Analyze

Classification type: Inspection Skill

A common inspection skill for combatants or those who have an inclination towards the martial arts. This includes adventurers, soldiers and guardsmen whose occupations are fraught with danger. Therefore, Analyze helps them gauge the might of their foes relative to themselves. Is the basis for the threat levels assigned by the guilds for monsters; the skill weighs how much of your own ability to pit against someone else in order to come on top; other esoteric parameters are applied by the World and cannot be quantified in discrete terms. Can be rebuffed by Obfuscation artifacts, some magic items or the analyzed subject’s magical aura.-World Compendium of Skills , The Order of Vesper, Church of Thea.

Three gazes met. Two pairs were big, round and amber while one was hidden behind tinted crystals. The air was rife with tension in that impromptu face staring contest.It would not have been amiss for a tumbleweed to roll past. More than anything, Arthur felt like he was the one encroaching on their turf.

He'd missed the pile of thornbrush that was home to a breeding pair of the nocturnal birds. He must've been so exhausted and lacking in sleep to miss it. Two days of non-stop travel just to get over the next dune, to find the next oasis could do that to you.

Arthur hadn't drawn out the interaction with the pair of wanderers because of said reason. At that time, he had two things in mind, sleep and fixing his hoverboard. He did both, the former...not in the way he would've liked because it cost him precious time. Arthur missed the window of the bandit's approach and now, he didn't know which way to head towards.

‘Feck it, it doesn't change my heading though. But first...these birds’

They were still watching him. Even as he'd retracted his foot. There was a hole in his trouser where the bird had pecked, just above the leather of his calf boots. Thankfully, it didn't break the skin.

’That was a warning I think?’

’Wait, how am I seeing them? Ah, the goggles!’

Arthur noticed the goggles made everything look grayscale to his vision. ’Dwarven made,...figures’

’Hooo!’ One of the owls hooted. Arthur stopped shuffling. The din of noise below suddenly stilled, becoming a susurration of murmurs. Arthur froze; a cold sweat formed on the nape of his neck.

”Whatcha stalling for yer sand rats, it's just a stupid owl!”

The knot of tension in his stomach untangled. Arthur relaxed the death grip he had on his dagger. Surreptitiously, he peeked over the edge, seeing the flaming torches bob around the oasis, bouncing off the mesas; there was no change to their behavior. He was safe. Then again, those were on the perimeter. In the middle, bandits stalked without any form of light whatsoever.

They had [Dark Vision] and similar skills. Arthur had to give them credit. They were very smart in that regard. But for the air? No one was watching the sky, and none of the people down there were mages so he was safe from mage lights.

He looked to the north, automatically his skill kicked in. It felt like an itch between the bridge of his brows, slowly drawing him towards a certain direction. He stopped thinking about it and the skill dropped.

’Creepy’ he shuddered. Despite getting used to throwing magic every now and then, skills were something else.

The direction he'd been looking towards was luckily, not watched by many bandits. They were too small a group to cordon off the whole oasis.

’Hold on... I'm just one person. What could possib—’

Ah, I must have made the man mad. Working on zero sleep is the pits, wouldn't recommend’ he murmured more to himself than anyone else all the while keeping a wide berth from the pair of owls.

He checked that he had everything. His water flask was topped up and cool, The flask was made of metal with a screw on cap. At the bottom was a small crystal of aqerite and a rune. A self refilling bottle.

His knapsack was still there, a little dusty sure but it was okay. His hoverboard was in inventory. He didn't get that out because he didn't want to startle the two birds.

”What, what do you mean you still can't find him? Oi Torpeth! Where's that sand sucker at?”

Arthur winced. That must've been the head honcho of that band of bandits. His voice had been the only constant sound bouncing off the messas. As he watched, more beady eyes blinked around the rocky formations.

There was a colony of the birds here. If he could just cause a distraction, he'd be scot free. Just as he was mulling over that. The owl hooted again. Below, no one paid any attention. But something changed. The nearby owls all flocked to Arthur's vantage point.

He was surrounded, a parliament of the owls, or was it a jury? Staring at his every move as if judging whether he was worth eating. And the things were the size of turkeys. There had to be like a dozen of the birds; their wing beats were eerily silent.

‘Ambush predators!’ Arthur smiled. He hatched another plan.

Crooktooth scuttled amongst the thornbrush, wary of the pointy things snagging at his desert garb. His short stature easily let him evade their thorny twigs. He tightened the wrappings around his arms, keeping the sharp end of his shiv away from himself. The cold was nipping at his harms the worst.

Cleftjaw was right behind him, jaundiced pupils also scanning for footprints in the brush. As if a grown human could fit in there. If there were any to be found though, his Dark Vision and Skulker's stalk would clue him in no problem. But first he had to find them with his own eyes.

The tracks back at the camp had been too bad to pick up, sand blown over them and messed them up bad enough they had to meander around for a while. Also, they didn't know which direction they pointed to. The clearest ones had all pointed towards the tent and nowhere else. Unless he was walking backwards then— 'Who walked backwards?' Crooktooth shook his head. 'Stupid'

But that the bossman spared no quarters to scour the whole oasis for one measly human did not make sense to him. They even brought the dusk hounds. The scrawny rabid looking poor excuse for sniffers couldn't even pick up the damn trail and kept looping around in circles.

Torpeth the bald one even said he was no mage, surely he couldn't have already flown off while they were not looking? Though if he wasn't, what valuables could he possibly have? But if he swore on his treasure sniffing skill then he and Cleftjaw had a job to do. Find the human.

But...but what if Torpeth had mistaken the human for one of those skin wearing horrors that crawled in the crypts? He'd heard the stories of the things lurking in the crypt-tombs.

Crooktooth smacked his lips nervously. His body shivered; maybe the chill desert air was still getting into his garb. ‘No,’ he shook his head. ’Scary things’ If what they were tracking was one of those things, let loose from the Sands. He would run.

Cleftjaw cuffed him in the back of his clean shaven head. Crooktooth yelped, rubbing at the sore spot with a hurt expression.

“Stop thinking lots,” he grunted. ”Scout!”.

’That hurt!’ Crooktooth winced at the sting of the blow.

He felt like jabbing his shivs between the ribs of the obnoxious hob. He was always picking on him because he was small.But if he did that, Crooktooth would remain the only goblin in the gang and that was not good.

Cleftjaw always kept other bullies away. So he squashed his indignance and devoted his mind to the task at hand.

As he was going to pull the wraps around his face, something even heavier smacked him at the back of his head. Crooktooth whirled, ready to smack back at the larger hob.

But he found his companion in shock. Cleftjaw crouched and picked up something from the sand. He found a piece of meat? Suddenly black blurs came streaking from the pillars of stone, claws drawn.

When the sounds of pained shrieks rent the air, Arthur was already on the move. The owls had been easily coaxed with the pieces of wyvern meat that Arthur kept tossing at them like bread at pigeons. And they were very smart in that regard...and patient too. So they made for a good distraction.

Eventually Arthur tossed larger pieces away from the where he wanted to escape to. He'd have a narrow window, but he'd make it count. The closest bandits were a pair of [Skulker] goblins, he'd mistaken for overly short brutes, that seemed hell bent on hunting him down through his trail.

They seemed like a good target and they delivered. They were a pair of cowards, he wasn't banking on having them scream bloody murder; in fact the shortest of them was booking it out of there like the devil himself was at his heels.

Arthur flew, he glided through the air, eyes on the slowly widening gap of the bandits' shoddy perimeter. You'd have thought they'd keep the most number of guards that side but only two of them were there, on those bird-like mounts of theirs.

Arthur flew over their heads as they were momentarily distracted by the shouts deeper in the oasis. His Nightstalkers cloak made him an incongruous blur against the night's cloudy sky.

The youth made it. Formations of worn volcanic pillars blitzed by as he crossed the boundary between the desert and the oasis.

It was too easy, he was almost tempted to cackle madly from a close brush with bandits. Suddenly, there was sand in his mouth.

‘What the?!'

Sand. Sand buffeted him like a cloud, peppering him with tiny grains of the stuff. By the time he'd realized that it wasn't a natural phenomenon but the work of a mage, he'd already gone in too deep. It was then his mana sense clued him to the magic in the air.

It had been a trap, a ploy to make him think he had things well in hand. Maybe he'd been too overeager because his plan had gone off flawlessly despite his first mishap.

Though, after his first experience chucking sand out of the Mark One during his repairs, he'd already had the forethought to put up a barrier using his [Wind Shield].

At the expense of saving his mana for long haul flying, he increased the intensity of the spell, enlarging it to more than a few paces his circumference lest he fly into a sand dune. Wind shield's spell matrix was only unidirectional facing, but his Aer mastery helped him make minute alterations.

Hoping against his better judgment that whoever was in control hadn't been alerted, he dumped more power into the Azure Surfer and climbed up. And that's when an arrow shot out of the sand.

It was meant for his eye—Arthur was one-shotted. Time slowed as Arthur saw the arrowhead heading, unerringly for the shortest route to his brain.

The draw strength of the Archer and a piercing [Piercing Shot] skill was pitted against dwarven mining goggles made of obsiderite—Arthur got whiplash so strong it almost took his head off.

Only his hybridized skeleton prevented him from getting a spinal injury. Though, he did get away with a concussion for his troubles.

A momentary lapse of his concentration interrupted his camouflage and caused the engine to sputter, dropping him back into the sandstorm. A moment was all it took.

Arthur came to, blinking the stars away from his eyes. The obsiderite lenses had saved his life. Not that he knew what the material was made of. An impossible alloy of dwarven genius; translucent obsidian meshed with siderite had stood against an iron tipped arrow. It didn't even scratch the lenses.

However, Arthur was not in the right place to be mulling about his brush with death. He wasn't out of the woods yet. And as if mirroring his thoughts, a piercing whistle split the night air. He'd been detected.

“ Schizz in a creek!” Arthur gasped. ”They almost had me…how?”. His eyes cast about the sand storm. He'd barely managed to arrest his fall. But the grating sound from his hoverboard was worrying.That short interruption of his concentration had allowed sand to get into his engine. Another thing had already been added to the worry pile. Now he had to worry about a mage, an archer and bandits at his back.

He gunned the hoverboard, the patch work repairs be damned. He needed to get out of the sandstorm and back into the sky. But not without turning his back, so he went forwards cautious of another arrow shot his way.

They came fast and hard. But he saw them coming and instinctually threw up a [Wind Shield] two of the arrows were deflected, one made it halfway into the Wind Shield before the spell shield snapped it into two.

And that was when Arthur knew they were probing him. Sooner or later they'd up their ante and he didn't have the luxury to let them; not when he could hear the hollering of the other bandits even above the howling storm of sand.

Arthur wasn't going to let them do that though. He felt for his internal well, sensing it was just above half. He grimaced. The youth was going to have to endure another bout of hangovers from mana abuse.

He knew what they felt like from before he entered the desert. The first time they'd given him a splitting headache before he opted to use the mana sail. The second time, nausea hit him…bad.

Thus he traded back spells of his own. With no way of knowing where his assailant was, he scattered his shots of Thunderbolt. Lightning met sand, and the resulting encounter caused pillars of petrified silica to rise up like anthills built at the speed of light. It burned holes through the moving curtain of the spell, and then the thunderclap enlarged the holes.

But just as soon as the gaps appeared more of the sand moved in to cover it. Where his enemies were, they were very good at hiding in their own magic. While he was shining like a beacon. Arthur realized that’s how the arrows had gotten to him, the sand was like an extension of the mage’s perception.

He had to get out, and right—

Another arrow came whistling out of the sand, he didn't even need danger sense or mana sense to tell him the futility of trying to put up a shield. The arrow just screamed dangerous—a black blur with a purple glow.

Arthur did the only thing he could, he pirouetted his hoverboard in the way of the shot. The impact resounded through his bones, jarred his knees…he almost bit off his tongue. Then the engine stalled; the conduits had been killed.

But an artifact had saved his life again, at the cost of mobility. Fortunately he’d barely gone far from the ground when it hit. A well aimed wind shield cushioned his fall. And as soon as he hit the ground, the hoverboard was spirited away. He drew out his dagger and kept his spells ready.

However, he was still trapped. Sand, like fog obscured everything beyond the reach of his barrier. It was like a sand storm, and yet no air moved,no gusting winds…just the barren parched soil of the desert suspended in the atmosphere.

Arthur wondered how the mage could keep up their spells for so long. Also, the arrows stopped homing on him, that was a relief at least. He stopped channeling mana into his Nightstalker’s cloak.

His mana well was steadily draining and sooner or later, he’d be left with no choice but to fight close quarters. And to fight to kill. Arthur grimaced at that. Getting blood on his hands…and human blood at that left a sour taste in his mouth.

‘And why did they stop?...a mage archer? That’s a thing right?’ Arthur thought. He was searching for something, some kind of tell for the spell’s direction. Unfortunately he hadn't read about domain spells yet ; else he would have known what to look for. And time was running out and fast; soon the rest of the bandits would be on him.

‘Schizz in a creek! Can’t see where they are—’ Arthur moved out of the way of the blade before Danger sense even screamed. The ring of metal sundered the air as the youth interposed his dagger in the way. The sound of metal screeching on metal grated on his ears as sparks flew. His hand shook from the blow but it held back the scimitar that slid all the way to the quillon .

The assailant’s eyes went wide with surprise at the sturdiness of Arthur’s short weapon—the adamantite dagger. Arthur dunked some of his mana into it and the two men watched as the dagger ate through metal as if it had been a stick of butter. The bandit tried to twist the scimitar to capitalize on both their surprise but Arthur had already recovered.

The dagger disappeared, spirited into [Inventory]. His adversary faltered, having used too much force to yank back. Arthur went for the low blow. There was no propriety in a fight with bandits; they would sooner bite your nose off before they stabbed you with a broken sword. The bandit keeled over with his hands between his groin. Arthur winced on his behalf but what was done was done; he was already running.