Name: Reyleigh [last name not specified].
Age: 20
Race: Half-Elf
Classes:
Blood Warrior - Level 1
Grants: +1 strength, +3 constitution, +2 charisma, +2 wisdom per level.
Feats:
- Blood Manipulation (Level 1)
- Blood Sense (Level 1)
- Blood Frenzy (Level 1)
- Empty Slot
- Empty Slot
Spells:
- Blood Stitching (Level 1)
Abilities:
- Life Absorption (Level 1)
- Corrupted Lifeblood (Level 1)
- Empty Slot
- Empty Slot
- Empty Slot
General Skills:
- Charge (Level 1)
- Greatsword Proficiency (Level 3)
Attributes:
Strength: 17 (+1)
Dexterity: 12
Constitution: 19 (+3)
Intelligence: 10
Wisdom: 12 (+2)
Charisma: 18 (+2)
Free Points: 5
Reyleigh’s heart skipped a beat. Disbelief, pride, and fear warred inside her. Stopping herself from looking around at the others to see if they noticed her shock, she tried to school her expression.
Does it even matter that a show some shock? Even Purity cycled through a wild range of expressions when she saw hers, right?
Trying to relax a little, she rolled her shoulders and refocused on her status. The first thing she noticed was, of course, her Class name.
So, Blood Warrior… I guess that’s me now. No going back.
I guess it could be worse. At least I can hide it somewhat. Necromancer would have been so much worse—an army of undead following in my wake! Blood Warrior might give me a few visual effects and I obviously can’t use my skills in public, but that’s manageable.
I think…
The initial shock of seeing the details of her taboo Class faded as she read carefully through the rest of the page. Even though the name was pretty sinister, the attribute gains were incredible! Soldier as a Class gave 2 points for strength and constitution, and that was considered above average.
Reyleigh didn’t know a lot about starting Classes, but the Watch had extensively drilled her on the Soldier, Ranger, Rogue, and Medic Classes since they were the most common ones. Comparing what she knew about them to Blood Warrior, solidified the fact it was way beyond the norm. The Class gave her an insane 3 points to constitution! An incredible bonus like that would very quickly translate into an exceptional physique where she could survive wounds, diseases and poison with ease as well as need less sleep and rest.
Every attribute had concrete effects on one’s body, mind, or soul like that. Reviewing quickly, she remembered that strength affected melee damage, power and muscle density, as well as balance and athletics. The last two properties were shared with dexterity, which also controlled finesse and fine motor skills as well as being the main stat for ranged accuracy and damage.
In the mental department, wisdom controlled how large a person’s mana pool was, but also magical tenacity, defence against spells, and spell control. Intelligence also affected spell control, but was more targeted towards spell damage, penetrative power, and general mental acuity. In a sense, one could say that wisdom and intelligence were opposites when it came to spell-casting, as wisdom gave better defence and could even negate spells cast by Mages with significantly lower intelligence. While intelligence was specialised toward offence and was essential to overcome the defence granted by wisdom.
Last, but not least, was charisma. The stat was decidedly the most obtuse and harder to grasp for Reyleigh, and she was frankly unsure about what exactly it did—which was troubling considering it was her second highest stat. The only thing she knew for certain was that it affected magic for certain special Classes and that it affected her presence and force of mind. Since she had 0 intelligence gain, she was pretty sure that it replaced intelligence as her primary stat for spell-damage.
Whatever that means, she mused. I’ll have to look into exactly what each stat means to me at some point. When I find someone who won’t kill or imprison me just for having my Class, that is.
Done with the recap on stats, she continued to analyse her status.
Strength was a stat she felt a keen interest in, and she was a little disappointed to see that it only increased by 1 per level. But her disappointment was quickly blown away by the plus 2 to wisdom and charisma.
By the Fallen, I’m going to be… incredibly powerful.
Reyleigh couldn’t quite process the changes she was going through at the moment, but the writing was on the wall – or the system at this point; she would be a wholly different creature soon.
Also, reviewing the stats made her realised that Blood Warrior was one of those Classes that were a cross between a mage and a warrior. The Watch thought her a lot of things, but she was coming to terms with the overly specific nature of the information. What she knew of Classes outside the ones regularly found inside the organisation was built purely on hearsay from the tavern or what little she had witnessed herself while living in the city. All this was to say that she didn’t really know a lot about magic or hybrid Classes at all. The only reason she recognised her own as the latter was stories from the tavern that talked about similar stat distributions.
As the stories went, there were Classes that fell in the Spellblade category and Blood Warrior certainly fit the bill. High magic stats with low physical attributes, but not totally specialised like pure mages. Her new class was even less specialised with its plus 3 to constitution, which was, frankly, unbelievable.
Also, the focus on skills synergizing with weapons was a dead giveaway. Mages rarely whacked people with their staves or wands, after all.
Spellblades were thought of as the middle ground. Not the best melee fighters nor the best mages, but something in-between. Where exactly Blood Warrior ended up on the ranking over the best hybrid Class was anyone’s guess, but Reyleigh had a good feeling about it.
Healing, weapon skills, magic and incredible stats. Taking taboo classes seems pretty overpowered. No wonder you hear about them so often.
The one thing Blood Warrior did the same as any other class was the five free points per level, which was totally normal. These points were typically used to balance out non-Class stats or to boost the main stats further if one wanted to really specialise. In Reyleigh’s case, she decided she would hold on to the points for a little while, since she was unsure of how she should spend them. She obviously knew next to nothing about Blood Warrior, after all.
Looking further down the page—skipping her feats, spells, and abilities for now—she was happy to see her hard work before getting a Class had paid off. One could train and condition one’s body to gain a non-trivial number of stats before getting a Class. After getting it, however, the ability to get stats by hard work was gone, except for those who managed to get Unique Feats, but that was the stuff of legends.
Her eyes widened again as she looked at her attributes. “Sixteen constitution,” she whispered.
Before selecting a Class, the maximum an attribute could be enhanced to was twenty, and surpassing fourteen was a massive achievement. Sixteen before adding the class gain per level was beyond belief.
And now I have nineteen. I’m level one with nineteen constitution! She almost jumped for joy before she caught herself.
They can’t know. At least not yet.
Charisma and strength were absurdly high as well. Dexterity was normal, as was her bottomed out intelligence and wisdom. Wisdom was almost an untrainable attribute without access to magic, but her Class would add to every level now, which was incredible.
Overall, she was beyond happy with her starting point. A lot of the citizens of Unbern sneered at the practice of levelling stats before Class selection, saying that it hardly mattered after gaining a few levels, but Alistair had always cautioned against such practices:
“You can’t get past the early levels if you die in the gutter to a thief or get backstabbed in the forest by a goblin. Good starting attributes are how you survive until you can become more than an ancle-biter.”
The wisdom in his words was clearly apparent to her now, and she was glad that she had trained hard to make him proud and gain an upper hand on the early levels.
Stolen story; please report.
Reyleigh could feel her reservations about her Class waning, which both excited and frightened her. In some sense, she was just happy to have such a powerful Class of her own. Being weak and helpless had been her life for a long time and even though she faced a challenging path ahead, she was starting to believe it would be worth it in the end. Unbern also didn’t scrutinise its citizenry too closely, which should let her return to the city without too much trouble. Practicing her skills and growing more powerful would have to be done in secret out in the wilderness, but she would deal with that like she had dealt with all the other hardships in her life.
What do I tell Alistair?
His severe face floated in her imagination and a dozen scenes where she told him about her new Class flashed through her mind. To be honest, she had no idea how her mentor would react to the news. He had personally hunted people with taboo classes down and killed them with his own hands. Would he do the same to her, or would he support her instead?
Shit… She cursed with a sinking feeling. I can’t dwell on this now. It just has to be another thing I have to fix when we get out of here.
Trying to bury her anxiety without too much success, she focused back on the text.
Now for the feats! She thought.
As she focused on them to expand the description in her mind, she reviewed what she had learned about Feats as a whole.
They were essentially passive effects that influenced the wielder in some way or made it possible to wield the Abilities and Spells of a Class. Essentially, The Watch had taught them that they were the knowledge and power of the gods made manifest and infused within one’s body and mind, which made it possible to create powerful spells and influence the world through your Class. At least that was the explanation most people believed. Nobody actually knew much about the screens and text people saw in their heads or where it came from, other than that it was a relic from before the Fall and one of the last vestiges of the divine in the world.
Done with her review, she read the description of her feats.
Class Feat - Blood Manipulation (Level 1):
Blood speaks to you, and you feel kinship to its nature. You are able to manipulate blood.
Class Feat - Blood Sense (Level 1):
You are able to gather information from blood you touch and can find blood at a distance. Blood within living creatures is easier to sense, as is blood recently shed.
Class Feat - Blood Frenzy:
Blood stirs blood. When covered in or near large amounts of blood, you become frenzied and gain a small increase to all attributes. The more blood, the stronger the effect.
All three of her feats made ice slide down her spine as her emotions rebounded from one extreme to the other. They just sounded so evil.
Blood speaks to me. Are you serious? I don’t want to touch blood and sense it everywhere. Or manipulate it, for that matter! And what’s Blood Frenzy? Am I going to go insane!? Shit!
She was freaking out now, and had to force herself to breathe slower to keep from hyperventilating. She had seen the Feat names when she scrolled past them, but the sinister descriptions were entirely too much. Counting to ten and breathing steadily calmed her down a little as she divorced her mind from the panic and tried to be objective.
Blood Frenzy was the worst of the three. It seemed to give her a boost to her attributes, which, depending on the size of the increase, could make her incredibly powerful when blood was spilled. That small caveat was a big detriment, however. Would she have to cut herself before entering combat or try to bleed her opponents as much as possible? Or would limiting the effect altogether be a better option?
The description didn’t say anything about the frenzy part of the skill either, but the name made it seem as though she would start to lose control, which in battle was a death sentence.
Gods damn it all. It’s a feat too, and can’t even be turned off. Fuck! I guess I need to test this thoroughly and try to find out how bad it’s going to be. If I become some rabid monster, this is going to be a problem. However, the attribute increase does seem promising.
There was no reason to panic yet. She felt fine now and dried blood still covered her entire body. Hopefully, it was manageable and even a solid increase to her power. Before the more rational part of her mind could disagree, she moved on.
The next two Feats sound strong and both of them help me wield magic. Blood Manipulation is probably going to enhance my spells and my abilities while also letting me influence blood in some way. I guess the weird blood vision I have is related to this. While using it, I could literally see inside my body and will my blood to heed my commands. I didn’t really have that much control over when and how I use it, though… But I guess that changes when I’m not on the verge of death.
Blood sense looked more like a tracking ability than anything else. The wording about information was strange. Could she learn something about blood just by touching it? She would have to try it out later.
Going through the descriptions with a more detached mindset helped a little, and her most recent roller coaster of emotion was on a downward slope again. She felt like she was switching moods faster than she ever had, but it was probably inevitable, considering the circumstances. She was trying to hide her taboo class from her friends and exam group, right after two near-death experiences, in the middle of her first real expedition, while looking for her mentor, after all.
When I think about it like that, this seems pretty intense… She thought to herself, shaking her head ruefully.
Reyleigh was positive that the others were looking at her now. Her face had cycled through so many strange expressions and the whole process was taking a weird amount of time. The Blood Warrior Class had a lot to look at, and since she wasn’t familiar with it in any way, she had to go through it with a fine-toothed comb. She really did have to hurry it up though, if she was going to have any chance of pretending to have a semi-normal Class.
She had saved the best for last, however, and was determined to read through her Abilities, Spells and General Skills carefully. General Skills were skills anybody could get through hard work and study, or by some extreme circumstance. They could be active or passive depending on the type and could influence anything beneath the sun.
Class Abilities and Spells were how a Class interacted with the world. It was hard to discern where Class Feats began and Class Abilities ended, and why some things were labelled as Spells even though they were long-term effects or used other resources than mana. Usually, though, one could discern between the three by categorising Abilities as active—well… abilities—that don’t use mana, Spells as active effects or abilities that used mana and Feats as passive aspects of one’s Class. However, like most aspects of the Class system left by the gods, these distinctions remained fluid at best.
Class Spell – Blood Stitching (Level 1):
You have learned about your body and experienced being ripped apart and injured. Through your familiarity with your own flesh and blood, you can will your blood to stich yourself back together at the cost of life-force. This spell activates automatically when you are about to die.
Class Ability – Life Absorption:
Steal the life-force of others by consuming their very essence. You shall never know exhaustion as long as a victim is near. Amount of life-force absorbed scales with power of essence.
Class Ability – Corrupted Lifeblood:
Corruption laces your lifeblood, making it solely yours and yours alone. You can coat your weapons and armor in corrupted blood at the cost of your life-force, which boosts effectiveness and infects your enemies.
General Skill – Charge (Level 2):
At the cost of your stamina, you charge forward with speed far above your normal means.
General Skill - Greatsword Proficiency (Level 3):
You have grasped at the art of the greatsword. The depths of weapon mastery are vast, and this is the first step to becoming a master.
Blood Stitching, a spell most would kill to get—at least if they could remove the sinister undertones. Healing or restoration was exceptionally rare, magically based types even more so. There were known medical abilities aplenty and some alchemical abilities who could mimic magical healing, including healing potions, but they were few and far between. She had heard of self-healing in stories woven by travelling bards and boasts from the odd adventurer or merchant—and she guessed that heroes like Alistair had similar abilities—but to gain one for herself spread a warm feeling of safety within her. It had already saved her life, and it would surely do so a hundred times over.
Being a Blood Warrior was worth it just for this. She knew it was. Even if she had to lie to her best friends and possibly be exiled or worse, this ability alone would warrant the sacrifice.
What gave her pause was the fact that it used life-force instead of mana. Aside from sounding incredibly sinister and dangerous, it didn’t really make any sense. She knew this was the spell that had activated when she almost died, but she had no idea how it didn’t just kill her faster.
How could it heal me when it uses my life-force to do it? Wont that just kill me faster, or at least just keep me in status quo?
It became a little clearer when she looked at Life Absorption, even though the Ability was utterly terrifying. She had to remind herself about all the fantastical changes her Class would bring several times before was able to read through the whole thing. The reference to victims and consuming left her with a deep feeling of unease.
So, I frenzy at the sight and presence of blood and then I’m supposed to do what? Drink it? This is… I don’t even know what this is… But it’s clearly how I gain more life-force to use for Blood Stitching. But how does that even work? Do I overload my own life force? Is it stored in the soul like mana is said to be? So many questions and no answers…
Complicated feelings were crashing inside her and were building up to an all-out war. She still felt good about the incredible power the Class offered, but the more she analysed the different aspects of it, the more she realised how close she was to an abyss she really didn’t want to explore further.
Will I be able to hold on to myself through all this? Or will I end up as some kind of blood sucking ghoul?
Trying to clear her head, she read the description of Corrupted Lifeblood and winced. It didn’t get any better—at all. She was corrupted and she could coat herself and her weapons in her own blood to infect others with it?
For a moment, she just stood there like a zombie, her mind in total overload. From being afraid, then elated and now experiencing true terror, she was suddenly totally exhausted.
Damn it all… What have I gotten myself into? Will I even be humanoid after this? Or will I turn into a monster who eats people to fuel my growth?
She didn’t feel any different. Even though the text in her mind’s eye described her new Class in monstrous ways, she just felt like herself. Like good old Reyleigh. Her mind was still her own, and she felt good, even better than what she had done before they had started the fateful exam.
She focused on the feeling of her own body and the sanctity of her own mind. Slowly, she relaxed her tense muscles and eased her breathing. Her face returned to its normal expression—she didn’t want to think about the despair that had marred it before she managed to calm down. Focusing on her breath and the feeling of it filling her lungs, she pushed the terror from her mind.
Even though she might be on the cusp of becoming a terrible creature of nightmare, she hadn’t succumbed to anything yet. She was still herself, and she still had a choice. With the power at her disposal, she would become fierce and powerful and she was going to control her own fate. She would make Alistair proud, and one day, she would stand tall and proclaim herself as a Blood Warrior. This was not that day, though. For now, she would have to lie and hide herself from everyone, even her closest friends, and if she was going to be able to do that, she needed to read the rest of her status. Finally, she was calm enough to continue.
Last was her General Skills. She managed to scrounge up a few motes of happiness over the fact that the divine system recognised her dedication to her chosen weapon. Greatsword Proficiency would let her wield her weapon a little more efficiently and would make it easier to learn, even without an instructor. Many watchmen or Soldiers had similar skills, and the recruits had been drilled on the importance of gaining at least one. This was the bread and butter of a true weapon master and at the higher levels, it could turn normal swordplay into something akin to magic.
Charge was the cherry on top. She knew she had unlocked it in the fight with the ogre and it had saved both her and her group. There was a reason she had invested so much time into learning it. One of the most important things for melee Classes—or Spellblades—was the ability to close a gap, and she knew the skill would be incredibly useful.
Reyleigh let out a shaking breath. Her body was still sore, her wounds still throbbing, but she could feel all of it healing faster by the sheer power she had gained. The blood was flooding through her veins, filling her with latent energy, and she could feel her body adapting. Her muscles were just a little bit stronger, her mind a little bit sharper and her power was champing at the bit to do her bidding. Even though she had her reservations—and even a large amount of sheer terror flowing through her—the unhinged power of it all was intoxicating, and with a quiet realisation, she knew deep within herself that she couldn’t wait to get more of it.