Chapter 199: Frustration

Aila’s expression didn’t change much as she wrote down Bridget’s status sheet but Jadis knew her well enough to recognize when she was hiding her disapproval. Clearly the orc’s stats weren’t impressive, but were they really all that bad? Thinking them over and comparing her companions’ classes in her head, Jadis could see an obvious difference between Bridget and Sabina even though they were only one level apart. The smith’s stats, when added up all together, equaled one hundred and thirty-nine total points. Bridget’s stats added up came out to be one hundred and fifteen. That was a twenty-four-point difference. Even taking into account that Sabina had gotten a five-point boost at level twenty, Bridget still lagged behind, and she had a combat class, one that ostensibly relied more on stats to succeed. Her attributes were also spread out more, with fourteen of them being put into Arcane.

Remembering their earlier conversation during Bridget’s interview, Jadis now had to agree with what Aila had said. A joint mage and melee class had some obvious downsides, primarily where stat spread was concerned, but they were made especially apparent looking at Bridget’s status sheet. Jadis had lucked out with her massive stats being able to support having both a melee and a ritual class, and even then, she hadn’t gotten her first active combat spell until a much higher level. It didn’t look like Bridget had been anywhere near as lucky as her.

“Your lantern spell relies on Arcane magic?” Aila asked, keeping her tone neutral and nonjudgemental.

“Yeah, it does,” Bridget answered gruffly. She had rolled over onto her side, one hand supporting her head while the other played with a bit of string she’d pulled off a blanket. “I’ll be honest. It’s been rough trying to get the points I need for it. I’ve had to ignore skills that would have been helpful for the warrior side of my class just to increase my Arcane, Focus, and Will. I’ve been really banking on the hope that my secondary class will make up the difference.”

“What skills do you have?” Jay asked, leaning forward and putting her chin on her fist. “I mean, you don’t need a lot of skills if the few skills you do have are good ones.”

Bridget sighed heavily, her expression growing dourer by the second.

“I mean, my primary skill isn’t bad. It’s just, not as useful as I’d like. Not yet, anyway.”

“That sounds like a cool skill to me,” Syd said with one eyebrow raised. “Magical fire that burns your enemies when you hit them and it does bonus magic damage? What’s not to like?”

“The fact that the bonus damage is currently only three points,” Aila pointed out bluntly. “Bridget has fourteen points in the Arcane attribute, which means the bonus damage is minimal. A fire-based attack combined with melee is going to do extra damage just by the nature of it—”

“But I could basically have the same effect by beating someone over the head with a torch,” Bridget finished Aila’s sentence. “Yeah, I know. It’s not great.”

“It has potential,” Eir said reassuringly. “Once your Arcane attribute reaches forty points, you’ll be doing an extra ten points of fire damage to the enemy with each strike, not just the blunt damage of a strictly physical weapon. It diversifies the damage you do in a good way.”

“Yeah, when I get it to forty,” Bridget sighed again. “If I get it to forty. How many levels away is that? How many levels where I’m ignoring my other stats and potential skills just to try and get my Arcane up to snuff so I can power this one skill? Which, by the way, I can only use for ten minutes a day because of how low my Focus is. Let’s speak truth here. I fucked up when I chose this class.”

Bridget’s self-recrimination for choosing a potentially dead-end class, while harsh, made a great deal of sense to Jadis. Sure, she wasn’t native to Oros, but she’d been living in the magic-based world and had experienced enough of its strange class and leveling system to know it well enough to recognize why what Bridget had done was upsetting her. Bridget couldn’t change her class. She’d picked a unique sounding but unknown class over other more stable and predictable options solely on the hope that it would be an amazing, super powerful class that would take her to the heights of battle prowess. Instead, she was struggling to tread water when compared to people with more mundane classes. She hadn’t even been able to gain membership into a mercenary company her sister was in because her class wasn’t deemed suitable.

How often had Bridget been rejected from mercenary companies? Jadis had never asked, but she had a feeling that the Gilded Rose wasn’t the only company she’d applied to and been refused.

How common was that scenario on Oros, Jadis had to wonder. Strange and unusual classes could be offered for unique deeds, but how often did they turn out to actually be good choices? How many people were out there who had been offered something like Aila’s “Battle-Ready Cliff Diver” class and had simply not taken the option because the risk of being stuck with something disappointing for the rest of their life was too strong? Was that part of why the Imperial Academy was willing to pay a high price to individuals who had gained unique classes and skills so they could be documented? So that future citizens could check and see if the class or skill was worth taking or not? It would make sense, so that people would know which classes to avoid as not worth the risk.

Bridget hadn’t had that opportunity, though, clearly. She’d rolled the dice and now felt like she’d gotten a losing number because her class hadn’t panned out the way she’d hoped it would. No doubt spending the past hour talking about all of their much better classes must have felt like rubbing salt in the orc’s wounds. In all honesty, Jadis couldn’t even fault the assessment. Bridget’s class, at least as it currently was, did not seem like it was as good as either of her classes, or anyone else’s classes for that matter. The only one among them with a worse start for their primary class was Aila with Cart Driver, and her secondary class had more than made up for the rough beginning.

Well, maybe she was letting Bridget’s mood affect her too much and she was being too harsh. Rethinking her position, the lantern light class did truly have potential, it just seemed to be a slow burn that would need time to grow into something better. With the right increase to her stats, Bridget’s odd class could become something truly special. She just needed time and a little boost to get there.

“Alright, don’t get all fucking dreary on us,” Kerr interrupted the moment of tense silence with a waggle of the now empty alcohol bottle in the orc’s direction. “Do I need to remind you that this big thundercock here can literally fuck you into some higher stats? And you’re practically guaranteed to get some kind of awesome secondary class just for being one of her buddies? Seriously, cheer the fuck up! You’re acting like someone died.”

Bridget stared at Kerr, her open-mouthed expression morphing from anger, to amusement, to confusion, then finally settling on embarrassment.

“Was I being a downer right there?” she asked, looking around at the gathered women. “I didn’t mean to, really. I just sort of vented a bit there, I guess. I mean, my class really isn’t as a strong as I’d like and we were literally fighting ice-based monsters and my fire didn’t do that much and—Fuck, I’m doing it again. Shit. Sorry.”

“I don’t know why you’re saying it didn’t do that much,” Syd said seriously. “Aren’t frost drakes rare and powerful magic beasts? You crushed the skull of one of them, and you’re only level nineteen. Eighteen at the time, actually. Isn’t that a hugely impressive feat?”

“It most certainly is,” Eir agreed with a warm smile. “I can guarantee you that most people at your level would not have survived a fight against such powerful beasts for as long as you did. Five of the soldiers with us nearly died in that encounter and all of them are more than twice your level.”

At those words of encouragement, Bridget’s cheeks darkened and she looked away, not quite willing to meet anyone’s gaze.

“Thanks…” she mumbled quietly, her genuinely bashful response making Jadis smile.

“So, want to tell us what awesome skill you got at level nineteen?” Jay asked playfully. “Or do you want to leave us all hanging? I know there’s no way you didn’t get something great after everything you’ve been through to get that level.”

Bridget gave her a sidelong glance, the corner of her mouth rising a bit.

“Well…”

“Come on, you did get something sweet, didn’t you?” Syd said, poking at Bridget from her other side. “Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

“It’s actually a pretty good skill,” Bridget admitted, her expression turning happier. “Pretty damn good, really.”

“What’s it all about?”

“Well, it’s—” Bridget started to say as she sat up but was cut off as Eir once again forced her to stay lying down. “Ahem, okay, right. It’s called Warmth of the Undying Light.”

“Hey, that is good!” Jay said with a nod of approval.

“It’s a damage resistance skill that only applies to a single type of damage, but automatically cancelling out half the damage done by that one type is very good,” Aila agreed as she wrote the skill description down. “Even if it’s dependent upon your lantern being lit to get the full effect, that’s still an exceptionally good defense skill, especially in areas where beasts that use cold-based magic are relatively common.”

“I w—wonder if environmental damage counts?” Thea asked quietly.

“Hmm,” Sabina hummed with a finger on her chin. “My guess would be that it does counteract the damage you’d take from extreme cold temperatures since it doesn’t specify ice-based attacks or anything more specific and just says cold damage in general. That means if we get caught in a blizzard, you’re the least likely to die due to exposure!”

“Comforting,” Bridget said with an amused huff.

“Yeah, it’s a good skill,” Kerr echoed. “So now that you’re all cheered up and not such a sad lump, tell us about your other class skills. I want to hear about what else you’ve got packing.”

Kerr had a point. While Bridget had told them her status sheet and her newest skill, she hadn’t really gotten into any details about the other skills her class had. She certainly didn’t have to, since she hadn’t heard anything detailed from the rest of them, but Jadis was also curious. What else had the orc gained from her class?

“Most of my skills are attribute boosting,” Bridget said as her mouth flattened out into a line. “Seriously, I really did take them almost exclusively. I’ll list them out, if you want.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Syd told her, but stopped as Bridget shook her head.

“No, it’s fine, really. I’m better off just telling you all at this point. I think I’ve officially thrown my lot in with you all. I mean, shit. I owe at least two of you my life. If I can’t trust you lot at this point, then I guess I’m super bloody fucked.”

“Then you deserve to know our skills as well,” Jay said, making a sincere promise. “At least I’ll share mine. What everyone else does is their choice, but you’re right. You’re with us now. A full member of the team. And you’ll be treated as such. All it took was one measly little death.”

With a laugh at Jadis’ comment, Bridget listed out all of her stat enhancement skills first.

“That’s a lot of them,” Dys grunted out as Bridget finished listing them all.

“Like I said, I had some trouble getting enough attributes to make this class work,” Bridget said, but this time with less self-loathing in her voice. “Other than my first skill and my last skill that you already know about, I have two other skills that don’t have anything to do with attributes.”

The flail skill Jadis half expected and showed no surprise at being there. She really was the only person who hadn’t taken a weapon mastery skill, wasn’t she? She was starting to think she needed to get one of those. Weapon skills aside, Bridget’s other skill, Burn Bright, looked like a great skill. When she pointed that out, the orc warrior shrugged.

“It definitely helps,” Bridget said, “but it has a high stamina cost, at least for me, so I can’t use it all the time or I’ll exhaust myself mid-fight. I see it as more of an emergency use kind of skill. I used it on that drake’s head, actually.”

“Like I told you earlier,” Jay grinned knowingly. “It’s not the quantity of the skills, it’s the quality of them. If we can work on getting your Arcane and Endurance attributes higher, you’ll be crushing enemies with that lantern of yours.”

“I can think of one way to work on getting at least one higher stat right now,” Kerr said innocently as she snuggled in more tightly against Dys’ side.

Kerr’s quip got some blushing out of the orc and some laughter from everyone else. With Bridget’s class and skills revealed and all other recent level ups discussed, the conversation relaxed and quieted as the group settled down for sleep after what had been a long and strenuous day. They’d already stayed up later than they should have and Jadis was starting to regret agreeing to take the undesirable second and third shifts standing watch. But at least she could have one of her selves sleep while the other two kept vigilant. No one else in the whole camp could claim that convenience but her.

As voices quieted and bodies stilled, Jadis released a sigh of contentment as her friends and lovers around her drew in close to her selves, warming her with their presence. It had been a rough fight earlier, but they’d made it through together. Hopefully, the frost drakes had been the worst encounter of the expedition and not a sign of things to come. But whatever the case would be, Jadis was glad to have all her friends here with her.

“Fuck! I completely forget to tell you all about those bandit tracks I saw in the woods!”

Even if some of them could be a bit frustrating on occasion.

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