Azure: Gunner

The way I like to think about threat levels is in terms of a classic question: “How many of these shits can a Farmer take in a fight?”

Any old Farmer can stomp a single swarm-type monster of their Level. Your average Farmer should win a fight against a single common threat of their Level, but they’ll probably take some injuries. And an elite monster is gonna be enjoying a Farmer-sized dinner unless someone helps the poor bastard out.

Since you’re planning to be fucking Delvers, you’d best be prepared to do a little better than a Farmer, got it?

- Delver’s Guild Handbook, Section 9.2 – “Threat Levels”

The next day we threw ourselves into training with a newfound intensity. A few of the trainees were just as casual as before, particularly the few that had been demoted to the basic track and didn’t seem to care. The recruits though – we started pushing even harder than our instructors had already demanded.

My team kicked it off by adding a morning Sprint before PT – though it meant we had to get up even earlier. With our privacy ward Arlo and I could shoot without waking up the veterans, who didn’t have to start PT until 90 minutes after us. Since PT was all about strengthening our bodies and burning stamina, we could dump our mana beforehand and be fine for the class. Or at least, no worse off than usual with JJ and Leon tormenting us.

We had plenty to discuss that day. Raylan and Zaire had each picked up new Skills, with Raylan choosing a very interesting one called Overlook. It was related to Stealth, but not the same. Stealth could only be activated when you hadn’t been detected by enemies and it would help you sneak up on them. I’d heard if you had enough Levels in Stealth, you might be able to use it in a fight, but certainly not at first.

Wolf described Overlook as the opposite of a Taunt – you used it in the middle of a fight and it would try to make an enemy focus on anything except you for a few moments. Just long enough, ideally, to get in close for a crippling strike. He warned us that it would probably fail if the enemy was already focused on Raylan.

Still, I was excited to see it in action. Normally, a monster would turn its attention to you if you tried to flank or get behind it. Raylan could use Overlook to prevent this, and it should give him a lot more opportunities to use Double Impact.

Zaire’s choice was a popular Mage ability called Overcharge. With it, he could pump extra mana into a Spell to increase its effects. The downside was that it had a five-second activation time and a one minute cooldown, so he couldn’t use it rapidly.

The results were impressive though – his Earth Spike could be up to twice as big, and so were the walls he could conjure. He said he wasn't likely to use it for walls, since it was much faster to just conjure two regular ones. For spikes though, it would let him punch deeper into targets and better attack the bodies of taller targets.

Arlo was the only other one in our group that had Leveled, reaching 4. Some of the Deathdealers had as well, but as far as we knew none of the rookie students who’d been at the Academy during the attack had. For the most part they just barely survived until the instructors arrived. Others had hidden in one of the buildings the whole time, so they didn’t get much – if any – Essence. We learned that a few of the veteran Squads had taken down a quadrosaur, so maybe some of them Leveled too.

We got a break from the usual gauntlet of traps in Dungeon class that day. Instead, Trick-Step spent the lecture part of the class describing different formations that could be used inside the confined space of a building or tunnels like those found in many dungeons. Then, in the hands-on part of the class, she showed us to a different section of the fake dungeon.

This one was somewhere above the trap rooms, and it seemed like a maze of different corners, hallways, and rooms. We had to practice moving through the area as if we suspected there could be a monster lurking around any corner. The most basic approach was to send our most heavily-armored person first – obviously Tara.

The Defender would be followed by someone who could deal damage while staying protected behind her. We had several candidates for that role on our team, between Arlo, Jayce, Zaire, and myself.

H’ruk and G’hala always wanted to be in front, but even in the slightly larger spaces where we could fit two people side-by-side, there was an obvious problem. None of us could see over, or even around, the massive orcs well enough to do anything when they were in front of us. Instead, we ended up putting Raylan up front with Tara, followed by the four ranged attackers in two pairs, and then the orcs in the rear.

Neither H’ruk nor G’hala was happy with that arrangement, but they also couldn’t argue with the facts. G’hala was seven feet tall and impressively wide, and her brother easily topped that by several more inches both vertically and horizontally. I had to remind them several times that we would badly need their size and strength whenever we had to fight something strong in a more open area.

When the class wrapped up, Trick Step told us that there was a lot more to learn about formations. Apparently we’d cover them both in Dungeon Basics and in Tactics. Dungeon Basics would focus primarily on working in tight quarters, while Tactics would deal with more open spaces.

The division didn’t really make sense to me, since dungeons could be a mix of both. When I asked about it, Trick Step admitted that it was a pretty arbitrary distinction. She said it was partly due to the instructors’ different expertise. It made sense that Wolf, as a Ranger, would be more of an expert at fighting out in the open than whatever Class Trick Step had. When I’d tried Identifying her, it just said ‘Instructor’, and my guess was that she was something like a Rogue.

The next day, Melee Combat forcefully reminded me of Alex’s absence. Not that I’d forgotten already – I’d thought about him every time I saw his sister or walked by their door in the dorm. But when we matched up for sparring that day, there was a glaring hole.

Before, we’d had eight sword-users – six shortswords and the two Rangers with their longswords – so we’d always had an even number. Now, there were only seven of us, and each round of sparring someone had to sit out and watch. Westin claimed that we could learn just as much by watching as we could by fighting, but all I could do during my turns on the sidelines was miss the cheerful, determined Archer. It really, really sucked.

The only upside to the week was improving both Inventory and Inspect to Level 3 as we continued finding different Squads to trade armor components with. I knew my Inventory capacity was going up a small amount with each Level. I didn’t see any difference with Inspect yet, but presumably something good would happen eventually.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

In PT2 that Saturday we had the privilege of learning about a bunch of different things that our barriers would not protect us against. Inhaled poison – or really, anything you breathed in – would go right through a barrier. The same was true for liquid you were immersed in, which meant it would do nothing to prevent drowning. Zaire and I were all too familiar with that one.

The most obvious way to bypass a barrier was speed, or rather, a lack of it. Anything moving too slowly would simply pass right through, never triggering the defensive barrier. This explained why you could hug someone without being repelled by their barrier, but also meant in a fight you could be grappled or choked without its protection doing fuck-all.

In fact, gradual pressure of any kind wasn’t blocked by a barrier. Leon even claimed you could lay a wooden board on top of a person and then slowly pile rocks on it until their body was crushed, all without triggering their barrier. How that particular fact had been discovered, I did not want to find out. Then, since it was PT2, the instructors demonstrated various chokes on us and had us practice them with each other.

Leon, apparently deciding that H’ruk and G’hala needed to practice with other students instead of always pairing up together, paired me up with the Shaman and Tara with H’ruk. I swear that my head nearly popped off when G’hala tried to ‘gently’ choke me the first time. I frantically slapped her massive green forearm, and she released me with a sound of surprise.

“Azure, I think I was just starting to figure it out – “

cough!

“Trust me, you had it!” I told her as soon as I could breathe again. Meanwhile, Arlo was having great difficulty in choking Jayce, whose half-metal neck seemed to be quite resistant to pressure.

When the drills finally concluded, one of the students I didn’t really know raised their hand.

“If slow strikes go right through a barrier, why don’t we ever practice them?” the boy wanted to know.

I saw JJ’s eyes light up and winced in anticipation.

“EXCELLENT QUESTION, MAGGOT! ANY IDEAS, CLASS?!”

If anyone had thoughts, they kept quiet. We’d all learned it was better that way. If we didn’t encourage him, his volume would usually go down.

“Fine then, I suppose I’ll have to spell it out for you. WHAT IS UNDER THE WASTED BARRIER?!”

“Uh, we’re all wearing armor. Sir.” the boy answered nervously, probably regretting having spoken up.

“EXACTLY! Now what do you suppose happens when you oh-so-slowly slice through someone’s barrier? Hah, no need to strain your young minds! Recruit Tara, step up here!”

I definitely didn’t pray for Tara’s safety as she reluctantly took a couple of steps closer to JJ. In the blink of an eye, JJ was holding his massive two-handed battleax. With a broad grin, he pulled it back.

“Don’t move, Recruit! I promise this won’t hurt!”

I’m sure Tara looked incredibly brave standing there as his axe oh-so-slowly cut through the air towards her armored chest. Of course, most people there couldn’t hear her desperately cursing over the Comms. The blade approached her at a fraction of the speed of a normal cut, and sure enough her barrier didn’t react.

Then the edge made contact with her breastplate, and with a grinding sound, she was pushed backwards, the blade scraping across her armor. When JJ finally pulled back, there was a long shining scar scratched into her plate, but no penetration.

“DOES THAT ANSWER YOUR QUESTION?!” JJ bellowed, returning his attention to the crowd. Tara quickly stepped away from the Berzerker. Always a good idea, in my opinion.

“The slow blade penetrates the barrier with ease, and is stopped with equal fucking ease by armor! And don’t expect it to work any better against monsters, with their fur, scales, hides, and so on! Not to mention the part WHERE THEY FUCKING DODGE!

“Unless you’re planning to be an Assassin and murder people while they’re sleeping and unarmored, there’s no point! You have to take DOWN your opponent’s barrier so you can CUT YOUR WAY TO THEIR WASTED HEART! AM I CLEAR, MAGGOTS?!”

“YES, SIR!” we answered in near unison, knowing what he wanted to hear.

So, we didn’t drill any slow cuts, but we did work on more grappling skills. Mainly we were supposed to learn how to escape from being grabbed. That required us to also learn the basics of how to grab each other in appropriately menacing ways.

I was stunned by how exhausting it was. I was not stunned by how it was laughably useless for any of us to try grappling one of the orcs. It felt like I was trying to choke a tree when I wrapped my arms around G’hala’s neck – and that was after she knelt down so I could even reach it.

I spent part of Sunday learning to play chess with Arlo. Then I had another training session with Trite, which went much better than the week before. At least, better in the sense that I actually got a Level in Tactical Reposition – plus one in Battle Focus. Otherwise, it was basically just as horrible as the previous time.

The next week was more of the same, though I picked up some more Levels in my Skills, reaching 5 in Shotguns, 4 in Variable Load, and 1 in Perceive Traps. Zaire was keeping up his staff practice in the evenings, and JJ had seen enough improvement to at least hold off on any punishment for him.

He also finally hit Level 5 in Earth Magic, which granted him a new primary rune. His choices were ‘adjacent’ to Earth – Mud and Stone. He picked Stone, so he could now cast Stone Spike and Stone Wall. Both of them were tougher – and unfortunately more expensive – than their Earth-based equivalents.

I hoped that his new Spells would make it harder for monsters to break through his walls and spikes. The main downside was that he needed something made out of stone or rock to cast them off of. This came down to what Professor Osco called ‘catalysts’.

Certain modifiers – including both Wall and Spike, but not Bolt – would make a Spell require a catalyst. From what I understood, a catalyst just meant you needed something that ‘matched’ your primary rune to use as a starting point for the Spell. This was why an Earth Mage couldn’t just make an Earth Wall appear a hundred feet in the air and have it drop down and smash a whole group of monsters flat.

Naturally, that explanation just gave me more questions, and I immediately raised my hand.

“So, what you’re saying is that if I threw a rock over the heads of the monsters, it would work?”

Professor Osco gave me a look that I recognized all too well. Disappirritation.

“Azure, what is the meaning of earth?”

“Uhh… you mean like this thing we’re all living on?” I pointed at the floor, obviously missing something here.

Ooh, that look must be double disappirritation!

“No, Azure…” She sighed before continuing. “I will clarify. On a conceptual level, earth is solid. Stable. It is not flying through the air. You cannot merely… throw a rock and expect it to simply function as a catalyst for Earth while it is in motion.”

I was sad, and also disappointed in magic for the first time. Magic was still awesome, but it would be even more awesome if Zaire could make Earth Walls fall out of the sky on monsters. Of course, then everyone would want to be an Earth Mage…

There was plenty of rock around the Academy, but not in the fighting pits with their sandy floors. That meant Zaire was stuck with his regular Earth Wall when I went up against Trite again the next Sunday. When I finally hauled myself out of the pit that day, I told Wolf that I needed a break from training Tactical Reposition.

I was grateful when he just nodded, not trying to talk me out of it. I figured that almost being killed another half-dozen times in the space of less than an hour had earned me at least one weekend off!