Born a Monster

The army was far from idle during that time; Rakkal might not be able to chase down the centaurs, but that didn’t stop him from trying. And from the morale of the troops, he seemed a notable degree more successful than Hortiluk had been.

I may have explained this earlier, that Hammer and Anvil is the tactic of driving the opponent’s cavalry into a heavy infantry force, the Anvil. This works best when the Anvil isn’t just standing there, easily gone around.

It also... well, the Hammer isn’t supposed to be outnumbered two to one. For all his politics and tricks within our own government, Hortiluk hadn’t made any great strides in keeping our friendships alive with the tribes that had been our allies.

When Rakkal was out, the central fortress was almost a ghost town, which allowed me to patrol the walls, checking for spots where termites were active. So far, I’d only found the two, but there were also areas with wood rot.

Rather than replace those with wood, I’d ordered stones from Rakkal’s Glory. No sense in throwing away diminishing resources.

But Rhishi, I can hear Kismet asking, why not the outside as well? Simple. The guards wouldn’t let me outside the walls until all of my healing was done. Flora wasn’t about to lose contact with her childhood friend; plus, she wasn’t about to do me any favors.

Blacksnake had opened my eyes to the world anew; Manahuru did no such... well, if you wanted a darker outlook on the world, I suppose he had.

Incidentally, if you ever wanted to know how evil your race can be, just check your System. If it has classes like Doomwarden, Necrotic Master, Slaughterheim, and Lifebane, that could be an indication of a darker history than you might want to explore.

.....

I did nudge Psychologist, though, to level one. It turns out that going around wondering what the hell people were thinking that led to them acting that way was a great way to generate XP for it.

It was a Scientific class that specialized in the treatment of mental and emotional wounds; don’t develop it when you have to spend over half your day in an infirmary anyway. And absolutely don’t do what I did, and mention it to Flora and Chamala where your fellow patients can hear you.

Out of all the odd classes in my System... well, okay there was Roustabout, which was some variant of Porter for mobile encampments. Somehow, I’d gotten almost 20XP toward that one. But the main limitation on classes appeared to be just becoming aware of them.

How had insane me selected just eight of them?

said Manahuru. So far, I’d been able to just remove disease from the patients and feed him on that, but he needed four mana a day, which I didn’t always have. The types I could convert to that were the same ones I needed to make Life mana.

It just felt, at that time, that I was running along a wheel or a river log, getting further and further from any kind of recognizable goal the harder I ran.

I told him.

I sighed.

I said.

I sighed.

I stopped walking.

I blinked.

Manahuru asked.

And as much as I wanted to argue, he wasn’t wrong.

I couldn’t remember a person I’d killed just for pleasure. Not that killing wasn’t sometimes pleasurable, never let it be said that I implied that. It just...

I wasn’t proactive about killing. It just didn’t have the same thrill that say, exploring brought me. Or meeting interesting people. Not just new people; meet a dozen different farmers and there isn’t a whole lot new to learn from meeting another.

Or was there? Agrarian was one of those flexible classes, farmer to rancher to orchard-keeper. So why did so many farmers just have the Farmer class?

But my feet had betrayed me, leading me back to the wallowing misery that was... well, almost any occupied hospital area I’d ever been in.

“I notice we are setting up additional tents?” I asked.

“Not you.” Cletus said. “If I let you so much as pick up a tent stake in your condition, my wife and daughter will hound me over it for a year or so.”

“If putting out the tent stakes is all that I can do...”

“I just said NO.” he said, but had his hands too full of sectional tent poles to stop me.

And yes, laying out stakes and helping to put up a tent would normally gain Roustabout XP, but apparently I’d done it often enough to exhaust that source.

“Might I help by carrying cots to the new tents?” I asked Leotan, the older son.

“If you can find them.” he said. “Or even get them here. We’ve been trying for months. Turns out that the frames are made of wood, which means fewer arrows for archers, or something. To hear Grimmin talk about it, wood isn’t quite as rare as metal, but it’s no longer as common as once it was.”

Grimmin was the quartermaster, an amiable enough person, if prone to overwork. He led a squad of laborers, although he complained that most of them were just Bearers, and few had the head needed to work in a warehouse.

Memory was one of those weird sub-statistics, sometimes using Intellect, and at other times Resolve. And yet, it was still Memory, and regulated the same set of skills, such as remembering what exact place each individual box had been emplaced at.

“I hadn’t heard of it being that rare.” I said. “There are still trees near Narrow Valley, and I presume near Whitehill as well.”

Leotan gestured with his head at the walls. “Trees big enough to make timbers like that? Problem isn’t trees, it’s usable sections of hard lumber.”

The Industrialist in me attempted to distract me. I’d run a lumbering camp, once upon a time. I had a magic that could merge pieces of wood together. If I could gather together enough people attuned to the Wood element, teach them the spell...

Attempted, I said. But the idea would come back to hound me later.

“But there seems to be plenty for tent poles.”

“You claim to eat wood. Take a look at this tent pole.”

I was about to say it had less nutritional value, and then I took a look at the rest of what my Reticule had to say about it. “It’s not a crafting problem.” I said. “The quality of the wood seems slightly less.”

“Like firewood.” he said, “Junk wood put to purposes that only higher quality wood normally would. Craftsmen forced to do things with inferior materials.”

“Are you certain you don’t have a level in Merchant?” I asked.

He shrugged, tamped a pole into place. “I’ve been forced to learn that classes aren’t everything. Do you know how many people ignore their skills?”

Skills. Cheap, easy to gain even without spending development points. Ignored by dolts like me.

“Leotan, has anyone ever taught you how to brew the woodsman’s healing potion?”

Those of you from technical realms, if you know what a treadmill or exercise bike are, you can draw that analogy.