Elyon lectured to the assembled tutorial participants, “Fundamentally monks use their discipline to control and empower their bodies from within. They unlock this potential from within through intense training and meditation. There are many names for the force that Monks unlock, but at its most basic it is ‘spirit.’”
As Elyon looked over the assembled party members to assess the impact of his words, Karen asked a question. “In the traditions from our culture, monks typically had to take a number of vows. Is that something that is required of those in the monk class as well?”
Elyon asked, “Vows can certainly help to build discipline and can be part of a monk’s path. What sort of vows were practiced by the monks in your world?”
Karen offered, “Well I don’t know that I know them all, but I have heard of vows of poverty, obedience and chastity.”
Elyon looked at Karen and over to Jim and erupted with a deep, booming laugh. Elyon was generally quiet and reserved in his interactions with the team, so his sustained laughter seemed a bit out of character. Karen was blushing deeply as he turned back to her and, wiping a tear from his eye, said, “Well if you can get obedience I would say ‘good for you,’ but no, those vows aren’t required.”
Jim actually really enjoyed watching Karen squirm. It was such a rare occurrence that he found it amusing when she got flustered or embarrassed. Jim was pretty sure that Karen was just about superhuman before the awakening, so seeing her in such basically human terms from time to time did his heart good. He knew better than to tease her now, but this would be a fun conversation to discuss later when they weren’t in front of the group.
***
The control that Master Elyon was able to exert over his body was unbelievable to Jim. The path of the monk was a long road where each step was additive to the foundation of what had come before. Jim had only taken the first steps toward reaching the heights that Master Elyon had reached, though Jim had his sights set on the pinnacle. Why aim low? The small potential that Jim had been able to unlock thus far was still more than he could have dreamed prior to awakening. He could harden his fists to protect them as he assaulted wooden and even metal targets. His hand should have been broken in a dozen places after each training session, but as long as he used the technique he was totally fine. It was like he flexed a new muscle just before the strike landed and his hand changed in response.
Jim wasn’t sure how it was possible, but he was able to use the same basic technique to throw darts and other objects with precision at increasing ranges and to move extremely quickly around the sparring ring. He was shocked at how versatile his class path could be. It was intoxicating. It actually reminded Jim of coding as a computer programmer. The same basic engine could be used in myriad ways if you understood the effect that you wanted and could envision a path to get there. A first draft might be overly complicated and would most certainly contain errors, but as you advanced you could find your own style and simplify to the point of elegance.
Jim was excited about what the future of his path would hold.
Category
Value
Notes
Name
James Douglas
Race
Human
Origin: Earth
Class
Monk
HP
150
MP
100
Spirit
750
Strength
110
Intelligence
100
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Agility
110
Dexterity
120
Wisdom
120
Charisma
110
Discipline
130
Ingenuity
75
***
I enjoy being alone. I like peace and quiet and not having to spend too much time thinking about other people. It is just how I am, but I also need other people. Left to my own devices, I can get going in some weird directions and can be a little obsessive. It is productive to have people to bounce my ideas off of from time to time as well as to ground me. It is also necessary to reconnect with the people that I care about from time to time. I owe Lierin for recognizing that and setting up that party “for Queakers.”
I was attempting to repay that debt right now with a wonderful brunch and a bespoke magical device that I had created myself as a gift for Leirin. It was pretty bold to give a master magic artificer a device that you developed in your first couple of months in the craft as a gift, but I also really thought that she would appreciate the thought and the functionality of the gift itself. I had a little extra confidence here, as Tanyl had definitely been intrigued when I showed the prototype of the device to her a few days earlier.
You couldn’t use magic to completely subvert the laws of physics, magic particles existed alongside other particles in our universe. They weren't separate, they were part of the fabric that we had missed previously, as far as I can tell because their density was impossibly low on Earth. Magic particle density was so low on Earth as to be suspicious, but that is a tale for another time. Leirin’s present was what I was thinking of as a positional disc. It used magic particles to fix a disc’s position relative to a center of gravity using a dynamic web of low power beams of magic particles.
The disc build created a lattice of low energy magic particle beams that essentially anchored the disc to whatever was below it. It was like a bunch of invisible tentacles constantly connecting to whatever was below the disc. This worked best for things that were very light, like Leirin. The disc navigated simply with respect to the center of gravity, it had foot switches to adjust with or against gravity to go up or down and you could tip it in the direction that you wanted to travel. All of the components that I used were existing devices or technologies, but as far as I could tell this was a unique combination, at least according to Tanyl.
The positional disc wasn’t suited to flying high in the sky, as those lattices would be too long, requiring too much power and being too susceptible to disruption. A position disc really excelled in hovering relatively close above something that could support the weight of the disc and its payload. The disc was actually pretty fun to ride and it could really zip with a small payload.
Leirin was short. It wasn’t an impediment to her in her daily life in any way, but I thought that this would be pretty convenient to be able to be at eye level with me and she only needed about three feet of additional height for that. With the low power requirements for someone as light as Leirin, this could be powered indefinitely from the user or for an extended time from a replaceable magic crystal. I was developing some other projects into which the discs technology fit, but I thought that giving her the first one would be a good way to say thank you for all that she had done.
Leirin agreed. She was positively giddy to get a gift from me at all. It turns out that I had been more of a taker than a giver in our relationship and the gift came as a surprise. I probably needed to look at the degree to which I was taking the people in my life for granted, but I was pretty darn exhausted with peopling at this point. I couldn’t wait to get out in the wild with the taciturn elven hunters for a little bit of a reprieve from all of this social activity. However, if Leirin was giddy with the fact that I had a gift for her at our brunch, she was positively ecstatic at the gift itself. It was actually pretty darn useful for her.
Of course, Leirin was a quick study and with a minute or two of fiddling, I was treated to eating the rest of our breakfast next to brownie who had pushed her chair aside and was hovering by the hightop next to me. It seemed like the fae thought about things a little differently than I did and this wasn’t something that had ever crossed Lierin’s mind. I could tell that she really enjoyed it as she sped off after our meal. Good deal. Now I could hit the wilderness on my first trip with Reginald guilty free.
***
Trolls are semi-intelligent and I honestly had mixed feelings hunting them. Deldes and Delirin both found this extremely humorous for reasons that they kept to themselves. They had taken to mocking me in some other language or code or something when I was around. I knew that they were making fun of me, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
For the first time Deldes and Delirin took us to the southwest of the Emerald Sea and we circled around into the plains in which my friends and I initially entered Region Eleven. We were actually going to hunt rabbits and then push further out into slime territory. I know that those might sound like starter monsters, but they are nothing of the kind. We were moving through troll territory to get there and we needed to make sure that we cleared the area of trolls so that they couldn’t surprise us while we were occupied with our real prey.
Turns out, Trolls are totally disgusting. They smell as terrible as you would imagine and they are brutal, unnatural, murderous monsters. They did have a certain beastly cunning and would set traps and sneak attacks, but calling them semi-intelligent was a stretch. Unfortunately, they were very, very difficult to put down. Even a headshot wasn’t always fatal if they still had the capacity to regenerate and an empowered troll was a strong combatant.
Against three hunters with top shelf stealth skills the trolls were at a disadvantage. Knowing about their prodigious healing abilities in advance and being able to bring a large loadout using Reginald, I had many options for dealing with their legendary regeneration. The most effective was the buster rifle version of the magic particle pistol that I used against the stone bears. This higher powered version of the basic magic particle gun could vaporize most of a troll in a single blast and the residual unaspected magic particles could also temporarily suppress a troll's regenerative abilities. I was capable of using this higher powered version continuously for extended periods of time, which was fortunate and from what Deldes told me not common. Unfortunately, I still wasn’t at the level of constructing or even customizing something this advanced at this point, which was something that I’d need to change quickly.