[Lufthynsth Language Proficiency 1 → Lufthynsth Language Proficiency 6]
“This way,” Red said in broken elvish. “More berries here.”
“Okay,” Aewyn replied. The little girl was strapped to his back with the stripped-down remains of Red’s rented suit. Her leg was splinted up with three sticks to keep the limb straight, but otherwise, the girl had grown quiet. Partially, she found it hard to believe that an adult couldn’t speak her language. But mostly, she was just in awe.
It had been nearly a dozen loops since the first time Red had rescued the little girl from the wyvern. In the beginning, she had complained more. Cried more. Been more distrusting. But that had waned with every loop as Red’s confidence increased. Even he had to admit that his ability to find food was scary efficient. At least until he ran out of memorized locations.
Red leaned down, having little trouble with the waifish girl on his back and shifted a moldering log. Underneath, white tuberous fibers clung to the rotten wood, but snapped back reluctantly as Red removed their food source. He started excavating around the fibers, and after a minute of work, extracted three grainy, white tubers that was their dinner.
[Foraging 4 → Foraging 5]
“What level ?” Aewyn asked, her words jumbling together as usual and making it hard for Red to understand. He didn’t mind. He’d get it eventually, plus the extra challenge was appreciated by his skill.
“Five,” Red held up five fingers as he glanced at her over his shoulder.
“You good,” Aewyn murmured.
Red smiled, and reassuringly rubbed at her knee — the only place he could comfortably reach — then started the long journey back to their little cave. As he walked he practiced speaking partially so that he could improve in the next loop, but partially to keep Aewyn’s morale high.
The Elvish language was strange. It was called Lufthynth which Aewyn pronounced with only two syllables and a mad slur. Words flowed together, with seemingly no pause in between them to give space to them. It was oddly like German. Not that Red knew anything about the language. Only the memes, and how they were infamous for long words.
The other oddity, that made learning it difficult, was the rearranged semantic ordering. Instead of using subject object, verb, elvish used verb-object-subject. It led to odd sentence constructions where instead of saying Red ate berries, he had to say berries ate Red. This resulted in comical confusion in the earlier loops before Red had been aware of this oddity.
Red ducked into their shelter. It was a small dip in the side of the mountain, more an alcove than a proper cave. One that Red had painstakingly made into a shelter. A large bed of leaves and moss formed a rudimentary mattress. A pile of mostly flat stones to the side served as their dining table, where they could at least pretend at some normalcy.
Red set Aewyn down, and she stiffly sank to the ground. He washed the tubers, then stripped them of the bitter outer bark before handing all three to the girl. She accepted them, devouring them with gusto. Red’s stomach growled, but he ignored it. Aewyn, though, paused.
“ do want?”
Hesitantly, with her mouth full, she offered the last remaining tuber to Red.
“No, you,” Red smiled and shook his head. Aewyn hesitated another half second, then devoured the root like it was gourmet cooking.
This wasn’t working. In each loop, Red saved Aewyn and then proceeded down into the valley. Unfortunately, there simply wasn’t that much food in the area. At least not enough accessible food, given his foraging level. In theory, he could hunt, but the few animals in the area either weren’t the type to be taken down with fists and a dream or were predators in their own right. Traps were also an option, but again. Not Red’s strong suit.
Besides, he didn’t have the first clue how to start a fire.
“Home? Where?” Red asked the girl, starting to get sick of his inability to speak. Understanding was better, but formulating the words was a nightmare.
Aewyn swallowed the tough tubers and pointed. Red followed her finger, quadruple-checking that he’d memorized the direction. He had no doubts that Aewyn might be as lost as he was, but he couldn’t stand watching the little girl starve slowly over another loop.
“I...go,” Red stood, and an instant look of panic flashed across Aewyn’s face.
“No! no I don’t !”
Red gently extricated himself from the little girl's grasping hands, and, as best he could, tried to reassure her that he was coming right back. She warily relaxed after some convincing, but there was doubt in her eyes.
Red’s forced smile faded as he left their shelter and marched purposefully to the bear’s cave. This was by far the worst part of each of these loops. Luckily, it would be over soon.
A nestling chirped pathetically in the distance.
Red zeroed in on the sound of the little bird for the first time. It was somewhere in the bushes near the...bear.
Reluctantly, Red backed away from the territorial mother and started walking. Not toward the wyvern cliff, but toward the far distant mountain at the end of the valley. In every loop that he’d asked Aewyn about her home, she’d always pointed at that mountain, and presumably beyond it. It was also the mountain that the wyvern always flew over, so Red had high hopes. Now, he just needed to cross it.
It took three embarrassingly long loops to even make it to the other side of the valley. Any time he approached the river, bifurcating the valley led to an instant and memoryless death that didn’t even grant him a clue in the form of a resistance skill. This forced him to hug the edges, but that made the journey long.
[Navigation 7 → Navigation 8].
Then came the ascent. The mountain was ice-capped, and Red had little interest in scaling all the way to the top, only to have to descend again. That left three sort-of-passes around the nearby mountains that might be scalable.
Red stared up the slope, cracked his neck, and started force marching.
[Athleticism 8 → Athleticism 9]
Perseverance flared like a torch as he leaned into skill to hide his aches and pains. Green lit his way as he forced his mind away from his labored breathing. The mountain was steep. The path was convoluted. He had to double back on himself numerous times when he got stuck in a dead or otherwise impassable segment. Each one cost him hours as he was forced to traverse the same hellish terrain again.
The wyvern came and went. Then the eclipse. And soon night arrived. Luckily, some kind of six-legged lizard found him in the night and ended his misery.
A nestling chirped pathetically in the distance.
Red cracked his neck, and started over, this time intent on the second promising path.
And so it went. Red spawned and marched across the entire valley. Then, the iterative exploration of the steep peaks began. There were no defined trails, and the few animal paths that were vaguely visible led to dead ends more often than not.
And his skills leveled.
[Athleticism 9 → Athleticism 10]
[Navigation 8 → Navigation 10]
Until they didn’t. As soon as both skills hit level ten, Red felt the change in his head. There wasn’t anything definitive on his status, but he could sense the difference. The skills had reached some kind of soft cap, and wouldn’t level until he broke through.
He wasn’t making it through this challenge by just grinding skill levels.
Still, he persevered. The primary challenge was supplies. He could carry some food in his briefcase, but he had no way to hold water. Practically, that meant that he needed to scale the mountain and find the elven civilization in a single day. Two at most. Even with perseverance dulling his sensations, there was no chance in hell his body would be able to push longer than that. Especially with Aewyn on his back.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Loops passed, and Red got a random assortment of other skill levels from random fights he got into whenever he stumbled onto the lair of some new and exciting monster.
[Stab Resistance 9 → Stab Resistance 10]
[Brawling 5 → Brawling 6]
[Stealth 1 → Stealth 3]
Despite not gaining any levels in navigation, Red’s knowledge of the mountain increased. Barrier Ridge is what Red named the peak, and over a month of constant ascents, he became a master of its intricacies. He learned where all five carnivorous six-legged lizards lived and how to avoid them. He named them Crested Slinks for the broad sail-like crest that extended all the way down their backs and even learned a little about their habits.
There were a total of 43 theoretically passable trails over Barrier Ridge. Twenty-eight of them were snow-blocked, as they eventually led too high or to areas that were too shaded to allow for the snow to melt. Eleven of them were impassable due to gravel avalanches. Either the slope became too steep for Red to ascend — and therefore definitely too steep if he was carrying Aewyn — or any attempt to traverse them led to a lethal avalanche.
He learned that the hard way.
[Crush Resistance 5 → Crush Resistance 7]
That led to four potential paths. The first two were ruled out as they passed far too close to the crested slinks. Depending on the time of day, taking those would lead to a very gory reset. The third was doable, but it passed within a deep crevasse in the mountain, which got blisteringly cold during the eclipse.
The last was steeper than the third, but it avoided all the challenges of the other trails. On the 48th loop, Red found it and managed to cross Barrier Ridge. He took a moment to hydrate from a small stream of water trickling from under one of the glacier-like slabs of ice, then hiked to an outcropping.
Another massive valley stretched out before him. Trees extended in all directions, fed by three ice water streams that converged into a fast-moving river that crashed its way down the slope.
He saw no civilization.
Green beacons of light erupted from his eyes as he stared impassively at yet another impossible challenge. Perseverance escalated, and what was left inside of him was an empty void. Cold, and passionless, the analytical part of his mind ignored any possible disappointment and arrived at the only possible conclusion.
He needed to bring Aewyn up here.
So he did, and ten hours later, Aewyn stared in awe over his shoulder at the melted gold of the sunset illuminating the second valley.
A blistering deluge of unfamiliar words exploded out of the little girl. She pointed, hoping excitedly on his back and nearly knocking him over. He was exhausted beyond all reckoning, but the light of perseverance was keeping up vertical.
Presumably, Aewyn recognized this place.
[Lufthynsth Language Proficiency 6 → Lufthynsth Language Proficiency 7]
Aewyn’s enthusiasm was infectious, and Red couldn’t help but smile as he trudged down the slope. The way down was far easier. Not only was it downhill, but the slope was also far more gradual than the other side of the peak. So much so, that the treeline extended nearly two-thirds of the way up the mountain.
The forest was unfamiliar to Red. Navigation tried its hardest, but he would have gotten lost almost immediately if it hadn’t been for Aewyn. For nearly two full hours, her excitement burned like a torch as she pointed and kicked her uninjured leg into Red’s side in a bid to get him to hurry. She seemed oblivious to his exhaustion, though, on some level, it didn’t matter.
Because they’d arrived.
A woman’s cry knocked Red out of his walking fugue, and before he knew it, he was surrounded by first one, then a veritable horde of elves. A cacophony of unfamiliar words hit him. He followed barely half the conversations around him. In his exhaustion, Red loopily found himself noting how tall the elves were. Red was a tall man, but it seemed that elves were taller on average than even very tall humans back on Earth.
A weeping mother found him, and he gladly relinquished Aewyn to her with relief. Without the weight, Red nearly fell over, and several sets of strong, slender hands caught him. He let them support him to the ground, where he was given water to drink from a strange woven bag of some waterproof fabric.
Aewyn excitedly explained what had happened, and appreciative murmurs went around.
An elvish man grasped his forearms, pulling Red’s attention.
“Thank you,” he said, with a serious smile. “My name is Valandil. I Aewyn . You me and me a give .”
“Red, and uh. No...uh, hard.” Red put a hand on his chest and smiled, hoping that he was understood.
Valandil seemed to get it, and a blur of events followed. An elderly woman arrived and undid the crude binding around Aewyn’s leg. Then, a display of green magic had Aewyn giggling as the huge swelling in her leg diminished. Her eyes drooped a second later, and her mother — Miriel, as he later learned — took her away.
The old elf then came to Red and gave him and his blistered feet a similar treatment. Her name was Elionor, and wielded her healing magic as if it was merely a fact of life. The power thrummed inside of him, and he instinctively felt that he could fight the power off. Not that he was going to; it washed through him like the cool waters of a gentle stream. For the first time in hours, the glow of green in his eyes faded.
Only to return a second later as it ruthlessly suppressed the unstoppable wave of exhaustion that hit him. Red coughed, struggling with the competing powers inside of him. He barely registered, and he suddenly found himself indoors.
Valandil gently pushed him down onto a mattress that felt like heaven as Elionor urged him to rest. He blinked owlishly at them, then very carefully nudged perseverance to chill. The green light in his eyes faded—
----------------------------------------
Red awoke to the sounds of birds chirping. He was rejuvenated, though it took him several long seconds to recall where he was and what was happening. Slowly, he sat up in the bed, and a thick blanket fell into his lap. It felt like silk, though it had the consistency of wool. He was in a small room with tall ceilings, where nearly every available surface was covered in some sort of fabric.
Speaking of, his clothes were gone, replaced by a flowing robe made of gossamer silk, though...with no underwear. Red pursed his lip. He fiddled with the lapels and managed to tighten them enough that he only showed a little chest hair. Whatever. It didn’t matter that much.
The room smelled earthy, with a subtle spicy undertone that Red was beginning to associate with elves. It was dark, with the only light coming from a rectangle of light peeking under a curtained doorway on the far side of the room.
Beside the curtained doorway was a wholly different type of doorway.
Save a Child to progress.
The Locked portion of the message was notably missing.
He stood, rolling the kinks out of his body, and hobbled to the curtain, entirely ignoring the glowing archway of shifting glyphs. Gingerly, he peered out, squinting into the light.
The elven village was exactly how he imagined it, and so alien at the same time. They didn’t live in trees, but on the ground, though each house was impeccably blended into the environment. It almost strained the eyes to find where houses ended and random foliage began. A feat even more impressive considering each house had a ceiling at least 10 feet tall.
There were a couple of elves hanging around, but before he could examine these strange creatures in their natural habitat, a wrecking ball of blonde hair slammed into him.
“Red! !” Aewyn looked up at him with sparkling eyes. Her leg was entirely healed.
"Hi, Aewyn," Red said, tousling her hair. She flinched, squirming out of his grasp while futilely attempting to tame her tousled locks.
“Don’t do that,” she grumbled, glaring at him, which only made Red chuckle.
“Red! You’re awake,” Valandil said as he approached. “ happy you .”
“Hello, Valandil.”
“Come, me home.”
What followed was a tour of their little village. There were around a hundred elves in the stretch of forest known as Lufthynsth. The village had a modest thirty-odd buildings, though only a few of the houses were dedicated to sleeping. Each household owned several disconnected buildings, many of which were a fair distance away from each other. Familial units of sometimes over two dozen elves lived together in what Red could only describe as cramped quarters, though they didn’t seem to mind.
He met many elves, each polite and thankful as apparently, elves were immortal — or at least very long-lived, the language barrier was getting in the way again — and the loss of a child like Aewyn was a devastating blow.
Valandil finished the tour in his home — or technically, it was Lady Elionor’s home since she was the matriarch of the family — for breakfast. Before food was served, however, Lady Elionor emerged from a deeper chamber with an ornate wooden bowl full of a shimmering liquid.
“Drink,” she told Red in a brusque tone.
“What is it?” Red asked, leaning in to sniff it. It smelled sparkly, making his nose buzz like taking a deep whiff of sparkling soda.
“Mheng root tea. A gift from us to you,” Lady Elionor said, gracefully sitting on a mat set before the dining table. “Drink.”
Red raised a brow but drank. It tasted sweet and minty with a sparkling jitter that was quite pleasant on the way down.
“Thank...you,” Red started but paused as a warmth started in his stomach and spread out to his extremities. He felt it, searching for something. In that same strange way, he understood the meaning of the glowing archways, he understood that the drink he had consumed was grasping for one of his skills. Or...more specifically, one of his three level-ten skills.
Stab Resistance, athleticism and navigation burned like brands in his mind as each one started jostling the others at a chance to touch the warmth.
“Ahh, an upgrade,” Red murmured in English as he understood. Without further thought, he nudged athleticism forward. All three skills were terribly useful, but the one skill that he would have killed for more levels was athleticism. It acted as a multiplier on all his physical acts, and while brutal to train, made everything else he did easier.
It was a no-brainer, really.
Athleticism gleefully lunged forward, and the warmth drained into the skill.
[Athleticism Evolving → Skill Lost]
[New Skill → Athleticism II 1]
[Skill Locked → Pending Admin Approval]
Red gasped as a qualitative explosion of strength rushed through his limbs. This wasn’t a tiny strength boost like he got every time the skill normally gained a level. It honestly felt like he had just gained ten whole levels all in one brief moment. It was exhilarating and slightly overwhelming.
At the same time, a green shroud obscured the skill in his status. It pulsed in tune with his heartbeat, and he understood instinctively that it wouldn’t gain any more levels until whatever this ‘admin approval’ thing happened.
Skills: Athleticism II 1, Brawling 7, Crush Resistance 7, Foraging 5, Lufthynsth Language Proficiency 7, Navigation 10, Power Strike 6, Slash Resistance 1, Stab Resistance 10, Stealth 3