The Dark Lord of Crafting

Kevin woke up in a diamond box ten feet to the side. There was no rulebook for Survivors explaining respawn mechanics, so I’d constructed his prison according to Bojack's knowledge of how heroes had been captured in the past. The purgatory Kevin had prepared for me had been overkill. You could downsize, but even the downsized version was a serious undertaking.

Technically, a coffin and an array of torches were enough. However, we didn’t want the residents of Mount Doom to see him, and dropping him in the wilderness would have been too insecure. He needed to be monitored. That, and Bojack wanted his spawns. Mobs were the cornerstone of Dargoth’s armies, a resource no other nation possessed. We’d argued about it, more monsters meant more risks, and if another demon appeared, Kevin could bargain with them for his freedom.

But Bojack was adamant that we needed more monsters, and if I pushed the issue, he was just going to give me an official order. I preferred to keep the active constraints of my oath to a minimum.

A single torch on the roof of the cell illuminated the center of a massive cube, making Kevin’s meager living space the focal point of an otherwise lightless space. The former Dark Lord had appeared with the dawn, not that the sun could reach him here. Bojack and I were standing at the end of a granite corridor I’d tacked onto the citadel, watching as the blue glow of a System screen appeared above Kevin’s arm.

“He looks pretty bummed,” I said.

“A success,” Bojack said.

“You could say that.”

There was a fifty-foot air gap between the cell and where we were standing, so unless Kevin’s dark vision was as good as mine, it was unlikely he could see us. If he was speaking, we couldn’t hear him. His cell was unbroken, as this had been a rush job, and I would figure out the amenities later.

His new home rested atop a pillar, placing it in the exact center of the larger cube, with the spawn anchor set beneath it, hidden within the pillar. The suspension was necessary, as well as the cavernous space, because he couldn’t come back to life in open air. It was still a gamble, the chances of him returning to the world farther away from the anchor were low, but not nil. Bojack wasn’t sure if transparent blocks interfered with reincarnating heroes the same way they did with mobs, but I would soon be covering the floor with glass to be safe.

Two sides of the cube were just the mountain, it had been faster to use the landscape than create the entire structure from scratch, and the floor was natural stone. Setting this up had still required the better part of a day and a full night, ceaselessly laying blocks, and occasionally shoving a loaf of bread down my throat to keep my energy up. I’d tasked soldiers with collecting torches from around Mount Doom, so the outside of the cube, as well as the surrounding area, was studded with them.

Not one of them had questioned my orders. Dargothians were not accustomed to arguing with their Dark Lord, and the cube couldn’t have been the first odd build project they’d seen around the mountain.

I was exhausted, and the result was unsatisfying. Kevin was here, trapped, dethroned, but the quest in my log remained incomplete. Capturing him didn’t fulfill the goddess's wishes, not that she had made any effort to make those wishes clear to me.

“How long until the demons get here?” I asked.

“A few that I trust are already en route,” Bojack’s hand drifted to an Oathdagger at his hip. It wasn’t mine, it was Bael’s, a curvy Kris with a black gem set in the center of its crossguard. The toad had been the one to make a bargain with Kevin, as well as other demons. Apparently, it was common practice for them to magically reinforce their hierarchy. Not every demon on Plana had been bound to Bael, but all the important ones had.

As soon as he broke the blade, they would feel their release, and a struggle for dominance would ensue, both with us and with each other. Before he did that, we were going to collect a few allies from the more recently arrived harbingers, who had less to lose and more to gain from a shake-up in the power structure of Dargoth.

Making new demonic acquaintances was not a pleasant prospect. It would dig me deeper into my relationship with Discord, but it was necessary if I was going to keep the throne. Not that I was entirely sold on the idea that taking Kevin’s place was the best way to go about saving Plana, it almost certainly wasn’t, but until a more permanent solution to my prisoner problem presented itself, that was what we were going with.

For now, working with the demons would allow me to help the people I cared about. If Esmelda had any better ideas, she could tell me about them when I had her back.

“Is there anything else I need to do here?” I said, waving a gauntlet at the naked man in the cell.

“I will watch him,” Bojack said. “I believe you have an appointment with the viziers.”

“Yeah, I guess I do.” What I wanted to do was pass out, but I’d agreed to talk to some of Mount Doom’s functionaries before I ran off to find Esmelda. While Kevin had occupied himself with his hobbies, Bael had acted as the defacto ruler, and a team of scribes had served under him managing the logistics of the empire. They could tell me everything I wanted to know about the fate of the lillits.

I left Bojack, my boots dragging as I shuffled down the corridor. It reminded me of a passenger boarding bridge, though of course, it was stone instead of whatever those were made of, attached to the east flank of the citadel. I’d mined out a section of the outer wall and installed one of Kevin’s fancy steampunk doors to keep it private. Thank the goddess, crafted objects were modular.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how we’d killed him.

Getting him out of his armor had proved impossible, as I didn’t want to destroy it or otherwise risk him being able to move. Bojack had suffocated him in liquid stone. Not a pleasant way to die. It wasn’t that I felt much sympathy for him, but I didn’t like how callous it felt. Having my first act as ruler be an act of calculated murder didn’t bode well for my intentions to help Dargoth become something other than an objectively evil empire.

I still hadn’t buried his body. It was in his bedroom. Once he was dead, removing the armor had been easy. I’d harvested it, and the resulting medallions were now in a pouch on the nightstand. Seeing his face had left me with mixed feelings.

He had dark, oily hair and pale skin. Not traditionally handsome by any means, with fish lips and a weak chin. It was surreal to see him this way, the man who had betrayed the heroes and become the most feared ruler in the world before cloistering himself in this mountain to dedicate his life to what amounted to an assortment of obscure hobbies. He’d been younger than me when he was isekaied, and that youth had never vanished from his face, even in death. He looked like a teenager.

His eyes had been wide open, staring at nothing, and they exhibited a severe case of heterochromia. One looked normal, as blue as Gastard’s, and the other was so dark it was hard to tell the iris from the pupil. It might have been a sign of Beldam’s taint. My eyes had changed differently, but this didn’t look any more natural than my slit pupils. Aside from that, he could have been a normal person, a person who was too young to be the Dark Lord.

I’d asked Bojack about it, and he’d confirmed that heroes don't age normally. Immortality, just like I’d asked the goddess for. Except there was a drawback. Kevin hadn’t acted like someone with centuries of experience and wisdom. He’d acted like a kid, screwing around and quoting movies as we fought.

The person he was supposed to be should have been able to beat me easily. But in all the time he’d been on Plana, he hadn’t grown, at least not mentally. He’d learned new things, sure, but no matter how much knowledge or power he amassed, Kevin had still been operating with the brain of a teenager. Impulsive, short-sighted. Of course, those could have just been personality traits. Some people were like that at any age. But the goddess’s gifts were two-sided.

At some point, I needed to talk to him. He was the only other living Survivor, as far as I knew, and he had to understand the System better than I did. But leveling up hadn’t given him his inventory, a piece of equipment did.

There had been a ring on his right hand; gold, and inscribed with lettering that looked suspiciously elvish. If there was one thing I could say for Kevin, it was that he’d been dedicated to the dark lord shtick well beyond the level of a casual fan. It was clearly the One Ring, and picking it up had triggered a new entry in my crafting log.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Storage Ring

The Storage Ring grants its bearer access to an extradimensional space capable of containing a vast array of items and materials without affecting its external appearance or weight. After attuning the ring, the wearer can mentally access its contents. Only the bearer can perceive or retrieve the objects contained within.

Formula access denied. Criteria unmet.

This was his inventory. I had an inventory. It was one of the most common and most casually abusable mechanics in any LitRPG system, and until seeing Kevin use it during our fight, I’d assumed it was something that I would never have. Maincraft, of course, used inventories, but the Survivor System was, at best, Maincraft adjacent, and I’d reconciled myself to doing without. The coin conversion mechanic; combining individual units of a given material into tokens, medallions, and cabochons, was a functional substitute for an inventory as far as carrying around massive amounts of harvested resources. This, however, was going to put me on another level entirely.

If I could use it.

The formula was redacted, so the System wanted me to discover that for myself, or earn it in some way. And how exactly was I supposed to attune the ring? The notifications sometimes came with hints, but they still fell far short of a proper instruction manual. The ring was on my finger now, but putting it on hadn’t given me the sense that there was a magical connection being made.

No other weapon or tool had required attunement, everything had worked on its own as soon as it was equipped. Was I going to have to meditate? Talk to it? The situation was frustrating, but the existence of a Storage Ring had at least assured me that Kevin wouldn’t have access to hidden resources when he woke up in his box.

The viziers lived in the lower levels of Bael’s tower. As I made my way through the citadel, the soldiers I passed saluted, and the servants bowed. Slipping into Kevin’s place had been as simple as sitting down. I was still wearing my armor, but I wondered if hiding my face was even necessary. The System had recognized me as the master of this citadel, and the result had been the men in the great hall immediately accepting me as who Bojack claimed I was.

The achievement that had come with it implied there was some mind-altering going on.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Achievement: Sheltered (6)

Congratulations, you’ve skipped some steps! Your stronghold is a marvel of architecture and artisanry. As a lord of a Domain, your reputation will attract followers from far and wide. Those who swear themselves to the seat of your power will display unquestioning loyalty. Try to be worthy of their fealty.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. While exceedingly convenient, the note came with a host of moral implications that I did not have the mental energy to work through at the moment. Achievements didn’t typically come with extra superpowers attached. Maincraft had villagers, and they were essentially passive mobs with some additional features. They operated on a simple set of rules, and you could do what you wanted with them.

People were not Maincraft villagers, though Kevin might have treated them like they were. Using magic to influence human minds was a slippery slope toward something worse than simple tyranny. There were a lot of arguments to be made about that. Is psychic influence all that different from simply being charismatic? Human decision-making is influenced by all sorts of things, and some people are better at pushing those buttons than others. Two-thirds of all Presidential elections are won by the taller man. But it felt wrong to know that the System was the one pushing buttons.

Bael’s tower was set apart from the main fortress, a soaring spire situated on a stark cliff. As I followed the cobbled path, a boy dressed in a gray livery exited the tower, saw me, and froze.

“You're fine,” I said, “continue doing whatever you were doing.” People here had jobs, I didn’t need them to be freaking out every time they saw me passing by.

The kid bowed deeply and then ran off. An ornate brass knocker hung from the door at the base of the tower, but I ignored it, and let myself in. I was the Dark Lord, after all.