Chapter 22: The School

-The Lab-

The laboratory had settled down rather quickly after this whole scene finished playing out. It should be said that James wasn’t just heartlessly torturing the man.

If he was going to grant someone the element of wrath, then he wanted to make sure that person had the ability to contain it. If the emotional elements affected a person’s nature like he suspected they did, then the last thing he’d want is someone constantly angry at everything.

To say that Goliath had passed with flying colours would be an understatement. The fact that he could maintain any sort of self-control with someone picking at his scars is an accurate measure of his character.

After Goliath had cleaned himself up a little, James ran him through the basics. His earth element was already rather strong, so he didn’t go into much detail about that. Besides, he knew that as helpful as that was, actual experience with the earth was worth more.

After imparting the meditation and breathing techniques, they left him to go up to the arena and get some practice in with his new element.

Skay and James both took this quiet opportunity to return to array research.

At the moment the computer had started being able to pick out distinct patterns trying to guess how they worked. The duo would draw up a little test pattern and then input the outcome to the computer. The more they did this, the faster the computer managed to understand what the different patterns did.

They now had a backlog of nearly 40 different patterns from foundations to lores. At last, someone who could accomplish this time eating task for them appeared. A young man looking around 20 was escorted into the lab by Harvy.

Skay looked at him sceptically. “Harvy, you bringing fucking riff-raff into my lab now? Are we going to have to go back to level 3 and start our liquid testing again?”

Harvy made a curt bow and his stiff expressionless face ... well, it did nothing, because of the poor bastard basically being half-dead. He probably tries to make expressions, but can’t, because the rigour mortise is like superglue for facial muscles.

“My apologies Master, Lackey 1 has offered his assistance with the lab job from the board.”

Skay perked up the moment he heard this. “Oh? Boy, you already started clawing these ... err I mean, recruiting fresh faces?”

James ignored the old bastard who was already moving towards the direction of a nearby workbench, he gave the man a look over.

He was the most average looking bloke James had ever seen. 5 foot 9, brown hair, brown eyes, fair skin. Not fat, fit or skinny. He looked like he was printed out from the compilation of every average looking man on the planet.

“You know the rules for this job?” James asked him.

The man gave a nod. “Yes, Guildmaster. I’m to swear an additional oath to never discuss, mention or even refer to the lab or anything I witness in the lab. In the lab, I am only to respond to a name given to me by the Lab Master, or to my assistant number. I am required to do a full 24 hours in the lab before I’m awarded any merit points, and my number of merits can be anywhere from 100 to 1000 depending on my performance.”

James just made a ‘tsk’ sound when he heard the last part. Apparently, Jessy had written this on the contract for the assistant job while he’s been down here.

He didn’t want to award anyone that many points, if someone, somehow, managed to survive 10 days in the lab and did exemplary work, they could request an Arc Cannon. That was just asking for trouble if one of those got out of his control.

He only put it on the merit list because he wanted to show off his pride and joy to the new recruits and give them something to aspire towards. It would encourage them to earn more merits, and by extension do good work on job’s contracted to the Guild.

Skay’s eyes glowed unnaturally, and he beckoned Lackey 1 to come over to him. “You any good at painting? Calligraphy? Doesn’t matter just get over here. Your job is to draw these patterns. I’ll set up the computer to project a different pattern once you’re done. All you have to do is paint the designs exactly the same as the projection. You understand? Don’t make any mistakes.”

Lackey 1 just nodded and then took the brush and paint from Skay and started painting onto a big sheet on the ground.

“Now listen carefully. Each time you finish just say it out loud, the computer should understand. Put this sheet away over in that room then paint the next one.”

Skay then left Lackey 1 to do this job. He and James had another important project they wanted to work on.

“Boy how many PG batteries do you think you’d be able to charge up?”

James thought for a moment. “Well, that depends. In a day of doing nothing else, I could probably charge up maybe 3 the size of the one we used for the Arc Cannon. But if they’re smaller, it might only take a fraction of the time.”

Skay nodded his head a few times then walked over to an available computer, after some playing around he pulled up a design for a little toy quadcopter.

“Well, these little things use fuck all. The battery would probably only be the size of your fingernail.”

James looked on for a moment at the design. He then realised what the old madman was thinking. “Do we have the capability to build these?”

Skay just gave a mad grin. “Well not yet. We have two jobs for the next few days. I want to assemble some automation for the lab. A couple 3D printers, some electronics manufacturing, you know. The basics. We’ll have to get Jessy to start buying up the necessary resources. That also means that the 400 gold we just made will probably fall back down to something like 50 gold.”

James cupped his chin. “Well that’s true, it would be a significant investment. But the automation would speed up everything. The things we’ve been limited in creating so far will be in reach, and we can start making some ... I guess this world would consider them artefacts. Then we’ll be raking the cash in.”

Skay gave few nods. “Good, we should start on this immediately. The second project is some cataloguing. Have you imagined how fast the computers could run if they were made with LS3? I could build a super computer the size of my palm. What we need to do is start cataloguing the full properties of all their weird spirit materials. If we can assemble a decent list, we would be able to replace everything in a computer with something better. The only issue is, there’s only two of us.”

James was leaning on the bench, and his mind was spinning away madly. “Well, I suspect we may be in this city for a while, and there’s no great rush. Let’s do this instead. We set up automation for the lab. That one I agree on wholeheartedly. Once that’s done, we can assemble a simple set up to test and record the properties of materials for us. All we would need is some lab assistants to replace things now and then and make sure nothing explodes.

“Instead of focusing our attention onto that, let’s design a basic training package and educate some people. Once we have a few who know the basics, they can then educate more. This Guild was never going to grow over night. The fact we’ve already achieved so much is a testament to the amount of gear that got sucked through with us.”

Skay scratched his head and then let out a sigh. “For the greater picture, this is the best option. I should warn you in advance, I don’t do teaching well.”

James just gave a wry smile. “Well, you only have to teach a few at first. After that, they can teach each other. I think our best bet would be some of the Hall of Forging Disciples. Any of them that show promise through the first round of teaching we will try and poach them from the hall.”

With this said they began to design and develop lab automation.

-2 Weeks-

For the next 2 weeks, everything was rather uneventful. Apart from a few more beast sightings than normal, there was no sign of a horde attacking. The Brotherhood was now only processing a handful of people a day for meditation because almost the entire rest of the city had already been able to scrape up the money to pay for it.

In total, the Guild made nearly 800 gold from this little endeavour. Which was close to half what the city earned every 6 months when they sold their grains to the empire.

The automation for the lab was somewhat more complicated for the duo of madmen than they’d thought it would be. They ended up digging out another 400 m² room on the other side of the elevator that became manufacturing and processing. After they had finished the first few machines, everything became a little easier, because the machines could replicate the parts needed to build more of themselves.

The guild members had risen to nearly 80 people, and the guild was getting an increasing number of jobs. Some of the more adventurous types even hunted some weaker spirit animals and beasts to trade the materials in for merits.

Once the guild’s automation was done, they could necessarily pour in resources at one end and then the computers would pump something out the other end. It sped things up even more than they initially expected.

By now they had three lab assistants at the same time who had somehow managed to survive mentally and physically for three straight days in a row. One of them seemed the most worrying because he was almost as mad as Skay when it came to playing with alchemy on level 3.

For the first time, Skay named a Lackey. And so Lackey 12 became Norman. He and Harvy seemed to hit it off really well for some unexplainable reason. He was put in charge of making sure nothing untoward grew on level 4 and has almost never left the bottom levels of the lab. Skay was of the opinion the man had a natural green thumb and took him under his wing as an alchemy protégée.

By this time the group had gone to training multiple times and started developing some martial techniques. James had created 2 he was rather proud of. The first one was throwing a lightning bolt.

If he used both plasma and lightning element when he used this technique it was capable of blowing a 3-meter hole in the arena’s wall. That made it almost as powerful as an Arc Cannon, the only downside is that it depleted nearly all his energy and caused him to bleed from every orifice.

The other technique he quite liked was levitation. He couldn’t take flight yet because the moment he was too far away from the ground, it required an exorbitant amount of wind energy to maintain the stability or move around. But if he was just using it in synchronous with pushing off the ground he could jump pretty high and move around fluidly.

Mostly in spar’s he just applied lightning energy and ran around though. In that situation, it was more useful to move faster than the opponent than to have more fluid running and jumping.

By this time Grace mostly just gave tips on how to operate in combat like maintaining awareness of your surroundings in battle and observing your opponent correctly. She’d stopped bringing other disciples with her when she came because no one in the barrier realm could contest with any of these freaks.

Skay hadn’t made another appearance since the first time they trained and neither Grace or the other members of the Brotherhood were too upset about that.

Since his arrival, Goliath had only become more freakishly strong. Jessy now had to apply everything she had just to close the distance when they sparred.

She’d started creating a technique as well, and the only reason she still won any matches against him was because of this technique. She began carrying a hip flask of water with her everywhere and used her spirit energy to create a lance of high-pressure water. Just touching it would be enough to cut through to the bone and it meant Goliath had to be extremely careful whenever she splashed some water on the ground.

If she stepped into it, then she could create a water jet that shot up from below and from out of sight. He actually got impaled a few times, and the only thing that saved him was his wrath energy. Which seemed to increase his regeneration speed by a full magnitude and visibly started closing his wounds.

Skay was almost prepared to start cutting pieces off him to test it, and the only thing that stopped him was James’ reminder that the man was the incarnation of Rage.

The Merchant’s Guild grew to love the Brotherhood. This came about for two reasons. Firstly, the Brotherhood purchased vast quantities of all sorts of cheap materials through them. They bought so much over the past two weeks the merchants guild had doubled their annual profits.

The second reason was that some odd requests the other guilds and sects wouldn’t touch, the dark guild would almost always take on. Although some of the jobs were morally grey areas and rather questionable in nature, James didn’t even blink and posted them on the job board. Hell, a few of the jobs joined the Lab Assistant Job in the ‘black’ section of the job board.

Of course, any job that might offend other parties or faction that could threaten the Brotherhoods peace was posted with rather high rewards from the Guild or Clan requesting it.

It wasn’t just the Merchant’s Guild that posted questionable jobs to the Brotherhood. Although the guild only had mostly weak members in the barrier realm, they always seemed to complete a job. This was mostly thanks to some ingenious contraptions or cheap tactics that James and Skay had thrown together for certain jobs.

Just as an example, the farmers guild was having a problem with a plague of Grain Fly’s that had started a feeding frenzy in some of the paddocks.

James just built some little fly traps similar to some on Earth and then started selling them. Gau city then had a massive influx of nearly a hundred Golden Grain Fly’s and the market almost fell on its head.

James, of course, wasn’t aware at the time how much Grain Fly’s were worth and had only sold the Traps for a gold coin each. Although he’d sold nearly a hundred of them, the 100 fly’s that went into the market got sold for approximately 3 or 4 gold each.

Not to mention he’d now released a method to help catch the Fly’s, so everyone was jumping up and down trying to create some traps and he’d be unlikely to make any money from that venture again.

Over the past two weeks a number of strange occurences happened around the city. Products that James’ guild were selling started seeing copy cats or similar products popping up in large quantities for cheap prices.

James wasn’t too worried and had started cutting back the quantity of production that was allowed to be sold from the guild anyway.

In addition now and then a few strangers managed to find a way into the guild and stirred up some trouble. Most often than not they would take a receptionist hostage and demand to see the Guild Master or try and break things.

Sometimes they were just suspicious looking vagrents that hung around the guild for a few days in a row or tried to tail guild memebers that went on jobs. Very quickly these people would suddenly disappear into the depths of the Guild and never reappear.

-The Lab-

James and Skay sat in the lab watching Lackey 1, who’d just come back after a short two weeks recuperating from a little accident he had while painting an array pattern. He was now bald ... everywhere, and his once very average looking face had a big burn on the side of it.

James couldn’t figure out for the life of him why this guy would come back down to the lab after that business with the flames, but he was quite impressed with how perfect the man’s array painting had become. If he’d made any mistakes in painting then it wouldn’t be more than half a millimetre out.

Lackey 2 hadn’t been as lucky as 1. She had been engulfed by a strange spatial anomaly and Skay was still picking little pieces of her out of unusual places in the lab. The pair had long since automated a painter controlled by the computer, but it was still in the testing phase, and they weren’t about to rush to finish it now that 1 was back.

Lackey’s 4,7 and 11 also had also met misfortune in the lab do to some carelessness. James had been fairly certain one of them had tried to smuggle an Arc Cannon out of the lab and got obliterated by Goliath on the way out of the Guild Hall.

Goliath never mentioned it and James only found out after he’d been caught a different interloper and started rewatching security footage and seeing goliath bringing the cannon back down to the lab.

After that, they started to ramp up security of the lab a little more. To prevent things wondering out and strange people getting in.

James sipped some tea as he watched 1 wiping the sweat of his intense concentration from his brow. “Old madman, is it ready yet?”

Skay looked to a screen and pushed some keys. “Nearly. Should be ready by tomorrow. Do you want to make this a public learning experience and charge money for it? We’re running out of LS3 stones and were going to need the money to purchase some more. On top of that, there are some exotic metals I’ve read about that I want to buy for some testing.”

James placed his tea down for a bit then got up and stretched his back. “Alright sounds good. I think this may be the best idea Harvy has ever come up with. Let’s see if the guy next door has settled on those sudden debts he incurred from the Merchant’s Guild yet. If he hasn’t, we’ll be able to set up a school next door. That way, the hall will remain for members and the riffraff can go next door.”

After saying this much, James walked over to a bench and started pouring lightning energy into a little grey cube the size of a Lego block. Once it looked like it was full of lightning snakes, he placed it into a small quadcopter about a foot in length and width.

“You sure these are gonna survive out there Old Madman?”

Skay glanced back with a grin as James placed the little copter into a dark little shoot on the wall that led up to the surface.

“Well, QC 1 has been out there for almost a week and hasn’t had any issues yet.”

James pressed a little green switch and the copter launched into the shoot. He then walked over to a screen and watched as a live feed came up with QC 100 written in the corner. On the side of the screen were a whole bunch of numbers and graphs from atmospheric readings to average spirit saturation and even compass readings.

The drone quadcopter then shot off towards the south. While this was happening a little red ‘alert’ popped up onto the screen. After pressing it, the screen flicked over to a list of drones from 1 to 100. Written next to about 20 of them was the words Endless Forest in flashing red.

One of them was flashing yellow. After James had pressed on it, the screen switched to a live stream, and he watched as it came flying back towards the inner city and the launch shoot.

“Oh? Old madman, looks like one of the forest drones is back.”

Skay shot up and ran over to check out the readings and graphs it had. “Haha! I knew it. There’s no way that magic forest is on this planet. It’s got to be an entirely different world, I’m sure of it!”

James then pressed the side of the screen and watched as the fast playback of its week long adventure in the forest sped past on the screen. James was surprised to see just how far it had travelled. At one point it even spotted and investigated some spirit beasts.

When he witnessed it rapidly flying away from a tiger with wings on its back he nearly fell over. “Holy crap, no wonder it’s back so early. It had to use half its energy just to escape that thing. Hey Old Madman, how fast did you say this thing can go?”

Skay thought for a second. “Well, your spirit energy, combined with the materials we used from this world to build these things, I measured it at about 180 km/h.”

James turned back and eyed the winged tiger chasing the drone through the air. He then chose to ignore the fact that this world had flying tigers and changed the topic again.

“How’s the computer going with the study on the monoliths array patterns?”

Skay scratched away at this head and readjusted his spider eyes. “It’s fucking not. They’re so fucking complicated it can’t make heads or tails of them. Fucking piece of shit. It needs to be about a 100 times more powerful in my opinion.

James gave a sigh. He really wanted to figure out how it traps something’s consciousness in it. That way, he would be able to build a living computer that could learn and process faster than any modern computers. Although, if they could start building a computer from this world’s materials, that would be just as good.

The only problem was, designing something as complicated as a computer was thousands of times more complex than building some little motors, gyros and sensors for the drones. Even the computer parts inside the drones had to constructed from conventional materials for the moment.

They decided to stop thinking about these things for a while and focus on something more fun.

The pair wanted to start playing with the array patterns again. For the moment their knowledge about these things was still limited. Both of them readily acknowledged they didn’t understand anywhere near enough.

One of the first things they wanted to test was a theory Skay had about the nature of each pattern being more synchronised to certain catalysts.

They separated the primal spirit array into its base patterns. In total, they found that it had 3 different foundations. A storage pattern, an attraction pattern and a gathering pattern.

They placed the storage pattern with the PG paint. Then they added some other recently created paint that encouraged the effects of collection and attraction.