Chapter 23 – Where’s The Big One
Luckily it didn’t take long before the rest of the squad came back, so Sam and the others could take a break. Immediately both Sam and Erik let themselves fall down, their energy spent.
Soon after the others took over, Trainer Quincy came back to the wall.
“Where is Don? And why do the four of you look like you’re still exhausted?”
“Don left the moment you attacked the undead. Sam, Jasper, Erik and Zach held the wall while the rest of us rested to regain our stamina.”
“That man is going to be in so much trouble.” The trainer’s face clouded over when he heard the explanation from the squad. “Too bad that I don’t have an officers rank anymore, I’d have him clean latrines by hand for a year. Unfortunately for him, a centurion put me in charge, and he disobeyed his orders. For now though, we need to hold our position. The four of you, take a break. I’ll support the rest of you, so take your positions.”
Immediately the eight other members of the squad took up positions facing the undead. While they had been chatting, the hordes had already reached the wall again. The few who did climb to the top had been taken care of by the trainer without them even seeing it.
Meanwhile Sam and Erik had gained enough stamina back to move out of the way, and Jasper had already left to gather more arrows.
Now that they really had a break, it was time for them to update their status.
Status update: Level up x2!
Status update: Reset Class
Status update: Level up 9x!
Status Update: New Achievement
Against all odds: You’ve prevailed against enemies that are stronger and more numerous than you and your party.
Now that could actually look at her status, what she saw was tremendous progress. She had gained eleven levels in total, and she was only one level from having to reset her class once again. Without doubt, she had lost a lot of experience during the first part of the fight, as she had been level eight when it started. Had she been paying attention to her level up notifications, she could have reset her class during that first part instead of at the beginning of the second part. Still, eleven levels was quite a lot, so she immediately distributed her free statpoints, with most of them going towards her physical stats.
Name: Samantha ‘Sam’ Bello
Age: 24
Statpoints: 0
Pending skills: 0
Class: Legionary recruit level 9
Skill: Shields level 10
Skill: Short Swords level 12
Skill: Discipline level 5
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Skill: Practice makes perfect level 6
Skill: Physical training level 5
General Skills:
Language - level 1
Identify - level 2
Running - level 3
Knife – level 4
Grab - level 1
Slash - level 15
Stab - level 12
Acrobatics – level 4
Special Skills:
War Machine - lvl 1
Weapon Specialist - lvl 1
Natural Fighter - lvl 1
Status:
Str: 15 Int: 11
Agi: 15 Wis: 11
Vit: 15 Cha: 5
End: 15 Luc: 10
Health: 145/150
Stamina: 20/150
Mana: 70/110
Titles:
World traveler
Achievements:
First kill
Run before you walk
Dungeoneer
Salty
Against all odds
All in all her status page was starting to look pretty decent. One thing did bother her though.
“Erik, do you have achievements?”
“Yes, of course I do. Everyone has them, most of the times a lot of them. It’s almost impossible to grow up without having almost a dozen or so of them.”
“Right, well I didn’t grow up here, and I just gained my fifth one. Are they even useful? Or can I just will them out of my status page? I don’t want to have stuff cluttering it up when it isn’t useful.”
“You didn’t.. Right, I knew that. Achievements are pretty useful, but you could cross them off of you page. But you did activate them right?”
“Uh, they do what now? My title shows a bonus, but the achievements don’t.”
Erik lets himself fall down again to look at the sky.
“You’re telling me that you haven’t used one of your achievements, and you even have a title? You didn’t activate that one either, didn’t you?”
“Activate them? No, they’re just there on my page.”
“Oh boy, now I get why you seem to have less statpoints than the rest of us. Someone really needs to start teaching you everything that’s taught to children, but it won’t be me. For now, it’s enough to know that you need to activate just about everything you earn. You know about the skills and statpoints, but pretty much the same thing works with achievements and titles. Achievements are something that are pretty easy to gain during your life. You got one when you entered the dungeon for example, right? They all give different bonuses. The ones that we gained as children are mostly easy stuff. They give only a few statpoints, but they do add up. When you get some better ones, they can give you pretty much everything, from statpoints to even skills.”
“So using them would give me a big boost in my fighting skills. I need to activate them immediately!”
“Don’t rush too much. They take a day to activate. You should activate them now though, but don’t expect the bonus until tomorrow around this time.”
Immediately Sam willed all her achievements and her title to activate. She did feel kinda stupid that she didn’t know this, but no one had mentioned it, so how could she?
Soon they had regained enough stamina, and Jasper had gotten his arrows. Thus they joined the others on top of the wall. This time though, Sam had gotten Erik to share how to have her status give her a notification the moment she leveled to level ten. With only one level to go, it shouldn’t take that long before she had to reset her class once more.
The fight on top of the wall wasn’t as desperate as the last time, due to Trainer Quincy stepping in here and there. With the four of them back to reinforce the rest of their squad though, he stepped back a bit to let them gain more experience.
After an hour of fighting, the senior centurion came to their spot on the wall.
“You people have done well holding back these weaklings. Trainer, have you seen any of the bigger undead? I did notice that you went into the horde for a bit.”
“No centurion, I haven’t seen any elites.”
“Right, how about your squad? Or that guide you have?”
“These recruits wouldn’t be able to kill any of the elites. Our guide left the moment I took my eye off of him, so he hasn’t fought any either.”
“He did what now? Never mind, I have no time for idiots who can’t follow orders. I’ll deal with him when this is over. You do know what this means don’t you? With you being a retired centurion.”
“Forced retirement maybe, but yes I do. It means that there might be a legendary undead being spawned sooner than expected. It’s only been nine years since the last one.”
“That’s our thinking. Luckily it also means that we have time to shore up our defenses. Therefore you and your squad will leave immediately for Veritas. I’ve written both a message and a recommendation for you. Bring it to your legate as soon as you can. Don’t stop at the backup century nor at Honor, as I’m not all that sure about some of the leadership of this legion anymore. I don’t want a repeat from nine years ago, so I want your legion here to help out.”
Somehow Trainer Quincy perked up a little about this for some reason. Immediately he ordered the squad to retreat from the wall, while he and the centurion took over. Soon after that the legionaries took over and the hole in the defenses had been taken care of. The wall was still under a lot of pressure, but with double the normal amount of soldiers they didn’t have that much trouble with it.
Satisfied that the undead wouldn’t overrun the wall anytime soon, Trainer Quincy ordered them to march back to Veritas.