Chapter 28: A Little Bit of Everything

[Furthermore, you may select one of the two options below.

1) Wrath and Ruin: As a Soldier, once per day, break the limits of your body to deliver a devastating blow. As a Merchant, you will know when someone is trying to cheat you.

2) Death and Taxes: As a Soldier, wounds you inflict cause rapid decay. As a Merchant, curses you inflict last twice as long.]

The choice was aggravating, because on the face of it, Wrath and Ruin was the obvious winner. Being able to focus my strength to punch above my weight could easily end a fight at my current level, assuming an opponent who didn’t outmatch me by too much. The second half of the ability would also prove its worth, with negotiations coming up with respect to the local criminal enterprise, the first of many undoubtedly. Yet despite the clear benefits, I hesitated to lock in my choice. The old Will would have done so without hesitation, but with the benefit of another life’s experience, I saw it for the trap that it was.

Given time, I could learn to break the limits of my body without taking a trait for it: the heroic sagas in the library all agreed on this point, propaganda though they may be. Eventually, combat experience would allow me to do it naturally, and the selection would be wasted. Likewise, with the second half? That was something easily accomplished, with a keen mind and an eye to detail. To take it would be to admit that I had no confidence in myself to negotiate on my own behalf, and that was just unacceptable. Meanwhile, Death and Taxes provided capabilities I was unlikely to learn naturally, poison being typically the domain of the Assassin and similar classes, while curses were more commonly associated with the Mage or Warlock.

Even if I couldn’t leverage these abilities fully, at present, the potential of a built-in, damage over time component in all of my blows? That alone held greater potential than Wrath and Ruin, and if I ever learned to cast a curse, the difference in power would only grow. With that in mind, the choice before me was obvious: Wrath and Ruin was the safe choice, augmenting what I could already do, while Death and Taxes was the risky bet, a wager on my ability to reach greater heights. Put in that context, my decision was obvious: I didn’t become a Soldier of Fortune to play it safe.

[Death and Taxes selected.]

I was very pleased with myself, having avoided falling back into old habits of caution. Less so, a second later, when I tripped over a furry bump in the night, and face planted into the dirt. Pumpkin, not content with that alone, added insult to injury by batting a paw against my face, until I pulled myself back up into a seated position. The reason why he did this became apparent as I stared at the building we’d reached: I’d let my mind wander, preoccupied with questions of levelling, and hadn’t even noticed we’d reached our destination.

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Supermarkets didn’t exist in Frontier, not in the modern sense, where vast shops contained wide varieties of foodstuffs and ingredients, often a dozen varieties or more of each major product. With transportation and preservation far more limited, because while ice and teleportation magic existed, they were far too rare to be wasted on wheels of cheese, stores were by necessity restricted in what they could offer. For a landlocked, rural town like Allensward, that meant the harvest from the fields nearby, supplemented by anything foraged or hunted in the forest, with only a very small proportion of food being imported from afar. The shopping format resembled more a farmer’s market, with stalls set out during the day, laden with produce ready for purchase by gilt or by barter, and locked away again in the evening.

[Padlock (locked) stored.]

Pulling the same trick as before, I popped another lock into my inventory, opening up the small building where goods were kept overnight, to prevent spoilage and loss due to bad weather or vermin. It was unguarded, somewhat surprisingly: even with the death penalty on offer, for those caught stealing from the stockpile, I’d have expected a more prudent approach to security. Still, I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, and so I began to move between crates of goods, feeling my way through the dark warehouse and helping myself to a little bit of everything.

[Items stored:

3x Loaf of bread

6x Apple

Strange looking rainbow fruit

Bag of oatmeal

Cheese wheel

Bucket of stagnant water.]

I paused, re-reading that last line, before dumping it back where I found it, because there was no way I was going to drink that. Magic was wonderful, but I had no desire to see how well it fared against the likes of E. coli.

[Bucket of stagnant water withdrawn.]

Pumpkin hadn’t been idle, either, as he darted around, taking advantage of his superior night vision to bring me some of the good stuff from further away.

[Items stored:

4x Chunk of Salt Pork

6x Orange

Lemon

12x Plums]

Before long, a varied assortment of food had made its way into my interdimensional pockets. I didn’t take too much, of course, instead practising the age-old tradition of skimming a little off the time, enough to feed the two of us without making it too obvious that larceny had taken place, when the shopkeeper arrived to sort the inventory in the morning. Most of what I’d found was normal enough, the sort of thing I wouldn’t have blinked an eye at, back in London. The salt pork was maybe a little old-fashioned, but still a viable export, and featured prominently for its longevity and ease of transport, at certain shops catering towards campers, athletes and preppers. There was one item of curiosity, however: a fruit in the hue of a rainbow, which I’d not have noticed without the System prompt, having grabbed it in near-darkness.

[Rainbow fruit withdrawn.]

“What in the world is this?” I muttered to myself, holding the fruit close for a better look at it.