I wake up and there is a considerable amount of shouting. Initially I thought it was screaming but it was too regular for that. I sit up and blink; the room is laced with fog along the floor, but above the fog is some bright light. Well bright for just waking up. A hand leans down to get me up, and I accept. Said hand does not let me go and drags me off. “Our newly woken unit is Mr. Walker, congratulate him on his poor life choices.”
I decide to yuk it up, and say “Thank you, thank you very much.”
“Why is he so grateful?” someone I do not recognize asks.
“Well If I wasn’t grateful for the gift I would have to return the said gift. Am I allowed to return my poor life choices?” The irreverent local adventurers laugh at my comment.
“Would you return your choices?” asks Antonio.
“No, they are my precious.” I do the last bit as a bit of an impression.
“Let’s get back on track everyone.” We all go quiet at the Local leader of the paladins proclamation. Said paladin then continues, “So the Angels finished their question and have begun pulling out of the local world. Without their energies the entire space will collapse and shatter, and make us easier picking for the monsters. We will face more monsters together but the maximum difficulty of any given monster will be the same. From the top who can make a go at being a lord.”
I raise my hand and get ushered to the front, the dragon slayer is also up with them, along with a couple of farmers. We all get a once over by an insecure twerp who wants to make sure he doesn't have any real competition. “Give the black armored Nem the most difficult of the positions to secure, as he already has some walls set up in his essence.”
The leader of the paladin inspects me and then looks back at the prick, then sighs. Antonio speaks up to defend me, “You know he’s causing trouble, why do you not intervene?”
I however shut him down, “Someone has to draw the marked straw.”
The head paladin looks at me before getting back to the task at hand, “The main objective will be defense, with that piece of anchorite being the object being defended.”
I look at the anchorite and realize that was the one I created for my dungeon, albeit upside down to obfuscate the resemblance. I disconnect from it to designate it as no longer mine. I then refocus on the paladin as Timothy notices what I did. Then the Dragon slayer walks up to me and says, “Swear yourself into my service.”
“We have not yet made an agreement, dragon slayer, so unless we are going to come to such an agreement, why don’t we leave the paladins to run things for now.” The slayer is incensed and gets immobilized by one of the head paladin’s skills.
The head paladin walks over and says, “stand down, that was an access removal, which strengthens your claim.”
The slayer calms and is dragged over, still bound, to where he can be monitored not to cause any more trouble. The head paladin turns back to address the group; “most of the other places were places before, and therefore are going back to their state pre-intervention. If you are here it is because you are either looking for a better future or were exiled. We are all going to assume that you are looking for a better future and therefore will not ask about if you were exiled instead. You can offer it if you want others to know if you trust them. Next is the resources, if you remove a problem you get priority on its resources, though if we collectively need it we have to buy it from you.”
“Wait, how am I to become as wealthy as the other lords then?” The dragon slayer misses the memo.
One of the knights grumbles, “then slay more dragons you twat.”
The head paladin glares at the two of them, before they both go quiet. “Now with the dragon gone we are heading into an area with undead monsters as the primary antagonist. This means that barring pack acquisition, we will not get any living resources. Now with our pair of farmers creating food, you will have to trade what you earn for that food. Ragnar here has graciously made available his ten lord levels and two spatial affinity to amplify the area our farmers have to work with, in trade for most of the increased wealth going into the governing charter. The first order of business is whether or not Lord Ragnar O'Neill and Lord Jack Walker can come to an arrangement. If they can then Lord Walker will set up and regulate a dungeon inside our encampment and if not then the dungeon will be placed outside of Lord O’Neill’s realm.“
“So Ragnar, how are we going to handle void resistance?” I ask him, “Or selecting targets for counteroffensive measures.”
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“Outside.” The head paladin looks between us, so I shrug at Ragnar’s comment. Everyone else is at wits end between the two major lords, and the head paladin sighs. Then Ragnar decides to one up themselves with a, “There is the exit,” which flabbergasts the head paladin.
Being one of those days, I just walk over to leave. Before I go, I ask, “Anyone want to come with me?”
“Can either of you be reasonable?” asks the head paladin as I focus my void resistance for void immersion.
“Cat got your tongue?” antagonizes Ragnar as I breach into the void.
I start using my aura to push out a new space. Timothy apologizes, “I cannot risk joining you, I’m sorry.”
Something tinks against my armor, and I look around to see Caseana trying to backstab me. I respond by commenting, “Ragnar, Caseana here is an elf, use an aura on him to help him behave.”
Ragnar does and thereby buffs Caseana with a fragment of his might, which emboldens Caseana, into attacking me again. By this point my defenses are up and his shadow based attacking style which was already struggling against a combination of my shadow affinity and my armor. My assailant switches to a more standard element muttering, “Colic will reward me when I rescue her from this brute.”
“Are you quite done?” I then drop a shadowlance into his chest.
There is an oh shit moment by Caseana as he forgot to start up his defenses as well, though any attack auto triggers it, but allows for surprise bonus damage as a punishment for being inattentive. As my attack didn’t have any of that it would have been better to shoot him as part of the opener, though it only takes up one of his three shields. And it is compounded by a tier advantage he had on me, which meant his attacks are really impotent for his tier two status. “I take half damage from magic and I have a tier advantage, how did you just force me to stick a four damage tick into my shields.”
While I could break his shields with my remaining mana I don’t have enough to make a habit of such tactics, so I just summon my knife and probe him with a stab. I miss and he staggers backwards; I can have the time to move the artificial slide and check my combat logs for his armor, which I discover only works against physical damage. As such every time with the slide I set the element to time as I intend to use it to frustrate his attack windup. Emptying the internal reservoir of my plinker into him I get my first bit of damage though the shields; I start hearing the thumping of paladins against the barrier Ragnar erected to give Caseana the greatest possible chance to assassinate me.
The other thing the damage reveals is that Caseana has no innate healing to speak of, all of his recovery is being pushed into mana production. He might have realized that as he fires his channeled spell early to set up a barrier of his own. His barrier is revealed to be not using his full tier and buckles rapidly in only a reload of my plinker. It did however work for him as it did manage to charge up enough to disable my second shield. It also cost a good chunk of his stamina, so I just advanced on an opponent intending to tire them out. Well I say advance but as I’m in a circular arena I move to the far side from my exit and switch to spate affinity from time affinity to knock him into my realms damage field.
After a couple of rounds of this Caseana, lowered to twenty health, draws a melee weapon and charges at me. As he is no longer casting spells there is no reason for me to switch back to time to deal with his abilities, so I keep up the pressure while my opponent flails wildly. It takes four sets of firing to get hit to change tactics as he’s incredibly resistant to the damage my current element deals. He moves to set up the barrier again and this time I step inside his personal space. I switch back to time as I probe his defenses with my knife, to give me an opportunity to load time affinity to escape if I need to. Also to both of our surprise my knife deals part of its damage as magic. That ends his wind behind the barrier, before it really starts doing anything.
I do end up breaking my way out of the barrier as I’d rather not be in striking range. I deal three heal of damage for three of my shields. His damage in melee is worse than his magic damage, but he is a lot more consistent with it. He utilizes my backstep to charge up a magical attack, but I respond by firing more shots and my second spell at him. He catches the second spell in his shields, forcing him to release the one of the time spells previously held in his shields. That caused his charge spell to explode and zeroed out his mana pool and took almost half of his initial health. My other spells combined with the effect to leave him on a sliver of health left. With only his haggard stamina left, the elf charges into my knife.
I extract his bonus health and bind the bonuses for my other elves, then summarily drop his card, as I don’t want it. I walk over the waste I just dropped to my realm which has almost finished assembling itself. The barrier shifts and Caseana is healed by the paladins from the drubbing he received. “Give back my health.”
“I’ve bound it in, so now Colic has it,” I pause before summoning a couple of gold coins, “I know this is self serving but, as an apology, here.”
“You are just leaving alone like that?” asks Caseana.
“It’s not that I can handle it, because I’m going to rely on my shadow affinity to hide myself. But If I cannot cooperate with rags then it wasn’t meant to be. Last call before I leave.”
Ragnar spits out, “Burn in hell.”
“Been there, done that, have dedicated flame resistance to prove it.” I pause before continuing, “Good luck without your backup lord.”
And with that I use my void ejection skill to disconnect myself from Ragnar’s realm. I can use my aura sight to see Ragnar’s spirit arguing with the head paladin’s spirit. I can also see some of the local monster lords take notice. I do my best to make a good pace while a pack of undead wolves is the first to arrive at Ragnar’s doorstep. I leave their range before the undead vanguard arrive leaving their fate to be unknown by me.