Over the next week, 10 more hobgoblins fell in the Arena, causing a deeper pallor to enshroud the valley. It wasn’t until Creeanth and two of the scouts had been taken that the hobgoblins saw their first victory. The entire scouting party had stopped in their tracks as they watched the place where they had been taken from. As the light flashed for the second time, foretelling the usual returning of bodies, all three hobgoblins were still standing. They were all wounded, but they were alive.

Mike watched on in amusement as the three hobgoblins acted out the fight in great enthusiasm. While he couldn’t understand any of their jibbering, it was clear from their reenactment that Creeanth fiery arms had scared the arena goers and made the battle decidedly in their favor.

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Weeks blended together as summer waned, and Mike put all his effort into training up the hobgoblins. He didn’t experience this increased drive alone; after the callous dispatch of those first two hobgoblins in the arena, all inhabitants of the valley were much more focused on their tasks. Where before he was rousing his scouting teams, now those scouting teams were waking up on their own. Where he had once been the sole initiator of most of the valley's innovations, now some hobgoblins were enacting plans of their own. The gardeners had worked on crossbreeding some variations of berries that the scouting parties had found, creating a new berry all together, which despite his protestations, they named the bossyberry. The System had greatly rewarded their labors, and the two gardeners who had headed up the project had been given a skill and title. Titles were essentially rewards for achieving something outside the bounds of what the System deemed as a normal skill tree. The two hobgoblins were now “Berry Blessed Hobgoblins” and had the skill Melding. The effects of Berry Blessed were only decent at the moment, giving them stat boosts so long as they consumed berries every 6 hours or so. But while the stat boosts were mediocre now, awarding only 5% increase to all non-luck stats, they would become truly amazing as the hobgoblins developed. That type of effect on Mike would be worth several level ups, and he was only Level 9 currently. Melding allowed the user to combine different components, which so far hadn’t created anything novel, but Mike suspected it could eventually become one of the best skills for his valley, providing he could devote enough resources. At Level 1, the skill required a 10:1 ratio of reactants to products, making it too expensive to thoroughly test for the time being.

The fisher hobgoblins had also made large strides in their personal development, as a few of them gained an affinity for water. Mike had been surprised as he visited them one day and saw a few of them performing a series of kata-like movements, causing small streams of water to dance and spiral in the air in front of them. The skill was called Aquamancy, and after witnessing it, Mike had immediately began devoting some amount of time to helping them develop the skill into a weapon.

The mine had finally struck some iron, after he had spent several days instructing the hobgoblins in the finer points of shoring up a mine, which was incidentally very similar to his experience when he had dabbled in construction in his late 30s. He had developed the Mining skill, which surprisingly gave him a point to both Toughness and Charisma. Maybe the System knew that women found a hardened miner irresistible. Several of the hobgoblins also got this skill, and he felt more confident leaving them than he had the last time. The iron was an immense blessing to the valley, enabling his smiths to continue production of key tools and resources.

With the increase in iron, the lumberjack population had gone wild, as more and more hobgoblins found that hacking down trees escalated their advancement in Strength, Dexterity, and Toughness. Fearing that he would soon be left with a barren valley, he sent the lumberjacks to grind their skills outside the mountain pass. He took to planting some new trees and received a new type of notification:

[Congratulations: A new Individual Quest has been initiated.

Quest: Oversee the planting of 1000000 trees.

Rewards: Mythic Skill ability]

He had never received a quest before, but decided it was worthwhile to get started on it. The zealots that had taken to watching him from afar soon joined in, and Mike was pleased to find out that each tree they planted counted towards his quest, even if he wasn’t present when they were planting. While zealots who were devoted enough to plant trees all day were small in number, he was happy to see that they managed to plant around 500 trees a day.

The unrelenting work on the part of his followers must have triggered something with the System, as he was prompted to accept a strange title:

[Congratulations! New title unlocked: Prophet.

Accept title (y/n)?]

After an internal struggle, which consisted of Mike wondering if the System was familiar with the biblical story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale when he rejected his prophetic calling, he decided to stick to his guns. There was no reason why he should be worshiped by another being, given all of his mortal failings. Upon rejecting the title a new title was forced upon him:

[Congratulations! New title assigned: Fatalistic Prophet

Speed of leveling increases for all followers based on current Veneration Points]

His curses filled the air for a good ten minutes in response to this unwanted title. He couldn’t help but see the irony that he had unwillingly become a Fatalistic Prophet, essentially confirming the idea of fatalism. Still, he was a stubborn man and would not let this be a part of his destiny, even going so far as to hide the title and his Veneration Points from his Character Sheet so it wouldn’t show up when he looked at it.

Two other major events happened in the late part of August as he worked on his personal development. The first was gaining some Skill levels. He had helped some of the hobgoblins create some bows from some deer tendon and wood, and found a creative was to help both him and the would-be arches gain some levels quickly. He stationed them around the edge of the pit and had them fire blunt arrows down at him while he dodged his axes. The results were exceptional for both Hardened Skin and Dodge, which advanced to Level 4, giving him 2 points to Dexterity and 50% reduction to damage taken from blunt objects. Now if only the entire town could decide to use clubs… The other skill that inadvertently prospered from this was Hands of Healing, which advanced to level 2 after he had to keep healing hobgoblins who were unable to get out of the way of his studs when they rebounded vertically out of the pit. He could now use the skill every 12 hours, which only helped train the skill faster.

The second major event was getting his Tinkering Skill to Level 3 and getting a new Skill Ability. Level 3 Tinkering gave him a whopping 6 stat points that he could assign as desired. He had achieved this by creating a roller mill (a large stone vessel with heavy lead balls that crushed substances to powder as the vessel was turned), which had been only a single piece of his plan to create explosives. His initial tests with blasting stone had proven very volatile, and rather than risking the lives of his hobgoblins, he had instead opted for black powder, which was really quite simple to make.

Black powder is comprised of three main components, potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal. The sulfur deposit, found as the scouts had started exploring the opposite side of the valley, had been a true godsend, and charcoal was almost limitlessly available as Creeanth continued to garner admiration by lighting the nightly fires. Truthfully, the hardest ingredient was potassium nitrate, which can be made quite easily. He started by taking some wood ash and boiling it in water. After straining out the ashes, he added hobgoblin urine to the water, which the hobgoblins were beyond excited to supply, causing the potassium nitrate to precipitate. The roller mill was then used to grind the three substances individually–using lead for the balls inside the mill was essential to prevent sparking as the rough chunks were slowly ground to a fine powder. The final step was soaking the combined powders in alcohol and leaving them to dry in the sun. He hadn’t quite gotten to this step yet, though he did have the barrels and pipes he had swiped from town during the raid that he could use to make a distillery. For now, he had hid the three powders in opposite directions from the camp. They would still explode if combined, and while he trusted the hobgoblins' intentions, he didn’t trust their low Intelligence score.

The Skill Ability he had been awarded for getting Tinkering to Level 3 was different from what he had previously experienced. Rather than being assigned a new ability, he could select one of three options. Melding, Blending or Aeromancy. He was unable to see what each of the abilities did, so he attempted to logically reason them out. Melding he already knew from the gardeners, and it was tempting. He had seen Aquamancy used by the fishers, and he imagined Aeromancy would be similar, but with air. Blending could be any number of things, from making it easier to make juice each morning to being better at combining edges of objects while he painted.

What made the decisions more difficult was that each ability had a branch leading to a second ability that was grayed out. Melding led to Transmuting. Blending led to Breaching. Aquamancy led to Avis.

After thinking of himself, a short bald guy that often spent time around buffaloes controlling the power of wind, he made his decision: he just hoped that Blending didn’t actually let him make juice, he would be missing out.

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Mike was soon regretting his choice of Aeromancy, which awarded two points to Intelligence. For the next two days, he was constantly distracted by his heightened sense of wind–which in turn increased his sensitivity to smells, a very bad thing in a hobgoblin camp. Although calling it a camp would be an understatement now. Many longhouses had been completed, in addition to the blacksmiths shop and the kitchen. Worse still was the requirements for gaining Level 2, which got him one step closer to Avis: Find the end of the kata.

He had spent the majority of the prior two days following the invisible dance that he could now sense. Whenever he stepped incorrectly, moved at the wrong moment, or even gave attention to a passing thought, the instructions sputtered out, and he had to start from the beginning. It was a very frustrating process, and even now that he could perform the first 20 minutes of the movement, he had yet to see any evidence that he had any effect on the air around him.

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One night he lay down and opened his character sheet, only to find that he was a measly 10 kills short of his next level. He had been slowly racking up kills on his jogs with the scouting parties. He couldn’t be sure, but it seemed there were more adventurers than there had previously been. And while he tried to give the kills to the hobgoblins, he had accidently been too forceful a few dozen times. His thoughts were interrupted by another quest prompt:

[Congratulations: A new Individual Quest has been initiated.

Quest: Defeat the #SRT%#STA in the mine.

Rewards: Mythic Skill ability and 10 Stat points by assignment.

Additional Rewards: Valley won’t be apocalyptically wiped out in 3 days.]

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System Leader’s scapula tentacles preened and he looked on in triumph as the anomaly’s dot approached the mine on his screen. What had been an unforeseen and unfortunate reaction between the System and the underlying chemicals of the planet’s core might be the means to stopping this infernal anomaly. At the very least, one of his problems would be resolved in the next few days. Maybe it had been a touch desperate of him to falsely predict the valley's destruction after three days, but it would bring swift results, which was System Leader’s Schzlupro Bogratchshl or modus operandi as the anomaly would say it.