Without any assignments, and with all his friends busy questing, Kaldalis had some time to himself to handle important tasks. Namely, he’d just gained two entire levels out of nowhere, and had some catchup work to do.

His primary concern was needing to catch up his weapon skills to unlock his new abilities, but before he could do that, he took a trip to Cotanaku’s crafting room. Kaldalis wasn’t really passionate about keeping his charmcrafting skill up to date, but he was passionate about replacing his now-outdated equipment in order to keep being the best tank he could be.

With all of the currently-available quests related to gathering materials for repairs and upgrades to Cotanaku’s infrastructure, the crafting room was nearly empty. A couple of people were cranking out potions - presumably to replicate the power boost Reno’s handouts had given them in the siege - but there were plenty of charmcrafting stations open. Kaldalis pulled out handfuls of mats and got to work negotiating them into charms to grind his way to his new level’s skill cap.

Kaldalis had a wide selection of materials to use. After doing so many random quests, he had innumerable scrap bits of rock and ore, mismatched chunks of wood, and tons of random pieces of bone, shell, skin, and hide from the various monsters he’d fought. He fell into the simple repetitive process of forming those materials into charms.

As with his weapon skills, his skill level helped to guide his hands through the motions of carving a large bit of material down into a base, and forming other materials into decorations for that base. The guidance made the crafting process quick and efficient. And with Kaldalis’s skill, his critical success rate was decent. On his way up to skill level 100, he crafted five charms that were at item level 20, and once he was there, he stuck to his crafting bench and churned out a dozen more charms that were guaranteed to be level 20 to give himself a solid selection of charms with usable stats.

When he saw his charms generating with a third stat at level 20, he knew he’d made the right choice to focus on this.

After suppressing his excitement for a moment, Kaldalis decided to wait until his next task was done before selecting exactly which charms to equip. His next stop was Sivima’s shop. When he knew what stats his weapons would have, he’d be able to make a better decision on which charms to use, in order to better balance his offense with his defense.

Sivima’s shop had seen better days. One of the blasts from the Abstract had struck the building next door, and while the shop was still structurally intact, the side of it had still been battered by debris and coated in dirt. Kaldalis could hear her working in her workshop in the back, but the shop door was open. In the absence of any obvious explanation, Kaldalis walked right in.

The shop door being open was not an oversight; there was a Human man behind the counter who was making a sale to a young Talsar woman. He wasn’t selling her a weapon, though. He had a soot-stained crate with a handful of charms inside, and she was picking from there. It took Kaldalis a moment to recognize the man as Misael, the grumpy proprietor of the charm shop. He was a friend of Sivima, and was probably helping her out by manning the shop while she was busy working.

Actually…

From the soot all over the crate of charms, Kaldalis realized who was helping who. The man’s shop had likely been destroyed by the Abstract. It was Sivima doing him a favor by allowing him to make sales out of her storefront until his shop could be rebuilt.

Kaldalis decided to let him make his sale before broaching the subject. Instead, he went about examining the weapons on display. It took a little longer to find what he wanted without Sivima guiding him, but he eventually found the spears and then the sets of paired sword-and-shield in his level range.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t find an exact match for what he already had. It was unfortunate, since he was quite pleased with his current setup, but the power difference between level 15 weapons and level 20 weapons was too big to ignore, especially since they had the additional secondary stat compared to his current gear.

There weren’t any sword-and-shield sets that could inflict the Slow debuff, like his current choice, but there was one with the Gust debuff, which might be acceptable. It wouldn’t give him the same defensive potential of Slowing down a boss, but the offensive power of getting a full Gust proc was pretty intense, and when he’d last used it, activating it had applied a knockdown effect to even dungeon bosses. It could be a smart choice when it came time to run the raid. Just the same, he really wanted access to the Slow debuff, and so he instantly snatched up the level 20 spear he saw that offered it.

Ventilated Arming Sword and Heater

Item level 20

Acumen: 20

Clout: 20

Vigor: 25

Attack: 75

Gust Affinity: 75

Attack Speed: +3%

Hit Points: 49

Fatiguing Ranseur

Item level 20

Acumen: 20

Clout: 20

Vigor: 25

Attack: 75

Slow Affinity: 75

Armor: 75

Resistance: 45

It felt strange that his sword and shield would be the more offensive option, but considering how attack speed would support the Combo ability the weapon category offered, Kaldalis felt pretty happy with it. The sword itself was a simple shortsword, but the long fuller and straight blade gave the weapon a feeling of lightweight speed that would give Kaldalis ample opportunity to stack the Gust debuff quickly in those situations that demanded it. The accompanying kite shield was a little larger than what he was using before, and would adequately cover his whole upper body, but the tapered bottom meant that it wouldn’t trip him up if he had to move quickly with it. And while the extra hit points seemed meager, but Kaldalis reminded himself that more base hit points would increase his extra Shield Block bar as well.

Conversely, holding the spear made Kaldalis feel nearly invulnerable. The extra debuff Affinity offered by the Resistance stat also translated to an increased Slow Affinity for inflicting the debuff, not just more defense against the more debilitating attacks he’d suffered. The increase in armor was just icing on the cake. With the ability to inflict the Slow debuff on large numbers of foes when using Sweeping Strikes, Kaldalis would be ready for the next time he was facing down an army of foes even if he couldn’t retreat into the nearest body of water. The weapon itself was a bit more fearsome-looking than what he’d used before as well, with a crescent-shaped hilt at the base of the spear’s head, with every angle sharpened to a razor’s edge. The haft felt nice to grip as well, the wood carved into an octagonal shape to give him much more control over the weapon’s angling.

By the time he’d made his decisions, the young woman at the front had made her purchases and gone, and so Kaldalis brought his choices to the front.

“I don’t suppose I could interest you in any charms?” Misael said in a dubiously grumpy tone, giving the soot-stained crate a half-hearted shake. With so few charms in the bottom, it barely rattled.

“I’m good for charms,” Kaldalis said with an apologetic grimace. “Just the weapons for me. Sorry about what happened, though.”

Misael grumbled as Kaldalis passed him the fistful of crescents for the weapons. Kaldalis paused for a moment as he put hew new purchases into his inventory. He couldn’t leave it at that, could he? Even if Misael was an abrasive guy, he was Sivima’s friend.

“If you need a hand,” Kaldalis said, producing a heaping handful of lower-level charms from his inventory and laying them across the store counter, “I have some stuff that I’ve been holding onto for a rainy day. And it looks like you’ve been rained on plenty.”

“Sloppy construction,” Misael said immediately, picking up one of the charms Kaldalis had crafted in Baimer, turning it over in his hands. “And the stats are all over the place. Amateur work.”

“I never claimed I wasn’t an amateur,” Kaldalis said, moving to scoop up the charms. “But if you don’t want them-”

Misael reached out quickly, putting his hand over the middle of the scattered charms. “I didn’t say that,” he snapped. The man’s face twisted for a moment as if he’d swallowed a bug. “Fine. You’ve caught me bent over a barrel. I can’t sell charms without charms to sell. How much?”

“Nothing,” Kaldalis said, pulling his hand back from the pile of charms. “Take them. Like I said, you’ve been rained on plenty. You don’t need me emptying a bucket on your head on top of that.”

Misael’s grimace evolved from “swallowed a bug” to “bit into a lemon through the peel” over the course of a three second pause. Kaldalis couldn’t tell if it was confusion, frustration, or anger. Eventually he scooped the charms into his soot-stained crate.

“Thanks,” the man said with such a begrudging tone, Kaldalis thought that he might be allergic to the word.

“No problem,” Kaldalis said, trying to sound nonchalant. The last thing he wanted was to be misconstrued as mocking him. “Any friend of Sivima is a friend of mine.”

After leaving the shop, Kaldalis shuffled through his handful of level 20 charms to determine the best ones to equip. With three stats, and nearly-random stats, they were all a mixture of offensive and defensive options. He eventually elected to just equip all of the ones with Armor on them, and to just accept that some of his other stats were going to be a little random, with a scattering of Affinities and offensive stats, instead of supporting his fully defensive build.

Kaldalis took a quick minute to go over his new stats. It shocked him to see how much it did for him to increment all of his gear up, in comparison to the power boost from just leveling up to 20.

Kaldalis, Level 20 Bodyguard

HP: 4515/4515

Aplomb: 100/100

EXP: 13/5250

Acumen: 364

Clout: 384

Vigor: 630

Armor: 765

Attack: 492

His elemental affinities were now 227 baseline, with 302 in both Wind and Light from random stats on charms. His debuff affinities were at 272, though, with his Slow affinity boosted to 347 by his spear, and he would enjoy a similar boost to Gust when using his sword. One of his charms also had 3% bonus Attack Speed on it, giving him a little extra boost to his offensive output, though the tremendous increase in his Armor seemed hugely disproportionate to the minimal effort he’d taken to get all Armor on his charms.

Then again, considering how things had gone for him so far, he wasn’t one to start questioning his luck. Down that route was trouble of the highest order.

Kaldalis had a little more time before he had to join Garyung for the meeting. The last task on his list was only going to take a little effort. He headed for the beachside gate.

He needed to catch up his weapon skills.