by Andrew Rowe
Edria Song is the Crown Princess of Edria, wielder of Diamantine after the tournament starts, and set to be the final opponent in the tournament. She has been blessed since childhood with six (!!!) attunements.
Kamaria Clarent was a Forgemaster who fought against Edria Song in the opening ceremonies.
Mikasa Kotestsu was an East Edrian Conjurer who fought against Edria Song in the opening ceremonies.
Zhang Yun was an Edrian with the Shieldbreaker attunement who fought against Edria Song in the opening ceremonies. He also had a crystal mark from one of the crystals in the Unclaimed Lands, but I’m not clear on if he actually used it during the fight.
Oskar Klein was an Emerald-level Edrian Legionnaire and lower level Sentinel who fought against Edria Song in the opening ceremonies.
Alexander Theas was a Valian Shaper and Swordmaster who fought against Edria Song in the opening ceremonies. I think he’s Elora and Sheridan’s cousin? Not sure. Need to ask about him sometime. Sounds cute, and possibly eligible.
I suppose I should also write down everyone that’s been listening to the story, just to help us keep track for later.
Corin Cadence is my brother, and much to his dismay, an Enchanter. He’s set to inherit House Cadence, at least for now.
Patrick Wayland is Corin’s retainer (after a decision he never asked me about). He’s about as kind-hearted as anyone can get, and loves stories about magic weapons and monsters. He’d probably love Reika.
Marissa Callahan is the best fighter of our little group of students, possessing a Guardian attunement with a vastly higher amount of mana than she should have at her age. We generally call by the nickname “Mara”.
Vanniv is one of my summoned monsters, and a karvensi, which is basically like a gargoyle but better.
Researcher is another of my summoned monsters. She’s a knowledge elemental, and loves learning things. She wasn’t there for the first part of hearing Keras’ story, so I may need to catch her up later.
Then, of course, there’s me — Sera Cadence, formerly known as Sera Shard, potential heir of House Cadence, and Summoner...or, rather, former Summoner. That’s kind of a long story, and one I’ll have to write about another time.
Appendix III – Combatant Abilities
A follow-up on a request to Keras
Patrick had asked about my approximate attunement level during the tournament, and I promised I’d try to come up with a better way to explain relevant power than summarizing it into a single number or name.
I still don’t have a great system, honestly, but I can try to give you some relative power assessments for how each of the main combatants would rate in different categories.
I’ll start by discussing my scale.
I’m going to rate people with numbers in several different attributes, such as Physical Attack, Physical Defense, and speed. My scale starts at zero, and generally goes up to around five, although I’ll have a few people with higher than five in a couple areas.
A rating of zero represents someone with no ability at all in a particular area. For example, a rating of zero for the Magical Attack category would mean they couldn’t use magic to attack people at all, to the best of my knowledge.
From there on, I’m dividing each attunement level into two points, representing the high and low end of each.
Thus, the list is as follows:
0 — Lower than Quartz
1 — Low Quartz
2 — High Quartz
3 — Low Carnelian
4 — High Carnelian
5 — Low Citrine
6 — High Citrine
7 — Low Emerald
8 — High Emerald
9 — Low Sapphire
10 — High Sapphire
11+ — Higher than Sapphire
Don’t panic when I’m saying things are “Sapphire” level. You can think of that as representing anything that has higher than the normal scope of Emerald abilities, including people with powerful equipment or unusual techniques. It doesn’t literally mean I was fighting Sapphire-level opponents in the tournament.
The attributes I’m listing are as follows:
Strength is exactly what it sounds like — physical muscular power.
Speed represents how quickly someone can move and attack.
Agility represents someone’s overall coordination, including things like accuracy and evasion. Some people are better at dodging or attacking, but that’s too complicated to split out for something like this.
Physical Attack represents how hard someone can hit in combat. This is related to strength, but it also takes things like weapons and techniques into account.
Physical Defense is someone’s ability to withstand being directly hit with a physical attack. It doesn’t cover evasion — that’s represented by Agility.
Magical Attack represents the power of someone’s attack spells. Simple and easy.
Magical Defense represents someone’s ability to defend against magic. This is a tricky one, since some people, including me, have different levels of defense against different magic types. I’m keeping it simple, and I may give some notes on individual people to provide more detail.
Endurance represents a person’s staying power in a fight. For this, I’m including both physical stamina and a person’s mana in the same category.
Technique represents a person’s general combat skill and experience. I’m also including things like general combat instincts in here, since instinct and perception are too niche to include as separate categories.
Utility is a catch-all category for anything else I’m not covering directly in the other categories, like healing magic, teleportation, and all that stuff.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of everything that is relevant in a fight, but I didn’t want to make a list that was too long and cumbersome.
Now, on to the list.
We’ll start with me.
Without any equipment, at the start of the tournament, I would have rated myself an 8 in Strength and Physical Attack — so, meaning about higher-end of Emerald-level. I could match virtually anyone in raw power, even without my Body-enhancing techniques.
I’d give myself about a 7 in Technique and Utility. In terms of Technique, I had quite a bit of prior experience, both in terms of tournament fighting and monster hunting. I also had a fighting style most combatants would be unfamiliar with, giving me an advantage.
Utility wise, my biggest edges were my Body-enhancing techniques and my ability to break the weapons of other contestants.
My Speed was probably a high 6 to start with, and grew throughout the tournament. After I improved my connection with Dawn, I would have rated it more like an eight.
My Magical Attack is hard to rate. Without my destructive aura, I’d call it a 1 or 2. The aura itself is probably an “11” in terms of raw damaging ability, but I couldn’t use it effectively. I’m going to call this a 6, since my general use of my destructive aura was probably just about as useful as someone with average attack magic, even if it was functionally very different.
I’d call my Agility roughly average for a Citrine, so somewhere in the 5 or 6 range.
Unfortunately, all my other abilities would be considerably lower. Endurance wise, I’d rate myself about a 3. My physical stamina was high, but magic drained me much faster than it would have for an attuned.
My Physical Defense was probably about a 3. My body was much tougher than the average attuned, even without any Body-enhancing techniques active, but my lack of a shroud was a huge disadvantage.
My Magic Defense was even lower, so I’d call it a 2. That 2 represents my ability to shape flame and stone, as well as the minor passive magic resistance that I’d gotten from Dawnbringer’s bond.
All in all, I probably rounded out to being somewhere in the high Citrine range, but you can see that my abilities were very offensively focused. I was very good at eliminating opponents quickly, but I suffered in sustained long-term engagements due to t
he cost of my spells on my body.
Most of the other combatants had more rounded capabilities than I did, since their powers reflected their attunement level.
For example, I would rate Meilin and Walter in the 6 range in most areas, for example. I would have rated Meilin a 7 on Speed, Agility, and Utility, and Walter a 7 on both Defenses and Technique.
Ari was…hard to judge. Most of the time, he only had about a 5 on Strength and Physical attack, but he could use his attunement to boost it all the way up to around an 8. That would decrease his defense, however, down from around 8 to about 5 — so, a big trade off. His Speed and Agility were both about 5 or so, too, unless he boosted them with his attunement — which could get him up to the 8 range on those as well, or maybe even higher. And then there’s his hidden power…well, I’ll save that for the next part of the story.
I didn’t have enough context to give Shun a rating in most categories at the time. At a glance, he seemed low in most attributes — maybe a 3 or a 4 — but with an 8 in Utility. I know a bit more now, and that assessment was flawed, but I don’t want to say too much and spoil later parts of the stories.
I’d rate the Green Guardian as a 6 in most categories, a 7 in Utility, and a 9 in Endurance, Physical Defense, and Magic Defense. Maybe even a 10 on Physical Defense. He was tough.
Xiaofan gets 8 across the board. She was absurdly dangerous, and very well-rounded.
As for Akadi, I didn’t have enough context to rate him accurately, but I’d have guessed 9 for Magic Attack, 9 for Stamina due to his ability to ignore injuries almost entirely, and relatively low for his physical attributes.
Lady Hartigan gets a 10 in Magic Attack, an 8 in Endurance to represent her colossal mana pool, an 8 in Magic Defense, and a 7 in virtually everything else.
Most of the people who fought against the crown princess in the opening ceremonies were in the Citrine to Emerald range. Alexander gets an 8 on Speed, Technique, and Utility, and 6ish in most other categories. Oskar probably had about an 8 in Defense, but it was largely irrelevant because of his opponent.
Edria Song was, by my estimates, somewhere in the 9 range on absolutely everything. Honestly, maybe even 10s on Defense. She was very impressive.
Reika is a tricky one. In her baseline human-looking form, she probably had a Strength and Physical Attack of about 7. I’d also give her about a 7 on Utility, due to the wings and the ability to turn into mist. She’d have about an 8 in Physical Defense, and more like a 5 in Stamina, Agility, Technique, and Speed. In her larger form, I’d drop her Agility and Stamina to 4, but increase her Strength and Physical Defense to 9. She had no Magic Attack to speak of in her human-looking form, but in her full dragony glory, her breath attack is about a 9.
Finally, I’d note that my abilities improved over the tournament. My second-stage mark from Dawnbringer would probably warrant an increase to a Speed in the high 7 range, for example, and a marginal increase to my other physical abilities.
Using specific weapons would also increase my abilities. With Dawnbringer, I’d give myself a couple extra points in Magic Defense, due to her ability to reflect spells. Maybe an extra point in Magic Attack, too, since she gave me some additional attacking options.
With the Dominion Breaker, if I was taking a fight seriously...let’s call my Physical Attack infinite, and leave it at that.
Acknowledgements
This book was hugely inspired by the tournament arcs in shonen battle manga, anime, and Japanese RPGs. It owes a great deal to things like the Hunter Exams in Hunter x Hunter, the Tenkaichi Budokai in Dragon Ball, and the Chunin Exams in Naruto.
I first created this setting for tabletop RPGs and LARPs. This story doesn’t directly coincide with the plot of any of those games, but there are a lot of references in here to story elements and characters from those games. I’d like to thank all the people involved in those games, especially the creators of Rendalir Remembered, a spin-off game run by Danielle Collins, Emily Gittelhough, and Trevor Gittelhough. They’re responsible for the creation of a character named Akadi, although my version of Akadi is very different.
I’d also like to thank the people who portrayed some of the characters from this story in my various games. Taer’vys Ironthorn is based on a character by Rob McDiarmid. Ishyeal Dawnsglow is based on a character by Andrew Warren. The Phantom Thief Ravenshade is very, very loosely based on a character by Amy Johnson.
Reika was one of my own creations, but portrayed in the LARP by Mallory Reaves. Dawnbringer, similarly, was one of my own creations, but portrayed in the live game by Carly Thomas.
I’d like to thank all my beta readers for their tremendous feedback, as always. They included Luke Chmilenko, Brittany Chhutani, Heather Crosthwaite, Gereon Hinz, Rob McDiarmid, Rachel Noel, Jess Richards, Bruce Rowe, and Christine Rowe.
Thanks to my fantastic cover artist, Daniel Kamarudin, for all his covers over the years. They’re getting better and better — and more so when paired with excellent graphic design work by Shawn T. King.
Devin McCarthy helped me with the symbols for Dawnbringer used in this book…as well as some other symbols readers might be seeing in the future. Thanks, Devin!
I’d like to thank my agent, Paul Lucas, for his tremendous support and advice.
Finally, thanks to the community over on Reddit’s /r/fantasy, /r/progressionfantasy, and /r/climberscourt.
About the Author
Andrew Rowe was once a professional game designer for awesome companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Cryptic Studios, and Obsidian Entertainment. Nowadays, he’s writing full time.
When he’s not crunching numbers for game balance, he runs live-action role-playing games set in the same universe as his books. In addition, he writes for pen and paper role-playing games.
Aside from game design and writing, Andrew watches a lot of anime, reads a metric ton of fantasy books, and plays every role-playing game he can get his hands on.
Interested in following Andrew’s books releases, or discussing them with other people? You can find more info, update, and discussions in a few places online:
Andrew’s Blog: https://andrewkrowe.wordpress.com/
Mailing List: https://andrewkrowe.wordpress.com/mailing-list/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Arcane-Ascension-378362729189084/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClimbersCourt/
Other Books by Andrew Rowe
The War of Broken Mirrors Series
Forging Divinity
Stealing Sorcery
Defying Destiny
Arcane Ascension Series
Sufficiently Advanced Magic
On the Shoulders of Titans
Arcane Ascension Book 3 (Coming Soon)
Weapons and Wielders Series
Six Sacred Swords
Diamantine
Soulbrand (Coming Soon)