“Ultimate Skill—Hidden Nature!” To be honest, I didn’t need to call out the skill name to activate it, and it certainly wasn’t an ultimate skill but rather a racial trait … but it just felt right, even if my new, cute little voice didn’t seem to handle shouting very well. Tiny little virtual lungs in my tiny little virtual body didn’t lend themselves well to volume. Plus, there was still the matter of the distraction of hearing my own voice: a young girl’s voice, cute and soft and a bit piping like a songbird’s. I had quickly grown accustomed to my avatar’s body, or at least the corrections provided by the game software had minimized the distractions of being small, being female, and wearing a dress, but proprioception and kinematics was one thing, and auditory feedback was quite another. Even all that time spent talking with Sunset Sparkle hadn’t yet gotten me accustomed to hearing my virtual voice.
It happened in an instant. A combat skill, and unleashing hidden strength can’t be anything but combat-focused, would be useless if it didn’t. And yet…. And yet, I felt the changes occur, not instantaneously, but rather over the course of many long, confusing minutes—made even more confusing since I seemed to experience it multiple times, from multiple angles, and not just from my own perspective. It was like watching a magical-girl transformation in a Japanese show, powering up from innocent schoolgirl into a costumed heroine capable of defeating the monsters of the week, but no transformation I had seen was quite like what I was experiencing.
Throughout the whole process, I grew taller. As I had discovered, Madelyn Alexis is short. Well, not so much discovered, since I had designed the avatar (not that I had expected to inhabit it), but it’s one thing to see a short character and quite another to be a short character. Even the newbie skeletons and giant rats looked more enormous than they should’ve. But, apparently the “more primal form” of a Hidden Nature is larger and more powerful, so I started growing from my childlike state to something more worthy of a so-called “Ultimate Skill.” Taller, and taller, until I passed even above my normal not-too-shabby height out in the real world, and taller and taller still. To be honest, though, I was only tangentially aware of becoming taller as the other changes my avatar—my borrowed body—underwent were much more … noticeable. Much more demanding of attention.
The “good thing,” if it can be called that, of having a childlike body for my avatar was that I didn’t have to deal with breasts or anything else drastically different, besides the obvious but less-important-in-a-game silhouette of a body. Perhaps that’s why it didn’t bother me, that much, after the first few moments. And with the aid of the systems behind the game, I had quickly adapted to be able to move and run and jump and fight as Madelyn Alexis. But all that changed in an instant—a prolonged, drawn-out, very confusing and disorienting instant, since time seemed to run slower while the Hidden Nature was activating.
As I grew taller, I grew in other ways, too. My breasts, non-existent as they had been, swelled up, starting slowly, perhaps hitting a modest average after half a minute of subjective time, but they didn’t stop there. As they continued to grow, and grow, and grow, the glaring flaw of making Madelyn Alexis a young Tauros—a cow-based Beastkin, in plain speech—being VERY apparent. I’m not sure how my poor little dress survived. And while it changed, too, to accommodate the changes that Hidden Nature was working upon my body, it seemed to struggle to contain the bountiful (in excess of bountiful, really!) bosom I was developing. And that was with the dress being open from neckline to hemline, held closed only by the brooch and sash.
It wasn’t just taller, and it wasn’t just bustier. I felt myself getting broader to match, shoulders to give a defensive lineman pause, a waist proportionate and not waspishly thin, and hips full and wide. Even my arms and legs, especially my thighs, became larger. Not fat, but not muscular either. Toned at best, but still soft. Madelyn Alexis had been a girl, a youth, but her, my … whatever … Hidden Nature was indisputably a woman, matronly even.
My tufted tail, which I had almost forgotten about, despite tails and short dresses being a dangerous match, elongated as well. Soon it was brushing past a backside that was no longer as-close-to-flat as my chest had been, but instead was plumping out to match. And as I grew taller and broader, it, too, grew larger and rounder. “Full-figured” might be a euphemistic term for someone with excess weight, but even though I wasn’t becoming fat, I was definitely full of figures.
My scalp itched; short hair gaining in volume and length, fringe fluttering and flipping in an ethereal breeze, and the two little ponytails coming undone, joining garnet-tinted ebony waves that cascaded down my back to brush up against the newly prominent curve of my butt. With a sharp pinch and dull ache, even my skull seemed to shift and change underneath the scalp, as I started growing horns, though they stayed small and relatively unformed, perhaps even almost unnoticeable past the wild cascade of curls I was now graced with.
And just when I thought the change couldn’t get any more drastic—taking me from a childlike, near-waif to a small giant at at least double Madelyn Alexis’s original height and with significant, pronounced curves—the changes continued. From fingertips to shoulders, from scalp to neck, and then lower and lower and lower, all over my body, short, dark fur grew out. Madelyn Alexis was already dark of skin, but the rich, dark berry brown of her, my, skin became concealed under a darker brown coat of fur, definitely bringing the “animal” to the forefront.
As the fur spread downward across my vastly changed figure, it seems that even those changes hadn’t yet finished. The breasts, probably not much more than “above average” for someone close to nine feet tall (though by absolute size, much larger than human women ever naturally get), continued to swell even as the dark flesh was covered by darker fur. The dress, by this time, had lost its ability to keep up with my changing height and size, and the previously knee-length fabric was now little more than a very abbreviated flyaway vest—enough to maintain a semblance of modesty, but only a semblance. The sash was gone, perhaps consumed in the transformation or perhaps just busted loose and fluttering to the ground, but at least the black bandeau and bikini remained, sizing upward to accommodate the changes in my body, but somehow not quite keeping the same ratio covered. Even they were more skimpy.
Even with doing the laundry, and thus knowing my twin’s sizes, I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess at my size, but at a glance—one I didn’t linger on—each breast looked larger than my own head. If my twin were here and somehow scaled up to match my boosted height, hers would seem somewhat small in comparison. The breasts weren’t pendulous, but rather full, firm, and embarrassingly prominent, riding high on my much broader chest. Protruding not just to the front, but to the side, forcing me to keep my arms further away from my body or else squeeze uncomfortably. Why was Hidden Nature working such changes on my body? Surely bust size had nothing to do with combat ability!
There was a commensurate broadening of the rest of my body as well, as I grew thicker, though still neither fat nor muscular—just a wall of dark-furred flesh, though a wall wider in some places than others. As the fur spread down my legs, which felt longer in proportion to the rest of my body than they did when I was still little Madelyn Alexis, even the structure of the legs changed, making a much stronger connection to animal I was channeling. I felt myself rise up on tiptoes even as the ankle stretched higher and the above- and below-the-knee bones grew shorter to compensate. The little white shoes, almost slippers, that I had as part of my “newbie outfit,” disintegrated into shreds of fabric and then seemed to be absorbed into the changes I was undergoing, giving the dark fur a bit of a white-tipped frosting above my new and shiny black hooves.
The vestigial horns, as well, grew more pronounced. Longer, thicker, and probably sharper, though I felt they wouldn’t serve any purpose other than cosmetic. Horns would be useless against the stone monstrosity I was fighting, and for almost anything else, arrows and spells and even daggers and staffs would be better than trying to slam my head into them.
Then…. Then time returned to normal, and half-stunned by the dramatic changes wrought upon my body, I was unable to react in time to the onslaught. The shockwave from a strike of a massive stone hand slammed into me, tossing me end over end as I was blasted backward away from the stone monster. “Graaah!” escaped my lips, in a voice that, too, was changed. No longer cute and piping like a songbird, I sounded almost sultry, definitely sensual, even in that started gasp of reaction. Even without the rest of the changes, I’m sure I’d be blushing from that voice alone, though with my animalistic side so far to the forefront, rather than just a cute little tail and ears, no blush could be seen past the fur.
Coming to my feet, now twenty feet further back from my foe, I spared a moment to glance at my stats. “Defense? This transformation gives me defense! How useless!” If I had been designing a character to play rather than one to just look at all the options that character creation offered, I would have min-maxed a little. Well, in games in the past I’ve played unlikely race/class combinations, such as a Pixie Lancer or Barbarian Wizard, albeit never in virtual reality, so it wouldn’t necessarily have been a lot of min-maxing.
However, I had no intention in developing Madelyn Alexis into a tank character—especially not after how I had felt after the fight with the skeleton mage—so that made an ability that boosted defense next to worthless in the long run. Which, in it’s own way, was maybe a good thing. After all, with how the ability transformed my figure, it wasn’t something I could see myself using all that much, if ever again. In fact, for a moment there as the transformation was occurring, I was more than tempted to just log out and restart anyway, regardless of everything that I would have lost. This figure certainly wasn’t something I wanted my sister to see!
But logging out would mean giving up, and I had come this far already. Regardless, I certainly didn’t intend to give up in the middle of this battle, even if it was something that seemed like I wasn’t likely to win. If I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting, and not crying because I ended up in an embarrassing situation. I’ve survived embarrassment in the past, like those times when—well, never mind exactly what—but this time, the only witnesses were the monster, myself, and Sunrise Sparkle … wherever she had flown off to.
Still. The boosted defense did help as that massive attack I took when I was unready didn’t hurt nearly as much as it should have. But ‘taking less damage’ is not a strategy for winning. Doing more, is. Well outside the range of the spiraling barrier of swirling stones, I readied my bow for another shot—somehow, it had scaled upward with my growth even if my outfit hadn’t—and very quickly discovered something that female archers have undoubtedly known since the dawn of time: breasts get in the way. And mine, massive as they are in this empowered form, got very much in the way.
That left archery out, at least until the Hidden Nature transformation wore off in about five minutes, but until then, maybe I could put the boosted Defense to work….
Grabbing the bull by the horns—very figuratively speaking—I put the bow back into my inventory and started another zig-zagging run toward Sar’Glagalth. For all that my body was significantly larger and significantly transformed by Hidden Nature, my balance didn’t appear to be affected at all. I could run on hooves as well as I could in shoes, and though my greatly enhanced bustline wasn’t suited for such endeavors, I was able to move in this body as naturally as I had in the avatar’s normal form, or as naturally as I had flown in my transformed hivatar.
I fired off several more Mistshards as I approached, aiming for yet-unscathed locations, and wasting a little bit of mana on another attempt to hit the large green glow. Unfortunately, the spell was brushed aside by a stone arm, though it appeared to have actually hit a bit of green on the monster’s forearm, so it wasn’t entirely wasted.
As I charged into the whirling barrier of stone, I was hit by several smaller rocks in quick succession. I barely felt the impacts, and only a couple did a point of damage. Still, even pinpricks could wear someone down, and since my maximum health was barely above 60, there wasn’t room for too many pinpricks. On the other hand, without the enhanced Defense from Hidden Nature, that many rocks would have knocked me halfway to death rather than just a few points further down. Still, between the rocks and the earlier shockwave that had sent me tumbling, I was starting to get low on health, so I grimaced and downed another healing potion. Yuck! I need to remember to send in feedback about them….
When the stone hand came down a few yards away from me, I jumped and somehow avoided the shockwave. If I had been paying attention earlier, maybe I would have seen the rippling and bowing of the grasses and flowers as the shockwave passed through them, and had thought to jump as it approached me, but at the time I had had other things on my mind.
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Somehow, the whole ordeal of the transformation had cleared my mind and made it easier to focus on the combat and less on extraneous things. Now that I was charging into battle in this form, even my earlier embarrassment seemed to fade into insignificance. What mattered was the task at hand.
And the task at hand was that stone hand. After each strike, it seemed to take several seconds before Sar’Glagalth raised its arms back up to throw boulders or remain in position to guard itself. So….
I changed course, double zagging, and got ahold of the arm and started clambering upon it. Even though I was significantly taller now, about double my avatar’s original height, the monster was still around ten times my height, which meant that climbing upon its arms was like climbing upon a giant fallen log. And as a stone monster, there were plenty of hand- and toe-, uh, hoof-holds, so I was able to hang out as the arm was once again raised high into the air.
I would have to hang on—a fall from this height would surely be fatal, even with triple my original defense.
As I climbed the arm, I got close to several of the glowing green areas. They turned out to be faceted gemstones much like the one I had assumed was treasure after the fight with the skeleton.
I drew my infrequently-used dagger and tried to stab at them. The blade skittered across the surface … but it did damage. Compared to the spell and the imbued arrows, the damage was close to insignificant, however. It took ten stabs to deplete the health bar and shatter the gem instead of two arrows or spells. Strange as it may seem, it appeared that this stone monster was weak against water-based attacks! Consequently, more Mistshards were cast and thus more mana potions were rather reluctantly consumed, but I was starting to make significant headway against this boss fight. Though I don’t know how any normal player was supposed to be able to manage to fight it, much less defeat it. Was this another example of encounter scaling gone wrong?
Even though I was making progress, one mistake could end it, especially as I clung to the monster and clambered around the arm, stabbing at green gemstones.
And right on time, Murphy came calling. I was clinging to the arm just below the elbow as Sar’Glagath was swinging for another shockwave strike when Hidden Nature wore off. Unlike the transformation, it was done in an instant, without any subjective time extension.
One moment, I was clinging to hand-holds with my hooves wedged into cracks in the surface, and the next I was dangling, suspended by only my arms since being half the height I had been meant that my feet couldn’t reach where they had been for support.
Somehow…. Somehow, I didn’t fall—but it was a moment that was sure to give me nightmares in the future. Further, when the transformation wore off, it drained the little bit of mana I had had remaining too. At least that timing wasn’t bad, as well. I had one more mana draught to force down, but it would have to wait until I could spare a hand to get it from my inventory. Just that moment, I was hanging on for dear life!
Finally, after the impact and shockwave, I was able to swing myself back onto the arm and a less precarious position. Also fortunately, the stone arm was shielding me from any of the rocks swirling around. When Sar’Glagalth was upright, its body and limbs weren’t inside the area that the stones spiraled and orbited in. It was like the eye of a stone hurricane. But when it was bent in a ground strike, it was. Small again, I would have been pulverized by the stones if they had hit me.
And … as I looked at my abilities, Hidden Nature wasn’t able to be activated. It wasn’t on cooldown, but it was greyed out. The description didn’t mention anything about limited uses or cooldowns, and calling out “Ultimate Skill—Hidden Nature!” repeatedly didn’t do anything.
Until it did.
When natural regeneration ticked my empty mana bar up one point, I was able to reuse the ability. And just like earlier, the transformation was a lengthy process that nevertheless took no time at all, just an instant stretched out to seem like minutes.
It wasn’t that I wanted to be in that form, but it was that being taller made it easier to climb and the increased defense meant that I wouldn’t be squashed quite as easily. I was also starting to formulate a bit of a plan that maybe would finish the fight faster than stabbing dozens, if not hundreds, of green gems ten times each.
Unfortunately, the lack of mana for Mistshard was a bit of a limitation. I drank my last potion and resumed my climb up the arm, using the spell to hit locations on another arm while my dagger and I slowly chipped away the gems on this one.
I reached Sar’Glagath’s shoulder just as my oversized form wore off, which enabled me to take a stupid, but calculated risk. As the monster turned its head to glare at me, and perhaps to unleash a sonic shockwave of a roar that surely would have knocked me off to fall to my doom, I re-equipped my bow and took careful aim at the nearest of the eyes.
Surprisingly, the arrow hit and wasn’t deflected by one of the three other arms, so I rapidly released another arrow and then a third and fourth. I didn’t have the mana for a Mistshard, not yet. Sar’Glagalth roared, but not as an attack—instead it was a roar of pain and disbelief as the green gem of the eye blinked out.
It reared back on its hind legs, forelegs flailing as the monster expressed its shock and agony, and I saw my opportunity.
Unfortunately, not only did I not have the mana for a Mistshard, I didn’t have the mana to re-enable Hidden Nature, and I was out of mana draughts. That left only one option….
I had thought it would be something I’d never end up using—Too Awesome to Use as it was—but the Ring of Limited Wishes had a full restore option. And I was wearing the ring. Gritting my teeth and taking a deep breath, more from annoyance at the rhyme I would be reciting, I activated a charge on the ring:
“A mermaid is part fish
And a fairy has no time
So please grant the wish
At the end of this rhyme—Full Restore!”
Amateur poetry indeed…. But the recovery was instantaneous. My mana was full; my health which had suffered a few points of damage was full; and my stamina, which recovered quickly enough on its own, was also full.
Sar’Glagalth was still rearing back, which with the way the head was tilted back as well meant the other eye was placed where I couldn’t see it. But…. But there was another target, a much more prominent and tempting target. With the monster rearing back and flailing its arms and legs (well, the one arm I had destroyed so many gems on was hanging lifelessly from the monster’s side), the great glowing green gem in its midsection was exposed.
It was too tricky a shot for my level of skill in Archery, and it was too far away for me to target with Mistshard, but I had another option. My half-crazed plan….
I transformed again—no it’s not so I can get used to spending time in that shape!—and leapt off the shoulder. With four arms, normally Sar’Glagalth appeared to be a bit hulking, with with chest broader and deeper than its midsection, and more importantly with shoulders well forward. Now, rearing back, it was almost a straight downward shot from shoulder to massive green target.
As I fell and got very quickly in range, I cast one spell, but my own speed outraced it. I braced for impact, and my hooves struck the gem with a thunderous force. The impact immediately took off over half my health—even with the increased Defense values I had in this form—but it did even more to the monster.
Unlike all the other gems that I had attacked, this one wasn’t set in stone and augmenting a joint. It, itself, was the joint. The stone torso supporting the centaurish legs was below the gem, and the stone torso of the humanoid portion above the gem. Cascading waves of energy seemed to hold the gem in place.
Physics was never my favorite subject, but even I remembered “Force is mass times acceleration.” I didn’t know how much acceleration I had manage in that jump, but I did know that my “more primal” form was massive, so I was sure I had applied a decent amount of force in that attack.
From where my hooves had impacted the gem, large cracks spread out, not just on the surface of its facets, but plunging into its glowing green depths. The gem shuddered and some of the waves of energy seemed to fade, but it held its structure. Damaged, flawed, but unfortunately still relatively intact.
I was then able to turn my strike into a controlled slide and tumble, landing on the ground at the back of the monster, where I hastily scurried to safety.
When it finally stopped flailing about and resumed attacking, I was able to repeat the whole endeavor: up one arm after a shockwave strike, stabbing at gems as I went along, reactivating Hidden Nature as I could, making it to the shoulder, using the last of my arrows on the remaining eye, using another charge of the Ring since I wasn’t given the opportunity to wait for a point of natural regeneration before I had had to shoot its eye out, and launching myself into another plummeting hoofstrike upon the damaged main gem of the monster.
When my hooves hit the gem again, time seemed to stop—not quite in the same manner as the dilated time I experienced when transforming. Instead, I hovered there, unmoving, with my hooves just touching the now shattered facet as the cracks spread out to engulf the entire gemstone. Still unmoving and suspended in both time and air, I watched the gemstone shatter into uncountable shards and its green light flicker out.
The two torsos separated and fell, breaking apart into smaller and smaller fragments of stone as they did so.
I had done the impossible (that shouldn’t have been impossible to begin with)! I had defeated Sar’Glagalth, Guardian of Stone, Destroyer of Nations.
I was also thirty or fourty feet up in the air with nothing between me and the ground. This was going to hurt!
As time returned to normal, I fell. And as I fell, I fumbled for my last healing potion, getting a mouthful even as I crashed into the ground.
But it was enough. Barely. I didn’t quite black out, this time, but being at one point of health meant I was again seeing stars. I just closed my eyes and tried to not cry from the pain. And from the relief of winning. And from the pain. Hitting the gem and hitting the ground both hurt. I didn’t have any broken bones, but I was more than just merely “sore all over.” Right now, I just wanted to lie here, unmoving, for a hundred years—even if it meant staying in a Tauros body for a hundred years—even if it meant staying in a primal form for a hundred years.
It wouldn’t, of course, but right now I didn’t even have the wherewithal to investigate the myriad of bouncing boxes for messages and system notifications.
Some time later, it had to be more than five minutes since I was back into my regular body with my regular proportions, I heard an astonished Elionne voice somewhere above my head. “Hey! What did you do!? And how did you do that? You weren’t supposed to fight that monster!”
As eloquent as a mostly-dead, fairly wounded person could be, I mumbled, “Huh?” and opened my eyes to see Sunrise Sparkle hovering above me and wiping my brow with a damp cloth.
“Hey! The fight against the ‘Guardian’ was to teach Travellers about how to escape from encounters. If you get far enough away, the monster loses interest. Lesser monsters lose interest quicker. Or,” she added with a bit of a mischievous tone, “it was to teach Travellers that death isn’t final for them. Until you reach a certain level, being defeated has no penalty except being sent back to your last bind location—here, that’s the platform you started on—after that level, you would suffer a temporary decrease in your attributes and skill levels.”
“Oh. So it was an unwinnable fight?” I sat up slightly, wincing, and let her flutter down to my shoulder as I investigate what could only be part of the boss monster’s corpse. The loot I gained was fairly unimpressive in appearance, but maybe significant otherwise: two Chunks of Elemental Stone and one Fragment of Sar’Glagalth’s Core.
“Hey! You won it, so it wasn’t unwinnable. But you weren’t supposed to win it! But congratulations, you’re now done with the tutorial. Check your messages!”
I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel up to focusing on whatever the messages had, but…. But the sooner I completed the tutorial, the sooner I could log out and crawl into bed and sleep for a hundred years not as a Tauros girl.
[System Broadcast] Madelyn Alexis is the first player to earn the rare Achievement “Titanslayer” for completing [hidden requirements]! Rewards for the achievement are doubled!
[System Broadcast] Madelyn Alexis has earned the unique Achievement “Scorestopper” for being the first character to defeat a monster level 20 or higher!
[System Broadcast] Madelyn Alexis has earned the unique Achievement “Impossible Odds” for being the first character to defeat a monster more than ten times their level!
System Message: You have gained the rare Title “Legendary” for—
I swiped them away without reading them all. There were a few others, such as Archery, Spellcasting, and Dagger increasing by one as well as prompts for me to take skills such as Climbing, Unarmed Combat, Giantslayer, or so on.
The last one, though:
System Message: You have completed the tutorial! Speak with your Tutorial Experience And Starting Expert in order to select your starting settlement. Welcome again to the world of Elemental Chrysanthemum Homeland Online!
“Ah. So, it looks like this is ‘Goodbye,’ for now, Sunrise Sparkle. What’s the closest I can start to Kystari?” That was the place that the GM had mentioned in her postscript. Any place that a GM goes out of her way to mention was probably some place I should investigate. The oblique hinting seemed to suggest that the owner of that inn she mentioned was a high-level skill trainer, so if I wanted, maybe, to take Cooking as a skill later, it might be good to visit that inn.
“Hey! Kystari? Well, the closest would be Stone Lotus Fields, but that would be a really difficult journey.”
“The easiest, then?”
“The easiest road would be from Krystall Banner, but no… That wouldn’t be a good place for you. It’s Yanari.”
I thought about it for a moment. Easiest path on one hand, and a place that popped up in flavor text as sounding like a very unpleasant place. “Yeah. No Yanari. Just, well, I trust you. Find me a good starting place that’s not too hard to get to Kystari but also isn’t deep inside some evil empire, okay?”
I searched through my somewhat depleted inventory and handed her another Wild Blackberry, “One for the road, eh?”
“Hey! Thank you, and take care!”
The tutorial instance disappeared around me and I got an impression of white, maybe snow, and a fountain before I logged completely out of the game—bypassing returning to the home instance first. When I crawled out of the FIVR pod, the sun was already shining through my west-facing window. Fortunately, I had nothing planned for the day, so I could sleep through until whenever I woke. I was too tired to set any alarm, but just curled up in bed with Luna under one arm, and was instantly asleep before even pulling a sheet or blanket over myself.