The aftermath of battle was a sensory assault. The coppery tang of goblin blood, thick and metallic, hung in the air, mingling with the scent of freshly churned earth and the sharp ozone smell of leftover fear. The three survivors were a pathetic sight, their faces pale with shock, their clothes torn and stained. They looked like walking ghosts, still trying to process the fact that they weren't dead.
Elara was busy with the grim work of cleaning her spear, her movements deliberate and efficient, a predator resetting after a successful hunt. The two Craftsmen were breathing hard, their eyes darting between the goblin corpses and us, their would-be saviors. My initial analysis was correct; next to Elara's brutal, kinetic display of violence, my contribution would seem minimal to the uninitiated. A well-timed distraction, a lucky trip. They hadn't seen the mana expenditure, the mental gymnastics, the precise application of game-breaking debuffs. They didn't understand that I had been the architect of this victory. I had rewritten the combat script in our favor before the first blow had even landed. The headache brewing behind my eyes from the double-casting was a testament to that.
The Cleric, Samuel, was the one who broke the silence. He finally managed to ask, "Who… what… are you people?"
His voice trembled, and I understood his awe. We hadn't just saved them; we had dismantled a lethal threat with a level of coordinated competence they couldn't possibly comprehend. In their world of panicked hammer swings and clumsy hatchet attacks, we were something akin to gods of war descending from on high.
Elara stayed silent, her focus on her weapon, projecting an aura of intimidating lethality. That was fine. She could be the muscle, the scary one. I would be the voice.
I stepped forward, carefully navigating around a pool of dark goblin blood, my bare feet sinking slightly into the damp sand.
"My name is Kale Lucas," I said, my voice calm and measured. It was the same voice I used in academic presentations, a tone designed to convey authority and confidence. "We were scouting the area upstream and heard the commotion. Looked like you were having some trouble, so we decided to help."
I delivered the line with deliberate understatement. The three of them stared at me as if I'd just claimed to be able to fly. The idea that another group, let alone a duo composed of a half-naked man and a wounded woman, would willingly charge into a goblin attack was so far outside their survival calculus that it registered as pure insanity.
The Blacksmith, Leo, was the first to find his voice. He was a big man, probably in his early thirties, with the thick arms and calloused hands of someone used to physical labor. Right now, all that strength was coiled in exhaustion. "Thank you, Kale Lucas," he said, his voice rough. He ran a hand through his sweat-soaked hair. "Seriously. If I had anything to offer you, it'd be yours. That… that was incredible." He nodded towards Elara, who was now testing the balance of her cleaned spear. "And her… god. She's something else." He extended a hand, then seemed to think better of it, letting it drop. "I'm Leo. Leo Vance."
The Woodworker, Maria, a young woman who couldn't be much older than twenty, stumbled forward a half-step, her hatchet hanging limply at her side. She looked like she was about to pass out, but a core of resilient politeness held her upright. "Y-yes! Thank you, Kale Lucas… and you, ma'am! So much!" She gave a little bob of her head that might have been a bow. "I'm Maria Reyes. We… we really thought we were dead."
Finally, the Cleric, Samuel, stepped forward. He was younger than Leo, maybe mid-twenties, and had the earnest, slightly overwhelmed look of someone who had chosen a support role in life only to be thrust onto the front lines. The golden light from his holy symbol had faded, but he still clutched it like a lifeline. "Samuel Jones," he said, his voice steadier than the others but still laced with shock. "We owe you our lives. There's no other way to put it. Those things… they were going to kill Leo, and then…" He trailed off, his gaze falling on the Lancer Elara had paralyzed. He had been next. He knew it.
"Forget the thanks for now," I said, cutting through the pleasantries with a dose of hard reality. This wasn't the time for campfire introductions; this was a post-op debrief in a hot zone. "This area isn't secure. That was a small hunting pair, but their main camp is downstream. There will be more."
I let that sink in, watching their faces. The relief of survival was quickly being replaced by the dawning horror that the threat wasn't over.
"We have a temporary shelter nearby, but it's not large enough for five," I continued, already steering the conversation. I was the one with the plan. "My partner, Elara, and I were looking for a more defensible position. A cave, maybe. Your first priority should be getting out of the open and tending to your wounds."
I turned my gaze to Samuel. "You're a Cleric. Status report. How much mana do you have left? Can you cast again?"
Samuel blinked, taken aback by the directness of the question, but he responded immediately. He was used to taking direction. "I… I have five mana points left, sir. It's not enough for another Minor Heal. I need to rest to regenerate."
Five out of seventy. He was running on fumes. "And you?" I looked at Leo and Maria. Even though I already had guessed, I needed to be sure."Vocations?"
"Blacksmith," Leo said, holding up his ball-peen hammer as if for inspection.
"Woodworker," Maria added, gesturing with her hatchet.
The pieces clicked into place on my mental chessboard. A healer, a blacksmith, a woodworker. They were the foundation of a settlement, the core of any long-term survival strategy. Protecting them wasn't just a moral imperative; it was a strategic one of the highest order.
"You three have been here for how long?" I asked, my tone shifting into interrogation mode. I needed data.
"We… we arrived together," Leo explained. "About twenty-four hours ago. Materialized right here in this clearing. The System gave us some basic tools… like these." He indicated his hammer and Maria's hatchet. "And some clothes, thank the gods. We were trying to figure out what to do when those… things… came out of the woods."
One day. They had survived one day and were already at death's door. It highlighted just how lucky Elara and I had been with our own arrivals.
Elara finally spoke, her voice flat and cold as river stone. "You made too much noise. You talked. You panicked. They heard you from a quarter-mile away." She walked over to the goblin corpses and, with a grim pragmatism that made the newcomers flinch, began systematically searching them, pulling out a grimy leather pouch from one and a string of what looked like dried ears from the other. "Loot everything. Never leave resources for the enemy to recover."
While the newcomers stared, paralyzed by the sheer barbarity of it all, I moved. I knelt beside the goblin Lancer Elara had executed, ignoring the sticky, cooling pool of blood surrounding its head. The stench was vile, a mix of swamp rot and stale meat, but I pushed it down. Survival was about compartmentalization.
My first priority was clothing. My nakedness had been a constant, nagging vulnerability, a visual reminder of my low position on the food chain. The Lancer wore a crude assembly of stitched-together hides—a ragged loincloth and a simple chest harness. It was filthy, stiff with dried sweat and gore, and reeked with a smell I didn't want to analyze. But it was cloth. It was armor, however pathetic.
I worked quickly, my fingers fumbling with the crude knots. The hide was rough against my skin as I pulled the harness over my head and secured the loincloth. The fit was absurd. The harness barely covered my sternum, and the loincloth was more of a suggestion than actual cover. I probably looked like some kind of deranged post-apocalyptic gladiator. But it was something. It was a layer between me and the world. For the first time since arriving in Norrath, I felt marginally human again.
Next, the spear. I wrenched it from the ground where Elara had left it. It was a short, nasty-looking weapon, the wooden shaft grimy and poorly balanced, but the barbed metal tip was lethally sharp. The barb was designed to catch on flesh, to make pulling it out a nightmare that would cause even more damage. Crude, but effective. It was infinitely better than my flint knife.
I handed the flint knife to Maria. "Here. It's not much, but it's better than nothing if you lose the hatchet."
She took it with a wide-eyed, hesitant nod, her fingers brushing against mine. The physical contact seemed to ground her slightly.
Elara had already stripped the Warrior goblin of its rusted cleaver and its crude wooden shield. She tossed the pouch of coins she'd found to me. "Your cut, Scholar." It jingled with the weight of about a dozen small, unfamiliar coins. Then she looked at the shield, a round buckler of splintered wood reinforced with strips of hide. She could use it, but her fighting style was built around the two-handed reach of her spear.
She made a quick calculation and then tossed the shield to Leo. It slapped against his chest, and he fumbled it, his eyes wide.
"You're the blacksmith," Elara stated, not asked. "You've got the highest Strength stat among your group. You're their tank. Learn how to use this. It'll keep you alive longer."
Leo stared at the shield, then at her, a glimmer of understanding starting to dawn in his exhausted eyes. .
"Right," he said, his voice gaining a new resolve as he slipped his arm through the rawhide straps. "Right. I can do that."
"Good," Elara said curtly. "Now we move. Upstream. Fast. The smell of this blood will draw scavengers, and not just the four-legged kind."
With that, we were in motion. The pace was a punishing, shuffling jog. Elara took the lead, setting a rhythm that pushed the newcomers to their limits but didn't leave them behind. Leo, with his new shield, and Maria, now armed with a hatchet and a knife, formed a protective cluster around the Cleric, Samuel. I brought up the rear, the goblin spear feeling awkward and alien in my hand.
The clearing and its grisly contents disappeared behind a bend in the stream. Now was the time. The immediate threat was neutralized, and we were moving. Now was the time for information extraction. I needed to gauge their mentality, their capabilities, and most importantly, their loyalties.
I moved up, falling into step beside Samuel. He flinched slightly as I approached, still clearly unnerved by our sudden, violent appearance.
"Samuel," I began, my tone deliberately conversational, a stark contrast to Elara's drill-sergeant bark. "Tell me about your Vocation. The System just designated you 'Cleric.' What does that mean to you? What abilities did you start with?"
He seemed grateful for the chance to talk about something other than the immediate prospect of death. "I… I got a pop-up, just like for my Vocation. It said my primary attributes were Will and Vitality. I started with two skills: Minor Heal, which you saw, and something called Divine Ward."
"Did you use Divine Ward?" I pressed.
He shook his head, a flush of shame coloring his cheeks. "I tried. The notice said it was a passive skill that would reduce incoming damage, but it required… I think it said 'unwavering faith' to activate. When those things charged us, I… I panicked. I lost my focus. The ward never came up."
Interesting. A skill dependent on a player's mental state. That aligned with what I'd anecdotally observed. This System wasn't just about stats; it was about synergy between the player's own psyche and their Vocation's mechanics. Samuel's low Will score wasn't just a number; it was a direct reflection of his current lack of self-confidence, and it was crippling his effectiveness.
"That can be trained," I said reassuringly. "Fear is a rational response. Controlling it is a skill, just like casting a spell. We'll work on it."
I saw a flicker of hope in his eyes. He wasn't just a collection of stats to me. I was treating him like a person with a problem that could be solved. I was building a different kind of alliance than Elara was. She was building a fire team based on fear and respect for her power. I was building one on trust and intellectual empowerment. We needed both.
My gaze flickered to my own status, the Subtle Influence skill a glowing line of text in my mind. The temptation to give Samuel a little nudge of confidence was immense. It would be so easy. So efficient. But I held back. I couldn't afford the mana cost right now, and using it so quickly on a new ally felt… sloppy. Crude. This needed a lighter touch. For now.
My mind kept chewing on Samuel's problem. A faith-based shield that fails when you're scared? What a raw deal. It was like giving a firefighter a hose that only works when he's not near a fire. I sidled closer, keeping my voice low so only he could hear over the slosh of our hurried footsteps.
"So that Divine Ward thing," I started, trying to sound less like a professor and more like a guy figuring things out. "When you tried to use it, what did it feel like? Was it like trying to remember a word on the tip of your tongue, or more like trying to lift something too heavy?"
Samuel looked grateful for the question, like someone had finally asked him about the mechanics instead of just the failure. "The second one. Lifting something. When those… things… were screaming, it felt like this… this wall of noise was pushing back at me. I could feel the power in my gut, but I couldn't get it to come out. It was just… stuck."
That was perfect data. It wasn't a knowledge problem; it was a throughput problem. His Will stat was the pipe, and fear was clogging it. Fix the clog, and the power flows. Simple. In theory.
"Okay. Okay, that's useful," I said, making a mental note. "We'll get you there."
I let him chew on that little bit of hope and jogged a few steps to catch up with Maria. She was clutching her new flint knife so tightly her knuckles were white, her eyes still wide and darting at every shadow. She was a bundle of frayed nerves, ready to snap.
"Maria," I said, and she jumped, startled. "Easy. Just me."
"S-sorry," she stammered.
"Don't be. You did good back there. You stood your ground. That's more than most would do." A little positive reinforcement couldn't hurt. It cost zero mana. "You're a Woodworker. What does that get you? What can you do?"
She looked down at her hatchet, then at the forest around us. "I… I know things. About trees. When I look at that big one over there," she pointed to a massive, dark-barked giant, "my head just… fills up. It's an Ironwood tree. The wood is dense, heavy, almost as hard as metal. Terrible for burning, but amazing for making tool handles or… or mallets. Or fortifications."
Her voice grew a little stronger as she spoke, the fear receding as the confidence of her Vocation took its place. She was describing a passive analysis skill, just like mine, but specialized.
"And this one," she gestured to a slender, pale-barked tree. "That's a Springwood. It's light, flexible. You could make… bows. Good bows, if you had the right tools to shape it." She looked at her small hatchet with a frown. "This isn't the right tool."
"But you know how it could be done?" I pressed.
"Yeah," she said, a flicker of pride in her voice. "Yeah, I do. If I had a good knife for carving, a scraper, something to make cordage with…"
I glanced at Leo, who was practically hugging the crude goblin shield like it was a holy relic. "And him? What can the Blacksmith do?"
Maria's face lit up. "Oh, Leo's amazing! We found that rocky spot"—she pointed back the way we came—"and he just put his hand on it and knew. He said it was full of iron ore. He said if he could build a furnace, a real hot one out of clay and stone, he could smelt it down. He said he could make us real weapons. Swords, spearheads… armor."
The a-ha moment hit me like a physical blow. This wasn't just a random assortment of survivors. It was a matched set. A Woodworker who could identify the best materials for bows and shafts. A Blacksmith who could find the ore and forge the metal for heads and armor. And a Cleric who could, hopefully, learn to keep them alive long enough to do it. The System hadn't just thrown them together by accident. It had dealt us a hand. A complete starter kit for civilization.
All we had to do was survive long enough to assemble it.
We rounded another bend, and Elara held up a hand, bringing our ragged column to an abrupt halt. She pointed up ahead, not with her spear, but with her chin. About two hundred yards upstream, the bank rose sharply into a series of jagged, water-carved cliffs. And nestled in the face of the largest cliff, partially obscured by a curtain of hanging moss and vines, was a dark, gaping hole.
A cave.
It was exactly what we had been looking for. A defensible position, elevated, with a clear line of sight down the stream. But as my eyes adjusted, my enhanced perception picked up something else. A flicker of movement near the entrance. Not an animal. It was smoke. A thin, grey tendril, barely visible against the dark rock, curling up from beside the cave mouth.
Someone was already there.