++Humanity was trusted with independence once, and found wanting. Without the kindness of elven guidance it would be doomed to wither and perish. Trust in your masters, and love them for the sacrifice of leadership they have mantled on your behalf.++

Reggie was running at a full sprint; legs burning, lungs burning, body, in general, burning. Oh how fragile the human form was to be in such pain from just a minute of exerting itself, and for what? Because a few police officers had decided to harass him out of nowhere.

"Get back here, you little fuck!" one of them called between pants, "I'll show you, punting a brick at my head!"

Such rampant discrimination would never have been permitted in a just world, alas Reggie did not live in a just world. He tossed another log of speed onto the bonfire under his legs and expanded the distance between himself and the officers that little bit more.

Truth be told, he was running with an advantage. Sure, these were only Workers, but that still gave them a leg-up over him. It was the most mundane Class in the world, something literal babies acquired without even meaning to.

Unless that baby was named Reginald Smith, in which case he'd have to settle for no Class at all and live knowing any woman half his size could become stronger than him if she wanted to.

So it was a good thing these fuckers chasing him were weighed down by all that heavy armour, then. Reggie wasn't in the mood for a gang beating today.

He wasn't the one with final say in that, though, not if he got caught. Running down the streets of Norvhan was an exercise in balance. Those rare parts of the road that were cobbled still ended up inevitably slick with whatever detritus its moron citizenry dropped onto them, which wasn't great when you had to move fast.

A great crash sounded out behind him, suspiciously like thirteen stones of prick falling down in six stones of armour, and Reggie smiled to himself. On the other hand it was a lot easier to keep your balance with no unfamiliar weights wrapped across your body. He'd have bet good money these idiot policemen hadn't trained to seriously move in all that gear.

In fact, he was betting good money on it. Or stolen money at the very least.

Reggie turned a corner and headed down a space between two of the shittier buildings, squat and lumpy things that were halfway down the road to decomposing and being scrapped for street-cobbles. The alley ended in a dead-end of course, and he made a nice show of pausing to 'brace himself' before he turned and faced the officers.

"Got you," the man at the back scowled. He looked to have a few less teeth than when the chase had started, Reggie assumed he'd been the one to fall, and that he'd landed on his face. Maybe there was a God up there.

"And for what?" Reggie called back, playing for time, "for daring to stand up against oppression? To protest an unlawful, attempted arrest?"

"You threw a brick at my head," the other officer snapped from beside his boss.

"Because you tried to throw me in prison!" Reggie snapped back.

"We did that because we found you eating a rat outside Jones' restaurant," the leader growled back as more of them filed into the alley. Reggie scoffed.

"Oh what, was he gonna fucking eat it?"

For a moment it looked as if the idiots would actually take the bait and keep arguing, but even they weren't that dumb.

Bad Cop started moving first, then Bad Cop number two followed, then the remaining three all joined the first two. Reggie let them come, gave them a few moments' worth of terrified staring while they closed in.

Then he threw a fistful of explosives down into the ground between them.

For most folks, what Reggie had just done was tantamount to magic. They heard 'explosion' and they thought of black powder, slow-matches and big clouds of rotten-egg smell that looked scary enough but took a whole lunch break to actually get started once you lit them. The idea of something going off on impact? That was Wizard shit.

Unless you read a few books and knew a bit of alchemy. When you'd done that you found out that mixing quicksilver, aqua fortis and spiritus vini, for some reason, made a remarkably angry sort of crystal that actually blew up a lot more powerfully than regular gunpowder. In this case, Reggie had used just enough to set off a larger charge of powder wrapped around it. Big and scary, not particularly deadly.

He didn't want to just kill five police officers, after all. That'd get him hanged.

No, a distraction worked just fine for Reggie. A distraction for his associates, and an escape for himself. While the cops were still busy screaming in horror and checking to see if they were dead or crippled—fucking pussies—he rushed in and smashed a rock right across one of their jaws.

That was a killing move, normally, but there were advantages to being one of the weakest men in the world. Though Reggie was tall and athletic, he did little more than daze the man and leave himself room to flee past the others.

Even then, he was almost caught. They were fast as well as strong, and that heavy armour didn't work nearly as much to his advantage in such slow, explosive motions as this. A swift correction from his rock kept the grasping hands short of him, though, and Reggie took off back down the street.

After dropping another explosive, of course. That kept the bastards tied up and yelping for a few more seconds.

Reggie felt the temptation to sprint as fast as he could, and resisted it. He paced himself. That was the thing, with Toughness as low as his stamina came at a premium. Heavy training had left him fit, but the lack of mana in his muscles, as always, made it all worthless.

Can't be strong, so I've gotta be smart. It was a nice little motto, some good words to live by. Better than the advice he usually got from his townsfolk, at least, such as 'kill yourself' or 'repent for your sins' or 'repent for your sins and then kill yourself'. Arseholes.

Such was life. Reggie had never complained—not verbally at least—and he was tough enough that he wasn't going to start now.

[So you can keep suffering in silence and feigning strength.]

Shut up, demonic voice that lives in my head.

There was always that, too, which Reggie also had no intentions of complaining about. Such was fucking life.

Had Reggie been left running forever, he'd have gotten caught. Fortunately he knew a thing or two, or two million, about giving club-wielding thugs the slip, and with his head-start being what it was, the chase lasted only another twenty seconds before he'd gotten out of both eyeshot and earshot. Other people would snitch him out, but given another week he knew the good officers of Norvan would lose their passion for breaking his bones.

They were just too stupid to nurse a grudge.

Reggie had an easy enough time laying low, too. He headed off to the outskirts of town, the only part of Norvhan the good people were willing to tolerate his presence in, and came to the small, shitty, thin-walled, shitty, cheap, shitty shack he'd called his home for the last few years. It was shitty.

[Just like you deserve.]

Reggie ignored the voice, as usual, and ignored the screaming demons that were squatting outside his home as he approached—he'd figured out a long time ago now that they couldn't do anything to him physically..

That meant that however eerie they looked and sounded, those silly little demons were automatically lower on the pecking order of Reggie's problems than most of the people in Norvhan. He probably had half an hour before some of those people, the cunty, dumb ones with heavy armour who called themselves law enforcement, showed up to start looking for him, which had his list of priorities even more pronounced than usual.

So he hurried up.

Fortunately, living in a scary, shitty shack on the outskirts of Norvhan also meant being essentially safe from anyone who wanted to find and beat him up. This was good in the immediacy of Reggie's current night, where having both legs bent up his own asshole was an otherwise imminent fate he was thankful to avoid, but in the long-term it was also what had allowed him to set up his current operation.

A great many things rested in the basement of this shack, hidden from the outside world by a good few feet of stone and earth, shielding Reggie's hopes. Mostly, those hopes were boiling in cauldrons. For now he was making booze—or as the alchemists called it, 'spiritus vini'— and explosives. One day though, he dreamed of expanding to even more booze and explosives. Let nobody accuse Reggie of having limited ambitions.

Those ambitions had to wait, though, because right now Reggie was expecting a visitor, and his expectations were met after just fifteen minutes of resting in his home. He heard the knocking—at the back of his shack, not the front, as previously arranged—and headed out to greet the source. He had a pistol kept hidden in his thick jacket, just in case they tried to kill him. The meagre few points of Toughness that felt so significant when they separated him from most men didn't do any good against supersonic lead, at least. There was always that.

It wasn't an ambush though, just a bunch of kids. Wiry little things, looking more like rats than humans. Here was a group that Reggie could feel confident about actually having a physical advantage over. They eyed him cautiously, and it was only the trio's leader who spoke as Reggie approached.

"We did the…thing," he mumbled, apparently hesitant to name the crime out loud. Fair enough, paranoia was just basic survival when you were growing up poor.

"Let me see it," Reggie prodded. The boy replied by drawing out a pot which, when Reggie checked inside, proved to hold a nice helping of quicksilver. Just what the doctor ordered.

"It was where you said it would," the first kid said, "right where you said. By the window, we just slipped in and out. Got it easy." There was a touch of pride to his voice as he spoke of the robbery.

Well, good. Not many kids had the guts to steal from an alchemist. Alchemists tended to be wealthy, and wealthy people had an easy time and a short wait in getting the police to investigate anything they complained about. Thus necessitating a certain town lunatic throwing a brick at those police while the thievery in question could be completed.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"You took a big risk," Reggie grunted as he started fishing around inside his pouch for a few coins. All of the kids recoiled, wide-eyed and staring until they saw it was money he brought out.

Right, they're still from Norvhan. They still grew up hearing all the stories.

[They're right to fear you.]

Shut up, demonic voice that lives in my head.

"Just money," Reggie told them, gently dropping the coins down between him and the kids, "for your trouble." He started backing away, figuring they'd be more likely to accept the gift if he wasn't too close to it. He was right.

Reggie turned around and headed back inside before he could feel any of the emotions threatening him with their presence, heading to bed. He kept the gun with him, of course. Could never be too careful.

There were some real psychos out there. Good thing they were more scared of the grimwoods than they were pissed with him.

***

As he'd planned, a few days was enough to cool the town guards' anger towards him.

Reggie woke to a horde of monsters scraping and shrieking at his face, the outside squatters. He pinched his eyes shut, lay there trembling as they clawed at the air around him and writhed, promising pain and terror, spitting and hissing, animal sounds and animal wants and animal hatred all pulsing into him at once. It took a while for them to leave, but they did so without hurting him.

All the same, he wasn't able to open his eyes and get up for a few minutes more. Damn it, but this time they'd surprised him. The fear was like fire in his guts.

Demons. They hated Reggie, or maybe loved him—maybe it was love that had them swarming him. But they did swarm him, either way, and that swarming had been ruining his life for as long as he could remember.

Through more than just the occasional fright, too.

Reggie thought of his parents as he got out of bed, checked his flintlock was still there, and readied for his day's work. His parents. They'd ruined his life, basically. Done some dark ritual, left the Adversary's agents trapped in his head, tainted him with evil. That they'd been burned for it did little to help him now, because the remnants of what they'd done were still with him.

Hell, they'd almost gotten him burned too.

His shack was locked up tight by the time Reggie headed out, secure if not luxurious, and he set a brisk pace across town by jogging the whole way. His destination was already far enough that he figured turning the trip into an exercise was killing two birds with one stone.

Name: Reginald Smith

Age: 21

Race: Human [Common Race, Tier 1]

Class: None

Attributes:

Strength 13

Speed 14

Celerity 15

Toughness 12

Charisma 9

Abilities: None

Traits: None

Reggie liked bringing up his sheet on the System, watching that pale blue screen of transparent light as it hovered before his eyes and displayed everything. There was a calming aspect to seeing everything about himself boiled down into a few numbers, and a character-building element to being reminded just how awful those numbers were.

Good for reminding Reggie where he was, after all. At the bottom of the pile being shat on by everyone else. And if there was one thing that always cheered him up, it was some good old-fashioned self-pity.

That and money, which he was currently working on.

Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of good ways to make money in Norvhan—nor anywhere else in the good nation of Engrid. Not for a human, and certainly not for one without so much as the Worker Class.

Save for one.

Witchfinders did the most dangerous, dirty work of all—but they sure as shit got paid for it. And more importantly, they got immediate access to the juicy bits of all sorts of supernatural creatures.

That sort of raw material went a long way when you were hoping to become an alchemist. Long enough that most Witchfinders actually worked with alchemists, dumping ingredients for a bit of bonus pay to their already respectable commissions. Reggie was willing to bet he'd make a whole lot more by using the stuff himself.

In fact, he was willing to bet his life.

Witchfinder Ludvich was the man he made his way for now, a person who had the unique distinction of being the only man in town to live as close to its outskirts as Reggie himself. Where Reggie did so through pure ostracisation, however, his choice was somewhat more practical. It meant he was closest to the grimwoods growing right beside town.

That was, as far as Reggie was concerned, the best place to put any Witchfinder. Apparently the rest of the town agreed too. It did mean he was approaching the deadliest location within fifty miles just to reach the man's house, but he was well used to making concessions by now.

Reggie knocked twice, then calmly stepped to the side as a musket ball tore right through the door.

"Bastards!" he heard Ludvich roar, kicking the poor wood open and stumbling out, waving a musket around like it was the pole of some battle standard.

Not a big man, Ludvich, but he moved with the sort of strength Reggie had long since made peace with never acquiring himself. Witchfinders technically didn't deviate from the Worker class all humans were born with—only the elves, chosen of heaven, could wield the higher Classes—but the nature of their work meant that just about all of them had followed that Class to almost the peak of its potential.

All the ones who lived, at least.

"What do you want?" Ludvich growled. He looked at Reggie with open hostility, but it was no bother from him. Ludvich looked at everyone that way, just a generally angry man who had a lot of annoyances with the world and its inhabitants.

"Remember that thing we talked about?" Reggie answered, suddenly feeling ridiculously nervous. Right. Punt a brick at a police officer's head and this is what has his nerves frayed.

Ludvich didn't seem to notice or care.

"I've told you already, I'm not bringing you with me."

Reggie had anticipated that, of course. He'd come prepared with the rhetoric needed to dismantle Ludvich's argument.

"Let me come with you," he said, drawing a handheld explosive device from his coat, "or I'll set this off and kill us both."

Ludvich just stared at Reggie as if he was shitting himself.

"Firstly, you don't have the balls to kill yourself," he began. Reggie actually couldn't argue with that one—he was bluffing after all. But Ludvich wasn't done. "Secondly, that won't kill me at this range. Thirdly, my Speed and Celerity are both at 25 so you won't be able to close the distance before it goes off if I don't want you to. Finally, you look like a tit standing with that there. Put it away before you embarrass yourself further or, knowing you, manage to have it go off in your hand and have to live the rest of your life as a one-armed demonically possessed Vagrant."

Reggie met his eye for all of a second, and then put it away.

"I hate you," he told Ludvich. Ludvich just sighed.

"Come in," he grunted, heading into his house.

Ludvich's home was actually one of the nicer ones in Norvhan. Locally, most buildings were made from a mix of wood and stone. Ludvich's favoured the stone more. Living next to a grimwood, it was just necessary.

Because though Reggie would forever be jealous of other people, and their ability to hit a 20 on pretty much any Attribute they wanted with enough time and effort, those same people were still human. In the grand scheme of things, a weak species that would've died out long ago if it weren't for the gentle hand of their Elf guardians.

Still, the elves couldn't be everywhere. Thus the stone.

"Why a Witchfinder, Reginald?" Ludvich asked him as they went deeper. The place wasn't small, but it was cramped. Every wall seemed twice the usual thickness which meant each room had that many fewer inches to work with at every side.

"Why for you" Reggie shot back at him. "Money, right? Best way to make cash." Not counting being born with cash, of course, which Reggie most certainly was not.

"There's less dangerous ways to wealth," the old Witchfinder sighed.

"No there's not," Reggie snapped. "Not for me. Every year I stay like this, I'm rolling the dice on catching some lung-rot, getting rabies from a rat, or just having something decide it's hungry and walk out of the grimwood to eat me in my sleep. Don't tell me I'll be in danger as if it's not already happening."

Ludvich's gaze softened for a bare moment, so briefly Reggie barely caught sight of it at all. Then he was all arguments again.

"And you think you can become a Witchfinder? Think you'll be walking into anything other than a death sentence?"

"I think you need luck to be a Witchfinder, on top of everything else. If I get lucky I'll be golden, if I don't I'll die. All this means is I get to find out right now instead of over ten years' time spent shitting myself to death."

Reggie was trying to keep his voice level, but it was hard to do when trying to convince a man to let him control his own fate.

"And what if I don't think you'd have any chance?" Ludvich growled. "What if I think you're just asking me to watch you kill yourself?"

"What do you care, anyway?" Reggie snapped, "it's just one less threat for you to keep an eye on if I do, right?"

Silence. Reggie waited it out, he wasn't going to give this old fuck the satisfaction of seeing him break and talk first. Ludvich apparently had the same idea. It was five minutes before one will finally caved in. To Reggie's surprise, it wasn't his own.

"One outing," the Witchfinder grunted, "one, and I won't be going after anything dangerous."

"What's the point of going out at all then?" Reggie asked.

"I will be going after something dangerous," Ludvich amended, "but not by Witchfinder standards. Probably just some peelers or a bear with rabies or something."

Reggie didn't know anything about peelers beyond hearsay and rumour, but a rabid bear sounded plenty dangerous to him. Not that he had any intention of complaining, of course. He wasn't about to talk himself out of what Ludvich had only just agreed to.

"Great," he grinned, "when do we head off?"

The Witchfinder eyed him for a moment, and Reggie feared he might change his mind after all.

"In an hour," he said at last. Reggie grinned to hide his relief.

As far as monster-hunting equipment went, Reggie didn't have much experience in actually assembling things. He'd done his research though. As a general rule, a monster hunter wanted to be as far away from the thing he was hunting as was possible. This obviously meant he was bringing a gun, and Reggie had been preparing this particular article for quite a while. A nice long-arm musket fashioned for accuracy and robustness.

Musket, Tier 0. Mundane.

Modifiers; Strength +8, Speed -2.

The System was a bit misleading when it came to firearms, or anything else that used explosives in some way. The stats Reggie was seeing would apply if he clubbed something over the head, he wasn't sure what a gun's actual projectile would register.

On top of that, he'd figured armour was a good idea. Unfortunately the best he'd managed on his budget was to wrap a bunch of curtains into makeshift limb-guards, which would hopefully stop him from getting his brain melted if a rabid animal bit there. A small one anyway.

That saw to the basics, and Reggie decided to dedicate the remainder of his backpack capacity to just cramming in as much explosive material as he could fit. Actual killing loads, this time, not the harmless little prank he'd used on the police before. He was almost excited to test them all.

Fortunately, he wasn't left to just stew in that excitement for long. He'd spent enough time gathering his things that Ludvich would be setting off soon, and Reggie found himself hurrying to rendezvous with the man at the edge of town. The grimwoods were looking particularly dark as he approached.

At a glance, it was pretty clear Ludvich was more prepared than Reggie was. That much was probably to be expected. He stood just a few inches shorter than six feet, his hair covered and bound beneath the archetypical 'Witchfinder's hat' that so many of his career path favoured. Reggie saw armour under his long overcoat, actual armour made of dull steel, and every inch of him was practically bristling with blades, bludgeons or guns. Ludvich suddenly seemed a menacing thing, standing there like that. Just one glance at him left Reggie baffled at how he'd ever seen this man as anything less than the edged killer he was.

"You're staring," Ludvich grunted. Reggie was snapped out of his stupor at that.

"Sorry, I—" a bag hit him in the face hard, sent him stumbling and falling over. Reggie was thrashing his arms around in reflexive panic before his fried brain finally realised he wasn't being attacked.

"Look inside," Ludvich pressed, nodding to the sack he'd hit him with. Reggie bit back his irritation and did so, finding…musket balls. Musket balls and powder charges, bound together in paper cartridges for quick loading.

"I brought my own ammunition," he frowned.

"Not like these," Ludvich told him, "those are special-made. Hardened lead. You mix a bit of copper in while the bullets are cast and it makes them hold together more on impact, good for killing things with tough skin and flesh. One of those will penetrate six inches of wood at forty yards."

Reggie shivered. He'd seen a man shot, once. Seen the mess normal bullets already made of people tougher than him—the idea that they'd be finding use for things even more destructive…Well, he had expected a dangerous job here. He could hardly act surprised to be finding out that there were very real threats ahead.

"I'm not backing out," he said, realising why Ludvich was making such a spectacle of the revelation. The Witchfinder actually grinned at that.

"Might be hope for you yet, then. Let's go."

[He wants to kill you.]

That, right there, was perhaps the most obvious lie the demonic voice in Reggie's head had ever told. He actually smiled to himself as he got up and heard it. Ludvich, luring him into the woods to kill him?

If he wanted to do that, he could just have Reggie burned like he did his parents.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.