### 36

You draw on your defensive skill of Mindblend to protect and keep hidden your psyche from the attacking horde. The Vortexi are psychic creatures who actively seek out their prey by the strength of their mind waves. Your Discipline disrupts this homing process and many, in the final few hundred yards of their dive, fail to lock on to your location and waste their attack.

But there are still those among the horde who sense accurately where you are. When they attack, you are forced to defend yourself vigorously.

Vortexi: COMBAT SKILL 40 ENDURANCE 22

For every level of Kai rank you have attained above that of Kai Grand Guardian, you may add 2 to your COMBAT SKILL for the duration of this fight. If you possess the Sommerswerd, restore 5 points to your ENDURANCE points score.9

If you win the combat, turn to 46.

[9] The originally published edition of this book instructed you to add 5 points to your ENDURANCE score. We believe that our alteration to specify restoration instead of addition is closer to the intent of the author. The original led to several questions. Would this additional score be a permanent increase of your maximum ENDURANCE? Permanent alterations of basic scores in the middle of an adventure are rare making this option unlikely. Nor does the context support this conclusion. Then would this addition only be for the duration of the combat similar to the bonus to COMBAT SKILL? This makes the bonus useless. If you were to complete the combat with fewer than 5 ENDURANCE points remaining and then removed the bonus after the combat was over, you would be just as dead as without the bonus. Another proposal was that you should remove the bonus from your score only if it leaves your score above the normal maximum after the combat. Although reasonable, this probably wasn't the intent of the author since he did not specify this procedure. We have opted for the simplest, most straightforward choice: that this is just a restorative effect.

Text copyright © 1991 Joe Dever.
Illustrations copyright © 1991 Brian Williams.