The Bathrobe Knight: Volume 2 (7 page)

              Qasin didn’t even bother moving or deign to give them a response. He didn’t have to. He could just tell by how they moved that they were slow and weak. Struggling to even pull themselves up with weapons in their hands, gravity and the elements alone were an enemy to these creatures who had been spoiled by the weightlessness of the sea. Like sponges in fresh water, they had grown soft and lost all chance of victory in a real battle. It was why they leaned on underhanded tactics, ambushing the untrained and relying on their superior numbers.

“Oh, we have one that is scared speechless. This should be fun.” A reddish-scaled one started twirling her trident like a baton--a difficult task considering its length--as she slithered closer to the statuesque Qasin.

              “Well, I for one am happy for a change that our prey is silent,” one of the slimy guests chuckled to her cohorts. “The main course at a dinner party shouldn’t beg. It’s unsightly.”

As they jabbered on, Qasin pulled out his sword and rested it gently against his leg. Even though he wasn’t waving it around, the message was clear: he was, without a doubt, holding it as if threatening to transfix the first slithering creature to come within arm’s reach. The women, noting his confident posture, reeled back momentarily before casting their nets at him.

Before the nets could even spread out in the air, he had already dropped his weight, shifted his balance and shot out under them, transpiercing the closest mermaid on his right through the chest with his blade. As she let out a blood-gargled scream from the pain, he took his free hand and grabbed the haft of an incoming trident on his left side. Instead of trying to push against it, he yanked it behind him, throwing the trident into the side of the boat and pulling the wielder off balance. The look of shock on her face as the force jerked her forward quickly became the last expression she ever made as Qasin’s sword ripped free from his first victim’s chest and slashed straight through his second victim’s head, lopping it off just above the jaw line.

“Careful! He’s not going to go down easy!” The one furthest in the back yelled at her comrades, but they didn’t listen. Two more of the snakes threw their tridents at him, yet he easily parried one and grabbed the other with his left hand. As the now defenseless fiends tried to turn and run, he hurled the trident back at them, impaling the furthest scaly wretch in the back of the head. He then lunged forward and slashed the other of the two right between the shoulder blades.

“Run!” One of the small group of remaining attackers yelled, abandoning all hope as the last three snake-women went for the sides of the boat.

Qasin just smiled.
Weak, soft bodies. They move like sand trying to squeeze through the center of an hourglass,
he thought to himself as he hunted down and skewered, sliced, pierced and rended each of one his three slow victims before they could make it over the sides. The last one, pinned to the very railing she was trying to jump over, squirmed.

“Pleas . . . pl . . . let me . . . ive,” she managed to spit out, the loss of blood and crushed lung interrupting and drawing out her useless pleas for mercy.

“It is, as you said, unsightly to see people beg before they die,” Qasin mocked, ripping his sword free and splitting her right down the middle.

“Oh dear, after all the trouble I went through to procure us a small enough boat for you to pilot, you go and ruin it with all these stains,” Eve called out from behind Qasin, causing him to turn and look at her. “What? Don’t look at me. I’m not cleaning it up. You made the mess. You swab the deck.”

“Let the rain take care of it,” Qasin muttered, walking back behind the wheel. “It’s not like red and black don’t go together anyway.”

“Fine, rain. But if it doesn’t come off on its own, you’re paying someone to clean it up when we dock.” Eve paused, then let a wicked grin cross her face. “You’re just happy you had something entertaining to do for a change, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I am,” Qasin nodded, settling his hands back on the ship’s wheel.

“Good. Can’t let your blade dull, either. We have a lot to do in the future.”

“I know, but I don’t think any amount of practice will ever prepare me to fight your friend Stephanie. I don’t think the others could see, but I could. I watched her fight, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for that.”

“Awww, is my strong, little knight growing nervous?” She moved closer, placing one hand on his shoulder.

“Realistic. I think we need a plan if we’re to stop her before she uses your brother to complete her plan.”

“Don’t worry. She may have planned this for a long time, but I’ve been planning how to handle her for almost three decades.” Eve’s usually coy smile faded and a serious expression took its place. “I won’t let her plan come to fruition--not if I can help it.”

Qasin didn’t say anything. He just put one hand on Eve’s shoulder and looked out over the water.

Chapter 2: Stomach Pains

Darwin
:

              “Great Lord Darwin, I see you’ve been hard at work training!” A voice called out as it approached him.

              Darwin turned around to see the male of the three White-Wings he had taken into his faction approaching him. He had apparently just returned from his scouting mission for the StormGuard Alliance. “Well, I was going at it pretty hard, but my trainer went off to take care of some business. Now I was just thinking about going into the Captain’s cabin for some rest,” he said, suddenly becoming conscious of the fact he was holding two spoons like they were deadly blades.

              “Yeah, that trainer of yours has some interesting methods,” Daniel noted as Darwin quickly put the spoons away.

              “If they work, they work. I trust him well enough,” Darwin said with a shrug.

              “That’s true, and you’d know best. Speaking of which, something's been on my mind since we watched you at the beach battle earlier. How come you never use any moves? I mean, you’re at least Level 40, right? Shouldn’t you have some cool skills you can activate? Don’t most people pick their professions around Level 30?” Daniel asked.

              “Wait, so you’ve given up on treating me like an NPC?”

              “I have now. I figured your response to a question like that would let me know if I needed to keep up with the Great Lord Darwin stuff. Wait, I don’t need to keep up with that, do I? That’s just what you make the NPCs call you, right?” Daniel looked nervous for a moment like he was trying to sneak around at night, one of the floorboards had creaked loudly, and now he was waiting for a moment to see if anyone heard it.

              “No, you don’t have to call me that. I don’t think I even asked them to. They just started doing it on their own,” Darwin said, causing Daniel’s momentary look of anxiety to fade. “Not that I don’t enjoy it. It sure beats the heck out of the things I used to get called.”

              “Dork? Geek? Nerd? Dufus? Idiot? Dweeb? Loser?” Daniel started to list off some familiar insults.

              Darwin thought for a moment about correcting him, telling him that, no, it wasn’t those but rather an entirely different set of insults he had gotten on a daily basis. Things like: ‘freak,’ ‘monster,’ ‘experiment,’ ‘soulless,’ ‘dog boy’ and the other random insults that had been lobbed at him when his classmates had noticed his strange physique. It was just the natural reactions of any child to something he doesn’t understand, but they were still biting insults none the less. Not that adults were better--it was just that by the time he had reached adulthood, he was already so well accustomed to hiding who he was that no one was given the reason to cast such malicious remarks at him. After considering it for a moment, Darwin decided to just agree with him instead. “Yeah, some of those, for sure.”

“It’s okay. I used to get them too. My dad was an avid gamer, so I followed suit like a good son. I even beat the old NES Contra without losing a single life,” Daniel said as he played with an imaginary NES controller using his hands for visual effect. “So yeah, been there, done that, glad the VR came out.”

“Heh, that’s very impressive. Anyways, you were asking me about skills?”

“Oh, yeah, Chief, I wanted to know why you don’t use skills in combat. I mean, I’m a Scout-type Rogue, so most of my skills are only usable outside of combat, but even I got a few good ones when I finally made up my mind and picked out my specialization.”

“You picked a specialization? And you were Rogue then a Scout?” Darwin was more curious now than he had been earlier as to how spoons were a necessary training tool against anything other than a ramen demon.

“Well, uhh, no. You pick a starting ‘type’ of Base Class, then you pick a Job Class for it. For instance, there are a ton of different Rogue-type jobs, but, because I wanted to specialize in movement speed and stealth, I picked the Scout Class instead of one of the other more popular Rogue jobs like Assassin or Thief that might be more useful for other things.”

“Would you believe me if I told you I was logged into this world so fast I didn’t even have a chance to change my name?” Darwin laughed to himself at his own private joke.

“Did you just, like, do the VR equivalent of button mashing the whole way through?” Daniel cocked an eyebrow at Darwin.

Darwin wondered if stomping on a burglar’s face over and over again counted as button mashing. “Something like that, yeah. All I know is that, as soon as I ran into this game, I was already in Tiqpa, and before I had a chance to complete the tutorial, I was already in combat.”

“Dang, talk about a trial by fire. So you haven’t gotten to the skill section of your tutorial then, I take it?” Daniel nailed it on the head. “Have you ever thought of just loading the tutorial back up and going through it again?”

Darwin had touched the tutorial once or twice, but most of it had been originally locked due to his unique race and class. Whereas Daniel was a Rogue Scout, Darwin still didn’t even know how to access his skills. “I thought you said you were a gamer . . .” Darwin decided to just appeal to Daniel’s gaming nature. No gamer would want to go through a tutorial, even if he wanted all the information inside.

“Fine, fine, don’t do the tutorial, but at least let me walk you through some of the basics. I’d hate to think my new boss in the game got killed because he didn’t even know how to use skills, not that I see that happening anytime soon. First, let’s start with the basics. Use the Tiqpa thought controls to open up your main menu. Just think ‘Tiqpa Main Menu,’ and it’ll bring you to the main menu instead of the character screen they usually like to start you on.”

Darwin followed along quietly as Daniel explained the system, nodding as Daniel covered each point.

“Okay, once you get there, you should notice that there is a series of buttons underneath your character screen, do you see them?”

“Yeah, I do.” Darwin said with a little bit of open-mouthed wonder as if noticing them for the first time.
Why didn’t I think to check for this?
he thought as he read through the list.
Character Screen, Inventory, Friends List, Map . . . Skill Tree. There it is! Ugh, why didn’t I check it sooner?
“So what now?” Darwin asked as he opened it up.

“Okay, now that you’ve got the Skill Tree tab open, you’ll see a series of choices you’ll have to make and specializations you’ll have to pick from. Basically, the further in the game you go, the more you’ll have to make your character fit you. For instance, when I hit Level 30, I had to pick between three different trees a Scout can take: Lightfoot, Tracker and Guerrilla. I took the Lightfoot tree because it boasts stealth and speed-related skills that help Valerie, Mclean and me get around more easily. Speed wins wars, and travel time is definitely the worst part of most games.” Daniel leaned against the glass rails as he kept talking.

“So, you picked a Job Class that doesn’t specialize in combat in a game where fighting is the only way to level?” Darwin thought, thinking the notion was kind of off.

“Yeah, I guess you could say that, but I did it mainly because this game isn’t just about fighting. Sure, combat gives you experience, but the blade going in and out of an enemy isn’t the only part of combat that matters. I mean, if we were fighting some trash mobs, how long would it take to actually kill them?”

“Ten? Twenty seconds? A minute? It depends how large the camp was . . . Oh, I see.”

“Right. Even though the experience comes from the kill, a lot more goes into the kill than just your blade or my dagger sliding into the back of some desert bug. Even if it increases the time it takes to kill an enemy by ten or twenty more seconds, effectively doubling it, if it halves the downtime from three or four minutes to one or two minutes, wouldn’t you say the rate I gain experience would be a lot higher?”

“I’m guessing Lightfoot has skills that help out your surrounding allies with their speed issues too, or else it would be useless. If you still have to wait around for your allies to catch up, wouldn’t that mean you’d have to either go solo or travel with a group of only other Lightfoots to take advantage of the reduced downtime?”

“Yep. That’s dead on the money. For every Lightfoot that you're grouped with, the entire party will move a little faster. Abilities only stack so much, but a group of three flight-friendly Lightfoots, for instance, can easily outpace almost everything else in the game by a mile. Granted, though, that’s only because every choice I’ve made on my skill tree I’ve pushed towards group-oriented speed buffs.”