“The premise is good.” Havoc flipped the page over so that Joe could see it. “Here’s what I see as the major flaws: You are looking at an upper Master, maybe lower Grandmaster, ritual. I don't know what your skill level is right now, but are you actually confident in casting that level of anything? Next, as I mentioned, the resource cost alone is what stopped us from being able to use this last time. How do you think you could combat that? There aren't enough things that you could grab from us to make it happen. Let alone the Core you would need to power it. Finally, you claim that you could use the Grand Ritual Hall—the existence of which is a national secret that I would love to know how you learned about—but you haven’t shown me any indication that you can control a Legendary building like that.”
“Legendary?” Joe breathed the word with delight. “I was only able to make a modular Artifact-ranked.”
“Should not have said that… maybe I should just wipe his mind and be done with-” Havoc was chastising himself, but paused and looked up with great interest. “Wait. You made an Artifact Ritual Hall? No. Skip that. Give me view access to your status.”
“You understand that I can hear you when we are sitting right across from each other?” Joe looked at the other man with dead eyes, but Havoc didn’t flinch from the stare. “Isn’t giving access to someone else a very bad idea?”
“Just do it,” Havoc grumped, unwilling to concede the point. “I need to know what you can do, in order to help you as best as I can. Also, I don’t care if you can hear me. If I decide that your mind needs to go, there’s nothing you could do about it. We’re in my seat of power. I could take out the entire Legion from here if I only needed to protect myself.”
Joe winced at the realization that he really had no choice but to follow orders. Again. He still hated that feeling. “I thought you weren’t going to stop me, but also had no plans to help me?”
“Then I found out that you weren't a random muscle-for-brains that got dumped in here as punishment. You haven't called me ‘Officer Bro’ a single time, or sent yourself to respawn by trying to slam your head into mine.” Havoc snarled as he thought of the last Legionnaires that he had needed to work with. “Do you want my help, or no? I have no idea how long I’ll want to give it to you, so you should take the opportunity to improve.”
Instead of answering verbally, Joe swiftly shared his status sheet, and Havoc started leafing through it. “Interesting… your cover was a cleric? Abyss, you are the champion of a deity. Don’t use that for anything, or you’re gonna tick me right off. Let’s see… lots of health or healing aspects to your build. Very little in the way of attack spells, and you’re practically useless in physical combat. Ah… there it is.”
“Ritualist, Rituarchitect, and this one, Reductionist. I know what the first and second ones are; can you give me a breakdown on the third? These are very impressive skill levels in the Ritualist tree… you even got a path advancement that made it into multiple passives?” Havoc regarded Joe again and nodded approvingly for the first time. “We can work with this. I think I know a few ways to get you what you’ll need to wipe out Elves efficiently. Now, tell me about that Reductionist class so I don’t need to read your notifications for the next three days.”
“It’s…” Joe hesitated, unsure where to start. “Thing is, I got that class right before I came here. I haven’t actually had a chance to test it out at all, and I have almost no information on it. What I know about the class is that it changed how I will be working with materials going forward, but even that was pretty hard to understand without any practical data or experience.”
“That's fine; let's go give it a test run right now. What do you need?” Havoc stood and marched them out of the room, down an empty hallway, stairs, and eventually directed them into an open warehouse area. Not a single time did Joe see another person, or anything that might represent a personal item, art, or pictures. “Come on. Speak, human! Do you need ink? Something to break down? How do you do things? Burn them? Rot them?”
“Well-” Joe suddenly realized that he didn’t actually know what he was supposed to do to make his class abilities function. He pulled open his notifications and found the class description, hoping that it could give him a better understanding of the next steps. “There was something that came up when I got the class; let me…”
You now have the ability to process all materials down to basic components. All raw materials, processed materials, and items are able to be ‘reduced’. You are able to reduce all materials by using mana alone. There is a ritual now engraved upon your being, a ritual that only requires the empowerment of mana to function.
Any sensory abilities now also inform you of the value of anything that can be reduced, as well as the amount of material you will attain by reducing it.
You can use the reduced material in any form of crafting, as a replacement for all components, ingredients, or other required material.
“According to this, I should just be able to directly touch something, focus on it, maybe even hear it if it is magical, and it will tell me what
