Kingshot Seth

Full background story

Seth spends most of his waking hours at the forge, and everyone in town knows him first as a smith. That's not where his heart actually is. What gets him out of bed and keeps him going through a long day of hammering is the hour or two he gets afterward to work on his novels. Whether he can ever make a real living from that is an open question, though his short horror piece "The Mysterious Case of the Missing Miner" did well enough to suggest it isn't impossible. Of everyone he knows who can read, only Edwin turned his nose up at it, dismissing the whole thing as "that penny dreadful garbage." Seth tends to take that as a good sign.

The reception to that first story is what pushed him toward the project he's working on now, an ambitious first-person account of the rise and collapse of the Marquez Dynasty called "100 Years of Chaos." The handful of people who've been allowed to read the early pages describe it as a gripping piece of work, sharp in its social observation and unashamed of its own ideals. Ask Seth what actually drives a blacksmith to spend his nights writing something like that and he'll tell you it comes down to what he calls the long conversation of the soul, something planted in him years ago by an old friend, a man of the cloth, whose talks on the power of the written word left a mark on him he never shook off.

He explains it best, he says, through a dream he had when he was younger. In it he was searching his own room for something he couldn't name, only certain that he had to find it, and eventually he did: a page hidden deep inside a pillow, telling him to go and find the First Holy Site. In the dream, he found that too. But the hope that came with it went moldy before long, and his ideals crumbled into dust along with it. So he kept searching, and under his own bed he found the dying body of his younger self.

To one of his younger readers, a girl named Pella, he once wrote something he clearly meant with his whole chest: "I am a firm believer that daylight will always come even if there is no sun! If you understand me, Pella, I believe you and I can both have confidence that a good day, a better day, will come."

Skills

Conquest skills fire in the Arena. Expedition skills fire on rallies and the world map. A hero who carries one can be dead weight in the other.

Conquest

Hammer Burn

Swings his hammer forward in a devastating arc, dealing Attack×200-280% AoE damage.

Armor Enhancement

Upgrades his armor to reduce damage taken by 10-30%.

Expedition

Burnished Iron

Passes on his passion for iron mining, increasing the town's Iron Output by 5-25%.

Craftsmanship

His special bond with iron increases his Iron Mining Speed in the Wilderness by 5-25%.

Best pairings

• Grouped with Olive, Forrest and Edwin as Gen 1's economy specialists — limited Arena utility, built for long-term food, wood, stone and iron production.

• Olive
• Edwin

Other heroes still being chronicled

• Amane
• Diana
• Edwin
• Fahd
• Forrest
• Gordon
• Howard
• Quinn
• Yeonwoo

Frequently asked questions