That night, Eadric made a stew out of purified water and chunks of small game that had been caught in snare traps around the camp. The three of us sat on makeshift seats around the fire in the center of the camp as we ate the stew.
The food of Ferrum couldn’t compare to the much more flavorful and plentiful food of Earth, but well-prepared meat was easy to stomach. The upside was that I had become relatively competent at catching my own food. I could fish, set snares, and hunt with magically conjured spears of ice. Perhaps I had a bit of an advantage, but I could hunt all the same.
“I guess this means you’re not a priest anymore,” Kinro said in between sips of his drinking gourd. He was drinking a strong liquor that had been diluted with water to simulate the type of drink popular in his homeland. When I first met him, Kinro still had some sake left over from Yomotsu, but his stash was soon depleted. As Kinro spoke, he tilted his head over to the large, ridged skull sitting at the edge of the clearing.
I shrugged and said, “I figured it was better to lose my healing potential fighting some monsters than lose it fighting humans. In such a difficult situation, I can’t afford to have something like that causing me to hesitate.”
Kinro paused for a long second, tapping his index finger against his scabbard as he thought. “Uh, whatever,” he slurred drunkenly. “We’ll be fine. You’re lucky. You always get out of trouble… because you’re… so… lucky.”
No longer listening to Kinro’s drunken rambling, my eyes flashed over Kinro’s face.
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
[Observe, Lvl. 9]
Name: Kinro Tsukumo
Class: Swordmaster
Level: 48
HP: 628
MP: 72
Fortitude: 24
Strength: 26
Agility: 26
Intelligence: 10
Willpower: 11
Charisma: 7
Tier: C
Abilities: [Enhance Sharpness], [Enhance Strength], [Enhance Agility]...
Spells: None
Talent: None
Alignment: Unprincipled (Selfish)
I was always baffled whenever I checked Kinro’s character sheet. With more than six hundred health points, he would probably survive having a meteor dropped on his head. Beyond that, I was amazed that he was still in C-Tier. It just went to show how much variety could be found within a single Tier.
In the game, Kinro was a recruitable NPC companion you could occasionally bring into battles once you reached level 20. He was absurdly powerful compared to the early level at which you could first recruit him, but he came with serious downsides.
The first downside was that Kinro was incredibly expensive. I had to pay his debts off with gold when I first recruited him, and funding his prodigious drinking habit was no small feat. The other downside in the game was that Kinro wouldn’t always follow the player’s commands. Sometimes, he would be too drunk to fight. Other times, he would attack the wrong target.
“There are no worries in the Kingdom… of… Etronia. Not like Yomotsu. No, it’s smooth sailing in the land of stars and roses,” Kinro muttered to himself as he leaned back and pressed the back of his head against a log.
“Where did that other mage go, anyway?” Kinro asked no one in particular.
“His name is Beltane Ostara, and he left to scout Etron just before you got here,” I said. “We’ll meet up with him when we get there in two days.”
“That’s fun. What’s this Beltane’s stance on booze?”