Aleem’s eyes fluttered open. A block of light blue text hovered in his field of vision.
ALERT
+1 to Cognition
[Trance] has levelled up!
[Trance] Level 12
[Meditation] has levelled up!
[Meditation] Level 13
He blinked the notifications away, and it took him a moment to recognise where he currently was.
Two sets of leather boots failed to obscure the shut wagon door from his vision. He lay now on his stomach beneath the bench he’d been seated upon for most of the previous day. Someone had moved him again. Why the fuck did people keep doing that? Sunlight contorted his face into a grimace as he yawned. The soft tremors of the wagon were more apparent to him from his place on the floorboards, and his body ached all over. The scent of crushed grass was strong in the low air, and he had no doubt that the culprits were the boots barely a foot a way from his face.
There was a quiet conversation going on. He deactivated [Trance].
“And that’s if we let it play out like he implied,” Hetti was saying.
“It’s a long shot, and you both know it,” Bebson added. Both their voices seemed to be coming from the bench above him.
“He’s awake,” R’shai helpfully alerted everyone. “Let’s not have this conversation twice.”
“Oh,” Hetti said, and the pair of boots directly in front of his face moved. “You coming out from down there, sleepy?”
“Just a moment,” Aleem called up to her in a raspy voice. On the wing of another yawn, he rubbed his eyes with his forearm and was hit with a stench so infernal he almost gagged. It had been two days since he’d had a bath.
“Come on, lad. Everyone’s been up and waiting for you,” Wulry said. “We have a lot to go over.”
Right. Aleem wiggled out from underneath the bench, and Hetti lifted her boots off the ground just enough for Aleem to slide beneath them. His back scraped the soles of her boot. Bebson hadn’t moved his boots at all, but then again, he wasn’t close enough that he needed to.
Aleem couldn’t say with any measure of certainty that the annoyance he felt wasn’t the result of his general predicament, forced cohabitation and skewed sleep cycles. Despite having had very few interactions with her, Hetti struck Aleem as more of a loose talker than a wilfully irritating person. In the game, Bebson had come off as a jaded and severe older man who acted as the voice of reason among Wulry’s companions. In person though, he just seemed to Aleem like a grouch bag. Even right now, he appeared to be sulking, and wouldn’t meet Aleem’s eyes for some reason. What was that about? Hetti widened her eyes meaningfully at Aleem as if to say ‘well, sit-down, dummy’.
Wulry and R’shai occupied the rear-facing seat. Across from them, Serend sat by herself, prompting Aleem to take his place on the other end of her bench, by the door. His cloth bag was on the bench between them. The blind girl’s musical instrument was nowhere to be seen, and Aleem simply supposed that she’d gotten Wulry to store the cumbersome thing in his Grommet. She gave him a small nod, and as usual, he wasn’t sure if he should return it.
The air in the wagon was ripe with the scent of unwashed bodies, sweat and grass. He wasn’t the only one in urgent need of a bath; Wulry especially looked dishevelled. A nigh imperceptible breeze wafted in from the window beside him, through which he could see the roiling plains flowing away as the wagon moved at what had to be human walking speed. “How long have we been travelling for?” Aleem asked.
“Just shy of three hours, well before the crack of dawn,” Wulry said. His expression grew serious. “We wanted to know more about this [Warlock] of ours.”
The last traces of sleep fled Aleem’s mind at that. He nodded. “Orotaz.” He leaned forward, fingers clasped and elbows on his knees. “Anything in particular?”
Wulry and R’shai exchanged one of those inscrutable looks of theirs. “You mentioned being able to disable him,” Wulry said.
This was something Aleem had already intended to explore in detail with them, and so he did. He dished out everything he knew about the Daibon Cult and their patron, Daranirajido. R’shai was especially interested in their mind magic practices, much to the ill-hidden discomfort of everyone but Wulry.
Sithen oppression and perversion were rather taboo in the world of Orig. Some even considered such practices just as forbidden as incarnation rituals. And in truth, the woman’s inordinate engrossment with the topic bothered Aleem more than a little, but he buried his initial concerns. In ‘Tales of Woe’, R’shai had become incredibly adept at this. Oppression, as the game had called it, was a brand of mental affliction that essentially broke the minds of its targets and twisted them and syphoned their memories and Skills. Her arc had been a truly tragic one. But this was a necessary evil, Aleem told himself.
Bebson shook his head as Aleem spoke. At some point the grey moustached man had folded his hands across his chest. “How does he know any of this?” he interrupted, though the question hadn’t been directed at Aleem. Bebson had spent the better part of an hour muttering and creasing his brow, looking increasingly troubled as Aleem revealed more and more about Daibon’s operations.
Aleem gave the man a quizzical look. “I mean, I just summarised the key points for your benefit because you weren’t with us on the first night, but didn’t they bring you up to speed already?” He extended his questioning expression to Wulry and R’shai.
“We did,” Wulry said. “But Beb here’s a very skeptical sort.”
Hetti snorted. “He wouldn’t even let up on insisting that the [Hag] wasn’t who she said she was. Not until Serend verified the woman’s identity.”
That piqued Aleem’s interest. It was quite the tangent, but he didn’t mind the diversion. He turned to his blind bench-mate. “You knew Feriona?”
Serend shrugged. Her skin was dark enough that it shouldn’t have been obvious, but Aleem thought she was blushing. “I uh befriended her eldest daughter at the Outpost.”
His brows rose a little. Feriona had scores of children but Bojra and Sambi had just one older sister at Wotbourne.The healer-type Vriorian that had attended to him after the incident at the encampment. “Yinsi? Why didn’t you say anything back then? You could have helped diffuse the tension earlier.”
“Well, you handled it wonderfully, if you ask me,” she said. “But is this really what we should be discussing?”
Aleem narrowed his eyes, but couldn’t controvert her deflection. He brought his attention back to Bebson. “Do you suspect me of lying?”
The man watched Aleem for several quiet seconds before letting out a sigh. His eyes darted very briefly towards R’shai. “I know that Nii is more than capable of sniffing out lies, so no.”
“Then you doubt my accuracy?” Aleem pressed.
Bebson shook his head. “I’m just—” he made to unfold his hands then seemed to think better of it.
“Just what?”
Hetti shifted beside him, some concern stealing over her features. “You’re not starting to have cold feet are you, Beb?”
“No, that’s not it.”
It was like playing a game of whack-a-mole. “You already know I have a backer, so what’s your problem?”
“You’re a child. Alright?” He looked to Hetti then to Wulry and R’shai. “He’s a godssodded kid! There! I said it.”
Not this again. Aleem brought a hand up to the bridge of his nose. “Look,” he began, but Bebson talked onover him.
“The alarm system thing is just—I mean, suicidal, yeah, but … come on.” The man looked at them with tired eyes. “It’s a little too much, isn’t it? What would you do if it were Diris, huh?” He’d directed the last question at R’shai.
Aleem tilted his head, surprised at the man’s outburst. Bebson, much like his two in-game companions, ought to have been shrewd, world-weary and a little ruthless. But everything he’d just heard the man blather on about seemed to be hinting quite strongly at a conscience.
There was silence in the wagon, the sounds of travel filling up the space between the seated passengers. Hetti appeared even more surprised than Aleem felt.
R’shai, however, had an accommodating look on her face. “You’re feeling guilty.” She wasn’t asking a question, but the hint of reservation in her voice suggested that she was only just noticing this.
“How aren’t you?” Bebson challenged.
“Because this isn’t Diris,” she said with a shrug. She just gestured limply at Aleem. “We didn’t cause any of this. We’re just trying to make the best of a bad situation here.”
There’d been no rebuke in her tone, but Bebson’s frame sagged a little. “So what happens if the boy …” he glanced briefly at Aleem, “you know.”
“Goes all abomination on our asses? We run, of course,” Hetti said, voice light with humour, but when no one reacted, her smile faded. “Right?”
“Right,” Aleem said with a stiff nod. He had come to terms with the possibility and had, well, he hadn’t embraced it, but he’d at least acknowledged how terribly slim his odds of survival were. He somewhat subscribed to the notion of making peace with the worst possible outcome so that it wouldn’t deter him if it did happen. But there would be no room for deterrence here. Just death. It was very new territory for him.
“You know,” Wulry began, a thoughtful look on his face, but Hetti cut him off.
“No, no, no, Wulry. The answer is ‘yes’. You heard the boy yourself. He consents. He understands. If we do anything other than run while he gets taken over, we’ll be deader than dead. It’s a doss. Once Dararo-whatever puts him on like a coat, we make like the wind.”
Bebson’s forehead crinkled in confusion. “We’d be abandoning—”
Hetti covered her face and groaned. “Not you too, Beb. Gods. Not you too.”
“How would you even live with yourself afterwards?” Bebson asked, and surprisingly there was no heat in his voice. He seemed sincerely curious.
“Gratefully,” she said, throwing her hands up. “Because I’d get to live.”
Serend finally joined her voice to the conversation. “I’m with Hetti on this one. Sorry, Twenty-two. This particular emanation ritual is decades in the making.”
“Thank you! See? Even princess here agrees with me.”
“I suspect there’s a range,” Serend continued, “but I doubt we’d be able to escape it in time. We can’t just … solve this one through any other means than what we’re already trying.”
Wurly nodded at Serend’s words but he was watching Bebson. Swaying gently with the wagon, he leaned forward and placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder, it looked as awkward as it must have felt, given the physical distance between them. “If you want to soothe your scruples, Beb, then let’s come up with as thorough a plan as we can manage to retrieve those relics. If we succeed, both he and Serend believe that the ritual would be greatly disrupted. And perhaps, gods be kind to us, that would be enough to spare the boy’s life.”
Bebson adjusted his folded arms, but didn’t say anything. He breathed out heavily.
Aleem wasn’t sure how he felt about this entire conversation. That was a lie. He knew exactly how he felt about it, and he found that he didn’t care much for this specific feeling. In the end, the pity of strangers meant nothing to him; he just wanted to survive this.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“The issue,” R’shai said, “of what we do if we fail, still hasn’t been decided.” Her gaze travelled to Aleem. “In a situation where the ritual is recommenced, do we just flee or do we …” she hesitated and surprisingly her eyes abandoned his, “do we grant the boy a quick death first?”
All eyes moved to him, deferring to his stance on the matter. Even Hetti watched him quietly.
Aleem hated this so much. He did not want to have to make this sort of decision. He swallowed, clenched his jaw. Stupid teenage body and its loose tear ducts. He tightened the grip of his clasped fingers until they resembled the hands of a man in supplication.
He was pretty certain that an incarnation ritual could be halted by killing the intended host. The game had often presented it as some sort of trilemma. Affect the ritual directly without killing anyone, kill the persons conducting the ritual, or kill the child at the centre of the ritual circle. In actuality, there were more options than that, such as do all three or any two. He looked at his hands. This body would probably be mostly unkillable by the time the emanation proper began, but he’d have to be enthralled first for the Dawalian relic to work, so that gave them a safe window.
“I won’t suffer?” Aleem asked. His voice didn’t shake nearly as much as he’d feared it would.
“You won’t,” Wulry promised gently.
A tightness surged along the bridge of his nose, but it passed quickly. He nodded in assent, an almost imperceptible movement of his head, and he thought he could see something akin to guilty relief flash across the faces of a few of his fellow passengers. He couldn’t in good conscience hold it against them.
“Right,” R’shai said, running a hand across her forehead. “Where were we? Daibon.”
Aleem’s plan was a very simple one. Infiltrate the Daibon minions in Salgad, something his knowledge of their phrenic commands and predetermined oppression phrases would allow for. But this knowledge was best wielded by the closest thing they had in their party to a mental affliction specialist. He gave R’shai the vague outlines of the system with the intention of introducing much more detail later.
The second part of his plan was to steal both divine relics. Every meaningful reference to Daranirajido’s ascension in-game had heavily indicated that these two relics had done a lot of the heavy lifting for the then-godling’s emanation ritual. This was where Wulry came in handy. The man had a Skill called [Vectorial Awareness], it would allow him sense specific kinds of spacial anomalies, and that was precisely what the second divine relic was. Like most artefacts of great power, it could be utilised in any number of ways, but one of its primary functions was to imprison spirits. In the lore of ‘Tales of Woe’, the Vorntza of Hwoix had been used to store several powerful elemental spirits, which Daranirajido had used to further fuel his ritual.
The Dawal of Rerongcha, amongst other things, allowed for one to be in two places at a time. In the game, Daranirajido had insisted on incarnating into a jrjis, and while he did in fact infuse his essence into the body of one, his real goal had been the Grand Coral all along.
Despite being called untethered, the jrjis were more closely—if uniquely—connected to the Coral than their tethered brethren. A fairly unpopular theory which had never been confirmed in the game surmised that every single Representative of Zraazrondre was a jrjis. Whatever the case, by infusing his essence into a young jrjis whose Sithen was yet unformed, Daranirajido found an entry point into a far more worthy vessel: the Grand Coral. The Dawal of Rerongcha was specifically vital for this, and so the godling had seemingly incarnated in two places at once. For this reason, the divine relics were paired and most likely in the same vicinity.
Aleem tried to keep yet another dimension of things in mind. Divine politics. Luctari had told him about the impleader that Daranirajido had initiated against Zraazrondre. It was essentially a procedure that prevented gods from interfering in the disputes of the much lesser divinities, and for the duration of its effectiveness, Zraazrondre’s hands would be tied. But that was the important thing: Duration. Aleem’s biggest regret from his conversation with Luctari was that he hadn’t inquired about how much time was left in Daranirajido’s impleader. It came down to guessing, which he felt very uncomfortable about. In the game, there had been very few instances of impleaders being initiated, and even then the specific amount of time such things had lasted for had never been important enough. It would have been a little silly if godlings sat around waiting for an impleader to elapse so that their own deus ex machina could show up.
Luctari had advised that Aleem kill himself and Zraazrondre had acted very quickly, eager to tie loose ends. Even the Tutelar goddess, Luxol, had sent Feriona to help Aleem with his Seeded Directives. He didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, but it did seem as though Daranirajido was fighting against the clock. If anything, that left Aleem in a more overwrought state than the previous day. A desperate higher order entity was a shitty matchup, but it did give him a sliver of hope. What he really needed was some way of accessing the divine rumour mill.
He’d shared his thoughts with the group; Serend, to be specific, since she was a votary of Akeshi.
She shook her head regrettably. “After using [Confirm] to find Salgad, I expended what little virtue I’d scrounged.”
Right. He remembered her saying just as much immediately before she’d activated [Confirm]. Bestowed Skills often worked with Virtue, which operated like a merit system between a higher order entity and their venerants, it determined how often these followers could make use of their patron’s bounty.
Wulry had an Auspice bestowed on him by Mhetep, and he’d acquired it after passing a Legacy Trial at a very young age. But he had no way of contacting a Representative of his patron Tutelar. Other than receiving his Grommet and being issued this Quest, the man’s dealings with the divinities had been through human intermediaries.
Neither R’shai nor any of the others in the wagon had an Auspice or any means of contacting a godling. Invocations needed some form of homing beacon, this was why altars where made of very special materials. Vriorians with decent enough priority in the Coral bond, could entreat Representatives of their patron goddess, regardless of where they were. But it wasn’t a real invocation per se, as no godlings would heed such a call; rather the invoker, if acknowledged, would be enabled to draw more power from the Grand Coral than they could conceivably contain, leading to a short range but highly devastating detonation. It was what the giantess had done after Wulry and R’shai had taken her down.
That left their driver, Clund. The seal of Thamior was technically a homing beacon of some sort, but Thamior had no Representatives, which was one of many downsides to being a non-Tutelar god in a foreign planet. He was the equivalent of an ambassador. While acknowledged as a god by the local pantheon, he operated more like a Representative himself. Still, Aleem thought there was no harm in asking, and decided he would do so once the carriage came to a stop. No point halting their trip for what was very likely a long shot.
Bebson knew the terrain of the region best, and Serend’s vision had shown her the exact layout of Salgad. The surrounding region, as she described it, was a river valley. Only slightly hummocky with nearly no tree coverage. As a predominantly fishing village, they would be reasonably self-sufficient. Closed off. Aleem felt sick to his stomach.
He didn’t think he could mentally prepare himself for Salgad anymore than he already had. While he’d never witnessed Daranirajido’s emanation ritual in the game, there’d been several others interspersed across the various play-throughs, and they’d all borne one very gruesome similarity: large amounts of human sacrifice. A thoroughly vile convention that held true across several such rituals. He’d only just seen his first dead bodies two nights ago, when Wulry and Hetti had killed those Vriorians.
He had no doubt that the former residents of Salgad would fall to ritual killings, if they hadn’t already been slaughtered when the Daibon cult took over their village. In the game, the sites where incarnations occurred, were repulsively macabre, and quite often sanitary measures were thrown out the window. No matter how bad the tellings of inhumane killings looked on a screen, Aleem had no doubt that it would be outdone by actually experiencing it real time.
After several hours of tedious concocting, the stale morning air had grown hotter. Aleem had gotten his water-skin refilled from a keg Wulry provided.
When the horses came to a stop, they took a break from their deliberations. Wulry went out to attend to the horses. The beasts had eaten before dawn and were scheduled to have another meal by midday.
He and a few others briefly disembarked to stretch their legs. Aleem cupped his brow to shield it from the painfully exuberant sunlight. There was an uncomfortably warm breeze bending the low grass of the terrain this way and that. Swarded outcroppings littered the landscape, and far up ahead of their coursed path, the horizon was lined with sharp mountain ranges.
After some minutes of stretching his joints, Aleem walked over to the horses. They hadn’t been unhitched this time. A bale of hay along with a bucket of water lay on the weedy ground by the outer edge of either horse. Everything from mane to hooves were dyed the same colour, be it green or orange.
They were pretty. Pretty scary. He’d read this article one time of a man who’d gotten an amputation after a horse had bitten and crushed his finger. The large animals fed quietly, and Aleem carefully made sure to give them a wide berth as he approached Clund who still sat on the box seat of the wagon’s lip. The Barveyan man was watching the creatures thoughtfully. The calm expression on his face soured a little when he saw Aleem approaching him.
“Hello, Clund. How has—”
“What bhurou boy want?” the man roughly cut him off.
Right to it then. “I wanted to ask about your patron god,” Aleem said. “Thamior?”
The man eyed him with annoyed suspicion but didn’t say anything.
“Do you have a way of…” Actually this plan sounded a lot better in his head, “contacting him? Or maybe just entreating? I need to—”
“Not understand,” the man cut in, shaking his head.
Aleem frowned. “You don’t—”
“No. No connection. Not understand. Nothing.”
“What I meant was—“
“I say ‘no’,” the man insisted. He swept a hand to the side. “Now scat, bhurou. Scat!”
At his words, the orange coated horse, which stood closest to Aleem, swished its tail, causing him to flinch backwards and almost fall on his ass. God, he hated animals.
That went well. He sighed.
Everyone else had, so he returned to the wagon, where Wulry was handing out leaf wrappings of roasted crickets, unsurprisingly, and nuts. All that talk and contemplation of death had left Aleem without an appetite, so he politely declined. And to be honest, in his former life, every time he’d eaten an insect it’d been purely accidental, and he very much preferred to keep it that way.
Bebson muttered something, running smoothly through a sequence of hand gestures. Then he flapped his fingers. A blueish, yellowish crest of small flames sprang to life upon his hands, which he dry washed with hurried movements. The flames seemed to be avoiding his spell-foci, circumventing them completely.
Aleem looked on with wonder. That was a fairly involved cantrip, not quite at the complexity of a spell. In the game, he’d seen the odd NPC or two use it before meals or during some form of field surgery.
Wulry sneered good-naturedly at his friend and retrieved a small vial, which in turn earned him a disgusted gurn from Bebson. He waited for Bebson to put out the flames before unstopping the vial. When he did, Aleem was inundated with a pungent, almost sickly sweet smell faintly reminiscent of … rubbing alcohol? While rather overwhelming, it did dampen the miasma of body odours in the wagon. Wulry dribbled some of the liquid on his hands and rubbed them together, then he passed along the vial to R’shai.
Aleem was barely paying attention to any of that, his mind ran over the hand gestures he’d just seen Bebson execute. They were not unfamiliar to him, and seeing someone else execute them made him even more confident. He slowly moved his fingers in the sequence.
Bebson caught on immediately, eyes widening. “Wait! Stop! What do you think you’re doing?”
Aleem froze, holding his thumbs and index fingers in an OK gesture, other eight fingers interlaced. “Trying to … to cast the cantrip you just did.”
Bebson gave him an incredulous look. “You want to conjure flames in an enclosed space that has just been exposed to a highly flammable substance?”
“Have you never heard of invisible fires?” R’shai asked Aleem, as she corked the vial and tossed it to Hetti.
“Invisible fires,”Aleem muttered, brows creased. Where had he heard that before?
Bebson peered at Aleem’s finger, he looked as though he was only just seeing the set of foci there. He turned to glare at Wulry. “You gave him a focus? Are you out of your mind?”
Wulry shoved some crickets into his mouth, shrugging. “He’s a responsible lad.”
“Who was just seconds away from setting us and this entire vehicle on fire,” Bebson said.
“What’s an invisible fire?” Serend asked as Hetti grudgingly dribbled some of the distilled liquid on her blind companion’s outstretched hands.
R’shai spoke around a mouthful. “It’s what happens when you light uncontrolled fires around that volatile liquid.”
“Which, by the way,” Bebson said with visible distaste, “is really bad for the skin and lungs.”
Aleem blinked. Actually, come to think, he’d heard some horror stories about methanol’s transparent flames back in his old life. Once ignited, methanol emitted a blue flame in the dark, which was functionally invisible in daylight. He’d never actually smelled methanol before though, so it hadn’t exactly occurred to him what this might be.
Bebson gestured at the vial in Hetti’s hands. “Wood distillate is made by the destructive refining of, well, wood; very dangerous substance, that. It’s a lot cheaper than grain distillate, so you see it used in these products sometimes.” He cast a glare at Wulry once more. “You should know better.”
“I have no idea all what you just said,” Wulry told the man. “Grain, wood, whatever. It’s all the same.”
Hetti glanced at the vial uncertainly before tossing it back to Wulry, who simply used his Grommet to make it disappear in the air. “Aren’t you supposed to be rich?” she scolded. “Why not just buy the safer grainy ones like Beb says, even if they’re more expensive?”
“What can I say, hm? I’m a miser, alright? Besides, I’ve been using the stuff for years and nothing bad has happened so far.”
Bebson shook his head and dug into his snack, eyeing Aleem askance. “So you know how to cast cantrips, boy?”
“A few,” Aleem admitted. Hadn’t the man seen his bungled version of ‘Self Lantern’ yesterday?
“You were meditating,” Hetti told Bebson. “You didn’t see him cast that evil finger-light thing yesterday. He must’ve done so twice or thrice while he was reading. Seemed to know what his way around it, though.”
She’d seen that? If memory served, she’d been asleep.
Bebson’s expression grew even more curious. “I’d ask you to show me what you’re capable of, but we’d best wait till we’re in a less … flammable environment.”
They were travelling through a large open area of grassland; Aleem suspected that anything resembling a less flammable environment would have to be nothing short of a pond.
“When we stop for a rest tonight then?” Aleem asked.
Beb nodded. “Sure.” He took a pull from his water-skin. “I could give you a few pointers, if you want.”
“I’d like that,” Aleem said with a grateful nod.
Bebson had the [Factotum] Class, which was very rare but quite often looked down on because it went with a generalist build. The Class allowed him to acquire middling proficiency in various schools of magic and, to a lesser extent, non-magical disciplines. In ‘Tales of Woe’, Bebson never did manage to pass the second bottle neck of third Elevation, but he remained a faithful friend and companion of Wulry’s till the bitter end, providing a vast array of versatile support and assistance. The biggest drawback of the [Factotum] Class was its unsuitability for acquiring expertise. There was a constant demand placed on the Class holder to keep on widening their repertoire. It was a tall order, and at some point most powerful generalists branched out laterally so they could specialise. Unlike most upward forms of Class evolution, Generalist Classes evolved sideways, after which upwards growth or further evolution could ensue. For this reason they were often referred to as dead-end Classes.
In all honesty, Aleem saw the allure of taking on a generalist build; it really just depended on what exactly that Class fundamentally did. Yamagita, one of the only player characters in the game with such a build, had held a [Polyhistor] Class, which allowed her to gain high expertise in numerous disciplines. It was just so terribly broken that the newest generation of Tutelars had pressured her into swapping it out for something else. She was the oldest player character in the game, and while not arguably the strongest, she was far more Skilled than any of the others.
Aleem had yet to give any personal thought to the issue of Class choice. He simply hadn’t felt the need to think that far ahead when his life was on the line. He didn’t mind having a mage-type generalist build; pronounced variety accompanied with the ability to cast as many spells as he liked—it appealed to him. He couldn’t remember where he’d heard someone say something along the lines of ‘love in close proximity, fight from a distance’.
And it was a good thing that his Agility stat was quite high. Tactical withdrawal, in Aleem’s opinion, was such an underrated Skill. He promised himself that he would give more thought to what exactly it was that he wanted, if he somehow managed to live through this ordeal. When, he gently reminded himself. When he somehow managed to survive. He’d be lying if he said that he knew how he would survive, but he was going to try his damnedest to make sure he did.