Suliana went up the broad staircase, her practiced neutrality struggling against her latest worries.

  "That he actually kept going when you disarmed him, even with an unsteady base!" Soffal was behind her, running his mouth as usual. "The little bugger has grit, I'll give him that. I was worried we'd lose him due to what the traitor tried to pull. Isn't he a great find?"

  "Perhaps."

  "Oho, high praise from our serious weapons master. Maybe love has struck in the lonesome campaign of a far longhouse? If you're not interested, you have to let me know. That boy is quite the snack."

  Finally, they reached the threshold of the second floor, and Soffal stopped his endless jabbering. A shamanic apprentice guided them past the usual stations to the room at the back, the office of the only true shaman in their contingent. Suliana thanked her main Axe they'd been assigned one as competent as him, the only reason the longhouse wasn’t a ruined husk many times over.

  The room had a simple bedroll in the corner and a large curved desk dominating its middle. Neat stacks of paper were piled on one end of the desk, and a box for storing natural treasures on the other. Most important were the logistical runes floating in the air at the desk's center, thin lines connecting them. Suliana took careful note of all these, for every aspect of meeting a shaman as skilled as Ramsen was heavy with Intent.

  Even if her knowledge of Okkar was still crude, she could make out each of her students, as well as herself, represented in the runes, the connections from her to them and the resource nodes orderly and concordant. Above her, a mess emanated from the chieftain to the other departments, the lines warning in orange or even a dangerous red.

  Suliana held her breath at being shown this, for it was intelligence on the inner workings of their longhouse beyond her station. Dangerous knowledge, given their situation.

  "Uhhh, I'll just wait downstairs for you," Soffal muttered. He didn't know the runes, purposefully never learning any of the logistical language, but he still sniffed out that this meeting was Serious Business, so it was high time for him to nope the fuck out.

  Ramsen turned to him, the gaze of the slender orc behind the desk disarmingly unassuming. "It's your choice, warrior. You're invited to stay for this discussion."

  "Thanks," he said, taking a step back. "But I'll just dumb it down, so I'll go check in with the trainees, gotta make sure they're actually running the hill and not eating it in their collective incompetence."

  Ramsen nodded, disappointed in the orc's choice once again. They needed more capable leadership, and the shield-bearer had genuine potential that was underutilized in his current role. Regardless, that was the expected outcome, and he gestured for Suliana to enter and take a seat at his table.

  "I notice you added a rune for Roken," she looked at the logistical network before her, the new nub isolated and uncertain. "I see pending lines linked to our various battle groups, but also—what is that one? Resource refinement?"

  "Alchemy."

  Suliana blinked. "His companion is apparently adept in the supportive glyphic arts, which is already a great benefit, an alchemist on top of that is quite the find. But he is only in the G-Grade, even if his Attributes are quite impressive for that. He likely has a rather powerful class, maybe even a Rare one, but it certainly is battle-focused, and should be of limited use in his side profession. Thus, I am not sure he will be of much use in the role."

  "Our healer had the opposite view, thinking that his focus is primarily on Alchemy."

  "That is not possible. He performed far too well in my entry test for any artisan. Either my assessment was flawed, or the healer's was. Why did the healer think this?"

  Ramsen slid a healing potion to her. "Folom bought this healing potion from our elven guest, which he apparently concocted himself. In the wilds, without proper equipment."

  She looked at the vial of clear liquid. "Seems pretty uncontaminated, but did the healer test it?"

  "Yes."

  Suliana paused, reassessing her initial evaluation. "A real prodigy, then. Soffal kept mentioning this assessment, and I assumed his claim was hyperbolic, but I now recognize that my own judgment was lacking. This means we need to keep him away from Woyfret."

  Ramsen smiled, finding the trainer's conclusion refreshing, if somewhat na?ve.

  "This could also be the means for him to break through to the E-Grade. I have also received the quest to kill the boy upon establishing his rune, and can extrapolate what it would be for our chieftain."

  Suliana measured her breath. "I can see how that is in line with his path." She looked at the runes leading up to hers, the chaotic mess left in the wake of their leader's mismanagement. "And I can also see how Woyfret no longer being here would improve the longhouse as a whole."

  The shaman slid the natural treasure storage container towards her. She opened it, her eyes widened in surprise, despite her best efforts to restrain herself. "This… This is too much." She gingerly closed the heavy box. It was a seeker natural treasure, one that would help you find exactly what one needed for their cultivation, a resource beyond the pale of value. "Does a G-Grade fledgling really justify such measures?"

  With Chief Woyfret away on a prolonged hunt, Ramsen was given wide dispensation, but even this was likely a violation of his role. After all, he was only a guide, not a leader. He felt the true burden acutely now, and was glad to delegate the issue to the young trainer. After all, no solution to their various problems was certain, even as he pored over the runes and extrapolated various differing scenarios. The answer would lie not in minor refinements or optimization, but in Vision, the ever-elusive property unfortunately lacking in their current chieftain. Young Suliana would have to carry this burden herself.

  "Thank you for the meeting," Ramsen said, the door opening, a shaman trainee already waiting on the other side to escort her back down.

  Suliana kept staring at the shaman, hoping for some more insight, other ways forward, anything. Should she give the treasure to Woyfret or the young elf prodigy? Or maybe even take a decisive step towards leadership and take it herself? The shaman’s face held no answers, only a practiced neutrality far more refined than she ever managed. With a held-back sigh, she stored the box in her ring and left, more uncertain than when she first entered.

  -x-

  Axl found the trainees easily enough, quietly joining their run. They were even attacked twice by pairs of the loud toads he'd encountered earlier, but the large group pummeled them to death easily, Axl not having the chance to contribute to the fight, since it was done so quickly after starting. The run finished just at the onset of sunset, and the tired group trudged over to the mess hall or communal showers, the training session apparently finished for the day.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  A few of the orcs engaged in polite conversation with him, but Axl couldn't see what their angle was, and they soon stopped after explaining to him that basic food was free, but that he could buy better stuff, and the unspoken rules for the showers.

  Apparently, the even hours of the day were for artisans and the odd ones were for fighters, regardless of gender, with the left side open for sexual activity and the right side for simple cleaning. He in fact greatly appreciated the heads-up on that, and even gifted the orc who volunteered the information one of his healing potions, the price more than welcome for sparing him the mortifying embarrassment of making a mistake on that front.

  Deciding to skip both the showers and food for now, instead, he went to one of the artisan shacks, picking out an empty one and labeling the door as taken and not accepting customers yet. He was told he could just claim one of these for his alchemy, so he proceeded to take out some random stuff from his dimensional pouch to make it look like he was working in there. After all, he didn't want people to suspect he had something like [Gastric Cauldron], so he needed a plausible explanation for how he was making so many potions.

  He still had a good deal of material left in his pouch to make healing potions from his current recipe, the materials Olkan left behind good for at least another hundred or so, but he wanted to save those for his Empowerment potions, realizing it would be harder to replace the starting materials on his unique recipe than on a common healing potion. He wanted to improve the healing potion anyway, given his F-Grade clientele and higher availability of Mana-dense materials.

  Sitting in his newly decorated alchemy lab, which would largely be used by Moxlin for her glyphistry, he spent the next few hours of the early night making his simple healing potions in [Gastric Cauldron] while she inscribed a fresh batch of triage talismans she'd used earlier to stabilize his missing arm.

  Axl managed to finish five healing potions before he ran out of empty flasks to use, then went back to the longhouse. Luckily, most were fast asleep already, so he managed to get to his bed without issue, Moxlin sleeping on a makeshift hammock swung between bedposts.

  Obviously, Axl stayed awake all night, only lightly focusing on [Mana Shroud] to help keep up his attention and relieve some of the fatigue. Still, morning arrived with Axl feeling rather refreshed. After all, this was one full night without any assassination attempts or even anybody trying any funny business near his bunk. A good sign.

  As much as he didn't get an easy fix for his Attribute problem among these orcs, he at least had a real path forward in good old-fashioned training.

  After asking Soffal for some pointers, he ended up with a rather promising plan for training each of his Attributes, even the obscure ones. Turns out that training Bilesong would work best with the healer, since he had access to many poisons and experience treating them, at least, so he scheduled a few hours with him every day to practice the Attribute at his clinic. Charisma would start with Soffal himself, the orc apparently using the social Attribute as a secondary focus of his class, which was a surprise, given how good he was as a spear-fighter. Axl would also get training on the common physical and mental Attributes from Suliana. Unfortunately, the two warriors were rather busy, so he could only get one hour from each of them a day.

  Lastly was Limerance, Soffal needing to take him to the shamans on the second floor of the longhouse to figure out who to tap for that one. After some discussion with the shaman trainees manning the booths neatly lined next to each other, they were eventually led to an office in the back, where a skinny, unassuming orc called Ramsen offered to be his trainer.

  He also planned to continue with the daily group training in the courtyard that was led by Suliana and at least one other trainer, each session lasting the three hours leading up to sunset. Soffal strongly recommended it, since it would not only give him experience sparring with others, but also give him a sense of the other orcs he might join in with for future excursions. Axl wasn't sure how much of that he would end up doing, but decided to follow the more seasoned warrior's advice anyhow.

  Unfortunately, only the group training was free, and all the one-on-one instruction cost Burrils. Luckily, selling ten or so healing potions at three Middle Burrils a flask would easily cover five days' worth of training, with one notable exception. Being unfamiliar with selling and buying things here, Axl decided for the first few days to simply sell his potions through the healer, who could vouch for his product. Only later would he sell directly to other orcs, to further his reputation directly, or in case he wanted to exchange them for favors instead of cash, which was also common.

  His one financial snag was Limerance training, since the shaman orc's time was by far the most expensive to buy, costing a full ten Middle Burrils for only an hour of instruction. So he needed to save up for those and only book it sporadically, to make it worth the investment.

  Axl's first day was spent largely running around setting all this up, and he barely managed to make it to the group training for the day, leaving Moxlin at their hut to continue her talisman glyphistry. He'd only seen the large sparring matches the day before, but apparently those were not the only kinds of training done by the group.

  That day, Suliana announced they would be specifically training Perception and Endurance, which brought a wave of palpable disappointment in the audience, a few groaning audibly beneath their breath. He braced himself for a truly grueling ordeal, but frankly, it wasn't so bad.

  They were paired up, each pair given a long stick with a rubber-looking ball at the end, which one member of the pair was supposed to whack the other in the same place, over and over, and then switch turns. The exercise was to focus on the tension in your body as you detected the attack, willing your skin, muscles, and bones to Endure the attack. It synergized well with Perception, where the more you focused on the attack, the exact angle and heft of it, and where it landed, the better you could will your Endurance to negate the damage.

  The explanation alone was a revelation, Axl not realizing this was how Endurance worked at all, much less the synergy with Perception. He cursed his positively deficient [Oocile Cultivation Manual], which claimed to explain the basics of the more common Attributes but did absolutely nothing of the sort. No wonder Olkan got stuck in the G-Grade, if even the free training of a bunch of F-Grade orcs was far superior to the stuff available to Piril's gate captains.

  The first few rounds of being pummeled were difficult, but it got easier as he got the hang of it, and by the end of the first hour, he figured he could keep on going indefinitely. He even started to ask his new partners to keep hitting him in the same place as the last after the regular pair switch-ups, since many of them didn't have enough Strength to really damage him, so the usual allowance of being able to switch where you were hit when switching partners wasn't working out, and Axl wanted more experience working Endurance on damaged flesh.

  When it came his turn to hit his partners, he started with as small an amount of his available Strength as he could manage and asked them to tell him if he should use more. Barely any took him up on the offer, to his surprise, since it seemed like almost all of the orcs used Endurance one way or another. But at least it let him practice deliberately using less of his Attributes, which was harder to do than he expected.

  Unfortunately, Suliana stopped Endurance and Perception practice halfway through the session and announced Stamina training, to an even larger surge of disappointment and overt groans from his fellow students. Axl instead perked up, not recognizing the Attribute as one he currently had, and wondered if he could get another one if he practiced it enough. Now that he knew how to prevent it from breaking his fighting ability entirely, of course.

  This was followed by another disappointment, as Stamina training was just more running around the hill, this time carrying weights in your arms. Apparently, Stamina wasn't actually an Attribute, but a resource pool in your body like internal Mana, which largely was how much physical activity you could do before resting. Soffal smiled widely as he gave Axl more weights than anybody else, which he took as a compliment, since it probably meant the orc trainer thought his Strength was up there.

  When the run began, Axl realized why he was given more, as the group's pace was barely more than a slow jog, even with Soffal telling them to speed up now and then. He saw that on the day before, and thought it was due to his skipping the first part of training, but that did not seem to be the case. Axl decided to stay firmly in the middle of the pack, not wanting to antagonize the other students by standing out too much early on, a lesson engraved in his bones back in Ost.

  While the run wasn't so bad, he still returned to the training grounds rather tired at the end of training and understood why it was scheduled towards the end of the day. Some of his fellow trainees seemed barely able to walk anymore, including the orc woman who told him of the shower rules the day before. Her name was Alifren, and she struggled so badly that he helped her to the longhouse, and gave her some of the salted creature meat he'd been eating so she didn't have to go to the cantina.

  She took the food and sat on her bed, then started sobbing. Axl was suddenly paralyzed in fear, worried he had done something terribly wrong.