It was fascinating just how invested people could become if they saw what was possible. It only took a few days to have Sonja and Lars show fairly impressive results, with Sonja almost naturally falling into an archer or scout role, and Lars easily acting as a tank and frontline, utilising his newly acquired Earth Magic to impressive effect. His approach to earth magic was radically different from mine, where I used Earth Magic mainly to, well, shape Earth on a larger scale and reinforce existing structures, his approach was to clad himself in Earth and Stone, forming it into a fairly sturdy armour and go to town. He wasn’t so much a Spellcaster as he was a force of nature, crashing into his foes and bowling them over. Well, he would be once he had a few more levels under his belt and could do more than reinforce his arms and hands, with the rest of him remaining squishy.

Similarly, Sonja was making progress but it would take her time to truly grow into her powers. Amusingly, her biggest problem wasn’t the magical part, she was fairly talented when it came to Wind Magic, especially when used in conjunction with a bow, but the archery. Or, more precisely, the lack of strength in her arms that brought her trouble. She could use a fairly soft bow with a small draw weight to great effect, especially when combining the arrow with her Wind Magic to increase penetration and accuracy, but that only went so far. It was a force multiplier and if she had a bigger bow, the impact would go up, too.

Lia tried to have her use a larger bow we acquired in a hunting store, and that was where things started to go sideways. The bow wouldn’t really work in combat, due to the fact that it was made before the change, but it would have been fine for training, or it should have been. Part of that trouble might have come from the effects the system had on pre-change weapons but a far larger part came from the simple fact that Sonja was a fairly average teenage girl and had highly limited strength in her arms. And bows, especially those with enough power to be considered worthwhile, required quite a bit of that.

Even the system couldn’t do much about that, well, it could, but only with a fairly large investment of attribute points. But it made me wonder how the interaction between trained musculature and attributes worked, the sheer, physical bulk and how it related to the effect of your strength attribute. I knew it couldn’t be as simple as ‘the more muscles you have, the higher your strength attribute’, simply because I could look at my own body. While my strength attribute had almost tripled since the change, going from a fairly impressive ten, impressive for a female of my diminutive size, to a twenty-eight, the changes to my muscle mass had been negligible I was stronger, by a decent margin, and felt as if I could direct my strength far better than before, but muscle-wise, little had changed.

This brought up the question, what would happen if someone like Sonja, with her low strength attribute of eight, started to deliberately train her strength, get some protein-rich food and pack on some bulk? How much of those muscles would increase the numerical value of her strength attribute and how much would influence some hidden stat and increase the effect of the attribute? Sadly, I had a feeling I wouldn’t be able to study this particular case, not unless we managed to find something truly interesting to do in this city.

So far, the city here had been quite boring, with only the usual Undead and Shattered shambling through the streets. We had seen some signs hinting at animals forming their own societies with a few beasts gaining power beyond the ability of the locals to deal with, but so far, those beasts hadn’t made a move towards the locals. So far, we had seen a sizable pack of wild dogs, led by a beast that could easily be Silva’s understudy, a murder of crows that could star in a Hitchcock film and signs that hinted at multiple felines and some other critters.

By my estimation, the crows were the biggest danger, simply due to their advanced mobility, while the dogs had the greatest power but I doubted they’d go after the people here, not unless they had a good reason. Or were really, really hungry and the meat on the Undead and Shattered had decayed too much for their tastes. The beasts had been feeding off them, we had seen evidence of that, but I wasn’t sure how long that situation would last if it still occurred. Once the ready supply of shambling food wasn’t accessible, things might get seriously dicy, as the beasts could deal massive damage to the locals, simply due to their numbers.

Hel, with the lack of strength the locals displayed, even a determined assault by a medium-sized group of Undead could be a serious danger for these people, but that was luckily neither here nor there. Undead didn’t gather, unless there was a force making them, something like the Withered or maybe some sort of evolved Shattered, nothing I had seen here indicated that something like that was present.

There was a part of me that considered whether I should actively start hunting those beasts down, or even try to cull as many Undead and Shattered as I could. But the more I thought about it, the more i came to realise it would be foolish. Sure, I could kill any current threat, it would take me a month or three of continuous work, but I had enough power to conjure mist capable of killing the Undead while covering a decently sized area, I only had to repeat that every night and sooner or later the streets would be cleared. But that would only leave the people as they were now, weak and vulnerable, unless I wanted to hang around and keep defending them against any threat that wanted to make a meal out of them. Something I simply wasn’t willing to do.

Now, if they had leadership worth the name, I might have worked with them to cull some of the greatest threats, while letting their people take down the rest, or maybe even provided some passive overwatch, simply making sure that they weren’t biting off more than they could chew, or intervene if they were about to get themselves killed. But there was no leadership, at least nothing worth the name.

And my efforts to create something worthy of being called leadership hadn’t really worked out. Sure, some people listened to me simply by virtue of my power but that wasn’t enough to make people organise. To say nothing of my people skills, or rather the lack thereof. I wasn’t someone who could organise people to work together, at best I could lead them in a tactical situation but for anything long-term? I wasn’t the right person, far from it.

That I wasn’t willing to actually live within the apartment building they were using as their living space didn’t help matters but I simply couldn’t stand the smell. Even with the occasional shower I was willing the conjure for them and the constant increase in Water Magic, both in the number of practitioners and in the skill of the individual users, the sheer number of people was enough to give the building a certain stench. One that I didn’t like and the protection provided by their number wasn’t enough to make me put up with it. Doubly so, because it wasn’t so much that their numbers provided me protection but that I’d be providing punch to any defensive effort they’d put up.

In addition, their numbers slightly increased the chance of getting attacked, as most enemies were a lot more interested in attacking two hundred weak but filling meals compared to trying to tangle with a group of five fairly powerful enemies, for nothing but those five bodies. Even now, predators picked their targets by nutrition, though I had a feeling sooner or later the nutrition most enemies were interested in would shift from calories to EXP.

Overall, I felt a little like I was shouting in the void. I could talk to them, but to make lasting change, my efforts simply weren’t enough. The best bet I saw when it came to strengthening the people here and giving them leadership was to create that leadership, something that seemed to work out amusingly well. Simply because Sonja and Lars were gaining strength, and with strength came respect. With that respect came people listening to them and hopefully, they would continue to remember my lessons in the future and turn the people from their current, frankly pathetic, state into something capable of surviving. In the long-term, it would be up to them to keep this community going, I certainly wasn’t willing to hang around.