Cass’s eyes widened as she read her reward. Magic! She’d been given magic!
She almost laughed. Here was the fantasy nonsense finally working in her favor! She tried it immediately.
Or, she tried to.
She focused on the skill the same way she focused on Stealth or Identify, but she could feel something was missing.
Elemental Manipulation! she thought with force.
Nothing happened. Her Focus didn’t fluctuate. Instinctively, she could feel that this could be used as a combat spell, just as she knew she was definitely doing it wrong.
She ignored the system-granted intuition and compared the feeling to activating Stealth. Stealth just required her to focus on it and it modified her movements just enough to hide her presence as she moved. There was no empty feeling.
Maybe it was more similar to Identify? Had Identify ever felt empty like this? She focused on Identify for comparison, only to find it empty too. She panicked before realizing that wasn’t how she usually activated Identify.
She did laugh this time. It was obvious. She locked her eyes on one of the crows and focused on Identify again. Effortless, the information on the crow popped up in her vision.
Some skills required a target.
She skimmed through Elemental Manipulation’s description again, “Attune your focus to an elemental force”. She needed to pick a force to summon it.
With her mistake in mind, she tried again. She focused on her hand and activated the spell again, this time willing water into existence. Before her eyes, a ball of water appeared from nothing. It floated just above her palm, barely bigger than a ping-pong ball. She willed it to float higher. A couple of seconds later, the ball had floated maybe a foot up before it lost cohesion and water rained down over her.
A headache descended immediately and a pressure on her eyes popped into full force. She winced and flipped open her stats to see how much Focus she had consumed.
10/108
Cass hissed in a breath, surprised. 49 points! For summoning the water and then floating it up a foot over maybe four seconds? That was almost half of her Focus pool.
She sighed. Well, it was only level one and she hadn’t applied her new stat points yet. Still, she had a feeling she was a long way off giving up her staff in favor of magic alone.
Speaking of stat points…
Str - 4 Dex - 10 End - 9
Wll - 16 Ala - 12 Res - 12
Frt - 2 Per - 5 Vit - 6
Free Points: 12
How was she going to distribute her free points now? Frt needed to go up, she knew that much. She wasn’t in too much pain now, but the next time she wandered into something dangerous she couldn’t be incapacitated after the first attack. Add that it was her lowest stat and she could easily envision problems.
Str, Dex, and End would all probably help her deal more damage with her staff, which was important at least in the short term. On the other hand, she had managed to deal enough damage against a significantly stronger opponent with the stats she had. Which meant she needed to put at least a little bit in those stats if she wanted to maintain that difference. She might be able to kill a level 7 monster with level 1 Str, and she might be able to kill a level 10 monster with level 4 Str, but she thought it was unlikely she’d be able to kill that level 10 monster with level 1 Str. So she should probably put at least a few in those stats so they didn’t fall too far behind.
Obviously, she should dedicate some of her new stats to Wll, since her new skill depended on it. How she wasn’t sure yet, but the skill description said it did. Maybe she’d be able to summon and control more material if her Wll was higher.
Vit could probably go up too. Vitality usually governed Health or healing in video games. She may not understand why her current Health was so low, but increasing Vit would probably help. And, she was pretty sure she didn’t want Health to hit 0.
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Res, resilience or resistance, probably affected her max Focus. That was just a guess based on the arrangement of Stats. Endurance seemed to increase Stamina and Vitality almost certainly affected Health. So, assuming there was some symmetry between the rows (a bit of a jump in logic, Cass was willing to admit), Res should affect Focus. More Focus would mean more Wind Steps and more magic.
Which left mysterious Ala and lonely Per. So far neither had been important to her survival as far as she knew. Did that mean she was going to ignore them for now? She wasn’t sure. She disliked the idea of ignoring perception. That seemed important. But more important than hitting stuff hard with her staff or tanking another enemy attack?
She sighed. Once again, she wished she knew more about what exactly each stat did. It was entirely possible, she was making a mistake because she didn’t know better. But, she was still low level, so (assuming she didn’t die) there would be time to even out her stats later if it turned out she was doing it wrong now.
Or so she hoped.
Now the question was how to split 12 across 7 stats? Dex and End were okay. Maybe she’d put points into Str to bring it up to the same range. Frt too.
Str 4 -> 7
Frt 2 -> 7
That was 8 of her 12 accounted for. What to do with the last 4?
As an experiment, Cass put one point in Res.
Res 12 -> 13
And, as she’d hoped, her total focus increased too.
Max Focus 108 -> 117
She nodded to herself. Good. Her guesses weren’t wrong then. That was nine points of Focus for each point of Res. That meant she’d need to increase Res to 17 to have over 150 Focus, which would let her use Wind Step 3 times in quick succession. Something to keep in mind for the future, since she didn’t have the points to do that in one go.
She experimented with Vit too, dropping on point there to see if it affected her Health as she expected.
Vit 6 ->7
Max Health 21 -> 24
Hmm, only 3 Health for one point of Vit. Was that evidence these resources were scaled differently then? She had no way to know until she got a skill that directly consumed Health.
She had two free points left, so she put them in Wll, to boost her new skill.
Wll 16 -> 18
She’d have to see how that affected Elemental Manipulation later when her Focus had recovered.
Cass sat in her tree for a while longer, waiting for her Focus to regenerate. Either she was impatient to get out of the bloody, corpse-filled clearing or it was taking much longer to regenerate than it had when she’d been walking through the forest earlier. It crawled up, one point at a time.
Cass tried controlling her breathing or meditating or something, hoping a calmer mind would Focus better, but either that wasn’t how it worked or she was doing it wrong. She tried not to let it bother her.
She wanted to get away from this place though. As soon as possible. The corpse had already attracted birds, how long would it take for other scavengers to find it and her? She didn’t want to fight anything else. She’d pushed her luck enough as it was.
That said, besides ‘away’ where exactly was she going to go from here? Further into the forest? Back the way she’d come?
The level of the enemies there had certainly been lower than anything she’d seen since entering the forest. Should she try to go back and follow the cliffs again? Could she even find her way back to those cliffs?
Cass sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose and rubbing her eyes. She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything.
Her headache was only getting worse. If this was the effect of running low on Focus, she was going to have to religiously keep it from falling this low in the future.
She shook her head. She wouldn’t backtrack. She already knew there were no people there. Finding people was the only goal.
A cacophony of cawing and a flurry of fluttering crows pulled Cass's attention back to the clearing below her. Something was approaching, their enormous body rustling through the underbrush.
Cass held her breath, unsure if she should run or hide or hold still. What new monstrosity had wandered into her now?
It stepped into view, massive but low to the ground. A badger, if badgers were midnight blue instead of black, and if badgers were the size of a truck bed.
Hissoran Badger
Lvl 9
[A giant badger from the Hissora Realm. An incorrigible glutton, happily devouring carrion and the raw energies of the realm alike. This beast is known for its prodigious size and powerful claws it uses for digging and hunting with equal ease.]
Cass’s heart hammered in her chest. Could it reach her in the tree? Could it climb? Would it need to? It was so big.
It didn’t so much as glance in Cass’s direction as it lumbered directly to the body of the terrorcat. It stuck its snout into the bloody corpse and tore off a chunk, chewing messily with decidedly happy badger noises. It turned Cass’s stomach.
She checked her stats again.
Stamina: 27/27
Focus: 48/117
Health: 5/21
Not quite 50 Focus, but was it close enough? The badger seemed distracted but for how much longer? The terrorcat wasn’t that big compared to the behemoth below her.
The crows had joined her in the trees. They watched the badger tear at the body impatiently, hopping back and forth, cawing ceaselessly. They all stayed out of its way.
Did that mean the badger would lumber off again when it had eaten its fill and the crows were just waiting to get back to their corpse buffet? Could Cass just wait here with them?
Or were they only brave because they were too small for the badger to bother chasing them up here when it was done? Would Cass have the same immunity?
Cass’s nerve broke. She had to take this chance to escape, while it was distracted.
She hopped down from the tree, grabbed her staff, and activated Stealth. The badger didn’t so much as flinch in her direction. But Cass didn’t stay to find out if her luck would hold. She raced into the underbrush as quickly and as quietly as Stealth allowed her to move.
If the badger noticed her, it made no indication.
Stealth has increased to level 4.