CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A NEW SKILL

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I had a few hours to clean up before Rio returned from work. I took that time to burn the rest of the accumulated trash in the backyard and my newest set of bloody clothes. I was pretty sure I’d left a blue trail all the way back up the mountain, but I wasn’t worried about it. People didn’t generally associate blue with blood, after all.

I assigned new stat points to get rid of the prompt. Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom, and Charisma all got another boost. I debated dumping them all into Charisma but decided I’d better not, just in case. I planned to stop going to the cave and get a regular job, but I never knew when I might need to fight again if my vines didn't hold.

I spent more time deciding on my next skill. I now had protection and crowd-control skills. Gripping Vines had proven especially useful both in battle and out. None of my skills alerted me to danger, though. Being ambushed seemed like the most dangerous part of all this. I’d have to worry more about that now that I no longer intended to regularly visit the cave. I’d been surprised more than once, but I hoped one of the skills in the Auras tree could help with that.

Skill: Windblade Totem

Windblade Totem slices enemies in a radius around it.

Mana Cost: Mid

Skill Level: 0.

Initially, the confusion totem seemed more useful. I’d rather have a confused and disoriented enemy than a slightly cut-up one, but I suspected the Windblade Totem would synergize with my Cyclone Armor. Wind spells improved the abilities of other wind spells, or so I hoped. Gripping Vines would probably be improved by the “Flytrap,” “Living Woods,” and “Strength of Flora” skills in the same way.

Of course, I was just guessing. I had no way to know. Even as a Druid, though, it seemed there were many paths I could tread. I had resolved to leave the shapeshifter tab alone, but who knew? Maybe one day I would feel the need to become a bear?

It didn’t seem wise to spread my skills too far, at least not while I knew so little about the system. What was that Bruce Lee quote? I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand punches, but I fear the one who’d practiced one punch ten thousand times?

Shit, I was butchering it. It was kicks, not punches. Dammit.

Either way, it felt smart to specialize. I was spreading my attributes in a very non-gamer way, so I decided I’d be ruthlessly narrow regarding skills. Wind and nature skills only, as well as relevant passives. Those categories seemed capable of controlling the enemies around me while I shot them to death.

I’d work that way until I discovered anything to indicate synergy wasn’t a thing. More and more, I’d begun to draw the conclusion that the system was… incomplete. It felt like there used to be more to it, and over time it had degraded. I was not only using a severely outdated version but a broken one.

Skill descriptions were missing. At first, I’d thought that the Passives skill tree was the only one with all of its descriptions intact, but further study revealed that it was random which descriptions were missing and which were present. The wind and confusion totems had descriptions but the earth and healing totems didn’t.

Of course, all of this was irrelevant. I wasn’t going down there again. If the goblins came up and started infesting the area, I’d act just as surprised as anyone else.

I chose the Windblade Totem. I didn’t know what to do from there, so I pushed my mana into making a small object while thinking of Indian Totems I'd seen in my high school history textbook. Fortunately, that was enough for the skill to activate as a small object appeared in my hands.

The mana drain was horrendous, the equivalent of using the vines ten times, but the results spoke for themselves as I beheld the small object. It looked more like an ankh than any Indian totem I was familiar with, but the tails curled back up the stem like the snakes in the medicine symbol. It was cold to the touch, like metal.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It was entirely inert, though. I could sense it with my mana but knew it wasn’t doing anything. The reason for that was obvious enough, though.

I turned on my healing aura, a mental switch I was becoming more proficient at flipping without thought, and instantly felt the totem spring to life, the aura powering it like some sort of long-distance magnetic charger.

It did nothing physically, but I could feel the line where its effectiveness ended. It covered the entire house but didn’t reach nearly as far as my aura, which extended a few meters past the fence line to the back and well past the gravel road out front from where I sat in the living room.

Good enough, though! Now, I had an answer to how the totems interacted. My aura acted like a battery for them. As a test, I shut off my aura and waited, surprised to note that the totem continued emitting its own aura for almost three minutes after losing its power source.

Could I make hundreds of these and pepper my whole property with them? I grinned as an idea began to form.

I didn’t have time to act on it today, though. I’d have to wait until tomorrow since it wouldn’t be long before Rio returned.

So I planted the totem in the crawlspace, confirming that my aura was a sphere, as I could feel my aura powering it even down there. Then, after cleaning up and removing the evidence of my spelunking, I settled down on the couch to wait for Rio to get home. Faithful Genji plopped her head down on my lap while I watched gameshows like the old man I was.

I was dozing off when I heard the door open an hour or two later. The TV had long since switched to news and was murmuring something about an increased amount of kidnappings in the tri-state area when Rio came in.

“Theo?” she called.

I could hear her dropping her laptop bag, water bottle, jacket, lunchbox, and all sorts of other things on the counter as Genji teleported to her side, jumping and prancing around like she’d never seen the girl before.

Darn mutt, always making me feel guilty. Hadn’t I just been petting her!?

“Yes, Genji, I’m home, oh my god!” Rio said with a laugh before bending over to pet the dog. “Theo, come get your dog!”

“She’s been mine all day!” I said before getting up and kissing her while doing nothing to shield her from the joyous dog. “How was work?”

“Oh, you know. The usual. Still collecting community outreach surveys for that big fiber grant. Still can’t believe we’ll have actual internet out here next year, instead of that wifi crap,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m still not buying that,” I replied. “I bet it falls through, or they find out the rock is too rocky, or the powerlines are too tall, or… shit, I don’t know.”

“I’m not holding my breath either,” she said, laughing. “So, how was your day? Do anything fun?”

“Finished burning the trash, as you can see,” I said with a gesture toward the back deck. “Made another few hundred dollars working as well. I think you’re right, though. It was harder to do today. I’m thinking those first few sales were just lucky.”

“Well, don’t get discouraged that fast. It’s only been a day. Just… keep looking for a regular job, okay? If Covid taught us anything, it’s that you go crazy when stuck at home too long.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I murmured. I hadn’t done well with the pandemic. I thought I would be one of the best equipped to handle it, considering how I spent most of my time on the computer or gaming but it turned out that even I needed to get out of the house every now and then.

“Still working on it. No bites yet, but I’m sure one will come eventually,” I replied. “How about you? Any new prospects on the post-graduate side?”

“Yeah, actually! Nagging Nora was gone today for some reason, so I had time to talk to Gerry. He’s hinting that he’d like me to stay on with a big pay bump once I graduate.”

“I thought you were going to look in Boyerton? It would be a lot closer,” I said.

“Yeah, but there’s hardly any room for advancement there. I’d get to be a Program Evaluator, which would be nice, but that would be the end of it. I’d basically live and die there,” she said.

“Heh, how high do you want to go? You aim to get elected to something?” I probed.

“God no!” she said. “But I at least want to get to where I can really affect the community.”

“The community. Just not your community,” I said.

She shot me a glare at the jab.

“Okay, I admit it. I don’t want to work in Boyerton. I love living out here, but going to the city is great, too. Urban Development Planner for the state has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?” she asked innocently.

I decided to drop it. Rio had her dreams, and I had mine. If she wanted to drive an hour every day to and from work, who was I to stop her?

“Honestly, until you give me numbers, it sounds no different from Program Evaluator to me,” I joked.

“Ugh. Fine. In terms you can understand, the difference is a max salary of sixty thousand versus one hundred. Kay?”

“Forty thousand sounds pretty good right now,” I said.

“Two more months.”

“Two more months,” I repeated the mantra with a smile.

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