Warsinger James Baldwin (read this if TXT) 📖

organized like a pyramid. We still had a few registered Heroes from the war, and I was easily able to call up their profiles and assess their suitability for taking on quests:

Available Heroes

●       Istvan Arshak

●       Zlazlo ul’Tiranozavir

●       Lazar Skaliz

●       Lord Franz Zediwitz

Recruited: 10

Total Available: 5

Unavailable

●        Suri Ba’Hadir (In absentia)

●        Taethawn the Bleak (Traveling)

●        Ur Robert Gehlan (Assigned to Quest: The Wolves of Fall)

●       Commander Timofey Lostra (Assigned to Quest: Border Crossing)

●        Count Lorenzo Soma (In absentia)

●        Vash Dorha (Critically Injured; 48% HP)

Things were looking grim, but now I was Voivode, I could also call in NPC heroes from other counties. When I checked the rosters available in the KMS rather than my Combat Management System, it seemed a little better. Calling on outside help required me to pay for a messenger and wait a few days for the message to be delivered and the hero dispatched to the quest. The quality of the NPCs the county lords would send depended on my level of Renown, and there was a chance they would reply to me by asking for a favor, or by issuing me a quest of their own. Given that my Renown with Myszno’s nobles was at the low end of ‘okay’ and – according to my sheet – other nobles would act competitively toward me, them calling in favors was likely.

[You are assigning the following quests: ‘Triage at the Border’, ‘Manticores – In MY Swamp?’; ‘The Whispering Marsh’; ‘Whatever a Man Soweth’, ‘Capture the Fort’, and ‘Where Children Toil’ for a projected cost of 3000 olbia. Is that correct?]

“Yes.”

[Quest dispatches confirmed!]

The money was deducted from our coffers, putting us to about 7000 olbia. The last thing I had to do was assign Engineers to survey Karhad’s water system in preparation for The World Beneath. That quest, along with a few others, carried hefty Renown and Build Point rewards. I needed as much of both as I could get. Gold was about to become an issue, but money could wait.

I reequipped my armor and sat on the edge of the bed with the Spear across my lap for a while, watching the faint traceries of black and red mana pulsing through the metal like embers. The Spear now had a sense of… gravity. A presence. Rationally, I knew it was just a fancy magic weapon, but I could swear that, as I looked down at it, that it was somehow looking back at me.

Rutha’s decision to give me the Spear had brought me and her both a lot of hardship. That one action had already changed the world in ways no one could have predicted two months before. It was one thing to play a bunch of games and stories about people getting drawn into world-shattering plots, and quite another to be at the center of one. But as I said to my friend all those years ago, “It is what it is, man.”

I opened my personal quests menu, and pulled up The Second Drachan War.

“Accept quest.”

Chapter 7

The Bashir Desert, Dakhdir

Suri had described Al-Asad as being mostly underground. Maybe the prison part was, but the horking huge fortress on top of it was definitely not. It was stuck on top of the only hill for miles around in this vast, dune-swept plain, looming over the desert like a giant stone wedding cake. Two concentric walls of white stone surrounded a steep, paved slope that encircled the keep, which was also walled. There was a steep zig-zag road leading up from a single gate at the base of the outer curtain wall, barely big enough to fit two hookwings shoulder to shoulder.

“Yikes,” I remarked to Lahvan, dismissing the Kingdom Management System. Since we’d left Myszno, every spare moment had been spent studying the damn thing, along with the Mass Combat menus. “Other than just flying in and dropping down into the middle of their shit, I don’t know how we’re getting in there.”

“Through the Sultir’s soldiers.” The shadow crouched on the saddle to my left. Its soft, hissing voice was somehow audible over the wind. “But it is pointless. The sorcery used to raise Bakhat Khasir cursed this fertile land to become desert. Al-Asad is a place of death. It is known.”

“I’m going to venture that being dead makes you kind of pessimistic.” From the air, I could see the faint outline of the river that had once wound across this place, the straight irrigation channels that led from it, and the impression of squared lots under the sand. It hadn't been abandoned for long - maybe twenty, thirty years. Long enough for the desert to crawl over everything and bury it. “Just as well we don't have to assault this place from the ground.”

I bent down over Karalti's shoulder, flaring my eyes to focus in on the castle. As I did, a flight overlay appeared, superimposing my view of the terrain. As it did, I got an alert.

New Quest: The Lion of the Desert

You have arrived at Bakhat Khasir, the fortress which guards the subterranean prison of Al-Asad. To learn more about the fortress, focus on it and label the different castle features. The more thorough you are, the better knowledge you will gain.

Reward: EXP, Skill EXP, Knowledge (Grade varies)

Special: This is a timed quest. You must complete it within seven minutes.

A seven-minute timer? That odd number of minutes was strange, but it was a welcome distraction. The augmented reality interface used for these mini-quests was almost exactly like the JADE-IV holomaps I'd relied on for five years while marching through the jungles of Indonesia, except they were less technical and more fun.

I got to labeling, eyes darting from place to place. Some of the elements of Bakhat Khasir were familiar from previous roleplaying games and late-night informative video binges. Most of them were from my on-the-fly experience