Bog Standard Isekai

In the end, they got off light. Sion didn't insist on divvying out a full twenty-five percent of his possessions, but he did give them each something as a thank-you gift. They were potions, mostly, but they were so perfect for each member of the Lance that the sheer foresight and thoughtfulness was probably more valuable than if Sion had just paid them out with coins.

Cowl was given a salve to harden his skin and prevent chafing. Brin didn't think that much of it at the time, but Cowl fell over himself in gratitude, displaying a rare amount of emotion from the man. Apparently, even though his carrying Skills made things lighter for him, they still rubbed against his skin as harshly as if they were their actual weight. It was something he'd been struggling with, alone, without telling anyone.

Brych received an antidote to pepper spray. Apparently, when used on a [Watchful Knight] it would cure nearly any status ailment that would limit his enhanced senses. Meredydd got some nice blade oil, Anwir got some rare feathers for fletching, and Hedreck, Rhun, Aeron, and Govannon all got a few pseudo-stamina potions. It was just a drug rather than something magical, but it would help them carry on after using a [Knight's Charge]. Brin received a couple nice Mana potions which he was delighted with. For Cid, it was a potion that would dull his senses and diminish his coordination. In other words, a rather nice bottle of brandy.

As for all the other stuff left in the town, he learned that the Order had some fairly comprehensive rules about how pillage rights worked. Cid would get a double share, while Brin and Cowl each got a share and a half. Brin for being Second, and Cowl because he was the Lance's acting quartermaster. The girls and the pages weren't given anything, but Mal had a half-share, assuming he hadn't already swiped whatever he wanted when the rest of them had been dealing with the uppity [Scout]. The twenty-five percent that the Order took would be held for the relatives of the deceased, but only if those relatives both found out about it and came to claim it. Neither of which were likely to happen.

Since it would take the Order some time to move all the stuff from the town and come up with a value, Brin decided to just pay out a portion to the Lance so they'd have some spending money, and they could pay him back when the Order finally came through. The ten silvers he gave them was pocket change to him, but pretty significant to the poorer members of the Lance. The proceeds from Talra was definitely going to be more than that, but even if it weren't that wasn't an amount he'd lose sleep over.

It took the rest of the night to get all that sorted out, so it wasn't until the next morning that they finally set off on their first real vacation since joining the Lance.

Brin asked if they might want to just stay the week and a half they had left in Witch Town, the old Commoner's Camp, but that was met with an emphatic no. They wanted to go to Fortmouth, a real city, and as far from war and common soldiers as they could get.

They spent the entire day on horseback. A horrible waste of time if you asked Brin, which no one did, but he made sure to tell them anyway. Now that they had more than a week where they knew they couldn't be pulled into the action at any moment. That meant they could do real training. He’d already planned out a day-by-day itinerary for how to get the most out of their time, and though they’d wasted a day, he was sure they could make up for lost time if they were willing to miss an hour or two of sleep. He wanted to start with muscle training that left them too tired to hold a sword, and maybe some unarmored dueling. But as great as he was making this sound to himself, no one else seemed very excited.

"Come on. We can do whatever we want, completely unsupervised, and you're telling me that none of you want to do any training?" Brin asked.

"We do though! That's exactly what I have planned. Poison resistance training, to start," said Hedrek.

"Probability, finesse, and coordination training," said Meredydd.

"Civilian outreach, communication, and etiquette training," said Brych.

"So you want to get drunk, gamble, and meet girls," said Brin.

"I'd be up for some sparring. Like you said, it'd be a waste if we don't come back any stronger than we left," said Govannon.

"Thank you!" said Brin, but on the inside he was already reversing his position. Any time it was him and Govannon against the rest of the Lance, he figured he should stop and reexamine his life.

Marksi spent the entire day still sleeping off the chaos dragon core, snuggled up on Brin’s saddle. He woke up for a few seconds in the afternoon, but just yawned, blinked a couple times, and then went back to sleep. And his sleepy mood seemed to be infecting the rest of the Lance.

When they got to the city that night, the Lance's high spirits had sunken by a lot, and seemingly out of nowhere. Brin thought it was the boredom of the long ride, and it took him a long while to realize it was the rain. It wasn't raining that bad, barely dripping, really, and not enough to soak his clothes under the armor. Back in the Boglands he'd barely even notice a rain like this, but here in Prinnash even this much precipitation was unusual. The Lance was quiet and melancholic when Cid organized an inn and care for the horses.

Brych and Meredydd split off from the rest of them there to go spend some time with their families, since both of them were from here.

Brin followed them both with Invisible Eyes. He watched Brych cross town, and saw the way his footsteps started to slow the closer he got to his destination. When he got to a small townhouse, he stopped. It was plain-looking and in a poor part of town. Brych stared at the door a long time before finally knocking. He then took four steps back and waited.

Did Brych’s family know he was a [Knight]? He was pretty sure they’d gotten the word last time they’d been here, but did they believe it? The Brych standing there now in armor that could buy this entire street was completely transformed from the Brych who’d joined their Lance all those months ago.

A woman answered the door, looking much too old for only being what [Inspect] said was thirty-nine years old. She looked a lot like Brych. When she saw him, her voice hitched and she held a hand to her mouth, eyes wide in shock. Then she leapt forward and grabbed him in a hug. Brin suddenly felt like he was intruding, and cut off the Invisible Eye. He could ask Brych how it went when he got back.

Meredydd was already in Sickside at that point. He was gazing around in wonder, as if everything were brand new, though the town looked the same as when Brin had seen it last. It was tidy and clean, the people proper and prim, though not any wealthier than those in Brych’s part of town. Meredydd seemed to think it had undergone a huge transformation. Brin sent a few more eyes out to snoop and listen in on people’s conversation, and he quickly saw a pattern.

Everyone was talking about how healthy they were now. Ever since the war had started, their flus, colds, and fevers had gone down to regular levels. He heard at least three people make the same joke: They were going to have to remove the “Sick” and call this part of town just “Side.”

Meredydd passed one mother and daughter on the street where the daughter, maybe 3 years old was dancing along and singing, "Not sick, not sick. Look mama! Not sick!" The mother just laughed and then leaned over with a handkerchief to wipe an extremely runny nose.

It was nice to see, but also sort of disorienting, because while everyone was talking about it, they were all just treating it like a boon that had fallen down from heaven. No one acted like there was a war going on. It was like the extremely brutal win-or-die slugging match going on just a few miles away didn't exist.

He turned off the eye watching Meredydd, too.

For those that stayed, they decided to turn in early and start their "real" leave in the morning. With the new silver burning holes in their pockets, they'd elected to get a private room for each of them rather than crowding into a bunkroom like normal. Brin was quite looking forward to spending a night alone.

When Brin had his handle on the door to his room, Cid stopped him. "I'm sure they'll want to get up to all kinds of trouble tomorrow. You can keep an eye on them for me?"

"Sure, but where are you going to be?" asked Brin.

"I have some affairs to see to. Don't trouble yourself. I mean it. Enjoy your leave. I'll return in time to join you on the ride back to the war," said Cid.

"That's fine," said Brin. Cid was definitely not the type of Prime to just up and abandon his Lance on their first real time off. Was he finally unlocking his own metaphorical Companion Quest? Cid had already gone one by one through all of the men, solving their little issues, but Brin had never even considered that Cid might have problems of his own.

The next morning he did as Cid asked and stayed with the Lance when Cid woke up an hour before dawn and started traveling north from the city. He went on foot, and only carried his sword and a small knapsack with food. Luckily he didn't go far, or Brin wouldn't have been able to follow him with an Invisible Eye.

Cid headed to a country mansion. It was near enough town to be surrounded by farmland, but the house itself didn't seem connected to any farm. There were large grounds, maybe ten acres, surrounded by a fence, but it was just prairie grass and a few trees left to grow wild.

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Cid went through the gate and walked down a straight dirt trail toward the house.

Near the front of the mansion, around twenty men and women stood in rows, all of them wearing simple loose white clothing, matching martial arts outfits to Brin's eye. They were practicing sword forms, going through a set of movements in unison. This was a martial arts school, it had to be.

When Brin had been guessing what "affairs" Cid needed to take care of, he'd figured it would have something to do with his family obligations and imagined all sorts of political intrigue. Cid just wanted to join a dojo? He should've said so; Brin would've come, too. Or maybe that's why he hadn't said so.

An ancient but strong-looking man came out from the front door. Brin recognized him.

Name: Master Odo

Class: Blade Master

Level: 80

Age: 130

"No," said Odo.

Cid fell to his knees and put his head to the ground. "Please, teach me!"

"No," said Odo.

"My name is Sir Gurthcid Trevorrow, heir of the Eldingblod Trevorrows. I can offer lands, gold–"

"Eridu's Ticking Clock. Stand up. I don't have so many hours left in my life that I want to spend them having the same conversation again and again. Give me your sob story so I can tell you no again," said Odo.

Cid gulped and said, "I–"

"Never mind. You know what? I'll just say your part. Your Class is [Knight Captain]. You're stupid young for your Class and Level, so you just came into it recently. And now you have a problem. Your Class isn't making you any stronger because you're getting pressured into taking leadership Skills. To make matters worse, you're on the third step of the [Path of the Blade]; I can tell from the way you're standing. That's good for you long-term, but you need to get stronger now. You can't keep carrying on while weaker than everyone in your Lance. There's a war going on for Eridu's sake! So what? So I'm going to help you."

"You are?" asked Cid, surprised.

"Of course. First lesson. Hold your sword like this," Odo demonstrated, holding a wooden practice sword horizontally in front of him, right hand on the hilt and left hand holding the blade.

Cid mirrored him with his own sword.

"Now bring it down," said Odo. He brought the sword down and lifted his leg until it touched his knee.

Cid copied him.

"Ok, now harder," said Odo. "Break your sword just like that."

"What?"

"Break your own sword, and you'll be ejected from the [Path of the Blade]. You go back to regular [Blade Mastery] and you're not a liability to your Lance anymore. Everyone wins," said Odo.

"I–"

"You can't do that. You want the next step of the path. Son, I was seventy-two years old when I broke through. Seventy-two. That means it took me forty-eight years to master. I'm a better teacher than I had so I could get you through it in five years. Three, if you're especially talented, but I make anyone I teach commit to five. Do you have five years?"

"No," said Cid.

"Then there you are. I got through that conversation in two and a half minutes. I bet I can get it down to ninety-seconds next time. Off you go, then," said Odo. He walked past Cid and stood in front of his students, eyeing their forms.

Cid sheathed his sword, and with his head held high and his posture carrying his usual confident dignity, he turned and left the country estate. Brin couldn't believe it. Cid always got his way. That was his superpower; he always seemed to be able to get everyone to do whatever he wanted them to. Not this time. A level 80 wasn't the type to get pushed around by a [Knight], a noble, or anyone else.

When he was far enough away from the house that Brin felt safe, he summoned a Mirror Image of himself and started walking next to him.

Cid didn't seem at all surprised to see Brin appear from thin air. "I wouldn't be the first nineteen-year-old to do it. Odo was the first person to walk the path, but he cleared the way for everyone behind him. He's a legendary warrior, but an even better teacher. My sword instructor growing up learned from someone who learned from Odo, you know. So in a way, I’ve been working on this since I was six. Thirteen years is a lot less than his five."

"So go back there and tell him that," said Brin.

Cid shook his head. "I can't. I can't risk offending him because despite it all, I still hope to come back when the war is done and give him his five years."

"You can't break your sword," said Brin.

"I'll wait until I really have no other choice," said Cid.

"Hm. Ok, go over there," said Brin. He pointed to a spot a half mile away where a stream had carved a wide depression in the earth, maybe fifty feet across of silty sand with the stream still working away the walls on either side.

"Why? What do you see?"

"Just go," said Brin.

When Cid got to the depression, he looked down the earthen wall. It was only about an eight foot drop. "I don't see anything."

"That's the point. It's a good place to not be seen," said Brin.

He created twenty-one directed threads, and had each of them cast Copy Light. While painting an illusion from memory was difficult, copying something that an Invisible Eye was seeing couldn't be simpler.

He copied a perfect mirror of Odo and all of his students. Then one last illusion over the top of the depression shielded the whole thing from outside eyes.

Odo stood in place in front of them, lecturing. His students all had their arms behind their backs, listening with rapt attention.

Cid smiled, comprehension dawning.

Brin nodded. "Go take your place, student."

Cid lined up with the others, and Brin walked his Mirror Image up to stand next to him.

"It won't work for sparring, but–"

"It's perfect," said Cid.

Meanwhile, back with the Lance and his real body, the first day of vacation was off to a lukewarm start. None of the Lance's plans really involved mornings; he figured they'd all planned to be sleeping off a hangover at this time of day. So when he offered to lead them in some light exercise, they jumped on the idea without needing any persuasion. So they spend their first day of vacation outside of town, lifting stones and weighted glass.

He pushed them harder than normal, as hard as you could push when you didn't need to worry about being able to move for the rest of the day. It was a grueling workout even by his standards, but it was worth it.

Strength +1

In the afternoon, they returned to their inn to wash up and put on their dress uniforms, and then it was finally time to hit the town. They latched onto the first somewhat nice-looking public house they saw and whiled the afternoon away with all sorts of frivolous activities. The public house had dart boards, and even a table game resembling ping-pong, so the Lance quickly insisted on creating a tournament.

Brin would have been unbearably bored by the whole thing if he couldn't check in with the split half of his brain that was currently going through Odo's training with Cid.

As the evening wore on, the public house got more and more crowded, and more people meant girls. Sadly, most attempts at attracting attention failed. The ratio of men to women was heavily leaning towards the guys, so the few women that were left were beset by so many persistent flirts that they didn’t have space for any of the visiting [Knights]. Hedrek was the exception, and disappeared early in the evening with his arm around a young woman's waist. Brin decided not to send an Invisible Eye to follow.

It was a relief when a [Bard] took the stage. The music served as a good excuse not to try to socialize. Then when the dancing music started, the men put in a good showing with their [Knightly] Dexterity, and seemed to actually be having fun for the first time on this trip.

The gang that headed back to the inn that night was wonderfully cheerful. They laughed and joked and bragged about their prowess in wooing all the pretty girls, completely oblivious to how embarrassing they’d all been. Brin supposed that was the way things should be.

The day of lessons with Odo were extremely enlightening. The old [Blade Master] led his Class in physical exercises, but those seemed mostly perfunctory, as if it were just to keep in shape and not the real point. The bulk of his time was spent with mental visualization and discussions of theory. Odo would ask his students strange questions like, “What is a blade? What does it mean to cut?”

He would listen and nod to every answer, rarely commenting at all. He felt so involved that when Odo got to their position and kept walking instead of asking the question he’d asked the rest of the class, Brin’s first instinct was to feel slighted.

It was clear that the [Path of the Blade] was a mental challenge, or maybe a spiritual one. It made sense. Highest level athletes always claimed that 90% of the game was mental. He’d always sort of laughed at that, because you didn’t ever see short and fat people in the NBA no matter how mental they were. But he wasn’t going to laugh at the greatest known [Blade Master] in the world. If he said you should think really hard about the word “cut”, then in Solia’s name, Brin was going to think about “cut”.

There was also a lot of meditation. Sometimes Odo led exercises, and sometimes he left them to meditate in silence. By the second day, Cid wondered aloud if he should take the General Skill. By the end of the second day, he’d taken it and gotten it to level 5.

The week went by much the same as the first day. Brin worked out in the mornings, and split his consciousness throughout the day between Cid and the Lance. Cid threw himself wholeheartedly into Odo’s training, and the Lance threw themselves wholeheartedly into every kind of tomfoolery that they could dream up. They got thrown out of the first public house for picking fights and found an even better one, this one with more women than men. Brych returned to spend the night with them then, and he fulfilled one of Brin’s prophecies. There were so many women around that three of them approached him at once, each of them trying to leap into his arms quicker than the other. Rather than bask in his new popularity he got nervous and defensive, and shut them all down.

Marksi woke up for real after two and a half days, and immediately went back to acting like nothing was changed at all. He flat out refused to demonstrate whatever new powers he’d received from the core, but Brin kind of expected that. In the past, he’d told himself that dragons never did anything without a reason, but he was starting to think that Marksi did want to show off. He just wanted to practice in private first so that when he did show his new ability in public, it would be suitably impressive. Marksi also found the Lance’s habit of hanging out in public houses to be unbearably boring, so he spent most of the week off in the city, doing whatever it was that Marksis did.

At one point, the Lance discovered that cities were also good for shopping and completely blew through the silver Brin had given them. Some of the money was spent well on interesting weapons or novel consumables, but most of it was spent on the most useless trinkets Brin had ever seen, the kind of thing Mark’s grandma put on all her shelves. Little lacquered model houses, cute model animals with big heads, and the like. There were even little statues of the gods, and Brin supposed he couldn’t complain too much, because he bought one of Solia.

Sadly, the days passed quickly and all too soon it was time to return to duty. Cid had gotten his [Meditation] up to 12. Brin had advanced his [Meditation] as well.

[Meditation] leveled up! 22 -> 25

Otherwise, neither of them had anything to show for his time training. Still, Cid was optimistic heading out, and in just as good spirits as the rest of the Lance. Thɪs chapter is updated by ⓝovelFire.net

Brin wouldn’t let him leave it there though. He would help Cid finish [Path of the Blade]. The one thing he’d learned in the week auditing Odo’s Classes was that their goal wasn’t an action or feat of valor, it was a state of mind.

Luckily, he was an expert at altering people’s state of mind. With how the war was going, they’d have plenty of down time and now he knew how to put it to good use. He’d see what [Say What’s True] could do.