[Book 1] Resupply

Immanuel enjoyed uninterrupted sleep at his personal storage that night. Just moments after finding his utility belt—with three leather pouches attached to it—resting on the table, he stumbled upon a familiar dagger. Its scabbard and grip, like the utility belt, had become red from having been soaked in his blood for a length of time.

The weapon lay on the floor, a little bit to the left of the table. Curious of the dagger's condition, Immanuel picked it up and studied its blade. It was chipped, cracked, blood-stained, yet not rusted, just like the blade of the throwing dagger he pulled out of the pouch.

Immanuel clicked his tongue. This dagger was my weapon of choice. Oh well, time to try a new one out later.

Having placed the bloodied dagger on the table, above the utility belt, Immanuel unsheathed the greatsword and studied its blade.

He noticed that, besides a few faint spots and streaks of blood he missed during the initial wiping of the blade, the sword was an immaculate silver piece, likely fresh out of the blacksmith's shop. My first greatsword and my first time getting a newly purchased weapon. I wonder how much this cost the big man back there.

Immanuel removed a familiar box that sat among weapons on one of the shelves. This box contained tools for cleaning and sharpening bladed weapons. Then he began to work on removing the faint blood stains on the greatsword.

As he progressed with his task, he imagined the deadly potential of the weapon in his hands. Its length, curvature, and weight meant that he could do crowd-decimating wild swings with it, while the blade's slender build and point made the sword a great thrusting weapon. It's about as long as two swords and half of a spear. Quite versatile, I'd say.

But he was not about to shelf his many throwing daggers just yet. When he had sheathed his greatsword and set it aside, Immanuel took the pouch filled with throwing daggers and spilled the contents to the table in such a way that they do not slip or bounce off the table and fall. Then he took a bunch of them with one hand and studied each one.

Seeing some of the daggers in the bunch still intact, though stained with blood, Immanuel studied more bunches of throwing daggers, making sure to segregate the damaged ones from those still intact, until he had taken a good look at every single one he brought to his last mission. By the time he finished, he found that there were more intact knives than damaged ones. The latter he set to one side of the table as he made a mental note to get rid of them later, while the intact ones, he began to tidy up. I was mentally preparing myself to spend lots of gold on these!

Each of the daggers and one-handed swords in Immanuel's collection were immune to rusting, what with these being made of a superior material than most bladed weapons available in the market. When asked, no blacksmith was willing to divulge the name and nature of this metal, claiming it to be one of the great secrets of their guild. And when asked why they keep such a secret, every blacksmith tells Immanuel the same thing—pettiness.

Magic items, as Immanuel recalled to the best of his ability, are any object infused with mana. The mana infused into an object can only be used in accordance with the crafter's intention for infusing mana into that object—either to give it another function or significantly improve its performance. Those who had a hard time remembering during training were told to think of a magic item as an object with a spell scroll attached to it. While not entirely true, Immanuel thought such a description easy to digest. But unlike spell scrolls which burn up once used, the magical properties of a magic item can be used repeatedly until the mana infused in it dries up.

Most crafters of magic items are blacksmiths, but not many of the Kingdom's blacksmiths can craft magic items. Mana, a resource that not many people in the Kingdom possess, is required in the creation of a magic item.

With the high social status of the magic item crafters being a constant threat to the blacksmiths' guild's social status and unity, they devised a way to be viewed at almost the same level with the magic item crafters and keep the guild members united. Just as the magic item crafters had their secrets, the blacksmiths convened to determine discoveries and mysteries of their craft they should keep secret from the rest of the Kingdom at all cost, lest they lose access to resources valuable to their craft. And the name and nature of the metal that's immune to rusting was said to be one of those secrets.

When Immanuel had finished tidying up the throwing daggers he could still use, he placed them back inside the pouch, arranged in preparation for an upcoming fight. Then he opened the two other pouches to study their contents. At first glance, their contents, explosives about as long as matchsticks, but thicker due to the deadly contents packed into each stick, looked to have been drenched in blood, judging from their heavy red stains. Maybe there are some in here I could still use.

When Immanuel tried to pour all the grenades on the table, he found that many of them had gotten stuck either to the inside of the leather pouches, to each other, or both. My blood must have interacted with the contents of these grenades and caused them to get stuck to the leather and each other. He picked those that had gotten stuck to the leather with his fingers, and in time, all the grenades were on the table, ready for scrutiny.

He picked apart the grenades that had gotten stuck to each other, and he saw that each one had been drenched in so much blood from that night. Immanuel clicked his tongue in disappointment. No amount of rubbing their heads to the striking surface on the belt would be enough to light them up, Immanuel thought in reference to how these explosives were designed to be activated—like matchsticks.

Their sizes and short fuses prevented the enemy from countering them in most ways imaginable. But their short fuses meant that Immanuel had little time to think about where to throw them. Before lighting up one of these explosives, you should have already decided where to throw it, lest you waste it or yourself, was how he was trained in their use, also because the blast radius of a fragmentation grenade of that size was only about half the length of a normal human jump, according to testing documents. It will, therefore, take a lot of fragmentation matchstick grenades to eliminate a large congregation of enemies.

As such, Immanuel preferred to use the nonlethal variants of the matchstick grenade. Most of the grenades that lay on the table in front of him had a black stripe that ran around them, which indicated that they were stun grenades. The others had a yellow stripe instead, which meant that they emit thick smoke, which quickly spreads around an area large enough to fit thirty people standing, according to testing documents.

Being nonlethal, not even the worst kind of mishandling could make them deadly devices. They could still injure in some circumstances, but the worst they could do was break skin, even in great numbers. In combat, with the amount of adrenaline rushing among fighters, such injuries are insigificant.

But while nonlethal, these grenades made Immanuel an even deadlier enemy. His stun grenades in particular blinded, deafened, and confused enemies, leaving them without any way of knowing where Immanuel would strike. While these effects did not last long, the time they lasted was enough time for Immanuel to put affected enemies to the blade and make sure they were dead.

These were not supposed to break through armor, but they do the job better than fragmentation grenades, was how Immanuel justified the use of non-lethal grenades.

—

Immanuel counted a total of two hundred gold coins he had stored inside a box. There were also other gold coins in the same box, but Immanuel segregated these to the bottom tray as they were not currency valid within the Kingdom's walls.

Immanuel held one of these coins up. This coin, like the others he did not count, bore an inscription of a man shaking hands with a skeleton. This inscription was one familiar to Immanuel—it was the symbol of The Ungovernable Ones, the first modern-day resistance against those who Baron Nigel Ironhelm, in recent times, called "The Tyrants of Varelith."

I still have my Coins of the Masses. I think I should pay them a visit, Immanuel decided as he placed a handful of gold coins in a different pouch, one that had not been damaged by combat. Then, with that last handful placed inside the pouch to total its contents to two hundred gold coins, he grasped five Coins of the Masses and held them up, thinking if whether they would be enough for the tasks at hand or not. But after giving it some thought, he took five more and pocketed all the Coins of the Masses he had in his possession.

Then Immanuel turned his attention to a shelf that was at the opposite side of the room. A white wooden box sat behind a number of daggers. Opening it revealed to Immanuel what he considered the backup to his cloak, in case it failed. It was a fullface mask shaped to fit the form of his face, but it had no features except eyeholes. Its color matched that of the box it was contained in, but the moment Immanuel took it out of the box, its form and color changed, gaining draconic features and becoming blood red in color. It still follows the appearances of whatever I imagine. Great.

Used together with the cloak he had taken off of Maddox, he could blend in or be something else completely, confusing the enemy.

Content with his preparations, Immanuel brought the greatsword close to him. Then he sat cross-legged on the floor, leaned his back against a wall, and shut his eyes to sleep.

The following day, Immanuel, already masked and bringing the greatsword, throwing daggers, and pieces of gold with him, walked out of his house to begin his search for his wife. First, he dropped by the wooded area that saw heavy fighting between Immanuel and the soldiers who took over his house. The pile of bodies, a feast for the crows gathered on it, turned out to be as high as his head was from the ground. It was topped by Maddox's headless body.

"I swear, if nobody helps me bring a swift end to my problem, I will find my wife as I stand on top of a mountain of dead men." Immanuel clenched his teeth as he imagined himself standing atop a massive mountain of corpses, overlooking a terrified populace gathered in front of the King's Palace. Across him stood another mountain as high as the mountain of corpses, and on top of that mountain stands Leanne and another man.