I turned back to look at Fiona again as she walked over to me from the edge of the room.
“Whatcha thinking?” She asked.
“I’m not sure, I don’t…” I trailed off, unsure of where I currently stood.
More from a philosophical stance rather than a physical one. I hadn’t fully had a chance to internalize everything.
Penny was dead.
Garrus was dead.
Karif, George…
The last time I’d even gotten to talk with the rest of the group had been me essentially getting booted from the group.
I wasn’t even sure how to identify the swirl of emotions currently running through my chest.
They were dead.
Something must’ve shown on my face cause Fiona gave me another hug.
“It’ll be fine, we’ll figure it out. We’ve got to take our first steps here though, you don’t need to make a decision right now on whether or not you want to take whatever he offers, but I think it might be a good idea to at least listen to what he has to say. Why don’t we start there, okay?”
I hiccuped slightly, wiping away a few of the tears that had started leaking out.
“You have an idea of what he’s going to offer?”
“I think so, but I’ll go with you to find out if you want,” She offered.
I nodded, “thanks,” I whispered.
We stepped out into the hallway where Mortimer was waiting,
“Excellent, follow me. It’s a bit of a walk to where we’re going, in the meantime, I’ll tell you a little of what I had in mind.”
“Alright,” I said, falling in step behind him as we began making our way through the building we were in.
“Where exactly are we anyways?” I asked.
Mortimer gave me a quick glance as we walked, “One of the guard barracks. Mine to be specific, or rather my main one. Each of the commanders covers a quadrant of the city, I just happened to be the one given the luxury of taking over this ordeal. From here though we’ll need to head over to a different part of the city, mainly because of what I want to get you started on, but before I can explain that we need to go over what exactly you know about our fair country.”
“The answer to that is; not a lot,” I quipped drily.
“So it’s been said, but tell me, what do you know about the guards as an organization?”
“Uh. Next to nothing honestly, I mean, besides the obvious at least. You guard cities? I guess you also guard the national borders to the north and south.”
“Not wrong if a bit simplistic in the notion. The Guards are everything. They police the cities, they fight off invading armies, and they even invade other countries in times of war. Each commander in our country is roughly equivalent to a general in other countries. In times of war, we’d combine our forces while drafting and that’s how we’d effectively come up with our standing army to fight wars if necessary. Although that hasn’t entirely been necessary in the past several hundred years. Not since the civil war led by Queen Ashendra. But that’s a story for another time.”
Huh, interesting. It looked like it was a similar thing in Alixia since I hadn’t noticed a big difference in uniform between the border guards, city guards, and the soldiers operating in the Pit.
But I guess in other countries they had a separation of policing forces and military.
“Are you a military state then?” Curiosity laced my tone.
“Hah, no. We’re an absolute monarchy. The queen gets the final say in anything. She delegates, but she rules absolutely.”
Huh, somewhat ironic all things considered. The queen overthrows a tyrant and becomes one herself.
Mortimer frowned, “I wouldn’t let anyone else hear that.”
“Hmm?”
Oh shit, did I say that out loud?
Whoops.
“Well, I’m not necessarily wrong. The difference between a beloved monarch and a tyrant is public opinion. But fundamentally they’re the same.”
Mortimer made a non-commital noise.
“That’s not important though, you were talking about the guards? I’m assuming you were going somewhere with that then?”
He nodded, “There are several branches of the guard forces, you met Denithin earlier, he’s one of the strategic officers for national threats. He works in national security. I’m sure you can infer what they do from the name. They handle analyzing statistics for the various areas of the guard forces. Border patrols, terrorism, crime, government corruption, and stuff like that. There’s the Navy, not much to say there. The Wyvern Riders. Essentially our air-based cavalry. I could go on.”
Interesting, so the guard just seemed like a conglomeration of police with all the military branches. I’m sure that was an oversimplification, but that’s what it essentially seemed like.
“What I’m interested in getting you involved in is the National Suppression Agency.”
“The N.S.A.?” I asked, incredulously.
“Yes, is that a problem?”
That was… an interesting coincidence.
“No, not necessarily. There was an organization from my home country with a similar acronym. Although they were more focused on global monitoring and threat assessment than anything else.”
“Mmm. Well, with our NSA you’d be handling suppression of various threats across the country. The group is fairly new, only founded in the past couple of decades after a series of vicious monster breaks and instigated international terrorist activities that we’re fairly certain we can link back to global rivals.”
I frowned, “I’m not going to be suppressing protests or militias intending to start civil wars am I?”
“Not likely, assuming those protests aren’t really just another terrorist threat intent on destroying critical infrastructure needed to run our country. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. Alixia has more than once snuck in agents to cause a ruckus across the country. But suppression doesn’t necessarily mean killing either. We just want you to solve the problem, not genocide the populace. But you’ll also handle monster threats as well. Generally when we’re sending you in it’s because we need muscle to solve the problem, not brains. The brains of our operations are handled by the Investigators. They handle things like missing persons requests and things that are more mysterious rather than clear-cut.”
As we made it out of the building there was a squad of soldiers waiting. Mortimer gave a few hand signs to them and they grouped around us as we walked. I glanced back at Fiona and she gave me an encouraging smile.
She seemed somewhat approving of the idea, but I wasn’t entirely sold on it yet.
“Okay, what exactly would this look like?”
Mortimer gave me a slight smile, I guess he thought he had me? I wasn’t too sure, I still didn’t know enough about the program to say one way or the other. I wasn’t interested in handling issues with civilians if it came to that. It’d be relatively easy for any government group to label disgruntled civilians as a terrorist insurgency, or even go about planting proof of it.
I wasn’t interested in being a part of something like that.
“Suppression squads are roughly squads of three to four members, we’d assess you and your capabilities, see what you can do, and give you a rating based on that. We’d then place you with a squad based on your proficiencies. Your teammates would help cover your weaknesses and support your strengths. Once you’ve got a group we’ll send you on a slightly easier mission than your rating would suggest, to give you time for the group to acclimate to each other. From there you would then return to HQ and be assigned a section of the country to handle. You’d then make sure your area is handled, occasionally your group will be dispatched to assist other squads with something in a separate part of the country if your area is quiet.”
Sounded simple enough, although it felt like there was a heavy overlap with adventurer teams.
“How does this differ from just being an adventurer then? It sounds like they would handle a lot of the threats that we’d end up going after.”
“To a degree. Sometimes there are monsters adventurers aren’t interested in handling. Slime overpopulation isn’t hard to handle, just tedious. Adventurers don’t care to cull the local populations so sometimes we end up handling it. A big thing that adventurers don’t deal with, or aren’t necessarily allowed to handle, is banditry. Bandit groups spring up all the time, we even have a couple of infamous groups we haven’t quite been able to grind down. Some are particularly dangerous as well, like the Crimson Sojourn.”
Fiona let out a slight hiss of air, “He’s not going to be expected to deal with them is he?”
I glanced back at her in surprise, she had been fairly quiet up until now, so I was surprised to hear her even interject at all.
“Him specifically? Not likely, not at his tier. If he were tier five or higher? Perhaps. Crimson Sojourn has been a pain in our side, and not even necessarily our side alone. They roam around the greater continent hitting various countries. The last time we got involved with them was two decades ago and was part of the reason we founded the N.S.A. in the first place. We lost one of our spell-blades, which was the reason Olivier Stark was instituted as one. May the Divines rest his soul.”
I frowned, “Olivier died?” I guess I hadn’t had a chance to hear about all the victims that Ili’kithari claimed.
Mortimer nodded, “He’s the reason there were even any survivors from Vinwood at all.”
We walked in silence for a while as I contemplated that. I hadn’t really known Olivier outside of the brief moment that I had met him during the demon invasion. He hadn’t been a bad person though, from what I could tell.
Just another corpse to add to the tragedy.
I couldn’t bring myself to fully care though. My emotions were already dominated by the loss of the few friends I had made. I didn’t have the capacity for anything beyond that.
We wound our way through the city and ended up crossing into a huge compound on the East side of the city. And by huge, I mean huge.
As we approached the guards standing in front of the gate recognized Mortimer I assumed and immediately began raising the portcullis. Crossing into the compound itself there was tons of activity happening around me. Sparring, dummy training, people running back and forth with papers and supplies. Groups of people were making their way out of one of the alternate entrances or coming back looking worn out and beaten up.
Their armor had a different look than the usual guards. The city guards wore something more akin to a half-plate cuirass, with a chain shirt and an open-faced Sallet helmet. Sallet? I think that’s what they were called anyway. Kind of like a Skyrim guard but not covering the face.
They definitely had a more realistic historic feel to them.
These looked to be more stylistic. Like something you’d see a fantasy character wearing in a game. Form-fitting metal chest plates and interlocking pauldrons overlaid over some chainmail and matching gauntlets and sabatons.
It looked like it was up to the individual whether or not to wear a helmet. Some I saw didn’t wear the armor at all, choosing instead to wear their own procured armor or had a skill like I did. Some had variants of the armor to suit their styles. Mages chose to wear less as they weren’t as strong to carry as much.
All in all, it looked very professional. A good first impression anyway. Mortimer seemed to know it as well, giving me a confident smirk.
“They look good, don’t they? We’re quite proud of them, so far they’ve done good work as well. We currently have an 85% success rate on our missions.”
“And how many missions does the average squad handle in a year, how many squads do you have in total?”
Mortimer gave me a suspicious look, but I just flashed him a friendly smile.
“It doesn’t matter what the percentage is if you only handle 10 missions a year or only have 2 squads. All the numbers are important for context,” I explained to him.
“Interesting. I’m not used to people being so well educated,” He said.
“Compulsory education is mandatory where I lived. We were required to go through twelve years of basic schooling handling things ranging from math, science, language, and history, both local and global.”
He nodded, “That’s good. Most of the people here barely understand how to read or write. Queen Ashendra has been working hard on getting education rates up, but it's been a hard fight. Most people aren’t interested.”
“That makes sense, the only reason it happened in my country is because we criminalized it. Basically, you had a legal obligation to go to school or receive an education in some capacity. Otherwise, your legal guardian faced criminal charges. If that didn’t exist then our numbers would look fairly similar I would think.”
“Humans end up the same no matter where they are then, huh?”
I snorted, “Got it in one.”
The compound was arranged in an orderly fashion. We had come in from one of the side entrances, apparently. The side we came in on was the training grounds. Several large fields existed for various purposes. Solo training, group training, there were dummies to work on, archery ranges, magic ranges. Some even had moving targets, which was definitely interesting to see. Some areas looked like they had wargames underway, an obstacle course. There was a building nearby that apparently hosted an indoor obstacle course.
He led me and Fiona up to a similarly large building, “This is where we assess new recruits. So what do you think? Is this something you might find yourself interested in?”
I looked at Fiona again, but she was annoyingly silent on any opinions.
“Why do you want me in the first place?” I asked, “I’m not inherently special beyond having a strong start in my early levels, or beyond my biology.”
“You’re not special, yet,” Mortimer retorted, “You’ve had a strong start so far, and yeah that’s going to cap off without someone supporting you. But what about a tier from now? Two tiers? You’re already running around with one epic grade class, most people don’t get one of those until tier five, or four if they pull off a miracle in the third tier. No, I have no doubts you’d be a valuable asset. You just need the right environment to get there. I’m willing to provide that environment if you’re willing to provide the effort. I can’t make you get there, but I can give you the tools you need to succeed. And unlike Orwen, I’m not picky about who I try to bring in.”
I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t necessarily hearing anything I disliked. But I felt… wary.
“I think you should do it, Alex,” Fiona said, causing me to turn to her.
“This is a good opportunity for you and helps address the problems you were having before. You went to Alixia in the first place because you needed a way to get stronger without a group to work with. Maybe go to the Imperial Academy. Well, that didn’t work out for you, but this covers those bases for you. It’ll get you open to the wider world around you, let you see what’s happening around you, explore. You’ll also have a team at your back to support you so you won’t be going into fights by yourself. And at the end of the day, if you don’t like it? You don’t have to do it all your life.”
“I…”
She was right… those had all been things that lurked in the back of my mind at some point.
“Why don’t we do this,” Mortimer interjected, “let’s get you assessed, find out where your talents lie, and work on seeing if I can pull together a squad for you. Once you go through the initial testing you can take some time to think about whether or not you actually want to do this.”
I thought for a moment before slowly nodding, “Alright, I can do that.”
Mortimer smiled, “Excellent, follow me then.”
I turned back to look at Fiona again as she walked over to me from the edge of the room.
“Whatcha thinking?” She asked.
“I’m not sure, I don’t…” I trailed off, unsure of where I currently stood.
More from a philosophical stance rather than a physical one. I hadn’t fully had a chance to internalize everything.
Penny was dead.
Garrus was dead.
Karif, George…
The last time I’d even gotten to talk with the rest of the group had been me essentially getting booted from the group.
I wasn’t even sure how to identify the swirl of emotions currently running through my chest.
They were dead.
Something must’ve shown on my face cause Fiona gave me another hug.
“It’ll be fine, we’ll figure it out. We’ve got to take our first steps here though, you don’t need to make a decision right now on whether or not you want to take whatever he offers, but I think it might be a good idea to at least listen to what he has to say. Why don’t we start there, okay?”
I hiccuped slightly, wiping away a few of the tears that had started leaking out.
“You have an idea of what he’s going to offer?”
“I think so, but I’ll go with you to find out if you want,” She offered.
I nodded, “thanks,” I whispered.
We stepped out into the hallway where Mortimer was waiting,
“Excellent, follow me. It’s a bit of a walk to where we’re going, in the meantime, I’ll tell you a little of what I had in mind.”
“Alright,” I said, falling in step behind him as we began making our way through the building we were in.
“Where exactly are we anyways?” I asked.
Mortimer gave me a quick glance as we walked, “One of the guard barracks. Mine to be specific, or rather my main one. Each of the commanders covers a quadrant of the city, I just happened to be the one given the luxury of taking over this ordeal. From here though we’ll need to head over to a different part of the city, mainly because of what I want to get you started on, but before I can explain that we need to go over what exactly you know about our fair country.”
“The answer to that is; not a lot,” I quipped drily.
“So it’s been said, but tell me, what do you know about the guards as an organization?”
“Uh. Next to nothing honestly, I mean, besides the obvious at least. You guard cities? I guess you also guard the national borders to the north and south.”
“Not wrong if a bit simplistic in the notion. The Guards are everything. They police the cities, they fight off invading armies, and they even invade other countries in times of war. Each commander in our country is roughly equivalent to a general in other countries. In times of war, we’d combine our forces while drafting and that’s how we’d effectively come up with our standing army to fight wars if necessary. Although that hasn’t entirely been necessary in the past several hundred years. Not since the civil war led by Queen Ashendra. But that’s a story for another time.”
Huh, interesting. It looked like it was a similar thing in Alixia since I hadn’t noticed a big difference in uniform between the border guards, city guards, and the soldiers operating in the Pit.
But I guess in other countries they had a separation of policing forces and military.
“Are you a military state then?” Curiosity laced my tone.
“Hah, no. We’re an absolute monarchy. The queen gets the final say in anything. She delegates, but she rules absolutely.”
Huh, somewhat ironic all things considered. The queen overthrows a tyrant and becomes one herself.
Mortimer frowned, “I wouldn’t let anyone else hear that.”
“Hmm?”
Oh shit, did I say that out loud?
Whoops.
“Well, I’m not necessarily wrong. The difference between a beloved monarch and a tyrant is public opinion. But fundamentally they’re the same.”
Mortimer made a non-commital noise.
“That’s not important though, you were talking about the guards? I’m assuming you were going somewhere with that then?”
He nodded, “There are several branches of the guard forces, you met Denithin earlier, he’s one of the strategic officers for national threats. He works in national security. I’m sure you can infer what they do from the name. They handle analyzing statistics for the various areas of the guard forces. Border patrols, terrorism, crime, government corruption, and stuff like that. There’s the Navy, not much to say there. The Wyvern Riders. Essentially our air-based cavalry. I could go on.”
Interesting, so the guard just seemed like a conglomeration of police with all the military branches. I’m sure that was an oversimplification, but that’s what it essentially seemed like.
“What I’m interested in getting you involved in is the National Suppression Agency.”
“The N.S.A.?” I asked, incredulously.
“Yes, is that a problem?”
That was… an interesting coincidence.
“No, not necessarily. There was an organization from my home country with a similar acronym. Although they were more focused on global monitoring and threat assessment than anything else.”
“Mmm. Well, with our NSA you’d be handling suppression of various threats across the country. The group is fairly new, only founded in the past couple of decades after a series of vicious monster breaks and instigated international terrorist activities that we’re fairly certain we can link back to global rivals.”
I frowned, “I’m not going to be suppressing protests or militias intending to start civil wars am I?”
“Not likely, assuming those protests aren’t really just another terrorist threat intent on destroying critical infrastructure needed to run our country. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. Alixia has more than once snuck in agents to cause a ruckus across the country. But suppression doesn’t necessarily mean killing either. We just want you to solve the problem, not genocide the populace. But you’ll also handle monster threats as well. Generally when we’re sending you in it’s because we need muscle to solve the problem, not brains. The brains of our operations are handled by the Investigators. They handle things like missing persons requests and things that are more mysterious rather than clear-cut.”
As we made it out of the building there was a squad of soldiers waiting. Mortimer gave a few hand signs to them and they grouped around us as we walked. I glanced back at Fiona and she gave me an encouraging smile.
She seemed somewhat approving of the idea, but I wasn’t entirely sold on it yet.
“Okay, what exactly would this look like?”
Mortimer gave me a slight smile, I guess he thought he had me? I wasn’t too sure, I still didn’t know enough about the program to say one way or the other. I wasn’t interested in handling issues with civilians if it came to that. It’d be relatively easy for any government group to label disgruntled civilians as a terrorist insurgency, or even go about planting proof of it.
I wasn’t interested in being a part of something like that.
“Suppression squads are roughly squads of three to four members, we’d assess you and your capabilities, see what you can do, and give you a rating based on that. We’d then place you with a squad based on your proficiencies. Your teammates would help cover your weaknesses and support your strengths. Once you’ve got a group we’ll send you on a slightly easier mission than your rating would suggest, to give you time for the group to acclimate to each other. From there you would then return to HQ and be assigned a section of the country to handle. You’d then make sure your area is handled, occasionally your group will be dispatched to assist other squads with something in a separate part of the country if your area is quiet.”
Sounded simple enough, although it felt like there was a heavy overlap with adventurer teams.
“How does this differ from just being an adventurer then? It sounds like they would handle a lot of the threats that we’d end up going after.”
“To a degree. Sometimes there are monsters adventurers aren’t interested in handling. Slime overpopulation isn’t hard to handle, just tedious. Adventurers don’t care to cull the local populations so sometimes we end up handling it. A big thing that adventurers don’t deal with, or aren’t necessarily allowed to handle, is banditry. Bandit groups spring up all the time, we even have a couple of infamous groups we haven’t quite been able to grind down. Some are particularly dangerous as well, like the Crimson Sojourn.”
Fiona let out a slight hiss of air, “He’s not going to be expected to deal with them is he?”
I glanced back at her in surprise, she had been fairly quiet up until now, so I was surprised to hear her even interject at all.
“Him specifically? Not likely, not at his tier. If he were tier five or higher? Perhaps. Crimson Sojourn has been a pain in our side, and not even necessarily our side alone. They roam around the greater continent hitting various countries. The last time we got involved with them was two decades ago and was part of the reason we founded the N.S.A. in the first place. We lost one of our spell-blades, which was the reason Olivier Stark was instituted as one. May the Divines rest his soul.”
I frowned, “Olivier died?” I guess I hadn’t had a chance to hear about all the victims that Ili’kithari claimed.
Mortimer nodded, “He’s the reason there were even any survivors from Vinwood at all.”
We walked in silence for a while as I contemplated that. I hadn’t really known Olivier outside of the brief moment that I had met him during the demon invasion. He hadn’t been a bad person though, from what I could tell.
Just another corpse to add to the tragedy.
I couldn’t bring myself to fully care though. My emotions were already dominated by the loss of the few friends I had made. I didn’t have the capacity for anything beyond that.
We wound our way through the city and ended up crossing into a huge compound on the East side of the city. And by huge, I mean huge.
As we approached the guards standing in front of the gate recognized Mortimer I assumed and immediately began raising the portcullis. Crossing into the compound itself there was tons of activity happening around me. Sparring, dummy training, people running back and forth with papers and supplies. Groups of people were making their way out of one of the alternate entrances or coming back looking worn out and beaten up.
Their armor had a different look than the usual guards. The city guards wore something more akin to a half-plate cuirass, with a chain shirt and an open-faced Sallet helmet. Sallet? I think that’s what they were called anyway. Kind of like a Skyrim guard but not covering the face.
They definitely had a more realistic historic feel to them.
These looked to be more stylistic. Like something you’d see a fantasy character wearing in a game. Form-fitting metal chest plates and interlocking pauldrons overlaid over some chainmail and matching gauntlets and sabatons.
It looked like it was up to the individual whether or not to wear a helmet. Some I saw didn’t wear the armor at all, choosing instead to wear their own procured armor or had a skill like I did. Some had variants of the armor to suit their styles. Mages chose to wear less as they weren’t as strong to carry as much.
All in all, it looked very professional. A good first impression anyway. Mortimer seemed to know it as well, giving me a confident smirk.
“They look good, don’t they? We’re quite proud of them, so far they’ve done good work as well. We currently have an 85% success rate on our missions.”
“And how many missions does the average squad handle in a year, how many squads do you have in total?”
Mortimer gave me a suspicious look, but I just flashed him a friendly smile.
“It doesn’t matter what the percentage is if you only handle 10 missions a year or only have 2 squads. All the numbers are important for context,” I explained to him.
“Interesting. I’m not used to people being so well educated,” He said.
“Compulsory education is mandatory where I lived. We were required to go through twelve years of basic schooling handling things ranging from math, science, language, and history, both local and global.”
He nodded, “That’s good. Most of the people here barely understand how to read or write. Queen Ashendra has been working hard on getting education rates up, but it's been a hard fight. Most people aren’t interested.”
“That makes sense, the only reason it happened in my country is because we criminalized it. Basically, you had a legal obligation to go to school or receive an education in some capacity. Otherwise, your legal guardian faced criminal charges. If that didn’t exist then our numbers would look fairly similar I would think.”
“Humans end up the same no matter where they are then, huh?”
I snorted, “Got it in one.”
The compound was arranged in an orderly fashion. We had come in from one of the side entrances, apparently. The side we came in on was the training grounds. Several large fields existed for various purposes. Solo training, group training, there were dummies to work on, archery ranges, magic ranges. Some even had moving targets, which was definitely interesting to see. Some areas looked like they had wargames underway, an obstacle course. There was a building nearby that apparently hosted an indoor obstacle course.
He led me and Fiona up to a similarly large building, “This is where we assess new recruits. So what do you think? Is this something you might find yourself interested in?”
I looked at Fiona again, but she was annoyingly silent on any opinions.
“Why do you want me in the first place?” I asked, “I’m not inherently special beyond having a strong start in my early levels, or beyond my biology.”
“You’re not special, yet,” Mortimer retorted, “You’ve had a strong start so far, and yeah that’s going to cap off without someone supporting you. But what about a tier from now? Two tiers? You’re already running around with one epic grade class, most people don’t get one of those until tier five, or four if they pull off a miracle in the third tier. No, I have no doubts you’d be a valuable asset. You just need the right environment to get there. I’m willing to provide that environment if you’re willing to provide the effort. I can’t make you get there, but I can give you the tools you need to succeed. And unlike Orwen, I’m not picky about who I try to bring in.”
I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t necessarily hearing anything I disliked. But I felt… wary.
“I think you should do it, Alex,” Fiona said, causing me to turn to her.
“This is a good opportunity for you and helps address the problems you were having before. You went to Alixia in the first place because you needed a way to get stronger without a group to work with. Maybe go to the Imperial Academy. Well, that didn’t work out for you, but this covers those bases for you. It’ll get you open to the wider world around you, let you see what’s happening around you, explore. You’ll also have a team at your back to support you so you won’t be going into fights by yourself. And at the end of the day, if you don’t like it? You don’t have to do it all your life.”
“I…”
She was right… those had all been things that lurked in the back of my mind at some point.
“Why don’t we do this,” Mortimer interjected, “let’s get you assessed, find out where your talents lie, and work on seeing if I can pull together a squad for you. Once you go through the initial testing you can take some time to think about whether or not you actually want to do this.”
I thought for a moment before slowly nodding, “Alright, I can do that.”
Mortimer smiled, “Excellent, follow me then.”
