With a huge slam, Tigre’s gauntlets smashed into the wooden notice board, crumbling some of the parchment notices and hammering the nails straight into the wood. The small man had somehow wriggled his way past the towering bully, appearing behind him and yanking downwards on his orange pony tail.

With the combined force of Kiefer’s pull and the ridiculous weight of the great axe on his back, Tigre fell backwards with a crash, cracking some of the wooden floorboards as he landed, dazed and confused. Kiefer gave him no time to react, immediately stepping on the man’s thick throat, bending down and placing his arm on his bent knee.

“Do not disturb me when I’m busy.” Kiefer reprimanded, glaring straight into the eyes of the fallen man. Not letting go of his foothold, Kiefer continued studying the now messier than ever notice board, looking at the structure of requests put up there.

Trying to break free and redeem his shattered pride, Tigre tried to lift his head, only to realize he could not budge even a little. He then wrapped his overly large hand around Kiefer’s ankle, attempting to crush it with his inhuman strength, at the same time trying to move it off his throat. The result though, was unexpected. Not only did he feel like he was squeezing an adamantium bar, he felt the pressure on his neck increase the more he tried to remove the foot. Had his muscles and skin not been enhanced by magic, he knew his throat would have been crushed long ago.

“I see. So you just list the task required, the criteria for accepting the task, and then the rewards for completion. Finally, you just include a time and place to meet. It seems most people leave the request up for a week, arranging to meet with prospective employees every day at a fixed time.” Kiefer thought to himself, as he retrieved a piece of parchment, quill and ink bottle from his PD, all while putting his hand inside his back pack to make it seem like he took them out from the bag.

Tigre was finally relieved when Kiefer stepped off his throat and headed towards an empty table, watching from the corners of his eyes as the spectators cleared the path for him. Thinking that this was his opportunity to get back at the impudent weasel, Tigre tried to stand up, only to feel the pressure around his neck increase. A thick silvery rope extended from the floorboards and constricted his neck, fixing it to the floor. However, that was not all. Tigre realized not only could he not move his head, his whole body seemed to be weighed down by an invisible force, making even breathing difficult.

Kiefer ignored the struggling giant’s inaudible mummers as he began inking down his request on a brand new piece of parchment. He took some time writing the request since it was not in English but instead in Aian, the most common language on the planet. It was relatively easy to pick up, since it was similar to English in that it had symbols that represented letters, and the grammatical structure was identical. All it took was for Kiefer to relate each symbol to its corresponding letter in English. His final request form read as such:

Request: Clearing junk and moving heavy loads. You will be required to bring your own carts, horses and manpower.

Ideal professions: Blacksmiths, farmers, merchants, anyone with physical strength and stamina.

Details: Assemble along the western road leading to Alluviate just beyond the last farm at sunrise 5 days from now. No limit to the number of spots available. The more the merrier. Your reward is based on how much you work. The job entails removing junk weapons and armor from a field, along with nutrient supplements for crops. You keep what you move. The event will last for 2 full days. The first day will be specifically for those going after the metals, while the second day will be for those after the nutrient supplements.

Note: depending on how well received this event is, more may be held in the future.

Reading over it a second time to check that he did not miss out anything, Kiefer increased his supergravity field around Tigre just to torment him more as he returned to the notice board and pinned his request up. Finally, he left the building the same time he undid the gravity field on the now unconscious Tigre.

Everybody on the scene rushed forwards to the notice board to catch a glimpse of the new request this stranger had just put up. As more and more people swarmed in, Tigre’s party could not do anything but wait for the crowd to dissipate before finally ferrying him out of the building back to the inn they were staying at.

For the next few days after Kiefer put up the notice, merchants and blacksmiths alike were scouring the area to the west of Mutatis, searching for this hidden treasure cove of weapons and armors that the notice supposedly spoke of. News quickly spread that no such place was found and soon, everyone was saying that the notice was a hoax, maybe a scam of some kind meant to rob gullible people who chose to show up. However, one thing was still stuck in everybody’s head – the scene of the young man who singlehandedly manhandled the newbie crusher within the time it took him to put up the notice.

Kiefer sat up straight on Feir who was lazily yawning, letting his tongue hang out like a domesticated dog. It was the day of the event and Kiefer watched as some carts started rolling along the road. Waiting until the sun had fully risen, Kiefer looked at the meager turn up of people. In total, there were only 15 groups of people who turned up, each group only bringing a small cart or 2. Most of them were blacksmiths who had chosen to take the risk in attending the event, but not before hiring some adventurers as guards for their own safety first.

Kiefer couldn’t help but sigh, before alighting from Feir to greet the participants. After a quick introduction, He climbed up into the air and told them to wait while he prepared the field. Facing the large empty field that used to be a forest teeming with life, Kiefer began to link his mana to the netherworld, opening the portal and establishing contracts with the souls wandering in that ethereal domain.

Within seconds, the participants watched in horror as entire undead legions crawled their way out of the ground. Seeing as they were not equipped to battle the incoming onslaught of rotting flesh and clacking bones, the adventurer guards turned tail and fled towards Mutatis to warn the residents of the events that were unfolding while the blacksmiths cursed their own luck, following a suspicious request on the notice board.

As the carts began to turn to leave, Feir summoned stone wolves along the road to cut the blacksmiths off. Doing as Kiefer instructed, Feir kept the blacksmiths on site, not letting them leave with empty carts. The participants had no choice to turn towards the man who led them here, hoping to bargain their measly lives.

However, they observed an unnatural sight, as the undead kept crawling out of the ground, but never moving ahead in any sort of attack. Instead, once the field was teeming with undead life, they all instantly fell to the ground, crushed by their own weight, the armour and weapons they held now dented and wrangled beyond recognition.

Kiefer now stopped the summoning procedure and descended from the skies, directing his voice to the blacksmiths who were trapped by Feir.

“Now please do what you have come here to do. It may smell pungent and look gross, but any and all equipment you pick up here will be yours to keep. You are welcome to return after transporting your carts but please take note that this offer stands only till sunrise next morning.” Kiefer announced loudly, projecting his voice to the participants present. Right at this moment, he looked like some kind of saint, floating in the air with the golden rays of the morning sun outlining his facial features from the side.

“Well at least the undead has its uses.” Kiefer thought to himself, as he watched the blacksmiths and their apprentices scurry though the field of rotting flesh and salvage anything they could. “To think that the netherworld siphons life essences in the form of souls from multiple worlds while I can convert those immaterial essences into physical forms with a simple summoning spell. It’s like I have an unlimited reserve of metals to tap into in the palm of my hands.”

The blacksmiths worked quickly, filling up their small carts in no time and transporting it back to their workshops. Soon, they were returning with an entire train of carts and possibly every single employee in their shops to come have a go at the bountiful harvest. Word spread quickly as more blacksmiths and merchants came along, following their competitors after being suspicious of their closed shops in the middle of the day.

The first round of summoning took nearly 3 hours to clear out, but subsequent summoning had exponentially more participants rushing to grab for the free loot that littered the field of dead undead corpses. As such, even with part of the workforce focusing on moving and clearing out the dead bodies, each summoning took only a little over an hour to be completely picked clean.

Eventually, as the day drew on and nightfall came, the speed gradually dropped as the workshops began filling up with junk metals. Blacksmiths were now busy making their employees smelt down the metals into ingots to make more room as cartloads of swords, axes, hammers and lances kept streaming in along the busy road.

Kiefer knew that this sudden influx of metals would severely upset the economy in neighboring citiesm especially Alluviate, but that was exactly his intention. With the cheap, almost free, supply f metals in Mutatis, equipment and tools could be sold at drastically cheaper prices in Mutatis, attracting business away from Alluviate. Therefore, he would have a bargaining chip in the negotiation for the eastern Alluviate plains’ territory, offering to impose taxes on metals within his city to deter merchants from buying in mutatis, hence returning the bulk of the demand for metals back to Alluviate. Even then, this was still beneficial to his city since they could now use the metals for themselves, improving infrastructure and amenities for its residents.

The night went by slowly, as the participants grew weary in the cold winter night. The reward was free, but tiring and repulsive. As Kiefer watched the men load up their carts, he began working on the pile of flesh and bones that had started to collect. Turning his orihalcom metal into giant mincers and grinders, he processed the pile into a coarse and moist mixture. He then heated them up in a huge pan with a flame spell to dry and sear the meat, before passing them through a ball mill also made out of his orihalcom. He worked slowly and leisurely, eventually making his way through half the pile by sunrise.

The next morning, Kiefer was greeted with an armada of farmers, with their carts and horses, having already heard the news of yesterday’s events. Kiefer had barely had any sleep last night, so he was tired. He briefly explained to the farmers and merchants the use of the bone meal fertilizer and instructed them to plough the lands while mixing the fertilizer in before winter set in. Quickly returning to work on the remaining pile of corpses, Kiefer had some help from grateful blacksmiths who offered to help collect and pile up corpses from around the field as thanks for the metals.

While waiting for the men to collect the corpses into a pile, Kiefer decided to take a quick nap, pulling out a thick blanket from his PD and laying it on the cold ground next the Feir. Using his mana ropes, he pulled Feir’s warm tail over his body and quickly dozed off.

The farmers worked quickly, loading their carts up with the fertilizer and quickly transporting it to their farmhouses where their employees were waiting to bag them up into large hemp sacks. They worked quietly, not wanting wake Kiefer up from his tired slumber, shoveling the tall mound of fertilizer granules one shovel at a time.

When Kiefer woke from his rest, it was already midday and the farmers were all huddles around in groups eating lunch. The mound of fertilizer was already almost gone and in front of him, was a basket with its top covered by a piece of cloth. Opening it, Kiefer was delighted to see Sandwiches packed inside, along with a note from Sher and Isana to eat up. Looking again at the sandwiches, Kiefer couldn’t help but chuckle, amused at what he saw. They were ALL egg based sandwiches, some with an omelet filling, others with mashed boiled eggs. Without much thought but filled with gratefulness, Kiefer finished his lunch in a flash and returned to work.

Seeing as there was still some time left, Kiefer decided to summon the undead legion once more, this time, picking the weapons and armour up by himself and crushing them into a scrap metal cube with his orihalcom crushers. The farmers watched as the pungent smell wafted through the air into their nostrils, already used to its weaker version while packing the fertilizer all morning.

Then, something caught Kiefer’s eyes. It was something foreign, but still unnaturally familiar. Moving to the ground to take a closer look and prying it out from the mangled corpse’s hands, Kiefer stared at the weapon in disbelief. He knew that the undead were reanimated in the same equipment they were wearing during their time of death. It was their last memory that was etched into their souls as they travelled into the netherworld. However, this item was the first of its kind to appear.

Looking at the dented barrel, crushed stock and heavily scratched body and magazine, Kiefer stood there in silence, contemplating while the farmers looked at each other quizzically, wondering what it was that Kiefer held in his hands. The appearance of such an item was an unprecedented breakthrough in his research into the netherworld, and he did not even have to spend time to focus on the research as it fell into his hands like a god given gift.

The rifle was a heavily damaged M16A1 that had materialized with the corpse. While the corpse was too disfigured to be identified if he was a soldier, Kiefer was sure it had come from earth. This meant that the earth he came from, was one of the worlds that fed souls to the netherworld. If he could study where the specific soul came from within the netherworld, he just might be able to trace it back to earth, where there’s a chance of opening a portal though his PD leading back to his original planet.

Intrigued, Kiefer decided he was going to hold more of these events in the future, hoping that more such souls would appear here on Aioa. Kiefer quickly threw the damaged rifle into his PD and continued picking up the equipment, before processing the bones and flesh to form more fertilizer. Naturally, soon after he finished the batch, it had already disappeared into the carts of the overeager and greedy farmers.

Moving on, Kiefer ended the day early, taking the rest of the day to help some of the more short-handed farms in ploughing their fields and feeding the fields with bone marrow. The sun soon began to set just beyond the horizon as the first snow flake of the winter season began to fall. Kiefer went straight back home, anticipating yet another egg filled dinner waiting for him. Surprisingly, the dinner he received was instead a warm pot of shredded Trenitt soup with diced potatoes and carrots.

Gladly emptying the warm bowl of soup down his stomach, warming up his shilling back, Kiefer smiled at his 2 girls that just stared at him intensely, hoping to get a feedback on their food from his face. Looking at the 2 girls, a thought came across Kiefer’s mind, and he started to speak.

“Sana, Sher. Hypothetically, if I found a way to go back home, would you be willing to come with me?” Kiefer asked the 2 titans who were still trying to figure out what he thought of their soup.

“Haipotetikally?” Sher asked, tilting her head at the unknown word.

“What are you talking about Kii? Isn’t this your home now? Didn’t you say that when we first moved in here?” Isana questioned with a worried face, fretting that Kiefer might leave her.

“Yes I did. I’m just saying. IF, I find a way back to my original world, would you be willing to follow me? I want to show you where I came from, a world without mana, a world where people could soar through the skies faster than you can fly. Of course, I will be returning here. This is my home after all.” Kiefer reassured her with a warm smile, to which he saw Isana’s stiff shoulders relax and droop.

“Of course I’d love that. That is of course, only if you make sure we can return.” Isana replied, to which Sher also nodded her head vigorously.

“Ok. That’s all I wanted to know, because today, I found something that once belonged to my world. It came here through the netherworld, so I was thinking I might be able to find a way to my world through the netherworld.” Kiefer said, pulling out the damaged rifle from his PD.

“OH What is that master!??” Sher exclaimed excitedly, rushing to grab the rifle from the table. Isana was intrigued as well at the oddly shaped item.

“Well, if you want to go through the netherworld, you know you are going to have to die first right?” Isana commented casually, half joking as she inspected the rifle that was now in Sher’s arms.

“Maybe, maybe not.” Kiefer replied, hinting that there might just be another way around. “ This is a weapon from my world. It’s called a rifle.” Kiefer continued to explain.

“Oh? A weapon? Such an odd shape. Do you use it like a club?” Isana asked, holding the rifle by its barrel and swinging the body and stock around.

“No, well you can use it that way, but that’s not what it was designed for. Do you guys remember this?” Kiefer asked, conjuring up a single mana bullet that spun rapidly in his palm.

“Yes! Scary arrow!” Sher exclaimed, still remembering Kiefer’s first misfire in the Alluvian plains.

“Well, imagine something like this made completely out of metal, and being shot out of the weapon faster and further than an arrow could ever reach.” Kiefer explained, dissolving the bullet and holding the rifle’s stock up against his shoulder, aiming the muzzle at Isana.

“And your world can do that without magic? That is interesting, to say the least. Now I really want to see the world you came from Kii.” Isana replied, immensely curious and intrigued by the rifle, unable to imagine how something would work as Kiefer described without mana.

“Yes absolutely, and this is only one of the many things that will surprise you. We have vehicles that run on 2 wheels, faster than any horse could run, ships even larger than our brig made completely out of metal, and even ships designed to travel underwater undetected for long periods of time.” Kiefer proudly listed a few inventions from earth.

“Really? Now I really want to go take a look for myself. Of course the no mana thing would be annoying, but if I could see all those for myself, with my very 2 eyes, it would be worth it.” (Isana)

“Good. Because I think I will be able to transport us there in due time, at least before we face Gondor, so that we will have help from my world’s technology before the battle.” (Kiefer)

“Yay! We are going on a trip with Master!” Sher yelled out jubilantly, raising her arms in the air and trotting over to hug Kiefer.

Well, here's today's Chapter. i know i said I will resume arc 3 on sunday but i just had so much ideas flooding my head i needed to get some out to make space for more.