Needless to say, Cal’s less-than-optimal reappearance caused something of a stir in our tiny household of three.
More than that, if I thought my reaction was bad, Verin’s was several times worse. She’d been out hunting in the desert when it all went down, and by the time she returned, I’d long since moved Cal to her bed. The very moment Verin was brought into the loop, she started flitting about, moving with a sort of nervous alacrity that I’d never seen from the noble before.
“Where would she even acquire such a wide range of different injuries? The gryphons? No. If she were hit by them, the wounds would be much deeper, and that would not explain the thinner cuts or bruising. Furthermore, they lack any form of skill to inhibit healing. Another region, then? Did she truly enter another region without breathing so much as a word to us? Foolish, foolish, foolish girl.”
Verin flung Cal’s blanket off, taking in the slumbering form of the princess beneath. Showing no care for modesty or propriety, Verin summoned a blade of ice before hacking away at the scraps of cloth and armor that had survived Cal’s ordeal. In some spots, the blood-soaked clothes had dried against her skin, necessitating greater care lest Verin end up ripping off more skin than was already missing.
“Lady Tess. If this thoughtless, half-witted, poor excuse for a princess wishes to recover without healing magic, then she can for all I care. But we will not be leaving her with open wounds to spill blood all over the floor and leave her at the mercy of rot and infection and whatever else this accursed place might have in store for her. Fetch the bandages. And a basin of water, while you’re at it. Trailing dirt all over our home... Some people…”
Already, I had a massive surplus of the necrolord’s bandages we’d looted from the desert crypt, and I removed them all, throwing them on Cal’s bedside table. Having kept my cauldron in the mountains, I was without anything that could be properly considered a “basin,” but I took out the largest of my stone bowls and filled it with Conjure Water.
“Good. Thank you.” Using a scrap of bandage as a rag, she began washing out any wound she could find. At a speed entirely at odds with her diminutive Dexterity, she then began tightly wrapping whatever portions of Cal’s body she’d thus far managed to expose. Entirely out for the count, Cal didn’t even wince a single time.
“Truly, what was she thinking? Was she that desperate to shave a few measly weeks off of our time here? How much longer does she think it will take to escape if she loses an arm or a leg or, gods forbid, her life? If she suddenly takes a turn for the worse and dies from this, do not expect any tears from me, do you understand? Come. Help me turn her over.”
As gently as we could, the two of us flipped Cal’s prone form. The moment Verin took in the state of Cal’s back, she sucked in a sibilant hiss of breath.
“Curses,” she spat out.
I expected her to elaborate on exactly what had gotten her so out of sorts, but she only continued to stare with an icy scowl.
“What is it?”
“Exactly as I said.” Gesturing to a few purple marks that I’d taken for oddly circular bruises, Verin repeated her earlier assertion. “Curses. The damned fool must have found a region made from curse mana. No wonder she resists your healing.”
Curses? Those were a thing?
Scratch that -- I distantly recalled Verin mentioning them after my birthday incident from learning the Stygian Citadel. Still, I hadn’t ever encountered any, and I certainly hadn’t known it was its own school of mana. What combination was that?
As if sensing the unspoken question, Verin came to the rescue. “A heavily intent-altered composite of death and dark mana. Hard to acquire, but infamous nonetheless. While often limited in scope at the lower levels, curses are notoriously hard to counter without specialized resistances or equipment.”
Not letting this newest revelation keep her from her task, Verin resumed her hasty treatment, soon wrapping up all of the most concerning injuries. Even having been half-transformed into a mummy, Cal never stirred.
“What now?” Was there some curse-breaking ritual they taught to nobles?
Entirely at odds with her earlier nervous energy, Verin simply shrugged. “Now, we wait. If she were under a curse of sleep, then perhaps we would require some greater plan, but the fact that she walked here on her own implies that she was not cursed into unconsciousness. She should wake. Eventually. Not that such a thing is my problem to begin with, yes?”
Thus said, Verin took one last contemptuous glare at her patient before briskly departing the room. Where she was off to, I wasn’t sure, and I had a feeling she didn’t know either.
Not quite as mortally offended by whatever Cal had done to warrant this state, I stayed behind. Flipping her back over and adjusting her as best I could, I covered her with her blanket once again.
It was strange, honestly. As best I could tell, this was the first time Cal had fallen asleep since arriving in the dungeon. Thinking back, it was only the second time I’d seen her unconscious at all. The first had been when she’d almost bled out to become a ritual sacrifice for Ephesis. I wouldn’t have even known she could pass out if not for that, but evidently, severe blood loss was enough to take her out.
Knowing Cal, I would have assumed her resting form would look different, somehow. That she would toss and turn, or start sleepwalking, or at least begin to snore.
In reality, she wore an entirely calm, at-peace expression, barely moving a muscle save for the long, deep breaths she took. Though she often projected a sort of larger-than-life persona, she looked shockingly vulnerable and small in that moment.
Which was, of course, fine. The two of us would watch over her, and in no time, I was sure she’d be back to shouting and sneaking around once more.
Not feeling entirely comfortable leaving her alone, I dragged a chair to the foot of her bed, popping a squat and leaning against the wall. If she woke up needing anything, I’d be there.
Sleep tight, pal.
----------------------------------------
God’s Eye has reached level 13!
I spent a full day staying with Cal, periodically identifying her to check on her health. Not once did it ever go down, instead continuing to slowly trickle upwards.
When she failed to wake after day one, all I could do was shrug. Cal had seemed to believe that she would recover on her own, and, her questionable choices aside, I generally trusted her. Sitting there fretting wasn’t going to accomplish anything, and I soon returned to my usual activities, making sure to check in on Cal here and there.
Despite her earlier fuss, Verin ended up spending more time with Cal than I did. On multiple occasions, I found her adjusting the room’s temperature with her frost magic, and once, I’d caught her asleep by Cal’s bedside. Tactfully, I chose not to comment.
And just like that, another two weeks passed.
With all my fiddling about with poisons, Alchemy hit the Initiate rank at last. Perhaps to be expected, my augment granted me a slight boost to the strength of my poisons.
More excitingly, I finally managed to bring Death Magic to the Apprentice rank, the last of my basic mana types to cross that hurdle. With how far away the Journeyman tier felt, it also marked the end of any easy class points and experience for me. Archery, Hammers, and Swords would eventually net me a few more, but nothing like the full 18-point windfall that my Apprentice-tier spell schools had given me.
Mental Magic and Spatial Magic were contenders, especially with the prior being at level 19, but that final level was proving to be insurmountable. Unlike all of my other spell schools, I didn’t have an Initiate-rank mental spell, forcing me to rely on Sense Minds instead. I had a sneaking suspicion that the cantrip was effectively offering me nothing at this point. The leveling speed was so horrifically slow that Spatial Magic was threatening to catch up, months of steady Mold Space and Spatial Step usage bringing the skill up to level 17.
After that, I’d be fully tapped out, which meant that I needed to be strategic with how I used my class points. Entering my class space, I surveyed all of my options.
Two skills were “new-ish,” in the sense that they’d been around for a while, but I’d only given them a cursory glance after unlocking them. The first was on the 7th tier in the Armorist room, which I’d gained access to after buying Reactive Armor. The armor rack in question was one of the stranger sets, as all the armor was hazy and translucent, as if not entirely there.
Perpetual Armor (0/5)
When not wearing existing armor, Arcane Armor now considers your skin a valid armor target. All class skills that require you to be wearing or empowering your bound or conjured armor will work at 20% efficiency even if you do not otherwise have any armor equipped.
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
Current skills this would affect:
Arcane Armory
Resist Magic
Mana Sink
Force Dispersal
Enhanced Physical Hardiness
Status Resistance
Much like its predecessor, the skill seemed to be geared towards helping me out in situations where I wasn’t wearing my armor. I was a fan in theory, as I already had a good deal of class skills it would work on. Or, reframed, I currently had a bunch of vital defenses that just flat-out wouldn’t work if my armor was off.
Plus, if I was reading the description correctly, it sounded like the defensive portion of Arcane Armory would work passively as well. Effectively, that meant my skin would provide me with as much defense as plate armor, 24/7.
Incredibly powerful in one sense, but overly situational in another. I already had Reactive Armor to summon my armor in the case of sneak attacks. As such, it was hard to imagine a case where I’d be attacked or in the midst of battle and not already wearing my armor in the first place. Admittedly, it would have helped when Warram captured me and kept me from summoning my armor, but I was really, really hoping that wasn’t going to be a recurring scenario.
Ultimately, I was sure I’d grab the skill eventually, but if my goal was making it out of the dungeon in one piece, there were better options for now.
The other newcomer was more recent, a fifth tier offering that had appeared after I bought Mana Sink in my fight with the boss of the darkness region. Of all the armor sets in the room, it was perhaps the showiest, different sections of the metal glowing in an uncountable number of different colors.
Arcane Supremacy (0/1)
Enhances the effects of Resist Magic against spells from schools of magic you have learned. This skill scales based on the differential between the caster’s magic level and yours. If hit with a spell from a composite or intent-altered mana school, you may partially defend against it using your level in the constituent mana types or sufficiently similar schools of magic.
While the description painted the skill as considerably more complicated than most of my others, it was fairly simple in the end. If my enemy was level 20 in Death Magic and I was level 50 in Death Magic, I would resist their spells even more than usual, essentially pitting our spell masteries against one another. If they instead hit me with Mud Magic, it was best if I had Mud Magic too, but I could also partially resist the spell if my Water Magic and Earth Magic was high enough.
Or even more simply, the higher my magic skills, the more magic damage I could resist.
This, too, felt like a must-purchase in the long run. If I could train up all my magic schools to absurd levels, then I could be immune to all sorts of magic attacks. With all of my magic skills sitting at around level 20, though, it wouldn’t do me much good yet. That feeling was only further compounded when I checked the price, discovering that it cost a whopping ten points to purchase. I had a feeling it was considered a cornerstone skill for Arcane Arsenals, but it was well outside my price range for now.
As no new skill had appeared after I’d bought Arcane Choker, I was thus left with the usual suspects to spend my remaining points on. I mentally listed out my options, sorely wishing that I still had Advisor Flithus to guide me.
Arcane Arsenal Skill Options
Spellsword/Swordspell - 3/5
Enhanced Weapon Skills - 0/5
Armor Penetration - 2/5
Weapon to Wand - 0/1 (Costs 3)
Magic Penetration - 0/5
Resist Magic - 4/5
Mana Sink - 1/5
Enhanced Physical Hardiness - 1/5
Force Dispersal - 2/5
Overload Resistances - 0/1 (Costs 3)
Perpetual Armor - 0/5
Arcane Supremacy - 0/1 (Costs 10)
Largely, I was leaning towards more defense. After upgrading Overload Weapon all the way, I hadn’t come across anything that I wasn’t able to damage. More than that, none of the Weaponmaster options felt that game-changing to me. If I went that route, I’d probably just dump more into spellsword or grab a single point of Magic Penetration just to see if it opened up anything new.
The choice became trickier when I examined my defensive options. If I wanted to keep using Overload Armor at full blast, then upgrading Mana Sink was a priority. Alternatively, Mana Sink scaled with how much damage I resisted via Resist Magic, so it was possibly time to finally max my resistance out. In an entirely different direction, Force Dispersal was an obvious choice if I expected to keep running into ridiculously large hard-hitting bosses.
Unfortunately, none of those would help much with poison. Overload Resistances would, but it scaled off of Enhanced Physical Hardiness, which was languishing at rank one. It also cost a full 3 points, which would bankrupt me again.
“I guess we’re doing hardiness then.” In the short term, it would boost my Poison Resistance, and in the long term, it synergized well with Overload Resistances and Perpetual Armor, making me feel like I wasn’t shooting myself in the foot or wasting points. I debated throwing one point into a different skill, but ended up going all out. If my initial experience in the jungle was anything to go off of, my Poison Resistance was not nearly high enough.
Enhanced Physical Hardiness has reached rank 4/5!
While wearing armor conjured or enhanced by Arcane Armory, all physical resistance skills are amplified by (20 +
Current bonus: 39%
Currently affected skills:
Bleed Resistance
Pain Resistance
Heat Resistance
Cold Resistance
Poison Resistance
On top of my class skill, I’d also gotten a resistance percentage multiplier of half my constitution from reaching the first Constitution threshold. The bonus stacked with my class skill additively, so with a Constitution of 36, I had an extra 18% bonus, totalling up to 57%.
Skill levels weren’t entirely linear, but that bonus effectively took my existing 19 levels of Poison Resistance and shot them all the way up to 30.
With the extra resistance and my new Cure spell, I was considerably more comfortable brewing and guzzling down all manner of poisons, too. I even swapped Conjure Liquid to one of my better batches of poison after storing enough seawater, sipping on the concoction throughout my days. It was from one such sip that I at last hit my target.
Poison Resistance has reached level 20!
Congratulations! You have reached the Apprentice rank in Poison Resistance!
Based on your skill usage, you have been granted a skill augment for reaching a new skill rank.
Augment of the Brewer
Take less damage from poisons that are identical or similar to those you have brewed in the past. Scales based on how many times you have created the poison in question.
Actually pretty handy, considering everything I’m making is from dungeon ingredients these days. In a weird way, the augment was sort of the alchemist version of mithridatism.
With the new skill level, though, I highly doubted I’d be raising the resistance any higher before we returned to the jungle. My Conjure Liquid trick might help a little, but I was long since out of the samples I’d gathered on our very brief first trip, and the poisons I’d found in the wandering woods were nothing in comparison.
To that end, I was spending more time in the toxic section of my gardens lately, trying to reduce my reliance on foraging. After washing off any possible poison residue, presently, I was returning from one such trip to make dinner.
Well before I arrived, a booming shout swept through the air.
“VICTORY!”
Cal. Dropping any thoughts of cooking, I chained spatial steps together to rush through the prairie. Even so, I was still on my way by the time she spoke next, only my heightened Perception allowing me to hear her this far out.
“Hey! Who wrapped me up like this? I could have had another level of Bleed Resistance from all this! Booo. Are either of you home? You guys are no fun.” After only a second’s pause, she started up again. “Oh, hi Veri- Ow. OW! Hey, OW!”
A new voice joined the first, radiating an icy calm.
“Is something the matter, Lady Calilah? I am merely helping you level your Bleed Resistance, as requested. Hush now. There is no need to thank me. In fact, this is rather ideal. I have prepared a number of choice words for you. To begin-”
It was impressive, in a way. All the way back when I became a Protagonist, I’d had the entirety of the Common language beamed directly into my head. That included curse words and a good number of insults, too.
Even so, the ever-proper Verin’Sylus managed to teach me a whole slew of new thinly-veiled jabs. Interspersed with her scathing words was the start of a much more proper yet equally withering lecture.
“And do you know how long you’ve been out for? How long we have been watching over you? And yet the first thing you do when you wake up is complain about your bandages, of all things? Lady Calilah, with all due deference to the royal family of Ftheran and without the intent to cast aspersions on your royal lineage, might I kindly suggest that your parents were-”
Having finally reached the cabin, I burst into Cal’s room to find the warrior liberally coated in ice chips. One Verin’Sylus was hunched over the bed with an icicle in her hand.
“Tess, save me! Verin missed me so much she’s gone mad! I mean, entirely understandable, and yet-”
A small ball of hail to the forehead cut off whatever else Cal was about to say as Verin straightened herself out. She immediately appeared reluctant to continue her earlier speech, but her icy glare made it clear that she still had some choice words saved up for the future.
For now, though, all of that could wait.
“Hi Cal. Glad you’re awake. What happened?”
At this, the rogue-turned-warrior beamed.
“Hi Tess! And thank you so much for asking. Come on, come on. Take a seat and I’ll tell you everything.” Once we were arrayed to her liking, Cal then sat up in her bed with a gleam in her eyes.
“As it so happens, I cleared a new region. Here’s how it went down…”