Warsinger - Chapter Fifteen

Suri started on the papers we'd looted from Al-Asad until we were in the carriage back to Vulkan Keep. While she read through them, I checked the status of Myszno and worried. Six days had passed, leaving us with only twenty-one until the harvest. Karhad was in a bad state. Food was running low, the engineers had identified the problem with the water and were working on fixing it, but the sewerage situation was reaching crisis levels. 

In slightly better news, Istvan had executed my orders to the letter, and the NPC heroes had rolled in and were doing the quests they'd been assigned. Taethawn the Bleak and his Meewfolk riders had arrived early, and with my gold burning a hole through their pockets, they were smashing the bandits that had occupied the freehold of Vyeshniki. A sheriff for Karhad was en route. Most interestingly, two player adventurers - a Level 15 Meewfolk Bard named Kylirra and a Level 19 Knight creatively named 'Konnan the Barbarian' - had picked up one of the open-call quests I'd asked Istvan to advertise. They were working together on 'Gather the Wayward Sons', a mission to locate the young nobles who had escaped the destruction of their manors, and bring them them to Karhad. The other quests I’d assigned had been taken up by NPC heroes, and were sitting at between 2 and 30% completion. I could see the quest progress in my Heroes menu.

Available Heroes:

· Istvan Arshak

· Lazar Skaliz

· Suri Ba’Hadir

Recruited: 10

Total Available: 5

Unavailable:

· Zlazlo ul’Tiranozavir (Assigned to Quest: Swamp Thing – 10%)

· Taethawn the Bleak (Assigned to Quest: Bandits? In MY Granary? – 3%)

· Ur Robert Gehlan (Assigned to Quest: The Wolves of Fall – 15%)

· Commander Timofey Lostra (Assigned to Quest: Border Crossing – 20%)

· Count Lorenzo Soma (In absentia)

· Count Franz Zediwitz (Assigned to Quest: Border Crossing – 20%)

· Vash Dorha (Injured; 38% HP)

· …

I surfed from there to my own character sheet, and realized I still had Combat Ability points to distribute. I'd hit Level 23 by killing some rats around the castle before the Myszno flashmob had rolled up at the gate, and had been so stressed and freaked out I'd forgotten to actually level up. Derrrp.

Suri was still reading, scowling at the journal she was paging through, so I left her to it and got to work. Since hitting Level 22, I'd gone from unlocking new combat abilities at each new level to every other one, so there was nothing new to choose from. That was actually just fine with me. I had points to invest in my current catalogue of abilities, and it gave me some time to consider my build strategy going forward.

One thing the war against the Demon had taught me about Archemi was that this system, like tabletop RPGs I'd played, definitely rewarded min-maxing more than generalized character builds. Every character class had some kind of specialization. Berserkers like Suri worked best when they min-maxed Strength and Stamina. Rin's Magical Engineer class emphasized Intelligence, and probably Dexterity. Karalti's specialized Draconic Path, the Path of Alacrity, was weighted almost entirely toward Dexterity. In theory, the strategic value of my Advanced Path, Dark Dragoon, was also founded on Dex… except it wasn’t, really.

I now had four main factors contributing to my build: My Tuun heritage, the Trial of Marantha/Dragonrider abilities, my Nasaku Half-Blood status, and my actual Advanced Path abilities. Combined, they made me reasonably strong, reasonably fast, reasonably good at crowd-control, pretty decent at close combat, and capable of commanding a relatively small army without losing my mind. I had some innate magic-like abilities with fairly narrow applications, which was unusual in a world where magic was a physical resource that had to be purchased and expended like gasoline. But that was it, really. I wasn't exceptionally good at any one thing. Having an especially awesome dragon kind of made up for it, as long as Karalti and I were together. But if we weren't, I lost any advantages of that specialization.

My highest stat was Will – 77 Will was head and shoulders over my other stats, but it wasn’t exceptional for my level. When I checked Suri’s character sheet, I could see that she was the same level as me, but her Strength score was already into the triple digits. Part of the issue for me was that my Path, my dragon riding, and my role as Lord of Myszno all needed a certain level of Strength, Stamina, and Dexterity to be useful, but they also needed the mental stats for things like resisting fear, reacting to dangerous situations in the air, powering Mark of Matir abilities, and using skills like Leadership, Persuasion, Perception and statesmanship.

What it all meant, really, was that I finally had to bring all the parts of 'me' together into the best build Dark Dragoon allowed for. The dragon-based combat abilities were fairly self-evident. Karalti and I were both high-damage mobile DPS when we worked together in the air. As a team, we were headed toward becoming ridiculously powerful. But Lucien had almost killed me with one badly executed strike when he was Level 35... higher than me, but not THAT much higher. If we were going to compete, I needed to start specializing in something: one or two stats, a set of interconnecting combat and arcane abilities, and non-combat skills that complemented those abilities and bought all the powers I had into play.

"Ugh. These journals are all bullshit," Suri groaned across from me, folding one of them into her Inventory and slumping back in her seat. "There's nothing in that one that's gonna help us find them."

"What were they writing about?" I shook out of brooding for a moment, peering through the translucent menu screen at her.

"Mostly whining about being 'trapped' in Archemi," Suri sighed. "Try'na think of ways to get out of here and back to 'Los Angeles', wherever that is."

"L.A is where I used to live. Imagine a smoky dump of about twelve million people living on top of one another, with no money and weird tastes in fashion, and your mental picture is probably accurate." I refocused on my screen, frowning at it. "Hey, what do you think the best way to train Willpower is?"

"Willpower? Uhh..." Suri trailed off. "I dunno. Playing chess?"

"That's more Int, I think."

"Willpower is all about resisting stuff, right?" Suri shrugged. "You probably train it through resisting temptation, defeat, stuff like that."

"Resisting temptation, huh?" I scratched the stubble on my jaw. "Guess I'm starting up No-Nut November.”

"Well, yeah. Like, say you get depressed and really just want to get shitfaced. If you resist that and go do something productive instead, you'd probably level Willpower. I'm not much help there, though. It's my lowest stat."

"I bet Ignas has Willpower out the ass." I tried inducing feelings of determination to level my Willpower, but no friendly red 'stat increase' arrow appeared. Worth a shot.

Suri nodded. "Ebisa might know more about Willpower. Or Vash. I’d ask them about it.”

I nodded, and filed that away. "Alright, well, I know one thing that raises my Will. Give me one of those journals. I'll help with the reading, because I sure as hell need willpower to do that."

"Try a couple of scrolls, first. All of these were written by Jacob, and his handwriting looks like a chicken walked through a pot of ink and onto some vellum." Several scrolls appeared in Suri's hand, and she passed them over to me.

I gingerly unrolled one of them and immediately began to struggle with it, while our carriage rumbled through the ornate city gates and started on the long switchback road up to Vulkan Keep.

"Let’s see here. ‘Jeez, I don't know what has got onto... into... Nick,’" I sounded out slowly. "He's... bottom? No, 'gotten'. He's gotten really fucked up since the Grade... Great Server Crash. He keeps talking about all the stuff we should be doing but isn't doing anything to help. I'm so tired after trying to... keep trying and falling to find ways to access the Penalties-"

"Panel," Suri corrected, not looking up. "He keeps talking about some Admin Panel in these ramblings of his. You know what that is?"

"Yeah. It's the menu that gives the Architects their powers over the world," I replied. "Remember the big blackout that let you escape Al-Asad?"

"Sure do."

"All of the Architects lost their access to the Admin Panel after that event. Without the panel, they’re just regular Starborn, same as us. Looks like Jacob was trying to hack into it, get his administration powers back." I kept trying to read the parchment the old fashioned way, but after a couple more minutes, the old squirrel brain kicked in. My eyes and mind started wandering, and my knees started jittering up and down. After misreading 'succeeded' as 'zucchini', I cried uncle, put the letter into my inventory, and had Navigail read the rest of it to me.

“Jeez, I don't know what's got into Nick. He's gotten really fucked up since the Great Server Crash. He keeps talking about all the stuff we should be doing to escape but isn't doing anything to help. I'm so tired after trying and trying and failing to find ways to access the Panel, but none of the backend routes are there any more. It fucking sucks. I just want to get out of here and log out and see if one of the Shards will take me in. 

The prison idea was great when we were just playing around, but now I'm stuck here it feels more like a horror movie than a hentai. I'm so done. We're almost finished the teleporter, but it's hard with an actual fucking SUPERSOLDIER boxing us in out there. I don't know what the hell Nick was thinking when he imported her into the game. Sure, the 'break a princess to be our slave' thing was great and everything, but now she's able to level herself and is basically a fucking virus in the database-"

My eyes widened.

"-and she's got an axe with our names on it. They weren’t supposed to be self-aware, for fuck’s sakes! If she finds the Morning Stars and they work out what she is, we're screwed. Nic is going ahead to Dalim to kill them all. I won't be going with him. I'm going somewhere else. All I wanted was to play out some kinky hentai fantasy. I didn't sign up for this serial killer shit."

I came out of the listening trance to see Suri staring at me. "Hector, what's wrong? You stopped breathing and blinking and went real still. I know you're like, part-vampire and all, but it's kind of freaking me out."

"You need to read this." I pulled the page out and handed it to her.

Suri took it, unrolled it, and began to scan it. As she reached the end of the entry, her face drained of color. By the time she finished it, the muscles in her jaws were quivering. She threw it on the floor of the carriage and pressed a hand to her face.

"Hey, Suri..." I leaned in.

"Don't touch me for a sec." Her voice was tight, controlled. I watched her breathe, watched as her cheeks and eyes turned red. But she didn't cry. When she looked back up at me, her one uncovered eye blazed in her face, as bright as molten gold.

"Reading that letter just gave me a quest.” She forced her hand down, clipping every word off with cold precision. "First one I've gotten in a while, actually. I need to go to Dalim and stop these mongrels from killing the Morning Stars."

"Who are the Morning Stars?" I asked.

Suri lifted her chin, eyes scanning something I couldn’t see. “New Quest: The Morning Stars. After reading a journal entry written by Jacob, one of the Wardens of Al-Asad, you have learned that they have fled to Dalim to destroy a faction known as the Morning Stars. Depending on who you ask, the Stars are either violent terrorists or revolutionary heroes. Their mission? To bring down the ruling Kanishka Dynasty, abolish the Caste system, and reinstate the ancient Line of Mandana to the throne. Go to Dalim with all haste, make contact with the Morning Stars, and either aid them – or hinder them – in their mission to change the course of Dakhdir’s bloody history.”

I thought back to all the quests we had to do in Myszno, and swallowed nervously. "Is there a time limit on it?"

"No." The afternoon light cut Suri's face into hard, angular shadows. "Just a recommendation. Says the best time to contact them is within the next seven days."

"Okay. Well, I'm all for going to hunt down these pieces of shit, but we haven't even gotten you to Myszno yet," I said. "You don't have a spawn point. We've got like, thirty kingdom quests, and Baldr to deal with. I know this is really important to you-"

She shot me a dark, piercing look. "Do you?"

"Yeah, I do. So what I was going to say was how about we get you back to Myszno, get you set up, get a handle on shit, and then you can go-"

"I can go, can I?" She stiffened, turning back to face me.

"You want to take on two Architects and a revolution without a home base to fall back to?" I gestured toward the west. "Istvan is stuck there, probably trying to put out twenty different fires. We signed up for our responsibilities when we were here, in Taltos. If there's no time limit on the Morning Stars quest, we can go get them once we have our base consolidated."

Suri leaned forward. "You know what he meant by living out some 'hentai'?"

"Uhh... yeah." I blinked a couple times. "It’s a kind of anime. Anime is like... a kind of cartoon. Like a fictional story told with pictures. Hentai is a kind of anime that's, uh, pornographic. Most of it is pretty tame, but there’s some extreme torture stuff out there, too. Seems these guys were into the extreme fantasy stuff, and they were like... acting it out here."

"That's all it was to them? A fantasy roleplay?"

"Yeah." I drew a deep, calming breath, and tried to sit back. "Seems like it."

Suri's long neck stiffened. "And you're telling me we have to go back to Myszno, right the fuck now?"

I rubbed the bridge of my nose and grimaced, hard. "Suri, those quests are all on timers. I already fucked over Istvan and my people - our people - by going to pick you up from Al-Asad instead of getting them food and water and sewerage. You ARE my priority, but we just heard it from Rutha’s lips. Baldr is about to invade some nearby country, and if we don’t sure up our base-."

"It’s your base. Because like everything I've been doing this last couple months, this is your quest." Her jaw worked. "And you think your quests are more important than mine."

"That's not true!" I snapped. 

"Yeah, no. You stuck yourself into my quest here, in Taltos, and when it turned into a fucking war, I went along with it and supported you." She gripped the cushion of the carriage, leaning in as far as her constricting dress allowed for. "You got tangled up with Baldr over what happened in Ilia because of Karalti, and I've fought with everything I've got to protect her and you and Rin through all this shit. I lost my life for it. But when we hear that these fucking bastards imprisoned me, tortured me because they had some disgusting cartoon fantasy they wanted to act out? Fuck, Hector. They're about to go and murder a bunch of people because of me, because of some secret I might not get a chance to find out about if we wait. But sure, we can just put a raincheck on it and go take care of your stuff first?”

"It's not like that-"

"It IS like that. Because I don't even recall asking you to go with me, let alone asking for your permission." Suri's eyes glowed with simmering heat. "You just upped and told me I could wait around for you while we - plural - make sure everything to be peachy in Myszno."

I was starting to get pissed off now. "I'm not your damn enemy, Suri. And yeah, am I wrong for assuming you’d want some help with this? You can’t take on two Architects alone!”

"Can't I?" She bared her teeth. "Says who?"

"Says me, and all the people who care about you!" There was no room to move in the carriage, and I was starting to feel claustrophobic. "These guys aren’t like Andrik, Suri. They know this world in ways neither of us do, and they come back to life if you kill them. You need backup-"

"What I NEED is for you to stop telling me what I 'need' and fucking listen to me and what I want for a change!"

"Fine then. Rush into this. Go get yourself killed and respawn in Al-Asad, then go crazy like Baldr." I threw my hands in the air. "We'll pull you out of there as many times as we need to, even if we have to dig you out."

"Hector, in case you didn't notice, I was about to pull myself and my men out of there when you and Karalti arrived." Her voice had taken a sugary, venomous tone now. "Don't get me wrong - I'm really grateful you came as soon as you could. I'm grateful you helped me break into the Warden's burrow. But don't assume for one fucking moment that you 'saved' me. I found my own way out of that fucking place once, and if I end up there again, I'll grab a fucking shovel, hold my breath, and do it again."

I was so shocked that I just fell shut down, fuming the rest of the way to the castle. When we got there, Suri didn't look at me. She hitched up her skirt and pushed out of the carriage, flipped the valet a coin, and stalked off into Vulkan Keep without me.