“One day? You really think that’s how long it will take the army to get here?” Elena asked.

  “I hope it takes that long,” Harvey said. “The three of us were able to ride Buttercup here in 6 hours.”

  “Alright, then what should we do? I planned on letting you add a few last-minute inscriptions to the wall, but it sounds like you won’t have the ink for that.”

  “Definitely not. Are you sure those metal plates can handle more inscriptions?” Harvey asked.

  “They should. My ocular skill can see essence conductivity now that I’ve evolved, and it looks like there’s still some room before we overload anything,” Elena answered.

  “Oh my gosh! I totally forgot to ask you about your evolution! Congrats!” Harvey said.

  “It’s ok, we’ve got better things to worry about right now,” she laughed. “I haven’t gotten my first F Grade skill yet, but I used my capstone slot to create a skill that helps me teach others.”

  “Really? That’s awesome!” Harvey smiled.

  “I thought so! Teaching you the basics really opened my eyes. I figure if I’m not going to fight, I might as well teach,” Elena said.

  “How many students do you have? Could they copy the arrays I designed if we guide them through it?”

  “There were around 30 who bought the guide before the quest ended, and another 10 who had somehow managed to make it here without a profession. They are still too weak to help much, but some could probably do it,” she mused.

  “Alright. Let me see how many lightning resonance crystals we’ll need for a batch, and then I can buy the supplies for everyone. Want to gather up your students and meet in an hour?” Harvey asked.

  “Works for me! Just meet us in the parking lot, you won’t miss us.”

  Leaving the large conference room, Harvey picked his way back to the bay of mirrors where he’d bought his new clothes. Moving through the tabs, he saw wands, weapons, potions, robes, and armor of varying styles, some of which he recognized after seeing Veilstriders in the lobby wearing them. Moving to the new Crafting tab, he saw ingots of iron, steel, and copper listed alongside portable forges and piles of charcoal.

  This would’ve been nice to have.

  Further down, he found inkwells, bottles, brushes, and low-grade resonance crystals that looked like colored dice. There weren’t any exotic resonances like gravity or undeath, so he assumed the selection was still pretty limited. He found the basics like fire, lightning, water, earth, air, light, dark, and a few others. Each sold for 5,000 merit, making them five times the cost of an F Grade potion and nearly as expensive as his old infantry warhammer.

  No use dying with a pile of money, right?

  Before he bought anything, he found the listing for a slipsack and was pleased to see an F Grade variant. The G Grade ones went for 7,000, and the F Grade commanded a high price at 30,000 merit, but he hoped the increased size would be worth the cost. Right now, he had multiple jingling around from a leather strap around his waist, and he was tired of trying to remember which one held what.

  Buying it, a black leather pouch covered with purple inscriptions appeared in his hand. It was almost weightless, but infusing his will into the bag revealed a space 10 times the size of his old one.

  “Worth it!” he sang.

  “What was that?” another Veilstrider, a few mirrors down, asked.

  “Nothing!” he blushed.

  His storage ready to go, Harvey flitted through the tabs and went on a shopping spree. First, he bought a portable forge and a full set of tools. Hammers, tongs, chisels, punches, and everything else he’d need to get back up and running now that his old forge was a pile of ash. He also bought 10 crucibles of varying sizes. His biggest concern was always maintaining his sole, cracked crucible, and he never wanted to feel the stress of breaking one again. Then he bought a small mountain of charcoal and a dozen bottles of oil that would quench his creations better than water could.

  Next, he bought dozens of health, endurance, and essence potions for 1000 merit a pop. He had the money, so he might as well spend it preparing for the worst. Satisfied with his pile of ruby, emerald, and sapphire bottles, he moved to the crafting tab and bought a few small hills of ingots, ink bottles, and resonance crystals. He ended up needing a second F Grade slipsack to fit everything, but two was still better than five.

  A small crowd gathered around him as one item after another appeared in his hands, only to immediately vanish into a pouch around his waist.

  “There’s no way he can afford all that?” someone whispered.

  “It’s like he robbed a whole Outpost!” another hissed.

  “Maybe the mirror’s broken? Did he find some infinite money glitch?” a noticeably younger Veilstrider asked.

  “I didn’t steal anything, and the mirror isn’t broken,” Harvey laughed. “I killed undead. You’ll get your chance to join me soon.”

  “How much merit do they give? 20,000?” the teen asked, speaking up.

  “Something like that,” Harvey lied. If merit would motivate these people to fight harder, he was happy to let them dream.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Still piling resonance crystals into his bag, he watched his merit tick down. He couldn’t spend it all, since right now he was only buying his personal supply of resonance crystals. He wanted a variety so he could test new inscriptions without worrying about finding suitable materials. He knew working this way was probably pretty wasteful, but it wasn’t like he could find much light resonance in an undead forest.

  Once he knew how many crystals he’d need for a batch of lightning ink, he’d buy enough for Elena’s students and get to work on the wall. His own bottle would be saved for Inkbound Ordnance, and he hoped that he’d also have time to refine another batch of healing ink before the army showed up.

  After all was said and done, Harvey had spent just over 500,000 merit in 20 minutes, cutting his fortune in half.

  Father would be so proud, he laughed, pretending he was the son of some European royal family.

  Pushing past the gaggle of stunned Veilstriders, he worked his way back to the hotel room before dumping out his G Grade sacks and consolidating everything. He couldn’t store spatial storage like a slipsack inside another one, so he decided to give them to Elena in case some of her students needed one. Finally prepared, he pulled out his inkwell and dropped it on the lacquered wooden desk before plopping into the incredibly uncomfortable office chair whose wheels kept getting stuck in the short carpet.

  “Never thought I’d be doing witchcraft in a hotel, but here goes,” he chuckled.

  Slicing open his hand, he let his blood drip into the inkwell, connecting his weave to the cauldron. Dropping a single lightning resonance crystal inside, he felt the latent will of an aimless thunderstorm rise up to meet him. Not angry or indignant, simply aiming to unleash the power pent up inside the clouds. There was almost nothing to strip away besides the physical matter of the crystal itself, allowing Harvey’s massive pool of Willpower to easily condense the energy and coax it into his blood. It felt like there was still room for more resonance, so he dropped in another crystal. It too was quickly dominated, and in minutes the runes covering the inkwell’s surface faded as vibrant blue ink settled inside.

  “That was easy,” he thought.

  Granted, none of Elena’s students were likely to have anywhere near his Willpower, but the incredibly pure resonance was far simpler to integrate with his blood than the rampaging energies of dead elementals. Inspecting it, he saw the potency was still medium, which matched his earlier batches. Harvey didn’t know what it would take to increase it to High, but assumed that not all materials were created equal. An electric eel and a taser might share a similar concept, but that didn’t make them equal in power. He could shove as many of these resonance crystals in the inkwell as he wanted, but he doubted it had the quality needed to produce high-grade ink.

  Alright, 40 students total, most of which will only be able to handle one… I’ll buy 50.

  He still had plenty of cores from all the Iron Elementals he’d killed, and planned on teaching everyone to create the same network of kinetic absorption and lightning burst arrays he’d used on Aftershock. It would take a slight adjustment to release the lightning as soon as the batteries were full instead of waiting for someone to actively trigger the burst, but he thought they’d be able to manage it. From what he saw last night, the walls didn’t have many essence crystals to tap into for power, so using the absorption method would allow them to cover a wider area and make it so every Ossari who tried breaking through would get a nasty surprise.

  After bottling his ink and rinsing out the inkwell in the shower, he left for the lobby, where he would buy the remaining crystals and meet the gaggle of inscribers sitting around plastic folding tables with matching inkwells on top.

  “Quite the setup you got here,” Harvey called.

  “John wasn’t happy about us spilling blood and ink on the carpet, so we moved our class outside. We haven’t had any issues other than all the rain yesterday,” she explained.

  Looking around, he saw people of all ages staring up at him. For the first time, he saw someone he expected to be younger than Elena. A teenage boy with a football player's build and a messy haircut. Beside him sat a woman older than John, the leader of the Hell Hotel, who was already pushing 50. Harvey had no idea what the cutoff was between being sent out into the forest and being kept safe in the fortress with the children.

  “Class, this is Harvey,” Elena said.

  “Hi, Harvey,” they all droned together.

  “Nice to meet everyone,” Harvey said.

  “Harvey’s going to teach us some new arrays today,” Elena said, sounding like an elementary school teacher.

  “You don’t have to talk to us like we’re five-year-olds,” Harvey laughed.

  “Sorry, force of habit,” she winced. “I taught art at a summer camp back home, and I’m still getting used to having older students.”

  Harvey went around to each student, handing them two elemental cores and a resonance crystal. “First, we’re going to make our Lightning Ink. Now, when you add the crystal to your blood, you’re going to feel a thunderstorm fighting back against your mind. Fighting back isn’t about destroying it. We want that raw power to be infused into the ink. The goal is to control it. Bend it to your will as you work to merge it with your blood.”

  “Let’s start one at a time so we can share any tips and tricks we find,” Elena suggested. “Eric, why don’t you go first?”

  They spent the morning refining their lightning ink. A few of the lower-level students couldn’t overpower the gem and were forced to let the essence dissipate as they struggled to protect their weaves from the errant energy, but most were successful in at least creating low-potency ink.

  Then, Harvey spent a few hours teaching them the arrays in painstaking detail. Elena had them each draw it on a piece of paper over and over again until they could replicate the design from memory. It wasn’t very complicated, but focusing on the task without constantly checking a cheat sheet to remember the design was tricky. Harvey was starting to see the effects of increased Wisdom firsthand, realizing that his own high stat pool had helped him a lot when creating these arrays in the first place.

  Once they had enough time to recover, another round of refinement turned the elemental cores into the kinetic ink that would make up the other half of the array. The sun was already setting by the time everyone was busy painting the massive metal sheets, but it looked like their task would be completed before the Ossari made their move.

  Satisfied that most of the inscribers were on the right track, Harvey made his own batch of healing ink. Once again, he needed three F Grade potions, but this time he was able to waste less of the energy healing his own blood and creating a stronger variant than what he’d used on Aftershock and the Sentinel’s Arcblade.

  All around them, inscribers leveled up as they stacked the first creation bonuses of Lightning Ink, Kinetic Ink, and the arrays on top of each other.

  “Thanks, Harvey. You’re a great assistant,” Elena smiled.

  “Assistant? I did most of the work!” Harvey laughed.

  “Yeah, but that’s only because you focus on the gross-looking runic inscriptions instead of the pretty ones I make,” she laughed, running her finger over the drawing of a sturdy mountain she’d added near the top of the wall.

  “Yours might be pretty, but mine are powerful,” he countered.

  “I’m ok with that,” she smiled.

  Harvey chuckled before stepping back and taking the wall in. Light from the pale white sun setting behind them made the inky arrays covering its surface sparkle until the rays were finally blocked by the trees. Turning back to the forest, he saw long shadows blanketing the ground beneath the trees.

  “I like sunsets,” Elena said.

  “Me too. I hope we live to see another one,” Harvey replied.