Elise took a deep breath and lowered her sword. She was glad to have won the fight, but in some ways it felt unsatisfying. If Howard had been even somewhat competent with his skills, and hadn’t telegraphed his every move, she would have stood no chance. She looked over to Howard, who was kneeling on the floor in disbelief.
“How... how...” he muttered. He looked up at Elise like he wanted to kill her for real. “You cheated. At the end there, you used a skill.”
Elise shook her head. “I didn’t. You’re just so predictable with how you use your skills, even a child could guess what you were about to do.” This was an obvious lie, but Howard’s temper was running too hot to not be inflamed by Elise’s every word. Now that the fight was over, she didn’t have any real reason to make him mad beyond her personal satisfaction. Still, it was certainly satisfying.
“That doesn’t explain how you—” Howard started, but Elise cut him off.
“Mirage blink. That skill you used at the end, it was Mirage Blink. You made it too easy to tell, it was just a matter of reacting to it in time.” Howard was dumbstruck, not understanding how Elise could have possibly known what skill he’d tried to use.
“You put up a good fight,” Elise continued, “for your first time using a sword.” Elise tried to sound as serious as possible when saying this, like she truly believed Howard had never held a sword in her life. In response, Howard stripped off his leather armor and chucked it at Elise, before giving her a few choice words.
“You bitch. You think you can cheat like that and embarrass a Yeltal? Do you know how much of this city we own?”
“Enlighten me.” Elise knew she was meant to feel threatened at the prospect of angering a noble family, but in truth his provocations only made Elise more certain that sparring the boy had been the right thing to do. She was going to get on the nobles’ bad side eventually anyway, might as well get some entertainment out of it.
“You...You...” stammered Howard, frustrated at Elise indignance. “You’ll regret this.” He stormed off, shoving past the other students as he exited the training grounds. Elise examined her class, waiting til Howard was out of earshot before clapping her hands and addressing them.
“Alright. Who wants to tell me what Howard did wrong?”
~~~
Most of the class was spent analyzing the fight, as the students nit picked details of Elise’s stance, Howard’s skill usage, Elise’s response to unfamiliar skills, and more. There was a bit of light sparring done in the last ten minutes, but most of the class time went towards discussion. Elise was thankful for that, as her legs were again screaming at her to stop all physical activity for the foreseeable future.
“Alright, and that’s time. Good job everyone, tomorrow I’ll finish going over stances and we can have a full session dedicated to sparring.” Elise dismissed her students and they all tarried off in groups of two or three, likely heading to grab an early lunch. All of them except for Ray, who went over to chat with Elise.
“Hey, that was a great fight,” Ray said. “I’m glad you showed that noble brat who’s boss.”
“Thanks Ray,” Elise responded, “And thanks for officiating as well.”
Ray shrugged. “I didn’t do anything. If he’d broken any rules I woulda stepped in, but that was a clean fight, you won fair and square.”
“I barely won,” Elise said. “If he used Mirage Blink at the start, as his first attack, I would have lost immediately. Fortunately for me, he was an idiot.”
“Crazy that an idiot like him gets such powerful skills. Imagine what you could do with those. You’d be unstoppable!”
Elise grimaced for a moment. Right, she’d told Ray about her getting Skill Transfer, but she never mentioned its stipulation. She really didn’t feel like talking about it, but at the same time, it was better to dispel any misunderstandings now.
“About that. I told you yesterday, I got Skill Transfer as my first skill, right?”
“Yep.”
“Well, Skill Transfer is the one skill that comes with no additional skill slots.”
Ray's jovial expression turned to one of shock. “Are you serious? Why? That sucks Elise, I’m so sorry.”
Elise shook her head. “Don’t apologize, you didn’t do anything. And besides, this doesn’t change my plans at all. I’m still becoming an adventurer, skills or no skills.”
“And you’ll be the best adventurer this town has ever seen. I mean it, after seeing what you did to Howard today, your combat ability’s on another level. And if you ever need help with anything, adventuring related or not, you can count on me.” Ray gave Elise a quick thumbs up, and she could tell he was being genuine, both in his belief in her abilities and in his offer to help. He wasn’t the type to just give thumbs up for nothing.
“Actually Ray, there is something you can help me with. You have your skill interface, right?”
“Yep.”
“What skills do you have?”
Ray quickly made a motion with his wrist, which Elise assumed was his way of opening his skill interface. She found that odd; even after only having an interface for a day, she’d gotten used to controlling it strictly through mental commands. It was something she’d have to ask him about later. “I’ve got three skills right now,” Ray said. “D rank Join Wood, which is the skill I started off with, but isn’t of any use unless I plan on becoming a carpenter. I bought two C rank combat skills from the guild, a Piercing Slash and a Quick Step.”
Solid choice of skills, Elise thought. At C rank, most sword skills were some variation of the D rank Slash, like Double Slash, Piercing Slash, Quick Slash, etcetera. They were your sort of bread and butter offensive skills for anyone with a sword, and they were fairly easy to get, either from skill crystals, or from leveling up the Slash skill until it evolved. The pitfall most beginners tended to fall into though was focusing too much on offense, and not getting any skills for defense or mobility. Quick Step was useful both for attacking and defending, letting you surprise your opponent by suddenly closing the gap or dodging an attack. When you compared it to the Mirage Blink skill that Howard had used, it was noticeably weaker, but in the right hands a simple Quick Step could turn the tides of a fight.
“Can I see you use Piercing Slash?” Elise asked. “I think there’s something about skills I’m not getting.” During her fight with Howard, she’d noticed a few things about his skill usage that felt odd, and she wanted to use Ray to test some theories.
“Sure.” Ray didn’t have a sword on hand, so Elise unsheathed hers and handed it to Ray.
“Be careful with that,” she said.
“I will, don’t worry.” Ray got into his stance and prepared the skill. For a brief moment, Elise saw his sword glow, right before the blade sliced through the air. Since he hadn’t been attacking a target, there was no way to measure the effectiveness of the skill, but that wasn’t the point of the test.
“What’s the cooldown?” Elise asked. Usually, lower ranking skills had higher cooldowns, but it depended on the strength of the skill. Some S rank skills were known to have cooldowns lasting over a month, while some D rank skills could be used multiple times a second.
“About five seconds,” Ray said. That sounded about right to Elise, based on what she knew about Slash skills.
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“Okay, and if you charge the skill, then what’s the cooldown?”
Ray did the same demonstration again, only this time the glow of the sword held for a couple seconds before he swung. “Ten seconds,” he said.
That adds up, Elise thought. Some skills you could charge up, by focusing hard on the skill before its activation and loading up its energy. This made the skill stronger, but also increased the cooldown. The question Elise had now was why.
“I noticed in the fight, Howard was probably fully charging every Super Sonic Slash he made. That’s why the shockwaves were so big, but also why they came out so slowly. I get why when you charge a skill it takes longer to activate, since you actually have to charge it and all, but why is the cooldown also longer? At A rank, he should have been able to use that skill every second, but there were definite gaps between each swing.”
Ray shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone knows. That’s just sorta how skills work, right? I mean, people have tried to study em, but they never come up with anything useful.”
“Right, but I have a theory,” Elise said. She mentally pulled up her skill interface and summoned her tome from Skill Transfer. She supposed she would look weird to Ray, holding an invisible book in her hand, but she brushed that thought away. She navigated to the pages with Slash, and focused on the two copies of the skill. Like she’d done before, she began trying to combine them, using all her mental strength to shove the two skills together, and like before, she was met with resistance. This time however, she focused on the resistance, trying to figure out exactly what was blocking her.
Previously, her impression of the skills in her mind was that they were two concentrated blobs of energy. Now, she felt her description was a bit off. They were blobs of energy, sure, but they weren’t homogeneous. Pushing them together, it felt like in some spots they meshed nicely together, whereas in others there was a brick wall.
“Elise? You good?” Ryan interrupted Elise’s train of thought, grabbing her attention from her mindspace and pulling it back to the real world.
“Yeah, sorry, was just thinking,” Elise said. “What was I saying before?”
“That you had a theory?”
“Right! So, we know skills have separate parts: there’s the skill itself, the activation period, and the cooldown. These parts are linked, increasing activation time scales up the power of the skill while also making the cooldown longer. What I’m thinking is that these parts aren’t linked in the way we think they are. It’s not a linear relationship.”
Ray looked confused at Elise’s explanation. “What do you mean?”
“I think it’s better to just demonstrate.” Elise went over and grabbed a training dummy, setting it in front of Ray. “Use the training sword this time, and hit the dummy with a charged Piercing Slash.” Ray complied, handing Elise her sword back and grabbing a wooden training sword. His skill went the same as before, the blade glowed, followed by a swift strike hitting the dummy in the midsection.
“How much damage did that do?” Elise asked. Similar to how the leather training armor tracked damage during spars, the training dummies also measured damage, assigning a numerical value to an attack's strength. The values were somewhat arbitrary and couldn’t give the full picture on how strong an attack was, but it was still a useful tool.
“22.5,” said Ray.
“Now, can you charge it again, but focus on increasing the speed of the swing after activation?”
“You got it.” Ray waited out the cooldown period before performing the same motion again. This time, his swing was noticeably faster, making a louder twunk against the dummy's trunk.
“What’s the damage and cooldown?” Elise asked.
“21 for damage, and still a ten second cooldown.” Even though the sword had traveled faster, the decrease in damage was expected, and was a somewhat well documented phenomenon for combat skills. When you charged a skill, it naturally enhanced all aspects of the skills activation, but sometimes you wanted to enhance one thing in particular, like range or area of effect. The tradeoff was that all other aspects of the skill would decrease in strength, so even though swinging the sword faster seemed like it should have done more, the piercing strength of the Piercing Slash had been reduced, hence the drop in damage.
“Alright, one last test,” Elise said. “This time, when you charge the skill, can you try to only charge it halfway?”
“I... I think so? I’ve never tried before, so I don’t know if it’ll work, but I’ll give it a go.” Elise didn’t actually know if it was possible to halfway charge a skill. Even after all her years of studying the skill compendium and learning how skills worked, she’d never heard of someone pulling off a partial charge. Who would make their skill weaker on purpose? Still, she needed it to be possible, to confirm the suspicion that was weighing on her mind.
Ray got into position again, and the training sword started to emanate that familiar white glow. Elise wasn’t sure, but it seemed to be glowing dimmer than before. She didn’t have time to dwell on it though, as soon after the sword went swinging towards the dummy once more.
“Did it work?” Elise asked.
Ray nodded. “I think so. It didn’t move faster than normal, but it still did reduced damage.”
“And the cooldown?”
“Ten seconds again.”
Elise fistbumped the air, realizing that her suspicions about skills were likely correct. Before she got ahead of herself though, she figured it’d be best to run her thoughts through with Ray, as a nice confirmation. Almost reflexively, she entered teacher mode, starting with questions rather than explaining her point outright.
“So, the cooldown was ten seconds, everytime you charged the skill?” Elise asked.
“Yep. Ten seconds flat.”
“Why is that? If charging the skill at activation increases the cooldown, shouldn’t that mean if you don’t charge it as much, then the cooldown increase isn’t as drastic?”
Ray pondered for a second before answering. “That would make sense. But that’s not what happened though.”
“Exactly!” Elise exclaimed. “There’s something about the extended cooldown from charging a skill that makes it immutable. It’s like once you start the charge, you’ve opened the floodgates, even if you don’t use all the water it still goes pouring out.”
“So what does that mean?” Ray asked. It was a good question, and to most people, the answer would probably be nothing. But for Elise, she felt like she’d just made a massive breakthrough. She went back to her skill tome and started trying to combine the two copies of Slash again. The sensation was the same as before: in some spots, the skills seemed to mesh nicely, and in others, they felt completely incompatible. Elise realized she was nowhere near understanding every facet of the skills and how they worked, but for now she focused on where the resistance was the highest.
This... This feels like a box, Elise thought. Like the skill’s energy is hardened here, to encase something. If her analogy from before was accurate, about charging a skill being a way to access a pool of extra energy, then this box of hardened energy she felt in her mind seemed to be exactly what she was looking for. There were two copies of this box, one in each skill, and ramming them together in her mind continued to do nothing.
I’m not trying to combine the box though. I need to combine the energy inside. Elise ran through some possibilities of ways she could merge the energy, but came to the conclusion that the energy that comprised the box was ironclad. There was no way of breaking through. Unless...
Elise had never actually charged a skill, but she knew the principle of how it worked. She examined one of the copies of Slash more closely, mentally moving the blob of energy around and checking each of its parts. She was looking for a part of the skill that was soft, malleable, and that she could pour energy into, and after a few seconds of searching, she found her target.
Now how do I charge this in my mind? Normally, the energy to charge a skill came from the skill itself, but now Elise found herself in an impossible situation, as the blob of skill energy sitting in Skill Transfer was fundamentally different from an actual usable skill. It had all the same components, but none of the functionality. Damn, Elise thought. If I had an actual skill, I could do something with its energy, but all I’ve got is Skill Transfer, and that gives me nothing to work with.
Or does it? Elise hadn’t bothered trying to charge Skill Transfer. What was the point? But maybe, with the extra boost from charging a skill, she’d have everything she needed. Elise let the skill tome vanish before refocusing on Skill Transfer, feeling energy coalesce as she lengthened the activation period. When the skill tome reappeared in her hand, it had a faint white glow, and Elise almost yelped with excitement.
Before the energy could fade, she quickly navigated to the two copies of Slash and started feeling at their energies, navigating to their activation sequences. Once found, she poured the energy from Skill Transfer into Slash, and she felt as the hardened blocks of energy present in the skills suddenly vanished.
Now! Elise quickly slammed together the two Slashes, finding some resistance but not nearly as much as before. With a bit of intense focus, she was able to push through, merging the two balls of energy into one, slightly more compact, slightly more defined shape. Zooming out mentally and looking back at the individual pages of her skill tome, she found that one of the pages that once held a copy of Slash was now blank. She turned the page, and a small smile crept up the sides of her face as she read the new lines of text.
Skill: Double Slash