Taloc mentally clicked on the “accept” button for the skinning prompt, and another appeared. Select tool: longsword, hunting knife was displayed. He accessed the longsword option, and it read Just because you can use a tool for a job does not mean that you should. This item likely will not produce good results. Would you like to try anyway? Yes/No? He selected ‘No,’ which closed the window. He then accessed the hunting knife: This item is suitable for the job. For better results, use a higher-quality tool. Give it a go? Yes/No? This time he selected the ‘Yes’ button, and several of the scales were suddenly brighter than they had been before. He focused his gaze on one of these, and he could just make out what appeared to be different markings around the scale that he had not seen just a moment before. Taloc took out his hunting knife and tried to cut along one of the markings, which was a line along the side of the scale. His hand slipped, and his cut deviated from the line. Abruptly, the scale reverted to its original color, and all of the markings vanished.
Taloc stepped back from the corpse and focused on another of the glowing scales. He attempted a cut along what looked to be a similar marking; his cut followed the line that the mark made, but the scale cracked when he was two-thirds of the way done with his cut; this scale also reverted to normal. After another four failed attempts, he felt as if he’d been cutting too deeply, and he tried a light cut on one of the three remaining glowing scales. He made it to the end of the marking with the scale remaining intact and still brighter than normal, but the mark was still there. He felt that he wasn’t finished, and so he made another light cut along the line. This time, the mark disappeared, but the scale was still active. He then applied the same technique to another mark along the opposite side of the scale. He was able to make a successful cut on one attempt this time, and he felt as if he now knew the depth that the cuts needed to be. There was one more mark on this scale, and it was near a corner. It was jagged and darker than the marks that showed up on the sides of the scales. He tried the shallow cuts with this mark as well, but the scale faded.
Taloc was annoyed at the failure. Overall, however, he was feeling more confident: he knew what he needed to do now. He believed that the jagged mark was at an area where the scale needed to be pried off, so he dug the point into the next scale and attempted just that. He put the point of the knife into one of the darker jagged marks and gently tried to pry it out; the scale broke. Taloc chastised himself for attempting the prying before he had done the cutting along the sides, and carefully went about the shallow cuts along the sides of the last glowing scale. It was still glowing, and the only mark remaining was the jagged one in the corner. He then pried the scale off using the jagged mark as a guide, and two notifications flashed at the bottom of his HUD. He opened the first one: You harvested a dull scale. This scale would only make the crudest of armor, but other uses exist. Well, that was vague and unhelpful. He opened up the other notification. You have gained the skill skinning level 1. Now, that was more like it.
Taloc looked around to see how Ewtain had done, and he found him off talking to Isla. Taloc went over to him and saw him holding five of the scales. “I got to level two in skinning, but I need to get something better than this dagger to use,” Ewtain said as he approached.
Taloc handed him the hunting knife. “Here you go. You’re the clear winner, so go take the black one.” Ewtain accepted the knife, and Taloc went on. “While you do that, why don’t Isla and either Maroftis or Vanya do the butchering on the smaller ones?”
“I’ll pass,” Vanya said.
“Don’t you want to use the hunting knife on those?” Ewtain asked. “Do we have other knives in the group?”
“Daggers should be fine for those,” Taloc replied. “It’s likely just meat, and even if it is cut badly, we can still eat it… It might not even taste good anyway.” He went into his HUD and offered the butchering rights of the two small ballowsans to Isla and Maroftis. Isla pulled out a dagger, but Maroftis just used his claws. After about five minutes, they were each done. Isla had butchered 11 pounds of meat from her ballowsan; Maroftis had a total of 14 pounds. He had also been eating some of what he butchered during the process, so his full take had likely been even higher. On the other hand, it was pretty grizzly watching him work.
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Ewtain gained another level of skinning, and he had two superior scales to show for his work. They decided to let Ewtain do the butchering on the black one, and when finished, he had attained the butchering skill. He produced 16 pounds of meat from the smaller beast.
“Did Ewtain win then?” Vanya asked.
“I think so,” Isla replied. “It’s hard to tell, since it looks like Maroftis ate a lot of what he got, but Ewt got more off of the smaller one.”
“It was also the tougher one,” Taloc said. “That could mean that its loot table was higher.” The others nodded in understanding. Many games enforced the belief that the tougher the monster, the better the loot. Killing a low-level bear in a game might only have one unit of food as a drop, but a higher-level one might drop 50 units.
“Eat?” Maroftis asked as if he had not just eaten several pounds of raw meat.
The dead ballowsans had not disappeared as the skeletons and mummy had in the crypt. “We’ve already scouted the area a fair amount,” Vanya said. “This place should be fine for the time being, but we should move away from the bodies. I’ll go find a place to start a fire.”
While most of them waited for the meat to cook, Maroftis ate more of the raw meat. They tried to determine what sort of crafting the scales were for. None of them got anything from the interface, so they likely weren’t used in any crafting that one of them possessed unless they needed to be at a higher level to do so. They did receive new updates about essences: ‘When a living creature dies, its essence will dissipate with time. An essence can be magically extracted from a deceased creature. Essence can be added to some crafting attempts to amplify the results.’ Now that was useful information. They could do nothing but store them for now, but once they began crafting, the essences would help them level or just make better quality stuff.
“It’s nice to know that we can gain skills by just trying them,” Vanya said as they discussed the day’s events over dinner.
“Agreed,” Taloc said, “but the tasks here seemed simpler than some of the fighting skills, except for the essence thing. The Anurans had said that some skills took years to learn. They didn’t mention what those skills were, but they might be some upper-level fighting or spell techniques.”
“They also said that we would just get some skills when we level,” Vultressant said. “Isla is level four, and the rest of us are level three, but none of us have gained skills that way.”
“There might be level thresholds for that sort of thing,” Ewtain said. “If we got a skill every time we leveled, there would be no need for those magic books to learn them.”
“I guess that we’ll find out as we go,” Vanya remarked.
When the meat was done cooking, they all ate some, except for Vanya, who ate a few carrots from her inventory, and Galuk, who had some smoked fish that he had brought. The meat was pretty good overall; it was a bit on the gamey side, but they all commented positively on the taste, and even Maroftis said the cooked meat was better than what he’d eaten raw. The others weren’t about to do a taste comparison, so they just took his word for it. They’d prepared less than a quarter of the meat, and the rest they split among them and inventoried. Then they cleaned up the area and buried the firepit before continuing on.
The direction that they traveled slowly changed from west to northwest. Vultressant’s map feature was keeping track of everything as they went; the thing was truly amazing. Features such as their fire pit and the corpses of the ballowsans grayed out as they got further away, but many of the general terrain features of the area they passed remained on the map. The zoom option was very handy as well: while he generally stayed focused on an overview of the area, he could zero in on a very close area in a fair amount of detail.
The forest began to thin, and the land had become significantly rocky by the time the first sun set for the night. They decided to make camp shortly after that, as they estimated that less than a half hour remained until the second sun set. They cooked up some more of the ballowsan meat, and Maroftis and Vanya took the first shift on watch for the night. They whispered to each other in Common to help the Berserker with his language lessons.
The night was mostly uneventful, save for some wildlife that came to investigate the fire, and they made an early start in the morning.