“Okay, this is a bit odd. Guess these things just have more Sanity than those Nightcrawlers?” muttered Esperanza as she inspected the corpse of a [Venom-Tailed Crawler Lvl 27] she just killed. She scratched her “head” out of habit in some confusion, since the creatures had not behaved the way she expected when she was testing out her new skill on it.
Esperanza had scoured the deep forest for the past couple of days to gather more souls in her [Soul Storage], which currently contained a good one hundred and forty six souls. She had mostly gathered those souls from creatures too weak to give her any good experience, which was one reason she had not leveled despite the carnage. At least she learnt a few things from it, though.
For one, she learned that the level of the creature was irrelevant to the “size” of the soul or soul fragment she received from them. She had killed a couple level 30 insectoid monsters and only got slivers from them, while killing off a first-tier grazer granted her a complete soul – or at least what [Soul Storage] considered a complete one – right away.
The effectiveness of [Soul Bolt] also varied greatly depending on the target. It did not seem to correlate directly to their size or anything, as some creatures the size of her palm survived a bolt, while some larger ones like the [Nightcrawler Stalker] instantly perished to it. She knew what the skill description said, and how it was likely related to the Sanity stat of her targets.
Problem was, she had no way to check out whether her targets had a low or high sanity score at all.
At best she could get an approximation through [Far Down the Deep End]’s side effect if she eased up on her [Aura Control], but that sounded like something that defeated its own purpose. Anything particularly low in Soul – and thus likely low in Sanity – would be rendered insensate or dead by the side effect as it was, and sending another strike at them was likely just overkill.
On the other hand, it was a way for Esperanza to strike at her targets in a different manner. When the skill leveled to level 2 and the effect allowed her to merge more than one soul into a bolt, she got the gist of what it would likely be like in later levels. While a single soul’s worth of [Soul Bolt] did relatively little to most targets it’d be worth using on, what about one made from a handful of souls?
Esperanza could definitely see a use to the skill once it was leveled, and even in its weaker form, it made for an excellent tool to distract enemies with, as a strike to the soul apparently disoriented her targets quite a bit even when they were strong enough to resist the more deadly effects. That in turn gave her enough time to take them out the more physical way instead.
Of course, targets with stronger Souls usually have weaker Bodies, and were more susceptible to a direct application of physical violence to begin with.
All the hunting and extra souls also allowed Esperanza to enlarge her [Storage Dimension] – the size grew when she collected her hundredth soul – to over double its size. At the moment, the size was closer to four feet per side, and could easily fit in many more things. She made use of that space to store up the valuable parts of the beasts she killed to give to the villagers of Navef.
Name : Esperanza Marisol de Gonzalez Cabrera
Race : Human (?)
Age : 18
Class : [Spark of Hope Lvl20]/[Emissary of the Forgotten Lvl7]/???/???/???
Stats :
Free Major Stat Points: 0
* Body : 45
- Strength : 45
- Dexterity : 45
- Constitution : 45
* Mind : 43.33
- Intelligence : 40
- Perception : 40
- Wisdom : 51
* Soul : 66.66
- Willpower : 40
- Intuition : 40
- Sanity : -120
Skills:
Class 1: [Spark of Hope]
* Far Down the Deep End :EX
* Flesh is but a Vessel: Lvl 3
* Shifting Guise: Lvl 9
* Consume: Lvl 6
* Gauze of Oblivion: Lvl 4
Class 2: [Emissary of the Forgotten]
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* Shepherd of the Lost: Lvl 2
* Soul Storage: Lvl 2
* Soul Bolt: Lvl 3
* ???
* ???
General Skills:
* Respawn: EX
* A Glimpse of Understanding: Lvl 6
* Language Understanding: Lvl 5
* Gaze Unto the Abyss: EX
* Aura Control: Lvl 9
* Tracking: Lvl 5
* Quick Learner: Lvl 3
* Butchering: Lvl 2
* Poison Resistance: Lvl 2
* ???
Esperanza took a glimpse at her stats, and nodded to herself. She mostly played it safe like what Oldies suggested, keeping her Willpower and Intuition no less than a third of her Sanity score, while at the same time making sure her other stats kept up with her Soul as well, to an extent. Oldies warned her of the detriments that focusing too much into one stat could cause, and Esperanza felt that what they said made sense.
She focused more on her Body stat with her free points, as the vast majority of her skillset at the moment made physical violence the most applicable method for her to defend herself with. She still lacked any skill that directly made use of the Mind stat – she knew that skills like [A Glimpse of Understanding], [Language Understanding], and [Quick Learner] were helped by it, but that was more in an indirect manner – and the only skills that really made use of her Soul were [Far Down the Deep End] and [Soul Bolt] for the moment.
For an unknown reason, she had the inkling that those worries would likely be covered as she leveled further. She had no idea where she got the idea from, or why she felt so confident about it. Esperanza was not that much into games, and while she had been assigning her stats for a more balanced setup, her own classes clearly wanted to lean further towards the Soul part of the triangle.
It was another thing on her list of things to talk about with Oldies when the next chance to chat with them came in a few days.
Due to her acquiring a new skill and the experiments with it, Esperanza had gone a good bit deeper into the jungle than usual this time. As a result, she also started seeing creatures that she had never seen before either. As she went deeper, the average level of the creatures in her surroundings also slowly increased. At the depth she was currently at, creatures in the high 30s were commonplace, and third-tiers were no longer particularly rare.
One creature that gave Esperanza quite a bit of trouble looked like a pillbug, just one that had particularly spiky carapace and was the size of a bull. Neither she nor her dogs could do much if any damage to the thing, until she gave [Soul Bolt] – which was level 2 at the time – a shot. To her surprise, the shot dropped the pillbug-like creature on the spot.
It didn’t outright kill the creature, but rendered it insensate and allowed her to just stab it with her knife and let the blade devour the creature’s blood until it perished from the blood loss. Esperanza still kept the intact segments of the beast’s spiky carapace in her [Storage Dimension] and thought to bring it back to the village as well.
The journey back to the village was a long one, however, as she had delved deep into the jungle. Even traveling quickly, she thought that it would take her at least three to four days of travel before she could reach the village of Navef. Still, Esperanza was in no real hurry, and calmly made her way through the jungle as she took down whatever creature crossed her path.
She could do that with ease and confidence now that none of the creatures that inhabit the region posed much of a threat to her. It was a great change from the days when she had to skulk around carefully in fear of attracting predators she couldn’t handle. The feeling was a rather refreshing one, to say the least, and one she rather liked.
Naturally, she also took the opportunity given by the journey back to the village to gather more souls into her [Soul Storage]. Since she did not let off even the creatures she would have normally ignored as they gave her little to no experience due to their low level, it made it easy for her to accumulate souls along the way.
By the time she was roughly a day away from the village, Esperanza already accumulated well over two hundred and fifty souls in her skill, though all those souls had yet to unlock the next stage of the skill like she expected yet so far. It was probably diminishing returns at work and the next stage would unlock at five hundred souls or so, she thought.
Any and all such lackadaisical thoughts fled her mind when she was maybe a few hours away from the village, however, for even from that distance, she noticed a dark plume of smoke on the horizon, visible even through the dense canopy of the forest.
And it unmistakably came from the direction of the village of Navef.
Esperanza put any thought to hunting and relaxing out of her mind as she rushed to get towards the village as fast as she could, her amorphous form – all pretense at subtlety discarded – moving through the treetop at the fastest speed she could manage. Dali and Gordy followed her on the forest floor, moving just as swiftly despite the multitude of obstacles in their path.
Despite their haste, however, none of it helped cut the distance they had to travel, which even at her best speed was still at least another few hours’ worth of travel. Even after they rushed for a couple of hours, they were still a good distance out from the village itself. What they reached first was the vicinity of Esperanza’s small hut.
Before they reached the hut itself, they saw the signs that something was going very, very wrong with the village.
They had found Adan-Zil collapsed face-down on the path that led to the forest depths, with several arrows protruding from body, both the front and back.
Both Dali and Gordy reached him before Esperanza did, with her jumping down from the treetops in her more humanoid form, landing hard not far from where Adan-Zil fell. She reached the old hunter and realized that he was still clinging to life, if only barely, and did her best to resuscitate him with what basic knowledge she had from her previous world.
Her efforts finally bore fruit when Adan-Zil regained his consciousness and looked at her with an unfocused eye – his other eye had gone missing, leaving only an empty and bleeding eye socket where it once was – and coughed. Esperanza carefully gave the old hunter some water from a waterskin she carried around with her, more of the water spilling than going down the old hunter’s throat as he drank with difficulty.
When he finally spoke, his voice was weak and barely audible, and Esperanza had to lean in close to make out his words.
“Honored one… I am… glad… to be able… to see you… one… last time…” wheezed the old man with labored breath, clearly using up with little life he had left to say the words. “Village… in danger… under… attack…”
“Who attacked the village?” Esperanza couldn’t help but ask. “Why?”
“Our former brethren… who chose… the new gods…” said the old hunter even as his eyes began to dim and his breathing weakened. “We still… follow the old ways… They do not… tolerate our existence… They want… to kill us all…” he said with difficulty. “I implore you… Honored one… Please… help the village… Save… our children…”
As the old hunter said those last words, the light went out of his eyes, and he exhaled weakly one last time, the life leaving his body. Esperanza was helpless to save him. She lacked any sort of healing skills, and had no way to save the man given his grievous injuries.
Even so, there was still something else she had to do, something urgent, as Adan-Zil’s last words implied.
Namely that there were still other people to save.