The monotony of our journey was interrupted when we came across the next major city. Or rather, another major city, if we had tried we’d have been able to visit other cities with only a day or three of detour, but neither my children nor I had been terribly interested. But now, with the dark remains of a skyline stretching across the gloomy night sky ahead, we’d have to detour if we wanted to avoid coming across it.
Something none of us was interested in, either. I was daily confident to see what had happened to this place, if memory served it used to be roughly the same size as my hometown, only with a different industrial base, or something along those lines. I might have read about it at some point, I think this place had done something with chemical manufacture, but I wasn’t sure. It was one of those trivia facts you stumbled across, acknowledged as interesting and tossed to the back of your mind, only for it to surface randomly.
If that was indeed the case, it might be interesting to see if the presence of the chemical plant caused some changes to the Undead and Shattered, or if we’d only encounter the same creatures we had witnessed at home. Either way, it was something to investigate and might yield some interesting results and if nothing else, the Shattered and random Undead might have used the time to gain enough power to become something of a challenge. That alone was worth checking out, even if I doubted it.
And so, after spending a night in one of the least damaged houses on the outskirts of town, we moved in. There was a strange sense of nostalgia, the Undead and Shattered were a lot more numerous than they had been in our hometown, but their levels were a little lacking. At best, they’d serve Luna as enemies but I wasn’t all that comfortable leaving my munchkin to fight them on their own. Instead, we decided to step out of our usual roles in combat, with me acting as frontline, Alex as skirmisher while using some of their psychic powers, Lia and Silva as spellcasters and, finally, Luna with her usual bag of tricks.
It wouldn’t do a lot for Luna’s EXP, we were still in combat with her, but given that gaining EXP was incredibly easy for her thanks to the Mother’s Guidance trait she had gained from the connection to me, that wasn’t much of an issue. Her skills needed a lot more work, and cross-training was something useful for the rest of us, so we went with it.
Fighting in close combat was something I had been trained in but also something I lacked practical experience in. Fighting with Mrs Wu, even if she had occasionally pushed me beyond my limits, or striking against training dummies was one thing, or using my blades as measures of last resort when fighting on Mundus, but acting as front line and actively keeping enemies from disrupting Luna and the others? That was an entirely different ballgame, something I wasn’t adapting easily to.
My biggest problem was that my preferred fighting style was conceptualised after the wind, using speed and distance to my advantage, but that also meant I wasn’t a really solid defence. Movement was my ally, but moving away meant that the enemies I was supposed to keep engaged could easily move past me and attack the others. What’s more, the Undead and Shattered had an advantage in mass and readily committed to suicidal attacks if that meant they could tie me down, forcing me to dodge and weave in close quarters without letting them tackle me.
During our first encounter, I failed horribly, allowing our enemies to move past me and while I managed to cut multiple of them down from behind, it came down to Lia and Sivla to use their usual weapons to take up the slack. From there, things slowly became easier and I gained a few points in Unarmed Combat and with my Dual Blades, bringing them to ten and nine respectively, but I was already looking forward to moving back into my usual caster role.
Watching Lia use Darkness Magic as her primary weapon was fairly amusing, though I made sure to keep that amusement under wraps. All her training had been focused on using magic to supplement her physical prowess, be it to distract or disrupt an enemy or to move into or out of their range, be that by shadow stepping or by concealing herself. Now, she was tasked with actually using the Darkness to harm them, which wasn’t an easy task in the first place, and she was struggling. She achieved the best results by using it similarly to the way she always had, by disrupting their movements and confusing their senses, giving Luna and me ample time to dispatch them. But when she tried to copy some of the more adventurous things she had seen me do, things didn’t go so well.
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She had seen me use Darkness Magic to tear enemies limb from limb, though even I could only do that against incredibly weak enemies or enemies that were in the shadows where Darkness ruled supreme. Lia tried to accomplish it outside the shadows against a normal Shattered. It didn’t go well, to the point that I had to feed her some of my blood as she had put a bit too much effort into their attempts, only for them to fall tragically short.
Similarly, she decided to try emulating a few of the traps in the dungeon, possibly because I had hypothesised that the anomaly had created them all from Darkness Magic, but that hadn’t worked out too well for Lia, either. She tried to create tendrils out of the shadows, thick tentacles to strike her enemies similar to those of the anomaly, but sadly, Lia lacked the magical power and the raw affinity to make those tendrils truly physical. She managed to stagger a few Undead before having to bow out once more, due to a lack of Astral Power. Turning her into a true spellcaster was, and likely would always be, a work in progress, though not one we put a lot of focus on. Ultimately, she brought her focus back into a direction she’d use in normal combat, though I insisted that we’d try to come up with some form of ranged attack for her. Simply because having one, especially if we happened to encounter flying enemies, could be crucial.
Maybe even more amusing were Silva’s efforts. She had always used her divinely granted powers as a method of last resort, one that could turn the tide of battle with the use of a single, massively powerful ability. Now, she was trying to conserve as much power as possible, using small encouraging barks charged with her magic or growling at enemies to temporarily disrupt their movement. The second method didn’t work too well on the Undead, but it worked a little, demonstrating that there was some divine punch to her powers. But all in all, she couldn’t do too much, simply because it wasn’t what she had been training for. Nor was it something her class supported, leaving her fairly useless. It pained me a little and, just like I would with Lia, I wanted to find some way to give her ranged capabilities, though I had no idea just how that would work.
With Lia, there were always ranged weapons, if the whole spellcasting thing didn’t work out, but Silva didn’t have the hands for those. Even if she went into her werehound form, as I had dubbed the two-legged transformation, she wouldn’t be able to use delicate weapons like a bow or crossbow. Javelins might work, or other simpler thrown weapons, or maybe a sling, but I wasn’t too sure there. A simple sling might be the best, something that could act as a bandana while on four legs, with a small pouch of ammunition, if there were no suitable stones around.
Alex also had their own troubles, though part of that was because our enemies weren’t really fazed by their psychic abilities. Thus, they had to move in and use their sharp claws to hamstring our foes but given that the majority of their movement wasn’t directed by physical structures like sinews and muscles but magically, that didn’t do too much. They managed to somehow channel some of their psychic power into their claws and it worked, but they would never be a melee combatant. Maybe we’d find some enhancement for their claws, some sheaths I could enchant or something, but it wasn’t high on our list of priorities.
And lastly, there was Luna. And damn, did she have a good time. I wasn’t sure if it was due to the rapid maturing she had been forced to endure or because the Undead and Shattered had decayed to the point that they barely looked human, but either way, she was going to town on them. The seeds she had spliced together, in combination with her ability to direct the plants she grew with her Life Magic, turned her into something fearsome. Her style was as insane as it was effective, using two normal vines to anchor herself and two spliced vines that ended in brutal, spiked pods to bludgeon our foes. It was vicious, it was effective and if I had been an Undead, I’d have shambled in the other direction as quickly as I could.
All in all, cross-training was quite fun and gave all of us something to think about.