Azure: Gunner

Learning Skills is great, except you can never just learn the really fucking cool ones. Mostly what you can learn is boring shit like passive weapons Skills, including General Skills like Short Blades and Class-specific ones like Warhammers, Bows, etc. Many supporting weapon Skills like Fast Draw or Quick Reload can also be learned and should never be taken at a Level up.

Sadly, the good shit like Infernal Strike and Word of Agony are things you can only obtain by Leveling – with the right Class – or being the luckiest motherfucker alive and finding a one-in-a-million Skill gem.

- Delver’s Guild Handbook, Section 3.3 – “Learning Skills”

We were split up into different groups for the evaluations. Wolf offered to let us sit out, since we’d already been placed into the advanced track, but I turned him down – to the surprise of the others.

“If we don’t show that we’re willing to prove ourselves, everyone is going to resent us,” I warned them, and Raylan immediately nodded in understanding.

“Besides, I’d rather get some training in today than sit around and watch,” I added.

That got the orcs on board, and we moved out according to Thompson’s shouted directions. Wolf was one of several instructors responsible for the ranged combat evaluation, so Alyssa, Alex, Zaire, and I all followed him to one of the shooting ranges. I wasn’t sure exactly how many students there were total, but there had to be at least twenty-five of us in the group that assembled at the range.

The range had ten lanes, each separated by a foot-high stone wall extending easily a hundred and fifty yards out to the base of the northern canyon wall. Only a few of the lanes currently had targets. Basic bulls-eyes were set up in three lanes, about ten, twenty, and fifty yards away. In the fourth lane, there was something that looked roughly like a human torso and head, seemingly made out of mud, sitting on what looked like a stone block. The instructors started off with a quick lecture on the rules of the range, then called out a student’s name.

The girl who was up first was an Arbalist, and she had no problems hitting the bulls-eye at ten or twenty yards, and her shots at fifty were tightly grouped around it. When it came time to shoot the dummy, I watched in fascination as her bolt sank into the target three or four inches, then was slowly pushed back out as the target re-formed. Enchanted targets, this is great!

She was asked to hit the target three times as fast as possible – which wasn’t all that fast. I wondered why she hadn’t taken a Skill to help her reload faster yet, then realized she might not even be Level 3.

She probably just has the basic Crossbows Skill and one other from the bonus at the end of the Tutorial… Sure enough, when the instructor asked her to demonstrate any Skills, she fired a shot that sank twice as far into the clay dummy.

The next up was another Arbalist, a boy who had taken a quick-reload Skill. It was fascinating to watch as his hands suddenly blurred, working the goat’s-foot with superhuman speed and slotting a bolt home in just a couple of seconds. Apparently the Skill had a significant cooldown, as he only used it a few times.

Alex’s name was next, followed by another Archer, and I figured out that they were going by alphabetical order of Class names. I zoned out for a while, only stirring when I realized that the next person up was an Earth Mage. The boy, whose name was Eric, struggled to hit the center of the upright targets, apparently not used to making his spikes come out of the ground at the right angle. When it came to the dummy, he gave up in frustration after a few attempts that barely reached its body.

“This is stupid! I can’t hit something vertical like that!” Eric complained. The instructors looked at each other, then waved him off and called up Zaire. As my friend stepped up to the first target, I heard someone behind me muttering.

“Filthy rad-born!”

I inhaled sharply. Zaire had never told me more about his people, and I wondered if they really were called rad-born. Either way, I looked over my shoulder to see that the comment had come from one of the trainees, a girl wearing an elaborate set of robes under leather embossed with silver. Identify.