniques were all trash, after all. If this one turned out to be useful to him as an attack and as a way to heal his mind, it'd be too useful to be trash. He should've known such a thing wouldn't be possible.
In all honesty, he wasn't even sure if the offensive part of the skill worked. The only people out here in the forest were him and the skelly boy. He didn't think the skeleton man had enough intelligence for him to traumatize it, and if he did, the last thing he needed was a traumatized cursed being. As for himself… he was already suffering from his own memories. He didn't need to do the mental equivalent of dick-punching himself for fun. He wasn't devoted enough to the grind, maybe, or maybe he was a reasonable human being without a masochistic streak, but either way, hammering himself in his own trauma seemed like a bad way to spend his day.
I'm already going to jump into toxic liquid later this afternoon, and that's if things go right. Surely that's enough punishment for one day?
Still, he kept practicing the form of the attack, refining it as he went so that he could launch it at the first sign of intelligent life outside of himself. It didn't hurt to be as prepared as possible, in the event a training opportunity popped up, literally. He wasn't going to launch it on random citizens, he was in control of the local criminal element, and he wasn't stupid enough to attack the Empire out of the blue unprovoked, but maybe he'd run into some vicious monster in a shitty mood or something? He was an optimist, after all. There was always the chance things would align for him.
Strangely enough, he felt something similar to curse power emanating from the technique the more he practiced it. It was an attack he'd modeled after the backlash of a curse, so he wasn't completely surprised, but he was still a little taken aback. He hadn't used any curse energy or anything else curse-related to create this technique. Nor had he done anything with the vibes of curse-creation. There was no blood, no sacrifice. No straw dolls, nails, strange chanting and unusual candles, nothing like that at all. Just him, alone with his thoughts.
The most terrifying option of all, Rhys thought, chuckling to himself.
Joking aside, he really didn't understand it. Since he wasn't doing anything curse-aligned, that meant his attack had to align with the heart of what curses were at their core. He wasn't a curse-studier, just a guy who was friends with the most powerful cursed being in the world and who habitually stole curses from other people—okay, maybe I do have a background in curses after all—but even so, he hadn't set out to create a curse. He hadn't even had the inkling that what he was doing was curse-adjacent. But the sensation he got from this technique gave him the vibe that he was creating a curse, or at least something curselike.
Are curses… created from negative emotions? It kind of tracked, except that he didn't know how the undead rider fit in, unless his creator hated him. Sable was kind of gloomy, but she could be bright, too, and Straw, the most powerful cursed being he knew, was… a giant weirdo who was distant and inhuman at the best of moments, but certainly not a depressed mess like the idea of 'a being made of negative emotions' implied. Rhys clasped his chin, thinking, then shook his head. He had an imperfect understanding, to say the least. He wasn't going to ponder curses and come to a wild new comprehension of a concept that Ernesto had devoted his entire elongated life to studying in the course of one afternoon. So instead, he just continued to focus on refining the technique, making it sharper, less mana intensive, and more powerful. With each passing iteration, he packed in more bad memories, and got faster at packing the bad memories in. After all, he'd need to call up the trauma to dump in a heartbeat in the middle of a fight; he couldn't sit there ruminating over bad days for half an hour while his enemy beheaded him in ten seconds.
All the while, the skeleton carried him on, wandering through the forest on its own devices, following whatever invisible directive it felt that directed it toward Impure Wells. The two might have appeared peaceful, if one wasn't a giant skeleton and the other wasn't emanating a terrifying aura of directionless, unchanneled curse power as they wandered.