Skadi is kinda-sorta based on Female Shez from Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, whom I’ve previously mentioned is one of my favourite Fire Emblem characters.
Admittedly, I don’t have a very clear mental image of what Skadi is supposedly to look like (admittedly, probably not purple hair), but the fact that she has two swords comes from Shez’s personal class — which, incidentally, probably has one of my favourite Warriors movesets.
Shez isn’t necessarily stupid and was educated by her adoptive mother, along with being an experienced mercenary, but she isn’t very conscientious, has a hilariously bad sense of direction, and lacks a proper understanding (partly due to basically wandering into the story by accident and being dragged along by the faction leaders) of the game’s more supernatural aspects, leading to some amusing misunderstandings about what exactly is going on.
In a real story, Skadi wouldn’t necessarily be this stupid, while her go-to strategy might be “All-Out Frontal Charge Straight Down the Enemy’s Throat“, I’d probably downplay the All-Outness of it, and the way it plays out in this scene is mostly for the sake of a punchline.
Kat glances at her new partner.
“Well?” she asks.
“Well,” the mercenary answers, peering out from the cover of the nearby bushes. “There’s two of us, and there’s — six, eight, twelve of them. Clearly, this will require subtlety, subterfuge, and a cunning stratagem on our part. Luckily, I am quite well-read on strategy and tactics.”
She thoughtfully rubs her chin and narrows her eyes as she ponders their battle plan.
She glances back at Kat. “Is this bush making you as itchy as it’s making me?” she asks.
“…Yeah,” Kat admits.
“Okay,” Skadi says. “The sooner we have our plan, we sooner we can stop being itchy.”
She offhandedly smacks one of the branches poking at her.
“Stupid bush.”
She shifts uncomfortably, clears her throat and mutters to herself.
“Come on, Skadi. You’re smart. You can think up something.”
Kat’s job as Baron Westfordnorthwestshire’s special Trouble Consultant has now seen her paired with a wandering Hrimfaxi mercenary by the name of Skadi.
Sure, the job title sounds cool, the pay’s pretty decent, and it’ll probably look good on her resume. But Kat still isn’t quite sure what a Trouble Consultant actually is or does — lately, she’s been getting Baron Westfordnorthwestshire’s coffee — but the two of them have been put to work by the Baron to bring down a ring of artifact smugglers. Kat and Skadi have traced the smuggling ring to the banks of the Neil river and are watching hidden in the bushes as the smugglers load up a longboat with stolen antiquities.
Now, all that remains is to make their move and bring down the smugglers.
Skadi assures Kat that she’s a trained and battle-tested warrior who’s fought all over Realmgard, and that’s she thought up plenty of brilliant strategies to win the day. Kat still hasn’t actually seen her in action yet, but she hopes the Hrimfaxi mercenary is as good as she’s been telling Kat she is.
“So, this cunning stratagem of yours,” Kat asks Skadi. “Any ideas in particular?”
“We need to negate their numbers advantage,” Skadi says. “Take as many down as we can before the rest even know we’re here.”
“Yeah,” Kat agrees. “It’s getting pretty dark. We could sneak around the edges of the camp. Pick them off one by one.”
Skadi nods thoughtfully.
“Maybe create a diversion to draw a few of them away from the main group,” she offers.
“We could try to knock down one of their tents,” Kat says. “They would get their attention, maybe even trap a few of them.”
“Okay,” Skadi declares suddenly. “I’ve got it all figured out. We’ve got this.”
“Yeah?” asks.
“Like I said, subtlety and subterfuge,” the mercenary. says “This will require delicacy and a genius tactical acumen.”
“Yeah,” Kat agrees. “Subtlety and subterfuge.”
“Subtlety and subterfuge,” Skadi repeats.
The mercenary nods resolutely.
“Follow my lead.”
“Right,” Kat says.
Skadi draws her two swords, leaps from the bushes and gives a great cry of something like “BLAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGH!” as she charges straight at the smugglers.
Now, to be fair, that is a strategy…
Follow me here:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
2 thoughts on “August 2023 Daily Writing: Day 16”