Zalia sat on a chair she had summoned from the ground staring at the now blank wall that used to hold her list. The list she had made when first arriving here had pretty quickly become pointless as the circumstances of her situation evolved yet it had lent her some direction so here she was, making another.
First, she wrote down “find the prison?”
Something in her dreams, twice now, had told her to find the prison, whatever that meant. She had seen a vision of what exactly that prison might look like, a large, flat topped, actually floating platform surrounded by a large number of the flying monsters. Under that she wrote a few things:
“Bad idea.”
“Twisted aura monsters”
“Zayes??”
It was an exceptionally bad idea to follow that as any kind of plan at the moment. The serious number of, as she decided to call them, aura monsters alone would spell her death long before she even got close to the prison. Her suspicion was that Zayes was being held there and she hadn’t even yet decided if she was alright with letting that guy out yet. His wife had turned out to be backstabbing and manipulative. If he was anything like her, Zalia wanted nothing to do with it.
The only reason that one went on the wall at all was the fact that as a known high rank person, Zayes might be a chance at escape from Cormaine if she could free him. If.
The next thing that went on the wall was “Find a way to make the ritual work.”
The ritual in question was the one that Juniper had used to bring them here. Another of her avenues for escape, it could possibly be a way out if she could just learn how to reverse it. Under that point she drew an arrow leading to Zayes as well as “God.”
Under god, she wrote “Gods name?”
The god was the other idea she had at the moment for being able to reverse the ritual or at least find another method of escape. For that though, she would have to help bring back its memory and trying to find its name could be a good start to that, if it had one.
As she stared at the daunting list, another idea came to mind. She knew that Zayes could control Hidey by using his true name but what if his true name was really just his name before he died?
Well, she had a shade in Cormaine who’s name she knew and who was quite knowledgeable when it came to the ritual she had, the shade being the very person who Zalia took it from in the first place.
“Juniper?”
At that, she circled the ritual section and then put both that and finding the prison under a bigger circle that she named as “Finding a way out.”
Moving over, she wrote something new on the wall that simply read “Get to Bronze.” She wasn’t far from it, only needing to grind through those last few levels on her Herbalist class and the last ability for the Hunter class. Once she made it there, her Survivalist and Healing presence skills would hopefully begin levelling once again, albeit slower, and start the road to Silver. She also knew that her heirloom items could rank up as well and wanted to find a way to get that done for her armour and bow. Boreal’s too.
Thinking of, she checked out Boreal’s ability rank up that had happened just as they arrived back in the cave.
Blending Shadows
Tin - you are able to blend into shadows, using their darkness to hide yourself.
Iron - when blended in a shadow you can move directly into a nearby shadow as you move.
Bronze - While blending into a shadow, you can now manipulate the shadows around you. This enables you to stretch or extend shadows as well as creating shadowy movements that mimic your shape.
With her new ability, Boreal was manipulating shadows now just as well as she often manipulated ice. It was quite something to experience, seeing shapes out of the corner of her eye only to turn and see nothing there. Boreal would be quite good at scaring the hell… Cormaine out of people with it.
That left only the two abilities Cute convincement and Frost adaption to rank up, meaning Boreal was pretty close to Bronze too.
Zalia’s own Flight skill had also ranked up the past week.
Congratulations! Flight has gained three levels reaching Tin 20.
Congratulations! Flight has reached Iron 1.
Flight - passive
Tin - Your manoeuvrability is increased and your air resistance is reduced while in flight. This scales based on the rank and level of this passive.
Iron - Your ability to perceive your surroundings while flying becomes exceptional. You can spot distant details and potential threats with remarkable clarity, allowing you to anticipate and counteract aerial assaults effectively as well as see threats on the ground.
Congratulations! Flight has gained four levels reaching Iron 5.
It was mostly a utility upgrade and nothing that special but still useful all the same.
Zalia was looking forward to seeing which of her abilities would be the last to rank up and what change would be wrought from it. Last time it had been her old skill Escape that had changed to Fight or Flight. This time it looked likely to be one of her Herbalist skills and she was tempted to manipulate her actions a little to choose which it would be. Stasis was the only one at the moment that had any sort of extra dimensional effect and anything she could get that would help in that regard would be good. The researcher from her memory had been looking into extradimensional stuff to try and discover something when he had died after all, maybe there was something to it she could use to escape.
Standing from her sitting position and sinking the chair back into the floor, Zalia looked around to try and find Boreal. The shadows were all contorting and moving, some Boreal-like shapes flickering within a few before disappearing and reappearing in other shadows. The room being filled with many different light sources didn’t help. Even her thermal sight didn’t help as Boreal's natural now mastered ability to hide from that type of sight was much better than her own.
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Trying to use the vibration sense to find Boreal, Zalia spun around as she saw a light tap on the ground only to be jumped from behind by a large metal feline. She was thrown to the ground under Boreal’s weight, letting out a gasp of air as she did.
“Boreall,” Zalia groaned.
Boreal jumped off her back and, for lack of a better word, pranced around in triumph.
Flipping over, Zalia sat up and rolled her shoulder with a wince.
“You’re getting much too big to be ambushing me like that anymore,” Zalia complained.
Over the two weeks and with her approaching Bronze, Boreal had grown even more. She now stood at stomach height with Zalia and was becoming quite… terrifying. She was certain that the speed at which Boreal was growing was unnatural, having gone from a kitten to almost fully grown in the space of… a month or two?
Zalia wasn’t quite sure how long it had been since she had found Boreal. It felt like much longer than a month or two though. Standing up, Zalia patted Boreal’s fluffy head a little. Somehow, Boreal had managed to bond deeper to her armour before Zalia had, now able to summon and dismiss it much as Zalia could with her bow. Zalia was still working on her own armour, not quite sure how to go about bonding deeper to it. With her bow, she had learnt about its past a little and that had been all it required. She really didn’t know anything about her own armour, who the previous wearer had been, what kind of order it belonged to or what its origin was. How Boreal had bonded her armour, Zalia could not figure out nor would she tell.
Summoning and dismissing her armour would be quite useful, though she needed to bond deeper to her gauntlet as well. She had a feeling that it wouldn't be summonable and dismissable like her other heirlooms. Something about putting an item responsible for an extradimensional space into a different extradimensional space felt like a bad idea.
“If only I had a god to bless either of the items for me,” Zalia muttered, glaring at Boreal with narrowed eyes, “you didn’t manage to get that god to bless your armour did you?”
Boreal turned away innocently, licking her paw and cleaning her face. Damned cat.
Boreal was now probably as heavy if not heavier than Zalia herself and a fiend in a fight. No undead stood a chance against this battle cat.
With a sigh, Zalia moved off towards her herb garden. It was always nice to relax there with the fresh air and nonexistent aura of corruption. Though, she had planted another herbal array in the main chamber to block the aura as well, she still enjoyed sitting with all her plants.
She moved the dirt in the centre of the room around to form a little nest for herself and sat down in it, allowing the dirt to spill over her a little. She closed her eyes and focused on the tide-like feel of her healing aura, letting it wash over the plants around her then spill back into her body. As the healing nurtured the plants, she carefully used Preparation to harvest sections of each, trimming the plants just as she let them grow. It was a calming cycle, allowing the plants to grow as they wished yet limiting them to stop overgrowth. A balance.
She let her conscious mind fade away as she almost instinctively played the game of balance with the plants around her.
Congratulations! Preparation has reached Iron 17.
After a while, she stopped and stood up, instinctively settling the dirt so that there was no trace of her presence in the room. Another level in Preparation done, she needed to get some in Flora identification and the only way to do that was to carefully study something.
Her herb of choice today was Adastem, the new one she had found on the fourth island she had explored. It was somewhat close to the island containing the god so going back and forth between was relatively quick.
Thinking of the god, she was a little frustrated with the lack of progress it had made over the last two weeks. Delphi and the other four from the collective were still there, trying their hardest to help it recover but the going was slow. It might not even be possible for a few creatures of their rank to single handedly resurrect a god like they were trying to do.
Sitting back down in the main chamber, she retrieved a piece of Adastem from stasis and studied it closely. It was an excellent piece of plant for her to study as a method of levelling Flora identification. Unlike all the other plants she had that would completely freeze when Stasis was applied to them, Adastem didn’t really seem to care. Its element being adaptability, it was constantly shifting form from vine to bush to tree. Of course, it wasn’t an entire plant, only a piece of one so it looked more like stem to twig to stick. The larger plants were truly something to behold though, ever shifting between different states and forms.
She had been a little perplexed when first encountering the plant but was definitely looking forward to seeing what types of effects she could bring about with it. Adaptability was just so, well, adaptable. She imagined a type of adapting armour or even an adapting curse, the potential combinations were endless.
Studying the Adastem for another hour, she was aptly rewarded.
Congratulations! Flora identification has reached Iron 15.
The past week she had taken to then switching to developing Stasis by taking things in and out of the extradimensional space and observing the effect it had on the plants but she decided she did want it to level last after all. So, she would level Hunter’s sight next.
“Alright Boreal, tracking time,” she said.
Her and Boreal had taken to a game, one that was probably the reason for Boreal’s Blending shadows skill levelling. Boreal would run out into the forest and try to hide her tracks as well as she could and Zalia would follow shortly, doing her best to track her feline friend. Zalia always found Boreal in the end, of course, but the odd fifteen years difference in Zalia’s tracking experience and Boreal’s hiding experience made that an expected outcome.
Boreal sat up alert and dashed out of the cave at her call, being more than prepared for this. Zalia quickly followed, sprinting after her, slower to get through the tunnels yet having a teleport to skip the hardest part. Just before she got out of sight, Zalia managed to get off the ritual that kept them both hidden from the shade's sight. Better safe than sorry.
She made it out some ten seconds after Boreal did and she was already gone. Zalia quickly sorted through all the information she gathered from her perceptive gaze and locked on to Boreal’s tracks quickly. The hunt was on.
Forty minutes or so later, Zalia found Boreal. After not three but four backtracks, a few purposefully misleading tracks and five split tracks, Zalia found Boreal hiding up in a tree. Boreal didn’t quite see Zalia coming though so she got her payback for earlier as she teleported behind Boreal and grabbed on. The two of them tumbled out of the tree as Boreal lost her footing and crashed through the withered branches to the ground below, a mess of limbs.
“Gotcha!” Zalia exclaimed, Boreal wiggling out of her grip and getting up.
“Mreow!” Boreal complained as Zalia grabbed her and wrestled her to the ground again.
“You might be stealthy as all hell when you’re right in front of me but you have a long way to go with hiding your tracks,” Zalia scolded, jokingly.
“Mow mreow meow, mreow,” Boreal replied, sarcastically imitating Zalia. Badly.
“You little!” Zalia said with a gasp, tickling Boreal.
Boreal let out what could only be called a scream before finally escaping again and sprinting off into the forest. Zalia quickly got to her feet and followed.
Only one month past she would have been able to keep up to Boreal with no effort at all. Now, she couldn’t. Boreal sped off into the forest on long legs, far outpacing Zalia.
Congratulations! Hunter’s sight has reached Iron 18.
Hunter’s sight finally levelled as she had to resort to tracking Boreal once more to follow.
She reached the cave just in time to see Boreal launch herself at some creature with a yowl.