Every strike must be filled with the deadly intent of damaging your opponent. Your attacks your defense, your defense your attack. You must be the discord in your opponent’s sword song.
- The Living Sword by Fen Vaigorus circa 520 AC.
We flowed with the tide of the cloth city, distancing ourselves from the scene of the crime, my mind understanding what I had just done and my steps growing lighter. My senses soon picked up on another rumbling, as my eyes laid upon a large gathering of people, the sounds and howls of combat familiar to my ear. Kidu and I made our way toward the origin of the sound.
A crowd of people surrounded a large primitive fighting pit dug into the ground with crude wooden walls around its perimeter. Its floor was lined with white coarse sand the color of bleached bone with rough benches and boxes to hold the spectators. The fervor of the crowd swelled like a living, breathing beast, its very pulse stirring the air with a palpable ferocity. The place was bereft of the scale and thin veneer of civilization and pomp of the place where I had made my first kill. This sordid arena was just a place to satiate man’s bestial base desires.
Two men, clad in archaic-looking armor and weapons resembling the Greek hoplites of antiquity, were fighting to the raucous cheers of the crowd. Money was constantly changing hands, as people looked to make their fortune on the next clash of steel.
I asked Kidu to clear us a way to the edge of the pit so that we might observe the fight more closely. His bulk parted the crowd like a leviathan of the deep cutting through a school of lesser fish, and I followed closely in his wake until we reached a good vantage point.
A man with a spear and shield was facing off against a man equipped with two straight swords of differing lengths. They seemed evenly matched in terms of speed and skill, but the sword wielder appeared to be tiring. The spearman was willing to accept the brunt of his attacks, keeping his distance and baiting the swordsman with his spear’s longer reach.
The two fighters disengaged from each other, and I took that moment to quickly cast Identify on both. The magic came to me easily, but for the first time more slowly, as if the energy was flowing through a resistor. I surmised that my slower casting may have something to do with my new thick armor.
Arvan Azzarik - Gladiator (Human lvl.13)
Health: 191/191
Stamina: 24/39
Mana: 9/9
Gaven Tolaris - Gladiator (Human lvl.15)
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Health: 187/187
Stamina: 12/38
Mana: 7/7
The two fighters were, unsurprisingly, Gladiators. The casting confirmed what I had previously observed without the aid of my spell; they were closely matched in ability. However, the spearman Arvan, having more Mana than the swordsman Gaven, seemed to be the ‘smarter’ fighter. His wily tactic of baiting his opponent into making ineffectual attacks was slowly draining away the Stamina of his enemy.
Suddenly, the swordsman engaged in one last desperate gamble. He seemed to split into two identical images, as he began his new assault against the spearman. Gaven’s blade became a whirlwind of steel, crashing against the spearman Arvan’s guard in a lightning tempest of blows. In turn, Arvan’s shield became a blur of motion, intercepting all of the savage blows. The display appeared to be as if born from magic, well beyond the scope of normal martial prowess.
Why isn’t he shouting the skill?” I whispered to my companion, remembering my own fight with Jongshoi.
Looming over me, Kidu had to hunch, his armor restricting him slightly and forcing him to bend at the knees, as he half-shouted in my ear over the roar of the gathered crowd. “Only those who have just started down the path martial do so as a way of learning the weapon forms. Once one becomes adept, it is as instinctive as breathing,” he finished, nodding to me slightly.
I realized now the distinct advantage I had gained by having progressed along both the magical and martial paths. The gamer inside me concluded that I had created a synergy of sorts; I could use Power Strike with Silent Cast to mimic the effect of a higher Skill proficiency. This also meant that the two fighters in front of me, as well as my companions, were, at the very least, adept fighters in skill.
The fight would be decided soon. The swordsman was exhausted after his last roll of the dice, drawing great gasping breaths, his twin swords lowered in exhaustion. The spearman led with his shield first, bashing through his opponent’s guard and finishing with a serpent’s spear at Gaven’s neck, forcing him to drop his weapons and yield. Half of the crowd went wild, and the others threw now worthless pieces of paper on the ground in disappointment.
The two fighters exchanged comradely handshakes, before leaving through iron portcullises at opposite ends of the fighting pit. Soon after, a woman just before her middle years, with auburn hair that seemed to glow in the afternoon sun, sashayed seductively across to the center of the pit.
She was clad in a clinging green dress that left little to the imagination as it accentuated the graceful lines of her magnificent figure, exuding a subtle feminine power with each step. A silk sash of deep crimson encircled a delicate waist that widened into full hips and gold bracelets, inlaid with precious stones, jangled at her wrists.
Between her generous bosom was a large, even more heavily jewel-encrusted, medallion, stylized in the design of the twin horns of an auroch. Skin, an ochre like the mellow-brown light that had bathed the forest, colored a still comely feminine face that spoke of a once unrivaled beauty in her youth. This beauty was juxtaposed by a jagged scar that ran across a now-blinded white orb of an eye. The woman’s good eye was a deep jade green, and an elegant patrician’s nose lay above a set of sensuous red lips that were arched in a knowing, seductive smile.
Raising both hands, she began to address the crowd with a ringing voice that echoed around the fighting pit, “People of Ansan, the next event is the match that you have all been waiting for! Today’s fight to the death! Wily human versus savage orc! Who will be victorious?” she paused as the crowd’s roars drowned out all sound. She allowed time for the crowd to quiet down, the silence eventually pervading the prolonged gaps before she resumed her introduction, “I give you the Bonegrinder of the Longfang tribe! He comes to Ansan, the jewel of the Grieving Lands, to win wealth and renown for his people. Many have fallen before his mighty blade, and he wishes to test his might against only the strong!”