Two days had passed since the caravan had arrived in the small town of Roquor. While bandits never appeared during their stay that did not mean that the would-be dark lord of Alterra did not have troubles to sort through.

Whoever had said that running a harem of absurdly attractive monster girls would be easy needed to be dragged out into the street and shot. Each of the girls desired time with Scott in their own way. Even a tiny hint that he did not like one of them as much as another would send them spiraling into a mildly depressed state. They were sweet girls. It was hard not to dote on them, but he could not. There were battles to fight. There were adventures to be had, and most of all he needed them to be able to handle the fact that he was only one man.

His special rewards program kept the girls competitive. Whenever one of them excelled during an activity they were rewarded with a bit of time alone with him. He personally considered it to be a lackluster prize, but the girls fought tooth and nail for the honor of a few minutes without competition.

Tessa and her amazons proved to be quite the interesting addition. They helped with the training sessions, as they were fully trained warriors. Scott knew military tactics from Earth, but only Scarlet and Rowan had any actual combat training before they had joined his team. The addition of skillful fighters had already helped to improve his team greatly in the few days that they had joined together.

Scott had thought long and hard over those few days before he had chosen to expend his attribute points from his most recent level-up. He had a tendency not to use them immediately, as doing so led to impulse choices.

His charisma and leadership grew as his level grew, but that did not mean that he should upgrade them. However, throughout his recent training he had opted to focus mostly on his vitality until it had reached a point that he could live with. His points had been spread around otherwise. What he needed to do now was determine a future plan of development. He had removed all of his equipment in order to see what his basic status would be. After he made his decisions, he turned his attention to the screen once more to try and discern his next move.

[Status]

Name: Scott Hunter | Race: Human

Class: Demi-Human Trainer

Alignment: Neutral

Fame: 12

Leadership: 15

Level: 12 (18.93%) | Attribute Points: 0

Health: 523 | Mana: 350

Attack: 9-13 | Defense: 9-13

STR: 23 | INT: 22

AGI: 30 | VIT: 50

MAG: 25 | CHA: 40

Scott rubbed his chin and considered what he saw. He had heavily focused on charisma and vitality. Most of the rest of his points had gone into agility and magic. Through rigorous training his other stats had increased by a few points, though it had become harder to do so each time.

"Agility helps me hit with my gun, but at some point in the future I'll either need a better gun or a hell of a lot of agility to make it worth it." He had already noticed that unless he delivered a solid strike to a vital area of a monster, his firearm took several shots to bring things down. Hell, even he could tank a few shots while butt naked.

"My charisma is decent, but I should probably put a point into it each level to go along with the automatic point that I get." Scott assessed his strategy for a moment then nodded his head. A steady two points per level for charisma would probably be fine for the moment. He knew very little in the way of magic currently, and what he did have did not require much in the way of magical stats. Those were fine for now.

Scott eyed the vitality stat for a moment. It determined how much health he gained per level, and how quickly he regained that health. At fifty, he had a fairly solid growth rate. Still, he knew that he would need more in the future. It also mattered when he acquired it. Each point he had in vitality would influence his health at later levels.

Strength only really came into play if he actually attacked something through directly using a melee weapon or unarmed combat. His attack and defense stat would be influenced by both it and agility depending on what he did. At the moment it was not his most important stat since he primarily fought with a shotgun. It ranked just above his magic oriented stats. After a moment, he decided that he needed to change that up a bit in the near future.

His shotgun would be good enough for a while, yet. He would spend his time developing strength through training since it was also his easiest stat to train directly. Scott decided on his new training regimen until he reached level twenty, then shut his status down.

Tomorrow morning they would strike camp, but they would not leave until the following day. That last day would be spent in furious trading by the traders, as they would want to achieve the best deals that they could prior to setting out for Sheiloon, a much smaller town a few days further to the west. Roquor was not much of a town, but the people there were friendly and offered the best chance to resupply before reaching Darcheilme.

The job he had accepted for his team would not prove to be as lucrative as he would have liked, but that was fine since he had traded the relatively easy money for excellent new companions. Whenever he saw the amazons interacting with his girls, it made him smile. His force potential had doubled, and he had not needed to take up a permanent slot in his command structure to do so. He could add over two dozen new permanent members to his team at the moment. That number remained available since he had simply hired mercenaries instead of taking them as his harem members.

All things considered, the money was secondary to what he had acquired. It was the start of the dream he had outlined for the girls. They would raise a freelance mercenary force made up of demi-humans, and create a place where demi-humans and humans could live together peacefully as equals.

That dream would not be easy to achieve. So long as they were merely mercenaries, it would be fine, but he was not stupid. Scott knew how the demi-humans were viewed even now. Things seemed better between the races after the recent system changes, but the old racism and prejudice still existed. The moment his team took up shop in a permanent location, people would start to see it as a threat to the status quo.

What he wanted to do, the very thing he had promised to Scarlet the day they had met, would be a hard thing to do. It was a dream, but it could easily become a nightmare. The entire ordeal was a wondrous tale in the making, and would require many hard battles to be fought. The current mission was nothing, a bump in a much longer road, but it was the start. It was the start, not of a simple story about day to day survival. It was the start of an epic saga.