Think about it this way – you can have a Perception of 100, but if someone cuts out your eyes, you’ll still be fucking blind. Same with Strength – if you raise the Stat without training your body, you won’t have any muscle for your Stat to work with. That’s why you’ll rarely see a Delver that’s out of shape, and if you do, kick their ass for me.
- “Introduction to Attributes
The rest of the night was uneventful, and I woke to the sight of a grinning Mason. It was terrifying enough that I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t having a nightmare. He’d decided to show us how to properly execute the tactics I’d tried to improvise the night before.
"You had the right idea to stay out of range of the ghouls. However, your execution was lacking. The correct way to go about it is to divide your Squad into smaller sub-Squads, called fire teams. Since there's five of you, you'll have two people in one team and three in the other."
He positioned me with Alex, and then had the other three stand about fifteen yards away.
"Now, when you need to fall back, you take turns. One group keeps their fire on the monsters while the other runs back to a new position. Then they take up the fire, while the first team retreats. Give it a try."
The big Delver ran us through the drill several times. I felt slightly foolish for not thinking of it the night before, because it was so obviously a better way to do it. The trick was to keep the right spacing so that we didn't accidentally hit one of our friends.
“If you want to stay alive, you need every edge you can get, and the biggest one is skill. Not Skills, just skill with all of these ‘little’ things. Movement, preparation, tactics – you might not get any of them as capital-s Skills, but you can master them just the same.”
We finished up a few more drills before a quick breakfast, then we were back on the road heading south. Ahead of us to our left rose the foothills of the Eastern Range, while far to the right was the Griffin Range, with its own foothills descending to the west. The gap between the two was defended by Fort Alpha, which we couldn’t yet see.
Mason pulled his ambush training on us a couple of hours later, though the small pack of Level 3 coyotes wasn’t much of a challenge for us. I could really feel my improved Stats in the fight, my higher Strength helping me control my gun’s recoil better and move between targets faster and more smoothly. We stopped afterwards, training for another hour or so while Block and Hassan carved up several of the corpses and stored most of the fresh meat while cooking some up for lunch.
“Why does monster taste so good?” I asked, washing down a bite of coyote with a swig of Jet.
“Mana,” Vale grunted, as if that explained anything.
I looked at Block for a better explanation and he shrugged.
“Some say mana, some say Essence, some say it’s the danger of the hunt. Personally, I think it’s gotta be something to do with Essence, because to me this just tastes like regular meat. Not bad, but if they were Tier 2, they’d taste way better. Just like I don’t get any Essence for killing a low-Level monster, I don’t get the delicious taste from one either. There are restaurants in the city where they tell you the Level of the meat in every dish, and the higher-Level the source, the more expensive it is.”
“You really like food, don’t you?” I asked. He’d done all of the cooking whenever we weren’t eating rations, after all, and he sounded like he’d eaten at those fancy restaurants he was talking about.
“Of course! Food and beer are two of life’s greatest pleasures!”
“Then why aren’t you carrying more with you? You just eat the same rations the rest of us do most of the time.”
He shrugged. “Several reasons. Expensive, for one, to keep anything decent preserved on the trail. Anything you put in your Inventory will spoil just like it would if it was in your pack – unless you’ve got certain Skills or Spells. I can cast a basic Preservation Spell, keep things fresh for a day or so, but that’s about it. Second, I tried it in the past, and it makes me soft. Out here,” – he gestured around with his fork – “I need to stay sharp. Live simple, be ready at all times. Then, when I’m back in town, I live it up and appreciate it all the more.”
“A fascinating philosophy, Defender Block,” Zaire commented.
“I wish you’d just call me Block, Defender Block is like, redundant or something,” Block complained.
“I can address you as Defender, if you prefer,” Zaire responded with a perfectly straight face. I peered at him, but couldn’t for the life of me tell if he’d gotten the slightest bit of amusement from Block’s comment.
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The rest of the day’s march was largely uneventful. At one point, Mason’s sword flashed into his hand and he stabbed at something hidden in a patch of sand. It turned out to be a Level 8 sandviper, a snake that was apparently poisonous enough that he didn’t want to risk letting it ambush us just in case it got in a lucky bite.
By the time we made camp, the mountains were much closer than they’d been in the morning, but otherwise the terrain was pretty similar. Dry rock, dirt, and sand, with the plant life more brown than green. We had something like eight or nine miles left to go to reach the fort the next day. Dinner was more coyote with a side of rations.
During my watch that night, a Level 9 corpsehound – which apparently, was not actually undead, just looked like it should be – tried to creep up on me. It failed, because it was nearly the size of a trihorn, and there wasn’t anything even resembling cover big enough for it to hide behind. I spotted it easily a hundred yards away, and when I Identified it and saw its Level, I hissed in surprise.
Mason, who was on watch with me, just nodded as if he’d been waiting to see if I noticed it, then casually threw his sword through its head. From a He summoned the sword back to his hand, vanished it into his Inventory, and went back to stalking slowly around the camp.
As we woke the others to start the day, I asked Mason why low-Tier monsters would even get close to us with him and Hassan around. He shrugged in response before speaking.
“Most monsters are sensitive to ambient mana, but they don’t exactly have Identify. If they’re in an area with the same or lower Tier mana as their own, they tend to attack just about anything close to their own size or smaller. If they’re wandering around a higher Tier area for some reason – which they usually avoid – they’re much more likely to flee when confronted.”
“What you’re saying is that the only monsters that are ever going to avoid me are the ones too weak for me to bother with.”
He laughed. “That’s true for a lot of monsters, but not all of them. Some are more cunning or perceptive than others. There’s been quite a few that have sniffed around us a bit and left us alone. Most of them just didn’t get close enough for you to notice them, or they were well-camouflaged. If you were out here with just Tier 0s and 1s, you’d have been attacked twice as often, and by generally more dangerous beasts.”
That morning, I tried sparring with Raylan with the bayonet attached to my gun. Despite my significant Stat advantage from hitting Level 5, it was a disaster. The gun was simply too heavy and cumbersome to have a chance of keeping up with the quick Knife Fighter, and he kicked my ass. Fortunately for me, Hassan was totally focused on our new Archer, and Mason was running our training, so I remained up 2-1 on Raylan by Hassan’s count. I hoped.
After an hour or two on the trail, we crested a small rise and I could finally see our next destination. To my right I spotted a narrow canyon carving its way along the base of the foothills from the west. It was the same Devil’s Gorge we’d crossed using the remnant bridge at East Bank. Flowing south, it ran into the Griffin Range and turned east.
In front of us, it flowed south through the pass, hugging its western edge. The rest of the pass was filled by the walls of Fort Alpha. It was hard to get a sense of scale from this far away, but I was sure it was immense. It looked formidable, dominant even, the way its walls spanned from the edge of the gorge on one side to the sharply rising slope of the Eastern Range on the other.
As we marched closer, the scale became more and more apparent. The walls were a hundred feet high and nearly a mile in length. I’d found the size of the remnant bridge breathtaking, but Fort Alpha was something else entirely. It hadn’t been built by some mysterious pre-System society, it had been raised from the very rock by some insanely powerful Earth Mages.
In front of the wall there was a gaping chasm dropping another hundred or so feet, with sheer, smooth sides. It was at least ten yards across and ran the entire length of the walls, meeting the river gorge on one side and ending at the base of the mountains on the other. Water from the river filled the bottom and turned it into a moat. The only way across was a single stone bridge spanning the gap at the center of the wall where the road ended.
Atop the walls were alternating ballistae and catapults, large enough to make the ones at East Bank seem like toys by comparison. Every so often there was a gap between the siege weapons. Curious, I asked Mason about it.
“Magical artillery,” he commented, then explained further at my confused look. “You can’t see anything from down here, but on top of the walls there are large ritual circles – areas with enchanted runes designed to amplify the power of Spells cast from within. Get a decent Siege Mage into one of those and they can wipe out a horde more effectively than any catapult. Of course, they’re stupidly expensive and impossible to move, but Wasted effective in defensive positions.”
As we approached the lowered drawbridge, Zaire peered over the edge of the chasm excitedly.
“Look, Gunner Az, this is where they got the rock for the walls! The Mages used a very powerful Shape Stone or something similar to dig this trench and then shift the rock from here,” he pointed into the depths, “to there,” pointing at the walls. “It must have taken some very high-Tier Mages to build this, and incalculable amounts of mana. But it would be worth it, because it effectively makes the walls twice as high!”
I shivered as we passed over the bridge, watched from far above by soldiers still manning the ancient walls. We then walked into almost a tunnel through the walls, which were exactly as thick as the moat in front was wide. I was sure that the thickness of this incredible wall was much greater than the of Sunland’s comparatively pathetic defenses.
The tunnel arched more than twenty feet overhead, and we walked below two different iron portcullises which could be dropped to block the way. Holes in the ceiling would let defenders cast Spells down at any attacker that reached the tunnel. It ended in a massive gate, one half standing open wide enough to admit a wagon with ease. Emerging from the cool shade back into the bright, hot sunlight, we were looking onto a wide-open space about a hundred yards across.
Directly in front of us was another fortress, this one much smaller, with walls merely fifty feet in height and only three or four hundred feet wide, a few soldiers on the walls proving that it too was still maintained. Apparently it was the oldest part of the fort, and the enormous wall in front of it had been constructed later. The road went around rather than through the second set of defenses, and as we followed it I saw that beyond the castle the ground dropped off suddenly, forming a steep and seemingly natural cliff sixty or seventy feet high.
[Cultivation] [Progression] [Fantasy] [Action] [Anti-Hero]
Synopsis (Click to Expand)
Two paths define the world: The Arcane and the Auric. Damon walks a third: The mind.
In the throes of tragedy, Damon stumbles upon an ancient inheritance thought to be extinct. In a world where Arcon rain fire and Auron shatter mountains, Damon becomes a Psion, learning to manipulate reality with a single thought.
But a unique power is not a gift. It is a curse.
Stepping out of his isolated village, Damon enters the vast cultivation world where strength is law and mercy is weakness. He quickly discovers that his secret abilities make him an anomaly and a target. To survive the ruthlessness, treachery, and betrayal running rampant in this cutthroat world, Damon must temper his mind into an invisible weapon.
“Pain is the chisel. Will is the hammer. Mind is the stone.”