Ch.31
I took 5th level in Monk the moment I woke up in the Dream.
I can’t lie, seeing indisputable evidence of monsters on Earth had freaked me out more than a little bit. Lycanthropes AND demons, in the real world? That’s the literal stuff of nightmares, but in the real world!
Before I’d woken up in front of the Hearthflame for the first time, I’d always thought of creatures like that as boogie men and cautionary tales, never anything more than fiction. Finding out they were real, and had always BEEN real?
The fact that the world had magic now, and that it had ALWAYS had magic?
Frankly, just the idea of it was terrifying!
Getting as strong as I could be as quickly as I could was the only thing that made any kind of sense! Who cares about milking every last drop of efficiency from the system in the face of THAT!?
Not me, that’s for damned sure. Other than Stat Masteries, which were too danged important to skip, and the prereqs for the Advanced Classes I wanted, the only thing I cared about from now on was LEVELS!
Primary levels, Secondary levels, and Advanced Class levels!
At least until I thought I could swim in this new, much LARGER body of water I suddenly found myself floating in! Man, talk about a frog in a well or a big fish in a small pond! Holy shit! And I was starting shit with them!?
I was scared and horrified at my own breathtaking naivety. I needed to get stronger, and I needed to get stronger ASAP!
Fifth level in Monk lets me qualify for the Adept of Pneuma Advanced Class. Adept’s only a five level Advanced class, so at 8th level Monk, I’ll be able to max it out then take a different Advanced Class. I’ll probably go with Awakened Initiator? Awakened Initiator is an Advanced Class that will boost all of my Soulblade stuff as well as my Combat Arts, so it’ll be great, too.
There were only a few Advanced Classes that did anything decent for the Monk class, unfortunately, and ended with people either only taking a few levels of Monk in L&L to get access to the nice early level bonuses out of Monk or focusing entirely on it, to the exclusion of all else... neither of those things led to a lot of strong contenders for Advanced Classes.
One of the few decent Monk-compatible Advanced Classes was the Psychic Fist, but it was easily weaker than either Awakened Initiator or the Dark Guardian Advanced Classes, so it was going to get stuck until after I’d maxed both of those Classes out, at 18th level! Even at that point I’m still not certain if it was the best option out of the other classes. I’d certainly do some research to figure out the answer, soon!
Hitting 5th as a Monk gave me +1 to my attack bonus, Purity of Body, which made me immune to all diseases, even magical ones. It gave me my first Style Strike, which was a special move only Monks could get that was usable once per round when I used Flurry of Blows, and I also got my 5th level Feat. It of course also gave me more hit points and Skill points, also.
For my Style Strike, I took Flying Kick. Flurry was a full round action, what Flying Kick did was let me move my Monk fast movement bonus distance, 10' for now, though it would be 20’ when I became a 6th level Monk, before any ONE of the attacks during the Flurry. It didn’t have to be the first one though!
At higher levels, 15th to be precise, I could even use two Style Strikes during a Flurry. It, along with Outslug Style, was going to make crushing groups of weaker opponents a joke with Improved Cleaving Finish... I was going to be able to smash small armies when I was done, whether or not I got access to Supreme Cleaving Finish or not!
For my Feat, I took Dragon Ferocity, the second tier of Dragon Style. Dragon Style allowed your unarmed Strikes to do an additional 1.5x your Strength Mod in damage for the first attack in a round, but Dragon Ferocity upgraded that to 2x your Strength Mod for the first attack and 1.5x for ALL other attacks!
Also, if you land a critical hit while using a Stunning Fist, the enemy was Shaken for 1d4 + Strength Mod rounds. Shaken is a Fear effect that gives –2 to hit, saves, skill checks, and ability checks.
For my purchased Feat, I took Critical Edge, a Feat that increases your critical chance by +1, but only after things like Keen and Improved Critical are applied.
For my Mastery, I took Steal Ki, from the Jiang-Shi Fist Monk Path.
Steal Ki - gain 1 Ki every time you reduce an opponent to 0 HP or every time you confirm a critical hit, as long as you have at least 1 Qi left in your Qi pool.
Now you can see why I took Critical Edge now, huh? Unfortunately, my biggest problem NOW was that I didn’t have enough things to spend Ki on! It also meant that using Qi Resilience, the Feat that granted me Temporary Hit Points, was now going to become incredibly useful! Keeping Barkskin up all the time will now be effortless as long as I had opponents to fight. One Qi for a five-minute duration +2 buff to my DR just went from something for emergencies only to pretty much just use it all the time!
I spent my Skill points, of course, and finished up.
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I came into Thistleglade by way of the Hearthflame at the Adventurer’s Guild, as I had been doing for several days now, and was surprised to see someone besides the cute Guild rep, Gina, standing at the Guild desk when I arrived.
Hers was the only new face I’d ever seen in here, so I strolled over to see her. She was a lot prettier than Gina, the normal Guild rep, 5’10” tall, maybe 165 pounds. Long, wavy blonde hair, blue eyes, with the long, pointed ears of an elf... and she had a DYNAMITE figure!
She was in obviously good shape and was wearing a long, slender sword and a dagger on her hips, along with a very well-made suit of chain mail under a breastplate that looked like a work of art.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
She looked nineteen? Maybe twenty?
My Armorcrafting skill was busy telling me that her armor was a bit higher quality than what I could make right now, which was damned impressive, since the extra levels from leveling up meant I could hit a QL of 32 with my crafting skills, or to put it another way, I could now make armor and weapons of high enough quality to handle up to a +6 enchantment!
Which meant that her armor was at least QL 34, and maybe higher!
I walked up to her and smiled. “You must be the guild master.” I told her.
She looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Huh. The way you were staring at my breastplate, I thought for sure the first words out of your mouth was going to be a pick-up line.”
I allowed myself to look offended. “Wow, harsh! The reason I was staring at your breastplate, madam, was because it’s the single highest quality piece of gear it's ever been my pleasure to lay my eyes on! What is it, QL 36? 38?” I lowered my voice to a nerdy whisper of glee. “QL 40 even?”
Yeah, yeah. I’m a nerd. I’ve never denied it and I never will! Nerding out about high QL gear is still being nerdy after all...
She stopped what she was doing for the first time and looked me up and down, really looking at me for the first time. The intensity of her gaze was a little uncomfortable. “Well, well, well. Are you just good at appraising, or are you a smith, yourself?”
I sighed. “A smith, but one stuck working my way up from the bottom. Making your own crafting equipment, just so you can then use THAT crummy stuff to make decent stuff, is a long and annoying process, especially when it comes to making an anvil and a furnace.” I told her with a sigh. “But, if you wanna get somewhere useful, you’ve gotta put in the work, you know?”
It wasn’t just an anvil and a furnace I’d needed to Craft, either. I was working on an Alchemy lab and tools, leatherworking and tanning stations, as well as everything I needed for glassmaking and jewelcrafting. I needed to make tools for a LOT of crafting skills, I had skill points in ten of them already, and I planned to get more of them!
She looked at me like I was insane. “Why would you do that to yourself!?”
“At first? I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. I was stuck in one place, and working on my crafting was one of the only things I had to do when I wasn’t fighting. By the time I found my way out of the place I’d been stuck at, I was far enough along in the process that anything I could have bought or made in town wouldn’t have helped much. Anyway, as of a few weeks ago, I finally have masterwork tools and equipment for most of my crafting skills, and those tools will easily let me make what I need for the rest of them!” I just shrugged.
She shook her head. “I have to wonder why you broke one of my tables and then refused to pay Gina for it, Battlesage Ramirez?”
She knew who I was, too, huh? I guess it's not hard to work out, what with all the new faces it seems like they DON’T get in here. “Why, I was making a point to three little shit heads, one of whom threw a knife at my head! I supposed you’d prefer that I do that as politely and non-lethal a manner as possible?”
She grimaced. She was higher level than I was, for sure... but I had no idea how much higher. “It's the only reason you’re still breathing, Battlesage Ramirez.” she told me, and totally went for the Intimidation check.
She got close but didn’t quite hit the DC she needed... but I also felt like she hadn’t really been trying. She used just enough to show me that she could be damned scary, but not enough to actually BE scary, I guess?
Maybe this was a more nuanced version of Intimidate? Or some kind of Intimidate + Bluff interaction?
It doesn’t really matter, I guess, because she’d made her point! I had a feeling that she could turn me inside out, and whether that was true or not, I really didn’t want her to feel like she needed to back up that threat! I wasn’t sure whether she even could, but I didn’t want to find out the hard way!
“I’m not a ruthless murderer, guild master... but I also can’t have random people attacking me, now, can I? It sets a bad precedent. I was as nice as I felt like I could afford to be, under the circumstances.”
She sighed. “That little gremlin really threw a knife at your head?” she asked me.
I nodded. “That’s where it was headed when I blocked it, yes. Maybe his aim is really shit, or it slipped out of his hand or something, but what else should I have done? Let it go, so he does it to someone less forgiving than I am, or tries again? Even if he missed what he was aiming for by a mile, he still threw a knife at me! Where he was aiming doesn’t really matter, now does it? What would you have done if you were me?”
She chuckled. “Back in the day, when I was running around, breaking dungeons and killing bandits? I would have slit his little gremlin throat. Congratulations, your less of a bloodthirsty fool than I was 120 years ago. I appreciate it... but I still need you to pay for my table.”
“Welp, my answer to that is still the same as what I told Gina. I’ll be happy to discuss that with you when you tell me what the guild’s going to pay me for a guild member trying to kill me INSIDE the guild!?”
She groaned and rubbed her temples. “That little turd. The second he comes back in town, I’m going to skin him alive!” she said, slamming a fist down on the counter hard enough that the whole counter bowed from the impact. “What do you want, weregild or a blood price?” she asked me.
My Lore: Local kicked in, translating what those two terms meant in local parlance.
Man, is this bitch fucking ice cold or what? Weregild is what old Germanic tribes paid each other when people got killed in raids and arguments and shit. Blood price... damn, I don’t need her to kill them for me! Nope, money’s just fine!
I smiled. I could afford to be gracious. “Not interested in a blood price, guild master; I could have killed them myself if I wanted something like that. How about we set a weregild at the price of what it would cost to replace one table, you keep the money, and we call it even?”
She was annoyed at not getting paid, but I saw a tiny amount of respect in her eyes.
She nodded in agreement. “Done. Before you go, the captain needs to see you. It sounded important, Mr. Hero.”
Huh. Yeah, she’s stronger than I am, no doubt about it, but I guess that doesn’t mean she could have taken out the cultists for sure... but it sure seems like she could. Something weird is going on in this town!
“Ok. Thanks for the information, guild master.” I told her and started to turn to walk away.
“It's Guild Master Magwen Hollyoak. Before you ask, Gina is my great granddaughter.” she told me with a little smile.
I took that bit of info and walked away. Holy crap! Great granddaughter? She looks like she’s twenty, for fuck’s sake! I mean, I knew that an elf’s long lifespan led to this kind of thing, particularly when they had kids with a human, but damn!
I went to find the captain.
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“There are two armies out there getting ready to clash, Ray. The cultists have a new leader already, and they’ve been busy summoning and animating. The greenies, who are always looking for a fight, are putting together a warband to go after them! Well, a Horde, technically.” Captain Grayson sounded damned concerned.
I frowned. “Huh. That’s not good at all. If the greenies, that’s the orcs, goblins, and ogres aka the Greenblooded Horde, win, their berserker blood will be calling to them. They could easily go on a rampage and come here for another fight. If the cultists win, that a whole lot of fresh bodies for animating!”
The captain nodded. “The only chance I can see is to hit the side that looks like it's going to win, preferably while they’re still fighting, and try to wipe out BOTH sides! At the very least, the Cultists have to lose! Either way, the problem is going to be their leaders. The cultists will have at least one leader who can use Hellfire, and I think you already know the problems THAT presents us. The greenies will have a Big Boss, what they call their warchief, and at least one shaman, maybe two or three, even!”
I nodded, that sounded a lot like the greenie horde I’d seen a few days ago. “Ok, that sounds about right from what I saw the other day. What’s it got to do with me?”
Rafe grimaced. “I was hoping that you’d be willing to come along and help us out? At the very least, we need someone that can handle those Hellfire chaining rays... and we already know you can!”
I nodded. That made sense. “Sure. I don’t think that’ll be a problem. When?”
Rafe frowned. “We don’t know for sure. Whenever they start fighting. It’ll be in the next week or two, from what we’re seeing.”
Cool! Maybe that’s enough time to get me to Monk level 6! If I can get there, I’ll be able to put my hands on Improved Cleaving Finish and Lunge! Once I have those Feats, I can probably fight a small army!
“Sounds good. I hate to put it like this, Rafe, but I really need someplace I can go for Records in the meantime. Do you know of any place around here with a ton of monsters that need to die?”
All of those Secondary levels and the two Monk levels had left me a good chunk of the way through the Records I’d saved up when I first came here. Without the easily repeatable kills from the rooms on the way towards the old Skraven town and the plentiful targets there, my exp grind had turned to dogshit.
Sure, I could keep fighting the undead ogres by the Temple, and the exp was good, but it was VERY dangerous! I was hoping to find someplace I could fight that was a bit safer than fighting them...
“I’m sorry, I don’t Ray. If I knew someplace for you to go, I’d tell you! Hell, I’d be there myself! I’ve been stuck at the first Gate for almost four years, now.”
The first Gate? What?
I looked at him, plainly interested. “The first Gate? I’m not familiar with that term, Rafe.”
He looked at me oddly. “Huh. Maybe they call it something else where you come from? It’s the first big jump in power for most classes, the first Gate is what the Farinfel Army calls people being stuck at 5th level, not being able to make it to 6th. The second Gate is at 10th level. Most people have a hard time making it to 11th. The third Gate is from 14th to 15th, then 17th to 18th, 19th to 20th, and finally the top of the mountain; becoming a Legend and reaching 21st level!