Chapter 48: Exploring the City (Patreon)

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Meditation (active): Increases the user's mana regeneration by 100% while lowering mind and perception by 75%. Lapses in focus will deactivate the skill. No mana cost.

Cayden tiredly accepted the newly offered [Meditation] skill after glancing over the description. It was likely an amazing skill for someone with a mage build, but Cayden doubted he’d find much use of it, what with his attempts to synergize as many skills as possible with [Boost Passive]. But he had an empty skill slot after merging his other skills into [Inertia], so it would be a waste to ignore it, even if he discarded the skill in a day or two for something better.

Augustus led them through the gates of Valtane without issue, and after grabbing their things, hopping off the cart, and thanking the centaur for the transport, they wasted no time checking into the first inn that they could find. Cayden would eventually have a room at the academy, and hopefully so would Elise after she passed her trial, but the princess had given them enough coin to pay for the next two nights until after Elise’s trial, although Cayden would have been fine paying for it even if she hadn’t.

Expecting to move in just a few days, they didn’t bother to unpack anything but the most basic of essentials. Cayden felt a bit awkward booking the room with Elise by his side, the innkeeper having obvious thoughts about the two teenagers who showed up at his inn in the middle of the night. But Elise seemed oblivious to the man’s thoughts, and in practice sharing the room was no different from when they camped out together after a delve, so Cayden didn’t allow it to bother him either.

They woke early the following morning, unused to the strange surroundings.

The trials for Elise would occur on the following day. They didn’t know what form the trials would take, but they had to assume it would be related to enchanting or alchemy, the two areas that Elise could contribute to a delve. While the affiliate academy was a separate school, it was still tied to the Delver’s Academy.

So for the first hour of the morning, Elise went through her bags and got out those things she thought she might need to pass a ‘trial’. And then, with the rest of the day to kill, they decided to explore the city that was going to be their new home.

Cayden was less than impressed.

The shops were bigger, the streets wider, and the citizens wandering those streets more diverse. Yet at the end of the day, Valtane was still just a city. It was the biggest city in the kingdom, yet was still many times smaller than the city of Cayden’s birth on Earth. Simply making things bigger or adding more of the same things he was used to would not impress him.

Elise seemed to enjoy exploring. The herbology shop in particular she spent over an hour perusing the available ingredients. There was apparently a much wider range of reagents available than what she’d had access to even as an alchemist’s daughter in Avernon. And of course she also loved the bookstore, though Cayden didn’t think that had anything to do with being in Valtane, but was rather simply the fact that it was a bookstore and she was Elise.

Cayden enjoyed looking through a few of the weapons shops. Not that they were anything special or that he needed a new weapon – his spear was serviceable enough, and there was little to differentiate an ‘okay’ spear from an ‘amazing’ spear. And it wasn’t like Cayden would ever need a replacement for his claws. Although, now that he considered it, a new sheath for his claws wouldn’t be amiss, especially with all the growing he’d been doing recently.

But at the moment, there was nothing Cayden needed to buy, but he still enjoyed looking over the different weapons displayed. As someone with an adult mind, he felt somewhat guilty about how immaturely fascinated he was with pointy things. Some part of him thought that he should have grown out of it by now.

But Cayden pushed his embarrassment aside as he wandered around the shops with a smile on his face. He was an adventurer, after all – it was important that he know what weapons were available for his future allies. He could probably even consider the time spent gawking at the weapons as homework for his upcoming classes at the academy. Research, pure and simple.

They visited a few other stores and then had an afternoon lunch in a plaza with a fountain and some marble sculptures of a beastman facing down a dragon-like monster. It was beautiful, but nothing special to Cayden’s sensibilities. Having enjoyed the privilege of the internet in his previous life with its ready access to music, paintings, and sculptures from around the world, local art didn’t hold as much appeal to Cayden as it might otherwise have.

Eventually, though, they visited the location Cayden had been most anticipating: the local guildhall of the adventurer’s guild.

Or rather, one of the local guildhalls.

With a city as sprawling as Valtane, and with as many nearby dungeons as there were surrounding the capital, more than just a single guildhall was needed to cater to the hundreds of adventurers that operated out of the city. There were three different guildhalls in Valtane, with one of them serving as the overall headquarters of the guild.

The one nearest to their inn was unfortunately not the headquarters, but that didn’t diminish Cayden’s excitement. The guild in Avernon was where he had spent the vast majority of his time over the last year, and – pending his new schedule at the academy – he had no intention of that changing now that he was in the capital. Exploring the facility and all the training resources they provided, Cayden felt like a kid on Christmas morning.

The overall setup was similar to Avernon: a central room of tables filled with adventurers eating and drinking, a bar on one side, a desk surrounded by boards on the other, and a massive map covering one of the connecting walls. There were a few more tables than in the guildhall in Avernon and the two boards were a bit larger and more filled with notices. But with just a few renovations they could have been identical.

That did not apply to the courtyard behind the guild.

It was significantly larger than the one in Avernon, and though most of the equipment available was similar, the differences were in the details. After running the same obstacle course multiple times a day for almost a full year, seeing the new expansive multi-leveled course was a breath of fresh air. After a quick heft of some of the free-to-use practice equipment, Cayden could immediately tell the increased quality. There were even some runes carved into the dummies that Cayden assumed would increase their durability.

To any non-adventurers, the differences would have been mostly invisible. Sure, this courtyard had a climbing wall, which Avernon’s guildhall had lacked, and a few other minor variations, but overall the equipment fulfilled the same purposes.

For Cayden, though, who spent so much of his time training, each new piece of equipment felt like a present gifted specifically for him. The benefits of the better equipment were probably negligible, as both Avernon and Valtane followed similar programs in how to train the physical stats. And Cayden would probably quickly get used to all the new equipment after a few weeks of training. But for the moment, he enjoyed looking over all the shiny new toys.

Unfortunately, Elise refused to let him play. They didn’t know if her trials would involve a physical component, and she didn’t want to show up tired if that was the case. So, with an internal promise to come back as soon as he could, Cayden reluctantly let his friend pull him away from the courtyard. Neither did they look over either of the notice boards or the map, as they expected to be busy for at least the next few days – they didn’t need the distraction of planning out future quests or delves until after they had settled into their new lives.

Which only left a single stop for the pair: the mail station.

Cayden’s disappointment in Tiana’s sparse replies only increased when he realized how quickly the trip between Avernon and Valtane could be traversed. He was sure there were extra steps involved in sorting and distributing the mail in each of the cities, but that couldn’t add too many days to the message time…could it?

Regardless of the intricacies of fantasy-world mail, Cayden wanted to get a message to Tiana as soon as possible telling her of his new situation. If all went according to plan, he’d get a chance to see her in a few weeks when her restrictions were lifted. So he dropped off a short letter to his sister directly at the mail station and was assured it would reach her within a few days.

By this point, the sun was starting to set after their full day of exploring the city, and Cayden and Elise made their way back to the inn for a late dinner before bed. The next day would begin the trials for the academy.

Cayden settled onto his bench, trying to find a position on the rough wood that was comfortable. He was one of maybe fifteen others scattered on various benches in stadium seating that could have held at least a hundred times as many people, looking down into a mostly empty sandy arena.

The arena was located on the edge of the academy’s campus, which was itself near the wall surrounding Valtane. It was technically still part of the academy, yet was outside of the ‘main’ campus boundary, which allowed for spectators to visit without being forced through the security checkpoints that safeguarded the academy itself. He’d been told that the academy semi-regularly held tournaments between its students and occasionally even with outside adventurers that people could watch, and Cayden was reminded of how high schools and colleges treated their stadiums on Earth.

He could only imagine the spectacles that might take place here. It was bare and sandy now, but he could see the piles of equipment and obstacles in a corner of the arena that could add nuances to whatever battles might take place. On the opposite end of the arena were several gated entryways that Cayden could imagine might house monsters in gladiator-style battles, and he couldn’t wait to find out if he might be able to take part.

For now, though, he was expecting a much less exciting spectacle.

The trials for both the affiliate school and the main Delver’s Academy were to take place within the arena, with the affiliate trials scheduled for this morning and the Delver’s Academy trials scheduled for the afternoon and the entirety of the following day. Apparently, the Delver’s Academy trials was one of those events that was extremely popular with many citizens of Valtane (partially because it was free, compared to most of the other events in the arena), and there would be hundreds showing up in a few hours to watch the battles between the prospective students to determine who would earn their place in the vaunted academy.

The affiliate trials, on the other hand, were much less exciting.

A table was set up in the middle of the sandy arena with three people sitting behind it: an ent, an intelle, and a gnome. The gnome looked surprisingly young, but both the ent and the intelle were grey and wrinkled with age.

Across from the table was a young-looking dwarven girl. Dwarves weren’t the most common race; aside from Dryson, Cayden had only seen one or two others during his time in Avernon. Unfortunately, though, this girl didn’t answer Cayden’s burning question related to the race.

She was the first female dwarf he had seen, but she was young enough that her lack of a beard could have simply been due to age.

Smiling and shaking his head at the distracting thoughts, Cayden refocused on the girl’s words.

“...and then…um…I propose that a reformed quest system, one which implements a point-based reward will, um, be much better than just using money. Because it will allow adventurers to be better placed in their tier and qualify for quests. Which will, um, overall allow…”

The girl’s voice was being projected across the entire arena via a runecarved item she held in front of her face, and Cayden grimaced at her stuttering, nervous words. She might have had a good point somewhere, but Cayden doubted she’d be accepted simply due to her struggling presentation. Intelligence and ideas were well and good, but without the requisite charisma to convey those ideas clearly and concisely, they were useless. Especially for someone who hoped to work in the administration of the adventurer’s guild.

A staff member had helpfully explained the format of the trials earlier that morning when he had gone with Elise to check in. The affiliate trials were much less defined than the trials for the academy proper, as all those attempting to join the main school of the Delver’s Academy had to be proficient in combat. Sure, different adventurers had different skills, some focused in ranged combat, some in melee, some in stealth, and some in perception, but at the end of the day every adventurer needed to be capable of defending themselves, and the Delver’s Academy trials reflected that. Affiliates, though, could have a much broader range of skillsets, skillsets that might not be easily compared to each other.

So rather than set up a standardized trial, they simply had applicants attempt to impress the three judges in any way that they could. There was no ‘scoring system’ that the judges used, or at least nothing that was public knowledge, no formula to follow to game the system or see how close they were to getting in. Applicants would just stand in front of the three teachers, put their best foot forward, and hope that their best was good enough.

It was a much more varied, though also more boring, set of trials than what was expected later in the afternoon.

There was scattered applause as the dwarf finished her presentation, mostly from an older couple a few rows behind Cayden who seemed to be trying their best to look optimistic.

“Thank you, Riola, for your presentation. We’ll be in touch. Next!” the ent said, before turning and whispering to the intelle next to him. It was a bad sign that none of the judges had any follow-up questions for the girl, and she seemed to know it, walking out of the arena with her head down. Cayden frowned in commiseration.

“Is this seat taken?”

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