Source & Soul: A Deckbuilding LitRPG

“...but Merunda said she’d wait for me next time, and she was the last holdout on Crowsfoot Alley, so that’s a whole square block sorted.” Bryll gave me a self-satisfied smirk, holding her hands out wide as if waiting for applause.

I didn’t clap for the proud little magpie; my hands were busy unlocking the door to Ticosi’s rooms and my thoughts were in a tangle besides. Everything had me jumpy these days, and even though I knew I should give the urchin the pat on the head she more than deserved, most of me wanted to snap at her to get lost. Best I could manage was to split the difference with a neutral grunt.

She scowled at me and strolled into Ticosi’s apartment like she owned the place. “Don’t fall all over yourself thanking me,” she said, hopping up to sit on the table by the window. “I’m just doing your work for you with nothing but two cards.”

I bit back the first thing that sprang to my tongue and instead said, “You’re doing a hell of a job, and I appreciate it. Has Roshum found anyone else he thinks I could trust with a card?”

She picked at a splinter on the table’s edge. “He thinks Bannel might be a good idea. He runs the shit carts.”

I thought it over as I wrestled the cupboard away from the wall. I’d seen Bannel around, of course, but I didn’t know him. I’d always kept my distance from the crews that hauled the Lows’ night soil out of the neighborhood. It took a strong stomach and a weak nose to do the job, and my smeller had always been too keen to be interested. “And what do you think?”

Bryll grimaced. “He hits his kids.”

I shook my head. Roshum was a good judge of character, but Bryll and her gang had a perspective that no adult ever could. People didn’t care what they did in front of street kids; they might as well be furniture. “That’s a no on Bannel, then.”

I put my face to the floorboards and breathed deep. My heart fluttered when I caught a faint whiff of bad eggs. The shards are done! I’d had Bryll and her squad of urchins checking for me every day, but I’d grown impatient as the days passed. I needed those shards, now more than ever. Pulling up the floorboards, I greedily snatched up the lead-lined box and brought it to the table where Bryll sat.

“Pfaugh,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Didn’t smell like that before.”

“I believe you,” I said distractedly. “They’re probably only just finished.” It was still short of the time that Roshum had recommended, but the egg smell didn’t lie. With hands suddenly sweaty, I eased the lid off the box. We both peered in with avid eyes.

“Hot damn, they’re beautiful,” she breathed.

I could only nod in mute agreement. The alchemical solution had gone a bright blue, and in that tiny ocean floated three irregular-shaped shards of flat, faceted ruby. Surprisingly, a fourth, smaller flake of bright gold bobbed in the corner. Not a hint of Chaos coloring remained on any of them.

“Why’s there a Rare shard in there too?” Bryll asked.

“Dunno,” I admitted. “I bet Roshum could tell us.” Using the tip of my duplicating knife I fished them out of the mixture one by one and laid them on the table to dry. It had worked! I had Epic shards for upgrades, and not a moment too soon. Ever since getting my ass kicked by Gerad I’d been walking on eggshells, looking over my shoulder at every moment for his damned assassin card to pop out of nowhere and gut me like a fish. I couldn’t sleep; food tasted ashy. I needed to be stronger, and this was how it was going to happen.

“D’you know what you’re going to use them on?” the urchin girl said, bending her head close to get an eyeful of the beautiful ruby shards.

I’d spent nearly every waking moment while not actively training in deep discussion with Basil on that very topic. He’d done viewings for all my high-rarity cards and helped me think through the advantages and drawbacks of each. My Commons he’d ignored entirely, saying that most low-level cards had only a single upgrade path available to them and thus not worth wasting a viewing on. “I have some options,” is all I said. It was a ridiculous understatement. I had so many options I could barely hold them all in my head. I had a folded sheet of paper in my pocket filled with scribbled notes, and I’d been pulling it out to review any time I felt the least bit jumpy… which was frequently. The paper was already wearing thin at the folds.

Bryll laid back on the table, eyes half-closed, an idle smile on her face. “The things I could do with an Epic,” she sighed.

“You’d be a tiny tyrant,” I said, slapping her dirty feet off the top of the chair where she had them propped.

“And you’re not?” she retorted, sitting up.

“I’m not small,” I said. “Makes all the difference.”

Her sour grunt spoke volumes. “Being a kid is shit.”

“You’ve got it better than most,” I said, wiping the shards clean on a cleaning rag I found in the cupboard. “You’ve got cards and a crew, and even the shop owners have to at least listen to you now that you’re working for me.”

“Still don’t have shoes,” she said, wiggling her filthy toes at me.

“Shoes are nice,” I admitted. “We’ll fix that. But think: if you grew up like one of those rich kids like I run with at the War Camp, you’d have family responsibilities, and you’d have to do whatever your parents told you. They even get to say who you marry.”

“Marriage is for idiots,” she said. “Go stick your dick in a tree if you’re horny.”

I snorted. “I don’t think that’s how it works. Even if it is, you might feel different when you’re a little older.”

She rolled her eyes with the cocksure arrogance only a child could muster. “Sure. What about you – got parents?”

I held in a weary sigh. “Yeah. Kind of.”

She scratched at an armpit. “Must be nice.”

“With ones like mine, you’re better off without,” I told her. For the first time, I wondered who this little dirt goblin’s parents might be. They had to be something special if she’d been born at Rare.

Just then, the floorboards creaked, and I whirled around, knocking over my chair. It was nothing. Just the rickety old building settling. I let out a shaky breath and scrubbed my hand across my face. I needed some time with Roshum’s Jade Pillow – I was exhausted.

“You’re a wreck,” Bryll observed.

“I’ve got problems bigger than the Lows,” I told her as I sealed back up the soak tray. “Do me a favor – if any noble-looking folks come poking around asking questions about me, you let me know, all right?”

“You want me to fight them?” she asked eagerly.

“No,” I said sharply. “Just watch, and keep your distance. Folks like that have more than two cards, and they’re not packing Commons.” Reaching back into the hole beneath the floorboards, I retrieved the rest of the Chaos Epics. There’d be time enough to break down the rest later; now that I knew the process worked, I wanted to hustle back to Roshum’s to get a bigger batch of cards into the soak bath. The cards went into my pocket, the floorboards went back into place, and the cupboard went back over the top.

“How am I supposed to get better if you won’t let me fight people for their cards?” Bryll groused as we locked the apartment back up.

“Just you wait,” I told her. “We’re gonna spend some time cleaning up the neighborhood, and then we’re gonna train together. I’m thinking that next year you can make a real killing at the Rising Stars Tournament.”

***

“Five Epic shards?” I shouted. “Are you insane?”

The thin, sallow man shrugged at me, unimpressed. “You want a garbage-tier elevation? Try to short the Twins and that’s what you’ll get. This is a really specific idea you’re talking about, and it’s a high-quality upgrade. We try to go in and create a Mythic like the one you’re describing without a full five shards and my best guess is that the process fails entirely and you waste the materials you put in. If you’re looking to throw away Epic shards, then Fate’s great saggy tits, man, just give ‘em away instead.”

“What if I put in the Rare shard too?” I said. “That gets us closer, right?”

He shook his head disgustedly. “I’m not negotiating here, boy. Take your shards to any Relicsmith inside the city and they’ll tell you the same, whether it’s here, in Dalrish, or the other side of the world. I won’t make more or less based on how much you put in – my fee for a Mythic upgrade if you’re providing the shards is 25 merits. I’m just telling you it won’t work.”

I strode out of the Relicsmith’s shop into the open pathways of the War Camp and tried to breathe off some frustration. The sun was high overhead. I’d spent the rest of the night at Roshum’s, resting on the Jade Pillow and beginning the card breakdown for the other Chaos Epics, but now it was time to put my earnings to use, and it was all going to shit. I’d decided that elevating the Talisman of Spite was the best move I could make for myself based on the possibilities Basil had seen.

One path he’d seen let me split the damage it did between targets, while another increased its damage output above the damage I took in. There was one that was highly tempting which eliminated the need for the Talisman to charge by taking damage first; it came into play ready to reflect damage on my turn. No big advantage in presummoned fights, to be certain, but that wasn’t where I’d almost died, was it? The option I’d finally settled on after much agonizing, though – the one that I’d told this asshole Relicsmith I wanted to work into the upgrade – was making the Relic Soul-linked, meaning it would always start in my hand in every match. As much as I had a soft spot in my heart for the Sucking Void, my first Nether card, the Talisman was the beating heart of my deck, the center of most of my combos. Being able to play it turn 1 – all of the elevations Basil had seen took its cost down to 2 Nether – would supercharge my already-fast play style.

But now this shithead was telling me I didn’t have enough shards for it. Did I open the tray too soon? If I’d waited, would that fourth shard have been Epic as well? It hardly would have mattered even so; I needed five shards, and I didn’t think another one would have magically appeared in the soak bath if I’d given it another week or two. Shaking my head like a dog coming out of water, I tried to let go of the idea of my cherished Mythic upgrade. It’ll have to wait. A few more weeks and I’ll have the shards I need. It felt like pulling a knife out of my own chest, but I hadn’t survived this long by refusing to see reality.

I pulled out my battered sheet of notes and scanned my other options. The Sucking Void was obviously out of play, as was my Vampiric Blade, seeing as how their elevations wouldn’t be any cheaper than the Talisman’s, but if I moved down to my Rares, then a whole world of opportunities were spread before me, and at a lower cost in merits, as well. I’d lied to Badgou about how many merits I had, but that single Mythic elevation would have essentially wiped out my stockpile. Now it was a question of picking and choosing the smartest moves from a dozen or more combinations.

I stood there in the street for a long time, letting people brush past me left and right while I wracked my brain and laid one option alongside another alongside another, weighing them all out, juggling the possibilities. My life was on the line here. It always had been, of course, but getting spitted by one of Gerad’s Souls had brought the fact into focus in a way I’d let go of beforehand. Survival first: it was a lesson I’d thought had been ground into my bones in the Lows, but lately it kept going fuzzy on me. I could almost thank the Prince for reminding me. I wasn’t going to, of course; I’d rather eat a bag of glass. I kept repeating it to myself: survival first. Survival first.

After nearly an hour staring at my paper and sweating in the sun, I marched back into the shop. The smith looked up from his work, waiting to hear what I had to say.

“All right,” I told him. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

***

It was past full dark when I finally found Basil. He was sitting in the Mess Hall chatting happily with Esmi. With a grunt and a sigh I settled in next to him. All the rest I’d stored up at Roshum’s was long gone. I felt like I’d run laps around Treledyne’s city walls and fought a Revenant Lord at the end. Card elevations took more out of me than I’d expected, and going from the Relicsmiths to the Soulsmiths to the sellers’ tables and back again, haggling and arguing for specific upgrades every step of the way had left me feeling like a wrung-out dishrag.

“You sound as if you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders,” Esmi said.

“Nothing on them but my own head, and even that feels like too much right now,” I groaned. I had a tray full of food in one hand, and I shoved half a bread roll into my mouth, talking around it as I chewed. “One of you could have told me how tiring it is to elevate a bunch of cards in a row.”

Basil grimaced and looked away from me. He hated it when I ate like a normal person instead of a highborn nonce. “I don’t know that either of us have had the opportunity to elevate more than one or two at a time,” he said. “It sounds a bit as if you’re complaining that your feather bed is too soft.”

I looked at him blankly, swallowing and taking another bite. “I don’t have a feather bed. That asshole Harganut made my bed into a slab of crystal, remember?”

“He means,” Esmi chimed in smoothly, “that given how expensive elevations are, you might consider focusing on gratitude that you were able to elevate so many at once rather than complaining of the effort.”

Perfectly said,” Basil said, beaming at his fiancée. “Effort is but a moment; elevation is eternal.”

“You people are too cheerful,” I said. “Let a fellow bitch for a second, will you?”

“Language, good sir,” Esmi said, a smile dimpling her cheeks. “A lady is present.”

I was tempted to say where, but Basil would be forced to defend Esmi’s honor even if he knew I was joking, so I took a big bite of food instead. Filling my stomach was helping. Now I only wanted to fall asleep where I sat instead of dying on the spot.

“Don’t keep us in suspense, my friend,” Basil said, turning to me once my mouth was empty. “How did it turn out? What were you able to achieve?”

Now that perked me up. I felt a grin growing on my face. “Well, I couldn’t elevate any of my Epics. I didn’t have the shards for it no matter how you split it.”

“I thought that might be the case,” he said, nodding sagely. “Unfortunate, but not unexpected. I didn’t say anything, because I hoped I’d be wrong, or that you’d end up with more that the average number of shards.”

“Next time, say something,” I grumbled. “I nearly took off the smith’s head thinking he was trying to cheat me.”

“So…” Esmi said, leading me along.

“First things first,” I said, pulling a small stack of cards from my pocket. “Now that I’ve got a little Order to work with it seemed like a good idea to get a few cheap cards to plug some holes in my deck.” I laid them on the table.

“The Restoration makes perfect sense,” Basil said, “but three copies of The Greater Good?”

“Those are mostly for when I have to fight Gerad again, to protect against Kitsanya,” I said. “I won’t leave them in my Mind Home most of the time.”

“It’s about time you developed a sideboard,” Esmi said approvingly. “But the elevations, Hull! I’m dying of suspense.”

“You should focus on gratitude,” I said.

From the arch of her eyebrow, she was less amused by me turning her own words back on her than she should have been. “I would be grateful if our dear friend would show us the card elevations we’ve slaved over together for days on end.”

I nodded. She’d put in nearly as much counsel as Basil had. Putting a hand behind my ear, I drew out my upgraded cards and laid them out one at a time in front of their eager eyes.

“Ah, even better protection,” Basil breathed. “I love it. I thought for certain you’d choose the elevation that protected it from Relic-destruction effects.”

“This might have been my hardest choice,” I told them. “More Relic protection is always going to be a good idea for me, seeing how much I depend on them. But I’ve got Restoration in there now, and I might end up getting a second copy. If the Talisman had the option for the kind of protection you saw for the Plate, I’d snatch it up in a heartbeat. But at the end of the day, Relic destruction is an every now-and-then concern. Getting hit in the face with Souls and Spells is an every-turn problem. And the fact that this elevation comes at a lower summoning cost put it over the edge for me.”

“Two self-damage per turn is nothing to sneeze at,” Esmi said, reading over the card.

“Either I have my Talisman out, or else I hope to have my Hatchlings in hand. Armor 3, Esmi. Armor 3.”

“Oh, I’m not second-guessing you,” she assured me. “It’s incredible.”

“And so is this one,” I said with relish, laying out my next prize.

“Oh, thank the Twins,” Basil said. “I was worried you’d be blinded by the version that grew even bigger and didn’t need to focus for its ability.”

“I remembered what you said,” I told him. “I’m always scrambling for enough Nether, every last damned match I play. This was too good to pass up for a better buff.”

“I’ll have to do another viewing for this,” he mused. “I wonder if at Mythic those extra source might remain for the duration of a match even after the Soul is destroyed.”

“That would be incredible,” I said. “Let’s talk about that later.” I laid out my third new Epic.

“You said you were going to bring the Night Terror back up to Epic,” Basil said, surprised. “You insisted!”

“I did,” I admitted. “But I was wrong and you two were right.” It was my mother’s reaction that had worried me, but I hadn’t seen mommy dearest since that last stroll into the Lows together. Would I ever see her again? Would she beat the shit out of me for ruining her Epic and getting it reduced to a low-grade Rare?

For days I’d told myself that no matter what else I upgraded, I had to restore the Night Terror, no matter than none of the upgrades Basil had seen would put it back on par with what it had been. But when I was at the Soulsmith’s shop and the decision had to be made, my heart had rebelled. It wasn’t the best upgrade for me. The huge demon had served me well as an intimidation tool in the Lows, but there was less need for that now, and my Demon Marauders filled the heavy-hitter role in my deck nicely. Honestly, either of them would have been a smarter elevation at this point than the Night Terror. My mother’s anger was an acceptable price to pay in order to make my deck the best it could be. Gerad would come after me again. He’d told me he would.

“Well, I’m proud of you,” Esmi said. “This elevation is by far the more useful one. I wouldn’t want to face you with these.”

“You’d wipe the floor with me and you know it,” I said mildly. “But I’m not done! My card breakdown ended up netting me a stunted Rare shard, too, and I was able to parlay that into a handful of upgrades as well.”

“Oh, let me see,” Basil said, clapping his hands.

“They may not be Epics, but they’ll serve me well,” I said.

“Nicely done,” he said, inspecting them closely. “Going to Uncommon may not be glamorous in the same way that Epics are, but you’re well past the point where basic Commons belong in your deck. What of the Runic Cloak?”

“Sideboarded for now,” I told him, “in order to make room for the Restoration. I hope you don’t mind.” He’d given me the card; I didn’t want him to think I didn’t appreciate it.

“I think you and I are past such pettiness,” he said. “If it becomes useful later, you still have it.”

Basil pondered the array of cards I’d set before him, one of his hands seeking out Esmi’s seemingly without him knowing it. “You’ve made great strides. I’m very impressed.” He gave me a grave look. “But it’s still not enough to take on Gerad.”

“I know it,” I said, my stomach churning. “I’ve got the other Epics breaking down now. That should give me enough to bring both the Talisman and the Sucking Void to Mythic.”

Esmi hesitated, then spoke. “Even then…”

“I know,” I said roughly. I stopped and reined in my anger. Esmi wasn’t the problem. “He’s got the strongest deck of anyone except the King. Best I can do is keep working at it. Maybe when Edaine takes us to that demon rift I can score big.”

Basil patted my hand. “I overheard the Prince agonizing – well, he was bragging, really, but it is a problem for him – about whether to keep Kitsanya or Hilbrand in his deck. The fact that you forced an elevation on one of his Mythics actually works against him; no more than a single Legendary of each type will fit in a person’s Mind Home. Well, except for the King. None of the rules seem to apply to him.”

“That’s a nice nugget of gold in my shit sandwich,” I said wryly. “I’d be happy to take that spare Legendary for him if he needs.”

We all had a good laugh about that, and the conversation drifted to more mundane topics as I slotted my upgraded cards into my Mind Home. My head felt stuffed full with so many Epics inside. It felt good. It felt like maybe, just maybe, if I kept running as hard as I could and scrambling for every last inch, I might survive.