Warsinger by James Baldwin (most inspirational books TXT) 📗

not me. I reached for her hand, and when she gave it to me, I squeezed gently. “Do you have any idea how much I missed you?”

“I missed you, too.” Suri leaned against me with a sigh, relaxing a little on her feet. “You and Karalti, Masha, Vash, Cutthroat…”

The ability to see around the back of my own head meant that, even though my face was turned toward Suri in the moment I leaned up to kiss her, I could still see Rutha's expression of disappointment as she gazed at the pair of us, and then turned a flashing empty smile back to the man trying very hard to hold her attention.

Chapter 15

We took a carriage back to Vulkan Keep. Once the curtains were drawn, Suri started on the papers we'd looted from Al-Asad while 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 down 5% already, 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 most of my remaining gold burning a hole through their pockets, they were smashing the bandits that had occupied the freehold of Vyeshniki. A new, un-corrupt sheriff for Karhad was en route. Most interestingly, two player adventurers - a Level 15 Meewfolk Bard named Kylirra and a Level 19 Human Berserker creatively named 'Konan 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 some young noble children who had escaped the destruction of their manors, and bring 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 (Critically Injured; 37% HP)

●        …

I surfed from there to my own character sheet, and realized I still had Combat Ability points to distribute. I was about 800 points from Level 24. I'd hit Level 23 by killing some mobs in the forest north of the castle before the Myszno flashmob had rolled up at the gate, but had been so stressed and freaked out about Suri I'd forgotten to actually level up. Duh.

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, so there was nothing new to choose from. That was 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, rewarded min-maxing more than generalized character builds. Every character class had some kind of stat 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: The Mark of Matir abilities, 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 – 97. 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