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MT 324 - Discount Tournament Arc
🕑 Added 2025-11-07 06:52:53 +0000 UTCWhile there was some discussion going on between the group of soldiers who seemed to represent the anti-Folly faction, I jogged to the sidelines and hopped up onto the bleachers. My party had taken up a position near General Connatis, who was himself surrounded by some other high-ranking brass. A Level 26 colonel gave me a polite nod, but didn’t bother to introduce himself.
Seeing the man made me wonder how good the general’s intuition about this whole thing was. After all, what if one of the top-tier Gold parties decided we were trouble, and a horde of Level 26 veterans came to play this game alongside the other Littan Delvers? In most circles, those would be the top dogs, seasoned and battle-tested. While we had a small lead on a Level 26 with raw attributes, our skill levels would be somewhat low in comparison. It would probably come down to what builds we were up against and the occasional rock, paper, scissors of Delver fighting styles.
Someone like Varrin would be my natural counter. High Physical defense to keep my elemental spells from hurting him, meaning my debuffs wouldn’t apply, decent Fortitude to stop Oblivion Orb from tearing him up too badly, and a strong focus on damage to cut through my mitigation. Since he was all techniques, most of my skill counters wouldn’t matter. I couldn’t Dispel a sword through the neck, or Reverse Card an evisceration. Yeah, I was immune to Bleeding, but he and his spiritual clones could pump out enough raw damage to overcome my healing and Shielding.
Then again, if we were talking about bringing his clones to the fight, then I’d be justified in bringing Grotto and Shog. Now we were talking about something else entirely. In fact, with those two on my side, I felt pretty good going up against most Level 26 builds now that I’d thought about it.
“I will fight the follower of Sam’lia,” said a Littan woman holding a plain-looking quarterstaff. She floated out from the stands and down into the pit, her wheat-colored fur swaddled in robes of blue and gold. She was Level 16, mostly Gold, with a thin ring of Platinum surrounding the base of her soul. That told me a story about her Creation Delve.
“She definitely knows my name,” Xim muttered under her breath as she stood. “If she was going to use a title, she could have at least addressed me by ‘Cleric.’”
Xim gave me a look. I didn’t say a thing, but she replied to me anyway.
“‘Follower’ is accurate, sure, but it’s also lazy,” she whisper-yelled. “Since she’s wearing the robes of a battle priestess of Yara, that means she knows the appropriate way to address me. But she intentionally chose not to acknowledge my station. It’s the closest thing to an insult without actually insulting me.”
I intentionally avoided commentary, so she gave me some more context.
“It’d be like a professional barber looking at you and saying, ‘I’ll fight the one who never shaves!’ Yes, it’s technically correct, but it’s not very nice.”
“Are you coming down here?” the Littan asked in a condescending tone. “Or are you asking your party leader for his permission?”
Xim’s eyes narrowed, and I continued to bite my tongue. Etja and I exchanged a worried look on behalf of the unidentified Littan priestess.
Xim jumped down from our row and landed solidly on the sandy ground. She took off her shirt as she walked forward, which elicited a few choice reactions from the audience. Until General Bavecista used her elevated position to glare like an angry Vulcan cannon at the mostly male crowd. Nobody wanted to be chunked, so it became the quietest coliseum in history after that.
Xim finished stripping down to her underclothes, then pulled out her wyldweave armor. The unjustifiably smug expression on the Littan priestess’s face fell as her eyes locked onto Xim’s sculpted musculature and washboard abs. The cleric somehow managed to look twice her normal size once the deltoids were unleashed.
Most of the wyldweave armor was a single piece, which expanded for Xim to step into it before shrinking back down to a skin-tight fit. Once armored up, Xim came to a stop and withdrew the Scutum of Blood Scour from her inventory. She warmed up her shoulder by giving the two-thousand-pound piece of gear a few casual swipes back and forth, then let the bottom of the outrageously tall tower shield drop to the sand with a thwump. The spikes on its front shed a few flakes of dried blood from stains that couldn’t be washed away.
The priestess snorted. “I hadn’t realized Sam’lian clerics were so immodest. I suppose your masculine physique makes it difficult to find suitors without such displays.”
Xim waved a hand up and down at herself. “The correct term for what I’ve got going on is ‘stacked’. I can understand your confusion, though, since this is what it looks like when your body fat is in all of the right places.” Xim stared at the woman’s midsection. “Honestly, I didn’t know a Delver could even have a paunch.”
The Littan rolled her eyes. “It sounds like there's something dangerously wrong with either your depth perception or your understanding of first-layer anatomy. In any case, you should go and visit a real healer. Head trauma and chronic ignorance can both be fatal if left untreated.”
“Sounds like you must spend a lot of time at the local clinic, then. That’s very sad, since they don’t treat witlessness. The place you’re looking for is called a ‘school.’ Do they have one of those in the backwater burrow where you grew up?”
“Speargarden Academy is quite well known, not that I expect you to be familiar with the names of any proper institutes of learning. Regardless, that means we have at least one more school than can be found beneath the dream rock that your inbred tribe calls home.”
“Ah,” said Xim. “I see. If schooling couldn’t fix your suicidal levels of idiocy, then it must be hereditary. I should have known from the look on your face.”
“Hmm,” the Littan hummed nonchalantly. She started examining her nails. “And what ‘look’ would that be?”
“Like someone oiled your whiskers with a sort of pungent cheese that won’t wash off. Don’t worry, I’ve seen this before. It’s symptomatic of the underlying affliction of having no real friends.”
The Littan looked up from her nails. “What does this have to do with my parents?”
“The disorder is generally brought on by shitty mothers and fathers who forget to socialize their kids,” said Xim. “Tragic, but I really can’t blame them in your case. If I had a daughter with fur the color of lukewarm piss, I wouldn’t let her leave the house, either.”
“My fur color?” said the priestess with a pitying look. “That’s your next move? I might have been offended if your insult made any sense, but being lukewarm doesn’t even affect the color of urine. Further, your skin’s the color of my least favorite steed’s member when he gets too excited.”
“I know you must be lonely, what with being so frumpy and intolerable, but you should really leave the pack animals out of your bedroom.”
“I find it fascinating that’s where your mind immediately went. Speaking from experience? I know you people from the third will fornicate with anything possessing a heartbeat, and even a few things without.”
“Ladies,” said General Bavecista. Both of them looked up at the Level 35 hovering over them. “As entertaining as it is, listening to you both compete to come up with the least interesting insult possible, we do have an invasion scheduled for this afternoon.”
“Understood, ma’am,” said the priestess, sending Xim a self-satisfied grin.
“I’m gonna punch ya’,” said Xim, pointing at the priestess while she picked up her shield. “Hard enough to get that cheese off your whiskers, that’s for sure.”
Bavecista didn’t bother repeating the rules; she just shouted, “Begin!” and the two goddess-loving women turned their verbal spar into a physical one.
Xim catapulted toward the priestess. She was the slowest member of Fortune’s Folly, but could still move a few hundred miles per hour, even under the weight of her shield. Sand practically exploded with each footfall, magic fuckery being the only thing making her sprint physically possible.
The priestess didn’t advance. She calmly backpedaled and spun her quarterstaff in a blur as gold-white light filled its length. As the intensity grew, she released the staff, and it began to orbit around her, rotating so fast it looked like a disc of light. Then it broke into two discs, both of which circled the priestess once, then, with a flick of the woman’s wrist, they both buzzed their way towards Xim.
Xim led with her shield and was about as talented at dodging as I was. She took both of the Divine buzzsaws right on the scutum. They collided with a clang mighty enough to cause the barrier dividing the audience from the arena floor to shimmer in reaction. That likely just saved a few hundred soldiers from permanent hearing damage.
The collision went beyond the physical. Xim’s shield only stopped so much, and each circle of golden light shattered into a thousand spinning shards, passing through the scutum and driving through Xim’s flesh and spirit. I had one eye on the party interface and grimaced as her Shielding was chunked away, followed by a frightening amount of health. She hadn’t dropped to the halfway mark, but it was closer than I liked.
Sadly for the priestess, Xim’s side-grade into Psychic thorns looked to be synergizing pretty well with the bleed effect from the scutum.
The woman screamed and reached up to grasp her skull, dropping the staff that had reformed in her hand. Her eyes shot open wide and darted around frantically as blood began to pour from every hole in her head.
While the priestess had her mind eviscerated, Xim tore through the sparkling cloud of mana mist that her opponent’s skill left behind. Gashes covered every bit of exposed skin that I could see, but it hadn’t slowed her down one bit. If anything, Xim pushed herself even harder. Right as the priestess seemed to be coming back to her senses, Xim hit her head-on with the scutum, shield bashing the shit out of her and sending her skittering across the sand.
Xim didn’t stop either. When a two-thousand pound hunk of metal moving at over three-hundred miles per hour collides with a one hundred and thirty pound Littan, it doesn’t do much to that hunk of metal’s velocity.
Xim practically rode the shield forward while healing magic flooded through her, repairing the many gashes she’d suffered. Xim released the scutum and hopped up to plant her knees on its backside. Momentum drove it onward, and Xim pushed it downward so that when it lost that momentum to fall and hit the ground, it did so on top of the priestess’s prone form. The woman let out a ragged breath as the object crushed the wind out of her and skewered her with its spikes. She then immediately took a left hook to her still-exposed jaw.
As the Littan’s brain rattled around in her skull, doing a hard reboot, Xim sent a flaming right-hand straight into the priestess’s snout. The ground shattered, and crimson fire engulfed the both of them. The sand became molten and rose in a plume of liquid glass and rock before streaking through the air and rapidly re-solidifying.
When the dust cleared, it revealed Bavecista holding the priestess’s limp form with one outstretched arm, hand gripping the woman’s face. Some healing was going on beneath the hand to repair a few things that, if they remained broken, wouldn’t be conducive to her patient’s long-term survival. However, the second Bavecista judged the priestess to be out of mortal danger, she lowered herself a few feet and dropped the woman back onto the sand.
The priestess landed with a thud, letting out a wheeze as she regained consciousness. Most of the fur on her head was gone, and I knew from experience that basic health regen wouldn’t bring that back. She’d need to regrow it the old-fashioned way. Or find a magic barber. Or a good alchemist. There were a lot of ways to quickly regrow hair, really, but it was a damned inconvenience.
More importantly, her whiskers were gone, along with whatever oil had been on them, cheese-derived or not.
“Winner: Lady Cleric Xim Xor’Drel!”
Xim got a much warmer response for her victory than I had, which lent further weight to the theory that the Littan priestess really hadn’t had very many friends. Connatis was once again very energetic with his applause.
“In case you did not know,” he said, looking around at the hundreds of soldiers. “That was their party’s healer.”
When Xim made it back to our seats, she looked more contemplative than I’d expected. Hearing my silent question, she immediately explained.
“That opening attack hit way harder than I thought it would,” she said. “It broke through my shield and still walloped me for more than 900 damage. I was 130 health away from dropping to half and losing that one.”
I thought about Xim’s Lifeguard skill, which activated at 50% health and, with her HP pool, would have healed her back to full. I wondered which skill would have gotten priority, Xim’s heal, or Bavecista’s Denial?
“Now that you mention it,” Xim said, despite my not mentioning a thing, “priority for overlapping friendly effects is generally determined by their target. Lifeguard would have probably triggered automatically before Denial.” She smiled and gave me a shoulder-popping side-hug. “I really wasn’t that close to losing. Thanks. I needed to hear that.”
I’d made no sounds, so there’d been nothing to hear.
I blamed our near-constant use of Reveal to share Soul Sight. Even when I wasn’t psychically communicating, everyone had had enough experience seeing the world through the Arlo filter that they could all make predictions on how I was going to respond to things with an uncanny degree of precision.
“Why was that lady mad at us, anyway?” I asked.
“Hells,” Xim swore. “I knew there was something I forgot to ask. I got all wrapped up in our back and forth. I think that might have been a skill, by the way. Maybe a passive.”
“Weird passive,” I said, watching as a few robe-clad figures dragged the priestess away. She’d managed to sit up, but hadn’t moved on her own since.
“She’ll be fine,” Xim said. “I pulled my punches.”
“Did you? I don’t think she had a face afterwards.”
“She got healed!” Xim waved dismissively. “Probably just some shock. She’ll be fiiine.”
“Uh-huh.”
Varrin’s match was even quicker than Xim’s. The big guy got challenged by the stoutest Littan I’d ever seen. Short, wide, the man was built like a square had come to life just so that it could start lifting weights. He used an axe and shield.
On their first exchange, Varrin dropped into a lunge so low that his cheeks got sandy. He used the position to plant his sword through Stout’s armpit and out of the shoulder of his weapon arm. The Littan’s axe swing was completely interrupted, and the same move had also divided his shield into two useless pieces.
Varrin’s dark helm turned ever so slightly towards Stout’s face.
“Would you like to keep the arm?” he asked.
“I give up,” was the Littan’s response.
“Winner: Lord Varrin Ravvenblaq!”
Overall, I’d say it was going well.
Comments
ValkyriaObscura
Don't ever change Xim 😂
McIntosh Ewell
Saving the best for last? On that note, I feel like it's about time we get another helping of Shog
Throh_goblin Lord
Hell yeah Varrin, gettem
Levi
This is my favorite chapter title to date
blaze87b
Loving this series even though I've never played DND lol
blaze87b
Man, a "Are you not entertained?!" situation would go so hard
