Adam Smasher, Level 1 Adventurer, Hestia Familia
"You aren't allowed to go back on your own." Tatertits declared firmly, arms crossed as she sat on the man-pulled two-wheeled cart. Said man-pulled cart currently being pulled by himself, holding onto the arms with hands practically dangling in order to get low enough to pull at even level. It was almost like a wheelbarrow, but backwards and flat, so not like a wheelbarrow at all really.
Currently filled with a week's worth of food, mostly in the forms of potatoes and a few other vegetables that were thrown in as part of a bulk discount and contract bonus. Two-thousand and five hundred valis per month in exchange for what was very clearly more food than what the Guild would be giving for the same value. Mostly potatoes, but there were other things in there too, foodstuffs that Adam didn't care to know the names of and a barrel of meat covered in salt.
Apparently meat came in wooden barrels here, who knew.
"Why?" He grunted out, politely asking for clarification on his new orders. If he wasn't going to come back here again, then he'd need to send someone else to pick up the food each time. Fine by him, he could use the time to murder more, but it was something to consider. The maintenance needs of meat were annoyingly regular in frequency.
"What do you mean why?!" His employer growled at him, throwing her hands up into the air. "You spent half the time flirting and the other half grumbling! Demeter-chan is a huge gossip! Everyone in Orario is going to know that I have a super-horndog in my familia!"
"I wasn't flirting." Adam grumbled. "You would know if I was flirting."
"You were flirting!" She accused with a pointed finger and a glare he could feel on the back of his head. It was mostly ineffective.
"I told her I wasn't going to fuck her." Adam pointed out with a flat expression.
"No! You said-" At this junction, Tatertits puffed herself up and started glaring at nothing, doing a very poor impression of him. "-We're here on business, bigboobs, I'll reshape your holes afterwards."
"No. I said 'I'm here on business, Tits, I'll renovate your insides later'." Adam corrected with a growl, his words met by an explosive groan by his employer and a shaking of the cart.
"That's even worse! AGH!" There was a moment of silence, before she spoke again. "...You did it in front of her entire familia too…"
"She decided to feel me up, woman. That encounter is on her." Adam grumbled, turning his head back and glaring at his employer for a moment. His employer was currently sprawled out on the potatoes and staring at the sky. "Stop complaining to me about it and complain to her instead."
"You didn't even try to push her away! I had to! She had a hand in your shirt!" Tatertits threw her hands into the air above her again. "You just kept reading!"
Adam scoffed. "You know how rare it is to see a proper fucking catalogue in these parts woman? A hand on my abs isn't worth getting worked up over."
"My delinquent was being molested by my friend! In front of her entire familia! It was traumatizing!"
"Oh woe is me." Adam flatly replied. "She gave us a ten percent discount for it, stop whining."
His employer let out a long groan of despair, staring at the evening sky. He ignored it, and kept moving along. All in all, a successful negotiation to secure a bulk ration supply line.
"...I'm cooking stew outside when we get back. I bought a new pot that's too big for the hearth." His employer muttered. "You're helping me build the fire, got it?"
Adam grunted in confirmation. The meat was hungry anyways.
—
"We're back!" A distant call from the barnyard duo came from near the front of the church. Adam didn't bother to stop his exercises, a set of increasingly quick sprints back and forth across the backyard. His employer was next to a somewhat ad-hoc fireplace near the well, a circle of stones around a pile of wood with coals transferred out from the hearth to kickstart the flame, a cauldron of cast iron mounted over it filled with water, vegetables, and whatever other nonsense that was used to make stews.
Halfbrat was currently dressed in a little maid dress, vigorously sweeping the stone courtyard with a broom that was a bit too large for her. Every now and then Tatertits would ask for something, whereupon Halfbrat would drop the broom and rush to retrieve it before returning to her sweeping. He was fairly confident the back was about as clean as it was going to get already, but he wasn't about to go out of his way to tell her that.
"We're out back!" Tatertits called out merrily, her words met by excited boot-steps paired with somewhat more hesitant boot steps.
"Hestia-sama! Hestia-sama!" Bunnybrat excitedly started, bursting through the backdoor and dragging Foxbrat with her. Foxbrat was flushed and attempting to slow her down.
"Yes, I'm Hestia." Tatertits responded quickly and quietly, a smile on her face, turning to acknowledge the two that burst through the doorway.
Bunnybrat immediately paused, turning and calling back inside. "Lili-chan! Bring him! Bring him!"
"No, that's okay!" Foxbrat pitifully wailed, holding onto her friend. "Please have mercy Lili-chan!"
Tatertits was sitting straight up at this, looking at the doorway with a hint of suspicion as the armored pipsqueak stepped through, pushing a dazed looking Scrappy.
Bunnybrat cackled, Pipsqueak was smiling softly, and Foxbrat wailed in embarrassment.
Scrappy's face was covered in lipstick. The bright and imperishable gold on his cheek, two sets of dull pink on his other cheek, and a dark purple on his forehead. His face was slightly flushed, and he didn't seem fully aware of where he was.
Tatertit's face scrunched up as she stood up, calmly making her way over to Scrappy, grabbing him by the collar and slowly inspecting his face. Taking measure of the cosmetics that now littered his face and his dazed expression, she mechanically turned to Bunnybrat and ground out a demand with narrowed eyes.
"Explain."
Foxbrat buried her face into her friend's back, tail waving erratically. "It's how the spell works, okay! I didn't get to choose!"
"Momiji's good luck spell! You have to give the target a kiss! That's the gold!" Bunnybrat immediately threw her friend under the bus with a wide smile. "Big Boss told her to use it on him while we were in the dungeon, for more drop items!"
Adam kept doing his exercises, ignoring Tatertit's brief piercing stare long enough for it to turn into a hum of begrudging acceptance. "And the others?" She grumbled, grabbing Scrappy by the chin and getting a look at both sides of his face with a closer eye.
"Then we came out of the dungeon, and his Guild Advisor got a look at the kissy-mark and her ears started twitching! Then we left, and Big Boss went to go buy food, and we went to go buy food at a really nice place." Bunnybrat was eagerly waving her hands in various ways to emphasize the story.
"Hostess of Fertility." Pipsqueak helpfully added.
"Yeah! And there were a bunch of women there too! And they asked where Big Boss was and we told them, and then we met mister Ronin again and got a table and started chatting and it was super nice!"
"Welf Crozzo-sama." Pipsqueak chimed in again.
"Yuh! And then one of the waitresses came out and saw the lipstick as she took our order, and you could tell that she was like, totally jealous! She was a catgirl with black hair! And she offered the 'Heartspoon Special' and Bell decided to order it! But it was a trap!" Bunnybrat sounded more enthused by this than any of her time in the Dungeon, she needed to get her priorities straightened out.
"And the Heartspoon Special…?" Tatertits growled out suspiciously.
"She came out with a dessert and fed it to him!" Bunnybrat answered with glee. "Then it kept going, and when he was done he was too embarrassed to stop her surprise attack!"
"Surprise attack?!"
"She gave him a big kiss on the cheek! And he went red!"
"What about the rest of them!" Tatertits growled, pointing at the other marks in question.
"There was an Amazon group in the bar, and they saw his face go red! And they brought chairs up to our table and took turns giving him sneak attacks too!"
"Grr… Coco-chan! Bring me a wet washcloth! I need to clean all this harlot-paint off my child's face!"
"Yes Hestia-sama!" A broom fell to the ground with the clack of wood on stone and tiny boots made little pat-pat noises as they ran inside to grab the requested item.
Adam idly wondered how many more hours he could spend in the Dungeon each day if he went in alone. Maybe adding in a fourth shift at the end? That would be a full sixteen hours of slaughter a day with only eight needed for recuperation periods.
He stomped, twisting immediately to start the next lap, bare chest soaked in sweat and breathing heavy, heartbeat well over into the red and limbs operating with far more resistance than they should be, the meat was struggling to keep up with him.
This frame probably wasn't up to the task yet, it was already barely keeping up with the pace he was setting for it.
Fucking meat, work harder.
—
"I got it done!" Shortstack excitedly boasted, pretending to polish her nails on her apron with one hand and other hand on her hip. The items in question were placed on the table in front of him, the things commissioned several days ago.
The visor of a helmet, a dagger, and a pair of rabbit feet attached to the end of a leather necklace. It didn't look too impressive overall, but functionality was more important than looks regardless.
"Took long enough." Adam grunted, standing in his underlayer in the slightly cool morning. The brats hadn't woken up quite yet, and Tatertits was sleepily staring at the fireplace last he checked.
"Hey I had a backlog to work though, you know? You ain't the only thing on my mind, mister." Shortstack waved a finger at him, before waving the hand. "The mask was the really tricky part, I couldn't figure out a way to put it under your helmet, so I made it the visor instead. That should be able to fit on most helmets with a bit of finangling, I left pretty generous proportions on the connection part."
Adam held the visor in question up, inspecting it carefully. It was the same kind of bended wedge-shape that most visors were, but substantially wider than normal. The bottom of the visor looked like it would sit around his upper lip, and the top stretching as far back as to nearly the top of his head.
"Try it on!"
"I need my helmet first." Adam grunted, setting the visor down and walking off without another word, heading inside again. Opening up the door and glancing over at Tatertits, he noticed that she had been joined by Halfbrat, who looked equally sleepy. He snorted, walking over to grab his helmet, and then walked out again.
Making his way back towards the table, he set the helmet next to the visor and glared at the smith. "Demonstrate."
Shortstack blinked, before starting to remove her top.
"The visor." Adam growled, before slowly explaining with a pointed finger. "Demonstrate how to detach and reattach the visor. I need to make sure I know this."
"Oh!" Shortstack replied, shrugging her shirt back over her shoulders but leaving the laces undone. "It's not too hard, see this bit right here?"
"Yes."
"You just gotta twist that, then it pops out, then you pull it apart slightly and fit the new one in. Most guild helmets work like this."
Adam took careful note of the parts in question, before attempting to do the same on the other side. Just as demonstrated, it popped out. He rumbled and fit the new visor on, not quite the same, but fitting over the helmet all the same. Twisting to secure the visor, he noticed something.
"It's uneven."
"Oh, that flexes the metal to keep the visor up when you want it to stay up. It's supposed to be like that."
He grumbled, before sliding the helmet over his head, taking stock of his basic senses. Visuals subpar, audios subpar, olfactories subpar, tactiles subpar.
"Hey now, be careful, I don't know exactly what it looked like but apparently it was pretty nast-"
He reached up and slid the visor down, covering his eyes. Briefly the world went black, then a wash of faint almost-color began to appear on the interior of the visor. A distorted mess of standard visual spectrums, a chaotic world that standard human senses were not equipped to handle.
A world of black covered by numerous tiny stars of blue-white, stars blazing briefly before dying and disappearing back into the void. Pinpricks of light that appeared and disappeared in instants, not quite forming shapes but rather the abstractions of densely populated constellations in his field of view.
It was a sense that he had a few years of practice with, if not quite as primitive as this. He clicked his tongue, watching as the world lit up in flat blue-whites that formed shapes all around him.
He huffed in amusement. It wasn't quite the same as getting the sense properly back, but it was good enough for the moment.
"Just a sound visualizer." He spoke aloud, turning his head and getting used to the almost screen-like visor filling with little manifestations of sound wherever he looked. It wasn't quite sonar, sonar had an active audio signal component. This visor was only taking in surrounding sounds and converting it into visual-spectrum light, it wasn't actively sending out its own signal to detect movement.
"What do you mean?" The voice of shortstack came with a burst of blue-whites that outlined the world around her for some distance. Her form fading back into darkness save the dim beating of her heart and exhales of breath, which softly illuminated her upper body but wasn't quite strong enough to reveal her legs or lower arms.
He reached up to tap the mask, an explosion of blue following and blocking out all other sights for a moment, he ignored it. "The Shademeats see in sound rather than light. The mask is letting me do the same. I had something similar back home."
"Oh…"
He adjusted the visor upwards slightly, seeing if there was a way to use both normal visual spectrum and the auditory visualization at the same time. He grumbled to himself for a moment as it looked like it wasn't going to work.
"Hm." He took the helmet off, frowning at it in consideration. The visor was an all or nothing affair. If he wanted to see in sound, then he wasn't going to be able to see normally.
"How hard is it to modify these things?" He grunted at Shortstack, who reached up to scratch her head with a contemplative expression.
"You mean like, you want me to cut eye holes out? I can probably do that yeah, it shouldn't break the rest of it or anything."
He briefly considered if that was even the best way to go about that. He was more used to dealing with proper cyberware, not this ye old version of the same thing. Ideally he would have both senses overlaid in the same optics, but that was unlikely to be available anytime soon. Goggles or glasses might be better, but then he would have to get his helmets modified to use them properly. Having a visor up at all times while in combat so he could use standard visuals was a horrible idea.
"Yeah, cut some eye holes into it." Adam rumbled, handing his helmet over.
Shortstack twirled her hammer for a moment, grabbing a chisel and holding over the front of the helmet, before tapping four times in quick succession, each time twisting the chisel slightly. Then moving the chisel over to the other side of the visor, she repeated the taps and twists, before setting both tools down and reaching inside the helmet.
She pulled out two eye-shaped sections, cut out in four quick cuts into the metal and formed into thin rhomboids. "Ta-dah!"
He reached over, and took up the helmet. Sure enough, in eight taps of a hammer and chisel, she had cut out two eye-holes in the face of the visor. Putting the helmet back on and making sure everything lined up, he confirmed that the eyeholes were indeed directly over his eyes.
He clicked his tongue, seeing the rest of the visor interior light up in pale blues and forming a ghostly shadow of the world around him in audio-visual imaging.
"Good." He rumbled out, satisfied with his purchase overall. This would do wonders to increase his combat efficacy in battlefields absent of useful light levels. He would have to track down other sensory upgrades if possible.
"Heh! When you come to Bruni, you leave satisfied!" She boasted, twirling her hammer around again. Then turning a sly eye towards him, she continued. "Or should I say, when you come in Bruni, you leave satisfied? Eh! Eh!" She reached over to nudge him in the side with her joke.
He ignored it. "And the knife?" He reached over, carefully grabbing the sheathed blade by the handle and raising it up.
Shortstack pouted at him for a moment, before nodding. "It looks like it's covered in purple rust, that's the poison. Don't worry about the blade integrity because of that."
He grabbed the leather sheath, pulling out the spike-like dagger. Around twelve inches of blade and another six or so inches for handle, a mostly grey shade in the metal and handle wrapped in black leather. True to her word, the blade was covered in a light coat of purple rust, and shaking it slightly cause flakes of this rust to fall from the blade and drift down to the table.
"Potency?" He rumbled, slowly sheathing the blade once more and using the tiny attached chain to lock it into place. Something he would have to deal with in combat, but better than it getting loose accidentally.
"Eh, about as much as the moths themselves?"
Headache and nausea then, enough to disorient but not kill. Good enough for his purposes. He nodded, and set the dagger down again. He glanced over at the rabbit foot necklace.
Shortstack shrugged. "I don't make jewelry. It's rabbit feet on a necklace."
He nodded. Indeed it was. He turned around and called out. "Woman! Is the boy awake yet?!"
From inside the church, Tatertits called back. "...He's eating breakfast!"
"Send him out!" He commanded.
"After he eats!" She defied his command.
Adam grumbled, glaring at the church door for a moment. Boy could eat later, he had a stupid necklace to get first.
"How good are you at armor?" He idly questioned Shortstack, leaning back against the table.
"Pieces or a full set?"
"Full set."
"My specialty is blunt weapons, but I'm a fair hand at armor too I suppose."
"How many drops do you need to make a full set?"
"I-" Shortstack hesitated. "A full set? That would take something like… Are you counting the underlayer too?"
"Just the plates."
"That's a bit more reasonable, but even so… I'd need maybe fifteen drops to do a whole set of armor. Are you sure you want to-"
"Give me a week. In the meantime, I got a frog tooth. I want you to make a poleaxe with it."
"...Why?"
"I need a Bug Killer."