A Tyrant, Sort Of

Lugging what might be a literal ton of treasure across dozens or hundreds of miles was a bit unpleasant. The weight wasn’t so cumbersome she couldn’t handle it, but the imbalance of the load made carrying it awkward, and picking up speed difficult. More than that, ensuring the thick canvas didn’t slip from her claws, or the package otherwise spill open and coins, armor, and jewelry to go raining to the ground, meant she had to take things slow.

That said, it was hardly an impossible task. Just annoying.

Arriving back to Lake Plateglass, and in a cacophony of metal-on-metal, Sable poured her spoils of war onto the small collection of gemstones that had a second ago been the entirety of her hoard. In a short moment, she had amplified her net worth many times over. The goblins of Skatikk hadn’t skimped on their first tribute.

***

~ Hoard ~

Your hoard is MEAGER. A pitiful collection of baubles and trinkets—this is the fruit of your tyranny? Gaze upon this pile of worthless spoils and understand your inadequacy. Until this mound becomes a mountain, until the weight of your treasure can crush a city, know you have far to go.

But it is a beginning. All that metal does have a nice glint.

[ 25% REDUCTION TO ALL STATS ]

***

That usual wash of greed coursed through her, but strangely, Sable was growing accustomed to it. She brushed away the emotional invasion with only minor effort.

Mostly, she was surprised. She hadn’t thought she was in for another hoard upgrade. She’d thought it would take tributes from several cities before she broke through to the next barrier.

But it seemed the upgrade had come in a smaller increment. Surely future ones would be exponentially more difficult to come by—in the same way her empire would grow exponentially faster, leveraging her strength to carve out more and more territory.

Or if not, Sable was hardly complaining. She’d take as many boosts to her stats as the system wanted to give her.

From fifty percent reduction to twenty five. That meant an effective fifty percent strength increase. A nice boost in power.

She checked her stat page.

***

Sable

Juvenile White Dragon

Level 5 - Frostfire Sorceress

[ Hoard ] - MEAGER

[ Notoriety ] - OBSCURE

Stats (base):

Might - 234 (312)

Grace - 234 (312)

Resilience - 276 (368)

Intellect - 360 (480)

Wisdom - 360 (480)

***

Her stats were increasing faster than she had expected. Not that she had a guideline to go by, but they were more than doubled from her level one stats. More than that, easing the debuff had brought her closer to her base stats, further emphasizing the jump in power.

That Skatikk had decided to feed her hoard, and thus knowingly increase her strength, confirmed to Sable that likely, they didn’t plan to rebel. They would have done so before donating so much to her. That they’d willingly let Sable fly off with an appreciable chunk of their city’s treasury meant they’d come to terms with her rule. Gadenrock’s fate had cemented their decision—if they’d indeed been wavering, as Sable had expected they were.

But her stats. What did they mean, anyway? When she’d fought Granite, she had had working stats of twenty. Now, they were in the two to four hundred range. Presumably, that meant where Sable had struggled the tiniest amount to defeat Granite, now she would steamroll him.

Was it linear? Was she roughly fifteen times stronger? What did the numbers behind the stats mean? Levels weren’t one to one, so were stats? If an adventurer had 300 in one of the attributes like she did, did that mean they would have equivalent, say, strength? It would feel kind of pointless if not. Levels being a force multiplier made sense, but stats had to be something closer to an accurate, objective depiction.

Why was she musing over this? There were plenty of questions Aylin couldn’t answer, but this one felt common enough she should.

[Stats,] Sable said. [Are they objective? Is four hundred for one person the same as four hundred for another?]

Aylin, who’d been appreciating Sable’s hoard with her own greedy glint in her eye, blinked, then turned to face Sable. Her mouth dropped open.

“Four hundred? That’s what yours are?”

Well, Sable hadn’t said that, but she supposed it had been implied. [Is it objective? Comparable between different people?]

Aylin gawked for a second more, then shook her surprise off. “Level five, with four hundred stats. That’s insanity. Um. Yeah, stats are pretty consistent, I think.” She scratched her cheek, then frowned. “At least, across the sapient races. Goblin, orc, human. Between something like dragons and us?” She shrugged. “I’d figure it still holds, though.”

[And what are yours?]

“Want to check? Go ahead.”

[Inspect doesn’t show stats.] It only showed name and level. Other people’s [Inspects] could, of course, be denied—that was something Sable had discovered early on. Otherwise the city of Skatikk might have been much more eager to attack her, knowing she was level three when she’d arrived. Instead, they’d only had her physical size and apparent youth to appraise her by.

“Pretty sure you can let someone do an advanced [Inspect],” Aylin said. “Not sure, though. Think I’ve heard people imply it. Here, try.”

Sable humored the goblin woman. She wouldn’t have minded Aylin just listing out her stats the normal way—with speech—but if she could receive it the system-way, that would be more convenient.

She focused her intent toward Aylin, then [Inspected] her.

Unlike the normal description of name and level, she got the full listing.

***

Aylin

Goblin

Level 1 - Dragonsworn Champion

Stats:

Strength - 11

Agility - 8

Constitution - 11

Spellpower - 4

Focus - 4

***

Huh.

They were even lower than Sable had expected. Aylin’s two magic-based stats were in the single digits, even.

Though, that made some sense. Sable was perhaps a hundred times stronger than Aylin, even considering that the goblin had received a class. Whether it was linear or not, with 200 being twenty times stronger than ten, she had no clue.

But Aylin seemed to think the numbers could be compared across species, and Sable trusted that until proved otherwise.

She focused back on her own advancements. Intellect and wisdom were growing the fastest. Might and grace, the physical stats, were going the slowest. She was pleased to see that resilience was between the two. Seeing how that was her defense stat, it meant she wouldn’t be grossly easy to kill as she leveled; mostly, her physical strength would be what lagged behind.

She also noted how might and grace scaled at the same speed, as did intellect and wisdom. Why? Was that normal? Was there some ‘modifier’ that affected stat scaling, and those stats had received the same one?

She wasn’t sure how ‘scientific’ the system was. Could her advancement rate be represented by some formula? Had that been done, somewhere in the world? Did she scale faster than the humanoid races, or were her initial massive stats a starting advantage, but not one that would continue into the higher levels?

Like usual, she had no way of answering these questions. She doubted Aylin could, either.

She checked on her health and mana.

[ HP: 26,566 / 27,880 ]

[ MP: 1,102 / 1,980 ]

Those weren’t increasing with the same speed. Where wisdom and intellect had more than doubled, HP had only increased by three thousand, and mana by four hundred. Still welcome advancements, but her resource pools would remain a limiting factor for the foreseeable future.

She appreciated her growing mana pool, regardless that it wasn’t increasing as fast as her stats. More mana meant both better spell endurance and stronger attacks, depending on how she wanted to use it. It was a shame her rapid advancements in intellect and wisdom hadn’t improved her passive regeneration much. Her [Recuperate] skill would be what she needed to rely on most.

Speaking of that. Seeing how she’d massively increased her hoard, her improved [Recuperate] ought to top her off each night, rather than a small portion of her mana. Hopefully.

Finally, she appraised the last major part of her advancement: her size. It seemed to increase based on a confluence of factors, with leveling, hoard, and notoriety all affecting it.

Initially, back when she’d first descended onto Aylin as a newborn dragon, she’d been about a time and a half the height of a large deer and several times it lengthwise. Now, she was starting to put on appreciable bulk. Roughly three times as large in both dimensions from where she’d started, she certainly wouldn’t be able to fit in that first dungeon she and Aylin had ventured.

What was the upper scale? Some stories had dragons the size of small mountains. While that sounded somewhat inconvenient, Sable hoped that was where she was headed.

While her improvements had moved her from ‘pathetic’ to ‘slightly less so’, she wouldn’t be satisfied until every aspect of her struck terror into the hearts of mortals. If mountainous bulk was off the table, then she demanded to be the size of at least a small fortress.

[I’m going to collect the mineral hearts from the rest of the orecrunchers,] Sable said. [Afterward, I’m going hunting. If possible, I want to gain a few more levels before the Rustspike campaign begins.]

“Will I be fighting in those?” Aylin asked.

Sable started. For some reason, she hadn’t expected the question.

[No,] Sable said. [You couldn’t contribute in a meaningful capacity, and I won’t risk my minion. It would be irritating to find another.]

Aylin bristled, but she bit down on her response. Sable could tell the woman had a temper, and was prickly about her combat skills, but she had enough sense to not snap at a dragon—and her mistress. It visibly took effort for her to swallow her first response, though.

“I think I could help,” Aylin said, trying not to sound argumentative, and mostly failing. “And what better way to start working on my own levels? Killing other classed is one of the best ways to advance.”

The casual way Aylin mentioned killing another person took Sable slightly off guard, even though it shouldn’t have. Again, warlike, medieval people. And Aylin had already been a fighter for her clan—had she killed before? Maybe she had.

[As I said, I would be annoyed if you died. Perhaps in the future.]

Aylin didn’t seem pleased by that, but Sable didn’t care.

[For your hunts today, though,] Sable said, [I want to give you some enhancements. It should let you progress more efficiently.]

Because she would prefer Aylin start leveling faster; a level one goblin warrior wasn’t much use to her from a combat perspective. She’d been crucial in her plans thus far, but mostly because she needed information and a means to speak to others. In the future, she needed thralls who could hold their own in a fight.

“Enhancements?” Some of her aggravation traded for curiosity. “The ones you were practicing with the Witch?”

Aylin hadn’t adopted calling Roman by her name as quickly as Sable had. That made sense, she supposed.

[Yes. Strength and speed boosts. With long durations.]

She focused inward, questing out for her mana, then seized the enigmatic resource. Etching the spell diagram, then pouring a decent amount of mana in—a few dozen points—she layered the effect onto Aylin, pleased that she didn’t botch the attempt.

Aylin’s eyes widened. “Oh, wow. That’s … pretty noticeable.” She clenched her hands open and closed in front of her, then mimed a few punches. “Yeah, this’ll definitely help.”

[Good,] Sable said. She cast the second: the speed boost. [I’ll learn more, eventually. I expect you to start leveling faster, using them.]

Aylin blinked, then her expression hardened. She nodded seriously. “Definitely. Have no plans to hang around in the lower levels, promise you that.”

[But don’t get yourself killed,] Sable said. [Measured risks.]

Aylin paused, then nodded, if less enthusiastically. That didn’t do wonders for Sable’s concern for the woman, but her life was hers to do with as she wished. She didn’t seem suicidal—though maybe a bit reckless.

She really ought to enlist a hunting partner for Aylin. Her thrall still had three spots open. Just another thing on the to-do list. Didn’t have time, right at the moment.

That taken care of, Sable dropped Aylin off into the forest, then headed for the Danner Quarry. After collecting the mineral hearts and boosting her hoard that much more, she planned on going on another hunt in more dangerous territories.

She had leveling to do, and if she wanted to conquer the Red Plains with minimal bloodshed, she had better be well prepared.