Book 1, Chapter 6: Skill Development

            “And so, he climbs down your chimney and leaves his presents under the Christmas tree. Remember, the tree is essential. If you don’t grow a tree inside your house, Santa won’t come,” Alen spoke, pushing his hair back with a kind smile as he looked at the two children that stared at him with widened eyes.

            “He’ll really come?” The little girl in front of him spoke, her twintails bobbing in the sunlight as she gave him a hopeful look.

            Alen nodded seriously. “Yes, but you have to remember to be a good child. Don’t eat anything sweet that would make you happy like candy for a year.”

            A boy who looked to be seven, wearing a clean brown tunic nodded vigorously beside the girl. “Yes! If I do this, I’ll be friends with Freide, right?” The boy blushed, and Alen presumed the girl was someone that caught his interest.

            “Yes. Santa will put her in a box, and when you wake up in the morning and open it, she’ll be there, and she’ll be your friend.”

            Chatting for a bit more and saying goodbye to the two children, Alen went on his way and continued towards the Commissions House. He still didn’t know how they operated, but he’d handle stressing over that later. For now, he’d glow in a mix of guilt and laughter as he remembered the hopeful looks on the children’s’ faces. Parents were weak to tantrums. They’d probably get some sort of small tree or shrub and put it inside the house, and then, when the snow starts to fall… Alen laughed to himself and opened the chat window.

Egg Chat Room

Anne: So I managed to meet up with Bernard.

Bernard: she’s freeloading off my work.

Anne: Shhhh. Shut the fuck up. I’m going to be making use of my savings soon, so I’ll buy you some food when I can actually earn money.

Bernard: buy me materials to make new crap and I’ll call it even.

Adam: can someone get me out of here? i asked the elves if they could teach me their shitty combat style and they’re teaching me dancing. help.

Sam: Mages. Walk. Their own paths.

Anne: Hoy fuck Sam shut the hell up.

Adam: he’s been repeating the phrase for days now. come on dude, we’re both on the southern side of the continent right? can we like meet up and fuck off to where the rest are already?

            Alen closed it. If he started talking to them now, it could drag on for hours. Right now, his priority would be finding a way to earn some money and keep himself fed after Xan kicked him out of the barracks. He suspected finding a job would be easy enough, due to the nature of the commissions house. Unless they had some sort of qualification or ranking system, he would probably find some kind of work that’d give him a good amount of coin.

            Really, he just wanted some spare change. His clothes were as bare as they could get, and with the weather getting progressively colder, he needed some thicker clothing on him. He didn’t want to achieve blue balls, and not the kind Sam was into. Hypothermia didn’t sound anywhere near as good as a warm bed and something that wasn’t bread and soup for once.   

            In the distance, the Commissions House came into view. It was as expected, a medieval looking building, but something that looked surprisingly refined. Clean stone steps led up to a beautifully engraved door. A copper plate hung under some chains above the door, clear words carved into the metal. Commissions House, it said. There were even some laurel-looking plants hanging from the second floor balcony.

            Alen was impressed. The whole thing really gave off that, ‘make sure to destroy this place first when attacked’ kind of vibe. Maybe the bakery he saw nearby would even be ignored completely in the event of some undead invasion.

            He slowly walked into the building, opening the door lightly as he slipped in. Inside, there were a few tables and benches, along with two sets of stairs that led up both left and right of the ground floor’s lobby. In the center of the two stairwells stood a counter separated from the outside with panes of glass. People, both ordinary and equipped in dangerous looking equipment, lined up and talked to the employees behind the counter. Alen glanced at the second floor and found that it was transformed into some sort of bar. He saw the backs of numerous people lining the railing as they sat against chairs, and multiple waitresses walked around serving food and drink.

            Seeing the place, he was somewhat surprised at how orderly it was. He was expecting a rustic looking place and expected a few brawls among some of the people inside as soon as he entered, but it seemed this place was kept in order, as evident by the intimidating guards on post near the counter and entrance.

            Alen continued to glance around as he fell in line. A few stray thoughts wandered their way into his head. Did this place have those unwritten rules sort of thing? Like, don’t stare for too long but don’t drop your gaze to the ground to show weakness or something? He shrugged internally. He’d get to it when he did. What he wanted right now was information regarding where he was, what this place was called, and a way to keep himself afloat financially while he sorted things out.

            Eventually, he reached the counter. A surprisingly fit man greeted him, his gray hair slicked back with some sort of gel. Alen supposed even office people from another world had to use gel. It was a universal rule at this point.

            “How may I help you?”

            Alen almost grinned at how generic the greeting was. But then again, what else would they say? ‘Sup cunt, you want some money? Look nowhere else but here.’?

            Yeah. Probably not. He scratched the back of his head and told the man what Xan had told him to say. “Uh, I’m a new arrival. Xan, er, the captain of the guard told me I should come here for an identification card and some work?”

            The man at the counter nodded knowingly. “Ah, yes. He sent word about you visiting us yesterday afternoon. Your card’s already been prepared. I assume you’re here to find work outside the city?”

            Alen nodded, and the man gave him a stack of papers. “These are some of the jobs the house assessed you were capable of doing. You can check them while I fetch your key. If you feel like you can handle harder work, then you can ask me to fetch more when I get back.”

            The man left, and Alen read what was written down. Blacksmith’s assistant, lost pet requests, and general things. The pay listed down was in coppers, and a silver at most, which Alen assumed wasn’t much. He looked further, and eventually found what he was looking for; subjugation requests.

            Essentially, it was exactly how it sounded. Apparently, the identification card provided by the Com-House would have a section in it that recorded what kind of monster the user killed. Looks like the guy in the counter was considerate enough to put in an information manual as well. The card he was about to get had to be branded by his mana before he could use it. It displayed just his name, race, mana type, and a unique number the house assigned to him. Apparently, after branding, it would claim a small percentage of the mana he absorbed after killing something, and it would show up on the metal card like it was engraved there. Alen was worried about it slowing his level ups down, but it seemed like you could retrieve the mana from the card at the cost of wiping your list of killed monsters.

            With this, Alen guessed the process was: go to guild, get a job, get proof that you finished it, and if the card has mana, claim it after showing proof and finishing the request.

            As the man came back, he handed Alen a thin, metal card. “Just hold it in your hand and put your mana inside. As for the number, make sure you don’t tell anyone you don’t trust about it. The number can be used to retrieve your assets from the guild, which you can deposit and withdraw in any of our branches via a teleportation array,” The man saw the worried look in his eyes and continued. “It’ll be invisible to the eyes of others due to a strong illusion spell, so it’s safe against most people. However, you may choose to pay a sum and increase the strength of the spell. At that point, the guild’s information network is good enough to determine who exactly stole your number, so we can take action. Our company does not take kindly to those that trespass on the security of our patrons. Remember this.”

            Alen took a moment for the information to sink in before asking the man again. “How much is the fee to increase the strength of the illusion?”

            “A hundred gold.”

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            His shoulders sagged. “Well, shit.” He probably wouldn’t be getting that upgrade any time soon.

            Shaking his head, Alen showed the man the request he intended to take. It was a simple subjugation request that was handed out by the city management and military regularly. It could be taken again upon completion, and had a good reward at ten silver upon completion. The requirements weren’t too bad either. It was to take out either sixteen skeletons, eight zombies, or a single ghoulbear. It didn’t have a deadline, and it could be taken three times to come out as forty-eight skeletons, or twenty-four zombies, or three ghoulbears.

            Alen found out that there was a request limit though, which only let the patron take a maximum of five requests at a time to prevent request hoarding. Seeing this, he took the undead subjugation request three times, taking three out of his five slots.

            He glanced at the man who was stamping the requests on his card before looking back at the paper. “…Are there undead stronger than the ghoulbear inside the forest?”

            The man handed it back to him. “Yes. A scary amount. The requests involving those are available. You want me to get them?”

            “Absolutely not.”

            The gray haired man shrugged and motioned him away, allowing the next person in line to take his place. Alen walked out of the Commissions House and looked at his card before putting it in his pocket. He visited the barracks, leaving his phone and watch, before heading outside with only his clothes and ID card with him. He left the gates with little trouble and entered the forest. After half an hour of walking, he reached the boundary.

            In front of him, grass stopped growing, replaced by dry, dead soil. The trees were black and shriveled, and the sky above was already half-gray. Alen felt the same edgy sensation of perpetual dread from this place, a sensation that hadn’t changed since he got here.

            Alen stood for a moment and sighed, taking a step into the forest calmly. This wasn’t going to be like that time in the cave. Alen was stronger now, in more ways than just his magic. He touched the scar on his palm. He didn’t want another one of these, either. He proceeded forward at a steady pace, his grown agility making speed walking feel like he was moving at the speed of an intense jogger. Not much, but faster than before, at least.

            Eventually, he started to slow down, creeping forward as he looked for any undead. His main goal here wasn’t completing the request. He had another six days to finish the job before he got evicted from the barracks. For now, he needed to focus on improving his magic. The skill trees still hadn’t shown up, and Alen wanted to see how far they would change his spell after he improved the programs enough. Sometime later, Alen found his first target. A group of skeletons.

            There were five of them, a common number as skeletons tended to group up. They were weak by themselves, but the way they packed together made them a problem to people who were inexperienced in hunting inside the dead woods. Alen examined the skeletons from afar, only now realizing how different the bone structure had become.

            First, their bones were grown more than normal. Thick, almost plate-like ribcages that were haphazardly merged together in different places, and a spinal column lined with sharp barbs of bone-matter. Their fingers and toes were longer too, the tips sharpened to a point so they could tear at their prey.

            Alen gulped and pointed at them from a behind a tree, a stream of his black mana shooting out repeatedly as it sunk into all of them. The skeletons all fell to the ground, before Alen felt the link of mana that attached them to him form. He ordered them to stand up and opened his status to glance at his mana. It was heavily depleted. He had enough room for one Blightbolt at most. Probably not the wisest way he could’ve spent his mana, considering how he needed it to experiment in the first place. Alen face-palmed and sat down. He waited until he could cast Empowerment on a skeleton for fifteen minutes and stood up.

            With this, he could apply the spell to all his skeletons for three minutes each, but he wasn’t looking to fight anything. He did this for another purpose.

            He had a skeleton come over and looked at its intimidating features. This thing was going to be badass with Empowerment on. That would come in a bit though, he had something else to examine. He programmed a short strand of mana and had it flow into the skeleton. It would perform a tracing action. Essentially, it would flow along the mana that kept the skeleton together, allowing him to inspect how it worked. He couldn’t use crap like mana-vision. Having his magic flow into his eyes just blurred his vision to shit, so he used strands of mana to relay information to him instead.

            Alen didn’t have the time to examine them fully when he was in the forest, but he had it now. He saw the magic pulse along the skeleton’s bones, but he noticed it also stuck off and traced something in the air around the bones. He frowned and waited until the strand flowed back into him.

            Then finally, it hit him. Those things his mana was tracing in the air? It was essentially his mana, but invisible to even him under normal circumstances. They acted like muscles and cartilage, keeping the skeleton together and making it move at the price of sacrificing the power of a flesh and blood body. When he used Control Undead on the skeletons, his mana took over those pseudo-muscles, allowing him to control the skeleton as he wished, but at the price of knowing how it worked. Alen had to give props to the first necromancer to figure this shit out. It was awesome knowing about it. And this wasn’t even the end of it.

            Alen casted his buff and found out that it looked like the reason why the skeleton turned black during Empowerment wasn’t because of his mana covering the bones, but flooding into the previously invisible muscles of mana, giving the skeleton a black hue as the mana reinforced the strings of magic that acted as muscle tissue.

            He stepped back, watching as the Empowerment he casted faded after a minute. Now, it was cool to have this knowledge, but how could he use this to improve his Control Undead spell? He sat down and pondered before arriving at a theory. What if compressing the lines of mana-code into a smaller program wasn’t the only thing that increased the quality of a spell? What if he changed parts of the spell entirely according to his understanding, and modified it to have a stronger output?

            Say for example, passively strengthening the lines of mana that acted as muscles when he took over an undead?

            Now that he had knowledge on how the skeletons worked, he could improve his spell accordingly. An end product was already visible in his mind. Upon takeover, instead of only driving the mana inside the body away and replacing it with his own, he would also reinforce the smaller details like the muscles and ligaments of mana. That would make his spell stronger; make it of a higher quality.

            Alen got to work, spending hours changing and testing the spell by cutting the string of mana that connected him to a skeleton before casting his new prototype of the spell on the skeleton held down by the rest of his undead. Sometimes, it had the weird effects like making the skeleton an invalid, and making the bones thicker, the latter of which Alen decided to keep in his program. Better to have skeletons that could take more hits. Sometimes, the prototype spell would even do absolutely nothing, forcing Alen to wait for the chunk of mana he had lost.                                          

            After a while, he managed to succeed, watching as the skeleton became stronger and faster. He continued, refining the contents of the spell and making his undead more potent at the price of increasing the mana cost due to the lengthy mana program he used to achieve the effects. Alen wasn’t satisfied with only being able to cast it twice before running out of mana, so he proceeded to the next phase and began to compress his program.

            When he reached a point where he felt like he couldn’t compress it anymore due to his current understanding of the spell’s intricacies, he stopped. Not even a moment later, a screen materialized in front of him.

System Message!

Congratulations! You have taken a step forward on your path as a scholar of magic by gaining the qualifications to upgrade a skill. To choose one of the many branching paths of your spell’s skill tree, find your own interpretation of this spell’s ideal form. When a powerful image of this skill’s path forward forms inside of your mind, your understanding of the spell and vision of the path forward will allow it to improve.

Walk a path that is your own, mage. Good luck.

            Alen looked at the darkening sky above. He was hungry, too. Alen couldn’t just leave the skeletons here though. They were stronger than before, and if he let them loose, it would haunt him forever if they managed to kill a person that was expecting an easy fight against normal undead.

            With this, Alen found a good, hidden spot inside the woods and had his skeletons bury each other, one at a time until only their skulls poked out from the dirt. As for the last skeleton, Alen just ordered in to bang its head against a rock until its skull shattered. It took a while, but Alen had managed to tick off one skeleton kill from his commission, and managed to secure four risk-free minions when he came back tomorrow.

            Even with their enhanced strength, Alen doubted they would be able to dig themselves out of the dirt after they slipped from his control.

            With this, he left the forest and headed back into the city. He had his dinner, and talked with Conrad and the rest of the soldiers for a bit before finally retiring to his room. He opened up the chat window and chatted with his friends, looking at the public message screen and noting that nothing much had changed, besides the fact that new names had appeared. From the context of what they were saying, they were in dangerous places as well, and Alen wasn’t around when they sent their few short messages during the first week.

            It looked like at least thirty people were sent here, not counting the ones that still hadn’t said a thing, and the ones that were… Alen closed his eyes and lapsed into silence, dead.

            He had to be more careful with how he handled things. Just that decision alone in the forest of using almost all of his mana to take over five skeletons could have gotten him killed if he was unlucky enough to encounter more skeletons in the vicinity.

            Alen glanced at the phone set down on the table near his bed, resisting the urge to turn it on and listen to his music. It would only last him for so long. He had to be stingy with its use.

            With a sigh, he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

            Tomorrow, he’d keep doing what he’d been doing since he got here. Experiment… and improve. Improve until he didn’t have to worry about things like his life, housing, and food supply all the time.

            And maybe tell a few more kids about Santa. Yeah.

            He’d do that.