Our grand excursion into the desert was agreed upon and set in stone, but rather than jump into it immediately, we decided to prepare a bit. And in this case, by “we,” I was strictly referring to Cal.
For all the rogue had spent her time wandering about, she still hadn’t fully explored the desert. Part of that was a matter of personal preference -- the forest was far more interesting, and it allowed her to contribute to our stash of herbs and small game whenever she went out. The other half was more logistical in nature. She had wandered across the sand for two days once, but when she found nothing but more sand and scorpions, she figured it was time to call it quits. After all, there was only so long she could be gone before we started to worry.
In light of our decision to try clearing the desert, though, she reconsidered that stance. For the next six days, Cal would push as deep into the biome as she could, mapping out a route for us, and placing markers for where we would camp. If by the end of day six, she still hadn’t found the end, she would return either way, giving us a total of 12 days to ourselves.
Initially, I was against such a plan, figuring that it would be easier -- and safer -- for us all to go together. That was doubly true considering Cal lacked a working spatial pouch to store food and water, and she would eventually have to sleep out in the open. When I raised those concerns, however, she waved them off. Neither, according to her, would be an issue.
Odd as that seemed, by now, I’d heard bits and pieces of what she’d been through with Hexaura. If perhaps I didn’t understand exactly where her confidence came from, I could at least trust her. And if there was some challenge or second type of enemy waiting for us deeper within, I could admit that knowing ahead of time would be well appreciated at the worst and life saving at the best.
And so, more down time.
Whatever responsible part of me still existed whispered that I should use that time to throw myself into training before our big trip. In reality, though, I doubted it would matter. Twelve days wasn’t even close to enough for me to level, and an extra level in a skill or two wouldn’t do much in the grand scheme of things.
Of course, there was one easy source of instant power I had available: my class trials.
I’d been attempting them for months by now, and unlike the trial for Mana Feet where that had been reasonable, the new trials were laughably easy. I had no doubt the old me would have been horrified to see how long they were taking.
Without any real deadline, I just hadn’t been able to force myself to give them my all. I had a hope, though, that with my steadily growing mental and soul resistances, coupled with the upcoming deadline, I could finally force myself to finish them properly. Over the next few days, I attacked the trials with a renewed resolve.
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If nothing else, the Arcane Armament trial was chaotic.
Bind Weapon, at least, had only really had five different choices, one for each of the weapons I’d been able to bind. Much like had been true for Mana Feet, though, Arcane Armament had a full nine different mana types for me to switch through. If that wasn’t enough on its own, the trial provided me with both a bow and a sword, forcing me to swap between them at a moment’s notice.
Fire ants. A swarm of insects rushed out of a newly formed ant hill, very literally blazing as they advanced. I had long since learned to take care of them first before they grew unmanageable, dropping all else to fire a water arrow directly at the hill. The hill disappeared when struck, and my arrow’s splash damage brought the surrounding ants down with it.
The nearest enemy capitalized on my distant attack, questing forward with a heavily bandaged hand. With a backwards jump and the barest of nicks from a fire sword, the dry cloth caught fire, rapidly spreading to the rest of the mummy.
Right as my feet hit the ground, a thick vine wrapped around my ankle, yanking me down. Rather than fight against it, I helped it along, diving towards the base of the vine. Like a gardener from hell, I pruned the vine right at its base, channeling death magic into my sword. Though it was hardly instant, the necrotic energy spread beneath the ground, and half a dozen other similar vines wilted, killed from the root up.
Over and over, this continued, new enemies spawning whenever I felt like I’d have even the tiniest of breaks. While the enemies in the Bind Weapon trial had already been strange, my new foes took that to the next level. Whoever had designed this trial had either been strange or deranged.
Bizarre, fleshy eyeless creatures approached on tall and slender limbs, their only defining feature being a spike of metal buried into the back of their heads. A well-timed earthen arrow sent them tumbling backwards, driving the spike into their heads when they fell. As if to make up for the lack of eyes, another of the abominations was nothing but eyes. It zapped any arrow out of the air save for those enhanced with light magic.
Flying creatures that looked like dark fairies appeared, always at the spot the very farthest from me, peppering me with long-distance bolts of arcane energy. The moment I got too close, they vanished, forcing me to accurately shoot them down with wind-enhanced arrows from afar. Shrouded, ninja-like figures confounded me, perfectly parrying every blow unless I hid my blade with darkness.
My only reprieve in the fight was a number of ethereal copies of myself that popped up from time to time, with little in the way of real offensive power, but good at keeping enemies off of me. Lest they die immediately, I was forced to heal them whenever I could, either with a healing blade or afar with an arrow.
And if all that wasn’t enough, there were the catalyst elementals. They began in opposite corners of the room, one made from flames, the other, a green sludge. Absolutely nothing I’d tried was able to kill them as they slowly walked towards one another, and if they met, the entire trial ended in a massive explosion. The entire fight, I had to keep striking them with as many frost attacks as I could, slowing their advance until the trial ended.
It was, to put it lightly, a mess. A chaotic jumble of too many elements that I struggled to keep track of. With months to get it right, though, half of my attacks had become automatic. For the other half, I focused as much as I could stand to, forcing the entirety of my warped mind to react.
Three earth arrows were followed with dull thuds as an arcane bolt clipped my shoulder. I spun about and killed the demonic pixie before it could get another attack in, lunging to the side to avoid one of the eye-beasts even as I slashed at one of my copies with a sword of healing mana.
Bit by bit, the room cleared out, until, after what felt like hours, the catalyst elementals were the last two enemies in sight. Only steps away from one another, it was all I could do to stand between them, striking back and forth with frost mana to keep them from meeting. When nothing else seemed to happen, I resigned myself to another loss.
No, I reminded myself. No defeatism. Try. Do better.
Even as I stabbed and slashed the two elementals, I scanned the remainder of the room as best I could, my artificially lowered Perception making the task a struggle.
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With only seconds left to spare, I finally saw it.
There.
A single, lone ant crawling towards me.
In a blur that pushed all ten pitiful points of my Dexterity to the max, I fired one final arrow.
The two elementals reached out with their amorphous limbs, sheer centimeters away from filling the room with a fiery death.
Until, all at once, they vanished.
Calculating score…
Time score: B
Health score: B
Minimum requirements met!
Gray fog swallowed me, and before I knew it, I was back in the central room of my class space, all traces of the battle left behind. After months of bashing my head against the wall, giant golden letters filled the space before me.
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE COMPLETED A CLASS TRIAL!
You have demonstrated mastery over your class skill Arcane Armament, and in doing so improved it in the process. The following upgrades have been granted:
All damage from weapon enhancements multiplied by 1.25.
All secondary effects strengthened.
Grants the ability to use up to two Arcane Armament variants concurrently.
Unlocks the ability to use advanced and composite mana types with Arcane Armament.
All basic weapon skills are now considered class-aligned until level 50, increased from the base of 40.
The majority of those bonuses had been at least somewhat expected, but it was still good to see that my expectations had been met. More than anything else, it was the ability to use advanced mana types that I was after, although I was certain that layering two mana types atop one another would greatly increase my strength as well.
The only true oddball was the final bonus, answering a question I hadn’t even realized I’d had. I’d known in theory that skills could lose their class-aligned status once they rose high enough, but I hadn’t known exactly when that would happen for me. It was mostly a moot point considering I was nowhere near level 40 in anything, but it was good to know I still had a while to go before my skill leveling would taper off.
Having finally achieved my goal, I exited my class space and moved on to my slightly more mundane daily activities.
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Something that I was slowly coming to terms with was that my improvement projects were overly functional. It had been a good two months since the three of us had started fighting scorpions, and I’d made a lot of headway on improving our living situation. Still, just about everything I’d built revolved around practicality or convenience.
Two new additions graced our prairie home, both of which followed that rationale. First, a bath. Rather than dig it directly into the ground, I’d painstakingly carved one from stone, raising it off the ground and above a fire pit to appropriately warm the water. It had taken several attempts to get the distance just right so that we ended up in hot-bath territory rather than boiling alive, but I’d gotten there eventually.
These days, I was having trouble remembering exactly why the old Tess used to have such strange hangups, but out of deference to my past self, I then built walls around the bath. No one needed to watch me bathe.
Second, I expanded our cabin. While Cal never seemed to use the building and I had my own space in the mountains, it felt wrong that we were all forced into one room when there was no shortage of space to use. Three new rooms now sprouted from the sides of the cabin, one for each of us. For starters, I’d made a chair and basic desk for each. Once I figured out enough sewing to make blankets and pillows, I’d follow that up with some bedframes.
As I got better at faking my old thought patterns, though, I belatedly realized that my choices had been somewhat uninspired. Normal, healthy people needed more than basic amenities to stay sane.
One trip to the forest later, and I had the singular tree I would need to start remedying that oversight.
Careful carving, guided by equal parts Perception and Dexterity, winnowed the large trunk down into a perfect rectangular prism. Slowly and carefully, I cut into the corners until they were gently rounded.
The next portion of my crafting session was the one I was least happy with. Having found a tree that released a sticky sap, I’d used it to cover one half of a rock and then coated the rock in desert sand. It was very far from perfect, but as I ran the sandy stone over the wood, I was happy to see that the makeshift sandpaper worked at least a little bit, smoothing down the few rough patches and corner imperfections.
From there, I summoned a thin blade and charged it with mana before cutting into the wood as if it were a loaf of bread. Slice after slice yielded dozens of wooden rectangles.
“Carving or burning?” I voiced aloud to no one. Both would work, but in the end, I decided burning would yield a more visually pleasing contrast.
It was a struggle to summon up something I could draw with until I recalled those thin needles that ninjas were supposed to throw around. With that image in mind, I pushed at Arcane Armament. There was a brief moment of pushback, but the skill conceded, and a tiny needle of fire mana appeared in my hand.
Hour after hour, I dragged the needle across the slices of wood, taking great care to only apply enough pressure and heat to blacken rather than burn. Perhaps Verin could have done a better job, but when I examined my finished work at the end, I could honestly say I’d done well.
“Huh. Should probably make a box for them too, shouldn’t I?”
Woodworking has reached level 12!
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CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE COMPLETED A CLASS TRIAL!
Five days after clearing its counterpart, I at last managed to squeeze out a victory in the Arcane Armor trial. With proof of concept that I could, in fact, push myself to finish them, my subsequent attempts yielded far better results than in the past.
It was a good thing, too. The obstacle course for the trial was particularly hellish. As best I could tell, it was built so that it was impossible to block some of the attacks, forcing me to spend half the trial in my life armor to keep the accumulated damage from finishing me off. Not that I truly minded that much, but expending enough willpower to push through the trial had been taking a toll on my energy levels. Already, I’d used three days since Cal left just to recover.
If somewhat predictably, the completion bonuses were essentially identical to the Arcane Armament bonuses.
The only true downside to finishing the trial was that it limited my options moving forward. I’d never filled out the next tier of weapon or armor skills, leaving me with only the Arcane Vision trial left for now.
Unfortunately, from what little I’d seen of the trial, it was just as involved as Mana Feet had been. I made some half-hearted attempts to clear it, but I’d yet to last more than ten minutes before an invisible spear ripped through my chest.
That, I decided, would be a problem for another day.
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On the twelfth day after her departure, Cal at last returned.
While she hadn’t managed to make it to the end of the biome, she was able to confirm that there was nothing but sand and scorpions for at least six days out. With no real reason to put things off, we decided to head out the next day.
But first, I had a surprise.
“I thought you two might want to do something fun before we left.” I pulled a simple wooden box from my inventory and presented it to the two of them. Without a hint of hesitance, Cal grabbed it immediately, leaving Verin to grumble softly. When she opened said box, her face lit up.
“Oh shit, Tess. You made these?” Cal lifted one of the wooden rectangles out of the box and displayed it for all to see. An image of a king stared back at us, one of the few pictures that was the same between my childhood and Sylum.
“Playing cards,” Verin whispered. “I hadn’t even thought to do such a thing. They’re lovely.”
Rather than spend any time admiring my artistry, Cal cut straight to the heart of things.
“Perfect! So? What are we wagering?”
The answer, as it turned out, was shots of moonshine. A good many hours later and after all manner of games were played, the three of us were drunk as skunks.
And yet, it was worth it, I thought.
When the three of us finally left for the desert, I could tell both Verin and Cal were in higher spirits than they’d been in months.
And with any luck, their moods would only brighten further from here on out. As we took our first step out of the prairie and into the desert, I could only hope our trip would prove blissfully uneventful.