Chapter 5: Thorny Tower

Murphy was too busy feeling ashamed of himself to feel happy about the renown and nearly 300 experience points. Even if he’d somehow accidentally killed some evil witch, the fact remained that he’d just ‘thought’ he’d killed an innocent civilian. The guilt and pain in his heart ... even Hurts So Good couldn’t make something like that pleasant to Murphy.

Nonetheless, this was a game, and Murphy did the first thing all players do after killing an enemy. He looted the corpse. Although the corpse was just ashes now, there were still some little bags of coins and accessories she’d been wearing.

Unlike before when he’d killed someone, something extra dropped from the witch. Presumably, this was something like killing a boss monster, so there was also a little black bag that was dropped which was called ‘Boss Loot’ by the system’s overlay.

Inside this bag was some strange crystals, a magic tome and a few rare ingredients. There was also a magic equipment that almost made Murphy cry when he discovered it.

To most other people, gloves with these sorts of traits were useless. However, to Murphy, who had a 6% chance of ruining anyone he touches, especially orphans who have a 56% chance of being afflicted by his touch, these gloves were a Sagesend.

He didn’t wait to try them and put them on as soon as he had discovered them. Once they were on, like most magic equipment’s do, they morphed shape a little to be a perfect fit. Murphy now had a set of black leather gloves.

After sorting through the loot from the Witch of Eastgrove and picking out a few things he thought Seelie might want, he went and sold all the junk.

When he returned to the academy gates, there was a group of teachers and students all standing around pointing at things near the gate and muttering and talking quietly.

Murphy had no idea what they were doing and frankly didn’t care. Instead, he continued past them to head through the gates.

Just as he was moving past the group, one of the normally very dead statues suddenly pointed at Murphy.

“It was that one.”

Murphy suddenly had a bad feeling. The last thing he wanted was for people to string him up on a cross because they thought he’d just killed some sweet old lady. As such, he turned to one of the mages nearby, who looked to be in charge, and explained the whole thing.

“ ... there’s a witch ... killed it...”

Feeling that he’d explained everything he needed to, he quickly turned to escape into the academy and find Seelie.

Unfortunately, the mage who he’d just turned to obviously had very poor listening skills, because Murphy’s well detailed and thought out explanation had somehow been misinterpreted.

“Who are you calling a witch you little brat?! You think you can talk that way to me in my academy?”

‘Shit! Nobody ever listens anymore.’

Murphy then stopped walking, turned back and looked at the lady mage. She looked like she was at least in her 50’s with greying hair tied back in a bun and a few wrinkles creasing her brow and eyes. Her complexion was ruddy and her eyes sharp and piercing.

Similar to someone else he knew, she seemed to be trying to stare a hole through him with her glare. Only, it didn’t seem to work on Murphy at all. Having suffered under the eyes of Seelie for half a lifetime, whose stare could stop a man’s heart, Murphy wasn’t even remotely phased.

The two people’s vicious glares were like two opposite planes of existence. One felt like a cool breeze on a hot sunny day by comparison to the other, which felt like gremlins had pinned you naked onto a cold metal table in the middle of the Arctic, while busily stabbing sharp icicles the size of a finger into your flesh.

Murphy, still glum from his loss of self-control earlier, just looked back at the mage lady with dead, lifeless eyes. Finally, after some thinking, he’d managed to cobble together a proper explanation and had rehearsed it in his head a few times.

The fact that he had the time to accomplish something like that, which would normally take Murphy nearly 15 minutes of puzzling and thinking, was apparently a remarkable feat in the opinions of the other mages and students who were busy watching from the sidelines.

From their quiet but excited discussions, the only other person to ever come into the academy that could withstand the Head Mistress’ glare was some girl with eyes so sharp the Head Mistress bled from every orifice when she tried to out glare her.

Now another freak had come along who seemed completely impervious to the Head Mistress and didn’t even seem to recognise that he was being glared at. In fact, he looked more like he was trying to remunerate over something.

Finally, Murphy had worked up the courage and words to explain properly what had happened.

“ ... so ... a witch came ... at the gate ... and I killed it...”

He then looked with expectant eyes at the big talking statue nearby, as if pleading for the stature to explain the rest.

By now the Head Mistress understood that this boy was another... ‘special case’, comparable to the strange girl that came to the academy the day before.

It was then that the talking statue, which had seemed completely inanimate earlier, now chose to speak up. Because Murphy now had a positive renown, for a rare change, the statue even went so far as to embellish the story a little.

Apparently, the way NPC’s viewed you was directly affected by your renown. As an example, before he accidentally killed the witch, his renown was -30 and everyone automatically looked at him with disgust, fear and distrust. Now that he had +25 renown, suddenly everyone viewed him in a good light.

Well ... not everyone. Renown worked inversely depending on who you were interacting with. If the person you interacted with was inclined towards ‘good’, then they would view you poorly with negative renown and positively with positive renown. Although this wasn’t ironclad, it more or less happened this way.

Inversely, if you interacted with people inclined towards evil then negative renown made them treat you well, and positive renown made them dislike you.

For a rare change, Murphy was in positive renown and wasn’t treated entirely like a freak. Unfortunately, his charisma was still -3, so that also affected how NPC’s interacted with him.

After some explanations by one of the statues that guard the gate, Murphy was properly defended, and the misunderstanding was cleared up. When he asked how to find Seelie, everyone had strange gazes as they looked at him and directed him to one of the towers connected to the library.

After a little searching and some exploring, Murphy found his way to the tower they were talking about. From what he’d heard, the four towers each represented something significant in the Academy.

One was the library tower which held all the restricted books and tomes on magic, one was the head mistress’s office and living quarters and another was where most of the staff slept while their labs and research were in the adjacent building.

The last one was a total mystery even to the Head Mistress. It apparently contained secrets from way back when the Academy was first founded nearly 3000 years ago. But no one knew how to get into it.

When James finally reached the Library’s restricted tower, the Librarian, an ancient looking old man who seemed only minutes away from death, went up to the apex of the tower and informed Seelie that Murphy had come.

The librarian was rather surprised to see her suddenly drop everything and race down to meet with Murphy. In the time she’d been here, she didn’t even deign to go and meet the Head Mistress, let alone some adventurer type that had stumbled into the academy.

Ai ... I wonder how Seelie’s been since yesterday. Hmm, I wonder if there’s any spells or some method to reset my character in the system. Even if I had to start all over again from scratch, I’d have no problems with it. Any opportunity to rid myself of these accursed stats would be welcome.

Oh, looks like someone’s come down.

Oh wow! Seelie looks amazing today. Ahh ... don’t stare, don’t stare. It’s rude. Great Sage please guide me, it’s a hug! She’s hugging me! Ahh, they’re so soft and big. Was she always this big? She sure is hugging me for a long time. She smells so good.

AH!! Stop stop stop. You evil thing go down! If you start poking her, I’m going to get beaten to death! Quick think of something! Uhmm ... Ok just disengage from the huge. Disengage gently. Slowly lean back.

Wait! No! Don’t lean back! It’ll touch her! Oh, Sage! It’s too late. Ahh! She’s looking down. She knows! What do I do! What do I do! Ah, she finally let go. Sweet freedom.

OK. Clear your mind. No dirty thoughts. Blank space. Nothing here. Man, they were so soft. I swear I could feel her nipples getting hard. AH! Stop stop! Abort the thought process!

Blank space. Blank Space. Just close your eyes and then when you open them, pretend nothing happened. Oh, please don’t get angry at me Seelie!

Oh? What a queer smile. Why is she looking at me like that? Oh, Sage! Is she already planning some revenge?

“You look great Murphy. Where’d you get those clothes.”

Hmm ... how do I explain the origin of these clothes ... well, it’s Seelie, so I’ll just tell the truth.

“Robbed some Gangsters.”

“Oh. Fair enough. Well, let’s go to my room and we’ll catch each other up. I can tell you’ve been busy because I received some prompts earlier about one of the academies quests being completed by the party. Something about a witch?”

Oh. Ok. Well ... guess we’ll go to your room.

Gah! She’s left underwear everywhere! What’s with these panties? Lace? Silk? Is she now an underwear model maybe? Hmm, best not to think about it. None of my business.

Mmm... ‘Great Big Book of Teeny Tiny Magical Creatures’, ‘Teeny Tiny Book of Great Big Magical Creatures’, ‘Very Ordinary Book of all the other Magical Creatures’, what strange books.

Oh, there’s even books on how to level certain skills the best and how to create your own spell models. Hmm, that’s odd, why would Seelie need a book titled, ‘How to get an idiot to notice you love him’?

I could never imagine her having trouble with boys. Even before the changes from the game, she was pretty. Now she’s smoking hot! How would she have troubles?

Well, not my problem. Seelie can worry about her boy issues by herself. I’m curious who it might be though. I haven’t met many of her friends. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her with anyone else. Must be some boy from her neighbourhood then?

“I’m just gonna get changed quickly.”

Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. It’s not my place to barge into her social life. I don’t really care that much anywayyyyy...

Oh Sage! She’s getting changed right here?! While I’m standing here. Damnit! She could have at least done it in the corner of the room I wasn’t facing! She’s standing right in front of me! Gah!! Turn away! Turn Away!

She’s going to kill me if I keep staring. Whew ... that was close. That was way too close! Man, she really doesn’t have any inhibitions that girl. Getting changed in front of a boy in a little room with no one around. If I was anyone else, something bad might have happened.

Especially if they saw those plush perky ... and the tight round ... and these cute little...

AHHH!! Too much! Too much! ABORT, ABORT! Abandon ship! Blank Space, Blank Space, Blank Space!

Gah! It’s seared in! It’s stuck! I’ll never be able to get it out! How cruel! How torturous! This was your plan all along wasn’t it! That’s why you smiled like that earlier. You’d already come up with a method to torture me!

Whew! Calm down! Calm down! Calm like an ocean. Gentle cool breeze in the summer. Refreshing clear spring in the mountains. Bright, beautiful day in the park.

There we go. It’s going down. Whew! I’m safe! I’m finally safe! Just don’t think about it.

“OK, let’s catch up and see what we’ve learnt so far.”

Disregarding Murphy’s social ineptitude, the duo started to discuss everything they’d been up to. When Murphy talked about his backpack having the class stone and game guides, he received a look from Seelie that very much said; ‘I already told you that earlier.’

In the efforts of saving some time, and preventing Murphy from somehow looking like he was listening while not, Seelie simply poured all her memories into Murphy like she had earlier. Turns out, either she couldn’t control it very well, or she could only send it in big sections.

Because she showed him literally ‘everything’ she’d done since the exact moment they left each other’s company the day before. Even the parts where she did naughty girl things that boys shouldn’t know about ... which she apparently did frequently and for extended periods of time.

Of course, it wasn’t a matter of her control or even a limitation of the special trait. It was all very purposely done. If Murphy was so oblivious that he couldn’t realise her feelings, then she would just make it so he would never be able to stop thinking about her in that way.

Every time she did an implant, she was going to fill his head with her and only her, until one day he finally wakes up and realises that all he could think about was her.

It wasn’t the most honest method to achieve her goals, but it was probably the only way apart from literally raping Murphy that she could get him to realise her feelings. It was almost as if he already very much knew her feelings and very deliberately ignored and even misinterpreted them.

Anyway, after that sharing process, which was followed by Murphy refusing to stand up for almost 20 minutes, Seelie took him around to some teachers and asked about this Elizabeth person. Finally, they met an old professor who seemed to almost pass out simply at the mention of the women.

He told quite a tale of how back in his days when he first started at the academy there was a girl who seemed like the sweetest thing you’d ever met. She was polite, cordial and stunningly gorgeous.

The only problem was, that if you ever got on her bad side, curses and evil magics would rain down on you as if the heavens themselves had marked you and the demons were seeking to destroy you.

It was only later, after numerous students and teachers had been killed that she was discovered to be a practitioner of evil and sinister magic. She was chased out of the school and now resides far off to the north in a place called the Tower of Thorns.

Many adventurers had attempted to go forth and slay her only to respawn in the city terrified of ever going back and refusing to complete the mission.

With all this, Murphy immediately decided that he would be the hero to go forth and slay the Witch of Thorny Tower. Seelie still had some things to work on and had elected to stay behind. Although she wanted to travel with Murphy, she wanted to be fully prepared for everything and so first planned to memorise the entire library of the Academy.

She wanted to be able to assist him in everything.

Murphy didn’t mind. For starters, he’d feel rather guilty if she joined him only to become targeted by some of his misfortune.

Murphy gave Seelie a few gifts he’d picked up from his travels and then made to leave. Seelie declined the spell tome he got from witch, saying he needed it more.

Before he left, the Head Mistress tracked him down and rewarded him for completing the Witch of Eastgrove quests. It was a rather sizable sum of money and a few accessories and other useless things. The only thing that was any real value to Murphy was a book of +1. It didn’t specify what it gave a plus one boost too.

The Head Mistress had explained that it would randomly pick a skill and add enough experience for the skill to level. He was somewhat dubious but decided to try it anyway.

After the blinding lights from the memory implant had come out of the book, Murphy received a level to his Deprive Skill.

Now that he’d calmed down from the incident that happened when he gained this skill, he started thinking along a similar line to what he’d thought when he reviewed the demon skill. It’s not the skill or the spell that is evil or sinister, but rather the intentions of the people who use it.

As long as he used it for good, it didn’t matter how evil people thought his skill might be, it was just a skill. He would make it good!

As Murphy left the Academy and started trading in town for everything he felt he needed, the system updated his quest.

‘Ping! Quest, ‘Who the fuck is Elizabeth’, has been updated.’

‘Ping! You have received the quest, Find the Thorny Tower.’

Luckily for Murphy, he had a fairly promising idea about where the tower was located. Thanks to his Mana Cartography, he’d determined the location the tower was in would most likely be the part of his map that had a huge spire covered in thorns.

If that tower wasn’t the tower of thorns, then there wasn’t a tower of thorns on this planet.

Once he’d spent all his money on ingredients and caused a few more accidents in the slums while refining more potions, he set out to kill the witch.

As he passed through the woods, he used his Identify on everything he saw. Trees, rocks, plants, animals. Seeing how important the skill was, he felt it would be prudent to level it up as quickly as possible.

Speaking of trees and rocks, he discovered that his inventory had a volume limit. As powerful as a magic inventory was, even it had to have limits. When he was trying to level things up as he travelled through the forests, he thought back to his idea of loading the shit out of his inventory’s weight to increase his agility and strength.

As such, he started touching trees and boulders and trying to put them into his inventory. After the first boulder, the weight of which quite literally crushed him into a thin paste and forced him to restart the journey, he managed to pick up another.

By the time he had two boulders in his inventory, his strength had reached 12, and his endurance was nearly 30. Unfortunately, the higher his strength and agility got, the lighter the weight of his inventory got.

Even more unfortunate than that, the two rocks he’d picked up that were about the size of a car, had completely filled the volume space of his inventory.

If he wanted to train using his inventory, he was going to have to find things with more weight and less volume. Lead or gold was his first thought. Another thing he’d been patiently levelling up was his Deprive Skill. Although it seemed quite sinister by the description, it actually wasn’t so bad.

He used it on plants, trees and everything he could find. Everything he touched while operating Deprive had its mana sucked out. This was a double-edged sword though. If Murphy’s Mana was filled up to his Max Mana, then depriving something of mana meant that he was trying to force more mana into his body when he didn’t have the capacity.

Turned out that Mana kind of acted like life force for many things. If he had too much, his body had to try and adapt. Every time it had to try and adapt it would cause excruciating agony. It was a pain that didn’t come from the body. But one that came from the soul.

The more he overloaded his body with mana from trees and plants, the more agony his soul felt...

Well, that is a little misleading, it should rather be described as the more mana he forced into his body, the more pleasure he was engulfed by. It took quite a lot of mana to cause the amount of pain needed to overwhelm Hurts So Good.

He also worked on various other skills in his travels. Occasionally he would meet a creature like a goblin or a kobold or something, and they would be quickly dealt with. At one point, he even ran into a unicorn ... which he accidentally dealt with.

In the dark, eerie woods north of Gateway city, heading in the direction of the Thorny Tower, Murphy stood over the corpse of a Unicorn that was busy bleeding out into the dirt of the forest floor.

His face was covered with a smile that looked jubilant but was meant to be wry and bitter. He knew he was very upset about killing such a magnificent and beautiful creature, however as hard as he tried he only felt some perverse level of happiness.

While secretly cursing his Hurts So Good, he watched the Unicorns body twitch now and then from the severe poison attack it had received. Unusually, despite what he’d expected from the system, he had been awarded good luck for this accident.

He had thought that Unicorns most definitely must be considered a good creature. However, when he was trying to discharge the built-up poison and bad luck that had been charged up into his gloves, the Unicorn had walked out from behind some trees just as he was aiming in that direction.

Receiving a sudden onslaught of -46 luck and 7 charged Poison Attacks from a Poison Assassin with Poison Mastery at level 5, the Unicorn really didn’t have much choice in its next actions.

Just as it tried to run, and as it appeared to be trying to cast some kind of cure spell, it tripped. Usually, a very innocent action that wouldn’t result in anything more than a scratched knee or a little bump on the noggin.

Unfortunately for the Unicorn, its -46 luck caused it to trip into a branch that just happened to be pointing up at an odd angle causing part of the branch to stab into its throat and disrupt its casting.

As if the Game System somehow had a very particular hatred for Unicorns, one of the ancient trees in the forest suddenly fell over for no reason and directly smashed into the unicorn.

Still not satisfied, a huge lion, as if it was only interested in making sure the unicorn was dead, shot out of the tree line and bit into the unicorn’s neck while shaking wildly until it heard a ‘crack’.

It then looked around confusedly and sprinted off back into the forests like it wasn’t even sure how it had ended up in this strange situation.

The system awarded Murphy 6 luck for that accident.

Murphy was sure that he’d just been set up and had become the scapegoat for an Assassination on the unicorn by the system itself.

Murphy then did what all Players did in such a situation. He took advantage.

After some effort clearing the fallen tree, he butchered what he could from the unicorn. Filled phials with its blood, cut off its horn, made an effort at taking its pelt.

Although it was his first attempt at cleaning a fresh kill, he didn’t do too badly. The only problem was, the only knife Murphy had on hand was the Poisoned Super Pointy Dagger. As such, he managed to rescue the pelt, but the entire Unicorn was now a poisonous trap.

Apparently, the meat of these sorts of supernatural beasts was very good for increasing your stats. That said, the only person that could eat the meat of this beast now was Murphy, who can’t die from poison no matter how much of it he takes into his body.

After lunch, Murphy used Deprive on the Unicorns body and drew out the remainder of its mana. Turned out, Unicorns are very magical creatures. In the wake of Murphy’s journey so far was a trail of decrepit and dead trees. All of them were once glorious and flush with life ... until he used them to practise the deprive skill.

Every time he deprived something like a tree or plant of its mana he would suck that mana in and the tree or plant would shrivel up and die.

What he didn’t plan for was that Unicorns, being innately magical by nature, were filled to the brim with mana. As such, when he used Deprive, the mana being sucked into his body was almost 4 times more than his current maximum. It dwarfed the mana of the trees and plants.

He then had the joy and agony of suffering for a few hours as his soul was torn apart from the influx of mana and then put back together by his Please Sir trait. When he was finally able to withstand the pain and stand up again, his Maximum Mana had risen to nearly 25 points, and his deprive skill had reached level 4.

At last, Murphy was ready to start levelling the last skill in his skill list that he’d avoided until now. Summoning Magic.

Summoning magic was slightly special in that it needed a median to activate. In the case of demon summoning, he needed a fresh corpse. Although the Unicorn had been dead for a while, it was an innately magical creature, and its corpse magically stayed fresh.

Even after he’d cut some off and eaten it, the corpse was still amazingly fresh.

He summoned his tome and flipped to the Demon Spawn spell. With some focus, he sent some mana into his finger and then activated the spell from the book while pointing at the unicorn.

In a gory explosion, the unicorn’s body was blown apart by supernatural forces. Bits and pieces of it slowly started swirling around in the air until they formed into the formation of a spell circle.

With a bright red flash, 5 little red creatures appeared. They looked like tiny humans with little horns, red skin and pointy tails. They each held a little dagger made of some kind of black rock and were clothed in tribal looking beast hides.

The moment they appeared, 3 of them turned around and started violently massacring the two smallest ones. Murphy then watched on horrified as they consumed their brethren and then turned to the now dormant pieces of unicorn meat scattered around the forest.

Murphy wanted to stop them, but they ate every bit of unicorn they found. Unsurprisingly, they all then fell sick from poisoning. Murphy wasn’t sure how he felt about that whole scenario, but because they were his summons he needed to at least make sure they wouldn’t die.

It’s somewhat like owning a pet. If you have one, then you need to feed it and take care of it.

With a few rejuvenation potions, his demon spawns were all better. Because he didn’t actually consider them to be ‘people’ he had no problems talking to his demon spawn.

It was very similar to the case with the Bear King, where he had no problems properly vocalising himself. It’s only people he can’t handle very well ... or rather can’t handle at all.

The first thing he learnt was that the demon spawn couldn’t actually speak. The only sounds they made were ‘rar, rahr, raw, rah, rar, roar’. The clearly didn’t understand how to communicate and were somewhat childlike in nature when they weren’t killing and eating something.

He also discovered that even though they had worse communication abilities than he did, they could understand his commands perfectly fine. If he taught them something, they seemed to remember it. He taught them how to make a fire and how to make a little hut.

He even taught them some fighting techniques.

Murphy had been in the forest for nearly a full day in game time, and it was already approaching the morning of the next day. Thanks to that he had taken a few naps in the forest and each time his little demon spawns would all crowd around him and guard him while he slept.

Then when he woke up, he would practice martial arts for an hour or two, which the demon spawns joined in with.

Apart from the incident in the beginning when they ate their buddies, they were very loyal and followed all his instructions.

He figured out later that he’d forgotten the ‘Max Summons’ limitation of his spell. He could only control three demon spawns at once. Because he’d used the equivalent of 5 mana when casting the summon, 5 spawns had come out.

Because two of them weren’t controlled by Murphy and completely loyal to him, they were immediately considered enemies by the other spawns.

The only other downside to this was that one of his demon spawns looked like a little woman demon spawn. This wasn’t so much a problem of him being shy around girls, not considering that he thought of the demon spawns as very clever little animals.

The problem came from the fact that just like animals, they would do naughty animal things whenever Murphy stopped for a break. The woman spawn got quite a workout from the two men spawns whenever Murphy was having lunch.

Even though he considered them animals, they were still doing it right in front of him while he ate lunch or was stopping for half an hour to have a snack or break. Most people would be uncomfortable at the site of two dogs rooting right next to you while having a picnic.