Noem landed with a graceful puff of dust. Mona landed with a yelp of surprise and a smokescreen that hid her falling flat on her back.
Noem leaned into the dust and offered a helping hand. “You alright?”
“No. Yes? Maybe.” Mona winced as she let Noem help pull her to her feet. She wiped off her pants and jacket with a grimace, then studied her hands and rotated her ankles. “Yes it is. That Resilient skill is really useful.”
A humorless snort escaped Noem as he started toward the tunnel. “Tell that to the university when you get there.”
Mona raised an eyebrow as she jogged to keep up. “That sounds like they think it’s useless.”
“Good for you. You can understand my implications.” Noem said dryly.
“Don’t be such a jerk, you know what I mean.” Mona said. “That’s, like, the setup to some terrible story about how a guy gets summoned to a pointlessly violent or stupid new world. And the hero is just some idiot who knows about crop rotation or basic military tactics or that shouting your spells to cast them is a bad idea.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Noem said after a moment of consideration. “Well, the real reason is unfortunately a good one. Remember how I have four active skill slots? And you only have two?”
Mona nodded. “Yeah?”
“Well, most people only have one or two. At least until they leave the mortal realm, then maybe a few decades later they’ll get another.”
Noem tapped on his interface and brought up his stats, pressed and held on ‘maximum active skills’, then turned so Mona could see. The display shifted to show four rectangular indents, three of which were filled by blocks of Qi. The first, Resilient, was extremely thick and had little movement. Nimble was wispy and active, with colours mixing and melding before Noem’s eyes. Steady was perfectly solid, without any motion at all, and seemed to be made of tightly woven threads.
“I have three skills active right now, which means I have space to use one combat-related skill. But watch what happens when I use Heavy Blow.”
Qi concentrated on Noem’s left hand, and the fourth slot was instantly filled with a gloopy mess of Qi as thick as pudding and about as structurally solid.
“Hmm.” Mona hummed with a little nod. “Using a skill takes up an active slot, even if it’s just for a second. But isn’t it still worth it to have Resilient active as long as you have one slot open?”
Noem shook his head. “Not if you fight like most people fight. If you want to use two reactive skills, like Dash and Punch, you can’t have any active skills on. And full-body skills like Resilient take a lot of Qi to keep up, so most people would rather have something like Block or Dash that they can use when they need them. Oh, and there’s one more thing.”
With a standing uppercut that blew away the dust in a long line, Noem launched the Heavy Blow he’d readied. The skill didn’t leave its active slot until a few seconds had passed.
Mona’s eyes widened in understanding. “There’s a cooldown between swapping skills. So I can’t just use Poke, then switch right over to Punch right after. But I’ve used multiple Pokes in a row, so it doesn’t count for the same skill, right?”
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“Exactly.” Noem confirmed. He dropped his inventory and continued on with all three of his skills active. “I could keep throwing Heavy Blows as long as I had the Qi for them. But if I only had one or two skill slots, I’d have to use my skills a lot differently. Especially because continuous skills take much longer to free up the slot they were using.”
Noem pressed his hand to the stone wall next to him and trailed it along as he walked. He raised an eyebrow in question at Mona, who was in the process of cycling through the four skills she knew; Poke, Resilient, Dash, and Block. She frowned and concentrated harder as she tried to go from Resilient and Block to Dash and Poke, then sighed in exasperation and let her hands fall limp at her sides.
She turned and finally met Noem’s gaze. “That’s a lot of work.”
“It is.” He agreed. “How much of your Qi did you just use?”
“Too much.” Mona grumbled, but opened her interface to check anyway. “I’m at seventy-one percent.”
“Well, since you’re getting used to using skills, it’s time you learned how to refill your Qi reserves. And why you’re going to hear people with only one skill slot being called unflattering things at the university.” Noem reached back and pulled out the anchor Mona had extracted five minutes ago. “Take this and hold it tight in one hand. Feel how its Qi compares to your own, then try to breathe it in.”
Mona held out her hand for the anchor, then brought it right up to her face. She breathed deeply before anything else and coughed up a storm for nearly a minute after.
She looked up at Noem with teary eyes. “Are you trying to kill me?”
“I told you to get a feel for it first. So maybe try that.” Noem sighed. They weren’t even halfway to the tunnel, and the smoky mist from below was already rolling over the edges of the next path down. If there was actually something terrifying down there, that was a terrible sign. “Actually, let’s speed this up a little bit. The thing should feel like Qi, but not your Qi. When you try to breathe it in, it just goes in your lungs, not to your Qi reserves, and that’s why it feels like breathing in smoke.”
“You couldn’t have just told me that?” Mona coughed and held the anchor at arm’s length with a withering side-eye. “So what does that have to do with one skill slot?”
Noem held up one hand and curled his finger and thumb into a ring. He pushed Qi through both fingers, then connected a thin strand of it that went all the way down to just above his stomach. After double-checking that he’d made it visible enough for Mona to see, Noem activated a skill he hadn’t used in years.
“Collect.” He decreed, then pushed the intent into his Qi. It glowed as bright as a roaring flame for a split second, then cooled down to a glass-like material. Qi from the world around him condensed onto his glass-like skill, then forced itself deep into his body and into his reserves through the connecting line.
A grimace split Noem’s face as he felt the foreign discomfort settle into his reserves. “Collect is a skill that the university developed to let people force Qi into their body. But it only works in Qi-rich environments–otherwise it starts pulling Qi out of you instead. Something about making the Qi concentration inside of your body equal to the Qi concentration outside of your body, but they wouldn’t tell me the specifics.”
He lowered his hand so Mona could get a good look before he continued. “It’s perfect for refilling your reserves when you get a spare moment, but it’s pretty slow. There’s also one other huge problem–the Qi you collect feels exactly like what you just inhaled. Which is why there’s another skill people use at the same time.”
Noem pushed a ring of Qi up around his forearm with a mental effort to make it visible. He forced it through his flesh until it was a perfect connected disk, then activated the skill. The Qi dimmed to a glow as low as a freshly blown out candle and shrunk until it was only a hair wide.
“Filter.”
Suddenly, the influx of Qi took on a radically different feel. As it passed through the filter it lost all of its unique properties, and by the time it settled in Noem’s reserves, it was already being assaulted by everything that made his Qi into what it was. The other Qi he’d taken in was slowly being converted, even without the help of Filter, but there was a huge downside to waiting.
Thin, black sludge welled up in the back of his throat. Noem forced all of the impurities out in a series of wet coughs, then opened his hand to reveal the stuff that had already begun trickling through his fingers.
“That’s all the impurities in the Qi that my body couldn’t safely absorb.” He explained, then flicked the impurities onto the ground. “If you can only use one skill at a time, you have to do that every single time you want to refill. But if you can use Collect and Filter at the same time, then you can… Mona? Are you listening to me?”
Mona startled and whipped around to reveal a face wrought with worry. “What? Yeah, filtering and collecting at the same time good, one at a time bad.” She jabbed a finger down at the hazy smoke. That almost spilled over the edge and onto the path. “Is it supposed to be doing that?”
Noem shivered as he felt something else’s Qi settle on him from deep in the smoke. Something huge, ancient, and with a Qi pressure that dwarfed anything he’d ever fought.
“No. Run.”