“No thank you!” Alice replied instantly with no hesitation.
“Well then too bad, I wasn’t offering a choice. You’ll be staying here until I say you’re strong enough to survive.” Karandi began to get up.
“But I don’t want to stay here!”
“And I don’t care what you want. Dinners at sunset, if you ne—“
“What do I need to do to leave!?”
“Get stronger.” Karandi pushed open the door before saying, “I will give you some advice though. There are so many paths to power that you’ve crippled yourself by picking all of them. I suggest you figure out what you can do before thinking of how to improve it.” The door swung shut.
Alice stood in the hut, quite angry. She had been taken prisoner, held against her will 'to keep her safe'. She had been doing well enough up to now, though she was a bit hesitant to say she would be perfectly fine. After about five minutes Alice's temper cooled down and she thought about what Karandi had told her. She found herself somewhat agreeing with him, she did in fact have no actual direction in her attempts to get stronger.
While her stats were improving it was quite slow, her skill with her spear was incredibly low, so low in fact it didn’t even show in her stat sheet, she had started neglecting her magic after getting stuck on how to improve further, her divine skills were powerful but she could already see their limits, and she had also forgotten about the system and the potential it had to help her. She had so many ways to improve, that she had let them all rot.
Alice could feel a fire ignite in her to improve all of her mediocre talents. Magic was immediately ruled out. While magic was simple to do, it was difficult to do well and even harder to understand. She would probably need a teacher to see any progress and the same could be said about her spear fighting. Her stats were a simple place to start, but Alice felt they were also the most limited. As far as she could tell, there were two ways to improve your stats: Leveling up and training. She supposed she could start exercising regularly to get a kind of passive growth to her strength, though when she considered that fully grown adults at her level or higher still feared the deeper parts of the forest, she realised it wouldn't help much, even if she doubled her strength. The next thing Alice could think of was learning how her divine skills worked and finding out how to use her system skills. Her divine skills would be hard to test in a combat situation though, as she was no longer allowed to use the wolves as punching bags and she didn't think it would be okay to start a fight with the goblins in the village.
Alice opened up her stat sheet for the second time in about a month.
Name: Alice
Level: 10
Race: Human(age:10)
Vitality: 30
Endurance: 30
Speed: 30
Strength: 30
Wisdom: 30
Total stat points: 512
Passive Skills:
[Navigation: Lvl 4], [Survival Skills (Forest): Lvl 6], [General Magic Proficiency: Lvl 2], [Language Proficiency: Goblin Lvl 1], [Language Proficiency: Common Lvl 5]
Active Skills:
[Basic Identification: Lvl 2]
Divine Skills:
[Protection of Fate], [Fate Vision (Minor)], [Deus Ex Machina], [Flames of Vengeance], [Protection of The System], [Artificial Active Skills], [Timeless Skills]
Achievements:
[Born Skeptic], [Accident Prone], [Unlucky], [Survivalist], [Lucky], [Melting Pot], [Divine Love], [Ambitious Spell Caster], [Masterful Healer]
After looking at her stat sheet through a new perspective, she realised she wasn’t actually sure what any of these meant. She knew that levels measured something about her soul, but she wasn’t sure exactly what. Her stats fell in a similar boat, after all, they seemed kind of self explanatory. Alice decided she would find out what every single thing here meant.
Trying to use [Basic Identification] on her name and race showed absolutely no useful information. Her level however was different.
Levels
These are a numerical representation of the strength of your soul. Each level represents twice as much divinity as the last level.
While this didn’t give much useful information, it did specify how levels were calculated. It also made Alice wonder what divinity was exactly? Not that she had any way to find out though.
Vitality
Influences the amount of damage you can withstand before death. Effective against blood loss, poisons and certain diseases.
Vitality seemed quite important, and its effect basically amounted to ‘preventing death’. Alice did wonder though, what would happen if she lost more blood than she had in her body, or if she could become immune to poison by increasing her vitality high enough.
Endurance
Affects your stamina, ability to withstand pain, elemental and physical resistances, as well as providing limited damage absorption.
This was mostly self explanatory, other than the fact endurance could act as armour if increased high enough.
Speed
Speed affects Dexterity, movement speed and reaction time.
Stolen story; please report.
Strength
Influences physical and magical strength proportionately to your un-enhanced strength.
Strength and speed were exactly what Alice thought they would be, other than strength also enhancing her magical attacks and speed improving more than just her movement speed.
Wisdom
Improves memory, cognitive functions (to an extent), mana control and spell efficiency.
Alice was excited by the potential her wisdom had. This could be what helped her with her stagnant magic! If she increased her wisdom she could potentially find ways to improve her magic!
With all her stats done Alice moved on to her skills.
Passive Skills
Slightly increase proficiency in a specific task proportional to level. Level up through use.
Purely cosmetic without [Protection of The System] or [Blessing of The System].
Active Skills
Powers provided by the system that require conscious activation to function.
Divine Skills
Powers fuelled by divine energy, can be passive, active or a combination of both.
Alice didn’t feel it was necessary to [Identify] her passive skills since all of them just correlated to a skill she had trained personally. Neither did she feel it necessary to [Identify] [Basic Identification]. She had already Identified all her divine skills and achievements so she began testing the limits of her skills.
[Protection of Fate] seemed to be passive as it had no effect even when she attempted to activate it. [Protection of The System] was the same.
[Fate Vision] still gave the world that syrupy, time-aged quality to it while ‘removing’ her from the world.
[Deus ex Machina] activated, but instead of the angel appearing as it did before, she heard an angel choir singing down at her. Although there were no words she could still understand the meaning behind them, similar to The Great Dreamer.
“I refuse. Do not call needlessly.”
The choir stopped singing and the room was as it was before. Alice concluded that the skill would only activate if her life was in immediate danger, like when she was on deaths door the first time she used it.
Alice was excited to test out [Flames of Vengeance] next. When it activated Alice had a red mist floating around her while her forearms and shins were coated in an armour of blood red flames. Alice could feel the flames slowly cooling and dying out without a supply of blood. Eventually the flames died out and Alice sat back down again to compile all the information she had on [Flames of Vengeance]. Firstly, it had a strengthening effect that scaled with how much fire coated her or her enemies. Secondly, it would spread when it touched blood. Third, it would share damage taken by her to her enemies and vice versa. And finally, it killed her foe after enough damage had been transferred. Alice would definitely need to do more tests whenever she got the chance though.
Alice was a bit nervous to test out [Artificial Active Skills] so instead she moved on to [Timeless Skills]. When she activated the skill she felt a slight tingle in her head, but other than her memory feeling a bit more secure there was no change. She tried activating the skill again and the tingle happened again but she could feel something was missing. Alice activated the skill again and left it on this time. [Timeless Skills] seemed to be an ‘active passive’ skill, if such a thing existed.
Having tested out all her other skills, Alice could put of using [Artificial Active Skills] any longer. She pulled up its description before she tried using it.
Artificial Active Skills
Allows the sacrifice of levels and stat points to create active skills.
Alice was scared of losing her levels just to test out a skill, after all they were the only reason a ten year old child could survive as long as she did. Alice calmed herself before activating the skill.
Skill Elevation
Select Skill to be used as base:
[Navigation: Lvl 4], [Survival Skills (Forest): Lvl 6], [General Magic Proficiency: Lvl 2], [Language Proficiency: Goblin Lvl 1], [Language Proficiency: Common Lvl 5]
Skill elevation converts the chosen skill into an active skill. The base skill will be lost.
Skill Combination
Select skills to be used as a base:
[Navigation: Lvl 4], [Survival Skills (Forest): Lvl 6], [General Magic Proficiency: Lvl 2], [Fate Vision (Minor)], [Deus Ex Machina], [Flames of Vengeance]
Skill combination creates a new skill based on the base skills chosen. Strength of the new skill is based on compatability. No skills are lost.
Skill Upgrading
Select a skill to upgrade:
[Basic Identification: Lvl 2]
Increases the level of an active skill.
As Alice didn’t want to risk losing a skill, she chose to combine two of her skills. She combined [Basic Identification] and [Fate Vision]. Hopefully it would make [Basic Identification] more useful.
Skill combination
[Basic Identification: Lvl 2] and [Fate Vision(minor] have been chosen for combination.
Two(2) levels or three(3)stat points required for combination.
Accept Deny
Alice accepted and immediately she felt something pull out of her. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, it was just… odd. It was barely noticeable in fact. But when Alice pulled up her stat sheet, she found the problem.
Name: Alice
Level: 9
Race: Human(age:10)
Vitality: 30
Endurance: 30
Speed: 30
Strength: 30
Wisdom: 30
Total stat points: 509
Passive Skills:
[Navigation: Lvl 4], [Survival Skills (Forest): Lvl 6], [General Magic Proficiency: Lvl 2], [Language Proficiency: Goblin Lvl 1], [Language Proficiency: Common Lvl 5]
Active Skills:
[Basic Identification: Lvl 2], [Eye of Fate: Lvl 1]
Divine Skills:
[Protection of Fate], [Fate Vision (Minor)], [Deus Ex Machina], [Flames of Vengeance], [Protection of The System], [Artificial Active Skills], [Timeless Skills]
Achievements:
[Born Skeptic], [Accident Prone], [Unlucky], [Survivalist], [Lucky], [Melting Pot], [Divine Love], [Ambitious Spell Caster], [Masterful Healer]
Her level had gone down! Along with her stat points . At least she had [Eye of Fate] as a consolation. Alice was about to test the skill when she heard her stomach rumbling. She was about to leave the hut to have dinner, but was stopped suddenly at the door. Her pride refused to let her eat the goblin’s food after they had trapped her here, but eventually hunger won over pride.