Karmic Balance: 149,864,661,343 World: Merinthia (Tier 1) Name: Jun Titles: Adopted Kitten (HIDDEN) Level: 2 (49/100%) Race: Human (Balance) Gender: Female Mana: 16/130 Core Status: (HIDDEN) Stable (Tier 0) Stats: MIND - 13 CON - 13 STR - 13 AGI - 13 DEX - 13 CHA - 18 SPR - 13 Traits: (5/5) [Touched by Karma] (Hidden) [Born of Karma] (Hidden) [Magic Touched] (Disguised; [Affinity Hoarder]) SEALED [Fast Learner] [Charismatic] Skills:
[Karma Manipulation] (Novice 2)
[Body Cleansing] (Novice 1)
[Mental Resistance] (Novice 1)
[Soul Sealing] (Novice 0)
[Piercing Missile] (Apprentice 1)
Quests: Introduction to Magic 101
Jun stared at the new addition to the skills on her status page. The spell Shiori taught her had been added, and it was of a completely different rank as any of her other skills. When she'd asked her master about it, the cat had simply flicked her tail and said not to worry about it, and that it was still a "spell for beginners," and to "start practicing kitten." Then she'd walked across the clearing and crouched into a "loaf" on the ground to nap.
It'd taken several minutes after that for Jun to figure out how to cast the spell again. Those minutes were frustrating as she fumbled at grasping the mana she could faintly feel humming in her body and shoving it into the spell form, only for the mana to leak back out. When she'd finally gotten the spell to work again, the result was... disappointing.
The first cast had felt powerful, reminding her of the time her father in her past life had forced her to learn how to shoot because "all real men should know how to use a gun." Not that she was a man, even if she hadn't realized it at the time. He'd forced her to try shooting a shotgun first. The kick of the thing felt like it'd dislocate her shoulder, and the blast had been so loud that she'd screamed and nearly dropped the thing! Her father had been disgusted at his "pussy of a son," and called him a girl the rest of the day. Her first cast of [Piercing Missile] had reminded her of shooting that shotgun, only without the recoil. The boulder she'd hit with the spell had shattered, and there'd been a hole the size of her palm in the side of the cliff behind it.
The second cast was nowhere close to the power of the first. Less like a shotgun, and more like a paintball gun. The spell had still been fast, but the next boulder she'd targeted had barely been scratched!
It'd taken several more minutes for her to finally cast the spell for a third time, and she'd gotten the same result. After several rounds, she'd finally remembered about her status page, and started poking around it until the blindingly obvious answer hit her in the face.
[Piercing Missile] (Apprentice 1)
Cast a concentrated blast of energy meant to pierce armor.
Mana Cost: variable
She'd figured out that her spell form would only work if she evenly distributed the mana into the pyramid shape, making sure that each symbol was powered up. It'd been obvious in retrospect, and Jun couldn't help feeling embarrassed that she hadn't thought to do so sooner. At least her Master was fast asleep, saving her from what she was sure would be more teasing and calling her a kitten!
Sitting in the shade under a tree, Jun looked at the result of her practice for the past couple hours. Several boulders were riddled with cracks as well as a couple of holes in the stone. Once she'd figured out how to power the spell form properly, she'd started playing with more and more mana, trying to see how much it would take to reproduce the power of her first cast. The more mana she dumped into the spell, the more it had hurt to hold the spell and the harder it had been to pump it full of mana. When she finally tried to dump her entire mana pool into a single cast, her spell had fired off with the same intensity as her first, shattering the boulder she'd been using to practice on!
Unfortunately, Jun couldn't celebrate the achievement, as the splitting headache that had followed had her nearly pass out from the pain. Wincing at the lingering dregs of that headache, she pulled up her mana to check its recovery. Another nifty trick she'd figured out after finally remembering to use her status page was getting detailed information on a number of things, and being able to pull up screens that only displayed whatever sections she wanted to see, like her mana recovery rate. It was especially useful now, as she wasn't sure she wanted to read her entire status sheet while her head throbbed like she'd just woken after drinking an entire bottle of whiskey!
Mana: 74/130 [9.75/min (0.25*MIND + 0.5*SPR)/min]
Jun sighed, watching as her mana ticked up another point. It seemed to take forever for her to recover her mana. Worse was that she only had a mana pool of 130. In her practice, she'd noticed that for her spell to leave any kind of mark, it required she put in at least 40 mana, so that meant she could only cast 3 times before she ran out, and it took almost 5 minutes for her to get a single cast! If she ran into that monster again, she'd only have 3 chances at best to chase it off before she had to rely upon the weapon she found, or hope that Shiori saved her. Thinking of her weapon, Jun looked around the clearing for it , spotting it leaning against the cliffside next to the entrance to the cave. While she waited for her mana to recover, she figured she should try to practice with it.
Picking it up, Jun moved to the middle of the clearing and unsheathed it. The blue gems on the blade glittered beautifully in the mid afternoon sunlight. She stood there for a few moments, quietly admiring the sight. Taking a deep breath in and exhaling, she closed her eyes, imagining the hulking lizard was in front of her. She pictured herself moving like a dancer, swinging the weapon around gracefully to wound it, before finishing it off with her spell!
Jun opened her eyes to try and copy her imagination, only to find the giant lizard standing right in front of her! Screaming, she leapt back, flailing the weapon at it as she hurriedly and clumsily shoved all the mana she could into her spell form. She pictured the spell shooting out and hitting the beast in its head and shoved that image into the spell, urging it to fire as quickly as possible. The light blue missile snapped into existence, briefly obscuring her vision as it fired off, drilling straight through the monster's head!
Jun stared at the fist sized hole in the monsters head, watching as it simply stood there and began bleeding... water? The monster suddenly popped, collapsing into a puddle that quickly began to absorb into the soil of the clearing. Jun could hear Shiori's snickering laugh in her ears and she whirled around, only to find the cat awake from her nap, her ears twitching in amusement!
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"You should see the look on your face kitten! Aaaah!" Her master was snickering and teasing her again!
Jun could barely hold the heat back from her voice as she snapped at the cat laughing at her expense. "What was that?! I thought I was about to be eaten! It's not funny!"
"You picked up your weapon, I thought you were ready to learn to fight." Shiori got up and stretched her paws out, then arched her back up and fully extending her tail in cat's stretch.
Jun glared at the stretching cat, her master, but the blooming headache she had from draining all of her mana distracted her even as it made her angrier. Her stomach growled, reminding Jun that she hadn't eaten anything since the disgusting soup that morning. Her master looked up at her and twitched her tail, ears perked at Jun's loudly growling stomach. "But first, we should go get some lunch!"
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Jun's anger had slowly been quenched by her growing need for food, and she'd silently followed Shiori as her master led her down the ridge, and back into the forest. The whole way down her master had made fun of her heavy footsteps that cracked dried leaves and fallen twigs. She offered advice to Jun on how to step quieter through the forest and walk stealthily as a cat would, but the technique didn't translate well to her human feet and size.
Jun did notice that she'd stopped making as much sound, and her feet didn't get scraped as badly as they had on her first day, whether it was because of Shiori's coaching or that except for her brief day and change with the now ruined boots, she had to run around the cave and clearing barefoot and started to develop calluses. Whatever the case, Jun was glad that her feet didn't hurt as much as they had!
About an hour after they'd first entered the forest, Shiori stopped and crouched low to the ground, telling Jun to be quiet. Shiori's tail flicked back and forth low to the ground, her hind legs bunched with her whole body coiled tight and ready to pounce, the body language of a cat on the hunt. Jun looked at where her master was watching to see a small herd of deer unlike any she'd ever seen before. The deer had mottled green and brown fur, the bucks each having an impressive set of antlers that looked like gnarled tree branches. They were grazing in a meadow a couple hundred feet away from where Jun and Shiori had stopped, concealed by the low lying brush of the forest.
Shiori nodded towards the grazing deer and quietly spoke in Jun's ear without shifting her gaze. "Wood deer. One will do nicely for lunch. Go get us one kitten."
Jun stared at her master. Her? Hunt what was clearly a magical deer? She'd only just learned her first spell! Panicked at the sudden assignment, Jun urgently whispered to the crouching black cat. "Master! I've never hunted before! How am I supposed to get one of those things?"
Shiori flicked her ears, clear irritation in her voice. "Use your spell my stupid apprentice. Aim for the head and don't miss. You'll ruin the meat."
Jun slumped in resignation. She could already tell if she didn't do the task Shiori set for her, she wouldn't like what happened next. Thoughts of the way the cat had easily force fed her that disgusting soup filled her head. The roast meat she'd had the first day was so much better. Maybe they could roast the deer? Her stomach rumbled in agreement. Roast deer sounded much better than that disgusting soup, and who knows what they'd eat if she didn't do as Shiori said. It might even be worse than the soup!
Gripping her not-spear in her hand, Jun crept forward, doing her best to remember Shiori's lessons on stealthy movement as they'd hiked. She wasn't confident that she could hit the deer with her spell from far away, even if it'd seemed easy enough to make it go where she wanted in the clearing. She'd only been a few dozen feet away at most, not over two hundred! As she got within one hundred feet, she made a mistake, accidentally breaking a twig as she stepped on it. The dry snap seemed to echo through the woods, and the green and brown deer suddenly looked up, alerted that something else was nearby!
The deer quickly began to scatter, bounding into the forest in all directions. A large buck that looked like it weighed over a thousand pounds chose to bolt into the forest directly in front of Jun. As it saw her, it snorted and lowered its head, pointing its sharp branchlike antlers at her, and charged! Jun stood frozen for a moment in shock, before quickly shoving mana by the handful into her spell form. The antler tipped head of the deer was easy to keep in her head as she shoved the image of her target into the spell, willing it to hit and hoping it was enough. The light blue missile quickly formed in front of her eyes, obscuring her target from her eyes before it rushed out and connected with her target!
The deer's head exploded with a wet pop as the spell hit it, the antlers sent flying end over end as a fine mist of blood and brain matter coated the trees around them. One of the antlers flew off into the bushes, while the other struck the tree closest to Jun, stabbed deep into the trunk. The headless corpse tumbled end over end, flinging more blood about before it came to a leaking, gory halt at Jun's feet.
The taste of iron filled her mouth, and her entire front side felt warm and sticky from the deer's blood. Alternating waves of shock, horror, and disgust filled her as she stared at the headless corpse of the deer, the not-spear falling from her hand as the wet pop of the deer's head played over and over again in her ears.
The corpse in front of her suddenly floated up and Jun shrieked, falling backward to land on her rear. she scrambled for her weapon and quickly grabbed the handle when she felt the cool etched metal handle. She whipped the weapon in front of her as she fumbled for her mana and began to layer it, ready to cast another spell with what remained in her pool.
"Good work apprentice, if a bit messy. You seem to have picked up magic quick enough" Shiori said, slinking around the tree and casting a glance at the deer antler stabbed deep into the trunk. Looking at her apprentice liberally coated in blood and viscera down her front, she snorted with barely contained laughter. "Though it seems you still need lessons on hygiene, my messy kitten. Come along, lets go prepare lunch."
Wordlessly, Jun got up and followed the deer's floating corpse as it bobbed along in the air behind Shiori, her weapon gripped tightly in her hands.
The trip back to the clearing was quick, and Jun had numbly helped as Shiori directed her on the best way to butcher and skin the deer. The guts and discarded bones she buried in a hole, while Shiori did something with magic that made much of the butchered meat vanish, leaving only a single large chunk of meat behind. Under Shiori's direction, Jun dragged the heavy cut of meat into the cave and skewered it on the iron roasting spit before rubbing it in various dried herbs the cat seemed to produce out of nowhere.
As the meat roasted, Jun took yet another bath and did her best to scrub the deer's blood from her skirt and shirt. She hung them up to dry on the line, grimacing that the tough clothes seemed permanently stained a rusty brown color. The sun had begun to set by the time Shiori called for Jun to come eat, and she slipped her still damp clothes back on before rejoining her master in the cave.
The roasted deer was surprisingly tasty, the herbs complimenting the meat well and the two of them quickly finished the entire roast, even though it should have been enough for ten people, rather than split between a single woman and a small magical house cat.
Her stomach comfortably full, Jun curled up on the pile of furs in the cave, memories of the day's events playing through her head. She shivered the wet pop of the deer's head played in her mind again, and quietly swallowed the bile that had begun to rise in her throat. She thought of the monster from the other day, the parasite in her soul, and her need to get stronger. Life in this new world seemed surprisingly brutal, and she was stuck in the middle of a forest with a strange, powerful, magical cat she'd accepted as her master. As she drifted off to sleep, she resolved to herself that she would get stronger.
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Karmic Balance: 149,864,661,344 (+1) World: Merinthia (Tier 1) Name: Jun Titles:
Apprentice
Adopted Kitten (HIDDEN)
Level: 3 (+1) (13/100%) Race: Human (Balance) Gender: Female Mana: 140/140 Core Status: (HIDDEN) Stable (Tier 0) Stats: MIND - 14 (+1) CON - 14 (+1) STR - 14 (+1) AGI - 14 (+1) DEX - 14 (+1) CHA - 19 (+1) SPR - 14 (+1) Traits: (5/5) [Touched by Karma] (Hidden) [Born of Karma] (Hidden) [Magic Touched] (Disguised; [Affinity Hoarder]) SEALED [Fast Learner] [Charismatic] Skills:
[Karma Manipulation] (Novice 2)
[Body Cleansing] (Novice 1)
[Mental Resistance] (Novice 1)
[Soul Sealing] (Novice 0)
[Piercing Missile] (Apprentice 2) (+1)
Quests: Introduction to Magic 101 (Completed)