Heralds- The Proving Grounds, page 18
Did she hear… crying?
She glanced around. Everyone seemed more or less as they had. Wandering about taking care of their own business.
A loud scream went up.
Her head swiveled around.
A large man with a cleaver in one hand had hold of a dark haired child dressed in rags with the other. He was nearly lifting her off the ground by her arm in the middle of the market. In broad daylight. In sight of everyone. The young girl was wailing on his arm with her free hand.
And there was not a soul who seemed to even notice. People walked right on by.
What in the…
These people couldn’t be that heartless.
She grumbled as she weaved through the crowd to get closer. The man looked up at her, but kept a tight grip on the child’s arm.
He leveled the meat cleaver at Jen. “Back off. This is none of your business. She stole from my shop.” The child bit the man’s hand but he held fast. “You little…” He raised the cleaver.
“What did she take?” The words fell out of Jen’s mouth.
People around glanced at her but kept on moving. Did they not see any of this?
“What does it matter?” The man scoffed.
The child tried to pull away again, her free hand prying at the man’s fingers. “Let me go!” She turned her eyes to Jen. “Please, I’m only hungry.”
And not a soul around Jen so much as turned an eye.
Weird.
She considered reaching for her sword. A bit of intimidation would probably make the man back off, but everyone about seemed to see her just fine and it wasn’t the most low key sword…
Jen tilted her head slightly. “Let her go. I’ll pay for whatever she took.”
The man raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s not about that. She’s a thief.”
The girl tried stomping on the man’s toe, but his shoes and her diminutive size made it ineffective. “Only because you charge so much!”
“This is a war zone. Everything of value goes to the war effort. Ingredients are hard to come by. If I want to make more bread I have to charge enough to get more flour.”
Jen frowned. It wasn’t as cut and dry as she would like. “Double your asking price.”
The man paused a moment, his eyes shifting about. “Show me your coin.”
A pop up appeared in front of her bearing zeroes with an up and down arrow beside them. The asking price wasn’t cheap, but she had enough to cover what she promised.
Weird all around. She had never seen anything like this in the beta.
She doubled the asking price as agreed. An icon appeared next to the submit button. She held her finger over it a moment.
Honor adjustment.
Oh, right. Hank had said something about that… but she had never seen anything of the sort because she didn’t hang out in cities to find them. The only NPCs out in the wild were trying to kill her.
Hmm. No note as to whether her honor rating would increase or decrease, just that it would be adjusted.
This seemed like a ‘good’ course of action… an evil person would just trounce the guy. Or the kid. Or both for bothering them.
She hit the submit button.
A strange sound played in her ears… a soft collection of high notes, like a glass wind chime.
The man scoffed. “Well, will wonders never cease.” He released the girl with a flick of his arm. “Don’t come back to my shop without money in hand. I won’t let you in the door if I don’t see silver.”
The girl stood up and dusted herself off. She stuck out her tongue at the man and gave Jen a wave and a grin before bolting off into the crowd.
The man grumbled to himself about delinquent children as he wandered away.
Jen followed him.
He wandered through the streets as if no one was there, passing through the various players littering the streets like a ghost. He turned at a shop with a sign out front only showing a loaf of bread. He let himself in. She ducked her head in after him to watch. He wandered up to the counter where a duplicate of him was already standing. The second one disappeared.
Super weird. Hank said the honor system had been disabled because it wasn’t ready for prime time. People wandering about like ghosts and vanishing was solid evidence of that.
Still… it had been nice to do something paladiny other than hit skeletons. To be a stand up person and have it acknowledged.
It was… neat.
Her character sheet showed a new stat that hadn’t been there before. Honor. There was no number, only a bar. Had the incident only been meant to give half that and she increased it, or would handling it some other way have reduced the score?
She had no way of knowing. This was something players had never had access to so she couldn’t even look it up, which was at once frustrating and… very interesting. She was the first one to see it. To try it out.
Very cool.
With her character sheet open she also noticed that she was practically level twenty. That was weird. She had been just barely into nineteen. So either the honor event had given her a ton of experience, unlikely, or it had given her some and she had gotten more from one of the other Heralds leveling some the night before and the bar only ticking as she earned some experience of her own. Much more likely.
So, honor events were a thing. She could see them. She could complete them and they even gave her experience.
Nice.
Well, there were downsides. It had cost her very real coin and she wasn’t exactly rich. That and no one else could see the events so she probably looked a bit crazy. If she saw someone talking to no one she would just assume some form of voice communication. Or that they were on the phone. A simple enough excuse, archaic as it may be. Really, who talks on their phone?
Of course if there were devs around and they happened to see her, her status as a Herald would be revealed. That might make her a target going forward and would certainly make them less trusting of her in the short term.
Best to avoid the honor stuff for now then. At least in Morblina. Or around Kingsmen. Fortunately she had no long term plans to follow the guild around like a lost puppy.
A soft sound played by her left ear. Someone had logged on.
From Samara: You could have waited, you know. Rude.
And the day had finally begun.
18
Gorin had appeared and started to organize his group by the time Sam made it to Morblina. Jen waved.
Sam muttered a bit as she stomped up close. She glanced at Jen, raising and lowering her chin. “You have new stuff.”
“There’s a merchant here. One that gives actual money, rather than chump change.”
“Huh.” Sam tapped at her chin. “Be right back then.”
“Think we’re supposed to wait here while they…”
Sam was gone.
Rogues. Go figure.
They didn’t quite have their own raid group going but more were arriving all the time. They might well exceed the number before they got rolling.
“Alright.” Gorin waved his hands over his head. “We’ll be moving out soon. Try to stay close together while we are out there. We’re looking for events, and failing that mobs about on level fifteen. A bit above or below is acceptable, but we’ll need quite a few to level.”
They did. Jen and Sam were the highest levels present. If they did start finding things to drop, she and Sam would be out leveling them in no time. It might be a problem… but it was a problem for later.
Sam reappeared beside her. “Did I miss anything?” She was wearing a new leather tunic with studs up and down it in rows and a dark red cloak, the hood covering her head.
“Not really. We might have a problem, though.”
“Just one? Things are looking up today.”
“Ha. Yeah, no. They’re trying to level. We’re going to be with them.”
Sam shrugged. “Scrubs gunna scrub. We’ll… disappear now and then if needs be. I’m sure we’ll have some freedom to move around.”
“Ahem.” Gorin was looking at them pointedly. “May I continue?”
Sam nodded. “Yes, you may.”
Gorin narrowed his eyes but he turned away from them. “Tobin Ironblood’s party isn’t far. They have a knack for finding events, so we’ll keep an eye on their location and have our pairs of scouts moving back and forth to keep tabs. We won’t get too far away and we’ll share information of any events we find with them. No showboating. No glory hounding. We’re all in this together folks.”
Sam scoffed.
Not surprising. She was a showboating glory hound. It was like asking her not to breathe.
“Alright, move out. They’re about an hour ahead, so we have some ground to cover. If you see anything along the way that looks promising, speak up.”
An hour later they hadn’t seen so much as ten mobs grouped together.
Tobin’s raid group had broken up into smaller groups and splintered to find their own mobs. Gorin’s group had been forced to do the same. Scouts couldn’t be spared to follow the main group and instead ran between their own set of four groups. They were doubtless still keeping track of Tobin’s location, though. Gorin, for all his talk of not being a glory hound, was just waiting to ride to the rescue… or ride their coat tails.
At least, that’s what Sam seemed to think. Repeatedly. Out loud.
Jen had to admit she probably had a point. Fortunately they didn’t end up in Gorin’s group but were cut out and acting as scouts due to their higher level. And because they volunteered… to hide their higher and advancing level a bit better.
The pair of them marched along an empty dirt road. Gorin’s group was behind them, some other group was ahead, barely visible at the edge of the game’s draw distance.
“Well this is dull.” Sam sighed.
“It was your idea.”
“I can have bad ideas.”
“It was actually rather inspired. It solves all our problems out here.”
“And it created a new problem. I am super bored and nowhere near my mark.”
“Patience.” Jen opened her friends list again. The location of Tobin Ironblood in the guild list hadn’t changed recently. They must be at a decent place. “I’m sure things will pick up once Bulorn makes his move.”
“They already are, clearly. Two raid groups worth of Kingsmen marching around and none of us have seen anything decent to kill for experience? They’ve been sweeping the area clear. Slash and burn. Leaving scraps to lead us along.”
Jen frowned a bit. She was aware of Bulorn’s plan, at least the nondescript rough version he had laid out the night before. “We are kind of lacking a plan to stop him, now that you mention it. We couldn’t alert them before without seeming to have inside information but maybe we can claim we saw something while scouting.”
Sam shook her head. “I wouldn’t believe us in their place. Not unless I saw a bunch of red names walking about with my own eyes.”
“Okay. But when the time comes we are capable of dropping Bulorn where most of the other people around are not. So, we need to be ready to.”
“Nope.” Sam shook her head again. “He’ll see us coming and it would hinder working with him in the future. Tobin’s side has its own group of Herald people capable of dropping Bulorn. We need to avoid being seen by him if at all possible. We help by taking down his cronies and screwing up his plan. We are quite capable of that, too.”
Their secret Herald status was still safe. Standing up to Bulorn might reveal it. Sam had a point. “Okay, I guess that’s fair.”
“Besides, once we all group up for safety I’ll be that much closer.” Sam spun a knife around her finger.
She hadn’t sprouted a sense of morality overnight then. Oh well. Sam’s chance was unlikely to come with a giant group of Kingsmen surrounding Tobin. Jen would let Sam have her dream for now. No reason to ruin it and lose her assistance. She was the only one here Jen could trust. There wasn’t exactly time to get Kail of Annabelle guilded and sent out with her.
“Oo!” Sam pointed off into the distance. “Oooo!” She ran off and vanished from sight amongst the underbrush and low tree branches.
Jen sighed and walked that way. There were easier and more efficient ways to chase mobs.
One lunch break later things hadn’t changed much. Sam and Jen were still wandering the open spaces between the groups. They had managed to level twice while everyone else had barely advanced at all. Kind of lent credence to the theory of Bulorn out there killing everything. It would mean he was stacking experience for them whether he wanted to or not. So far no one had really commented and seemed to buy the excuse of fighting mobs that jumped them.
Sam sighed as the pair of them sat in the shade of a large tree. “If Bulorn is really causing this… drought, he’s a dickhead. This sucks.”
“I’m sure the sheer number of people about is part of it. We’re supposed to be keeping our distance from Tobin’s people but we’re not that far. And more or less following them as they sweep up whatever mobs they can find. So, kind of our own fault at this point.”
“Bulorn is still a dickhead.”
“I guess.” Jen could barely make out someone running in the distance. They were not coming toward them, they were crossing from their left to their right. “What do you suppose that is about?”
“Maybe he found a goblin and wants to report in.”
“The haste seems genuine.” The distant figure disappeared into trees well off to their right.
“Maybe he ran into the dickhead squad, then.”
A few moments after the man vanished a broadcast went out over the raid group’s chat channel. “Group up people, there’s an event going on. Tobin Ironblood is already there and we might be able to help.”
Jen rubbed at her chin. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
Sam nodded. “I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if a bunch of dickheads were about to be dickheads.”
“Well that would make sense, I guess.”
They moved with all the speed their feet would allow. If they didn’t, Gorin and a few of the others would have left them behind.
Word was that not only had Tobin’s raid group found an event, they had already started it. If they wanted to get anything out of this they had to hurry.
Sam didn’t seem to mind. She wore a small smile all the while. They were being escorted to her target and the people all around were lending a false face of friendship. She claimed this sort of thing was normal… then again she could kill someone and then die herself in the past. That wasn’t exactly an option here. Or, well, actually it would be if she got Tobin. Huh.
The trees fell away swiftly as the group ended up running along the road with reckless abandon as they followed their scouts.
The camp was visible once the trees were gone. It looked like a pile of rusty metal scraps that someone had decided to set on fire.
Not exactly inviting.
Blue names were swarming the place but there were plenty of mobs still fighting back. Hell, the mobs might have had the upper hand. They were pouring out of tents and pointy buildings at a rate the players couldn’t seem to keep up with.
Gorin was at the front now, his shield high and his sword drawn. “Okay, we’ve got this. I want ranged DPS peppering anything that isn’t a Kingsmen! Tanks grab aggro from anyone below fifty percent. Healers, heal. We’ll sort out the rest later.”
There was certainly no lack of targets but Jen had nothing as far as ranged capability. She watched as others fired arrows or hurled magic over the walls from the outside.
She was one of the first to enter through the numerous gaps in the iron walls. Not exactly secure.
Soulshine sang through the air and bit into an orc before she had a chance to think about it. The blow sent the orc careening forward into several Kingsmen who finished it off.
In all the chaos… no one seemed particularly concerned by the sword. Good.
The orcs were head and shoulders above her, most of them decked out in rough metal armor with green and gray skin showing beneath.
A particularly large one was readying a downward swing toward someone in front of it. Jen couldn’t see who it was trying to hit. Someone small. Most of the orcs were already focused on targets, so she was swinging at their backs and legs. This one was no different.
She swept the sword horizontally while the orc had its club high in the air. It let out a pained cry which only intensified as she swung back the other way. A blue trail followed in the wake of her shining sword. She hadn’t had much time to practice with the Duo hits, but she wasn’t likely to miss something large enough to swing a car like a weapon.
The orc looked over its shoulder and shoved its right arm back at her. She was in too close to avoid it, and ended up losing a third of her health as her feet skidded along the dirt. She gritted her teeth and swung again before it finished turning to face her. She had given enough ground.
The beast gave a final cry and collapsed into a heap, throwing up dust in a circle.
She swore the ground shook a bit.
The orc… really shouldn’t have gone down that easy. It hit her hard enough to cause very real concern, so it should have taken more abuse. Then again she hadn’t been stacking health the way most paladins would, so that might be part of it. But the sword was easily stronger than most, even in its incomplete state.
Soulshine held high, Jen turned to look for any other threatening orcs. They were breaking. Some were trying to run, but the original force of Kingsmen and the reinforcements were making short work of them now.
“Thanks for the assist.”
Jen turned and nodded to the… wolf. “Uhh…”
The wolf laughed. “Sorry, ran out of mana. Better to bite than nothing.” A flash of green light and smoke revealed the blond druid Jen had seen the night before. Hell, the druid Jen had kept alive the night before. The reckless one. Her name was… Jesse.
“Happy to help, of course.” Jen bowed her head. She hadn’t spoken to any of them before, and assumed she had gone unnoticed…
“Oh. Paladin. Groovy.” Jesse gave an exaggerated bow. Her eyes shifted about the field as she rose. “Looks like we won. Cool. Gotta go.” She waved as she started walking. “Thanks again.”
