Double-Blind CH126

The sun bathed my bedroom in orange hues as I reviewed the options for King’s Ranger. I tried to focus on the positives.

It appeared to be a mostly ranged class.

As a secondary, it integrated cleanly with Ordinator and was tied to my true level, which meant I didn’t have to worry about it lagging behind in level like my Page Class.

It was usable as an additional identity, if I wanted to go that route.

There were options that served as shortcuts for mastering other weapons, which solved my problem of constantly falling back on a crossbow.

All things considered, it really could have been worse.

Still, I kept coming back to the same repetitive thought. Nychta’s friend was an asshole.

Unlike both the Ordinator and Page class, King’s Ranger personified the one element I’d wanted to avoid from the start. It was flashy as hell. There were trick shots, massive attacks that drained almost all mana to utilize, even some options for drawing aggression.

More problematic was that the name wasn’t for show.

King’s Ranger. Emphasis on King. There were feats like <Fealty>that gave bonuses to acting on the king’s orders. <Steadfast>granted a massive power boost for coming to their defense. The potential connection to that court the Suits were pursuing wasn’t lost on me.

I supposed it helped to some extent in terms of providing an additional cover. It would be easy to spin as an alternate reason for seeking the suits out. But I didn’t like the idea of being beholden to anyone. Especially when I had no idea who they were. With luck, the class being my secondary would diminish whatever pull the “king,” might have with his entourage.

There were two acquisitions that came with the class. <Bow Journeyman> and <Acclimation,> a skill and feat respectively. Because of the nature of hand crossbows, and the clunkiness of their larger counterparts, I’d been limited on range from the start. It was possible to inflict serious damage at considerable range with <Probability Cascade,> and its counterpart, but it was unreliable by definition as a method of attack. Being able to pepper targets at range while my summons ran interference, then swap to my crossbow for anything that broke mid-range range, was far closer to ideal than the way I’d been haphazardly throwing myself into fights.

It would help differentiate me in social settings as well. Using the same weapons regardless of identity was going to bite me in the ass eventually. If I wanted to distance Matt the Page from the Myrddin persona, it would be easy enough to have the bow as Matt’s primary weapon. Bow and saber for Matt, knives and crossbows for Myrddin.

<Acclimation> was a little more questionable, in terms of benefit.

According to the description, it buffed navigation and mobility in familiar environments. I’d lived in or adjacent to cities all my life, so I was most likely to see that benefit in urban environments. Which was a serious boon—if the skill itself wasn’t a joke. No way to know until I tested it.

All that in mind, I used all but one of my feat points to purchase <Bow Adept,> which upgraded the <Bow Journeyman> skill. It was the first time I’d seen a feat directly affect a skill. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the sort of flexibility the direct combat oriented classes had access to from the start.

I glanced at the time. Just past seven. As antsy as I was to talk to Ellison, waking him up and dragging him off somewhere was the perfect way to start this off wrong. I just… needed to be patient. With that in mind, I bought a small training bow and a padded target.

<Kinsley: Negotiations are going well. People have been noticing how quickly we’re building. Got a few merchants from that group of fuckers I mentioned. Not sure what made the difference, but you were right, walking away from the table made a difference. Tired as hell. Gonna be dead to the world for a while, so VC if there’s an emergency.>

Still working her ass off. No surprise there.

<Mom: I’ve been monitoring the intranet. Expected a million things to pop up after the market went live and people figured out how to access it, but there’s almost nothing. There was something interesting, though. A partially made site that, I think, was meant to be a replacement for SMS after the cell towers went down. Guessing they abandoned it when the system integrated messaging went live.>

<Mom: It gave me an idea. What if we set up a discussion board? We could have sub-forums for crafting, dungeon sightings, people looking for groups, and User abilities and theory crafting. It won’t take long to make.>

I cocked my head, considering the possibility. It was an excellent idea. Not to mention, it would give mom a project to work on to distract herself, decreasing the chances of a backslide.

The problem was the potential for misuse. Scams, misinformation, or worse, a streamlined method for necromancers or similarly incentivized Users to lure others into a trap.

<Matt: Sounds solid. Just wait to go live with it until we have safeguards in place.>

My last unread message was from Sae. It’d come in later than the others, close to four in the morning.

<Sae: Is there anything I can do to help?>

I wasn’t certain how to answer. The purely pragmatic answer was no. Given what she’d been through and what she was dealing with, any help she could offer was likely to be unreliable at best. But she’d never struck me as particularly proactive before. When we’d formed our short-lived party, Sae seemed happy to let Nick and Jinny operate as co-leaders and went with the flow of whatever was put before her.

Which made this departure from the norm concerning.

<Matt: Plenty. What would you like to do?>

I winced after sending it, hoping she wouldn’t notice the flagrant attempt to stall. Our main hurdle was her inability to go out, well, pretty much anywhere. There was a very real possibility anyone who saw Sae would misidentify her as a monster and act—or rather, overreact—accordingly.

After a few more moments, I reached out to Iris.

<Matt: Hey. I know you’re still getting a grip on your power and your plate is already full, so feel free to disregard this if you don’t have the time. That being said, my friend Sae is in a bad spot. You’re not stupid, I know you probably realized that what she said about her armor being a dungeon drop wasn’t true. Good job taking that in stride, by the way. Anyway. What we need is some way of making it look more like armor. It doesn’t have to be functional, though that would be a future goal.>

A notification pinged, notifying me that the bow and target had arrived. I eased myself out of the bed and into the wheelchair to place the target on the far side of the room, next to the walk-in closet. I took a position across from it and took a few minutes to study the bow. It wasn’t particularly sturdy and had a light pull. Which was fine. It was meant for training, after all.

I nocked an arrow, noticing how smoothly it locked into place, and, taking in a quick breath, drew the string to my chin and released.

The arrow whizzed through the air, landing with a thump in the third ring of the target.

Interesting.

<Unsparing Fang> had taken an adjustment period to get used to, and even now, there were still times it felt unnatural and unwieldy. Every time I used a crossbow had me wishing for a Glock instead. But with <Bow Adept,> my movements were instinctive and intuitive, like I’d been doing it all my life.

The result wasn’t perfect, however. I took a few more practice shots and realized the problem. Horizontally, the arrows were well centered. My issue was vertical. I was compensating too much for drop, still adjusting for distance like I was using a crossbow.

Keeping that at the forefront of my mind, I tried again.

One arrow landed in a perfect bullseye.

Encouraged, I tried to replicate it and failed. Still, every shot I fired after landed in a tight grouping within the center ring. It’d take some work, especially when I added more range into the mix—the entire reason I was considering a bow.

I tore myself away from it after an hour of practice. Ellison had a strict internal clock that woke him at eight every morning, regardless of how much sleep he’d had. It was well past that now, and he still hadn’t responded. He was either avoiding me, or wanted me to come to him.

Fine. If that’s how he wanted to play it.

I opened my door to find Iris swaying on her feet outside the guest room door, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. She was still wearing the same clothes from the previous day.

“Where’s your brother?” I asked.

“Woke me when he left.” Iris yawned. “Said he was gonna go talk to Kinsley about something.”

This early?

I clamped down on the beginnings of alarm and fired a message to Kinsley, checking to see if Ellison was there. The anxiety grew more significant when she didn’t answer immediately. Maybe Ellison had fed Iris a line of bullshit, and Kinsley was still asleep, but I wasn’t willing to leave it up to chance. Kinsley was my achilles. The foundation of everything we were building and working towards. Few people knew that, but with his involvement up to this point, Ellison could easily put it together.

If he was working to undercut me, he would absolutely start with Kinsley.

The gruesome aftermath from the cathedral played on repeat in my mind.

“Gotta go. You need anything?”

Iris shook her head, stifling another yawn. “Nu’ uh. Just gonna talk to Sae.”

Dammit. If it wasn’t for the Ellison issue, I’d ease Iris into this, frame it so Sae understood what we were trying to do. Still. Out of all of us, Iris was the most empathetic. Which was probably why she’d moved my request to the top of her list.

I’d just have to trust her. “Thanks, kiddo.”

Iris knocked on Sae’s door as I passed her, exiting the penthouse into the hallway.