An Unwavering Craftsman

"That was mean," complained Grungle, who hadn't budged an inch.

"But ever so satisfying," replied Damien, massaging his fist, thankful for the boosted regeneration perk he'd taken. Even false gods turned out to have quite sturdy faces, and he'd broken a few bones with that punch. "Or at least it would have been, if it had worked."

Grungle laughed, producing a deep, gruff noise that wouldn't have sounded out of place coming from Shigeo. Damien filed that under 'deeply suspicious'. While he didn't know the personalities of the Five, from their recent actions, he hadn't pegged them as the sort of people who would laugh off a physical assault.

The others said nothing, torn between wanting to berate Damien, and the knowledge that they were quite possibly here as assassins.

"I suppose you want to know what really happened five hundred years ago," said Grungle. "Not that it's complicated. Humans—weak, bottom of the food chain, prey for pretty much anything else on the planet. Same thing for the other humanoid races. All of them small, fragile, unable to wield magic. The dwarfs fled underground. The orcs revelled in the violence, uncaring of how many of them died. The elves took refuge in forests. Humans... couldn't do anything. Jacks of all trades, masters of none. We could dig better than elves, but worse than dwarfs. Bred faster than either, but not as fast as orcs or goblins. We could forage in forests, but not pick up threats from a mile away and dart up trees like flat ground like the elves and beastkin could. We tried to build walls. They got torn down. To put it simply, life sucked."

"We heard that much from Grant."

"Hah, yes. The [Tourist]. What a strange class that was, and what amazing use he put it to. Scared the life out of me the first time he turned up in my forge. Truly an inspiration."

"An inspiration? A strange class? But you gave it to him."

Grungle snorted. "Odd things, classes. It's not like we have inside information. Me and four friends—some of humanity's best, not that that was saying much back then—got together and begged the Other for salvation. To level the playing field. To give the humanoids of the world a chance. And, for some unfathomable reason, it listened. It gave the five of us the first classes, and the ability to bestow classes on others. I got [The Maker]. And so we did our best. We travelled from settlement to settlement, spreading the power we'd been granted. Giving humans the chance to protect themselves. We turned frightened children cowering in caves into mighty warriors, powerful mages, incredible artisans. For a moment, we thought we had a chance. Then we realised the truth of our situation. Previously, we'd been ants. Pests to be exterminated or food to be harvested. Now we'd made ourselves interesting. No longer did we face random monsters acting on instinct and hunger. Instead, intelligent dragons and demons came for us, seeking the thrill of the chase. Hunting humans practically became a global sport. Every area we visited became a target, everyone slaughtered before even getting their first feat."

A loud crack accompanied the anvil shattering as Grungle squeezed it hard enough for the metal to ooze between his fingers.

"Can you blame us for wanting to get humans out of there? We had a plan. It was a good plan, too; for Gaia to nurture a dream of Murill, for Illumis to grant it a measure of reality, me to sustain it, and Kakkerxat to defend it. To let our people in while keeping the nightmares out. It was never meant to be forever; just enough for us to grant a class to everyone, then for them to train, grow used to their new power, and gain some levels. We could build fortified cities, raise up champions capable of defending them, then return and carve a place for ourselves on that hostile planet. But our planned few years stretched into a decade, then a century, and in all that time we had only a few such champions. Only two are alive today. I asked why. Did the power granted to us have limits? Had we spread it too thin? We didn't know how our own powers worked. Thankfully, there were plenty of researchers in the new bowl doing our work for us, and it didn't take them too long to spot the potential of tier ones. I found it hilarious; couldn't think of it as anything other than the Other making a joke. Not that it mattered; we finally had a solution. With the enchanted items they could produce, humanity had the chance to thrive. And then Illumis killed them, and showed me what an idiot I'd been. They deliberately hadn't been producing champions. They'd abandoned our plan, desiring to stay there in their dream world forever instead. Dreaming of being gods."

Grungle snorted in disdain.

"We could never stay there indefinitely. The Other would have breached the bowl eventually, or Brenhin-Tân would have grown his kin enough to launch an all out attack. With the others sabotaging our own power base, we never could have defended against the dragons forever. Even my source-lights weren't built to last as long as they did. Anyway, that's my story. Any questions?"

Damien had thousands, but started with the one that outraged him most. No wonder the Five had never tried to explain, and had moved directly to attempted murder! "So the reason every tier one craftsman group got executed was nothing to do with them being a threat to anyone, but because they were a success? If they succeeded, humanity would be able to defend itself against the rest of the world, and you lot would lose your excuse to play gods?"

"Yup. Sucks, doesn't it? No-one, no matter their power, could protect everyone, but you can give them the power to protect themselves. Exactly what we thought we were doing when we first started bestowing classes on people, except that your items don't start at level one. Just think; every human having the physical strength of a dragon. Able to reach the level cap within days of obtaining a class. Being immune to every insidious assault a monster could make."

"So, what now?" asked Fleta, dealing with the most important question before Damien had the chance to continue ranting.

Grungle shrugged. "What I want to happen is for you to spread your enchanted items far and wide. Monster spawn rates will increase by an order of magnitude out in the real world, where we can't discourage their formation, and without our suppression, each individual monster will be stronger. It won't take the stronger creatures of the world long to realise humanity has returned, either. Not to mention the dwarfs are probably very unhappy that we stole a continent quite a lot of them were living on, and unceremoniously dumped them over the other side of the ocean. You'll have enemies on every side, and will need to hurry if you want to save any semblance of civilization."

"That's a nice long-term plan," said Fleta, "but I was referring to now."

"Ah. You mean the fact that the Other ordered you to kill me. I was rather hoping you'd ignore it, to be honest. Think how many lives I could save, using my power to defend this city while you worked to produce weapons and equipment."

Damien frowned, picking up on the obvious dishonesty. "Then why are you here? Shouldn't you have started already? The city guard is already struggling to keep up, and I'm sure you could have built a better wall around the island than the one we hopped over."

"I was waiting for you."

"I can understand not leaving this place, given that you'd likely get tentacled if you ever stepped into the real world, but waiting for me isn't a reason not to have been sending weapons back, is it?"

The false god glared at Damien, but Damien didn't miss the twitches.

"You're scared," said Shigeo, not having missed it either.

"Dammit," swore Damien. "I assumed the accepting one was you, and the terrified one was Gaia. It was the other way around! You haven't been sending weapons because you're afraid that if you opened a link between here and the real world, the Other would notice and squash you as easily as it squished Gaia. Except, unlike her, you don't have Kari around to undo the damage."

Grungle's demeanour changed completely as he dismounted his anvil and dropped his act. No longer a chatty, friendly, middle-aged smith, but Grungle the Maker, one of the Five. Damien subconsciously took a step backward as the pressure hit.

"And what do you intend to do about it? It's the others' fault that damn demon in the sky is so pissed! If we'd only stayed in the bowl for a few years, like we'd planned, I doubt it would have cared. Why should I be punished for what those power-hungry idiots decided?"

It wasn't as if they'd decided anything, at least not at first. All of them, Grungle included, had thought that the setup they had in the bowl was pretty good, and that perhaps drawing things out a little would give their people a much-needed rest. A decade wouldn't hurt. And then a century had passed, and no humans of the bowl remembered the lives of fear their ancestors faced in the real world. For those who had lived peacefully all their lives, throwing them back out into a place where every day was a struggle to survive wouldn't be fair.

And of course, since none remembered that place, no-one remembered that the Five were human, either. Parents had passed on tales of their wondrous saviours to their children, and those children built shrines to give their thanks. Their children had seen the shrines, heard the thanksgiving of their parents, and had built churches. In that, Grungle had been as guilty as the others, and the power gifted to them by the Other responded, giving them the ability to raise up priests and priestesses.

It wasn't until a couple of centuries later, when researches had catalogued enough of the advancement trees of classes, that the first person spotted the tier one break, and it was only when they tried it that the Five were forced to confront what until then had been mere unconscious desires and actions. Illumis didn't take long to make his decision. Unaware that the other four had fallen into the same thinking as himself, he took care of the problem before they voted to end their project.

Grungle decided the opposite, deluding himself into believing that the initial delay was nothing to do with him. Believing that if he gave up his comrades to the Other, it would spare him. That the dispassionate god that had by some whim granted him power more than half a millennium earlier could be stirred to compassion once more.

He was wrong; the creature had never had compassion. As far as its thought processes could be rendered into something comprehensible by humans, it would be better to say that it preferred diversity. Watching species fail when it knew they had potential would disappoint it. It could see the potential of humans. Despite Grungle's opinion, they did have a strength of their own; their ingenuity. It was no coincidence that the Five were human, rather than one of the other humanoid races. Which of the other races would attempt such an unlikely path? Given time, what inventions would they come up with? Would a dragon still prevail against them once the humans invented guns and bombs? Humans never needed magic; they simply needed time. On a whim, the Other had granted it to them.

The results had been disappointing.

They'd focused their attention only on the power granted to them, and had never tried to grow beyond it. But necessity was the mother of invention, and now they had that necessity once more.

The wall of the forge shifted, the brickwork peeled back without a single brick breaking. Behind it was a red, slitted eye. Grungle's aura failed and his skin paled. Now it was his turn to back away. Not that it would do him any good; a tentacle of the Other snapped in through another wall, grasping the false god and pulling him screaming through the hole in reality.

Now the bricks cracked, the entire forge crumbling around Damien's panicking party, before the air shimmered, leaving them back in front of Grungle's statue. Its hammer had snapped at the shaft, the head crashing into the floor, and the crown had shattered. Grungle had avoided the wrath of the Other by never linking his realm to the real world, remaining hidden, but his fear had led to a vain hope of talking Damien around to his side. Of convincing him to intercede with the Other. He had foolishly linked his realm to the real world to bring in Damien.

"Why do I feel like I just got used as bait again?" Damien grumbled.