Non-combat classes can be alarmingly powerful, especially when supplementing those with combat classes. In addition, non-combat classes tend to have more achievable class activities and quests, allowing its users to maintain level with their more violent counterparts. These, amongst others, are measures the System has taken in allowing several avenues of survival through the Apocalypse.

Giada Marino - Scholar - Intricacies of the System

____

Silas awoke the next morning to a chilling breeze. Drawing the covers closer, he snatched his axe off the bedside table and peered around the dim room anxiously, faint sunlight passing through the thick curtains. He couldn’t hear anything except for the blow of the wind and the birdsong it brought along.

Although there was an odd smell in the room, he couldn’t quite place it, and he grew distracted as the shadow from his resting armour quivered. His muscles bunched, then released as he realised it was just the curtains fluttering. Then, his brain ticked into order and he sighed, exasperated: the faint scent lingering in the room was Bandit’s…

Cursing the damned bird, he wondered how it had even got in; he had made sure to shut the windows at night. Pulling himself out of bed, he crossed the room, drew the curtains, and at once noticed savage yet precise tear marks around the window lock. Not only had the owl broken in, but it had done so without him hearing a sound. How?

Pacing through the room, he tried to find Bandit, but just as he suspected, the owl was long gone. After sniffing through the room like a bloodhound, he could guess what had happened as its scent was strongest by his bed covers: it had likely watched him sleep in its voyeuristic fashion before slipping away.

Cursing the bird once more, then a third time for luck, he shut the window as best he could and readied himself for the day. Shortly after, he left to tour the town again, hungry for some street food. He immediately spotted a redguard following him from a couple dozen strides back but acted ignorant of the fact: he figured it was something to do with him being the mayor of the neighbouring settlement and all. Besides, he doubted he could give the man the slip anyway given his lacking knowledge of New Derby’s layout.

Fortunately, he was just in time to see the engraver opening up for the day. The guards standing by the entrance offered him a scowl as he strolled in and watched his movements from their posts.

“Y’right, lad?” the proprietor said without looking, fiddling under the counter. Gaunt and a skinhead, the man had various tattoos coursing up his bare skin with piercings through his nose and ears. Most prominently, his eyes and nose were darkened and his lips and cheeks were covered in a teeth-like tattoo, giving his head the outward appearance of a skull. Although he had a considerable aura, Silas sensed no danger from it as opposed to what he felt from the redguards. “What’ll it be then?”

“What can you do?” Silas asked.

“Anything to do with your attributes, so strength, agility, constitution, all of them. If you’ve got anything more specific, I can try my hand at creating a rune: I helped a lass improve her control and shoot lightning bolts out of her fingertips the other day,” the skinhead said.

“What about teaching?” Silas asked, catching the skinhead’s gaze coolly.

“You don’t take me as the engraving type - you need a lot of perception for this, lad, a crazy lot.”

Silas figured the assessment came from his aura. Although he was less sensitive to it after being perpetually encompassed by it, there was no doubt it showed a fair bit of violence. “I’ve got a perception of 53. I had the option of Runesmith during the tutorial, but I chose another class instead,” he explained.

The skinhead’s eyes gleamed, highlighting the tattooed dark patches around them. He cast his hand out. “Well met, then. I’m Skully.” He firmly shook Silas’s hand as the Duellist introduced himself. “Been forever since I met another with high perception: they all want to learn how to engrave runes but none of them wants to dump their points into a useless attribute,” he said using finger quotations. “So, do you know much about runes?”

“The System gifted me with an engraving set during the tutorial. It had a rune,” Silas replied, pulling his boot off and propping it on the counter, “This one.” He pointed at the engraving of the man’s bountiful chest, “It adds three points to my constitution and the System allows for a maximum of nine points if I wear several copies of it.”

Skully nodded, “That’s how it is: three of any rune, any more and the System ignores the rest. But you can have several runes at once as long as they affect different things.” Dipping under his counter, he brought up a book, flitting through the pages to show his runes. “You were lucky to get gifted a rune from the System: I had to discover all these by myself. I’ve found the shape of the rune doesn’t matter as much as your thoughts while engraving.” Each of his pages showed several variations of the runes.

“I thought so as well,” Silas said, “But when I tried to make new runes, I couldn’t complete the circuits. Like I could imagine strength, imagine pushing and pulling and I would feel the rune close to completion but then it would collapse. The mana circuit would simply refuse to complete itself.”

Skully chuckled in good humour. “Although I said the shape doesn’t matter as much as your thoughts, that’s not to say the shape is insignificant. I reckon what’s stopping you is your hands don’t know what to draw: you can think about strength all you like but if you can’t create a decent image with it, then the rune won’t stick - no two ways about it. That’s where I got lucky as I used to work as a tattooist before the whole Apocalypse.”

“Could you engrave my gambeson with runes for the four other attributes then? I’ll try to learn them from there,” Silas asked.

“Sure, lad. That’ll be 2000 credits. I’ll need half an hour to complete it, and they’ll last for five days after that,” Skully said.

Silas paid this easily enough - while it might have been unreasonably expensive for others, he had near ten thousand credits in his personal account from all his kills.

The Runesmith promptly got to work, allowing Silas to watch as he expertly engraved the gambeson. All in all, it proved to be an invaluable experience, and he promised to be back once he learnt how to recreate the simple runes.

By now, the suns crested the sky and Silas decided he would quickly complete his shopping at the more popular stalls before rush hour kicked in. As such, he was buying several salves said to greatly reduce healing time when he saw someone walk past a ways ahead of him, someone he knew.

There was a pause as the ugly beast inside of him veered its head out and prevented him from calling out. He had to close his eyes and take a calming breath before he found his voice again. “Olivia.”

She turned in fright, her doe-eyes wet. Although she hadn’t been the paragon of health while he had known her, she looked even worse now: her dark hair appeared straw-like, her gaunt face covered in a light layer of dust, her aura thin and near non-existent. She didn’t smile on seeing Silas, if anything looking for the worse.

He gulped at her reaction but nevertheless kept his composure. “It’s me, Silas.”

Slowly, agonisingly slowly, recognition dawned on her face: her eyes widened and her features softened. “Silas,” she said as if tasting his name and finding it fuzzy.

“How are you?” he asked, pulling the salves into his rucksack. Although he tried his best to hide it, he found it strenuous to speak to her as if a thick fog had rolled over his thoughts and made them difficult to recite. Then again, he didn’t think any of the conversations he would have with people from his past would be easy, least of all with his siblings.

“Silas,” she repeated, and he could immediately tell something was wrong. Her eyes glazed over, and he saw tears pooling at their edges, her feet wobbling from underneath her. He dashed and caught her before she tumbled down. She trembled in his arms, her flesh alarmingly cold.

As he checked her condition, one of the redguards came over and gave him a scathing look. “Pass her here - she’s got work to do.”

Silas shook his head without looking up. “Work? I don’t think so.”

“She’s a bloody whore who I’ve booked for the hour - she better stop playing and bloody get to work before…”

“Before?” Silas asked. He wheeled about and glared at the redguard. Hearing the man utter whore so venomously didn’t sting, after all, they had survived the streets differently, he with his petty thefts, she with her body. However, he felt an icy rage rising inside of him at the man’s insistence. Noticing several redguards striding towards them did cool his anger but not by much.

“Before I bash your face in, you little cocksucker,” the man said, a flush flaring across his pockmarked face like an angry rash. One of his fellows arrived and regarded the scene with a frown.

Opening his mouth to snark a reply, Silas then closed it and set his jaw as his muscles bunched, ready to spring. He felt Olivia tugging at his arm, likely telling him to back down, but he wasn’t a street rat anymore. He turned to the other guard, “Tell your friend to fuck right off.”

Before anyone could respond, the pockmarked redguard lunged, his fist flashing forward like a furious comet.

Silas pushed Olivia away and stepped to the side, clearing the fist. Then, as the man stumbled forward after his failed punch, Silas viciously kneed him in the face and sent him tumbling back. Before the fight could devolve any further, the other redguard caught his mate and pulled him back. “That’s enough.”

“My fucking nose,” the pockmarked redguard said, the slow trickle of blood running down his fingers. “I’ll…”

“You’ll do nothing! Go wet your dick with another whore if you’re so backed up,” interrupted a third redguard, in fact, Silas observed, the very one that had been following him this entire time.

The pockmarked redguard’s response was lost in the succeeding noise as several other guards closed in on the commotion. Silas’s tag shouted over the chaos, “Take him and the girl to the Morel hotel.” He must have held high status as the others swiftly acted on his command.

In a handful of minutes, Silas was back in his hotel room with Olivia hunched over herself on the floor, sobbing softly. She eventually quietened and stilled so thoroughly it worried him. “You alright?”

It took a few seconds, but she looked up and nodded, her tears mixed with the grime on her face: she looked dreadful. He wondered if Aengus and Mia had thought the same thing of him in the tutorial, just a filthy street rat, and yet they had still helped him.

“You should wash up - there’s a shower there. I’m going out to get some food.” In truth, he needed some time alone. Seeing her had evoked several feelings inside of him, very few positive, and the incident with the redguard had hooked his feelings to the surface.

He came back half an hour later with burgers and chips. She was on his bed with a bathrobe hanging loosely off her shoulders, her dark hair tied up. Her skin was clean and flushed, drawing his eyes to her prominent chin, hollow cheeks, and high collarbones: she looked like a skeleton covered in a delicate layer of wax.

She turned to him with her dark, wide eyes and he faltered for a step but only one before he passed her the food. She took them in her bony hands, and he saw tiny scars crisscrossing up her arms up to an ugly purple bruise from when he had pushed her.

“I should go,” she said, dipping her head.

“You really shouldn’t,” he replied without missing a beat. “You look terrible, like you’re about to collapse.”

“I’ll be trouble,” she said, tears pooling at the edges of her eyes again. “Only trouble.”

He cringed away from her - he couldn’t handle another bout of her crying. Then, he stopped in a moment of introspection and clenched his fists in anger, in anger at her and in anger at himself. “I can handle trouble,” he eventually replied. Thankfully, it put a stopper on her protests and she began nibbling on her food, keeping her gaze away from his.

They ate in silence.

____

Freddie Littlewood, the Dreadnought, was originally a college student from the United States. Completing the extreme tutorial, he set up Newford and tended to it as it grew into a hub. He first came to the world’s notice when he shot up the leaderboards by solo killing an F-1 monster, a shambler, at a time when it had only been achieved by Lucian Grimes, Kuraim Jaffer, and Dahlia Howe. This event catapulted his status, and by extension, the status of Newford.

He used this explosion in reputation to travel to nearby settlements and form a coalition with him at its helm. Using the coalition, he annihilated the local Ratkin settlements and then declared war on the Stingtail clans…

Stefan Sommer - the Chronicler - Heroes and Villains of the First Age