“Alright Cal, it’s clear. Let's see what we’ve got.”
Callestris Flintheart dutifully came out from behind a boulder and approached the scene of devastation. Hosts of Barbegazi lay dead, burned, sliced, crushed, or riddled with arrows. The monsters were blue and hairless, like monkeys without tails, with icicle teeth that were already melting.
He touched the first of the bodies, reaching for the lingering experience trapped inside, and activated his skill, Hand of the Harvest.
Golden light wisped up from the body and its skin peeled away, combining and coalescing into a blue, leather glove. All that remained of the monster was a shriveled, blackened, and crumbling husk.
* Frost Gnome Glove (Uncommon)
* Level: 3
* Condition: Perfect
* Description: Drains heat from the user’s body to increase the potency of ice or cold based abilities.
Callestris tossed the glove to Augustus, his team leader, before touching another corpse and using his skill again.
When it became clear that the central theme of Callestris’s talent was getting loot from monsters instead of fighting them, he’d purchased and absorbed the most detailed and comprehensive guide to monster materials he could find. It had been expensive, but when you came from his family, money was rarely an obstacle.
Cal knew from the information he’d absorbed into his interface that the most valuable part of the Barbegazi were their teeth, so this time he focused on those.
The body shriveled and crumbled to dust, all except the teeth, which stopped melting and gleamed with newfound strength.
“Take a look at these, Hallanea. Think they’d make good arrowheads?”
The team’s archer and primary damage dealer, took the teeth from him and considered.
“It’d take a fletcher to shape them properly, I can’t do it, but I think you’re right. Assuming they don’t melt, I can see them being very useful.”
Cal smiled at the affirmation of his usefulness, even if it was only after a fight was over.
Getting a new team would be easy, but switching teams after only a couple of missions felt like giving up. Cal had insisted, against his father’s advice, on signing up with the most powerful team that would take him, not realizing that level 5’s and 6’s were only interested in his utility to their team, not his combat abilities.
* Name: Callestris Flintheart
* Level: 3.2
* Experience: 12%
* Attributes:
* Mana Capacity: 1
* Mana Regeneration: 0
* Magic Power: 0
* Strength: 1
* Speed: 0
* Endurance: 1
* Vitality: 1
* Mind: 0
* Toughness: 1
* Perception: 0
* Talents:
1. You have an additional experience reservoir of the same size as your standard reservoir. Any experience stored in this reservoir cannot be used to advance.
2. Gain Skill: Hand of the Harvest. (This skill occupies your level 2 skill slot).
* Talent Skills:
* Hand of the Harvest (Unique)
* Type: Harvest
* Affinity: Wealth
* Range: Touch
* Cost: Variable Mana
* Effect: Extracts and refines desired materials. This is a versatile harvest skill, which may be used on all types of resources, though the mana efficiency of this skill is initially very low. The first harvest-type skill you absorb each level will be consumed to increase the efficiency of this skill when harvesting related materials.
* Consumed skills and related materials:
* Blood Money - Experience
* Butcher - Meat
* Extract Metal - Metal
* Skill Slots:
* Pulse (Common)
* Type: Attack, Ranged, Area of Effect
* Affinity: Force
* Range: Medium
* Cost: Moderate Mana
* Effect: Releases a pulse of kinetic energy from your body in all directions.
* Occupied by Talent Skill: Hand of the Harvest.
* Blood Reaper (Very Rare)
* Type: Attack, Melee, Harvest, Conjuration, Healing
* Affinity: Blood, Blade
* Range: Touch (via Weapon)
* Cost: Moderate stamina
* Effect: Increases the penetrative power of an attack with a bladed weapon. If the weapon makes contact with the target’s blood, this attack absorbs a small amount of health from the target, which is condensed into a floating sphere of blood. This sphere can be absorbed by anyone who touches it to gain a small, instantaneous healing effect.
Harvesting most of the other Barbegazi only gave ice affinity mana crystals, which were useful enough to enchanters and crafters, but not very interesting. One did drop a necklace with a cold resistance effect, but Cal guessed the frost opal it was set with would be more valuable on its own than the item itself. The guild appraisers would decide, since no one on the team needed the item.
He deposited all items and money into his right pocket, which contained a dimensional space he used to carry team loot. That loot was always split three ways, with none going to Cal, though the rest of his team didn’t know that. It just felt dirty to take anything from the three real slayers when his family stipend was higher than what all of them earned from completing jobs and looting monsters put together.
“Well done, Cal,” Augustus said with a clap on the shoulder, “You continue to impress.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“For the hundredth time, call me Augustus, or Wardscore, or really anything but Sir. Makes me feel old.”
“Of course, sir.”
Augustus sighed, but Hallanea and Grayson both chuckled. Cal smiled at the reaction. At moments like these, he almost felt like a real part of the team.
“Anyway!” Augustus said with a glare for his still laughing teammates, “I just wanted to say that your harvest abilities are consistently better than the pendants we used to use, and we’re grateful for it.”
Cal knew his harvesting skill was exceptional, even if he sometimes resented it. Most harvest skills that worked on monsters were limited in what they could produce. The most common were Blood Money and Reinvestment. Blood Money produced notes and mana crystals from a monster’s experience, but didn’t do anything with their body. Loot pendants were just a worse version of the same skill. Reinvestment used experience to increase the quality of the monster’s body as a whole, but wasn’t easily focused into specific parts.
Cal’s talent skill, Hand of the Harvest, could do all of that, but could also create entirely new items, without the need for him to control or direct the process. He could even drain all the mana and experience from any part of the monster he didn’t need to enhance what he actually wanted. For anyone else, the wealth they could earn would be outstanding. For Cal, it was a drop in the bucket.
“Agreed. I like my hat you got me,” Grayson said, patting the shapeless, gray hat Cal had harvested from a Bog Troll. Hallanea groaned.
“Again with the hat. Why are you even wearing it right now? It's so ugly.”
“It’s gray, I’m Grayson,” Grayson said, like it was the most obvious explanation in the world. The real reason was clear to Cal. It irritated Hallanea, a fact she continued to prove as she pulled out her bow and tried to shoot the hat off of his head.
Despite its unimpressive appearance, the hat was one of the better items Cal had created. It granted its user the ability to walk on water.
There were no bodies of water in sight.
***
In the next few weeks, Dyani made impressive progress on discovering new ways to fail at making skills, between fighting increasing numbers of monsters. It turned out that cobbling together a new skill from the bits and pieces she learned from Lukewarm Chill Flesh and Feverish was orders of magnitude more difficult than copying the Jump skill, and she hadn’t even managed to do that.
Dyani was coming to suspect that her skills destabilizing after one use had more to do with errors in their design than an inherent limitation of her talent. She’d managed to create a less powerful and cheaper version of Haste to see how long she could keep a skill active. It had lasted just under five minutes before slowly losing efficiency until it reached the breaking point.
While her ability to sense skill structures and reshape her spirit had been straightforward and obvious, the intuitive understanding of skill structures her talent mentioned hadn’t become apparent until Dyani drew out the simplest pattern, one that all three skills incorporated near the energy input.
To her, it was obvious that this was the equivalent of a one-way valve, allowing mana or stamina to pass one way, but resisting anything flowing back the other direction.
Even with much more knowledge of runes and enchanting, Pikawon hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of it.
It had quickly proved necessary when Dyani failed to incorporate it and suffered an immediate, mild backlash.
Overcharged skills could cause a backlash, an experience with a variety of symptoms, including pain, loss of mana control, temporarily being unable to use the overcharged skill, and even permanent spiritual damage.
As to the relationship between the valve and backlash, after a bit of research Dyani found that backlash was caused by an influx of mana, especially mana with a different affinity than the mana in the core. Stamina backlash had no complications from incompatible affinities, but caused damage to both the spirit and body.
Nearly all skills altered the affinity of the mana used to power them, and the one-way valves prevented any of the transformed mana from feeding back into the core, as long as someone didn’t overwhelm it with the pressure caused by overcharging a skill.
Another common component was a gate, coded to allow only specific types of energy to pass through. Each skill had a gate at the input. The Jump skill only accepted stamina, while the two heat related skills accepted most forms of mana, as long as the affinity wasn’t too dissimilar to heat mana.
Dyani’s mana was skill pure, so it should theoretically be compatible, but if she had something like ice or cold mana, the gate most likely wouldn’t accept it.
Further along, the two heats skills also had a component that Dyani was calling a converter, to transform the mana into the appropriate type. It was a spiral shape, with heat affinity mana running through the spiral and the input mana running in a line through the center. At the end was another gate with much stricter requirements, which accepted any mana that had been successfully transformed into heat mana. The rejected mana was sent back through the spiral repeatedly until it was completely converted.
The Jump skill had something different. Either stamina couldn’t be converted, or this skill shard wasn’t set up to do it. Instead, it had a gate that accepted most of the stamina, while sending some back into the body. Dyani hadn’t ever heard about there being different types or affinities of stamina, but it seemed some portions of it weren’t useful for bodily movement.
Once a skill was powered and the energy was converted, things got more complicated.
The energy passed through a series of structures that drew out the overall shape of a rune, though they were three dimensional instead of flat.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Dyani could get a sense of what those structures were doing, but she still had no idea how they were doing it. Somehow, these runes instructed the mana on what it was supposed to do when it was released.
Even more interesting were the modifiers that changed how and where the effect was located, and the monitors that reached out from the skill structure into her greater spirit to gather information and determine which modifiers were active at any given time.
Both the heat-type skills used similar runes, one to generate heat and another to move it, but their modifiers and monitors were completely different.
The Feverish skill had modifiers that set the target of the skill to the user’s own body, but there were damaged sections where something had been ripped out when the skill was shattered, presumably where monitors of the body’s current temperature would prevent the skill from overheating the user.
The Lukewarm Chill Flesh had the opposite problem. The modifiers that instructed the skill to move heat out of the target instead of increasing it worked perfectly fine, but it had additional monitors that were initially connected to a different rune, one that this skill no longer possessed. Those imposed unnecessary restrictions on the skill, not allowing it to reduce the level of heat past one monitor’s reading of the ambient temperature or target anything but meat.
And finally, there was an output, where the transformed and instructed energy was released to do whatever the skill required.
As far as she could tell, that was all skills were; inputs, outputs, valves, gates, converters, runes, modifiers, and monitors.
They were all the skill components that Dyani could identify, but even with that knowledge, she still made plenty of mistakes.
The conduits, like little pipes, looked simple at a glance, but even they had variety and complexity. Firstly, they weren’t hollow. Instead, their core was made of braided threads of conductive mana, while the outside was a tight spiral of insulating mana.
And the mana in the channels had subtly different properties depending on the energy they were supposed to contain. The input conduits were thicker, with additional insulation, to handle the varieties of energy that could enter the skill, while the channels used after mana was converted had specific properties to better contain and move that affinity of mana.
The change wasn’t sufficient to call the mana a new affinity, but it was similar. The inner conduits that carried heat mana had a touch of heat, and the insulation had a touch of cold, but it was so subtle that Dyani was sure she would’ve missed it if her talent hadn’t helped.
Even the channels within components could vary. The most obvious were the channels in converters. The channels input mana ran through had much less insulation, while the insulation on the spirals had a property like a valve, letting their heat affinity mana out, but not accepting any mana in, to preserve their high level of heat affinity that allowed the conversion process to work.
The converted compensated for this mana loss by pumping a portion of the newly affinitied mana back into the spiral, but that was mana that couldn’t be used to directly power the skill.
Powering skills with dissimilar mana lowered their efficiency, and this seemed to be where that occurred, but if more heat mana wasn’t pumped in, the converter eventually stopped working and no new mana could enter the skill, causing a buildup of pressure that either broke the skill, caused a backlash, or both.
Dyani had experienced that, and a thousand other issues as she experimented. Channels ripped open and dumped mana directly into her spirit. Gates failed and let pure mana inside, which ran through the rune and its modifiers, only to be released with no effect other than to drain her pool. On one memorable occasion, she’d put a valve in backwards and had the entire skill structure broken down and dumped into her core.
Pikawon had to jump in and save Dyani multiple times, when a skill failure left her vulnerable to attack, something he seemed to enjoy, since it gave him something to complain about.
But finally, Dyani managed to create a skill that not only worked as intended, but remained after it was used.
* Mana Jump - Variant of Jump (Unique)
* Type: Mobility
* Affinity: Force
* Range: Self
* Cost: Low Mana
* Effect: Propels the user in a desired direction.
She’d been forced to rework and adapt the skill to work with mana, since she didn’t have enough experience with stamina based skills to fully understand how they worked, especially when their output was integrated into the user’s biology, but she was happy with the result.
The skill was no longer dependent on her actually jumping. All she had to do was fuel the skill to have her entire body propelled in a desired direction. It was a major achievement, but one that came with even more work.
Dyani might know all about how the magic of the Mana Jump skill worked better than anyone alive, but that didn’t mean she was any good at using it.
“I’d give that a nine out of ten. You need to stick the landing.”
Dyani groaned and growled, peeling herself off the wall.
“Maybe, instead of making fun of me, you could help.”
“How exactly would I do that?”
“You could…Shut up!”
“My dearest Lady Farlight, that is the one thing I cannot do.”
Since her hands were already filthy, Dyani had no problem scrapping a bit of muck from the wall and throwing it at Pikawon. He yelped and jumped back, but bits of mud still splattered his legs and shoes.
It turned out Pikawon could help. Chasing him down with dirty hands outstretched was excellent practice at using her skill, at least until the came across a monster that looked like a stretched out guinea pig with dozens of feet and long, luxurious, golden hair.
Pikawon jumped right over the monster, which was too surprised to snare him. It hissed in outrage and reached its hair out to Dyani.
Still running on instinct from the chase, Dyani managed to activate her skill to jump backward, barely stumbling over the uneven stones.
“Don’t get caught, the hair’s strong.” Along with the words, Pikawon sent over a description of the monster, which she didn’t have time to read. She trusted her friend to tell her anything relevant.
* Tanglepillar:
* Level: 3
* Creature Type: Monster, Beast
* Affinities: Hair
* Description: A long, many legged mammal with long hair, which it uses to ensnare and constrict prey. Tanglepillar hair has high durability and low mana conductivity and is useful in weaving cloth armor.
“Got it. Let’s do Bouncing Ball.”
Bouncing Ball was one of the few strategies the pair had come up with. It was simple. Whoever the monster was facing would retreat, while the other attacked, alternating as needed. The strategy was best for single monsters in tight spaces, not that they ever got to fight anywhere else.
Dyani retreated, waving her spear to keep the Tanglepillar’s attention, while Pikawon tested a floating lock of the monster’s hair with Sundering Claw. He managed to cut a few strands, but most were undamaged.
That was bad. Getting close enough to be caught wasn’t an option, but neither of them had ranged abilities.
“I can barely get through it. We should retreat.”
“Not happening.” Dyani’s blood was pumping. She grinned. These monsters were so rarely a challenge, especially once the two had teamed up. This was the perfect opportunity to push themselves.
“Then what? I’m not dying to a hamster rope.”
The Tanglepillar turned to Pikawon, giving Dyani a chance to test her own weapon. To her disappointment, her bloodletting spear had finished repairing itself with absorbed blood, and hadn’t improved in quality past that, lacking a growth quality like her interface or armor. But it was still a useful weapon, even underleveled.
She lunged forward, using her own body along with Mana Jump, but the Tanglepillar’s hair formed a sheet to block the blow and immediately started winding around the shaft.
It was similar to how some of the False Hydra’s had climbed up the spear, something Dyani had enlisted Pikawon’s help with defending against.
She injected mana into the wooden shaft, and a chain of identical runes down its length flashed to life, pushing outward.
The hair was forced away. It was durable, but didn’t have anything more than human strength.
Dyani shoved forward before the Tanglepillar could recover, drawing blood before she was forced to retreat. Pikawon threw a rock the size of his head at the monster, disorienting it enough for Dyani to strike another blow.
After four more successful spear attacks, and two activations of the shaft’s force enchantment, her mana pool was nearly empty, but the Tanglepillar was lagging.
Its reactions were sluggish enough that Pikawon got a few strikes in, only having to cut himself free once.
They were both exhausted when the Tanglepillar writhed one final time and released its experience.
Absorbing experience had long since become an instinct, which was good since it took Dyani a minute to switch out of combat mode. She absorbed about a third of the dense experience of the level three monster before her core reached its capacity, putting her on the edge of Level 2.2.
* Name: Dyani Farlight
* Level: 2.1
* Experience: 100%
* Attributes:
* Mana Capacity: 0
* Mana Regeneration: 0
* Magic Power: 0
* Strength: 0
* Speed: 0
* Endurance: 0
* Vitality: 1
* Mind: 1
* Toughness: 0
* Perception: 0
* Talents:
1. You gain two skill slots per level, instead of one. You cannot absorb skills.
2. You have increased sensitivity to and intuitive understanding of skill structures. You may alter and reshape your internal spiritual structure more easily and with reduced risk.
* Talent Skills:
* None
* Skill Slots:
* Mana Jump (Unique)
* Type: Mobility
* Affinity: Force
* Range: Self
* Cost: Low Mana
* Effect: Propels the user in a desired direction.
* Empty
* Empty
* Empty
“You are crazy. Pikawon said, kicking the Tanglepillar’s body, “You know we have higher level inspectors that can deal with these? We don’t need to risk our lives to kill the manifestation of a good hair day.”
“Slayer’s don’t get to pick their battles. What if it killed someone before another inspector could find it? What if it climbed up a ladder into the city? It had enough legs to do it.”
“What if it did?” He shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal.
“You think a civilian could kill that thing? Besides, we took it down easy.” That was an obvious lie, as both of them were still panting, and Dyani could feel the beginnings of a low mana headache.
“We are civilians,” he pointed out.
Dyani was saved from further argument as the remaining experience coalesced into a sphere of amber crystal.
“Hah! Look at that. If we hadn’t killed it, we wouldn’t have gotten a new skill.”
Pikawon plucked up the skill core and rolled his eyes before tossing it to Dyani.
“Whatever would we do without such a legendary power?”
Since he’d forgotten she couldn’t identify the skill, she tapped the side of her head.
“Oh yeah. Better brace yourself.”
A moment later she had a message with the skill’s description.
* Skill Core: Prehensile Hair (Uncommon)
* Type: Manipulation
* Affinity: Hair
* Range: Short
* Cost: Low Mana (Movement) / Moderate Mana (Increase Durability or Stimulate Growth)
* Effect: Manipulate hair attached to your body. You may infuse your hair with additional mana to increase its durability or stimulate growth.
“Maybe it can teach me more about skill structure. And if it’s really useless to us, I’m sure we could sell it to a bald guy.”
“They make potions to regrow hair. They’re not even expensive, just a little problematic.”
“Problematic?”
Pikawon smirked.
“Hair growth tonics grow all your hair, not just the stuff on top of your head. My uncle lost his hair in an enchanting explosion, and didn’t read the tonic’s description before he used it. His wife was cutting and shaving for hours, and took plenty of pictures. Let’s just say that eyelashes shouldn’t go past your chin.”
Dyani should be disgusted, but honestly she was really curious.
“Any chance you could sneak back home and get the pictures?”
Pikawon’s lightheartedness shriveled up and died.
“I doubt anyone’s at home. Most of the family moved up to the palace when the city lord brought me in. After I escape, I doubt they’re allowed to leave the grounds, and if they are, it’ll only be as bait.”
Now they were both depressed. He talked about it so rarely that Dyani often forgot why her friend was living down here.
“I’m sorry. If you want to talk about it some more…”
He was silent for half a minute.
“Any idea how to harvest this hair? The description said it was good for weaving, so you could probably sell it to your friend in the pawn shop.” Hoss was their go to for selling anything they found down here. They could turn loot in at their job, but when they did that, they only got a fraction of its value.
Dyani thought they could probably skin it here, if cutting the hair at its base was too difficult, but she had another idea.
“Let’s take it back to the base. We can figure it out there.”
She’d been steadily gathering experience for the past two weeks, mostly from monsters, but also a little from increasing her ability with creating skills, since that exercised her spirit like any type of crafting. And while she didn’t know Pikawon’s exact status, she hadn’t felt any progress.
He didn’t want to eat living mushrooms and diseased rats, which she wholeheartedly agreed with, but besides it being dead, the Tanglepillar looked as healthy as a beloved pet. She didn’t want to push him into doing anything, but if the monster was skinned and cleaned and Dyani left, she hoped he would take the initiative and eat it.
It was at least worth a try.