The Incompletionist

Phraan set a brutal pace for her training days. The schedule that she set afforded the team minimal time to eat and sleep on active days and definitely didn’t allow time to do anything else beyond train. The team was allowed to recover on the weekend and they managed to rebuild their endurance just enough to support the next week of training. Warriors are a strength-based class, so conditioning was a significant focus across the training session. The balance of the two weeks were spent across defensive focused training and basic weapons skills.

The basic Warrior class offers several primary development paths. Warriors are typically good at dishing out physical damage and disrupting enemy tactics, but on most teams developed teams rogues and mages are far more effective in these roles. Where warriors truly shine is in their capacity to soak up damage and manage the tempo of an engagement from the front. Whether adopting a defensively focused tank path or specializing in another martial path like Sword Master or Berserker, the use of specialized armor, equipment and weapons is essential to most Warrior specializations.

To support this critical component of the Warrior class Phraan elected to cover a wide range of weapons and equipment during the gauntlet of physical condition and combat exercises that she designed for the team. This would be a useful foundation for all of the team members, but Lando was the primary beneficiary of this training segment.

***

Lando was extremely tired from the training thus far that day, but judging from the state of his teammates he was considerably less tired than the rest of his team. Lando’s high initial strength stat as well as his general endurance and physical condition prior to awakening provided him with a better foundation for these activities than the rest of the group. Unfortunately, despite his physical advantages, Lando lacked experience or training in any type of fighting and it showed.

Category

Value

Notes

Name

Roland White

Race

Human

Origin: Earth

Class

Warrior

HP

150

MP

50

Spirit

500

Strength

150

Intelligence

95

Agility

95

Dexterity

90

Wisdom

95

Charisma

100

Discipline

100

Ingenuity

75

As Lando attempted to pivot his weight to his left foot and shift his stance to sidestep an incoming slash from Phraan, he lost his balance momentarily. The relatively heavy armor that he wore reduced his agility as well as his range of motion. Instead of dodging the slash from Phraan’s practice sword as he intended, Lando took the strike directly in his chest. Lando felt an explosion of force from the contact even as his cuirass dissipated a significant amount of the force from Phraan’s blow. Lando’s armor prevented any significant injury from the initial strike, but as Lando attempted to regain his composure and reset his stance, he left himself wide open to a follow up attack from Phraan. The elven warrior adjusted her momentum as she followed through the slash and circled behind Lando with practiced ease. She attacked the back of his knee with a fast strike that brought him down to a kneel and quickly followed up with an overhead strike on the back of his helmet.

Lando’s bell had been thoroughly rung by Phraan’s blow to his head. He crashed to the ground as Karen, Jim, Kelly and Sarah leapt to their feet. Lando had already proven that he could take a hit, but he and his friends still weren’t acclimated to the violence that was commonplace in Region Eleven and they simply reacted to seeing their friend fall. Several of the other instructors interposed themselves between the team and the practice ring to prevent another breach of training etiquette. The elves were knowledgeable instructors, but their rigid style, focus on decorum and lack of visible emotion didn’t pair well with the temperament of their human students.

In truth this first training session had been a wake-up call for the team. Having only two and a half days under their belt thus far they could see both how lacking their current abilities were relative to their elven instructors and their goals for the tutorial. The team could also see that the instructors’ methods for their practical education were much more violent and potentially dangerous than they were initially prepared to endure. Since the training team had a healer standing by, there was little risk of long-term injury from Phraan’s exercises, but that didn’t reduce the physical pain and exhaustion that each participant felt.

Once Lando had regained his composure, he was happy to see how concerned his team had been for his safety. Lando was especially happy to see Kelly’s concern for his injury. He already knew that he wanted to adopt the role of tank for the party and to shield his friends from damage and difficulty to the best of his ability. Lando’s mindset was laudable and would be one of the pillars of his success, but it wasn’t particularly compatible with the training regime that the elves had adopted for the tutorial. During this first rotation of practical sessions, each team member was required to participate in the basic training for each segment, only moving to specialized training in the future. So as a result, as much as Lando wanted to find the strength to protect his team, he had to watch as each team member cycled through combat exercises with Phraan.

It was hard for Lando to watch his friends get beaten up day after day. Lando used the frustration and rage that began to bubble up during these sessions as fuel to push himself harder each time he cycled through his own physical conditioning and combat exercises. Lando did not have the dexterity or agility to match the elegant stances and weapon skills that Phraan put on display across the week’s sessions, but Lando did find some success in combining a shield with a magically range extended weapon. For many advanced warrior classes the shield was situational equipment, often abandoned for an alternative like the buckler or another weapon when fighting primarily offensively. For Lando the shield would be the foundation to his entire style, ultimately becoming both his most successful weapon and his most important tool for defense.

Even with his relatively low mobility, Lando had both the agility and the strength to get into the right place at the right time and block, deflect or redirect hits with the great shield he had chosen as his primary focus within the tutorial. Lando also had the MP and Intellect to eventually become an expert in the use of magically enhanced weapons. During the training sessions Lando trained with a basic spear that also had a magic javelin function. Karl had found the weapon during the pre-tutorial bonus period and gave it to his brother, as using a spear didn’t really fit with Karl’s goals. Capable of generating force based projectiles, the magic javelin excelled in providing additional range and some piercing damage that complimented Lando’s use of the shield, even if the damage potential of the weapon wasn’t spectacular.

Although Lando never scored a clean hit on Phraan across the duration of the training, he could see that he put considerably more pressure on Phraan when using the great shield and magic javelin combination. Of course, Phraan was not using her full capability, but still this suggested to Lando that he was on the right track and he got to work learning how to get the most out of this classic combination.

***

Deldes and Delirin were kind enough to give me at least a little notice about what to expect on our next week-long expedition into the forest. Apparently, the territory that we’d be working through was populated by stone bears. Stone bears were like normal bears, but with magically imbued skin and flesh. My research suggested that the stone bears would be able to shrug off damage like a heavily armored opponent. They could also dish out the punishment, so even with some adjustments to my array of defensive artifacts it was going to be important to avoid any contact.

My loadout this time included a high powered magic rifle loaded with piercing rounds that were made from an extremely dense type of magic stone. These bullets were shaped and polished to a spectacular point, helping them to penetrate even armored opponents. I was also sporting a pair of goggles to improve my vision in low light conditions and protect my eyes from the second weapon I was bringing. The “laser pistol” that I had found on my first walkthrough of the Treefort was in fact an advanced and elegant device that could concentrate and release unaspected magic particles at a spectacular rate. Certain types of energy armor or magical shielding could potentially dissipate or deflect the magic particle beam that it fired, but fire from the magic particle gun could through just about anything else in a flash.

The first few stone bears were pretty easy to take with the rifle. They were operating solo either in the open forest or in one of the small caves that littered the area. I’d made the mistake of thinking that this pattern would continue and I wasn’t expecting the second bear to come charging out of a cave that I approached after a clean kill with my rifle on the stone bear sniffing the air at the cave’s entrance. Even at that abbreviated range, I was able to get a good shot on the second bear and my shot pierced its skull and took most of its brain out with it through the other side. The problem was the third bear.

I didn’t even get a shot off before the third stone bear caught me full in the left shoulder with a swipe from a massive paw with claws that looked more like steak knives. The pain from my feedback device was spectacular, but the hit was so strong that my energy shield wasn’t able to fully dissipate the force. My shoulder was definitely dislocated and I learned that the feedback device didn’t really reduce the pain sensation it created when you sustained a real injury that also created pain. This was a serious design flaw. I was in excruciating pain when I landed on my back about ten feet from the ursine monstrosity that was turning to dig in.

I pulled the magic particle gun from its holster with my non-dislocated arm and let it rip. There was no way that I could miss from that distance. My first shot punched a quarter sized hole straight through the bear’s eye and the second shot went straight through its heart. The collapsed to the ground, instantly dead. I was really hoping that there wasn’t a fourth bear and I really wasn’t looking forward to D&D resetting my shoulder or hearing about it for the rest of the week.