The Pinnacle Warrior

Despite the Assassin’s casual demand and obvious expectation that it would be immediately followed, Astrid didn’t react at all. Instead of blindly falling in step behind the more experienced woman as she walked away, Astrid just stared at Miriam. In truth, so far as Astrid could remember, Miriam hadn’t changed at all in the year and a half or so since Astrid had seen her. Still sharp-faced, wearing armor that seemed the same to Astrid, and still thinking that Astrid was a child that would obediently fall in line.

Behind her, the rest of the Wanderers remained still as well, staring at Miriam. She took a few steps forward, and then stopped, turning around to watch them.

“Isn’t this why you’re here? I would’ve thought that you could have gotten control of your temper by now,” she demanded, a tilt to her head that the Astrid of a few years ago would have seen as joking confidence but now saw as cocksure arrogance.

“What is wrong with you?” Astrid asked instead of responding to the question.

“That evolving to Arcanite hasn’t even nearly solved half of the problems that I wanted it to,” Miriam answered immediately. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I’d like to think that you’re intelligent enough to understand what I’m actually asking,” Astrid spoke flatly. She didn’t expand on that, and Miriam nodded in slow acknowledgment.

“I wanted to see how far you’ve come, to be able to sense me and resist my influence.”

“Again, I ask,” Astrid demanded, “what is wrong with you? I’ve spent years away from this country because there are people here who are in control, both of the rightful government as well as the rebellion, who can take control of others. They make them slaves. Apparently, this side is the one that’s trying to not enslave people, but the first time I come in contact with some of the strongest people supporting the Duchess, I’ve got a shadow crawling up the back of my neck to try to take control of me? Are you stupid?”

“Oh, the kitty got fangs,” Miriam smiled, the look distinctly unkind. “Are you so sure it’s a good idea to bare them at me?”

“Yes, you could kill every one of us if you wanted,” Astrid waved her off. “What a surprise, someone more than a hundred levels higher than me is stronger. What I’ve heard, though, is that if some Arcanite tiers start getting too uppity up here on the surface, there are some people down below who decide to come up and remind them that there are people another hundred levels higher than them too.”

Miriam blinked slowly, her snark and confidence draining away. In its place sat the real delver, the member of the Golden Fist who had fought against monsters, surges, and even invaders for decades. The teasing smirk disappeared, and Miriam went totally still. A part of Astrid regretted having blown up at her, but the rest of her couldn’t bear to bow down before these people. If they decided they were going to try to bully her into submission, she’d resist if she could and make sure that nothing was easy. Plus, she doubted they’d do anything like that. Petulant prigs? Yes. Wholesale murderers and slavers? No.

Behind her, Astrid felt her party get into position while her mother stepped forward, a calming hand between Miriam and Astrid. Brighid stared meaningfully at Astrid before turning to Miriam.

“I’m sorry, as you know, you didn’t part on the best of terms.”

“No apology required,” Miriam said, still deadly serious instead of teasing. “She’s right on every account. As soon as we evolved, the Golden Fist became more limited in what it can do on the surface. It’s no surprise that the Marchioness took that opportunity to begin her revolution, and, beyond that, I’m not in the habit of murdering people for knowing the truth.”

Astrid narrowed her eyes at the woman in front of her. Her first ever interaction with Miriam had been when the then Adamantium tier delver had taken control of Astrid’s body and forced her to enter a conversation with Miriam and Isana, the Golden Fist’s Dungeoneer. At the time, Astrid was so starstruck that she had immediately gotten over the terror of having control of her body stolen from her. Even so, while Miriam had been more serious than Isana, she’d also been almost playful in how she acted.

Something about the Assassin was entirely different right now, and having spent a week with the Golden Fist after the Wandering Trials gave her no real insight into why Miriam was acting this way.

“You don’t need me to present you,” Miriam said, seemingly contradictory to the goal of bringing the Wanderers along that she was here for in the first place. “I’ll go ahead, let the Duchess know that you’re coming. If it is that you all want to go see the Duchess. This isn’t a demand, this is simply a request.”

Brighid started to open her mouth, to say something, but seemed to decide against it. She turned and looked at the Wanderers, waiting for their answer.

“We’ll be along shortly,” Astrid confirmed after looking at her party for confirmation. As soon as she said it, Miriam nodded and disappeared.

“She really tried to use a Skill on you even before she said hello?” Skandr asked, disbelieving.

“Why do you think you can talk that way to someone who’s over level 200?” Brighid demanded, cutting off the response Astrid was going to give.

“Yes, she did,” Astrid answered, ignoring her mother’s disbelieving face. “It’s not the first time, either.”

“Oh yeah,” the Wanderers all nodded, having long since heard Astrid’s story of how she had initially met most of the members of the Golden Fist.

“Are you crazy?” Brighid spoke up again. “Do you want to get crippled? Killed? Jailed? She can do all of those things to all of you and nobody would bat an eye!”

“If she wanted to do that, she would do it, and me calling her out for doing the very thing she’s supposedly fighting against isn’t going to change her opinion on that,” Astrid shook her head. “While I don’t know her very well, we’ve spent a lot of time around people who are as strong as her, almost. You don’t get to level 200 while randomly stomping out people half your level. Even if you try, you’ll get cut down before you get as far as she has.”

Instead of answering, Brighid leaned forward, looking into Astrid’s face as Savraba drew closer as well.

“You haven’t explained a lot about that town you were in. Neverwood. What kind of place was it?”

“I’ll tell you more about it after we get to this meeting,” Astrid shrugged. “For now, let’s go see what the Duchess wants to talk to us about, shall we?”

“This is… different from how I was expecting it to go,” Benedict said, looking at the rest of the Wanderers. “That said, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Despite herself, Astrid let herself chuckle at that. Then, she squared her shoulders, gestured for her mother to lead the way, and started walking. Maybe, for the first time since she’d been bestowed with the Class, she would be able to have a good meeting with a noble.

She wouldn’t hold her breath, though.

***

Miriam

Slipping through the shadows allowed Miriam to reach the outer walls of the building the Duchess had claimed here in Stahlstadt in just a handful of seconds. It probably—absolutely—would’ve been faster for her to just run, but the group of little monsters might have been able to notice her going. She doubted it as they didn’t have a good scout, but better to continue to force this aura of strength over them while she still could.

The edges of the Viscount’s home had been heavily warded by Saul, and would be able to hold off just about any attack. A trade-off for that was that, even though Miriam was keyed to the magical signature, it was better for her to take a second and receive his permission before she went waltzing through them. Enough high mana intruders being given permission to pass through would weaken the defenses’ reactions when somebody actually trespassed.

A flicker of shadow flew in front of her eyes to let her know that Saul had seen her approach and paused the wards’ protections, so Miriam disappeared into shadow once again. Without any further thought, she appeared in the dining hall.

Once upon a time, the man who lived here had not had any real place to receive visitors. He had an office off of his property, which is where he would meet with anybody, and hadn’t had any reason to develop a more formal system than that. The Duchess, though, once she had decided to make this one of her key staging areas, had refused to be so lackadaisical with her presentation. What had once just been a moderately large dining hall was now half ballroom and half throne room.

Since the Duchess had arrived back, the room was prepared more to be a throne room, to allow any visitors or subordinates to continue to see her as powerful.

The illusion was difficult enough to sell, given that she had been ousted from her seat of power, but the fact that she wasn’t even a high tier Mithril did her no favors either. To the regular populace, she was astonishingly powerful, but to the stronger individuals, those people whose support the Duchess needed to gain and maintain in order to succeed in wresting and holding power in the long run, it was a dangerous game.

As always, the Duchess was already sitting on her throne. Though she had no Skill to artificially extend how long she could remain seated, years of training, combined with her attributes, resulted in an individual who could literally spend days sitting in the chair without any visible negative effect. She didn’t put on her “leader” façade as she acknowledged Miriam, her usual kindly smile replaced by a faint frown and narrowed eyes.

“Welcome back, Miriam,” she said, allowing herself a brief smile before her face settled into the perpetual severity that had become her usual over the past months and years. “I was under the assumption that you would be bringing these newfound potential recruits of ours. What happened?”

“They’re coming,” Miriam assured her. Then, she looked behind the throne, where Aleksandr stood. Beside him, Isana was changing the base makeup of a giant vampire’s fang. It was something she had been fiddling with for months, constantly changing the originally ivory white item into something that was red, then black, then orange for a short time, and was now a nearly white shining silver.

“Do we need to step out?” Aleksandr asked, narrowing his eyes at her.

“Not step out, but all of us should be together for this,” Miriam answered, looking at the Duchess. “We’ll include you in our conversation, but it will be one where you have precious little to add.”

The Duchess narrowed her eyes, curious, but simply nodded in response. Though Saul and Leah weren’t anywhere to be seen, Saul was aware of basically everything that was happening within half a dozen kilometers and could send coded messages to anybody within that distance without any effort. He strode into the room about thirty seconds later, his steps quiet and unobtrusive, even as the mana in the room reacted to his presence. He spread his will out to keep every scrap of ambient mana from flooding towards him, stepping forward and standing beside the other members of the Golden Fist.

“How long until they get here?” Miriam asked him. “They didn’t seem in a hurry when we parted.”

“They had a brief argument with Brighid before beginning to come directly towards us,” Saul reported immediately. The faint presence of wind hummed with a pressure that wasn’t quite audible, but was instead something to be felt in the bones approached, and, as Saul gave his answer, Leah appeared through an open window along the eastward wall. “They are walking at a Bronze pace, and will arrive in maybe three minutes.”

Miriam nodded, turned to the pair of “guards” at the door and gestured for them to go out.

“Don’t let them in until we give permission. Hopefully, our conversation will be complete before they arrive, but if it isn’t, offer them whatever facilities and refreshments you would give to a foreign ambassador.”

Both guards saluted in response and walked out of the room, leaving only six people in the throne room, the Duchess and the Golden Fist. Then, finally alone, everybody looked at Miriam in curiosity. She didn’t hesitate.

“We already know that Astrid’s Iron tier Class was extraordinary rarity. It’s now guaranteed that her Steel and Mithril tier Classes were as well.”

“Guaranteed?” Saul asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Using her burst Skill, I can guarantee that she has over 4,000 Power. Assuming the Skill is Mithril tier, we can guess that, at most, it gives a 350% bonus to Power. With how fast she reacted and how it seemed to be the same Skill that also did an area of effect damage, I’d put it’s final output to be much lower than that. It’s not a mindless brute Skill, and she also had some secondary effects from the single attack she made on me.”

“Even so, within her burst, she has a higher Power attribute than you,” Aleksandr grunted. “She’s even stronger than we expected.”

“Significantly stronger than me,” Miriam affirmed as she nodded. “With all her equipment and whatever attribute bonuses she has, I’d guess while under the effect of her burst Skill, she has over 4,500 Power. I had to use a couple Skills to make sure that her attack didn’t destroy everything around me.”

“Would I be in danger if she landed a hit on me?” Leah asked, her eyebrows narrowing.

“In danger? No,” Miriam shook her head. “If you let her land a hit on your head, she might kill you.”

“Is she fast enough for that?” Leah pressed.

“Not at all,” Miriam shook her head. “I took the hit because I chose to, both to take her measure, as well as to keep the building from getting destroyed. However, she is absolutely an explosive finisher. I also get the feeling that it wasn’t her greatest finishing blow that I took. Just as fast of an attack as she could muster without any prep time.”

“So she is a monster,” Leah said, smiling. “If she is only barely Mithril, she will have almost exactly 4,800 points across all of her attributes. Perhaps around 1,300 Power, then?”

“You’re forgetting about her victory in the Wandering Trials,” Aleksandr interrupted. “Call that an additional 300 attribute points, rounding up.”

“1,400 Power then?” Leah corrected. “She was relatively well balanced in Iron, so call it about the same in Fortitude.”

“With equipment and Skills, over 1,500 Alacrity,” Miriam continued. “We know she had Steady Load, so 700, maybe 800 Alacrity?”

“Which would leave 1,400 points across the three mental attributes,” Saul mused. “Acumen would be lowest, though the other two wouldn’t really matter for us either.”

“I’d guess about 550 for Self-Mastery and the Magical Potency, the rest for Acumen,” Aleksandr finished.

“Since the rest of the party kept up with her, then we can assume that they’ve gotten extraordinary rarity Classes in Steel and Mithril,” Saul said. “In keeping with what they were like in Iron, the Bard will be well balanced while the Wizard will continue to focus on his mental attributes. We can assume Skandr will have somewhere around 1,600 or 1,700 Magical Potency. The Bard will have most of his stats around 800, with an outlier closer to 1,100.”

“The other two will be hard to get a solid estimate on,” Saul continued. “Felix seemed unsure as to what kind of path to take as a frontliner, though I suspect he will have moved towards a more traditional role than a half-finisher half-fighter position.”

“He better,” Aleksandr granted. “He wasn’t helping anybody by being mediocre in two places.”

“Could you tell if Muti had embraced the greater flexibility her boon was granting her?” Leah asked, interrupting her lover. “I don’t think she’ll become a magifighter in any way, but part of the beauty of being in her position is the opportunity to do various things.”

“Shadow mana was clinging to her just as much as it does to me,” Miriam said with a shrug. “I’d guess that she has narrowed down her focus but yes.”

As the Golden Fist continued talking about the Wanderers with as much detail as they could reasonably estimate, the Duchess continued watching. It was only because Miriam had known her for so long that she could see the surprise and, eventually, wonder that flickered across the eminently controlled woman’s face.

“That’s enough guessing for now,” Aleksandr cut off a line of questioning between Saul and Leah about if Muti would be capable of casting spells or instead would be a half Mage. Once everyone went silent, he glanced at Isana and said, “Make sure not to piss off any of the Wanderers by fiddling with their Skills or anything.”

“They’re too strong for me to do that now,” she waved him off, barely taking her gaze off of the palm-sized fang. “They’ll be too infused with mana for me to do anything to them while they’re still alive.”

“I figured, but I wanted to give you the reminder to not even try it,” Aleksandr insisted, reaching out and placing a hand on the experiment she was holding. The thick smell of blood suddenly filled the room, the magical material slicing through Aleksandr’s palm.

He didn’t react, though Isana scowled, pulled his hand back, and then frowned curiously at the tool. Only when Leah snapped loud enough to make the walls rattle did Isana look up. Her eyes were unfocused, but settled back in reality before she nodded and sent a wave of healing mana towards the Soldier.

“I will not harm them.”

“As good as we’re gonna get, I guess,” Aleksandr shrugged. Then, he looked back at Miriam and offered his thanks. “I appreciate you finding that out. Now, we simply have to address the reason why you wanted us to speak about this in front of our erstwhile employer.”

Miriam inclined her head towards the party leader, then looked towards the Duchess.

“Ruth,” she said, using the Duchess’s first name for the first time in what was probably a couple of years. The use of the other woman’s name startled her and shook her, and she looked at Miriam as a true frown covered her face.

“Ruth,” Miriam repeated, “these are people you need to win over. You can probably win the war without them, simply because we are pretty sure your side has a few more Adamantium tiers than the Marchioness. Of course, both sides are keeping their cards close to their chests, and we can’t guarantee anything until the war is over. Regardless, if Astrid doesn’t choose to throw herself into the Dungeon and, somehow, become Arcanite in the next two years, she will be even more influential than the Golden Fist ever was within the next two or three years, so long as she wants to interact with people on the surface. People are going to push her to slow down, and frankly, it’s better for her if she does, so plan on it.

“If that’s the case, you need her to firm up this new country you make, whatever it ends up being. Now, she’s created the best foundation she possibly could for herself, and if she chooses to take a few decades to finally lose herself in the Dungeon proper permanently, having her on your side will mean that the rest of the Wanderers are on your side and she will serve as a foundation you can build the new Humanity’s Bulwark on. If not, you’ll have someone that is stepping into our place and has an antagonistic relationship with you.”

She went silent after that, watching Ruth, the woman, not the Duchess, react to that news. It wasn’t often that the Duchess was forced to confront the fact that she was just a woman, regardless of political and personal power. Now, having lost the vast majority of the political power she had inherited with her Class and upbringing through this rebellion, she was also being told that an individual with immense personal power probably already was more capable than the Duchess and needed to be won over to maintain security in the long-term.

“So, don’t be like us and piss them off,” Miriam shrugged. “We were hoping to light a fire under them, but I’m pretty sure we burned the bridge instead of tempered the steel.”

“So, let me get this straight,” the Duchess said, knuckling her forehead as a knock came on the door, warning them that the Wanderers had arrived. “I’m about to meet a party of five people, each of whom could quite possibly kill me personally. Despite their immense personal strength, I need to impress upon them that they should be loyal to me, not out of duty, but out of friendship or some other positive emotion. I also need to make sure that I don’t step on their toes while continuing to rely on you for my protection, even though you have a negative relationship with them. Then, I need to continue this positive relationship with them for decades, while also strengthening my hold on this new country that I’m going to have to establish out of the wreckage of power-hungry nobles and assassinated predecessors. Am I missing anything?”

“Oh, plenty,” Isana giggled. “But that’s where you learn, isn’t it?”

The Duchess took a deep breath, raised a hand to her collar and pulled at it for a brief second. Then, she sat up formally and looked forward once again.

“Very well. Send them in!”