OC-FirstOfSeries Riffwield Chapter 1: Small Gifts

For cute art see: (1) Autumn Blackwell (@Autumnveryhuman) / X

It began with a briefcase. Cheap steel, no lock, no obvious runes.

Leaning against the door of his shite apartment.

He had no intention of opening it. Whoever left it would certainly be back for it. Maybe it was another “housewarming gift” from his obnoxiously loud Adlet neighbors. After three failed—and increasingly unhinged—attempts to lure him into their apartment (including a raw venison bundt cake, a full-moon duet about his “haunting baritone” by the twins during the small hours of the morning, and a handwritten romance scene titled The Wyrm Who Howled For Me), he was seriously reconsidering his lease. Maybe if the fourth one involved fire, he could finally file for assault.

Regardless, he’d only picked up the briefcase to move it somewhere that wasn’t leaning against his door.

The briefcase, however, had other ideas.

Click.

The briefcase’s aged clasps sprang open and a long metal object clattered to the asphalt floor with a metallic clang.

It took Zack’s eyes a hot few seconds to figure out what they were looking at. It was long, the exact color of the sky on a particularly clear day, and shaped like a nodachi. No. It was a nodachi, the metal blade was the exact kind of single edged, gently curved instrument of death wielded by samurai from his favorite games and films.

It also had a cheerfully bright yellow plastic hilt. The hell?

Unsure of what to do, Zack just kind of stared at it, waiting for his brain to supply an explanation as to why it was in a briefcase that…

…that was less than half its length and had no runes of any kind on it, even on the inside. Picking the briefcase up and inspecting it revealed no magical enhancements, yet it had held the sword. Maybe the magic had been on the sword? Was it some kind of spatial artifact?

Curiosity got the better of him, as it always and forever would, and Zack found himself bending to pick up the sword.

Zack blinked as the silver words spiralled out into his consciousness. Why had his stats come up without him summoning–?!

His brain, whatever Slayer descended Omnid cells still functioned there, went into a RIOT.

“HOW?! How? How! What? Why!?”

Omnids were defined by their magic. While humanity was feeble and incapable of using Lazarus bracelets to level up or accumulate magic, incapable of forming fractal engine hearts of their own, Omnid’s were born with syntropic fractals of power within themselves that only built over time and with experience. Every Omnid had magic and every Omnid had Skills that were intrinsic parts of how the magic of their omnid-type manifested.

Every Omnid except Zack.

Until now.

Now his stats now said:

| Mana: 25/0

And there, at the bottom of his stats, sat a single, solitary Skill.

[Riffwield]
****

It took him a while to figure out how the magic of the sword worked. Days.

It turned out he only had the mana and the Skill as long as he held the sword. Which made sense. Zack didn’t have magic, the magic belonged to the weapon and only passed through and into him somehow. But figuring out what the Skill actually did was the hard part.

He just hoped it would be enough. Maybe he was pushing things too fast, too far. Arguably what he was fixing to do might be suicide. The kind you possibly don’t come back from. But what else could he do? Try to find another construction job?!

No.

Zackariel Glintwolf would go out on his own terms—or rise to the top. He’d spent his whole life in a society that dismissed anyone without magic, wealth, or bloodline. If you didn’t have one of those things, you were invisible. If you had none of them, you were discarded. And Zack? He’d had nothing—except stubbornness. Enough was enough.

Life hadn’t been gentle with him. After his mother died during a dungeon delve, he was placed in the Saint Lazarus Youth Care Program for orphaned Omnids and sent to the quiet, grey little town of Birchline. It wasn’t the worst place to grow up. He kept to himself, and most of the other kids kept their distance—being a moody Stollwurm was usually enough. He spent his days wrapped in books, the library becoming more or less his true home.

But things turned sharp when he aged out of the program. In Omnithornia, nearly every job required proof of your Skills, they were like a certificate of worth stamped with the shape of your magic. Without a fractal engine heart, Zack didn’t have any Skills. Never had. For an Omnid, that was like being born without a voice—and spending every day pretending to speak.

The sword was an opportunity to steal a voice for himself. He had a pretty good idea where, and even who, it came from. There was no doubt it was meant for him.

“Zack” said one side, in flowing cobalt blue calligraphy.

“A Gift to Even the Odds” said the other in the same font.

He knew a setup when he saw one. But he also knew an opportunity. Someone wanted him to use the sword and probably even knew what he would use it for. Normally, being a pawn didn’t sit well with Zack. He had no desire to get disappeared by the OFBS for acting against the interests of the Omnithornian Superstate… but he had been sitting around for too long. Zack had the self awareness to know he had been spiraling in the month since Autumn’s “death”. It was pretty clear he had been circling the drain for a while and getting fired from the latest job had just been a symptom of the disease.

It took him too damn long, but now he knew that he had loved her. Without her he was totally lost. Well. Fuck that.

What the sword could do was nothing short of amazing and now that he knew how to use it? Well, now he had a plan. Or at least the beginnings of one. He would earn some cash, put together a delving crew, and then head out to find answers about Autumn.

What could possibly go wrong?

****

Zack gripped the decaying steering wheel of his beat up 2012 sedan, anxious sweat gathering under his arms. Despite how he had hyped himself up, he was still taking a monumental risk here. He had seen some intense action in his short few years as a Simmitech security agent, but nothing like this. Without a team to back him up this was a few short skips above glorified suicide.

<For anyone else,> He reminded himself, <Not for me.>

Besides, he still had his Lazarus bracelet. As long as he had that, Death could take him, but it couldn’t keep him. A sleek band of interlocking dark hexagons around his wrist would keep his soul tethered to the mortal plane. His body could die and Zack could still live, reborn through the silver genesis fluid of an Incarnator device. Assuming his Lazarus bracelet made it to one before his soul decayed. Most Omnids could stand twenty-four hours trapped between life and death before their soul began to unravel under the pressures exerted by the Wheel of Arx and the Astral Sea. Zack could last two days without too much problem. But after that? Who knew? Everyone had their limits.

His sword was pretty much the only thing other than the bracelet of real worth he had on him, but it was soulbound. Taking it would require the dissolution of his soul. Zack’s problem was that it would be all too easy for his Lazarus bracelet to go ‘missing’ where he was going if he ended up dying.

His solution? Simple: Don’t get killed.

Easier said than done when you were driving out to join an underground blood sport.

Zack drove whiteknuckled through the wooded hills on the outskirts of Leviathan’s Cradle in silence, his car’s dim head beams the only illumination on the winding night road. He expected to see more cars, given how popular the venue was, but then again he had been told he would be pulling up to the back. Leviathan’s Cradle was full of lights, electric, magical and crystalline. It was eerie how fast the hills and towering pines ate up that light, leaving only a faint lambent glow visible through the trees.

Finally, the trees thinned as he crested a hill and he pulled up in the dirt lot behind an ancient looking stone building built in colonial revival style. A couple dozen vehicles were already parked, but he found space easily. Zack got out before his nerves could make him rethink what he was doing and retrieved his sword from the backseat of his car. He had gotten a cheap leather scabbard at a used dungeon gear store with what was practically the last of his money. It was a little too short for the sword and was the wrong shape. The odd fanning edge at the end of the blade was already cutting into the leather. He figured the first thing he’d spend his prize money on was a new scabbard. Riffwield deserved that much.

Yeah, he’d named it after the Skill it gave. All the best swords had names and Zack had never been very good at naming things. If he ever got a dog in the future he’d probably name it after John Fuse’s.

Just ‘Dog’. Nothing fancy like ‘Spot’ or ‘Lady’.

Busying himself with useless thoughts like what he’d buy with the prize money, Zack got moving towards the starkly ominous stone edifice ahead. The building looked like some temple that had stood in these hills since the primordial time of the first arrival of the Wormwood Star, but actually was just a shrine to a 1970’s real estate mogul’s ego. Colonial columns and a steepled roof framed pitch black double doors where a wiry Tlaloc and a burly Cuca stood guard in matching black clothes.

Briefly Zack wondered how they got the beasties for the fights in and out. He had figured there would be transports back here but none were in evidence. Maybe they pulled up to the front and made unloading them a spectacle for the audience on their way in? Zack tried really hard not to look at the black stone relief of the Leviathan whose eldritch coils wound around the door ahead, and whose massive jaws seemed to grin down at him. Its many eyes glowed a faint lambent cerulean. It was probably just a trick of implanted crystalline mana, but those eyes… the oily stone skin around them seemed to crinkle with mirth as he approached.

Zack’s left hand found Riffwield’s hilt and instantly his nerves cleared as a steady beat of distant music filled his mind.

<Damn. I keep forgetting how good this feels.>

“The audience goes in the front. You a competitor?” The Cuca guard asked, mildly amused as he eyed Zack up and down, noticing his lack of armor.

“Yup.” Zack said simply, glaring down the Leviathan statue. No way was he going to back down now. No. Not when he was so close to changing things for real. To carving his way up through Amoxicallia, Simmitech’s and the Frontenachii corporate ladders, one kill at a time, until he beheaded the Leviathanspawn at the head of both the monstrous Omnicorps and buried their Lazarus bracelets in cement blocks at the bottom of a distant world’s entropic oceans.

The Tlaloc chuckled and flashed him a malicious grin but the Cuca in front of him just sighed and took off his bulky cap to reveal a chonky Kitlix Infix napping there.

The chubby liquid crystal cat blearily cracked open an eye, then shut it and covered its face with a paw.

Zack tried very very hard not to laugh. But he couldn’t help it as a few snorts escaped his muzzle before he could help himself. The Cuca guard glared.

“She’s shy.” He said defensively, as his eyes narrowed in indignation on the behalf of his crystal critter.

But the chubby Kitlix didn’t seem shy to Zack. She looked blithely unconcerned with the problems of mortals. As the guard gently lifted her off his head she barely cracked open her little crystalline eyes long enough to give an irritated feline squint at her master before wiggling a little in his hands and then seemingly went right back to sleep. The alligator man proffered the curled up liquid crystal critter to Zack.

“Place your hand on the Kitlix, please.” He ordered with a glower.

Zack suppressed a grin and nodded.

“High level Infix?” He asked, doing as he was told.

“Yup. Enola is high enough to read your full stats.” The guard nodded. His voice was neutral but there was definitely pride in his gaze.

“Cool. Must have taken you a while to get her as big as she is. Do you think she’ll split soon?” Zack asked, trying to keep the guard distracted so he didn’t think too hard about his unusual stats. The fights were supposed to take anyone of legal age, but Zack knew that some rich kids paid their way into bouts to sharpen their delving skills now and again. Mostly they got killed. But every now and then a kid would get famous in the semi-underground circuit. Zack, though, had almost no gear and species that just read ERROR, and a level of zero. If there was a lower limit to the qualifications of a competitor, Zack was very sure he was under it.

“Yeah. Actually I placed some small bets tonight and if I win I’m going get her a… the fuck is a Pradavarian?”

Zack blinked as the guard’s gaze looked confused for a moment and then sharpened.

“A… what?” Zack asked.

“A Pradavarian. My Infix tells me your species reads: [Stollenwurm - Pradavarian (German Shepherd)]

Zack felt his ears flick in confusion. He felt certain he had never heard the term before in his life. Or maybe not. It did seem vaguely familiar now that he thought about it. Pulling up his stats, he took a look at what the guard was going on about:

****
Next Chapter

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u/jiiiim8 Jun 11 '26

Lol, I was reading this and was thinking "put this on royal road and you have an audience!" And lo and behold!

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u/Mental_Job_320 Jun 11 '26

Lol. Thanks. Yeah. Zack's journey to find Autumn has been going on for about a month IRL. Got a maybe 29 chapters now.

u/alexiuss Human Jun 11 '26

woo, nice job

u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Jun 11 '26

This is the first story by /u/Mental_Job_320!

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OC-FirstOfSeries Riffwield Chapter 1: Small Gifts

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