At this point, after living as one for months (if you include the time spent training with Kaelan), I was willing to admit that I may have been an adventurer. It wasn’t really what I’d envisioned for myself, and was pretty much what everyone back home had expected me to end up doing, but that was fine. All that mattered was that it was fun, and if what I’d managed so far was any indication I’d probably end up being able to retire early.
Well, there probably weren’t enough level 30 monsters threatening the Kingdom for that to actually happen any time soon, but if I evolved Lightning Steps again I might be able to travel fast enough to do multiple jobs a day, so maybe I wouldn’t even need to fight anything that’s all that strong.
Which brought me back to here, at the Job Hall, where I was once again looking at the Job Boards for something that could be good for levelling my Skills. The main thing I was looking for was a way to level Chain Lightning, since I couldn’t think of a way to level that without several willing (or unwilling) living test subjects.
That feels a little cold, is there not a better way to say that?
“Hey! Rob! Are you still looking at the third board?” Kaelan, who had apparently been here the whole time without me noticing, waved me over to the board he was looking at.
“Oh, hey Kaelan. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for the fourth one yet, so I thought I may as well stick to what’s safe.”
“Come on man, you’re selling yourself short. Has anything on that board really challenged you yet? I’d bet that you can handle a good amount of the ones over here. Come on and look, see for yourself,” I looked at him doubtfully but eventually decided to acquiesce.
“Alright, if you say so.”
I looked over the options and realised that, actually, he was right. I suppose I didn’t have tons of experience with a lot of the things here, but they didn’t sound very difficult at all. Maybe I was just overconfident after coming out on top of He Who Emerges From The Depths, but none of these seemed too far out of my reach.
Once I came to this realisation I zoned in on one Job in particular, that I felt would be the most valuable for raising my Skills (or more specifically Chain Lightning)
Clear out the Leaf Ant hive outside our farm
Paying 1 copper for each confirmed kill, or 15 silver for clearing out the whole thing
“Hey Kaelan, do you know a lot about Leaf Ants?” He looked curiously at the Job I was considering before shaking his head.
“Unfortunately not, but I do have a bestiary so you’re free to see if it’s in that.” As he was speaking, he put his bag on the floor and pulled out a massive leather bound book that must have taken up at least half of the bag’s available space.
“Oh, thanks. Do you just carry this around with you everywhere?” I asked as I began flicking through the pages.
“Yep, I’m a teacher you know? Gotta be prepared whenever I need to help someone learn some, it’s in the teachers’ code.”
“Really?” Is there a Mages’ code I need to know about? Or an Adept one, I guess.
He gave me a look and asked, “Seriously?” Oh, he was joking. I knew that.
I coughed into my hand and ignored the question, I’d just found the page about Leaf Ants anyway so I didn’t have time to answer. Totally.
“Anyway, I found the page here,” I turned the book so he could see as well, “Apparently their carapace is good for Beast Crafters, that’s pretty lucky. And they have some good stuff for Alchemists too, wow this was a good find.”
“Why? You’re not a Beast Crafter, are you?”
“Hm? Oh no, my Innkeeper is though. And I know an Alchemist, so I should try and get a bunch of these parts for them,” Kaelan was silent for a few seconds so I looked up to see him making an amused face at me, “What?”
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“Your Innkeeper is also a Beast Crafter? Are you sure they aren’t just lying to you?”
“No, they just changed their Path recently. It was super weird, for some reason they needed to put all of their Affinity into some monster parts. I even got a Feat for helping them.” When I said this I happened to look outside and saw that the sun was already out of sight from this angle, so it must have been nearing noon.
“Oh shoot, I gotta go if I want to do this Job today,” I put the bestiary back in Kaelan’s hands and rushed out of the building, “See ya!”
“Wait what? Rob! Hold up!” Kaelan quickly followed me out of the building, but by that point I was already halfway down the street.
“I’ll tell you about it later if you’re that curious! Bye!”
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The farm I had to get to wasn’t really too far away from Ironhold, I could probably get there in just under an hour, but I wasn’t sure how long the Job itself would take so I wanted to give myself as much time as possible.
Of course, that didn’t stop me from experimenting a little with Lightning Steps. The main thing I was trying to do with it was use just the right amount of Mana so that I was able to keep it up for as long as I needed to without sacrificing too much speed.
Ideally I’d be able to just use my recovery, but I tried that and the results were… disappointing, to say the least. The Lightning looked incredibly sparse compared to what I was used to, and the speed boost was at best an increase of half my speed. The less said about my stamina the better.
Unfortunately, that meant that I wasn’t currently able to keep it up perpetually whilst also being able to travel as fast as I wanted. So, using that as a baseline, I slowly increased my input until I found an amount that worked quite well.
By using roughly a tenth of my Mana an hour (as opposed to the half that I was used to) I was able to constantly jog at over twice my unaugmented speed without needing to rest my legs too much. Admittedly, that just meant that I only had to take a break every hour, but if I increased my Agility that might change so I didn’t dwell on it for too long.
By the time I was able to figure all of this out I had reached the farm I was looking for. Or at least, I assumed it was. This seemed to be the right place, but the Leaf Ants would have surely damaged the fields quite a lot already, and I didn’t see anything like that from here.
The key word being ‘here’.
Once I walked around the edge of the field towards the tree line, I was able to see the actual problem. From what the bestiary said, Leaf Ants didn’t tend to cause any problems for regular people. Their hives were up in the trees, cleverly disguised amongst the foliage, and they were completely herbivorous so they never really killed people.
Supposedly, the real problems began when they ran out of space. There were only so many livable trees in the forest, and only so much space in the forest regardless, so at some point expanding became a little more complicated than simply moving to another tree. This was the point at which their natural Affinity came in, specifically some kind of Life or Plant Affinity. Basically, they forcefully caused trees to produce seeds, and then used unstructured magic to promote the growth of said seeds, which could cause problems when something was in the way of that growth.
I’m sure you can see where I was going with this.
Every inch of farmland that was even close to the treeline was completely destroyed, either left on the ground to rot or taken to feed the ants in the colony. In its place were dozens of saplings, already reaching to be around half my height despite the Job having been posted only a week or so ago.
As I watched, a small cluster of leaves fell from a tree and revealed itself to actually be a giant foot sized ant. It was closely followed by a swarm of 5 other similarly sized ants that all surrounded the nearest sapling and bathed it in some kind of green light. Over just a few seconds the sapling grew by at least 20 centimetres and looked almost thick enough to actually support my weight.
Seemingly spent, the ants began to scurry back up the tree they came out of. Obviously I wouldn’t be letting that happen, but I would probably be feeling bad about it. They were just growing trees at the end of the day, they’d just chosen a bad place to do it.
I Charged a Bolt, making sure Scorch Affinity was turned off, and loosed it at the nearest Ant. It was completely overkill, and the Ant was blown apart by the sudden attack before it could even turn around, but it didn’t stop there. The other Ants must have heard something because they tried to turn towards the mysterious threat, but the Bolt blasted between each one, killing them all within seconds.
Combat Cleared 6 Leaf Ant Tenders Defeated [Levels 5-8]
I didn’t think it was particularly likely, but I checked to see if Chain Lightning had been able to Level from that anyway, just to be thorough.
Path Skills Lightning Generator 15 Lightning Bolt 14 Lightning Cloak 7 Charge 12 Chain Lightning 2 Grand Skewer 2 Scorch Affinity
General Skills MAX Lightning Steps 10 Breath Of Mana 6 Sense Danger 8 Channel Mana 9 Meditation 6
Nice! I guess it was close from when I used it on the Giant Crabs before.
I was about to dismiss the window and move onto the rest of the hive when I noticed something that was a little out of place.
Lightning Steps is Level 10. Not max, Level 10. Is 10 just not the max Level anymore? Will I just be able to keep levelling it like my Path Skills? Why didn’t Kaelan tell me about this before?
All of these were good questions, but none of them had answers, or at least none that I could find for now. Resolutely deciding to ignore that for now, I looked back towards the tree line and tried to see if I could discern the shapes of any Ants.
Ant hunting now, questions later. Let’s get started.