by Simon Archer
I felt my hands shaking, clasping them together as I slowed my breathing to calm myself. After a beat or two, my heart had regained a steady beat again. Back to the matter at hand…
Magic Salvage was the first stumper. I already had a reserve of magic, and it was a different value than this one. What did it represent about my magic? Was it an extra pocket of magic I could use? Did I recover that many magic points and did I have to activate some feature to do so? I’d just have to pay close attention to the next battle’s numbers.
Now it was back to those abilities. Or, if it was going to take me to a different page again, then it had better have all of my spells on it. That wasn’t too much to ask for, was it? For a magical person to know what magical things they could do? I was a goddamn mage, and I wanted to cast at least one spell before I died to prove that. That was a very forgiving minimum expectation for my career of magic, I thought. Some might have said that was the absolute minimum requirement, in fact. The system could have more than accommodated me on that front. Where were my spells, system?
I gave the screen another touch, only to find:
Spell Augmentations
Elements: Death Lv 1, Earth Lv 1, Flames Lv 1, Impact Lv 1, Nature Lv 1, Lightning Lv 1, Mind Lv 1, Poison Lv 1, Radiance Lv 1, Space Lv 1, Time Lv 1, Twilight Lv 1, Water Lv 1, Wind Lv 1
Types: Aura Lv 1, Beam Lv 1, Blast Lv 1, Bomb Lv 1, Control Lv 1,
Creation Lv 1, Enchantment Lv 1, Hex Lv 1, Self Lv 1
That was a lot to take in. The first thing to note, I learned what Spell Augment meant. Inferring from the last screen, I could put literally all of these onto any one spell I cast in any combination. If high school math taught me anything about math, it was that this sort of combination game fucktupled in size very easily with more things to combine. Eight things had more than forty-thousand, and I had twenty-three here. Just off the top of my head, with twenty-three individual augments, assuming any of them could be done individually, there were more than two hundred fifty, and combinations of three were reaching two thousand. And it only got crazier from there.
I could blast shit, blow up shit, shoot ‘beams’… hopefully meaning lasers if I paired it with ‘radiance,’ project an aura, enchant things, curse people, augment myself, make things, control things, and add all different kinds of elements to them. Lightning lasers, firebombs, controlling seas, enchanting things with ‘impact’ power. The possibilities were endless.
Some were strange to think about, especially the more abstract elements, like ‘death,’ ‘time,’ and ‘mind.’ A death laser? A mind bomb? Creating space? A space laser? Mind creation? Death to ‘self?’ No, thank you. Do not want. Although, ‘death aura’ didn’t seem like a bad way to keep the baddies at bay. All that being said, some of these combinations had to live on the shelf until I knew more about how each spell element and type changed a spell. Still, exciting.
Well, I needed a light anyway. Time to test out my first spell with a little ‘fire blast’ and finally see what the hell was around me. I gave the screen a tap on the word ‘Fire’ to see what that would do. Change the screen entirely is what it did, just like before, to a whole new screen yet again:
Job Skills
Mundane: Acrobat Lv 1, Artisan Lv 1, Beastmaster Lv 1, Covert Lv 1, Defender Lv 1,
Doctor Lv 1, Hunter Lv 1, Gladiator Lv 1, Generalist Lv 1, Presence Lv 1, Pugilist Lv 1, Researcher Lv 1, Trickster Lv 1, Sniper Lv 1
Magic: Alchemist Lv 1, Demonologist Lv 1, Elementalist Lv 1, Mythozoologist Lv 1,
Occultist Lv 1 Priest Lv 1, Spiritualist Lv 1, Spellweaver Lv 1
Special: Analyst Lv 10
Jesus, this was getting ridiculous.
I looked down at my hands to see if there was even an ember. Nope. I was strictly without ‘Fire.’ Perfect.
If I had another page to look at, I might as well not waste it. I didn’t know that being ‘the Omnimage’ meant that I had to work all the available professions, too. That was my assumption that my special omnimage super-seed gave me all the things. I also assumed that some of these had to come with perks since they leveled just like everything else. Maybe they were better than just money makers. While I could have inferred what each of these did, these skills were going to be especially difficult for me to discover what they did until I figured out how to level them up.
However, if I had to pick favorites, they were probably ‘Gladiator,’ ‘Demonologist,’ and ‘Beastmaster.’ They just seemed ridiculous to think about as casual occupations. Did people get paid to be cultists regularly here? Could parents have raised their kids expecting them to study demons for a living, like some might have done for a doctor? Were gladiators like sports stars?
This place was nuts.
But, finally, I had something to connect some dots to. Everything else only has one level, but the Analyst skill had already reached double digits. It was also the only skill that was considered ‘special.’ Torlith used the same word when we were talking about my display screens. Coincidence? Technically possible, given how much I just didn’t know, but very, very, very unlikely.
And it might have explained why my Sight and Intellect were so high compared to my other skills. If that were the case, then every level of a job skill also affected my attributes in other ways, and with the number here and only six attributes, there had to be a lot of overlap between them. When I learned how to level up the rest of these skills at a timely rate, then my stats would have started jumping through the rough.
Wait! The Hunter skill! I had enough for the primal rat. If I could have leveled that up, then I’d have known what attributes it affected, and if I was lucky, I’d learn enough to get the level grind into gear. Then I’d really have been in business.
Before that, though, I was going to see what the hell those abilities were doing for my scores if it killed me. No stat screen was going to get the better of ol’ Jeremiah Thorne.
Nope, never doing that again. Third-person was something crazy people did, and I refused to be crazy, too. I touched the screen again, praying I didn’t have another screen to worry about. Too much of a good thing was getting exhausting.
And my hubris bit me in the ass. The damn thing disappeared on me, leaving me in the shadows of this stone prison. As much as I tried to wave my hands and reactivate it, it wasn’t showing up anytime in this century. Was that screen only going to show up every time I leveled up? And I couldn’t even have yelled about it when I was stuck in the dark. I could have been next to a giant monster’s mouth, and I was not going to wake it up, no matter how angry I was.
Whatever. Maybe I’d have gotten something from the rat to cheer me up.
Time to figure out about hunting in the dark. The screen was still up, still saying that I needed to be a level one hunter to do whatever it expected of me. After all this nonsense, my eyes had yet to adjust to the darkness, and I blamed the ‘analysis’ screens for that. They seemed bright enough to confuse my eye muscles into staying permanently fixed at daytime positions. I was still groping around in the dark with one hand while, at the same time, my other hand was flexing and twiddling its fingers, trying to get some kind of fire magic going for some light.
Still nothing. Maybe I could have tried radiance. That must have been at least part of what Torlith was doing with all of his magic hammers and shields. And I was in the beginnings of being able to do the same.
There had to be a trick or something to casting spells. Did I need to channel my… wizard ki energy? Or align my sorcerer chakras? Focus my magic energies into some kind of wand or staff? That could have been it. I didn’t even know what to look for when I thought of a wand. The stick had to be special, right? Made of some fancy wood to control the energy or something? I had no idea. I knew nothing. And I still had no fire and no light. Eh, forget it, how hard could using my hunter skill in the dark be? I was already at the appropriate level. I just couldn’t have… touched it, because of the Plague-carrier ability.
Was my weapon from before ne
arby? At the risk of running into something else, I felt around for it, forced to rely on my analysis skill to spot anything in the dark. I found another long item, similar in weight to my other weapon, and began to use it like a walking stick to extend my field of feel.
I reached underneath the rat, and my ghetto cane touched down on its body. With a careful feel around it, I found my way to the closest distance I deemed safe to its body. Now, after all of that preparation and hype, I was at a complete loss as to begin. Was I going to need a knife? Should have I started with a prudent application of flames, by way of a torch or a minor fire spell, to its fur to destroy the harmful diseases living on the beast. The primal rat’s skin should be tough enough to survive long enough for me to remove all of the hair. Afterward, I would only need to strip the chest down the center, just below the sternum, paying attention so as not to harm the organs on the other side with the blade. I should look for the primal rat’s bizarrely powerful liver, which can act as a temporary filter for toxic water found while adventuring.
“What the fuck?!” I shouted out loud, jumping back in fear of myself.
The voice was in my head, and it sounded like my own. It felt like I was speaking the words, but I knew that they weren’t from me. Something compelled me to begin field dressing the rat right here and now as if I’d done it all my life. It was like I was in a trance for a second, and yet totally in conscious control. I knew what I was doing. I still felt that knowledge kicking around. I could have properly taken this rat apart if I wanted to. I had some skill at being a hunter. Magically.
Before I could process what had happened any further, a chill ran up my spine, forcing my neck to the side as if on instinct. When it did so, though I had no different landscape to view, three yellow eyes flashed open under three more analyst displays, all manifesting in the distance and rapidly approaching me with obviously predatory intent.
I was absolutely right about the shouting. Nothing but trouble and danger.
9
Here was what I had to work with this time around as the three displays approached, along with the flush of ticking sounds that accompanied them:
Pumicestone Crab, beast Lv 1
Health: 5/5 Magic: 0
Armor: 5 Aegis: 2
Abilities: Earthen Armor
And then, a quick glimpse at what the blurb for the ‘Earthen Armor’ ability had to offer the magic rock crab and what that meant for me:
This creature is protected by magical armor derived from the surrounding minerals of the earth, protecting it conventionally and allowing it to camouflage in plain sight as inanimate rock.
+3 Covert
+3 Armor
+2 Aegis
+3 Resistance to slashing damage
+ ??? (Hunter Lv 2 required)
- ??? (Hunter Lv 2 required)
That was to be expected from a crab seemingly made of pumice, though I couldn’t have said that was true from looking at them. I didn’t think that it being covert was going to be much of an issue for me in the current situation, but it did interest me that its ability directly linked to its armor and aegisy. That had to be important. Then there was the new ‘resistance to slashing damage’ that I didn’t know was a thing until now. Logically, the idea of resisting certain kinds of attacks was sound, but I was still mad that I had yet another thing to remember.
And at the very end, another two bullets shrouded in the mystery of question marks. I didn’t like not knowing one of its advantages. However, the last one, instead of adding something, looked like it took away from the crab’s scores in some way. If I was lucky, that was a weakness I could have exploited. I just had to learn what that weakness was through some trial and error. I wasn’t getting more hunter levels in the middle of a fight.
Or was I?
No, probably not.
As I returned my attention to the movements of the analyst displays in the air, I noticed that they hadn’t really traveled much farther than before. They were still moving as fast but hadn’t actually changed positions between when I started and finished reading their analyst screens. Or, rather, it was like they had slowed down while I was reading, then sped back to normal the moment I looked at them.
Was this a pause effect, like when someone had to change some settings or take a bathroom break? Was the world stopping just so I could read some stat sheets? That kind of thing wasn’t possible with multiple players from across the whole world since it would stop time for them. But I was the only person from Earth, effectively making me the only ‘player’ in the system. I wasn’t dealing with multiple players. That might have qualified for an exception to change how the system treated players.
But, wait, that didn’t happen when I was scanning the others from Earth or when I scanned Torlith or the eyeball. They were going about their business normally, whether or not I was flipping through the pages on their analyst screens. Was that just because we all weren’t officially in the world anymore?
However, applying Occam’s Razor to this whole scenario, I could have just been that I was getting fast at reading. My Intellect score was pretty high. At least, it was higher than the other scores. Hopefully, I started out average and was moving up instead of still trying to reach the minimum for commoners in this world.
Jesus, I needed to stop distracting myself from monster fights. The three crabs’ screens were nearly upon me, the clicking of their pointy legs now accompanied by the snapping of their pincer claws. As anyone might have guessed, the pincer claws resounded deeply in the nothing I was subjected to, like big rocks clacking against each other. And I was armed with only the whacking stick.
Or maybe not just a whacking stick, but also a magic stick. With crabs coming to kill me and my need for a source of light becoming harrowing, I was desperate enough to try it.
With my focus aimed at the unseen tip of my new wand and the crabs practically on top of me, I pushed away the fears and anxieties to just concentrate on this spell. All of my imagination, all of my creativity and thought, with no other focuses for my attention except for the idea of the arcane, of magic and wonder, of shaping the world around me to my will. The power, the energy, all was mine to control and change as I saw fit. I felt the flow of the universe as it drifted in and out of me, filling me with its awesome strength. I was the weaver and the tapestry, the sower and the field, the--
“OW! FUCK!” I shouted as I felt a sharp pain in my leg.
The pressure was like a vice clamped down on my leg, as one of the screens had come on top of me, meaning the stone crab itself was right here, clenching my leg. It hadn’t let go. Instead, it squeezed me tighter, like it was trying to snap it in two pieces. This was a big-ass clamp on my leg, too. I was totally right about how big these animals were.
In the air, I saw a red ‘-12’ symbol flash in the air above where the pain was coming from. That wasn’t good. I only had twenty-six total points in my Health, and now I was at a total of fourteen. Two more of those clamps and I was bleeding out in this stone mess.
Suddenly, in the corner of my vision, another display came out, much tinier than the others had been. Also, unlike the others, it stayed perfectly in place in the corner of what I could see, regardless of where I was looking. Instead of showing any of the typical scores, it merely had the two:
Health: 25/26
Magic: 142/142
Oh, hey, look at that! Those were the same stats I had when I was looking at my level-up screen. They must have only shown up when I was losing points. No use bothering with showing me constantly that nothing was wrong, I guessed, so they were just tucked away until I was below my maximum for one of the scores. That was a smart feature. I officially gave my stamp of approval.
The math the system operated on, however, needed tweaking. Not that I was complaining right now, but I was positive I saw a twelve, but I’d only lost the one health point. I mean, hurray for surviving, but that was only a short-term victory. If the system was malfunctioning, that would have been really bad
for me in the long run, especially when it was my one and only lifeline right nowwwwwWWWAIT!
The math checked out after all! It had hit me for the twelve damage, which it did to do me, but I then remembered that my armor score was at eleven. If armor worked how I thought it did, then the mitigation that my armor provided for me blocked most of the damage, the remainder taken out of my health.
That was awesome, having that bit of buffer room for attacks. Did my aegis work the same way, but for magical attacks? If so, then I could have taken some arcane punishment like no one would believe. I hoped that it wouldn’t have hurt as much as this.
But, as the crab continued to squeeze against my leg, more of the red negatives were bouncing into the air and fading, like a heartbeat reversed to take away my life instead of giving it. My health went down with it, going down to twenty-four, then twenty-three, and still squeezing down in anticipation of that twenty-two.
With the fury that only came from a struck nerve, I swung the whacking stick a few times towards the space where the crab had to have been. I aimed specifically for the arm that was pinching my leg like a hydraulic press, needing to gain some distance before the other two crabs got the same idea.
Confirming my suspicions, while my impromptu mace was dealing the usual five damage that it did against the creature, the crab buffered four of the points with its armor and only lost one health point on each hit as a result. Three hits in, though, and its five health had been reduced to two, forcing it to retreat as it stood at death’s door. Well, more like death’s city block. Death’s neighborhood? Whatever, he was getting close to dying.