After sending a quick message to her mother in case she didn’t survive to see her again, Dyani silenced her message notifications and got to work.

She internally reviewed everything she’d learned about skill creation.

Skills were similar to enchantments or spells, specific magical constructs that used mana or stamina to produce the desired effect. They had various components, each of which performed a necessary function.

Conduits were thin strands that carried the energy from place to place. Most other components were made of them.

The skill’s Input was a heavy duty conduit that connected the entire skill structure to the edge of the skill slot, and beyond, to the spirit’s resource pools. Without it, there would be no way to charge the skill. Each skill slot had a permanent input, making it one of the few components that she didn’t need to create herself.

Outputs were a bit more complicated. Each skill slot had a permanent output, positioned opposite the input, and most skills used that to project their effect outside the body. However, any skills that targeted the user themselves required Dyani to create custom outputs that directed the energy where it was needed. She was still fairly unpracticed at that, but fortunately, she didn’t need to make use of custom outputs today.

Valves controlled the direction of energy flow, usually only allowing it to pass in one direction. Every skill had at least one value, positioned right by the skill’s input, to keep any mana or stamina you put in from leaking back into their respective pools and causing a backlash.

Gates also controlled energy flow, but they did so by only allowing specific types of energy to pass, only stamina, only mana, only specific affinities of mana, and so on. They could also be set to open or close entirely based on feedback from other components. This allowed more complicated skills to activate different subsections independently.

A good example of this was the Prehensile Hair skill. It had three different effects, moving your hair, reinforcing your hair, and stimulating hair growth, which could be activated together or separately, thanks to a combination of gates and the next component type.

Converters altered mana affinities, taking whatever the user put in and converting it into whatever type the skill required, with some mana loss, depending on how different the required mana type was from whatever you put in. Technically, you could leave the converter out and power a skill with any kind of mana, but the effects of using fire mana on a water skill would be inefficient at best, and catastrophic at worst.

Touchpoints were the component type Dyani had used the least, mostly because she didn’t need them. For the average user, they allowed a degree of control into how a skill operated, such as toggling specific effects on and off, or allowing the kind of fine control that using an elemental manipulation skill required.

Even with skills without touchpoints, the user had some forms of control, but that generally boiled down to controlling where the skill activated and how much power was used. Without a talent like Dyani’s, or an astounding amount of mana control, touchpoints were vital for the function of more versatile skills.

Next was the skill component most closely related to ordinary enchanting, Runes.

Instead of flat images, the runes used within skills were three dimensional, and they comprised the bulk of a skill’s structure and were the largest factor when determining a skill’s effect.

If used alone, runes could only produce the most rudimentary effects, but Modifiers and Monitors allowed much greater specificity and versatility.

Modifiers were placed within runes to tell it exactly how to behave. The base rune of mana bolt simply told the skill to condense mana, which by itself wasn’t very useful. It took a modifier to bestow the condensed ball of mana with the velocity necessary to work as a projectile.

Monitors kept track of specific factors both within and without the skill’s structure. Combined with modifiers, they allowed skills to react to changes in circumstances, like how Dyani’s own Thermostat skill monitored her internal temperature, and heated or cooled her body when necessary.

Modifiers and monitors could do a lot to alter how a skill functioned, but they couldn’t outright circumvent the overall effect of the rune they were attached to.

If a skill incorporated an earth moving rune, it would move earth. You could use modifiers to change how, when, and where the effect occurred, such as only targeting sand, moving to towards or away from something. You could even create something as sophisticated as a passive skill that automatically repelled sand from the user’s eyes, but the skill’s base function would always involve moving earth.

It normally took her days or even weeks to create a new, fully functional skill, but she’d either created or intensely studied these skills, which was more than enough to bypass most of the testing and trial and error.

The only exception was the skill shard she’d received today, Exclusive Mana Sight, dropped by that purple snake monster right before Pikawon poisoned her. She set that one aside for now, still within reach, in case she needed to reference one of its simpler components.

She picked up Mana Bolt. It was the only projectile skill she had, so it was the obvious choice for the base of a new skill.

As Dyani once again examined the Mana Bolt’s internal structure, she grew increasingly confident she could create her own version, one similar enough that her interface would simply identify it as Mana Bolt. That was a good start, but insufficient to her current opponent.

Attacks that used pure mana had a few advantages over other mana types.

They were among the best at disrupting the mana constructs, including spells, enchantments, and the spirit itself.

They tended to have lower mana costs, probably because most people’s mana pools were largely pure, so the skill didn’t have to convert as much mana to the appropriate affinity.

Many pure mana skills could even phase through physical objects, making them perfect for striking from behind cover or through unenchanted armor.

But they had just as many disadvantages.

They carried little to no physical energy, no force, heat, cold, light, sound, or corrosion, and were thus poorly suited to damaging the body.

Most important in Dyani’s current situation was the issue that, because pure mana skills usually only affected mana, their level of effectiveness scaled with the relative level of the target. If you were more powerful than your opponent, pure mana could incapacitate the spirit, or even tear it apart.

But if you were less powerful, your opponent’s denser mana would rebuff your pure mana attack like a pebble bouncing off an iron shield.

Of course, fighting higher level monsters was going to be difficult, no matter the affinity of your attack skills, but skill with physical effects were still a better choice.

Dyani was still planning to incorporate much of Mana Bolt’s structure, specifically the parts for conjuring and propelling a projectile of dense mana. She just needed a different affinity, and effect.

She toyed with the idea of a force affinity bolt, but eventually rejected the idea. She didn’t have any way to focus the force into a small enough area to pierce the Evolved False Hydra’s hide. Blade affinity would be a good choice for that, but she had no experience using it, and didn’t want to make a mistake and slash herself up.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The stamina powered skills were of little use. She still struggled to make anything useful that ran on stamina, and now wasn’t the time to experiment. Even if she suddenly mastered the ability, stamina skills tended to affect the user’s own body. Unless she had a bow, or some other ranged weapon, enhancing her own body wouldn’t do much to help her fight a monster so far away.

She supposed there might be a stamina skill for climbing that would help her reach the monster, but she didn’t want to get close to all those heads. Dyani shuddered at the thought of being consumed and having her own head added to the rest. Hopefully anything incorporated was truely dead, with only their head being puppeted. Spending the rest of her life limbless and trapped was a terrifying thought.

Hopefully she could make a powerful enough skill, that she’d never need to find out if that was possible.

After discarding the stamina skills, she was left with heat or crystal based skills.

If she combined the rune from Crystallize Mana with the modifiers from Mana Bolt that designated speed and direction, she could create a physical projectile. Mana crystals weren’t as durable as real stone, so they’d most likely shatter when they struck, but that might even be better. The physical crystal would wound the body, and the released mana could affect the spirit.

The diffuse energy released by breaking a mana crystal would be less effective as a spiritual attack than mana bolt, but every bit helped. It might be possible to use another mana affinity and include a secondary effect when the crystal’s mana was released, like a lightning mana crystal that shocked or a heat crystal that burned, but she had no idea how to create that second effect, so she stuck with pure mana.

Within minutes, she had a working version of the skill.

* Crystal Mana Bolt (Unique)

* Type: Attack, Ranged, Conjuration

* Affinity: Pure

* Range: Medium

* Cost: Low Mana

* Effect: Shoots a projectile of crystallized mana.

The only difference between her new skill’s effect description and Mana Bolt’s was that ‘compressed mana’ was replaced with ‘crystallized mana’, but she was still happy with the result.

Dyani was confident that no one could track her by her spiritual presence or skill use within the turbulent mana close to the Proto-Mana Node, but she still wanted to avoid making unnecessary noise.

So, instead of testing the skill at full strength, she altered the speed of the projectile to nearly nothing and bounced a few slow moving crystals off the wall. Once she was satisfied, she increased the speed back to the same value as Mana Bolt. After a moment of consideration, she pushed it just a touch higher to add a bit more power in each attack without increasing the mana cost too much.

Even with a new attack, Dyani didn’t feel amazing about her odds. She didn’t want to waste time, but she reminded herself that proper preparation was just as essential to a warrior as a fine weapon.

With regret, she dismissed Crystallize Distilled Mana from her spirit. It was the most useful and complicated skill she’d created so far, but was useless in combat. She could remake it after she slayed the guardian. She would’ve preferred creating a skill core for the skill, but since Crystallize Distilled Mana the skill that she used to make those, that wasn’t possible without creating a copy of the skill to feed it through.

The skill slot needed time to recover, time which Dyani used to plan out her next creation.

Instead of crystal, this time she opted for a heat-based skill. She’d spent weeks studying Feverish and Lukewarm Chill Flesh in order to create Thermostat, and that time showed its worth now.

She was confident that she could create a Heat Bolt skill by including the mana condensing rune from Mana bolt, replacing the modifiers designed to push pure mana into the target with the heat generating rune from Feverish, and various other components.

That might be enough, but she wanted more.

So far, the maximum number of runes she’d incorporated into a skill was two, and she’d only managed that with a single skill, Thermostat. The skill incorporated a rune for generating heat and one for moving heat out of the body, the joint functions allowing the skill to defend against both heat and cold.

The potential skill Dyani had in mind would require at least three runes, possibly four. She wanted to take advantage of the heat moving rune by creating a skill that shot two, separate mana bolts that transmitted heat between the locations each struck, burning one and freezing the other.

Dyani formed twin mana condensing runes, with a heat moving rune between them. For the first time in weeks, she struggled to keep a skill’s structure stable. While her skill slots had a stabilizing influence on incomplete skills, that was insufficient to hold together a skill as large as this one at her current level. She had to hold it together manually, all while adding her changes.

She managed to add the necessary components to create twin bolts of compressed heat mana, but lost hold of the skill when she tried to link them together, through the heat moving rune.

“Shatter!” she swore as mana slipped through her proverbial fingers. Her skill slot’s energy drained away, leaving it as barren as when she’d dismissed Crystallize Distilled Mana.

She comforted herself with the fact that at least now she had time to refine her design. During her first attempt, the skill had broken down when she’d connected the second mana bolt to the heat moving rune. While she couldn’t form a copy of that rune at the moment, she did have one available.

She rolled Lukewarm Chill Flesh over in her fingers, her sense of touch mapping out the shard’s physical dimensions while her spirit examined the skill within.

Relying on her instinctive understanding of skill structures granted by her level 2 talent, Dyani examined the heat moving rune from every angle. While her failure to create the skill she wanted might simply be a matter of losing control of the mana, the fact that it had occurred right when she tried to connect three runes she’d created together suggested there might be another factor at play.

A quick glance at the rune in front of her provided some basic information. This rune was designed to move heat from one location to another. It worked best when powered by heat mana, but she got the impression that other mana types could function as well, like fire or ice mana. She wasn’t sure how that would alter the rune’s function. It was something worth experimenting with, but not the current issue.

She dove deeper, examining each twisting line. A stabbing pain started behind one eye, but a bit of pain wasn’t enough to stop her. There was something here, some necessary insight just out of reach.

Her attention was caught by a diagonal line running through the rune. It was straight and completely free of modifiers or other components. She started and nearly dropped the skill shard when she realized why that was. This ordinary, downright boring line was the center of the whole skill. It couldn’t be modified, not if the user wanted the rune to function at all. It was a visual representation of the flow of energy, in this case heat.

Her suspicions were confirmed when she looked at the much more complicated sections at either end of the heat transfer line. Each side specified locations, one to pull heat from and another to send heat to. The amount of heat moved was largely a function of how much mana the skill accepted.

Within her own skill that utilized this rune, she’d switched out the modifiers for location with those already in place, never realizing that those positions were vital to the functionality of the rune.

And while she’d defaulted to using the same input sections, or variables, with her new skill, it was now blatantly obvious why the rune had broken down when she’d designated the two mana bolts as variables.

Dyani had never been good at math, more from lack of interest than lack of intelligence, but she still recalled the concept of formulas with input variables, mostly because one of the examples her math teacher had used was designed to calculate the destructive effect of a Flare spell, based on the amount of mana used.

Blowing stuff up was much more interesting than math.

Like that formula, this rune had input variables and a result based on them, but she’d been trying to enter a variable of the wrong type.

Instead of locations to move heat between, she’d included two mana condensing runes. And while the mana bolts those runes created would have locations in space when the skill was used, the heat moving rune didn’t have the ability to calculate their relative locations at the moment of impact.

In terms of the Flare spell formula, it was the equivalent of entering the user’s level into the variable for amount of mana and expecting the formula to properly calculate the power output. Sure, it was a related piece of information, but not the one that was called for.

Someday she might have the knowledge and inclination to incorporate complex calculations into a skill, but her newfound understanding of this rune gave her another idea, one that would be much easier to create and use in combat.

She failed one more time while trying to create it, but this time the reason had nothing to do with incorrect variables.

She released the nearly complete skill when she heard panting breaths and the clicking of claws on stone. Dyani scrambled to her feet and had her halberd halfway out of her bag when she recognized a familiar, blue glow.

Dyani was surprised to see Pikawon turn the corner, followed closely by her mother.

She dropped her halberd back into her dimensional backpack, raised a hand, and shot out a Crystal Mana Bolt.