I Swear I'm Not A Dark Lord!

Classes

There were fewer people inside the Temple of Origins than Taylor expected. The priestess from earlier was there, as was another priest he hadn't seen before, sitting in pews at the front of the room. Knexenk loomed above them, bathed in hazy winter light. Instead of spreading wide to embrace her congregation, her arms were filled with fruiting branches. Even more unusual, she wasn't absurdly busty and looked nothing like Feythlonda, the goddess of fertility. This was an ancient depiction of the Giving Goddess.

Taylor could feel Knexenk's system inside the statue. At rest, her system buzzed like bees. When she wrote quests, she grated against his skin in hard square waves. This sensation was new, a hum of thousands of smoothly turning gears, emanating from the statue.

This was Knexenk, the original one, stolen from the Ancient Wastes hundreds of years ago and placed here by Wynnefreede the Evangel, on a tiny island precariously perched a foot above sea level. There had to be a reason she was here instead of buried in a vault somewhere. Taylor wanted to ask if there were more clauses to the Covenant, but it didn't feel like the time. Instead, he stared in shock at the origin of the class system.

Why did the gods insist he get his class here? Why would the church let him touch it?

The two priests stood when the pontiff entered the temple. They had notebooks in their hands, ready to write. His Holiness and the Lord High Bishop flanked the statue.

"We are gathered," said the patriarch, "to witness the Selection of Taylor. We pray to Knexenk that she will be generous to him."

"We pray for your gifts, All Mother," responded the other three.

"We beg Knexenk to find him a place in this world."

"We pray for your wisdom, All Mother."

"We plead for her blessings to nourish us."

"Bless us, All Mother, for we are your servants."

"Taylor, come forward and touch the foot of the goddess."

Taylor inched forward, cautiously, and reached out a hand. The statue's foot was stained by millions of devout fingertips and was a slightly different color than the rest of her.

He touched the side of her foot and felt the magic machinery inside her whirl faster. Then, it came to an abrupt stop. A public viewing screen popped into existence.

Taylor — Unclassed, Human Male

Suggested Paths

Commander -> Nobility -> Royalty -> Emperor

Priest -> Purifier -> Saint -> Prophet

Mage -> Sage -> Systemic Sage -> Transcendant Sage

Rebel -> Destroyer -> Decontructor -> Omega

Knexnk waited for him to make a decision. These were the best, most powerful paths suitable for him. They offered temporal power, religious authority, magical mastery, and chaos. There were plenty of crafting and other non-combat classes in the system, but they generally lacked the potential to change the world. And the gods brought Taylor to Aarden to change it.

Knexenk stood over them all, waiting.

Don't shove me onto a path. I'd rather have the wilderness of infinite choice.

The screen went blank, to be replaced with new text.

All offered paths are ultra-rare and will lead you to greatness.

Encouragement is nice, but I don't need my hand held all the time.

The screen blanked again, and new words appeared.

Enter class prompt: _

That was easier than expected. Taylor was prepared to wrestle with the system for a while, but it gave up so easily. It was like the gods knew what he was planning.

He almost entered the word in Orlut, and then Arcaic, but decided to have a bit of fun with it. He thought the class name in Mi'iri, the lost spoken language of Spellscript, and was gratified to see a series of four complex glyphs appear.

For a moment, he felt someone open the lid on his brain, shine a bright flashlight inside, run their hands over the wiring to make sure everything was connected all right, and slam the lid shut again.

Words began to scroll, too fast for anyone to read it all. It scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, and eventually it stopped. As soon as he could, Taylor made his interface private and closed it.

The note-taking priests gasped in consternation. "Can you just … "

"No," he told them. "You had your free peek."

He nodded to His Holiness, Laurence VI. And then to the Lord High Bishop. He smiled gently at the two priests (not that they could tell) and made good his escape. Saria drafted silently behind him, bursting with unasked questions.

-----

High Bishop Yaonoch

"Did the oculus get all that?"

"I'm checking, High Bishop." Cassyon fiddled with a tablet he pulled from under the nearest pew. After a few seconds, he looked satisfied. "It's there, but he closed the screen before Knexenk was finished. It's a lot. Take a look."

Yaonoch accepted the tablet and replayed the video, recorded by a magic device in the back of the temple. He halted playback at the crucial moment when Taylor's initial logs were written and played it forward at reduced speed.

Taylor — Undeclared Human Male, level <measurement in progress>

Ability Scores: <measurement in progress>

Mana: 4.2 x 10^6

Mana Attributes: [by attribute…]

Conditions

[Accrued Potential +++]

[Monstrous Mana (Curse)]

Languages

[Arcaic 43]

[Orlut 41]

[Spellscript 65]

<eliding dead languages>

Skills

[Angling 26] [by subskill…]

[Cooking 10]

[Chess 47] [by variant…]

[Healing 50] [by subskill…]

[Interior Decorating 13]

[Language 58]

[Martial Arts 35]

[Magic Engineering 47] [by system…]

[Magic Resistance 45]

[Mana Handling 46] [by subskill…]

[Mana Sensing 51] [by attribute…]

[Mental Enhancement 54]

[Physical Enhancement 59]

[Purification 27]

[Silent Spellwork 53]

[Superior Spellwork 51] [by subskill…]

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

[Sword Arts 39]

[Staff Arts 29]

[Sculpting 32]

[Teaching 53]

<collating logs>

Special Abilities

[Combat Flow]

[Flare]

[Divine Sculpting]

[Dragon Shot]

[Mana Drain]

[Mana Fire]

[One Thousand Cuts]

[Plasmatic Lightning]

[Quest Creation]

[Magic Interference]

[Spatial Defense]

[System Creation]

<collating logs>

Summoner Roster

Army of Darkness (109)

Army of Lightness (4)

Hermes

Saria

Titles

[Catalyst]

[Cecilia d'Mourne's Little Brother]

[Collector (Books)]

[Disowned]

[Dux Twilight]

[Dwergbank Rank C]

[Divine Envoy]

[Governance Graduate]

[Kasper's Big Brother]

[Legate of Mourne (former)]

[Merciful]

[Rift Raider]

[Saria's Favored Companion]

[System Creator]

[Wyvern Slayer]

<collating logs>

There was a lot of strangeness, starting with his class: Undeclared. They had watched him turn down no less than four ultimate paths. Most people weren't offered paths before receiving their classes. At best, they could choose from a handful of starter classes. A brave few would beg Knexenk for something more specific to their desires. Taylor had clearly decided to forgo Knexenk's extraordinary guidance in exchange for the freedom to do whatever he wanted.

If his mana attributes were collapsed into a list, then he had more than three, which wasn't a surprise. His mana pool was extreme, but not quite absurd. Exponented numbers weren't unheard of for fourth-tier magicians, but it put Taylor at the same order of magnitude as the Pontiff and magicians of the Imperial Court.

Spellscript as a language was odd. Any scholar knew that Spellscript was descended from a language lost to time. There were hundreds of symbols whose meanings were forgotten, collected from ancient ruins or decaying scrolls. One oddball magician had published an entire series of books in Spellscript, which he claimed to have transcribed from tomes he rescued from Archome during the Collapse. But nobody spoke Spellscript.

Except, apparently, Taylor.

Yaonoch had seen group summons before, and he'd already heard about the boy's ability. Army of Darkness sounded worrisome, but Yaonoch knew what spirits were like: the name was merely a fancy. He was more concerned that the army was, in fact, a very large number of spirits. It certainly explained how someone could storm through the southern provinces, cleaning up emergent dungeons that the Empire didn't know about.

Knexenk hadn't assigned a level to Taylor's Summoning skill yet, but it was bound to be at least third-tier. She had assigned average levels to several skill groups and collapsed them into lists. Those average numbers could be very misleading. They could contain mostly level 59 subskills and one or two subskills in the twenties. Some skills only became available at higher tiers and started at level one, so they brought down the score for the whole group. But that didn't mean the magician was weaker.

Yaonoch's best guess was that Taylor would be given a third-tier rank, maybe as high as 59, the threshold of the fourth tier.

Overall, the boy was shockingly overpowered for someone his age, but not enough to destabilize the Empire. No, his overall power wasn't the concern. The potential problems lie in a few lines: Divine Envoy, System Creation, Quest Creation, Superior Spellwork, and Purification. His Accrued Potential would magnify everything he did until it was spent.

Less obvious, but no less important, was that class boundaries clearly didn't apply to him. General spellcasting, Healing, and Summoning, all in the third tier? Second-tier combat skills inaccessible to magicians? The normal rules didn't apply to him, and Taylor intended to keep it that way.

Yaonoch returned the tablet to Brother Cassyon and Sister Vuldre. "Run down the rare skills and abilities. Find out if anyone has been Undeclared before, or if Knexenk made it just for him. Think of ways to develop intelligence sources. There's nothing in the Covenant that says we can't keep an eye on him."

After the priest and priestess left, Yaonoch glanced at the creche where Strife stood in martial glory.

"What have you set loose on us now?"

"Come now," said Uncle Laurence, patting him on the back, "we both know change is necessary. It's been coming for a long time, and if it were something that could be accomplished without breaking things, you or I would have gotten the job. If not us, then someone else in the Imperium. He's not out to destroy the Empire, and that's a good place to start. Imagine if he had taken the Omega path."

"Your bar for 'okay' is shockingly low. And you're putting a lot of faith in that boy's words."

"I have faith in my fourth-tier Detect Lies. Let's find some lunch, shall we? Francillia's has a special tasting menu today, and I'm pretty sure they'll let us in without a reservation."

Taylor

Saria and Taylor had time to visit one small museum, a private home whose occupants made extra income by showing off their collection of Vogoville-designed furniture and housewares. Too many classic, ornate forms pressed into too few rooms made his head hurt, but he couldn't deny they were beautiful. They did the tour, ate a lunch of raw fish served on beds of sweet, sticky amaranth, and caught the next train to Wokehaad. They had a few days to spare, but Taylor found it hard to enjoy a city on the verge of drowning while a new process in his head kept telling him things he already knew.

He was a third-tier magician with second-tier combat skills. He knew that much. His otherwise superb Mana Handling was hamstrung by a weak Emission Capacity. No surprise there. His detection and handling of certain kinds of mana were subpar. It hurt to see that in numbers, but it wasn't news. The system didn't try to inundate him with quests, which was a relief.

The ghost butler's name was Hermes, which was news to Taylor. He was Taylor's connection to the Army of Darkness, the proctors, and greater spirits, so he was separately summonable. Seeing him on the roster made Taylor feel bad about not having asked for his name.

Clearly, he needed to spend a lot more time fishing. He checked his card catalog, looking for class references, but he didn't have anything for Angler. That was too bad. Suddenly, he had a desire to know what fishing-related titles were available.

Titles and skills kept dropping into his logs at odd moments as Knexenk rifled through his brain and found things to stick labels on. He was glad the church didn't see some of them. Demiplane Creator. Transmigrated Soul. Taboo Knowledge. Otherworld Savior. He was Favored by Lanulculte, and several other gods. He archived everything that smacked of being yanked from one world to the next and decided to look at them some other time.

There were two genuinely interesting developments from taking a class. The first was a quest-giver's tab.

In Progress

Forest of Nope (DLD 1): 48 Found; 18 Current; 30 Completed

Enchantress's Grotto (DLD 2): 12 Found; 12 Current

A Boon Of Books: 156 Remaining; 0 Compiled; 0 Received

Dark Lord's Discourse Bonuses

Discourse Occupation Gains: 20xp/hour

Dark Lord Dedications: 5

Completed

A Friendly Boon (Lindastra Prevost)

Big Cori-Cori for Big Dori-Dori (Prudence Vawdrey)

Finding tallies for Dark Lord's Discourse was delightful, but discovering that he received experience while people played was thrilling. It wasn't much, just a trickle, but the thought of gaining bonuses from courses set up all over the world … how could it not put a smile on his face?

The Dark Lord Dedications line was odd, and it took Taylor a while to find the relevant log entries. "Steve Portchuck dedicated his game to the Dark Lord." He had four more entries just like it, but with different names, and no hints about what he was supposed to do with the dedications.

Perhaps they were just for fun. Knexenk was named with a palindrome because she was as much a mirror as a guide. She picked up on his light-hearted intent and named things accordingly. The "dedications" were probably something silly. He'd be sure to ask the Celosia disk-kin about it the next time he was in town. Maybe they received slight bonuses in exchange for dedicating their games to him.

"Check your class," he told Saria. "Do you see anything about an occupation bonus?"

She looked through her screens for a minute before declaring that no, she didn't see any such thing. Taylor opened Enchantress's Grotto and silently expressed (in Mi'iri) his desire to share experience with the creator of the course. He had to retry it a few times until he found a formulation that worked, but then he saw his own occupation gains decrease.

"What about now?"

"My log says, 'You receive trivial rewards when players spend time on a Glider Golf course you designed, which the Dark Lord has approved.' I gain six experience points per hour! See? Isn't having a class fun?"

"I suppose," admitted Taylor. "I am not having a terrible time."

He felt the quest generation happening from inside his body, moments before they popped into his logs. Did he generate the quests himself because he wanted to do them? Or was this the gods pushing work at him? Or both?

Regardless, the wording sounded like him, so his brain was involved in phrasing the quests, if nothing else.

Quest: [Class Franchise I 0/100] Expand the class franchise. This quest is available in increasing sets. Larger sets reap larger rewards.

Quest: [Two Knexenk Are Better Than One] Copy the Knexenk origin and allow it to grant classes. This is a main questline – completing it clears your path to the fourth tier.

Subquest: [Create Knexenk Core] Create the crystalized core necessary to duplicate Knexenk. Requires a flawless crystal of BeAl2O4, cyclically twinned, weighing a minimum of eight pounds.

There was more to the core quest. The crystal had to be doped with other elements at specific valences, and the finished product had to be cut and polished a certain way. The quest came with diagrams to ensure he got it right. He was supposed to create a perfect, giant chrysoberyl, shaped like a six-pointed star.

As he was now, Taylor could create small gems when he wanted to, given the correct elements to work with. Silicate-based gems were the easiest because they were familiar, and most of them were simple. But a massive, perfect, complex structure required a crystallarium. A crystallarium demanded technology specialized for manipulating natural law — magic circles in this world lacked the necessary vocabulary and precision. He had invented such a system in his previous life, but that wouldn't work here. He needed to …

Subquest: [A Better Alchemy, For A Better World] Write a new alchemical grimoire.

… that. But an eight-pound gemstone was more than eighteen thousand carats. To allow for cutting and polishing, he had to grow it even larger. It needed total isolation from vibration and temperature changes, or every little disturbance would threaten to ruin the project. Once he had such a machine, he could turn out any kind of gemstone in any size or quantity he wanted. That meant …

Subquest: [Dark Lord's Crystallarium] Build a crystal-creation machine large enough to destroy the world's market for gemstones.

Taylor rushed to the train window, opened it, and stuck his head out. "Enough already!" he yelled at the sky. "Let a man think!"