“You three might very well be the dumbest warriors I’ve ever laid eyes on,” Rulfar drawled, staring blankly at their three varying expressions. Samantha had the decency to look embarrassed, blushing as she reflexively hid behind one of her emerald wings. She’d been a warrior the shortest, so she at least had a decent excuse. Asher merely shrugged, feeling a bit sheepish, but still proud of all he’d managed to accomplish. He’d been dealing with so many different people coming after his head on top of figuring out his never-before-seen skills, that he thought he’d done pretty well for himself. Moxy, in typical fashion, merely grinned, staring at Rulfar hungrily like she was just waiting for this strategy meeting to end so that she could get back to trying to pester the bloodhound to go another round of sparring with her.

  As much as Rulfar tried to tell them he didn’t like needless violence, Moxy had eventually figured out that if she simply continued needling him long enough, he’d eventually crack out of sheer desperation to punch her.

  “How did none of you, even once, think about taking advantage of Asher’s Personal Rift to lug critical supplies around?!” Rulfar continued, looking at them all like they were idiots. “That room is the size of a small warehouse at this point! He could store hundreds of different kinds of potions in there, prepared explosives, various poisons, anything he could think of! Instead, I wake up this morning to find you three talking about what kind of couch to purchase for the space?!”

  “Hey, let’s see if you’re singing the same tune after you spent ten hours doing nothing in there without anything comfortable to sit on,” Moxy said, not fazed in the slightest as Rulfar turned his ire on her.

  “Those two have only been warriors for a few months,” he said, thrusting a finger toward Moxy. “You have been one for most of your life! I can forgive them the slip up, but you should have considered the combat applications of such a skill!”

  “I’m really more of a ‘punch them in the face’ kind of warrior,” Moxy grinned, getting a groan out of Rulfar as he sat back in his seat.

  Nearly a week had passed since Asher, Samantha, and Moxy had tracked down Rulfar and convinced him to join their team. Asher had thought revealing the fact that they were going up against The Council of Death, a group of fourteen powerful, undead wizards scattered across the continent, would be a hard sell. To his surprise, Rulfar had all but jumped at the opportunity after being shown a few of Asher’s memories of the lich, its demon army, and Horntho village being burnt to the ground. Not even learning that he had the never-before-seen element of Eternity in his soul, or that the liches had a forbidden ritual designed to extract it, had deterred the bloodhound from joining.

  If anything, that knowledge had only added fuel to the fire.

  As much as Asher and Moxy had wanted to take the fight straight to the lich who had been a constant thorn in their side and was committing atrocities left and right, Samantha and Rulfar were more hesitant. Asher knew Samantha was still worried about actually going head-to-head with the lich for the first time, and Rulfar refused to use his skills to track down the lich until he was satisfied with how they operated as a team. Seeing as he was the only one capable of finding the lich in the first place, they were forced to follow his demands, which meant two things.

  Training and strategy.

  The last week had gone by in the blink of an eye, the four of them falling into a simple routine. In the morning, they’d grab breakfast at the royal palace before flying out of the city and start sparring. Getting a feel for the skills their teammates had was critical to being able to fight alongside one another, and while Asher, Samantha, and Moxy all knew one another’s capabilities pretty well by now, Rulfar was a brand-new piece of the puzzle they had to find a spot for. Thankfully, with his Strength, Bear, and Blood elements, the answer was a pretty simple one.

  Their party finally had a front-line fighter who could take a hit head-on and shrug it off. Without dying.

  Once they were all too tired to move, and Moxy finished healing them up with her Life element, they would pick up lunch and talk synergy. Getting a feel for what their teammates could do was important, but Rulfar demanded they all sit down and take the time to come up with actual battle plans they could run and rely on when things got tough. Ways to synergize their skills. Methods to efficiently utilize different items. Asher knew it was all extremely important, but Rulfar demanded they spend hours discussing all afternoon, until they’d thoroughly run out of ideas and started throwing out ridiculous things that would never work.

  According to Rulfar, that was when the really good ideas started flowing.

  Evenings were left open, allowing everyone some time to unwind or work on their own projects. Moxy often vanished into the night, presumably having found some new version of her favorite underground fight ring right here in the capital somehow. Samantha alternated between her favorite hobby, crocheting, and practicing with her wings. She wanted to be able to move them as quickly and nimbly as her own arms, and she seemed to be approaching that point rather fast. Rulfar hit the library and a few of his contacts he’d made over the years, gathering as much intelligence as he could about The Council of Death and demons specifically. And Asher…

  Well, he spent a lot of his time avoiding Richard, the court wizard.

  Wizards, a class of people he was still rather uncomfortable with, were those who had devoted the vast majority of their long lives learning how to harness the energy within their bodies that was used to power skills. This energy, known officially as tritessence, was theoretically capable of being used to replicate any skill in existence, or could even be used to create entirely new ones if the wizard was talented enough.

  Richard had finally decided he wanted to replicate some of Asher’s more unique skills, and Asher wanted absolutely no part in it.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  In his attempts to hide from the wizard, Asher spent most of his evenings away from the capital, choosing to explore the other cities more thoroughly. With Recall at his fingertips, traveling a few hundred miles across the Noala Kingdom was as easy as breathing.

  Some evenings he spent hanging out with Rosh in Whikoga, catching up with his old friend and chatting about the world at large. Others were spent in Dormaul, lounging in the relaxing bathhouse he’d once been forced to kill a shark-assassin in named Fin. Sometimes he went to Poltar to swim in the giant lake and work on his endurance, or traveled to the sprawling city of Furora, where he wandered the city streets, people watching and getting in some additional training with Identify.

  By the end of their week of training, Asher’s skills had all improved at least a little bit.

  Name: Asher Holden

  Class: Assassin

  Unique classes available: Demon Slayer, Awakened Beast Hunter, Assassin, Librarian, Guardian

  Element: Spatial

  Ability: Astral Dip - Lvl 33

  Ability: Distortion - Lvl 33

  Ability: Personal Rift - Lvl 33

  Ability: Spatial Lock - Lvl 29

  Ability: Recall - Lvl 19

  Element: Knowledge

  Ability: Identify - Lvl 31

  Ability: Comprehend - Lvl 31

  Ability: Incorporate - Lvl 27

  Ability: Secret Seeker - Lvl 27

  Ability: Judgement - Lvl 18

  Element: Eternity

  Ability: Eternal Regeneration - Lvl 36

  Ability: Complete Resilience - Lvl 35

  Ability: Eternal Mark - Lvl 24

  Ability: Permanence - Lvl 19

  Ability: Sever the Thread - Lvl 24

  Resistance: Darkness - Tier 2, Truth - Tier 2, Scrying - Tier 2

  Shards: 13,378,843

  Most notably was the fact that both his Permanence and Recall skills had reached level 19, meaning they were each a single level away from evolution. His Judgement skill wasn’t far behind, and he could practically taste the Stage of Bleed waiting for him. He constantly found himself daydreaming about what his three new blended skills would be, and he couldn’t wait to find out. It would take him some time to actually receive them after entering the Stage of Bleed, but that didn't mean he couldn't get excited.

  “I don’t think defeating the lich or its demons is going to be quite as simple as ‘punch them in the face,’” Rulfar continued, snapping Asher out of his daydreams once more. “The four of us need to be prepared for just about everything, and that starts with loading up Asher’s Personal Rift with enough potions to feed a small army. Asher, you said you had a potion shop you’d shopped at before, correct?”

  “Yeah, there’s one in Dormaul owned by a rather nice woman,” he nodded, remembering his brief meeting with her. “She gave me a good deal on a half-dozen potions of Lesser Restoration, and even sold me a potion of Water Breathing and a potion of Bright Sight.”

  “Bright Sight? What is that?” Rulfar asked, his brow furrowing. “I’ve never heard of that one.”

  “Oh, it was some sort of silly experiment she tried,” Asher said. “She mentioned trying to basically create a potion that did the exact opposite of Darkvision. It should allow the drinker to stare directly into a bright light without issue.”

  “Why would you buy that?” Moxy asked, looking at him curiously. “Working on some grand-plan in secret?”

  “Maybe,” he admitted, wondering if it was finally time to reveal an idea he’d been working on. “It was part of my plan to take down Owl and the rest of the Knuckles, before we learned that they weren’t actually people and were just a powerful skill of the Head’s.”

  That had been quite the discovery, and Asher could still barely believe it. The fact that a skill existed that allowed the Head of the Assassin’s Guild to summon ten seemingly autonomous, master assassins to carry out their bidding, was mind-boggling.

  It just made him even more excited for his blended skills than he already was.

  “Regardless of your terrible taste in potions, we should start there,” Rulfar said, tapping the table with a firm hand. “We’ll see what potions she has on stock, and buy whatever we think might be useful. Asher, you said you were rich, right?”

  “Rich is a relative term,” he said slowly, gazing at his shard balance. He’d earned a ludicrous number of shards from selling the corpse of the greater demon he’d killed and a chunk of the lich’s own private library at the grand auction. “I do alright for myself.”

  Shards: 13,378,843

  “Yeah, he’s filthy rich,” Moxy confirmed, getting a glare from Asher as she shrugged. “What? You are, aren’t you?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny the fact that Rosh may have almost lost consciousness the first time I Recalled back to visit him after collecting my winnings from the auction,” Asher said, snickering at the memory of his old friend sweating as he struggled to decide whether or not to ask why Asher’s soul felt like it was filled to bursting with shards. Rosh had the Shard element, an element forbidden in the Noala Kingdom. The passive effect allowed him to sense the quantity of shards held by anyone he looked at, and apparently, holding thirteen million shards in one’s soul was a bit much to take in.

  “Then the plan stands,” Rulfar said. “We’ll buy up every potion that sounds even remotely useful. After that, we need to look at artifacts.”

  “Alright, let’s pump the brakes a bit here,” Asher said, remembering the price tags on some of the artifacts he’d seen in the past. “I can buy us some artifacts, if we stick to the cheaper ones, but even I’m not ‘buy out an artifact shop’ rich. Some of those go for millions of shards!”

  “I know, we’re not going to go crazy,” Rulfar reassured him. “Our souls have limits to how many we can carry, anyway. But we should arm ourselves as best we possibly can if we’re going to go after an actual lich. There’s no telling what defenses or tricks it’s managed to put into place over the past few millennia, so we better be damn well prepared.”

  “I agree with Rulfar,” Samantha chimed in. “We might only get one shot at this. Once the lich realizes we tracked it via its old staffs, if it gets away or we’re forced to flee, it will probably take measures to ensure the same method won’t work again.”

  “Which throws off the rest of our plan,” Moxy nodded, ticking items off her finger. “Find the lich, kill it, and pray there are items near it that can lead us to the others. If we lose this one, we lose the rest of The Council of Death as well.”

  “Exactly. That’s why we need to make sure we’re as prepared as physically possible before we pull the trigger on our assault,” Rulfar said, getting to his feet and flashing them one of his rare smiles. “With that said, I think that’s enough strategy for one day. Let’s take a trip to Dormaul.”

  Discord