Part 9 - … And Come to Dust.

Liz’s first trip to the baths in the weeks she’d been on Pallos were beyond liberating.

All of her internal musings just… faded from her consciousness for an all-too-brief time.

Public baths weren’t a concept she’d been overly familiar with back on Earth, but she’d known some places to have them as a cultural thing.

The Justiciary certainly did them right, though. The bathhouse was run by a man with a steam class that kept a layer of steam hovered at the midsections of the typical adult height for most Elvenoids, even—especially—in the changing rooms.

It was nice enough to have a measure of privacy. Liz had largely gotten over the changes to her body as they were, but she still felt uncomfortable about letting others see her body in public. It was why she’d been wearing the long robes so much, and why she hadn’t come to the baths sooner. She’d have to get over it someday, but that day was not before her just yet.

Her blonde-tipped hair was short enough that it hadn’t gotten messy, and she was at a high enough Vitality that her bruises usually recovered within a few days. She’d used water and a towel on occasion to keep from feeling completely unlivable, but the baths were… blissful relief.

She took some time to finally comb over the changes she’d been through.

Her left hand and right foot were the most visible changes exposed daily. Then there were her legs, which were generally the same toned and athletic legs she’d remembered, right one from the knee down aside. She had been tall, and that earned her a lot of movie roles, so her legs were a selling point, in her mind.

That rain of cosmic dust that had passed through her had torn holes in her torso despite being so small. She had a gaping section of her lower abdomen, slightly on the left side, that had been replaced with solid stone, and she didn’t know how to feel about the implication that the goddess had likely removed the remains of her damaged reproductive organs during the extensive modifications she’d performed. She hadn’t gotten her time of the month since she’d arrived, and Liz gave a mental ‘good riddance’ at that.

Still, though, she had to admit she had no real urge to bed anyone anytime soon. The entire mental concept of such an act in what looked like ancient civilization gave her goosebumps over the stories of historical diseases involved. That was a huge ‘no, thank you’ to that concept entirely, [Healers] or no.

The other areas of her abdomen were riddled with smaller damages, usually around the size of a ping-pong ball. They dotted her body all over, and she’d wondered why her lungs seemed to function despite the perforations. Her diaphragm functioned with no issues, so she’d assumed there was divine mischief at play.

She’d visited [Healers] many times since she’d come to Pallos and—somehow—the stone was part of her body. Apparently all healing efficiency required a solid image of what was needed, but generally restored things to the person’s stored state within their own system. When she’d spoken with a [Healer] about the subject, her translation had phrased it as an “eidos backup” of a person, whatever that word meant. Healing on Liz had required an incredible amount of mana, and some healing had a risk of erasing foreign objects within her body, including the items she stored inside herself. The stone was simply so dense that it had made multiple healers burn out their entire mana reserves when they’d done work on her over the past few weeks.

The rest of her body was mostly fine, however.

The longer she had spent with her training in Arlyen’s supervision, the more she’d actually come to wish she had more stone in her body than she did. It was an immensely useful tool for her to use to her advantage, and she had a feeling if she was more stone golem than human, her [Earth Manipulation] would’ve been an intrinsic ability to her race, instead of a crutch skill from a class she effectually couldn’t live without.

Her queries had pointed out a budding field called Biomancy that was similar to how the Khazad dwarves would give themselves metal body parts for enhancements. Biomancy practitioners apparently got a skill called [Permanence] that enabled them to make the body modifications change the eidos backups of how healing worked. That meant she could make her own changes built from Seira’s initial efforts and make those changes permanent. Or if her future goals worked out, she could replace the stone with gemstones and make those changes permanent.

The issue was that her plans involved some personal flexibility with what she was made from, once she had options she knew more about. If gemstone body parts were made into her eidos backup, she’d lose any future changes she made. She’d just have to cross that bridge when she came to it.

After her bath, she moved on to the local “library,” such as it was.

The building was more of a place for storing records, but it had enough basic information to get a better idea on some of the topics she’d been hoping to learn about.

She had to admit that she’d been quite pleased with the maps recorded. Being so late in the Immortal War cycle meant that a lot of records and information were currently well documented.

Her first goal was getting an idea of where she was.

To the east lay a desert that was the majority of the Justiciary’s lands. Just beyond the border, reaching across the rest of the desert, was recorded to be a tiny coastal civilization she could most closely call ‘Egyptian’ to some extent, and the nation was called the Ankhelt Kingdom, though it was fairly small. They’d created artificial spring towns with skills and planning that meant the society would likely thrive if given the chance.

South of the desert was a dizzying mess of tiny dynasties that, according to notes by the cartographer, were constantly in violent flux. Not a vacation destination.

Further south lay a broad range of nomadic lands that separated the dynasties from the Khazad dwarves.

The area to the west wasn’t even her concern. She wasn’t especially interested in the jungles that grew progressively dense the further one traveled. Allegedly, some vampire and human mixed community had been set up to keep watch over a ruin in the harshest of the jungles, waiting for something to return, according to Sylvestre’s conversations with Arlyen. Vampire movies were all awful, and she didn’t want to be anywhere near such a mess.

With her immediate surroundings established, she mentally filed the information away for future use.

Next, she started to dig up information on various goings-on in the area around Heron Lake, only to find anything useful locked away for government purposes. She simply took note of the details she might need and kept whiling away her free evening.

The only interesting details she found were mysterious notes about robots called Pekari that would pop up, cause small-scale chaos and then end up vanishing back into the earth wherever they came from. She somewhat smelled a rat in the whole account of things. None of it made sense to her, since the things seemed to be a low level scourge nobody had dealt with. If being in Hollywood had taught Liz anything, it was how to spot a manipulative scheme. She decided to remain well away from any Pekari lairs when she could help it.

It wasn’t long before Liz had analyzed the basics of methods used by any regular threats that cropped up in her corner of the world, and took mental notes of things she might need later.

She was even offered a basic [Mental Notes] skill she declined. She had an excellent memory, just no time to attend school. She still refused to take skills for things she felt she was already good at. With her luck, she’d take an [Acting] skill and it would actually fight her own years of experience and make life miserable. She had long guessed some people could tell what skills might look like in action, and if she used her own experiences instead, she might be able to trip people from Pallos up. The people of this world were wholly reliant on the system and all their skills, after all.

She shuddered at the memory of watching someone molding copper jewelry on the street the other day. The man had blue stains on his hair and arms that just made her skin crawl. That would never be her life.

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She returned to her training the next day with a refreshed feeling of having been scrubbed clean. Ready to be thrown across the dirt again.

Her new regimen revolved around training her skills and hoping to hit her level thirty-two class-up on her metal class. Arlyen actually gave lectures on metals during their mana breaks.

Liz had been wondering why her fight hadn’t awarded many levels when she’d killed the smuggler leader before, and rapidly found out it was simply not what her class wanted to do. Her skills had remained capped wonderfully since the fight, but the class itself wanted her to wield chains for binding enemies and defending herself. She simply didn’t have enough gold or silver to use the former, and the latter hadn’t been an option until she got [Chainmail] and started training the new skill up.

She was back to being Arlyen’s punching bag for skill levels.

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Liz hit her next metal class-up as the town began to feel tense.

Merchant caravans hadn’t arrived in the past week.

She couldn’t help but feel something was wrong, but she couldn’t do anything about it.

Her whole being felt restless as she made her next class-up trip in her room.

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Seer had a small frown at her arrival.

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Something was very wrong.

“I can feel your nervousness. It’s making me tense, same as how you feel deep inside. Come, let us make this next big choice.” Seer gave her a wry smile.

Liz finally took in the slight differences around her.

The tent had more of a reddish tint to the fabric now, and glints of metallic armor peaked out around Seer’s sleeves on her fortune teller’s robe.

She knew what it meant. She’d begun to get used to her new life on Pallos now. It had taken her a full month but she’d begun to consider this place her new home.

“The best we have right now for this class slot—that we have methods to level—are in the orange category or lower. Same deal as last time. I’m going to assume you won’t be resetting your path right now, so I’ll just give you the metal options.” Seer got down to business with a wave of magical hands over the crystal ball.

[Fate’s Shackles] was the first up, and it sounded amazing.

It carried much of the chains aspect from her current class, but gave her a bit of self boosting abilities that she could use to nudge her own fate in combat. It even had a weak self healing passive that was clearly offered due to all the minimal injuries the training had been causing her. It was the perfect upgrade to her current class, all defense and personal skills.

She was tempted to take it and run, but she held herself back and kept watching the images for the next class.

[Coils of Restriction] was a weak choice. The color was a deep red, but still had poor skill quality and the worst stats. She knew why. It was for binding her enemies, which she hadn’t been able to do, so the class offering was barely unlocked at all.

[Preservation’s Constraints] was actually a class built on holding herself together after taking an injury, using chains bound within her flesh to keep her body going after taking devastating damage, right up until she passed out from blood loss. The unlock of the class option referenced her trip through the void of spatial travel gone wrong. She’d had her body knit back together on a genetic and atomic level by Seira, creating the basis for a class around pushing through incredible pain to keep going through nightmarish experiences. The class finally explained her oddly powerful pain skill, and a huge factor in her [Mental Partitioning] ability.

She chewed her lip as she realized Seira’s domain wasn’t anything to do with healing, and therefore making changes to her body’s makeup fell into the category of Order through her roundabout methods. She had so much more context after little details kept piling up and each one made her come to terms with Order not being the same as good. Her faith was set in stone by now, so she knew she wouldn’t allow herself to waver, but coming to terms with complex things helped in a way.

She didn’t have to worry whether she was worthy of Seira over the actions she took in life.

[Chained Lobotomizer] was just a morbid reminder of what she’d done. She gave Seer a look of revulsion.

“So that’s the end of the useful ones?”

“There is the modification class from last time, but it’s only gotten worse. You just haven’t been using your skills quite in the way you needed to in order to chase the biomancy path. Maybe if you get the merged class, you can try to get a biomancy class temporarily to get your [Permanence] skill that way?”

“I wanted to get the skill as part of the Gemstone class to make changes when I need to.”

“You’re being very simple-minded, actually.” Seer gave her a flat look.

“What?”

“Easy. You are hoping for a future in which we use our deep knowledge of gemstones and their crystalline structures for rapid gemstone body enhancements. Jadeite fits the sturdy but not overly breakable concept we need perfectly. Make a body of jade instead of stone, and then save that with [Permanence] and if you ever need intense healing, you’ll go from whatever your custom makeup was back to jade. You can easily customize again from the jade version.”

Liz was left with her mouth agape in realization and shock.

Seer reached across and closed her mouth gently.

“I totally forgot because I only had the biomancy perspective, but I won’t even need to keep that skill once the basic template works as a foundation. I am sooo not thinking clearly. It doesn’t matter what I take now, does it?”

“Not even slightly. Pick what you find fun that merges into your future class.”

“[Fate’s Shackles] sounds so good right now. Is it still an [Artisan] class?”

“I doubt that, actually. You’ve been creating armors, but all your work has been for combat, even your method of leveling [Chainmail] by having Arlyen hit you so hard it levels [Rigid Body]. Great work on trying to cap things, but your appearance skill is still dying in a basement with no windows. No, [Fate’s Shackles] seems to be a hybrid of defensive magic and physical reinforcement magic. My guess is that it would be a [Mage] archetype.”

“You know, you refer to me as ‘we’ when it’s most things, but always use ‘you’ when you’re dissing me. It’s kind of rude.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Liz shook her head and gave up.

“So, before I make this decision, what are all the considerations?”

“The [Lobotomizer] class is definitely out. The mess that stunt made? Gross. And you put it inside you afterwards, with only a rinse in alcohol from a seedy bar. You are aware you have some really gross class options right now that I didn’t share?” Seer had that expression on her face that Liz knew she made when she ended up with soaking wet socks. Worst. Movie. Of. Her. Career.

“Okay, I get it. It was uniquely gross. I won’t do it again.”

“Oh no, you’ll do it again. I’ll be really mad if we die because you’re trying to keep your gear clean or something.”

Liz rolled her eyes. She finally gave up and put her head in her hands.

“Can we please continue now?”

“Mhmm. The Fate class is the only outright powerful class. You’ve been laser-focused on your ideal future class and that’s been building your skills upgrades directly into a synergy that’ll help Seira put in the least effort when putting a class together for you. Which will likely mean a stronger actual class strength.”

“Then, easy as that?”

“You want the drawbacks? Alright, the class doesn’t have incredible individual skills, though some could merge, maybe. The power is spread out across as many as a dozen smaller enhancement skills, which you can’t take all of, especially without losing some of your current skills to make room. Your current class, and this one, all throw a lot of smaller skills at you.”

“Right, that level twenty [Coiled Reflexes] would’ve completely ruined [Roll with the Punches] if it ate all the levels to merge in, and then basically mirrored the effects of [Rigid Body]. The level thirty skill was even worse. [Awareness] is my weakest general skill for combat, and becoming a class skill that automatically reacts to incoming attacks isn’t quite what I’m after.”

“This class has the same difficulties, frankly. You’ll get a lot of weaker skills to try to merge together, assuming your levels go slow enough that you can get the merge before the next skill is offered. Skill leveling while doing things your class doesn’t want to do will ruin your future class options, though.” Seer threw out a few solid pieces of advice that Liz enjoyed just hearing aloud.

“Well, things considered and duly noted. I guess we should wrap things up and see how long it’s been outside, as well as if the tension in town has eased much.”

“Hey,” Seer spoke with a surprising amount of gravitas, “stay safe, and don’t lose the lessons we learned all our lives. We’re strong enough to handle what comes our way, yeah?”

Liz chewed it over, taking time to mentally adjust.

“Come what may, I’ll survive. I swear I won’t fail.”

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[*ding* You have upgraded your second class - [Fate’s Shackles] - Metal]

[*ding* Congratulations! Your class [Fate’s Shackles] has leveled up from level 32 to level 34!]

[*ding* You have gained the following stats per level! +4 Free Stats, +6 Strength, +4 Dexterity, +10 Vitality, +2 Speed, +5 Mana, +5 Mana Regeneration, +4 Magic Power, +4 Magic Control from your class! +4 Free Stats for being Partially Human, +2 Vitality for being Partially Stone Golem! +1 Magic Power from your element!]

[*ding* You’ve unlocked the class skill [Fate-Linked Dexterity]!]

[*ding* You’ve unlocked the class skill [Fate-Linked Vitality]!]

[*ding* You’ve unlocked the class skill [Fate-Linked Speed]!]

[*ding* You’ve unlocked the class skill [Fate-Linked Mana Regeneration]!]

[Fate-Linked Dexterity: Gain improved Dexterity through the chains you forge to shape your own destiny. Vastly improves Dexterity momentarily on use, does not stack with other “Fate-Linked” Physical Skills. Improved duration and efficiency per level]

[Fate-Linked Vitality: Gain improved Vitality through the chains you forge to shape your own destiny. Vastly improves Vitality momentarily on use, does not stack with other “Fate-Linked” Physical Skills. Improved duration and efficiency per level]

[Fate-Linked Speed: Gain improved Speed through the chains you forge to shape your own destiny. Vastly improves Speed momentarily on use, does not stack with other “Fate-Linked” Physical Skills. Improved duration and efficiency per level]

[Fate-Linked Mana Regeneration: Gain improved Mana Regeneration through the chains you forge to shape your own destiny. Slightly improves Mana Regeneration on use, does not stack with other “Fate-Linked” Skills for Magic Stats. Improved potency and efficiency per level]

She had four open slots. She took all of them in a heartbeat without even reading them fully.

Something was horribly wrong.

She couldn’t move.

She cracked her eyes open and took in the room around her.

Except she wasn’t in a room.

She was in a cage, trundling through the gates of a burning town—Heron Lake.

She craned her head slightly, but the stone of her body was unresponsive as she tried to will it all to move. She just barely caught the sight of them as the caged wagon she was in.

Heads.

An unthinkable number of heads were mounted on spears outside the gates of the town.

The smell began to hit her then. The burnt corpses and ashen remains of the settlement seared her sinuses as she glanced at the other people in the wagon alongside her. All of them were the low level or still system-locked orphans of the church.

Liz paled as she saw an elderly face pass by her line of sight.

“Sylvestre!” She called out as she stretched her barely mobile human handout towards the face, only to be stopped short by chains around her wrists.

She only had a brief moment to make out the reality of what she’d seen. It wasn’t Sylvestre—not anymore.

It was his head mounted on the first pike before the ruin of the small town.

Liz felt a cloying fear turn her blood to ice.

[Name: Elizabeth Fereday]

[Race: Stone Golem/Human Hybrid]

[Age: 21]

[Mana: 0/23,880]

[Mana Regeneration: 20,696]

Stats

[Free Stats: 1,347]

[Strength: 248]

[Dexterity: 3,705]

[Vitality: 3,309]

[Speed: 3,785]

[Mana: 2,388]

[Mana Regeneration: 4,488]

[Magic Power: 2,745]

[Magic Control: 2,715]

Classes:

[Acrobatic Templar of Seira] - Earth - Lvl 74

[:Seira’s Tenet of Equivalent Exchange 74]

[:Earth Authority 74]

[:Earth Conjuration 46]

[:Earth Manipulation 74]

[:Tenacity of Stone 74]

[: Rigid Body 36]

[: ]

[: ]

[Fate’s Shackles] - Metal - Lvl 34

[:Chain Proficiency 34]

[:Elegant Chains 34]

[:Chain Reinforcement 34]

[:Chainmail 32]

[:Fate-Linked Dexterity 1]

[:Fate-Linked Vitality 1]

[:Fate-Linked Speed 1]

[:Fate-Linked Mana Regeneration 1]

[Class 3] - Locked

General Skills

[:Mental Partitioning 74]

[:Martial Arts 74]

[:Identify 51]

[:Awareness 74]

[:Roll with the Punches 74]

[:Learning 74]

[:Stunning 14]

[:Imaginative 48]