Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 7 - Chapter 2

Spring of the Fifteenth Year

Setting Transition

To travel the world is the work of heroes, and to imitate heroes is the work of adventurers; adventurers are quick to leave behind their old stomping grounds in search of something new.

Many are the reasons that could fuel such drastic change: personal (i.e., story-related) reasons, an awkward atmosphere in the current area (due to the wrongdoings of a previous campaign), or tantalizing rumors of a newly discovered land (as laid out in the latest supplement), to name a few.

Mensch were some of the squishiest organisms in this world’s animal kingdom, but we had two things going for us. First, we were adaptable enough to survive from the polar north to the ends of the south so long as we changed our attire. Second, we could adapt pretty much any technological advancement to suit our physiques, if not just use them by default.

“Hup!” I yipped, kicking Castor’s sides. My trusty steed was getting on in years, but that didn’t stop him from kicking off into a full gallop. As swift as ever, his pace was so fast that anyone less experienced than me would’ve been thrown right off.

“C-Can’t you, wah—do something, ah, about the rocking?!”

“I’m already doing my best!”

I stood up on the raised stirrups—a so-called monkey crouch position—to lessen the load on Castor’s back and, with any luck, to steady my hips in the air so Margit could stay stable on my back. This was killer on my glutes and lower back, but even the most optimal posture didn’t exactly make for smooth riding. In my ear was a sound all but foreign to my ears: my childhood companion was clicking her tongue in frustration.

She’d missed. The Margit had missed.

Such was archery atop the saddle.

Going back to that earlier tidbit about the benefits of the mensch body, we had two arms and legs each and sat neatly at about the midpoint between the largest and smallest races. If anyone else ever invented something useful, the odds were good that we could just scale it up or down accordingly; most tools interfaced with an arm or leg, after all.

But perhaps our greatest stroke of luck was that we shared our general physical attributes with the pinnacles of ingenuity, those who’d dragged civilization in their wake since the dawn of man—the methuselah. As a rule, their long list of contributions to society could almost always be traced back to one of them thinking, “What a pain. Let me invent something to do it for me,” and then doing just that. Naturally, the methuselah did not care about how convenient their solutions would be for other races, and tailored their creations to suit themselves.

And would you look at that—we frail, pitifully mortal mensch got to reap the rewards.

On the other hand, my friendly neighborhood arachne girl had a spider’s body below the waist. Riding horses was a totally different process for her; rather, riding beasts of burden as a whole was just not suited to her body type.

Obviously, Margit had never needed to ride a horse before, and it followed that she had never shot a bow on horseback either. With a debuff like this, not even the expert huntress could boast total accuracy.

“How,” she spat out as we bobbed up and down, “many does, ugh, this make?!”

“I dunno!”

“Are you, hngh—are you sure you aren’t cursed?!”

“I don’t remember, hup, doing anything to deserve a curse!”

Margit continued to cock her crossbow—one of the eastern ones I’d brought home—through her grumbling, but now that she mentioned it, maybe I was cursed. Particularly bad fortune counts, right?

Anyway, our situation didn’t require any long-winded explanations: we’d been jumped by a gang of bandits.

We were out on the western reach of the Empire: relative to the rest of the continent, we were finally entering the westernmost corner. Only ten days away from the lovely town of Konigstuhl, we could hardly claim to have entered the frontier—in fact, we were closer to our urbanized state capital now than we’d been when setting off.

So why the hell were there marauders here?

Five men clad in mediocre gear were chasing us down on horseback. There had been six of them to begin with, but Margit had put one in the dirt earlier.

They’d looked blatantly dishonest from the word go: mercenaries at best, but more likely opportunistic bandits whenever they could get away with it. Most criminals didn’t make crime their day job anyway, since the imperial patrols would have them skewered if they did.

These goons must’ve put a mark on us while we’d been feeding the Dioscuri: Castor and Polydeukes were quite the grand horses for a couple of young kids to own. The thought of a big payday for robbing a pair of brats must’ve been too tantalizing to ignore.

Looks like I miscalculated. The Overwhelming Grin and Oozing Gravitas traits I’d picked up only worked when I could Negotiate in the first place—they wouldn’t help me ward off trouble from afar. Maybe I should’ve taken a permanent passive instead to avoid getting sized up by those out of sight.

But then again, that could very well make me scare honest, innocent folks for no reason. Once, when Sir Lambert had tried to help a child who’d scraped their knee get back up, they’d peed themselves in terror; I don’t think my heart could take it if that happened to me. Dealing with riffraff was very annoying, but such was the cost of looking like a good-natured fellow. That I could only have one or the other was both disappointing and vexing.

Today’s thugs had been tailing us from a distance for quite a while, and had pulled the trigger once we were on a less populous road. It was a simple job: take the horses and find someone to buy them without paperwork. Easy stuff. As for us, they’d bury us somewhere off the road and call it a day; it wasn’t as if anyone would notice we were missing in a world without instant messaging.

Unfortunately for them, we weren’t just hapless children: we were fighting back. Margit was in charge of offense, while I focused on evasion and escape. I snaked around, simultaneously directing Polydeukes with a long lead. To give them credit, the bandits knew their stuff about horse-jacking; all their attacks were nonlethal—for the horses, at least.

A bad feeling washed over me, so I held the reins with just my right hand and used my left to draw Schutzwolfe. Of course, unsheathing my sword one-handed like this was preposterous, so I’d sneaked in the use of a helping Hand in a way that looked natural. In one fluid motion, I drew my blade and cut down the lasso arcing toward us.

The sound of a firing crossbow rang out at the same time, but the number of enemies remained the same.

“Sorry!” I yelled. “Got in your way!”

“Not a problem!”

My pulling out my sword had moved Margit mid shot, since she was on my back. Our synergy still wasn’t up to par: I needed to time my movements better around her.

“Besides...”

A mechanical click rang out. The crossbow took me ten seconds to load as an experienced user, but the marksman on my back had done it in an instant. This went beyond dexterity and into the realm of expert precision. Evidently, her shortbow skills transferred to the more mechanical instrument.

“...I’m, hah, getting the hang of it!”

The bowstring jolted forward with a crack, launching a bolt straight through the wrist of a crook who’d been whirling around a lasso. These crossbows could fire through plate metal; the man’s hand flew straight off.

“Nice shot!”

“If only! I’d been aiming for his shoulder!”

Precise targeting aside, we’d be perfectly fine if she could hit them at all. Our enemies were starting to get the hint, and they’d begun to let up as they questioned whether it was worth the risk.

Alas, it was too little, too late. The next bolt was more accurate than the last, and the one after that even more accurate still. They’d chased us into a long stretch of flat ground so we wouldn’t have cover to hide, but that decision was going to cost them.

The ability to judge one’s prey was the hallmark of a good hunter. A faulty eye was ever prone to confusing a gently sleeping dog with a ravenous wolf.

Ah well. It wasn’t like these fools would ever get a chance to learn their lesson.

[Tips] Ability check modifiers are the bonuses and penalties a player receives upon engaging in some action based on the difficulty of the task or the location it is being attempted in. Firing a crossbow prone on the ground and firing a crossbow on a shaky saddle are two completely different tests of skill.

Margit and I sat on the bed of an inn, facing one another.

Not in any saucy way, though. We were separated by the contents of our shared wallet dumped onto the sheets.

“One, two, three...”

Her cute voice slowly incremented as she sifted through the coins with her dainty fingers. Tonight’s lodging would be ten assarii for the room, thirty more for a dinner for two, twenty for tomorrow’s breakfast, and another twenty-five for a to-go lunch. We’d also rented a pail of hot water for five assarii, and tacked on another ten assarii’s worth of options, like getting freshly laundered bedsheets for three.

For the horses, we’d gotten two stalls in the stable with water and hay for forty assarii to take the day’s total to a libra and forty. We’d paid in one silver coin and thirty copper ones; we were splurging a bit, to be sure, but that was a ludicrous sum for a single day.

Doing some basic math, we’d be burning at least eighty-four librae if the trip to Marsheim took two months. That was assuming we didn’t have to stop anywhere or rush to restock at inopportune times.

We were best off steeling ourselves for the worst: two drachmae could realistically up and vanish by the time we reached our destination. I’d surely want to get my trusty horses reshod at some point with how long the journey was going to be, and we’d probably think of things we needed along the way, not to mention how we’d need to replace anything that broke.

It was no wonder people didn’t leave their hometowns—or if they did, that they chose to camp outdoors. Shelling out a good chunk of an average family’s yearly income on one trip was insanity.

That said, it wasn’t as if we were broke enough to be counting pennies as we huddled around an empty wallet. We were better off than most, considering how it was common to find beginner parties sharing meals just to ward off starvation; I myself had played such roles many a time to great enjoyment.

I distinctly recalled when my friends and I had gone out of our way to blow all our cash on gear and consumables so we could walk around town talking about how broke we always were. Led by a priest, we’d dubbed ourselves the Mendicants and greeted every NPC with, “Good citizen, please... We haven’t eaten in three days!” Looking back, that might’ve been going a bit far.

But that had been how we’d gotten our main quest: we’d marched off to fight powerful foes as repayment for the charitable soul who’d lodged us. And, upon completing the task, we’d gotten a little too into character and refused monetary compensation on the grounds that the bowls of porridge we’d received on empty stomachs had been worth more than the shiniest of coins...only to greet the next NPC we’d come across with, “Good citizen, please... We haven’t eaten in five days!” We’d all been riding the high of watching Seven Samurai, if I remembered right.

Ahem, I digress. Among the pile of coins between me and Margit were a few that gleamed proudly gold—and not the kind that were worth less than market value. Each piece was a fine mint worth a drachma or more.

“...and that makes five drachmae, forty-five librae, and thirty-two assarii,” Margit announced as she completed her count. “Goodness me, it’s almost as if we’re rich.”

Her expression bore a mix of sarcasm and concern as she pinched a gold piece and flicked it into the air. It twirled over and over with a crisp jingle, sending the girl in profile on its face spinning at breakneck speeds. If I knew my money, that print could be traced back to Cornelius II the Merciful—or as he was more commonly known, Cornelius the Doting. As the name suggested, his name had become allegorical for how he’d pampered his daughter to the point of putting her face on the money instead of his own.

The history of the Doting Emperor’s coins notwithstanding, the gold was awfully clean for something we’d earned with blood.

“Seven times. Erich, would you care to tell me what this number means?”

“...Who’s to say?”

It wasn’t every day that Margit glared at me like this, and I couldn’t take it. Despite knowing the answer, I averted my gaze.

Seven...was the number of times we’d gotten into trouble since leaving home.

Today’s ambush made four total bandit attacks. We’d noticed a wanted man at a pub—in pitifully poor disguise, might I add—and caught him for five. A deeply confused soul had mistaken us for horse thieves and pestered us to make six. Lastly, some moron gave me grief about having a sword on my belt, so I’d returned the favor until things escalated into a full-blown melee—bringing us to seven.

“All this in ten days. This isn’t normal, is it?”

Don’t ask like you don’t know the answer, I conveyed with a wordless glance.

“Erich...” Margit let out a deep sigh. “Fortune has never been kind to you, but I hadn’t realized it was this bad.”

“I-It’s not that—”

“Remind me: did you ever, once, win a pouch of candy at the autumn festival?”

“...No.”

She just had to go there. The autumn festival was an event that the magistrate put on for the people of the canton, and every year, he ran a raffle for all the children to take part in. A bunch of strings were set up, with some of them being tied to little bags, and the kids were free to keep whatever was attached to their chosen string—which, of course, could be nothing.

Enough rewards were prepared for two in three children to win a prize. From the day I’d been born to the day I’d left the canton, I had managed to hit the thirty-three percent chance to lose every time. Sure, there was only one bag with a silver piece every year, so landing that was too much to ask for, but it was genuinely absurd that I’d never gotten some pastries or cookies or something.

“Th-That’s all in the past,” I said. “Besides! It didn’t matter because you always shared with me.”

“Aw, I do remember passing those little pouches back and forth. But the aftertaste of these coins isn’t quite as sweet as the candy, now is it?”

“But, uh, hey...at least we’re funding our journey?”

“Erich. I’m trying to say that I won’t last like this.”

I really did think we’d earned a good chunk of change. We’d passed off all the criminals alive, and the two most recent captures had already had warrants for their arrest, further boosting our reward. All in all, we’d made a lot of money.

Before leaving home, Margit and I had talked it out and decided that we were going to split our finances down the middle. Half of our income would go into our shared wallet, and the other half would be split again for each of us to take as a personal allowance—which was to say, this wasn’t even all of what we’d earned. In ten short days, we’d put together more money by turning in criminals than I’d gotten for winning that dueling tournament back in fall.

Gods, what a bloody road this was. Whose fault was this, anyway?

“Do you appreciate how astonishingly improbable this is? We aren’t even in the borderlands yet, and we’re encountering bandits at every turn.”

“Well... I think part of that is because we look a little wealthy.”

“Even so, it’s too much. I shouldn’t need to question whether the God of Trials has blessed you or not.”

Her complaint was so justified that I would’ve groveled in shame on the spot, had it meant anything in imperial culture. But in my defense, I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I wasn’t some Sengoku-era general praying to the moon for more masochistic challenges to overcome.

In fact, I’d been exceptionally careful not to accidentally offer my prayers to the God of Trials. I knew He was the type to bestow tests on those who showed promise, and that worshipping Him would only bring more tribulations into my life. Any time I’d seen one of His temples, I’d turned a blind eye.

I’d done everything right. How had things turned out this way?

“In any case, I’ve had my fill of trouble, and we’ve earned more than enough for our travels. Much, much more. It isn’t as if we’re trying to stay in first-rate inns the whole way there.”

“Uh... Yeah. You’re right.”

“So, I have a proposition.” Margit raised one finger and attempted to reason with me. “It may delay our arrival, but I think we should find a westbound caravan to accompany.”

To begin with, my eagerness to get us on the road west to Ende Erde the moment spring rolled in had led me to sorely mistime things if we wanted to convoy up. In the spring there was no shortage of westbound merchants eager to follow the long circuit through the borderlands, filling their purses with the coin of frontier folk who’d spent all winter cooped up and now found themselves in dire need of supplies and entertainment—but we were ahead of them. Most of the traffic we’d encountered was from smaller border merchants following similar opportunities closer to home opened up by the thaw.

So okay, there had been a few convoys we’d crossed paths with, but they’d invariably been on their way to peddle their wares at other nearby cantons, and the constant stops would’ve ground our pace to a halt; not to mention that all of them had made nearby cities their final destination, meaning we’d be taking a detour for a very short stint of company.

Unable to find any other traveling groups to ride with, we’d been forced to head off just the two of us, my weariness with camping be damned. I honestly couldn’t tell if we’d been too picky or if the world was just toying with us.

“First, I’d like for us to stop by a city. Surely we’ll find at least one company heading for the frontier there.”

“That’s true. Merchants heading abroad are probably setting off around now so they can spend their whole year being productive.”

I couldn’t tell what she was thinking behind those big amber eyes, but there was something to her gaze that wouldn’t let me say no.

“Then it’s settled. We’ll start looking around tomorrow—our first order of business will be finding someone headed toward a big city.”

“Sure. Sounds good...”

Luckily for us, there was a middling city just a few days away on horseback. If we could find a merchant caravan on their way back to resupply after selling out at a nearby canton, they’d show us the way for a small fee and we’d be able to enjoy a relatively safe trip there.

But, to be honest...ignoring all the incidents, traveling with Margit hadn’t been bad. I could trust her to watch my back, and I’d finally gotten to enjoy the romantic thrill of adventure. I knew that our safety came first, but, well, it felt like a shame to give up on this when it was just getting good.

“Oh, please don’t make that face.” Having read my mind, Margit scooted over and grabbed me by both cheeks. Then, without warning, she pinched them up into a forced smile. “You aren’t the only one who’s disappointed, you know.”

Oh, come on, that’s so unfair. I was never, ever going to be able to say no to her.

“Bear with me,” she said. “If things continue as they are now day in and day out, I’m afraid I’ll grow sick of it.”

“...Okay. As you wish, ma’am.”

“Aw. I do love it when you’re a good boy.”

Once I gave in, she began to squish my face with a mischievous smile. I tried to get away by falling backward onto the bed, but the arachne leaped forward as jumping spiders do and landed with me, square on my stomach.

Finding a caravan, huh? Tomorrow’s going to be an early day...

[Tips] Caravans are the result of merchants herding together. Sometimes, the whole group will belong to one company, but others can comprise several smaller entities banding together.