Novels2Search
But for a Slime
074.8 - Preparations for a Tide in Shifting Sands

074.8 - Preparations for a Tide in Shifting Sands

Professor

++ Party Skill Growth: A tiny increase to party members’ skill growth.

++ Learning to party: A tiny increase to your party’s learning.

Researcher

+++ Party Skill Growth: A small increase to party members’ skill growth.

+++ Learning to Party: A small increase to your party’s learning.

Joe brought up his next job which was professor. But when he saw the similarity between the professor and researcher jobs, he brought up a list of both the job’s skills. His expectation wasn’t disappointed when he found the similarity between the two and to be honest he was quite frustrated by it. He calmed himself, reevaluating the situation. Calm down. This is actually pretty good, especially for the others. He sighed and tried to calm himself and sought out the silver lining. He forced the grin to his face and quickly went to his next job. He brought up the skills for faith healer then immediately frowned. Wait… Magic heal is already leve… wait! Joe flipped up magic healer as well.

Faith Healer

Cure All: Capable of curing all diseases at a base mana plus variable mana cost with a tiny chance of no mana cost. A tiny chance at failure. A small chance to double mana cost. Increase your faith!

Magic Heal: Capable of healing wounds at a base mana plus variable mana cost with a tiny chance of no mana cost. A tiny chance at failure. A small chance to double mana cost. Increase your faith!

Magic Healer

Cure All: Capable of curing all diseases at a base mana plus variable mana cost.

Magic Heal: Capable of healing wounds at a base mana plus variable mana cost.

Joe actually cursed aloud then quieted when he heard the two boys shift in their beds from Joe’s shout. Right… gotta keep quiet. Joe sighed and evaluated the skills as objectively as he could. Right… same thing… so… it’s a crapshoot. Take the chance to do a zero mana cast and have it fail at a critical moment. That seems… Joe sighed at that and moved on since there didn’t seem to be anything else of use to look at. He did note the interesting use of tiny and small, flipping open a couple other jobs skills with ‘+’ in its name and noticed that there seemed to be a connection. A single ‘+’ was associated with the word miniscule, while a ‘++’ was tiny, and ‘+++’ was small. He did find a ‘++++’ and it was called minor. But does it match here? Or is it a coincidence? Joe set that aside, making a note of it but realizing there wasn’t much more... Ooh… Joe paused and started poking himself and healing himself, alternating between the two magic heals. He did a good five or six dozen heals, half of them in each, and he got about four failures. Of the four failures, one of them was a full failure and three doubled the mana cost.

He doubled the number of heals again and found the numbers relatively the same, now with three outright failures and seven partial failures that double the costs. One interesting one was a double failure where the heal failed and he had to pay double the mana cost. He succeeded six times, healing without any mana cost. Joe found it interesting but ultimately felt that the faith version was just not worth it. He turned to dresser.

Dresser

Mob Seeker: You can seek out any mob you desire.

Mob Weak Spot: Any mob you target will display their weak spot.

Dresser - Skin: Have the knowledge and ability to skin any monster or beast.

He smiled at the three skills, curious about them and kinda happy to see them. These ones are... actually kinda nice. Not bad. Just wish I could try them out right now... Oh… well, wait. He thought about the inns’ place in the city in comparison to the two dungeons and then enacted the first skill. Mob seeker I want a goblin. He waited for a moment, and nothing seemed to happen. He frowned and tried again. Again, nothing happened. He focused, tensing a bit, but didn’t really feel much of anything. He tried once more, this time really putting effort into it, whatever that meant, and he noticed a pressure of lights form up around him and a bubble of some kind he couldn’t grasp somehow came into being.

He frowned and the bubble vanished with a pop even as the light gathered more firmly and something began to form. It was hazy and hard for him to grasp, but the light surrounding him seemed to flow and form towards him and he realized he was looking at mana somehow stirring because of whatever he was doing. It plunged into him, into his chest, and he felt a bit weirded out to see things actually going inside of him.

After a bit of time that Joe could barely call seconds, something erupted out of him, a strange hazy construct that seemed to fade in and out of focus and became increasingly blurry. He couldn’t quite grasp what it was, but it seemed some kind of spherical object inside of a donut like outer structure that then began to send out some kind of wave like… Joe frowned. What am I looking at? It’s… He blinked when the donut structure seemed to have something coming back to it off to one side and Joe felt his eyebrows knit. He looked at the direction of the return and quickly tried to figure out things but he noticed nothing. He frowned. What’s… He tried again, this time focusing on more effort. The odd bubble did not appear this time but the construct came out and seemed somehow… more. Again, the odd donut sent out odd waves and returned once again. Joe really focused and didn’t notice much of anything but might have sensed something.

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A third attempt with the extra effort and more dedication to sensing the returned signal actually brought something useable. He closed his eyes after the construct began sending out waves and as he now knew the direction, he was able to vaguely sense a soft heat wave coming from the direction he’d seen from the wave. It was so slight and vague, Joe wasn’t even sure he would have noticed if he hadn’t known that something was coming back and where it was coming from.

Joe tried a few other monsters and a few other times of deeply sensing and he did notice that some monsters brought returns that were much easier to sense and he wondered if it might have something to do with distance. One thing he’d found out, however, was that the skill either didn’t work for dungeon monsters or couldn’t cross the barrier of the dungeon. Another item on the ‘to test’ list. Joe rechecked the skills one last time and decided that he’d figured out all he could and turned to the next job: mule.

Mule

Double Strength: A double increase in strength.

BackPack: Extra skill and capability in packing a bag.

Double Strength: A double increase in strength.

Mule turned out to be pretty interesting, although other than a rather ridiculous and powerful stat buff of double strength, twice over, the other was backpack and made Joe quite upset. Double dipping on useless skills. He clenched his teeth and forced himself to calm down. Right. Calm down. Focus on the next one.

Transporter

Magical Bag: Capable storing X stacks of X items in an item storage space where X equals your current level. Weight is reduced by a total of ten percent.

Magic Space: Gives a space of approximately one cubic meter. Increases your Presence in the world. Weight is irrelevant.

Magic Space ++: Increases Magic space to approximately two cubic meters.

Stacker: Doubles number of items in each stack of magical bag.

Magic Space 4+: Increases Magic space to approximately four cubic meters.

Magical Bag ++: Capable of storing 2X stacks of X items in an item storage space where X equals your current level. Weight is reduced by a total of twenty percent.

Joe turned his thoughts to the next job, transporter, and in that job, Joe found skills that moved him, and he shivered in excitement. Finally! Something actually magical! Ha! Wonder what all this could be used for! Does storage mean I can only store what I think is a store-able item, or can I just… do anything. And… OK… ok, ok, ok. One at a time. Joe’s grin was almost manic as he got to play with something he felt was the closest thing to real magic since getting here.

While healing was cool and all, watching his cut slowly heal in real time much like a sped up time lapse video felt rather basic, simply because he’d seen examples of it before on the internet. The magic storage bag of holding, however, was giggle inducing and he found it very hard to hold in his happy giggles. Pop… pop… pop… hahaha! That’s… ha! He held his dagger in his hand and popped it into and out of storage, laughing at the fact that it would literally appear and disappear from his hand with a simple thought.

His grin grew and he grabbed some cores and coins and began popping them in and out of his storage as well, then soon had a frown replace his grin. It wasn’t one of disappointment, but of deep thought as he pushed through to understand his magic bag capabilities. He soon noticed some very strange oddities. He could stick in weapons and each weapon took a spot, even the tonfa which were literally identical pieces, yet somehow were still seen as individual. The very nice thing about the weapons was that he could call them to hand. Granted, everything he called came to him in his hand. With some effort, he could have it form on a flat surface in front of him. But for the most part, it was his hand or a surface. Clothing did not come out on him. It, too, formed in his hand then he had to put it on. He’d frowned, disappointed with that, but still tested it with his armor as well, and found it would not form or ‘come out’ on his body already worn. He had to take it out and put it on manually.

Even what came out didn’t come out with any uniformity or similarity. He’d been playing with his tonfa, hoping he could throw in some surprise attacks by throwing a punch and willing the tonfa into his hand in the middle of a strike. He’d tried to set it up that he struck with the ushiro tsuka gashira, the point at the long end of the tonfa while holding it in a normal grip, or the Zenkutsu Monouchi Kumi grip. This extended the punch of an attacker by the length of the entire tonfa but transferred the force of the punch into the palm of the attacker, straight into the wrist and into the bones of the forearm without ever endangering the knuckles. Sadly, the tonfa would come out at strange and entirely odd directions or positions.

Sometimes he would be holding it as he expected, but rarely as even in the times he was gripping it correctly, it could be rotated around in any three hundred and sixty degrees the grip was capable of holding the tonfa. This put the long end sometimes pointing towards where he wanted, but most of the time had it pointed in a completely different direction, sometimes forward, backwards, or to either side. Rarely did it actually face directly forward.

That wasn’t the worst of it. Sometimes he ended up holding it much like a traditional sword, hand where the grip of a sword would be. Even then, the rotation could be anywhere, which meant the one grip that worked as a ‘sword guard’ when the tonfa was held like a traditional sword could be pointed in any direction above his thumb. Other times he was holding it in the middle, or even at the far ‘blade’ end of the tonfa, if it were a sword, which really made him nervous when he considered using a bladed weapon. He had absolutely no control how it came out of the magical space, only that it was able to be held easily and well controlled in his hand such that he could hold, move, or change it to the grip he wanted afterwards. It almost worked better if he simply held out his palm to allow it to fall into the palm of his hand as he wanted before he wrapped his fingers around it. He frowned, then chastised himself for being disappointed. True, it seemed he couldn't do any cool ‘magically appearing sword thrusts’ but he wasn’t going to complain about such an easy way to store materials and items. He moved on to other experimentation.