The next day was the start of my new routine, and so far it was going fairly well. Although my view of the sky from where Sula had put me on the ground, while a great way to appreciate the variety of cloud shapes on offer, wasn’t the most comfortable place to rest.
After dishwashing duty for Ember, and my morning run, followed by breakfast and hunter healing time, Sula had shown up to start our training together. She had managed to swap shifts with the other night guard to finish closer to the morning, so she was able to join me nice and early in ruining my day which so far consisted of trying to dodge being hit, then being hit or flipped when I failed almost immediately.
“Slow, and sloppy, for self defence from the odd drunk or panicing injured person you would be fine, but if you are joining any kind of combat team even in just an emergency healer role we need to improve. Enough throwing you around though, questions time, you mentioned you unlocked a body enhancement skill? Tell me about it, and the others you were thinking you might be able to unlock”
Sitting down on my meditation rock next to her, we barely fit but it was less dusty then the ground, I walked her through my process to unlock the enhancement along with the other pathways I could feel and wanted to try activating, but that I wasn’t sure if they would merge in a poor quality way like she had mentioned earlier.
“Honestly Styx that is a good skill, when we talk poorly of your training it's because you weren’t trained properly for the kind of combat your class is clearly going to encourage, not because it was lacking in fundamentals. We are all treating you like a warrior rather than a mage healer for sure, because that is where you seem to be growing to be a healer bruiser combination type of combatant. This skill is solid, is it the best you might have been able to produce with some training and guidance? Absolutely not, it's mid tier if we are being generous. But produced in a combat situation, not prepared properly for the skill development and without any related skills from a card? It's better than I would have expected by a fair bit. Combat often encourages our best results within the system, but people also often panic and flail about more than they would like others to think and so they get worse results for it.”
“I would say hold off on developing the other pathways. From my own knowledge on these, and I do possess a rare tier whole body enhancement skill so this isn’t untested knowledge, you will want to develop the remaining areas in as small sections as possible initially with a focus on the desired result. Then you can work on merging them by manually triggering two at a time together until you bring it all into one cohesive skill which you can then work on ranking up. I would suggest continuing to focus on speed, with your healing and honestly light frame you have no business worrying about strength or defensiveness, along with being able to dash in to grab someone injured is going to be worth more than just hitting hard ever would for you. But if you can get a better feel for your fighting style and needs, along with your continually improving mana control, then you will be more likely to create better skills when doing this. So its a balancing act deciding when to do it, but at least give it a bit of time training with me first before rushing into it”
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Letting the silence wash over us for a bit I contemplated this information dump, it all made sense and matched what I had found in the books from Bren around mana control and exercises, and watching Ember bouncing through the short grass hunting for the small white butterflies that liked the local flowers I found myself quite agreeable to slowing down a bit after this whirlwind period starting.
“I am fairly happy with that, not really looking to rush right now its more if I don’t improve and someone suffers because I couldn’t get to them or heal them I would hate to know I could have improved faster and prevented it. But you are right, I need to be realistic and focus on quality improvements. Thanks Sula, I appreciate it. I won’t keep you longer, you look as tired as I feel after that beating, enjoy your sleep” hugging her as she headed off for her rest I got ready to start tidying the cave while waiting for Chris.
I had let him know over breakfast I needed bedding if he had finished the core, he had but hadn’t traded it yet as it wasn’t really useful for the builder and no one else had furs. He promised to take a look again to see if anyone had something spare, and if not to see when the next trip to the nearest town was to sell it via the traders for the goods we both wanted to split. Apparently the core had allowed him to make a generalised weapon skill for one handed blades, which would be usually quite a decent card however in our settlement almost everyone had some kind of combat skill as was the norm for new settlements. Worst quality crafters, cooks, and healers were worth it compared to someone dying from a lack of combat capacity, particularly when once things settle and grow more specialised crafters and the like will end up migrating.
Seeing the Gem crystallizer had finished as I was cleaning I did a smaller dance, this was the last gem we needed to complete the cave if Bren and my expectations were right. Grabbing the gem out I placed it in my box at the end of my bed, the dungeon box had become an important items box for me, as much as I really wanted to go fill the last lighting spot over the front of the cave entrance I had promised Bren to wait for him to do it.
Part of it was because I couldn’t have done this without his nudge and help, but also because the centre of the cave entrance was my height plus another half again, and an earth mage able to make a stone stand for me to step onto to avoid falling and breaking something just seemed smart, even if I could heal myself it wasn’t worth tempting the fates.
Settling back down out the front I decided to try to entertain myself with Ember while I waited for my day's visitors, although finding games we both enjoyed was a game in and of itself. Fetch resulted in Ember thinking it was hunting practice, and eating the stick. Toss the rock resulted in Ember eating the rock. I made a small flower crown which reminded me of making them for my mother as a child, until Ember ate the flower crown I adorned him with. Eventually we settled on trying to stack rocks higher, for some reason Ember saw me stacking a few small pebbles and decided to copy, and not eat the rocks. Until my tower fell over, at which point he pounced and started pulling my stones into his body to eat, which clearly was his end goal, the little glutton.