Macronomicon
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Chapter 104: The Double Fake Out
🕑 Added 2025-02-01 16:26:26 +0000 UTCOh yeah? Well, When William oh was a child, he wandered into the strategy room of the gods themselves.
Seeing that none of them were around, he spent many hours amusing himself by setting up the flags of nations atop their expansive map, lining the flags along the Ring before toppling them over like dominos.
In the real world, a hundred thousand years passed, the rise and fall of nations mirroring his every whim.
- Gerald Hussar – level 20 Cavalier
I don’t think I’ve ever been in a ship that stunk as bad as this one, Jairus thought sourly, taking in his accommodations. They were nearly identical to those that he’d housed The Deceiver in a few hours ago.
The crucifix restraining him was made of laminated Leviathan scale bound by some kind of resin, with silk bonds that outperformed any rope Jairus had ever heard of. There was a bit of bend, but it was easily as strong as the steel he’d secured the Deceiver to.
A small part of him beneath the controlled fear, was impressed by the material and dimly wondered what else it could be used for.
Maybe if I escape or am traded back to the church, I can find the creator. Possibly that ranger girl they have in their Party. In the meantime, I should focus on the task at hand.
There were reportedly at least a hundred fervent Believers on board Shimmer, as well as the low-focus Tangled pet that William Oh seemed to be fond of. That was fertile ground for his particular style of Abilities. Something that they were surely aware of, given how painfully secure his gag was.
Jairus moved his lips around the gag.
“Gag off?” The young man asked.
Jairus nodded.
The Master Decoy pulled out a dagger and held the point to Jairus’s throat, the tip pricking the skin under his throat.
“You understand if I feel any Charge, or if you start a sentence with the word ‘nonbeliever’, I’ll have to kill you?” Travis asked.
Jairus nodded again.
Blade still held to his throat, the Decoy leaned up behind him and yanked the gag loose with his other hand.
“Let’s talk details.” Jairus said, working his lips over dry teeth.
“Whaddya want?” Travis asked.
“I don’t know yet.” Jairus responded with the closest to a shrug he could manage.
“Not ‘set me free’?”
“Not if it lands me in the middle of the ocean or gets me captured again. I need to know what is going on outside before I can make an informed decision. I might want to be let go, I might want you to deliver a letter, or maybe just ask you to kill me before your leader can get any useful information.”
“So what you’re saying is…you want me to spy for you? For free?” The youngling gave a dramatic sigh and moved to put the gag back over Jairus’s mouth.
“Half now, half later.” Jairus interjected before the Master Decoy could cover his mouth.
“Well, now I’m interested.” Travis said, pausing.
“What stat do you want?” Jairus asked.
Please don’t say Focus.
“Focus.”
“…Pick something else.”
The young man’s eyes narrowed.
“Why?”
“Because the Stat point is coming from me. If I give you a point of focus it cripples my Build.”
“In what world do you expect to win without sacrifice?” Travis demanded. “You’re acting like you’re getting out of this alive.”
Jairus thought about it.
If I make sure he dies later, I can get it back. If I die, then it doesn’t matter, does it?
“Fine. I need to kiss your forehead.”
“Seriously?”
“No, I’m going to kill you with my Exploding Kiss Ability, then proceed to commandeer the ship with nothing but my lips. Get your fucking face over here.” Jairus growled, his sailor slipping through.
The young man cautiously leaned forward, putting his head in front of Jairus.
Holy Investment
102 -> 52 Charges remaining.
“Take a portion of my Focus and carry it into battle, my champion.”
The Master Decoy’s eyes widened as his Focus suddenly shot up.
Meanwhile, Jairus’s Focus dropped precipitously.
Focus 180 -> 120
Maximum Charge has decreased!
180 -> 120
“Now get me some information,” Jairus said, ushering Travis away.
“Nah, twenty-eight points to my Focus was plenty. I’m not greedy,” Travis said, raising the gag again.
“How long do you think it’ll take Your Party to notice the extra Focus?” Jairus asked. “They can see your status if they want. Sooner or later, it’ll come up.”
The brown-haired young man paused, staring into the distance, obviously calculating his odds in his mind.
“Alright.” Travis said, stuffing the gag back into Jairus’s mouth. “Be right back.”
He was not right back.
Over the next eight hours, Jairus tested his bonds every way he possibly could, only pausing when their Nuker and the Tangled came to watch him use the chamberpot, something none of them were happy about.
Will visited twice over that time, asking odd questions about the organization of the Church of Granesh. Who reported to who, where they were outside The Tower, what responsibilities different parts of the church had in the day-to-day tasks of running such a large organization.
These were largely questions that weren’t even secret. Any Acolyte pushing a broom across the church floor understood the organization’s hierarchy, and therefore how they could expect to climb it.
It was strong institutions that led to human advancement. As Granesh intended.
Meanwhile in another section of the ship, Loth and Will were poring over a map of Graneshian Churches, organized by hierarchical importance and their ability to rapidly deploy messengers to any corner of the ring.
Based on what the Graneshian believers had told them from casual conversation, they were able to confirm large portions of what Jairus told them about the organization of the church to be true. And everything else…merely highlighted what was important enough for jairus to lie about.
Learned that one from you.
Those tiny inconsistencies drew their attention to two possibilities:
“Well, it’s either this one or this one,” Loth said, pointing at two different churches. “The scribes of the Laniston church have a strange amount of independence from the hierarchy of the church. Robust logistics supporting a nearly independent intelligence agency. Their outward facade as scribes and messengers serves as an excellent cover for disseminating prophecy, sending out messages in large quantities and transcribing your friend’s ‘prophecies’ for later dissection by scholars.”
Will heard Loth’s quotation marks around ‘prophecies’ without her having to make any gesture at all.
“You don’t think he’s a real prophet?”
“I’m a firm believer in self-determination.” Loth said with a pointed look. “I am where I am and what I am because of superior talent and superior efforts.” Loth said.
“Yeah, but what if you were always destined to have superior talent and superior efforts?” Will asked, always enjoying poking the Loth.
“That’s a circular argument,” Loth said, brushing aside the conversation with a wave. “Which is why I detest certain branches of philosophy.”
“You taught me about philosophy.” Will replied with a frown.
“Yes, so that you could learn enough to hate it too,” Loth replied, eliciting a chuckle from Will.
“Okay, what about the other one?” Will asked.
Loth’s black claw glided across the map of the Ring to point out another location with a large painted mountain that looked vaguely like a femur.
“The home of the military arm of the Church of Granesh, Bone Mountain, where the leadership of the Church of Granesh resides. The level of security there is fitting for protecting a so-called ‘prophet’; not a single priest there is under level twenty and there are nearly a dozen Saints represented among their numbers.
More than we could hope to subdue. Bone mountain also has it’s own message system that they use to send relayed orders up The Tower. It’s the only other place with the infrastructure to send word of your movements fast enough to take any advantage of it.
“So we’ve narrowed it down to these two as the only ones able to send a message fast enough to hound me like they’ve been doing, and the only two with the internal authority to hold a valuable asset like a prophet and thumb their nose at the other arm of their organization?”
“In any large organization, there are rivalries.” Loth said, scanning the map. “These two are reputed to be particularly bitter. If we go after Laniston, their allies will be slow to defend them with arms, but if we go after Bone mountain, the spies of Laniston will be unlikely to warn their bretheren, and even if they did…”
“They’d laugh them off,” Will mused, scanning the distance between the two locations. Only a few hundred miles. A high level Climber could cross that space in less than a day.
Abyss, I could cross that distance in less than a day.
Will shook his head, briefly remembering a time when he thought level four was almost respectable.
“Either they’re keeping him safe through obscurity,” Will said, tapping the monastery. “Or through force of arms.” He tapped the impregnable mountain range.
“Defeated with blistering speed…or careful planning. Respectively.” Will mused.
“All we’ve got are possibilities. We need a way to be sure which one your friend is at.” Loth said.
They’d danced around the issue and only asked easily verifiable, oblique questions to Jairus because they didn’t want to tip their hand and reveal what they were really after.
“But we run the risk of Jairus getting word out and warning the church what we’re after.” Will mused.
“What if he did?” Loth asked.
Will cocked a brow at her.
“What if he did get a message out?” She asked.
“We could follow it back to the person it’s supposed to be warning…” Will mused. “Assuming we ignored the acclimation period.”
“You’re not afraid of a little fever, bulging bloodshot eyes, coughing, pustules, necrosis of the extremities, paraphilia, parasitic twin growths, and death, are you?”
Will did the math. There were five floors between them and the outside world.
Five days on the Fifth, four on the Fourth, and so on. Fourteen days of waiting, in total, since the first floor didn’t have an acclimation period.
A relay message system could get a letter back outside The Tower in a single day.
If they could intercept the letter, and reach the destination first…
These are the lower floors, Will thought. It was the higher floors that skipping Acclimation would kill someone, but skipping the Acclimation phase of multiple floors in a row would still add up, and by the time they got outside the tower, the Miasma sickness would probably be crippling.
“I am a little adverse to those things, yes,” Will admitted.
“Well, I have an idea for how we might be able to…fudge it a little.” Loth said with a grin, a row of insects marching across her arm. “It won’t be pleasant, but I think It might just work.”
Will shuddered. He knew what it meant when Loth said something would be unpleasant.
“But we still have to give Jairus the right prod to get him to risk his life to send word.” Will mused.
Will and Loth locked eyes and nodded.
Two weeks later, Travis slipped into the holding cell, carrying Jairus’s daily meal.
Still gagged, Jairus merely glared at him.
“What? It takes time to get information without being suspicious,” Travis said, loosening the gag.
“We aren’t rejoining the flotilla. We’ve been moving, and fighting. I can tell. Where are you going?” Jairus asked as soon as the gag left his mouth.
“We’ve been grinding.” Travis said, sitting down in front of him, giving Jairus a light tap with his dagger to indicate that he was still paying attention.
“Will and Loth have some hair up their butt to get the entire Party up to level thirty before we move on. The last of us passed it this evening, so we’re going to be hitting the Key Point and moving floors tomorrow morning.”
“And…where does that leave the several hundred people aboard this ship? What are they planning on doing with us?”
“The other Climbers get the ship, and we’re going down a Floor.”
“You’re going down?” Jairus asked. “Why?”
“Because the seventh floor doesn’t have the infrastructure to sell Saints.” Travis said with a shrug.
“You’re ransoming me back to the church in Akul.”
“Loth got everyone together and gave us this weird lecture about ‘Sun Tzu” and putting the enemy on ‘death ground’. I didn’t get it, but it’s above my paygrade. I’m the lowest man on the Party totem pole…aside from Brianna, I guess?”
Travis pursed his lips in thought.
“That’s it?”
“You’re worth a lot of money.” Travis said with a shrug. “Why wouldn’t we want to separate the profit from the hassle that is keeping a priest of Granesh hostage? I know I for one, am eager to no longer supervise your shits.”
“Damned waste of a point of stat growth,” Jairus groused. At least I can have a mark put on Travis’s head when I get back. He’ll certainly be easier to kill than the Deceiver.
“Then after that, we’re going back down to the Ring for some much-needed vacation before we go back up to the Seventh Floor. Can you believe we’ve been doing this one floor for over a month? I’m starting to understand why married couples get further up The Tower.”
Travis sighed. “I need a girlfriend. Or two. Three might be too much. I know an infinite amount is definitely too much, that poor bastard…”
Jairus frowned.
“Anyway, we’re gonna R&R and Will and Loth are gonna go visit a friend of theirs. Some kid named Jason.”
“Jason Salazar?” Jairus asked, his skin going cold.
“I’unno” Travis grunted. “Sounded like a friend from the orphanage?”
Dozens of thoughts flickered through Jairus’s head at once.
The Deceiver had gleaned the existence and Identity of The Prophet. Likely from something said or housed aboard the Floating Church of Granesh. That was the secret of Fire. The Deceiver was going after him once it got back ouside The Tower. That was what the prophecy warned of. Unacceptable.
They would take two weeks to get outside The Tower once they offloaded Jairus into the hands of the Church in Akul.
He would send a letter down to The Ring, and it would get there with plenty of time to allow them to move Jason out of harm’s way and set up a trap for the deceiver.
The immediate problem was not letting on that he knew, and diverting attention away from the fact that he’d asked the Prophet’s name.
That meant engaging Travis Oilton in meaningless conversation for at least half an hour, to scrub the exchange out of his recent memory, which turned out to be quite possibly the most uncomfortable experience of his capture, because even the Deceiver was easier to relate to.
“So it seems that nothing is actually required of you, by evening tomorrow, I’ll be free, and you’ll walk away with thirty extra Focus. Seems like a good deal for you.” Jairus said.
“You’re backing out of the second stat point?” Travis demanded.
“I don’t NEED you to do anything.” Jairus pointed out.
“You need me to keep my mouth shut.” Travis said, leaning forward aggressively, dagger hovering near Jairus’s throat.
“Go ahead, tell them you traded information to an enemy for a buff. See how that goes.” Jairus called his bluff.
Travis growled and sheathed his dagger before replacing the gag and storming out of the room.
Now all we have to do is wait.
On the other side of the ship, Travis marched down the Party’s hall, his posture shifting from anger to languid ease.
He ducked inside the officer’s room and halted at the low Miasma that almost felt like walking into a freezer, causing an involuntary shiver to cross his body as an unknown energy began to drain out of him at a rapid clip.
You have entered a Low Miasma area!
Miasma Acclimation: 14 days!
Warning, this is a higher acclimation period than your current tolerance accounts for, leave the area immediately or you may experience detrimental side-effects, such as fever, bulging bloodshot eyes, coughing, pustules, necrosis of the extremities, paraphilia, parasitic twin growths, and Death.
Lining the walls of the room were thousands, hundreds of thousands of Loth’s bugs, pulsing faintly with a miasmatic glow, while Will and Loth sat in the center of the room, where they had had their Miasma drained out of them ever since they hit level 30, ten days ago.
“Seems like he bought it.” Travis said.
“We heard. Close the door, you’re letting the Miasma in.” Loth grunted from under her pile of faintly pulsing insects.
“And so…”
“All proceeds from his ransom go to you.” Will said under from his pile of bugs. “You provided the inroad, you get the prize.”
“Nice. Sad I couldn’t get that second stat point out of him, though,” Travis pouted for a moment before he caught himself and headed for the door before he grew an extra limb. “I’m gonna leave you guys to…” He gestured at the two of them. “…whatever this is.”
“Have fun trying to score two girlfriends,” Will said. “If you want, I can teach you how to get an infinite number.”
“Ah shit, you were listening,” Travis said, shaking his head as he closed the door. “I was just saying that to make him think I was stupid and shallow!” Travis shouted through the door.
“You really sold it!” Will’s muffled voice carried through.
Comments
JACOB HEBERT
God I love Loth and Will
Meredith
Hello good author! Thank you for all the yummy chapters! Typo alert: ouside → outside > The Deceiver was going after him once it got back ouside The Tower.
Nate Oppy
I may be having Deja Vu but I feel like I have written a similar one to this before?
Kronos
Tftc! “Seeing that none of them were around, he spend many hours” Spend->spent
Ral
Well Travis is not betraying Will I think he is keeping his options open. He doesn't seem loyal yet just a opportunistic believer. He is comitited (His family is backing Will.), just not as personaly invested. That is my read.
Emily Gurnavage
“You really sold it!” Will’s muffled voice carried through. What a dick, lol. Love that interaction.
Antony Claughton
Will only knows the most recent prophecy is a prophecy, from the messages he read. Before that he had no idea they were prophecies, just stories that had run wild amongst the climber community. Which is where he heard them.
Myrdin
How does Will know about all of these prophecies about him from Jason? I thought that they serve as comments for chapters, but Will doesn’t know the exact content. Just that Jason still pumps him up with ridiculous tales.
Macronomicon
I considered that, but realized that while giving Brianna a point or two in Focus would make her into a complete monster, it would 1000% alienate Travis, who did the work to acquire the leverage.
richard bond
Have fun. I have Vegas advice: go to the roulette table and put $100 on red. If you hit you have fun money with no downsides. If you miss that's enough to quench my need to gamble for the night.... :)
Bookworm bibliophile
It feels logical but this was moment for Travis to shine besides it would have like couckblocking him from stats
Amit Gupta
Damn, I was really hoping it was Brianna shapeshifting and cosplaying as Travis, getting that stat boost would've been invaluable to her.
Hamy
I'm curious ability Will is gonna choose now that he's level 30
Scion
I'm loving Travis stealing the dudes focus through this trick would eventually make the priest less and less of valuable as he fails to live up to expectations over and over again and loses his reputation.
Shakyamunie
Thanks a lot for your answers people !
Nate Oppy
A researcher set out to find what makes a man attractive. He wasn’t sure if the ladies he asked were shocked as they all answered with an “Oooh”, a faint blush then followed by a moment of thought. His findings were inconclusive.
Patrick
It was how much money Will gave Jason to go off and be his hype man.
Nate Oppy
These bits make this story so good to follow. Same as the Brianna reveal
Moon Winchester
Travis and Brianna, I’m interested in a couple
Macronomicon
The 'five silver' mentioned in the prophecy was a hidden message to Will.
Shakyamunie
Thanks for the chapter ! I think I missed how Will managed to find out about Jason being the prophet jailed by the Church, would someone here be nice enough to explain it to me ?
Macronomicon
You know, my thoughts on gambling have changed drastically since I was a young man with nothing to lose, VS an author who can make a substantial amount just by sitting down and grinding out some work. the risk reward of gambling is just...no longer as appetizing as it used to be.
Jeff Wells
I was confident.
Tom C
Enjoy your break! Remember the house always wins when gambling 😂🥳
Tom C
Yay. I like Travis’s character. Lots of room for change and he can provide good piss taking of Will. TFTC!
Beeees!
He's not dumb enough the cross THE William oh
Andrew
Thank you!
Crispined Glover Potato Snacks
Pretty smart getting that temp mithridatic immunity to miasma. Too bad that Loth failed to sneakily get her boy to develop a reptilian inclined paraphilia.
Josiah Elliott
I mean it's just the smart choice, Will requires nothing but loyalty and has gotten out of literally impossible situations and killed people massively above his level, Travis seems to be pretty aware that betraying Will is a short path to death.
Jarkko Kotaniemi
Nice to see that Travis wasn't really betraying the party.
Παναγιώτης Μαυρογιαννης
Tyftc
Enzo Elacqua
Makes sense Travis told his party, can’t see why they wouldn’t be happy that their team member got a buff. Dudes not that dense to the point of self destructiveness, though I can see why the saint would think so
Macronomicon
Bit late but a bit chunkier. heading out to vacation tomorrow! See you guys soon!
