“Hello Lost Angels! Thanks for having me on the show, Demophon. I hope you know I’m a huge fan.”
“Incredible! Folks, this is clearly a man of great power and great taste! Now, let’s start off with a real softball of a question, just to get things rolling. How did you get a wicked name like Two-step? I’m dying to know!”
“Funny you should ask that, my man. You see, back when I was just a young Tier 1 whippersnapper, I once cut a guy’s throat so cleanly he took two steps before he realized what had happened to him, and my teammates started calling me Two-step. Of course, that was almost fifty Levels ago, I’m much better at it now, I promise.”
(prolonged silence)
“THAT IS FUCKING AWESOME!”
- DJ Demophon Kerner, with guest Two-step on K-RAD LA, April 2nd, System Year 453
The afternoon sun was uncomfortably intense, especially in my dark armor and baselayer. Downing some water from my canteen helped, but I was still sweating as we walked. I looked back at Vale and Block in their heavy plate.
“How can you handle the heat wearing all that metal?”
“Eh, it’s not so bad when you get enough Endurance, Skills, and the right armor mod,” Block answered. He and Elin had moved up and were now walking in a group with Vale.
Beyond them I could see the town walls getting smaller as we got further away, and I realized with a start that I was further outside the town than I could ever remember being. My parents’ farm had possibly been further still, but I had only hazy memories of it and didn’t even know which side of town it had been on.
It doesn’t feel real, leaving like this. I mean, just walking out the gate and into a new life… I guess I was always scared that Sunland wouldn’t let me go, and now that I’m actually here… I shivered for a moment, despite the heat. This place shaped me, but I won’t let it define me! I’m on my own path now!
I smiled and looked over at Raylan. “You going to share anything about your Class, Raylan?”
“My Class is Knife Fighter.” He gestured dramatically and a pair of knives appeared, one in each hand, before vanishing just as quickly. “So far, I’ve got Quick Step and Swift Cuts, which gives me a passive bonus to my attack speed when using short, bladed weapons. I’m good up close, obviously, though I have a shortbow in my Inventory for emergencies. Unlike you though, I can’t conjure up more ammunition, so I’ve got a limited number of shots.”
“Well, between my gun and Zaire’s spikes, hopefully you won’t need it. How about Elin?” I turned around and started walking backwards. “What can you do?”
What she seemed to be best at was being angry at me for no reason I knew of, it seemed. Her glare was fierce, but she had to realize the question was perfectly reasonable because she eventually replied.
“I’m a Healer, though I… can’t actually heal anyone yet. As I’m sure you already know, healing Classes get an offensive option as their first Skill so we can fight in the Tutorial. My primary rune is Pain, and I can cast Pain Bolt using my scepter. Like Zaire, I can switch the modifier in it for another, so I’m working on Touch next. Once I get to Level 3, I’m supposed to get a healing rune.”
That was… interesting, and vicious-sounding. I hadn’t known that Pain was a rune at all, and a Pain Bolt sounded nasty. Probably effective. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of having to trust her to watch my back in a fight, but I couldn’t do anything about it. Surely they wouldn’t make us stay in a Squad together for all of our training, right?
“I’m glad you’re taking an interest in your fellow recruit’s Skills, Az. You’ll get a much closer look at them once we’ve stopped for the day and can get a little bit of light training in,” Mason added.
I had a feeling his idea of light training wasn’t going to be a lot of fun. Sighing, I turned back to face the front and looked around me at the farms we were walking by. The first farms we’d passed, those closest to the city gates, had been visibly greener. Most of them either had a Water Mage in the family or were rich enough to employ one to help irrigate their fields. We’d passed that first ring of farms already and the hard-packed dirt and gravel road was now running between rows of cactus.
The widely spaced, towering yucca plants – they were considerably taller than even Mason – were as far as I knew, the easiest thing you could grow in the hot, dry weather. They didn’t need much water, which made them cheap, and so we ate a lot of them in town. I had no idea who’d figured out you could eat the things.
Their leaves were razor sharp and if the plant was injured, it would randomly shoot out deadly spike-leaves in all directions. Farmers obviously had some way of dealing with that, but I didn’t know how. The dangerous crops probably also helped keep their farms safe from monsters. At least any monsters dumb enough to try and eat something that looked so unappetizing.
We’d walked a while further when a faint clinking sound from my pouch reminded me that I had mods to use! I decided to start with the dregs and work my way up. I pulled the first one out of my pouch and touched it to my armor. Even after attuning it, it was still a dull and lifeless blue compared to the ones I’d used in the Tutorial.
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Item: Armor Modification – Attuned
Level: 0
Effect: Fast Charge – barrier recharge delay reduced slightly.
Type: Passive
That was, well, not a terrible result. At Level 0, a barrier needed fifteen seconds to start recharging – fifteen seconds after the last time you took damage. If you kept getting hit, it would never recharge. For every Level you gained, the delay would go down by a tenth of a second. I wasn’t sure what ‘slightly’ meant in terms of seconds, but I doubted it was very much.
Well, at least I got a discount on these… I watched my armor absorb the mod, then moved onto the second one.
Item: Armor Modification – Attuned
Level: 0
Effect: Thermal Regulation – slight enhancement to user’s resistance to hot or cold environments.
Type: Active
Cost: 2 mana/hr
That made me crack a grin as I eagerly applied the mod. Once it had been absorbed, I concentrated on pushing some mana into my armor. I could ‘feel’ that there were now two places I could send the mana – one had already been there, and would clean and repair the armor. The new one should activate my mod. I checked with PAST, and he told me that my mana regeneration was now an impressive – to me – 33 points per hour, so keeping the armor mod on shouldn’t be much of a strain.
I activated the mod with a trickle of mana, and felt… slightly better. The effect was there, it just wasn’t nearly enough to counter the afternoon heat. Raylan chuckled at me as my expression went from excitement to disappointment in a heartbeat.
“Not what you’d hoped for?”
“Oh, it’s a thermal regulation mod… It’s just that the effect is barely noticeable,” I replied.
He laughed. “What Level is it?”
“Zero.”
“Then what did you expect?” Elin’s tone was biting.
Oh Waste it, I just want to punch her, but I can’t! It was one thing to get in a fight with a kid in school, but this is the real world now. I can’t do anything that would risk me getting in trouble with Mason. Locking away my frustration – I don’t even know why she’s mad at me, I haven’t even done anything to her – I just rolled my eyes.
“Whatever I expected, it was more than what I got. Guess I’ll need to find a higher-Level one eventually.”
“My understanding is that thermal regulation mods are reasonably common, Gunner Az,” Zaire chimed in helpfully. I still felt a bit weird when he called me ‘Gunner’, since literally no one else but PAST had ever done that. Fortunately, Zaire’s voice was much more pleasant and less shouty. Also, he called me ‘Az’ like I preferred. Ashley was such a boring name.
I started to reach for the Level 2 mods, but I was distracted by the sight of a small hill in front of us. On top of the rise, sticking up all by itself, was a narrow wooden post with a round red sign on top of it. As we got closer, I saw that the sign wasn’t actually a circle. It looked like someone had looked at a circle and thought to themselves, ‘I like the idea here, but it just needs some corners,’ and then proceeded to chop off the curvy bits.
The sign read ‘STOP’ in blocky white letters, and it was facing slightly away from us. Despite being out in the middle of nowhere, it was in perfect condition – the paint absolutely pristine – like it was brand-new.
“What is that?” I asked Mason, who had slowed down.
He ignored me for a moment, gesturing for Hassan to go ahead. I watched as a gorgeous dark wood greatbow appeared in his hand, along with a matching leather quiver on his hip. The bow looked to almost as tall as the man holding it. The Archer casually jogged up the rise to the top, stopping briefly near the sign and looking around. There seemed to be a shimmer in the air around his legs. He continued a bit further, out of view for a moment due to the crest of the slope, and then I heard his voice in my ear.
Mason grunted and started walking again, waving the rest of us along.
“It’s a remnant,” he offered by way of explanation. I frowned, trying to remember what I knew about remnants. I knew of the capital-R Remnant, sure, even if the mountains to the south meant we couldn’t see it from Sunland. The Remnant was a building that was supposedly over a mile high, though I didn’t really believe that. The entire town of Sunland was less than a mile from east to west, and I couldn't really imagine a building that size. Only mountains could be that tall, surely.
“You mean this thing has been here since before the System?” I asked as I made a mental connection. “It looks like it was just put here yesterday.”
We reached the top of the small hill and I looked around in surprise. What I thought was a simple hill was actually a long, elevated – shit, is this what roads used to look like? The sign was standing on the side of a stretch of dark, almost black stone-like material. Even though the road we’d walked up was covered in dust, this strange black material was as clean as the inn’s porch.
It extended for perhaps fifty feet to either side of the sign and was maybe twenty feet wide. Down the center was a series of bright yellow strips of paint. As I followed Mason onto the strange surface, I could feel the heat radiating off of it. I realized the shimmer I’d seen around Hassan a moment ago was actually the heat rising up from the smooth black roadway.
Past fifty feet or so, however, the perfection slowly faded away, the material showing a few gaps filled with dirt. Within maybe another twenty feet, there was more dirt than black. After that it was just an elevated pile of dirt stretching off into the distance, at a diagonal from the road we were following, which continued down the far side of the rise.
At my side, Zaire spoke up. “Remnants like these are fairly common, though no one knows why. I’ve heard that each one is the idea of something as it once was, refusing to fade away into memory even after hundreds of years. They somehow draw in ambient mana like a sponge, and that mana maintains and restores them almost like our Class Items.”
Hassan
Dreadspire: The Weakest Druid
Dreadspire was a single-player game designed to break the unbreakable.
Eryndor Leafshade, he found himself trapped in the body of a druid, the weakest playable race in Dreadspire.
Dreadspire proves that no one was ever meant to win.
Only the strongest may ascend
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