Kingdom Come

by James Osiris Baldwin

  I couldn’t recruit Ebisa, but I could still see her Hero profile in this menu:

  Red Ebisa, the King’s Blade

  A Mercurion bastard who is reviled by her own kind for her alien appearance, Ebisa is an unusually talented assassin – even by Mercurion standards. After the death of her ‘father’, the Master Artificer Kanzo, she has absorbed his knowledge and has become a master weaponeer in her own right, though her primary art is still that of the unseen killer. Like all assassins, she is suited to one-to-one and small-group combat, infiltration, and the destruction of enemy Heroes.

  Unit Rank: S

  Faction: Nightstalkers Syndicate

  Health: 3788

  Morale: 120%

  Speed: 150 (Extraordinarily Fast)

  Melee Attack: 554-638

  Melee Defense: 195

  Abilities: Duelist, Scout Leader, Armor-Piercing, Infiltrator, Chameleon, Damage Resistance (Magic), Inspiring Presence, Immune to Fear, Skirmish Leader, Poison Master.

  The Buffs and Vulnerabilities lists were inaccessible to me, greyed out. “What does a speed of 150 translate to, in terms of DPS?”

  “Good question. The average DPS rate is five seconds at eighty percent, and every percentage point after that reduces the attack interval. In mass combat scenarios, Ebisa is attacking around every three seconds. She can boost her speed in short bursts, which decreases that interval even further. You can see why I like her.”

  I chuckled. “Maybe we should just send her to go kill the Demon.”

  “If not for the horde of undead standing in the way, I would.” Ignas made a sound of amusement. “Recruiting heroes relies on two factors: having sufficient Renown to command their respect, and completing quest lines that allow you to form a relationship with them and bring them to your own faction. Once recruited, Heroes will be added to your Mass Combat menu, where you can improve their abilities and stats through training and point assignment. These abilities are separate from their individual menus, by the way – they apply only to mass combat situations in which you are their commander. You cannot normally add stats and abilities to people, unless they are bound to you as Karalti is.”

  “Right.” Fascinated, I had a look at some of the other hero profiles. Most of them were blanked out, because I had no renown with their factions. “Are there skills I can take to buff and improve Army and Hero units?”

  “Yes, if you choose to level the Leadership and Strategy skills. I strongly recommend you assign any free skill points to them. Now, on to Logistics.” Ignas gestured with a long hand toward Vulkan Keep. “Logistics covers your buildings, your means of production, and the quality of your equipment. Different structures are required to produce certain units. For example, if you wish to train Knights of the Red Star, you must have a Red Star Chapter House, which costs 15 Build Points and 1000 Gold. To support it, you require a Gunsmith, a Blacksmith, and a Hookwing Stables, plus a steady supply of steel, lacquer, and gunpowder. This makes the Knights rather expensive, but they some of the best hybrid cavalry in the world. You earn Build Points through quests, naturally. They can be offset with manpower, but that costs money. More hands means less Build Points are needed, but more gold is required to pay your laborers. The eternal question of time versus money.”

  “Huh.” I didn’t have any information in that menu yet. “Alright – that’ll do me for now. I’m starting to get lost.”

  “You will get used to it. I remember when my father trained me to use this very menu.” Ignas clapped me on the shoulder. “Once you reach Myszno and begin your localized quests, this information and these options will make more sense. But for now, we must turn our attention to the send-off. My officers approach, as does the Lady Suri.”

  Sure enough, Suri was headed for us, coming up out of the tunnel and gate that Ignas and his posse had used the day before. She cut a striking figure on Cutthroat, dressed in her mismatched armor, her axes belted to her hips, her oversized sword strapped over her back. She’d bought spiked leather barding for the hookwing, who was as ugly and ill-tempered as ever. The hulking dinosaur snapped and snarled at anything in her path, her tail sweeping from side to side.

  I grunted. “Mind if I ask a question, Your Grace?”

  “Of course.”

  “If you had one piece of advice for a would-be barbarian commander, what would it be?”

  Ignas snorted. Then, he thought about it. “My Vizier tells me I am too generous with my advice, but he is not here to temper my excesses, is he? I would suggest you train your mind. I see you and Suri and Karalti running all over the castle, training and redeeming quests, but I’ve yet to find either of you with your heads buried in a book.”

  “Oh.” My face got hot enough that I was glad I was wearing my new helmet. “Yeah, I’m kind of dumb.”

  Karalti huffed. “Ugh, this again.”

  “You are not, but you must learn that for yourself. Improvement is merely an issue of time and discipline.” Ignas twirled a hand, the Vlachian shrug. “Assuming Karhad isn’t burned to the ground, you will have access to the Karhad Archives and the library at Egbolt Castle after your victory. Gods willing, they are intact. We can assume the undead, unlike some human armies, do not need to burn books for fuel. The Archives reputedly hold some grand, ancient lore.”

  “Yeah...” Chastened, I stroked the side of Karalti’s neck. “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.”

  Ignas nodded. “My father raised me to believe that discipline is the foundation of everything good in life, including love. Despite his treatment of me, I still believe that. It is why I stand here today, preparing to address these men, while my brother’s ashes swirl around on the bottom of the ocean. You, Karalti and Suri are strong, but as Lucien demonstrated yesterday, strength of mind is as important as strength of body when it comes to dealing with tyrants.”

  Book 2: The Prezyemi Line

  Chapter 11

  The 4-day journey to Myszno was difficult. There were no enemy mobs willing to take on a fleet of noisy warships and a dragon, but we didn’t need them. The trip from Taltos to Myszno was a raw test of Karalti’s endurance, our stamina, our patience and cooperation. Before now, the longest flight we’d made together had been about eighty miles outside the Taltos city limits. The first day of our voyage, we flew 315 miles, spending the other 200-ish laid out with exertion on the deck of the fleet’s flagship, the Orozlan. We would fly until Karalti’s Stamina reached 5%, land, recover, and then go back out until we had to rest again. But it paid off - big time.

  For one thing, Karalti’s hunting problems were resolved out of necessity. She had to eat to support the amount of exercise she was doing, regardless of how much she wanted to whine about it. We snatched geese and Dimorphodons from the air and gazelles from the steppe below, and her stunted Hunting skill grew exponentially, shooting up from Beginner 2 to Apprentice 3. One of her vitally important skills, Laden Flight, climbed 10 points to Apprentice 4, lessening the burden of my weight and our gear. Her Stamina grew a full 10 points; her Dex swelled by 4 and her Str by 6.

  She wasn’t the only one stacking on those sweet, sweet points. Depending on our altitude, I was either cooking or freezing in my armor, hanging onto the saddle with numb hands and aching with fatigue. My resistance to the elements only took the edge off, and there were times I had to buckle myself on and just sleep like the dead. The exhaustion was part altitude, part physical exertion, but the better part of it was the mental battle going on behind the scenes: my old friends ADHD and dyslexia.

  Neither ADHD or dyslexia are states of mind: there was something physically wrong with my brain. I’d learned at an early age that if I wasn’t moving or doing something with my body, then my mind turned into a bucket of ferrets. The secret sauce to trigger this state of mind was boredom, and the only break in the monotony was when Karalti needed to hunt. Then, I could come back to my body with the adrenaline rush of flight. The rest of the time, when Karalti was gliding and trying to conserve as much energy as poss
ible, I see-sawed between unfocused excitement and skull-splitting boredom as the Sathbar Plains inched along below. By middle of Day 2, I was about ready to claw my face off, so I did something I’d never done in my life. I willingly took out the book I’d borrowed from the Royal Library just before we’d left Vulkan Keep - ‘A Very Brief Physick of the Solonkratsu’ - and sat my ass down to read.

  The book was written in Vlachian. Even though I knew how to speak the language, trying to read the script was hell. I’d gotten used to my augmented reading assistant, which compensated for my dyslexia and allowed me to flip through my HUD, my quest descriptions and the Wiki with relative ease. The ArchemiWiki suited my squirrel brain just fine, but this was ink on paper, words-on-page old-fashioned reading, and as it had been during my school days, it was pure torture.

  Dyslexia is hard to describe to someone who doesn’t have it. Words don’t look like they’re spelled ‘right’ somehow. Punctuation seems to leap out of nowhere, causing my eyes to skip and flick around. Letters sitting next to each other join up in weird ways. The whole time, my brain ferrets screeched and wrestled, trying to get me to put the book down and so they could go off on a happy tangent into the audio-narrated ArchemiWiki. The ‘Very Brief’ book was just a field guide, twenty pages long. It took me two days to read all of it.

  [Congratulations! Despite suffering a penalty, you have finished reading your first book: A Very Brief Physick of the Solonkratsu. +250 bonus EXP!]

  [You have gained +1 Int, +1 Will]

  [Through sheer force of willpower, you have reduced the severity of your Dyslexia debuff! You can now read books at 0.8% normal speed (up from 0.4%), and all language-related skills now gain -3% slower than normal (up from -5%)]

  [You have gained new knowledge: Dragon Physiology (B-Grade)]

  [New Feat: Budding Scholar. You have collected 10 items of knowledge at B-grade or higher! Find a Knowledge specialist (Librarian, Scholar, Archivist or similar) to learn more about the value of Knowledge and how to apply it!]

  [You have gained access to a new skill: Field Medicine (Dragons). Learn and practice to level up this skill!]

  Whoa, okay. I blinked as the notifications cleared, shivering as the stats jumped up. “Holy shit, Karalti. I just cured myself of part of my dyslexia.”

  “Really? By doing the reading thingy?”

  “Yeah.” I leaned back on the saddle. “And now I finally know why you have two hearts.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yup. We’ll talk about it later.”

  In fact, once I was over the mental torture I’d just inflicted on myself, the book had given me a lot to think about - like how Karalti could go from barely being able to carry me 10 miles during our maiden flight at Level 5 to almost 2000 at Level 8. And it was exciting, because it wasn’t just her physiology or anatomy at work: it had to do with the way that stats worked in Archemi.

  Archemi’s stat system had been bugging me for a while. In most games, you got stat points to assign, and you leveled by gaining levels and splitting points. I’d reconciled myself to this game’s stat training system many levels ago, but in the back of my mind, I’d always wondered - why the fuck were the numbers so high overall, and what the fuck did those numbers mean?

  For example: my Strength stat. I’d already figured that 10 was the average score across all stats for beginning players. When you went into character creation, the system then adjusted your scores a few points from the average based on your mental profile and your basic Path choice. Fairly simple - but what did it mean in context? Was 10 Str relative to, say, the hardness of a 2x4 plank of wood? Or someone’s jaw? Or to the weight of a sword like Suri’s?

  My first revelation was this: if you added a decimal and a percentage sign to your stat score, the number began to make a lot more sense. ‘10’ was actually ‘1.0%’. My starting Str of 12 wasn’t ‘twelve’, but 1.2%. Not excessive, but realistic for my current level of ability. There weren’t many normal people who could ninja flip thirty feet in any direction.

  But here was the interesting thing: the basic stat score of 1.0 was arbitrary. There was no ‘Average Joe 1.0%’ in Archemi. Everyone here, PC or NPC, had a unique set of racial, cultural, and Path-based modifiers at play. If I was correct about the stats being percentages of a base score, that base score wasn’t the one I could see on my character sheet. That meant my 4.7% Strength multiplier wasn’t ‘4.7% of 10’. It was 4.7% of an unseen number I didn’t know, a number that was not on my character sheet.

  In other words, all characters in Archemi had HVs: Hidden Values.

  Dun dun dunnnn.

  Being an antique games nerd, I knew all about HVs. They were a core mechanic of a ridiculously addictive game from the late 1990s - the Pokémon series. HVs explained how two Pokémon of the same species at the same level could have wildly different stats. There were two kinds of HVs in that game: Individual Values, which were like a character’s genes, and Effort Values, which were hidden values you could improve by battling - to a maximum of 510 EV points across all stats and 255 to a single stat. You trained them using special items and by fighting enemies that gave you EV points to one or more stats. A fast Pokemon might give you 1 EV point toward speed, a Rock-type toward Defense, etc.

  For example: if my hidden Strength score was 14 and my Str stat was 12, then at Level 1, I could multiply 14 by 1.2% to get my actual effective strength modifier: 2.32. Assuming that HV didn’t change, at my current level, my real Str score was 47 (14) - which came out to a percentile score of 9.212.

  Let’s say I got into an arm-wrestling contest with a guy who had the same Str stat as me - 47 - but who had a lower Strength HV. His percentile score worked out to 9.200 Strength. Assuming no debuffs, I would win our arm wrestle. This would be true even if he was a higher level than me or his visible Str stat was higher than mine, as long as that HV was lower. The only thing that really mattered was that secret percentile score.

  There was probably other factors involved in the Real Stat Score calculation, like levels or your character race, but it could explain Karalti’s exponential stamina growth. It would also explain how lower-level characters here could beat higher-level characters by leaning on their HVs and using smart tactics. You could do that in Pokémon: a lower-level Fire Pokémon could often beat a higher-level Grass Pokémon through a combination of clever attack selection and good HVs. It was even possible that there were HVs in Archemi we didn’t know about, like a Luck stat, or a Karma stat… or a Corruption stat.

  My experiences in the game so far seemed to support the existence of such a system. I could say with certainty that if I met another male Tuun Dark Dragoon who was the same level as me with a Level 9 dragon companion, that he and I would have very different stat arrays... and THAT led me down a brand-new train of thought. If Archemi had Individual Values, did it have Effort Values? And was there a way to hack EVs and increase those hidden scores?

  If there was a way to grow these hidden values in the same way that you trained EVs in Pokémon - and assuming I wasn’t completely deluded - then your stats could multiply those real hidden scores to superheroic levels. In Karalti’s case, I was betting that was what happened to allow us to travel the distance we had in such a short period of time. That was the most exciting part of this whole thing, because I was pretty sure we had unintentionally been honing our EVs the entire time I’d been in the game.

  The reason the book had tipped me off was because it focused on dragon hearts. Dragons had two hearts, and I’d learned that both of them served different functions. The Prime Heart was like a normal hearty-heart, pumping blood to Karalti’s brain and limbs and doing all the other regular things hearts do. The Drive Heart was a totally different beast. It was much larger than the Prime Heart, an ocarina-shaped, white and blue-fleshed organ that was connected to her lymphatic system. Most of the time, it was on standby. The Drive Heart only activated when she was about to fly. Whenever she pumped her wings, the organ came into gear: it would speed up, p
ressurizing her blood and charging it with mana as it activated the magic that lightened her body during flight. The book had said, and I quote:

  “...A dragon’s Drive Heart and the vessels which control the ability of flight are the essence of their Words. Each dragon differs in the strength of the Words written into their flesh and blood, the strength of their hearts, and their maximum potential as individuals. All Queens have larger Drive Hearts than their subordinate female kin, sometimes twice as large as their sterile drone daughters and sisters. In fact, every Queen born, even the weakest, is created with unique Words and her own uniquely powerful Drive Heart, which she must strengthen through the course of her conquests. The strength of this organ is the deciding factor of battles between Queens, because she with the strongest hearts shall be proven as the swiftest flier, the most enduring warrior, and the most talented at magic.”

  That ‘which she must strengthen through the course of her conquests ‘ line had gotten me thinking about HVs, because Karalti had drastically multiplied her flight distance over just three levels. The only way she could have done that was by percentage - by her visible Stamina score of 55 being multiplied against something.

  Not only that, but the improvement in her range implied that her IVs and the rate that she could improve them had to be good - REALLY good. Like... ‘holy shit, I have caught the shiny Mewtwo of dragons’ good. I was betting that she was exceptional even by Queen Dragon standards... which explained why Baldr-Ororgael would go so far as to offer me the position of Knight-Commander. He was willing to let bygones be bygones and put me in charge of the Skyrdon, because if this IV/EV thing was correct, my dragon would be able to pass her crazy-ass HVs down to her children - his future dragon slaves. Given that Ororgael was a dev, he probably knew all about the math that went into the backend of Archemi... and that meant his offer to me via Lucien had been made in desperation. He didn’t want any old Queen dragon. He wanted THIS one.