7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Nonsense! Going for the dreams is what makes them so grand! Never mind what regrets come what may!
Well mind some regrets, like when Kino & the girls finally learn Faction Disguise...
Halkegenia Online Thread 24 : WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAM
- Thread starter Triggerhappy
- Start date
Nonsense! Going for the dreams is what makes them so grand! Never mind what regrets come what may!
Well mind some regrets, like when Kino & the girls finally learn Faction Disguise...
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
Yuuki - "Kino, turn into a girl so sharing a bed isn't weird!"
Kino - "How will that make it less weird?"
Yuuki - "Less weird for me!"
- Location
- Myanmar
How does Yui's truth sensing work here btw? As an AI, I assuming she collect biometric data from people's VR headset thingies and use that data to diagnose the players. Now that she is flesh and blood, how does she do it? Is it magic or is it one of the inherent abilities of her new body. Perhaps her maeve hearing is that good that she can detect people's pulse from a distance. Is that something Asuna can train herself to master?
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
I left the mechanism vague. But it's implied to be some sort of extrasensory perception. Might work on the same principles as Shiori's wifi :-/
Perceptually Yui describes it as another layer of colors/tastes/scent that cling to a person. The important part being that Yui's perception is based on surface emotions. It doesn't grant her any understanding of WHY people feel the way they do, or why they might be lying.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
I'm now imagining Shiori deciding to violently flee the sight of a common chicken wire fence, thanks.
(Chicken wire fencing, if kept in a single piece, is about the cheapest signal effective signal blocker known to man. It also gets used as a concrete stabilizer, which is why government buildings have the worst cell signals)
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
How could you miss the opportunity for everyone opposed to the Faerie Court to wear tin foil hats around Princess Yui?
Yui - Annoyed that people think she can read minds -
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Because unitary foils don't actually work very well. You need wire to get that premium field, and the mass 60 degree angles make a lot of constructive interference. A lot of small spots is a lot together than one big spot here.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
*Lord Rute rubbing his hands together after his brilliant plan to fix the fairy financial situation comes to fruition, selling tin foil hats*
Last edited:
Careful, that sounds like something a tin foil hat conspiracy theorist would say.*Lord Rute rubbing his hands together after his brilliant plan to fix the fairy financial situation comes to fruition, selling tin foil hats*
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Lucent-Wing III
After the duel, and two days of frosty teaching from Asuna, I was tired. We'd rather obviously fucked up, but I couldn't see a path forward from it. Still, being tired wasn't an excuse to not go through with the basics of life, so here I was, on the stoop of the traveler-house with my sword out as I sharpened it. Running along the edge of the blade with a barely-heard rasp went my polishing stone. It was old kit, SAO kit, a little block of white porcelain that drank up linseed oil and slowly stained itself dull with the metal it took.
Coming up to the building, a well-built woman looked down on me, before raising an eyebrow at my weapons care. It was Lieutenant Agnes, and wonder of wonders she wasn't immediately trying to drag me off to the yards.
"Kino, why are you out here? You normally do this in the armory."
I shrugged. "I get claustrophobic if I spend too much time with the girls, and they're working on tailoring their uniforms. This keeps me out of the way, and lets me finally get this thing to be decently sharp."
Agnes' snorted. "Come off it, your sword is always twice as sharp as it needs to be."
"Nah," I grumbled back, digging around in the satchel I kept most of my blade-care tools in, before pulling out a scrap of leather. Putting my sword on it, I pulled it down from the base of the blade all the way to the tip, before it slipped past the leather. "It'll be sharp enough when it can cut through this scrap in one stroke.
The scrap was, for the record, about three centimeters square. My cut had made a half-centimeter line through it.
Agnes just whistled. "Damn. What is that?"
"Bonded leather from a Corrosive Dragon."
"Well that sounds like a load of Fae bullshit. Mind if I try it?"
I shrugged, handing it over. Pulling out her service sword, Agnes took another display cut like I'd just done, making a quarter-centimeter pull through it. "What the hell?"
"Bonded leather is basically scrap leather that's been shredded down, then mixed with some alchemical concoctions to help serve as glue, then spread into sheets," I explained, my old experience with tailoring in SAO coming in handy. "Once it dries up, they roll the sheets, and start doing whatever to 'em. It's a bit like making paper, really."
"Except paper isn't tougher than any cured leather I've handled," Agnes muttered. "How expensive is this stuff, anyway?"
"When I wrote Caramella- my sister back in Arrun- she was quoting prices of three Yrd to the meter for bonded Caustic Dragon hide, and eight to the meter for split-grain. Full thickness… twelve to the half-meter, but that's entirely because you can't get a piece larger than a half-meter: Caustic Dragons explode when they die, and weapon injuries tend to turn into full running tears in the hide."
"She does mob patrols, then?"
I smiled. "Yeah. She spent all her shares of the drops on buying up all the hide, and cut a deal with a leatherworking place to make it into finished armor. Now we've got something like... A hundred yards of mixed hides waiting to get used? I'm getting new armor out of it at least. Now I need to make sure my sword can beat this, because if we've got this much of it, who else has it?"
"Oh," Agnes said, muttering. "How much would you charge for a set of armor?"
I shrugged. "I'd write Caramella on that, honestly. She's already getting hers done, then I'll get mine, and who knows?"
"Well then, I'll write you something, and you can send it with your next letter. Seems reasonable?"
"Sure," I said, before an idea came to me. "Could you do me a favor, though?"
"Depends on the favor," Agnes said, raising an eyebrow. "I'm not taking some pretty trinkets to the Princess or some garbage like that."
"Nah, I need Silica and Yuuki's sizes. Miss Asuna is taking on a lot of the cost of outfitting us, but if I can get them some good armor, I won't have to worry about them as much."
Blinking, Agnes looked me over again. "That sounds rather… expensive. And propositional. Are you sure about it?"
"Yeah. They're my friends, and I want to protect them."
"Then I'll get those measures for you," Agnes said, smiling as she sheathed her sword and pocketed my test swatch. Moving out of her way, I just went back to sharpening my sword. It wasn't a bad sword, to be clear- but as my whetstone dragged over it, I could swear I felt the edge moving under the stone. It was as sharp as I could make it, I guess. It couldn't cut the dragon leather, though, so I'd need to work on something else.
Or rather, I'd need some different way to use it. The tip was mostly sharpened, but I couldn't trust it too much. I could improve it, though. Grabbing my rough shaping stone instead of my fine polisher, I oiled it up and checked my edges. The lozenge blade form could take a sharpening on the back of the false edge- and I had time. Wrapping a rag over the true edge to grip it, I started work sharpening the false edge behind the point. This wouldn't be a slashing edge or a cutting edge. This would be a piercing edge, riding in behind the sword-tip as I stabbed to defeat the leather.
When I was finished with it, Agnes was behind me with a smug smile, along with a pair of familiar wing-glows. Purple and yellow light danced over my work, and the musketeer just gave me a smile and a pat on the shoulder. With her other hand, she gave me a folded sheet of paper, before walking off.
"Don't open that," Silica said, crossing her arms. "That's for Caramella."
"Ah, he can open it if he wants!" Yuuki teased. "They're just numbers."
"They're our tailoring measurements!"
"Yeah, just numbers. Now, if he does open it, well, looks like I win the bet!"
"Don't tell him about the bet!" Silica snapped. "Don't you dare!"
Agnes just looked over the two of them, and started laughing. "I'll see you later, alright? And don't worry about my letter to Caramella, it's in there too!"
"Got it!" I called, before shoving the whole thing in my satchel and making for the palace library. I was going to need to write a bigger letter than normal this week!
///
It was the next day, and Asuna was running the girls through combat sword drills. This was a problem, mostly because I didn't have a good combat sword yet. Asuna had taken mine over Albion, and while I had four orders in with smiths back in Arrun, the waiting lists were obscene. I wasn't going to be replacing an Ensorcelled Mithril Rapier +19 anytime soon, and Asuna'd broken the one I'd loaned her back then. Which, to be fair, she'd also killed something like a dozen dragons with it while we were on the run so it was hardly a waste. Didn't get me a good war-sword though, and I definitely wanted something better than Tristanian steel.
It was about that point Agnes walked over to me, taking a look at how the combat drills were going. "So the girls get some extra practice time?"
"Yeah. Yuuki is damn good, but she's not used to fighting people; while Silica is quick and clever and never put too much work into a sword before."
"And you get set on the sideline?"
"I'm an armsman," I explained, "and I am practicing something."
"That being?"
Carefully bringing my left hand up, I muttered a four-word chant, then went through the hand motions Yuuki had taught me last night. Hand flat open while chanting, ring and pinky finger to 'arm' the spell, point the middle and index at the target destination. Close the middle and index fingers-
-and stagger, woozy, as once again I managed to mis-cast Blink. Looking up, I noticed it had at least moved me a half-meter. Progress! One nauseating snap at a time!
"Ah. Well, if you'd like to work on something a bit less esoteric, I've got Sergeant Ursula who was interested in seeing how you'd do with that brace of pistols your friend has."
Trying to look Agnes in the eyes and failing miserably, I focused on keeping my lunch down. "Really?"
"Yes. It'll be good for her, since she's trying to get promoted to the training cadre; and it'll be good for you since it's nice and reliable."
"Pistols, reliable?" I snorted.
"More so than that jumping-around spell then."
Blinking out from under Asuna's training to get some water, Yuuki passed by with a groan. "Chihiro-sensei said the first hundred casts are going to be terrible. How many are you on yet?"
"Forty-six."
"Only fifty-four more to go then."
"Yep."
Agnes shook her head, sighing. "Mages. C'mon."
My eyes rolled, but I followed Agnes to the range, where I was promptly sat down with Sergeant Ursula and getting drilled on pistols.
See, the thing about pistols is that they're dogshit. Complete trash. A musket was long and sturdy enough to beat the tar out of someone in a pinch, or a bayonet could be affixed for the ol' stabby-stabby. Fae Muskets, made by either TRIST or the Gobinau Arsenal, were even nicer since they used our super-simple and really nice flintlocks instead of the much more finicky local snaphaunces or wheel-locks.
It took me a solid minute to realize that no, Ursula wasn't having a laugh at me, the usual high-end gun lock was a spinning chunk of steel scraping a flint every time the trigger was pulled. They were reliable as hell- only misfiring one in ten times, as if that was acceptable!- according to her, and didn't need too terrible much winding to reload. Since the Musketeers had about a dozen in their collective armory, I was allowed to take a dozen practice shots with one. It wasn't hard to quickly develop a distaste for the persnickety thing, especially since the best way to hold it was half-cocked sideways. It looked like I was some sort of gangster using it!
I was quickly learning to share the opinion that pistols were just bad in general, but then I got to go back to using Silica's set of four. Why she'd bought four pistols, I didn't know. They were all apparently older snaphaunces that had been rebuilt with Gobinau flintlocks, so I could ditch the gangster lean at least. Even better, they all took the same bullet size- a real risk, apparently, since nobody had really standardized on that yet. Shooting them was much better than the wheellock; without the spinning steel wheel and the need to hold it cockeyed, they weren't nearly as messy to hold. Plus, there wasn't any notable recoil either.
Then Ursula let me try a blunderbuss and all my good mood about the pistols went away. Dumping a sack of birdshot down the barrel was just funny, and I could practically see the forty-odd balls of lead create a cloud of death downrange. Oh yeah. I needed to get one of these for the next time I was fighting a dragon. Fly in, blast the wing, drop it so I could pull a sword, and finish off the mage on the ground if he survived the fall. I was about to ask for a recommendation on where to go purchasing, when a set of three thumps landed behind me- presumably Asuna and the girls.
"Having fun, Sergeant?" Asuna asked, sounding quite pleasant.
"Having a ball, ma'am," Ursula replied, looking over the shooting bench we'd covered in guns, between her musket, my pistols, the blunderbuss, the demonstration wheellock, and both our swords for good measure.
"Good. Any thoughts on Kino's work?"
"Well, ma'am, he's an 'armsman' so he should be proficient at everything," Ursula said with a wink and a grin, "and he's certainly got loading pistols down pat. Accuracy's a bit rough, but we weren't drilling for accuracy and he's yet to whiff something over the backstop, so better than most of the cavalry."
"I'm glad to hear it. Kino, come on. We'll be cleaning up, and then it'll be a short flight out of town for us. Wear your wargear, everything you've got."
The girls looked surprised at that, and so did I. Still, I rushed through a shower, then back to our rooms to start suiting up. Since I was faster than the girls, mostly because Yuuki's hair was a giant time sink, I got my gambeson on and all my kit settled on the roof so they could change in the room.
Aside from a thin silk shirt and a jock strap to hold my cup over my underwear, the base layer of my war gear was the gambeson. Hard-wearing cloudbloom fabric and canvas duck layered together and stitched with ironthistle thread, it was the first real piece of ALO equipment I'd bought once I got my bearings in Arrun. Overtop my hips went the jack-of-plate kilt I used to protect the family jewels and vital points in my hips, while resting over that went my cuirass. Gnomish jewel-steel wasn't cheap by any measure, but a few of the Nymphs coming from Albion with me had friends there- friends who offered favorable positions in working queues. My next addition to the ensemble would be a gorget and pauldrons, but until then all that was left was to throw on my helmet and coat.
Weapons were a more questionable subject. I had my court sword, but that wouldn't cut the mustard to Asuna. Still, it was an easy thing to work on under my coat once I adjusted the baldric to carry it forward, over my hips, instead of in the frog down at my side. The coat was already full of throwing weapons- twenty shuriken, thirty knives, and sixty spikes- and my war dagger was on the belt of the coat in back. Then there were the pistols, which I still had for some reason. Getting a sash out, I tied it around my waist and hung all four guns in it, perfect for cross-draw with my left hand. It pinched at my throwing pick storage a little, but compared to a support backpack it was fine.
With one last shrug of my shoulders, I leaned down towards the window. "Ready to go?"
"Yeah, we're ready!" Yuuki called back. With that, we set off.
I'd never seen the girls in full wargear before, and it was worth mentioning. Silica's coat was worn under her breastplate, now, and her daggers looked almost artful on her belt. More importantly, like me she had a court sword at her waist: not much improvement over the knives, but every centimeter of reach was valuable here. Yuuki, meanwhile, was half-naked it seemed in comparison; with just a breastplate and fine ringmail extensions to bring it into a shirt. It was probably of Leprechaun make, the way it flowed like water over her form.
Taking the time to breathe carefully, I checked my water stores as we headed off on foot from our landing point. Once we'd progressed a hundred meters or so into the trees, Asuna spoke up.
"Word came in from the courriers there was a suspicious camp out here," she said, fingering the hilt of her rapier nervously. "The four of us can check up on it, and if anything happens we are on a patrol route for the Dragon Knights. This shouldn't be violent."
But if it is, an unstated voice told me like a ghost in the wind, we are prepared.
"Think of this as a shakedown mission," Asuna continued. "We know what we have and what we can do, now it's time to put it to the test. Alright?"
Three nods went back to her, and we started moving. I'd decided to follow Asuna for a lot of reasons. Back in Albion, it was her experience. Back in Arrun, it was for her kindness. Now, it was for her experience. Nobody knew what was coming, but there was a scent of war and violence in the wind. Better to face it head on than have it overtake me from behind again.
Anything to keep Arrun from turning into the Town of Beginnings… that would be enough for me…
After the duel, and two days of frosty teaching from Asuna, I was tired. We'd rather obviously fucked up, but I couldn't see a path forward from it. Still, being tired wasn't an excuse to not go through with the basics of life, so here I was, on the stoop of the traveler-house with my sword out as I sharpened it. Running along the edge of the blade with a barely-heard rasp went my polishing stone. It was old kit, SAO kit, a little block of white porcelain that drank up linseed oil and slowly stained itself dull with the metal it took.
Coming up to the building, a well-built woman looked down on me, before raising an eyebrow at my weapons care. It was Lieutenant Agnes, and wonder of wonders she wasn't immediately trying to drag me off to the yards.
"Kino, why are you out here? You normally do this in the armory."
I shrugged. "I get claustrophobic if I spend too much time with the girls, and they're working on tailoring their uniforms. This keeps me out of the way, and lets me finally get this thing to be decently sharp."
Agnes' snorted. "Come off it, your sword is always twice as sharp as it needs to be."
"Nah," I grumbled back, digging around in the satchel I kept most of my blade-care tools in, before pulling out a scrap of leather. Putting my sword on it, I pulled it down from the base of the blade all the way to the tip, before it slipped past the leather. "It'll be sharp enough when it can cut through this scrap in one stroke.
The scrap was, for the record, about three centimeters square. My cut had made a half-centimeter line through it.
Agnes just whistled. "Damn. What is that?"
"Bonded leather from a Corrosive Dragon."
"Well that sounds like a load of Fae bullshit. Mind if I try it?"
I shrugged, handing it over. Pulling out her service sword, Agnes took another display cut like I'd just done, making a quarter-centimeter pull through it. "What the hell?"
"Bonded leather is basically scrap leather that's been shredded down, then mixed with some alchemical concoctions to help serve as glue, then spread into sheets," I explained, my old experience with tailoring in SAO coming in handy. "Once it dries up, they roll the sheets, and start doing whatever to 'em. It's a bit like making paper, really."
"Except paper isn't tougher than any cured leather I've handled," Agnes muttered. "How expensive is this stuff, anyway?"
"When I wrote Caramella- my sister back in Arrun- she was quoting prices of three Yrd to the meter for bonded Caustic Dragon hide, and eight to the meter for split-grain. Full thickness… twelve to the half-meter, but that's entirely because you can't get a piece larger than a half-meter: Caustic Dragons explode when they die, and weapon injuries tend to turn into full running tears in the hide."
"She does mob patrols, then?"
I smiled. "Yeah. She spent all her shares of the drops on buying up all the hide, and cut a deal with a leatherworking place to make it into finished armor. Now we've got something like... A hundred yards of mixed hides waiting to get used? I'm getting new armor out of it at least. Now I need to make sure my sword can beat this, because if we've got this much of it, who else has it?"
"Oh," Agnes said, muttering. "How much would you charge for a set of armor?"
I shrugged. "I'd write Caramella on that, honestly. She's already getting hers done, then I'll get mine, and who knows?"
"Well then, I'll write you something, and you can send it with your next letter. Seems reasonable?"
"Sure," I said, before an idea came to me. "Could you do me a favor, though?"
"Depends on the favor," Agnes said, raising an eyebrow. "I'm not taking some pretty trinkets to the Princess or some garbage like that."
"Nah, I need Silica and Yuuki's sizes. Miss Asuna is taking on a lot of the cost of outfitting us, but if I can get them some good armor, I won't have to worry about them as much."
Blinking, Agnes looked me over again. "That sounds rather… expensive. And propositional. Are you sure about it?"
"Yeah. They're my friends, and I want to protect them."
"Then I'll get those measures for you," Agnes said, smiling as she sheathed her sword and pocketed my test swatch. Moving out of her way, I just went back to sharpening my sword. It wasn't a bad sword, to be clear- but as my whetstone dragged over it, I could swear I felt the edge moving under the stone. It was as sharp as I could make it, I guess. It couldn't cut the dragon leather, though, so I'd need to work on something else.
Or rather, I'd need some different way to use it. The tip was mostly sharpened, but I couldn't trust it too much. I could improve it, though. Grabbing my rough shaping stone instead of my fine polisher, I oiled it up and checked my edges. The lozenge blade form could take a sharpening on the back of the false edge- and I had time. Wrapping a rag over the true edge to grip it, I started work sharpening the false edge behind the point. This wouldn't be a slashing edge or a cutting edge. This would be a piercing edge, riding in behind the sword-tip as I stabbed to defeat the leather.
When I was finished with it, Agnes was behind me with a smug smile, along with a pair of familiar wing-glows. Purple and yellow light danced over my work, and the musketeer just gave me a smile and a pat on the shoulder. With her other hand, she gave me a folded sheet of paper, before walking off.
"Don't open that," Silica said, crossing her arms. "That's for Caramella."
"Ah, he can open it if he wants!" Yuuki teased. "They're just numbers."
"They're our tailoring measurements!"
"Yeah, just numbers. Now, if he does open it, well, looks like I win the bet!"
"Don't tell him about the bet!" Silica snapped. "Don't you dare!"
Agnes just looked over the two of them, and started laughing. "I'll see you later, alright? And don't worry about my letter to Caramella, it's in there too!"
"Got it!" I called, before shoving the whole thing in my satchel and making for the palace library. I was going to need to write a bigger letter than normal this week!
///
It was the next day, and Asuna was running the girls through combat sword drills. This was a problem, mostly because I didn't have a good combat sword yet. Asuna had taken mine over Albion, and while I had four orders in with smiths back in Arrun, the waiting lists were obscene. I wasn't going to be replacing an Ensorcelled Mithril Rapier +19 anytime soon, and Asuna'd broken the one I'd loaned her back then. Which, to be fair, she'd also killed something like a dozen dragons with it while we were on the run so it was hardly a waste. Didn't get me a good war-sword though, and I definitely wanted something better than Tristanian steel.
It was about that point Agnes walked over to me, taking a look at how the combat drills were going. "So the girls get some extra practice time?"
"Yeah. Yuuki is damn good, but she's not used to fighting people; while Silica is quick and clever and never put too much work into a sword before."
"And you get set on the sideline?"
"I'm an armsman," I explained, "and I am practicing something."
"That being?"
Carefully bringing my left hand up, I muttered a four-word chant, then went through the hand motions Yuuki had taught me last night. Hand flat open while chanting, ring and pinky finger to 'arm' the spell, point the middle and index at the target destination. Close the middle and index fingers-
-and stagger, woozy, as once again I managed to mis-cast Blink. Looking up, I noticed it had at least moved me a half-meter. Progress! One nauseating snap at a time!
"Ah. Well, if you'd like to work on something a bit less esoteric, I've got Sergeant Ursula who was interested in seeing how you'd do with that brace of pistols your friend has."
Trying to look Agnes in the eyes and failing miserably, I focused on keeping my lunch down. "Really?"
"Yes. It'll be good for her, since she's trying to get promoted to the training cadre; and it'll be good for you since it's nice and reliable."
"Pistols, reliable?" I snorted.
"More so than that jumping-around spell then."
Blinking out from under Asuna's training to get some water, Yuuki passed by with a groan. "Chihiro-sensei said the first hundred casts are going to be terrible. How many are you on yet?"
"Forty-six."
"Only fifty-four more to go then."
"Yep."
Agnes shook her head, sighing. "Mages. C'mon."
My eyes rolled, but I followed Agnes to the range, where I was promptly sat down with Sergeant Ursula and getting drilled on pistols.
See, the thing about pistols is that they're dogshit. Complete trash. A musket was long and sturdy enough to beat the tar out of someone in a pinch, or a bayonet could be affixed for the ol' stabby-stabby. Fae Muskets, made by either TRIST or the Gobinau Arsenal, were even nicer since they used our super-simple and really nice flintlocks instead of the much more finicky local snaphaunces or wheel-locks.
It took me a solid minute to realize that no, Ursula wasn't having a laugh at me, the usual high-end gun lock was a spinning chunk of steel scraping a flint every time the trigger was pulled. They were reliable as hell- only misfiring one in ten times, as if that was acceptable!- according to her, and didn't need too terrible much winding to reload. Since the Musketeers had about a dozen in their collective armory, I was allowed to take a dozen practice shots with one. It wasn't hard to quickly develop a distaste for the persnickety thing, especially since the best way to hold it was half-cocked sideways. It looked like I was some sort of gangster using it!
I was quickly learning to share the opinion that pistols were just bad in general, but then I got to go back to using Silica's set of four. Why she'd bought four pistols, I didn't know. They were all apparently older snaphaunces that had been rebuilt with Gobinau flintlocks, so I could ditch the gangster lean at least. Even better, they all took the same bullet size- a real risk, apparently, since nobody had really standardized on that yet. Shooting them was much better than the wheellock; without the spinning steel wheel and the need to hold it cockeyed, they weren't nearly as messy to hold. Plus, there wasn't any notable recoil either.
Then Ursula let me try a blunderbuss and all my good mood about the pistols went away. Dumping a sack of birdshot down the barrel was just funny, and I could practically see the forty-odd balls of lead create a cloud of death downrange. Oh yeah. I needed to get one of these for the next time I was fighting a dragon. Fly in, blast the wing, drop it so I could pull a sword, and finish off the mage on the ground if he survived the fall. I was about to ask for a recommendation on where to go purchasing, when a set of three thumps landed behind me- presumably Asuna and the girls.
"Having fun, Sergeant?" Asuna asked, sounding quite pleasant.
"Having a ball, ma'am," Ursula replied, looking over the shooting bench we'd covered in guns, between her musket, my pistols, the blunderbuss, the demonstration wheellock, and both our swords for good measure.
"Good. Any thoughts on Kino's work?"
"Well, ma'am, he's an 'armsman' so he should be proficient at everything," Ursula said with a wink and a grin, "and he's certainly got loading pistols down pat. Accuracy's a bit rough, but we weren't drilling for accuracy and he's yet to whiff something over the backstop, so better than most of the cavalry."
"I'm glad to hear it. Kino, come on. We'll be cleaning up, and then it'll be a short flight out of town for us. Wear your wargear, everything you've got."
The girls looked surprised at that, and so did I. Still, I rushed through a shower, then back to our rooms to start suiting up. Since I was faster than the girls, mostly because Yuuki's hair was a giant time sink, I got my gambeson on and all my kit settled on the roof so they could change in the room.
Aside from a thin silk shirt and a jock strap to hold my cup over my underwear, the base layer of my war gear was the gambeson. Hard-wearing cloudbloom fabric and canvas duck layered together and stitched with ironthistle thread, it was the first real piece of ALO equipment I'd bought once I got my bearings in Arrun. Overtop my hips went the jack-of-plate kilt I used to protect the family jewels and vital points in my hips, while resting over that went my cuirass. Gnomish jewel-steel wasn't cheap by any measure, but a few of the Nymphs coming from Albion with me had friends there- friends who offered favorable positions in working queues. My next addition to the ensemble would be a gorget and pauldrons, but until then all that was left was to throw on my helmet and coat.
Weapons were a more questionable subject. I had my court sword, but that wouldn't cut the mustard to Asuna. Still, it was an easy thing to work on under my coat once I adjusted the baldric to carry it forward, over my hips, instead of in the frog down at my side. The coat was already full of throwing weapons- twenty shuriken, thirty knives, and sixty spikes- and my war dagger was on the belt of the coat in back. Then there were the pistols, which I still had for some reason. Getting a sash out, I tied it around my waist and hung all four guns in it, perfect for cross-draw with my left hand. It pinched at my throwing pick storage a little, but compared to a support backpack it was fine.
With one last shrug of my shoulders, I leaned down towards the window. "Ready to go?"
"Yeah, we're ready!" Yuuki called back. With that, we set off.
I'd never seen the girls in full wargear before, and it was worth mentioning. Silica's coat was worn under her breastplate, now, and her daggers looked almost artful on her belt. More importantly, like me she had a court sword at her waist: not much improvement over the knives, but every centimeter of reach was valuable here. Yuuki, meanwhile, was half-naked it seemed in comparison; with just a breastplate and fine ringmail extensions to bring it into a shirt. It was probably of Leprechaun make, the way it flowed like water over her form.
Taking the time to breathe carefully, I checked my water stores as we headed off on foot from our landing point. Once we'd progressed a hundred meters or so into the trees, Asuna spoke up.
"Word came in from the courriers there was a suspicious camp out here," she said, fingering the hilt of her rapier nervously. "The four of us can check up on it, and if anything happens we are on a patrol route for the Dragon Knights. This shouldn't be violent."
But if it is, an unstated voice told me like a ghost in the wind, we are prepared.
"Think of this as a shakedown mission," Asuna continued. "We know what we have and what we can do, now it's time to put it to the test. Alright?"
Three nods went back to her, and we started moving. I'd decided to follow Asuna for a lot of reasons. Back in Albion, it was her experience. Back in Arrun, it was for her kindness. Now, it was for her experience. Nobody knew what was coming, but there was a scent of war and violence in the wind. Better to face it head on than have it overtake me from behind again.
Anything to keep Arrun from turning into the Town of Beginnings… that would be enough for me…
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
It's not easy, being Kino.
Yes, the problems a plenty of early firearms.
Be prepared!
jwolfe_beta
Semi Genre-Savvy Overlord
- Location
- Canada
They just need the backup Cu Sidhe singers to get it right.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Some people really hate Kino for how he's got it on easy street. Those people haven't seen his massive pile of letters or smelled him after he shoots off ten pounds of powder to get good.
Then they see him getting henpecked by all the girls in his life, and oh dear god there's the understanding.
Kino, at 2200, mildly drunk after a few games of cards being sociable with Wales' court of exiles
It's great that we'll soon be connected
With a king who'll be all-time adored.
Of course, quid pro quo, you're expected
To take certain duties on board
The future is littered with prizes
And though he's the main addressee
The point that I must emphasize is
You won't get a sniff without me!
jwolfe_beta
Semi Genre-Savvy Overlord
- Location
- Canada
Yeah, rom-coms etc are a lot less fun when you're living in one instead of watching it.
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
Kirito - "I just want to play video games with my wife."
*Disembodied generic audience laughtrack*