“So, umm, I didn't really get to hear much about this quest,” I eventually broach the subject after hours of tromping through the wilderness, mostly a mix of light forest and plains.

“Simple extermination quest. Take out some goblins infesting this ruin and we're good to go. Nice and easy for your first quest.” With his words, our healer thumps me lightly on the head. He's a dog-altra with almost nothing to set him apart from a human except his floppy ears and tail. His name is Keane and he seems pretty alright.

“Three gold each on completion, not bad,” one comments. That's... yeah, that's a good amount of money for just a few days of work. It took me most of a month working at the bar to make money like that. Even if they're just goblins, life and death quests are still life and death quests...

It's a two day trip into the wilderness to reach our destination, which is perfectly fine by me. It gives me time to wait out whatever is happening back in town, and gives me plenty of time to practice my magic. Because yeah, I really need to practice it. As I expected, the skill curve is insanely steep.

Sure, I can just conjure an element and then use it, but that works, to put it lightly, not at all. A single element of fire can't even ignite a leaf. I have to combine eight of them to get something that can be considered a decent fireball spell.

But even the way they combine is tricky. Like slotting moving puzzle pieces together, a little different every time.

I figure out pretty quickly that all of the elements play off of each other depending on how you mix them, but the crazy thing is how each new element is exponentially more powerful than the last, and if the drain I feel when conjuring them is any indication, they cost more and more mana to conjure, the more I try to do at once.

The best I can manage is ten at a time, but it completely drains me in one spell. Three eight-element spells or five five-element spells seem to be my limit for casting consecutively.

I have no idea if that's good or bad, but I actually do feel like I'm getting better. Like, not just my own knowledge and control of the magic is getting better, but my control over the mana itself is improving the more I use it.

Best guess, that's an effect of the growth factor of my class. Essentially, I'm gaining experience. When I Scan myself after two days, I'm still sitting at Rank 0, so I can't say for certain how much I need to level up. It might be a little more, or it might be a lot, there's no real way to tell.

The other main thing I pick up along the way is Panir. Just listening to the others chat as we walk, I have to assume it's the celestial magic filling in the meaning of their words, which helps me to rapidly learn the language better.

Well, that's what I manage to pick up when I'm not killing myself trying to keep pace with the others. God damn these people never get tired!

But at long last, we reach our destination around some ruins. I spot some of the little green things in the distance. Alright, they look just like little horrible fantasy goblins. I think I'll be fine throwing fireballs and big rocks at them to kill them when they look like that.

Shaking away my nerves, I take up position near the back of the party, just like we all discussed on the way. We move into the ruins, which are thankfully above ground, so we don't need to do any cave diving in the dark or anything.

There are bits of collapsed wood and stone buildings all around, originally very tall from the looks of them, though they haven't aged well and are heavily worn by the weather. The ruins are mixed with some trees cropping up here and there

Soon after we enter, we clear a few goblins. The sounds of crushing and squishing when the frontline mows them down with their swords and hammers is pretty gruesome, but the goblins themselves begin to dissipate into a kind of smoke soon after they die, which makes it a little less creepy.

Not long after we start, they leave one for me. One uses his shield to bash the goblin, half knocking it out as it staggers, then calls for me to hit it. I guess it's my time. Mentally calling on my magic, I conjure eight of the fire elements at once, slotting them all together into a good size fire spell as they float around me, and launch it at the staggered goblin with a point of my finger.

The ball of roiling fire hits it square in the chest, and the goblin lets out a horrible shriek that makes me cringe. So that's what it's like to kill a monster...

Then the fire and smoke clears, and the goblin is somewhat singed, but still standing.

What.

“Uhh, you messing with us?” one of the others asks.

“N-no. Let me try again.” Once more, I queue up the magic. I feel the drain as the elements manifest all at once, and the magic latches together into a complex weave. This time, I focus even more to get the best effect I can out of their combination, yielding a more impressive fireball than before. I hurl this one at the wounded goblin, and despite the even larger explosion of flames that wash over the creature, it's still standing afterward.

“No really, you can't actually be that weak, can you?”

“I'm sorry, I'll try something different!” I squeak. What's wrong? Why isn't this working? Goblins aren't fire resistant in this world, are they?

Intent on going a different way, I pull together a more complex spell this time, stringing airs and a little water and earth. I even push to nine elements, totally exhausting my mana as the whirling vortex of magic blasts the goblin with a rush of surging wind and shredding bits of stone with blades of water blasting it from every side.

This is a longer duration spell, so it goes on for much longer than a single hit from a fire ball, more like a whirling blender shredding the goblin over and over again as it's whipped and beaten by wind and water and stone from all sides. Just watching the results of my magic makes me a little ill, even as I sink to a knee from mana exhaustion.

Then the spell ends.

The goblin is still alive.

“Ding ding ding, we have a winner for the worst mage of all time!” the man with the shield laughs derisively. Then he throws an easy kick at the goblin and it's entire body flies into a wall with an audible crunch, dying instantly.

What. The. Fuck.

“At least that's one less human to worry about fighting,” the the racist one says from the other side of our formation.

From there, my duties devolve purely to drawing attention of enemies, and disruption, which my wind spells are pretty good at. I can only use a few spells once in a while, needing to wait, panting heavily as I continuously run my mana down to nothing repeatedly throughout the day.

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What the hell is wrong? Is it me or the class? Maybe my spells do no damage because Synergist essentially trades off all of their firepower for their incredibly versatile spells. But then why are they an Offensive Magic Class? Unless it exists as an option under all the magic Jobs, not just Offensive Magic? Maybe it doesn't actually synergize with Offensive Magic, but Support Magic? Did I choose an F-tier Class for the Offensive Magic Job?

No no no no, I can't just assume that. Maybe I'm just not using it right. Maybe the Class is supposed to focus more on flinging a steady stream of low-power spells instead of a few stronger ones like I've been trying?

But that doesn't make sense either! What's the point of using elemental synergy in the spells if the optimal usage relies on using tons of non-synergized spells? The exponential scaling of power seems to outpace mana consumption as far as I can tell, so that really shouldn't be it.

Of course, there's another possibility... I hardly want to consider it, but it's a possibility I can't ignore. This world is not a video game, endlessly playtested and hotfixed to ensure near-perfect class balance.

Maybe Synergist just sucks.

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Darkness falls over the ruins, and we make camp for the time being. As I've learned in my time here, each day has two periods of light, and two of dark. They move in a weird pattern that has to do with how fast the suns and moons spin around Verilz. Because as far as I can tell, they all orbit the planet, instead of the other way around?

Anyway, it goes twelve hours of light, twenty two hours of dark, twenty eight hours of light, ten hours of dark. Currently, we're in the ten hour dark, which turns out to be when a lot of people sleep. Because their crests give them insane, superhuman stamina. Meanwhile, I feel halfway between ill from long term mana-depletion, and dead-ass tired from trying to keep up with everyone for so long.

I end up collapsing on the ground near the fire one guy builds to ward off any encroaching danger, and I'm out cold until they shake me awake again. Yup, already the next day. Even with ten hours of rest, I'm still a groggy, exhausted mess.

I do my best to push through. It'll get better. I'll get stronger eventually. Despite my pathetic showing of magic yesterday, I can clearly feel it getting stronger as I work on it. I was able to push up to a maximum of twelve elements in a single spell yesterday. Sure, it doesn't seem like much, but that's twenty percent growth in one (admittedly insanely long) day, if I ignore the exponential scaling of the magic.

Maybe Synergist isn't useless, it could be a carry Class. Super weak to start, totally overpowered later. It would fit the immense complexity of their spells. Sure, I'm still thinking in game terms, but I'd rather assume I'll get better later than just give up right at the beginning...

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As we move carefully through the ruins, clearing more and more goblins, I try to change up my spells. I attempt barrages of low power spells as well as mixing long and short duration spellcasts and even tossing them all out at once so they can combine and synergize in flight. That's the hardest for obvious reasons, but is quite a bit more effective. I'm starting to get a feeling like the longer I hold the magic after it finishes combining, the weaker it becomes, before it fizzles out.

When they give me another chance, I do my absolute best, throwing a full dozen fire spells at once so they converge, synergize, and explode over a goblin in a huge wave of fire that actually singes some of the grass in the area as well.

The spell puts me on my ass but it actually, sort of, almost kills the goblin. I think.

Hey, it's something!

We keep working our way through the ruins through light and dark, and despite my insane work schedule this last month, I'm really dragging my ass by the end. My body just isn't built for seventy two hour days...

Thankfully, they let me rest before I collapse. Ok, when I collapse, but at least they let me pass out in a comfortable grassy spot. When I finally stagger my way back to consciousness, they've cleared all the immediate surroundings. I'm... not contributing anything, am I?

I think I'm just slowing them down...

Stronger late-game, stronger late-game, I keep telling myself. A mantra to keep my spirit from being crushed by the possibility of my one and only major life decision I chose on my own being a complete, disastrous failure.

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I think we're almost done with the goblins. We've hit a few bigger groups that actually pressed the frontliners, drawing blood so the healer needed to toss out a couple light healing spells.

From the look of it, big tanks aren't just armored in, well, armor. Their magic definitely protects them against physical injury. There's no way they could have turned aside the clubs and daggers of the goblins with their bare hands like they did a few times.

I wonder if it comes from their specific abilities from their Classes. Or maybe it's just a natural part of the magic strengthening their bodies?

We're sweeping the area, cleaning up stragglers, when I think we're just about done. Apparently, this area didn't have a nest, so they probably aren't reproducing here, they all got pushed here from somewhere else. There isn't any mana vein here either, which is apparently some sort of thing that causes monsters to spawn.

That means there will be another quest later to go find the nest, or possibly search for whatever got these goblins to take up residence in this particular ruin.

Then there's a scrabbling sound, and a goblin clambers out of a blind spot between two collapsed pieces of rubble, no more than ten feet to my left. The others are all spread out wide in a search pattern, so it's eyes land on me immediately.

“Kriaaa!” it screams, and my entire body freezes. It hardly reaches my stomach, but the sight of its bald green head, bloodshot eyes, jagged yellow teeth and rusted out little knife, every muscle in my body locks up.

The goblin rushes toward me, weapon raised. I'm not like those big armored men. I'm wearing a tank top, my bare skin unprotected by armor or magic. I stumble away in panic, falling and scrambling on all fours as the goblin bears down on me.

Magic churns, manifesting piece by piece all around me, but I can't focus on weaving it. Can't build anything useful out of it. It's all too complex when the only thought that fills my brain is to flee.

Even so, dozens of unsynergized spells rain down on the charging goblin. It doesn't even notice them. Then it lands on me, plunging the knife down and I grab desperately at its tiny arm for any chance to save myself.

It's arms are like sticks, gaunt to the point that they're hardly any thicker than my fingers.

And they feel like fucking boulders. I push with all of my desperate will to survive, and it doesn't slow the monster's strike at all. The knife punches straight into my shoulder and it feels like my entire side has been crushed under the impact.

I didn't come from a world like this, I'm not used to pain. Not like a stab injury. I scream, still trying to push the goblin off as it claws at me with its free hand, tearing gouges into my arm with its filthy nails as I try to fend off the strikes, curling up into a ball.

A gasp tears from my throat when the goblin draws the knife back out of my shoulder, and in the moment before it strikes again, I hear shouts, loud clanking metal, and heavy footfalls. Then the knife point jabs down to bury itself in my shoulder again.

A big metal boot slams into the goblin's side, and it's sent flying away. But I barely notice, my entire world turning to pain when the descending knife in its hand is thrown sideways to sheer straight through my neck.

My body convulses, blood gurgling up as I try and fail to breath through my torn out throat. I stare up at the sky, rapidly losing feeling in my limbs as my heart hammers for no more than few seconds, dumping my lifeblood out through my wounds, before it begins to fail too.

No air, no blood, I'm dying. Everything going dark. I can barely hear the shouting through my failing senses and fading life.

I don't even have time to think. To regret any of this.

Everything goes dark.

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“Kaa-aah-acckk!” I suddenly gasp and hack and my voice cracks and breaks and my body shudders, convulsing uncontrollably. My back arches, just a moment of agony passing before I flop down, feeling like death.

Then I remember that I died.

I desperately try to open my eyes, try to sit up, and completely fail. I feel so weak, I can't even move. The best I can do is croak out a questioning sound through my miraculously intact throat. It's hard to even think enough to guess what happened.

Then I lose consciousness.