29. Dorelle

While the base received its final touches outside Verevain, Alistair kept extending his reach across the island. Since he still was not ready to leave Emerier by voidship, Dorelle naturally became the next important point in that expansion. Verevain lived through trade, supporting the port from behind by storing goods, moving labor, and feeding the wider traffic flowing in and out of the island. Dorelle was different. Its economy stayed focused inward. Almost all of its shards came from food production, livestock, and the smaller businesses needed to support the farms and villages around it.

In some ways, this left Dorelle more conservative and less influenced by whatever passed through the port. The town proper was also much smaller than Verevain if one looked only at the buildings inside the center. Most of its population was spread across surrounding farms and villages instead. Dorelle itself felt more like a gathering point for the countryside.

One thing about Dorelle surprised him. He found more combat-related classes in Dorelle than in Verevain. At first, the balance seemed backward. Verevain was closer to the port, and the port was where escorts, hunters, and rougher work naturally gathered. But the explanation became simple after he watched for a while. In Verevain, combat ability was concentrated in the town guard, in hired hands connected to trade, and in the port itself. In Dorelle, the danger was more scattered. Voidlings reached the outer farms and smaller villages more often, probably because of livestock, isolated roads, and groups of people living beyond the town walls. The threat was not overwhelming, but it was regular enough that many young men and women saw value in passing combat-related trials, even if they never became proper hunters.

Most were not especially strong. Those who wanted to progress seriously eventually had to move on to better opportunities, usually toward the port, escort work, or outer island hunting. There was only so much combat an island the size Emerier could provide. Even so, the town had built some support for combat classes.

The most useful of those was the local hunting guild office. It lacked the reach of a full guild tied to nests or large hunting routes, but it functioned well enough. Locally, it handled two main things: paid lessons that gave recent classed a proper start in weapon handling and fighting basics, and information about voidling sightings around the farms and roads. More serious work was still referred onward to the port guild, but Dorelle clearly preferred not to wait helplessly every time a voidling appeared near a field.

The logic behind the training made sense to Alistair. Combat classes suffered under the same early limitation as every other class. A single skill still had limits. A person could have a class that helped with movement, or that improved striking, or that gave an edge in using a weapon. Some had general skills that touched several areas at once, but those usually did so more shallowly. That meant newly classed fighters almost always had gaps. Training existed to cover those gaps until the person became stronger, more experienced, or wealthy enough to get properly geared.

After gathering information through Falsehand, Alistair decided Dorelle would get a combat persona.

Farmer was still a likely future choice there. He had no intention of turning away from the EXP and practical knowledge he could get from real farm work. But that would have to wait. Four hours of clone duration were still too short for building a believable persona in Dorelle’s fields while his real body remained in another town.

Training under the local guild seemed more feasible. He could play a recent classed boy from one of the more distant villages, coming into town every day for instruction and leaving again before evening. If questions came, he could always lean on a simple excuse: his parents did not support the idea of him chasing combat, so he had to make do with what time he could spare.

The cost would be steep, but he still decided it was worth it. He needed combat experience, and more than that, controlled combat experience. Random fighting, ambushes, and desperate reactions had already taught him some things. Now, proper instruction could fill the parts instinct and survival could not.

Beyond that, Dorelle had also given him another discovery he appreciated more and more each time he visited. Food.

With its variety of produce, dairy trade, and closer relationship to the surrounding villages, Dorelle offered far more options than Verevain. Alistair had even started considering whether a kitchen assistant persona there might eventually be worth the effort. Not immediately, of course, but once his clone duration increased again, it became a real possibility.

In any case, the next level did not seem far off. Between the continuing base construction, the growing complexity of his routines, and the steady accumulation of EXP through many classes at once, another level felt like a matter of days.

Another change came first.

The gain came as a surprise, but a welcome one. He felt no dramatic increase in power. Effort-driven growth never seemed to work that way. Still, the difference was there. His movements with strength-based skills became more confident, and the use of force felt less awkward. The gain helped a great deal now, because he had no wish to present himself in Dorelle as a level one combat class with no strength.

Three was still low, but it was acceptable. A recent classed boy could reasonably still be that weak if he had not yet committed his first free points or if he had chosen to place them elsewhere. Since he intended to present a skill more dependent on movement and disruption than raw power, he could easily claim that his early growth had gone into DEX or PER.

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He did exactly that when he finally went to sign up. The guild office sat near the edge of Dorelle’s main square, with a small weapons rack outside and a faded board listing training days, sighting notices, and warnings about road travel.

A narrow-faced clerk looked up from a ledger when the clone entered.

“What do you need?”

“Training,” Alistair said. “If you’re accepting new people.”

The man looked him over, starting with his hands, then his boots, then his posture. “Classed?”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“Combat.”

“I need you to narrow it down a bit more. We don’t need the class name, just the focus.”

Alistair had prepared for that. “Close fighting. Footing and movement. Helps me disrupt enemies.”

The clerk’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“Village?”

“South of Bracken Hollow,” Alistair said.

“Do you need help with lodging?”

“I’m not moving into town, for now. My parents are still coming to terms with my class.”

The clerk snorted.

“You’re not the first one to say something like that.”

He dipped the pen, turned a page, and asked, “Name?”

“Lenn.”

“Age?”

“Seventeen.”