Dylan returned to an empty house. His father had already told him that, other than Risha, it was his squad’s turn to guard the wall at night.
After walking through the door, he found dinner, a note, and a small pile of equipment waiting for him on the simple wooden table.
With the hint of smile, Dylan sat down and began to eat while reading.
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It’s not perfect, but I managed to scrounge up some gear for you to use tomorrow. In addition to the standard stuff, I found a couple mana-enhanced pieces. You’ve got my old belt and your mom’s pendant. There’s not much tier one stuff available around town right now, so they’ll have to make do.
I also traded for a mana potion. The quality’s not great, but it’s better than nothing.
If you need anything tomorrow, talk to Wilcroft. Like me, you kids will probably be assigned somewhere on the west side of town, and his group’s been handling logistics there.
Hensly’s still sitting in the east while we finish reinforcing the newly repaired sections of the wall.
Anyway, we might not get a chance to talk before you head out in the morning, so I just want to tell you to take care of yourself. Make sure you get plenty of rest and try not to worry too much about tomorrow. Every veteran assigned to watch over you guys while you adjust is at about Risha’s level, so we’ve got you covered.
~Dad
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Dylan looked at the rest of the table and sitting next to a longsword, a mana gauntlet, and the leather armor he’d worn in the Tutorial, he found what his father had mentioned in the note. A well-used leather belt, a delicately carved flower pendant on a silver chain, and a vial of blue liquid.
Examine, he thought, picking up the belt first.
[Leather Belt, Tier 1]
[Resilience: +7]
[Physical Power: +2]
He repeated the process with the pendant.
[Pendant, Tier 1]
[Magic Power: +4]
[Mana: +5]
[Mana Regeneration: +0.02/minute]
Finally, he turned to the potion. Before he inspected its effect, he uncapped the vial to get a better look. The pale-blue liquid was cloudy and viscous.
Dad wasn’t kidding about its quality. Dylan sighed. Although it wasn’t an absolute rule, high quality potions tended to have bright, clear colors and a consistency similar to water. He’d read that stronger potions could even react with the mana around them once unsealed, but the one in his hand was clearly not at that level.
Dylan recapped the vial and examined it.
[Weak Mana Potion, Tier 1]
[Restores 17 Mana]
With a slight shake of his head, he tucked the potion into a strap on the belt specifically designed to carry similar vials.
“Be grateful for what you can get,” Dylan whispered to himself.
He finished eating and then cleared half of the table to make room for his catalog. It was time to finalize the deck he was planning on using the next day.
His eyes scanned across his entire collection, before coming back to pause on the Blank Cards.
Over the past few days, he’d managed to determine that the daily reset for his ability to make a new Blank Card was a few minutes after three in the morning. The unusual timing led him to believe that the cycle was bound to the world rather than to himself. The exact hour and minute would most likely change as he traveled across time zones, but the time between each reset would remain the same.
The only questions Dylan had left were about what would happen if he traveled outside his own world. It was something he’d need to do if he joined the Boon War Chester had mentioned. Would the reset time remain consistent or would it change to match the daily cycle of the new space he found himself in?
Doesn’t matter right now.
Next, his gaze stopped on a card that had been left to languish in his catalog since he’d received it. Duplicate Card.
He had a lot of thoughts about how to use it, and a lot of thoughts about why he shouldn’t. He’d already created a list of potential candidates to copy. Along with a few others, Lunadera’s Bloom, Lizard Ravager, Phantom Rally, and even DESTROY were all in consideration. But without knowing how often he’d be able to get more Duplicate Cards, he was hesitant to actually take the one he had out and activate it.
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Some of the cards in his collection were inherently more valuable than others. While some of those he could reproduce on his own, some were either given by the System or had come about in such a unique way that it would impossible for him to replicate.
If he was confident in his ability to gather more Duplicate Cards, he’d have no concerns about using the one he had to enhance his immediate strength, but if his single copy was all he would ever get, he wanted to save it for the future.
All of his thoughts came together to create a sense of decision paralysis, and after hesitating, Dylan ultimately left the card alone.
I’ll ask Dad for advice when I get a chance.
He shook his head and stopped wasting time; he began sorting out the cards that he’d need to support his deck. Basic Energy. Intermediate Energy. Mana Surge.
When he reached Lunadera’s Bloom, he cursed under his breath. He’d intended to do a few more tests with the card with Risha to see how effective its ability to negate mental debuffs was when used across tiers, but he’d forgotten about it when working with his newer cards.
“Later,” he muttered and continued to work.
He paused again after another few minutes, looking over to a window by the door. The familiar, distant sounds of battle had just started, stretching into the house from across the town. The noise didn’t set him on edge in the same way it had when he’d just returned, but it was still slightly unnerving.
He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. “They’ve got this,” he reassured himself. “Just like every other night, they’ve got this.”
When he opened his eyes again, he refocused on the task in front of him, and it wasn’t long before he had the basic framework of his deck.
Next, he had to pick and choose from the rest of his collection to fill out the required forty cards.
He began by excluding a few that he knew wouldn’t work.
One of the first he set aside was Wisps of Knowledge. He was really starting to like the card and had a lot of fun working with it, but before he could make a dedicated deck to support the way it functioned, he couldn’t justify including it.
One day, he thought.
After the easy cuts, he began taking longer to deliberate, and when he came to the welf cards he couldn’t decide for a few minutes.
Having the ability to summon more creatures without a turn limit would be useful, but Dylan was concerned about two things.
The first was the ballooning cost of his cards. The increases he’d seen in his mana and mana regen could help him cover the deck’s summoning cost, but the activation costs of each card were different matter. He hadn’t thought of a good way to make more Intermediate Energy cards yet, and even if he decided to use the Blank Cards he’d made in the last couple of days to make more copies of Basic Energy, including too many cards that required more than two energy to play would start to be troublesome.
All three welf cards were expensive. The cheapest, Intermediate Welf, still offered a decent amount of performance for the price, but Dylan felt the other two were less efficient.
Especially when compared to something like the ravager.
When taking his second worry into consideration, he put the Mature Welf and the Young Welves cards aside.
The risk’s not worth the price.
The welves he could summon were largely indistinguishable from the real thing. Using the cards in the midst of a fight where welves were the primary enemy could potentially cause problems. It would be easy enough for someone to mistake the creatures as real monsters and try to kill them, wasting both Dylan’s limited resources and his ally’s efforts.
Even if he let the people around him know what was going on, the situation on the battlefield could change at any moment; other defenders could be swept up in the fray and inadvertently kill his welves. It wouldn’t be practical, or even possible, to give a running update of everything he summoned to every single person on the wall, and for the smaller number of people he could tell, keeping track of the monsters they weren’t supposed to kill in a mass of nearly identical beasts was an added burden that Dylan didn’t want to impose.
It might be better to just avoid the potential trouble. Dylan played with the Intermediate Welf card, flipping it back and forth between his fingers. But now I’m wondering, just how similar to the real monsters are my cards? They look the same to me, but are there differences that I just haven’t noticed? Will the real welves be able to sense something off, or will they think mine are also their kind…
A continuous series of flashing lights and rumbling explosions jolted Dylan from his thoughts.
He scrambled from his chair and rushed to the nearest window. Tendrils of fire covered the sky above the entire eastern half of town, creeping along like forks of sluggish lightning. Wherever they passed, Dylan thought he could make out dark shapes falling from the canopy of flames.
Are those…monsters? Pulling himself from his shock, Dylan closed his eyes to regain what night vision he could and turned to look toward the other side of town. It seemed calm. The rumbling in the sky began to fade
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he whispered. But there was a pit beginning to fester in his stomach. “It could have just been an attack from the east.” Wrong. “Hensly took care of it.” He wouldn’t have made such a big move if things weren’t serious.
With a fluttering heart and trembling hands, Dylan found himself back at the table, reaching for the equipment his father had left behind. He’d didn’t remember moving, but after regaining conscious control of his actions, he didn’t stop.
His father’s belt wrapped his waist, spreading a reassuring sense of strength and stability through his body. Tucked beneath his shirt, his mother’s pendant clung to his chest; the small, subtle hum of mana and the cool metal against his skin helped calm his mind.
“This is just a precaution.” His voice quavered while he donned the battered leather armor that had accompanied him through the Tutorial, strapping his sword to his left hip.
Finally, after unsummoning the card catalog, he reached for the mana gauntlet. He wore the weapon on his right hand and adjusted it as he walked back the window.
Most of the flames were gone; all that remained was a steady glow coming from where Dylan assumed Hensly must be.
He’s probably reabsorbing what energy he can. Even if he’s high tier three, that must have taken a lot out of him.
His eyes swept across the rest of the sky, and Dylan noticed flickers of light from multiple kinds of projectiles reaching up from the wall. No, he thought, not just the wall. Some of those are coming from inside the town.
Blood thumped in his ears, momentarily warring with the distant sounds of combat, but after regulating his breathing, he managed to slowly calm his racing heart.
When his gaze traveled the furthest west that the window would allow him to see, he frowned. There were more signs of fighting within the town that way than in any other direction, but the wall behind was silent.
“Dad,” he whispered.