The weeks went by at a decent rate. Me and Fred would alternate watching each other practice our skills, and provide feedback to each other. It was a nice way to get alternative views on how we approached our skills, and I’d like to think that we both ended up progressing at a strong pace.
We also ended up inadvertently taking each other’s skills at one point. Well, I say that, but Fred had way more useful skills than I did.
~~~
Aim Lv.2
You locate a target with your eyes, and attempt to hit it. Carefully.
Mastery: 3%
Rating: 0
Accuracy Modifier: (While using this skill, your accuracy is increased by an additional 3%)
Level Bonuses:
Level 1: Aim steadies your breathing
Level 2: Aim brings your target into focus
~~~
~~~
Shoot Lv.0
You shoot with something. Anything? Probably a bow and arrow, but I guess you could shoot some spit too.
Mastery: 0%
Rating: 0
Efficiency Modifier: (While using this skill, your projectile does an additional 0% damage)
~~~
~~~
Slash Lv.0
You slash with something. Anything? Probably a sword, but I guess you could slash with a stick too.
Mastery: 0%
Rating: 0
Efficiency Modifier: (While using this skill, your slash does an additional 0% damage)
~~~
Slash seemed like a fairly redundant skill for me, so I never bothered trying it out. I noticed Aim’s mastery was going up as I practiced using chantless Chop. It made total sense, since I had to focus on hitting the specific part of the tree that I wanted.
On Fred’s end, Chop was… mostly useful for cooking. Interestingly enough, the “flavor text” for his Chop was different. I guess since he didn’t have any attachments to axes, it turned into something about cooking.
It seems that Fred was an avid cooker back home on Earth. He hadn't thought about it much, but at the mention of cooking in his Chop flavor text, Fred ended up buying some ingredients and inviting me over for dinner. We hadn’t noticed it before, but this world had plenty of “human” foods that originated from our old world.
Well, now that I think about it, it was pretty obvious that there would be human food. It was just "rare" because we were in a slime city.
The dinner that Fred made that night was probably the best food I had eaten since arriving, despite Fred insisting that he wasn’t the best at cooking.
Mister Pink had noticed our continued attempts at improving ourselves outside of just our mana and mana regeneration, and supported us in any way he could. For Fred he gave one of the magical bows he had in his bank, which was able to conjure a dozen weak projectiles for a single point of mana.
Fred had been complaining about the scarcity and cost of finding arrows to use for practice since he started practicing with the bow, so this magical infinite ammo bow was a great present. He promised Mister Pink that he would never be able to pay him enough, despite the pink slime trying to clarify that these bows were mass produced decades ago for a war effort.
For me, Mister Pink found a spellbook that allowed me to accelerate the growth of the trees that commonly grew around the Slime Kingdom.
~~~
Accelerate Tree Growth -- Slime Kingdom Fauna Lv. 5
You are able to accelerate the growth of trees under the influence of the Slime Kingdom. Are you trying to be an adventurer, or a tree expert…?
Mastery: 0%
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Efficiency Modifier: While using this ability, you consume 0% less mana.
Level Bonuses:
Level 4: You accelerate the growth of trees by 500% (100% + 400%)
~~~
Why not an axe, you might ask?
“I wasn’t able to find any training-oriented axes. My apologies, Mister Grant. The only axes that I found on the market were ones that came enchanted with additional effectiveness at cutting trees, which I believe are not suitable for training.”
Mister Pink said that, but I had seen battle axes and war axes being carried by a small handful of adventurers that had passed through the town on occasion. While I didn’t mind too much, I couldn’t help but feel that he still had an obvious aversion towards axes.
The Accelerate Tree Growth skill was definitely useful in keeping up the overall appearance and damage that I did to the small tree gathering that I frequented. As I had practiced Chop, I realized that I was beginning to cut down a few trees a day. It ate a good amount of my mana, but it gave me an excuse to practice using my mana regeneration skills.
I was even able to grow a tree for Fred to practice his archery on, so we were able to drop by the human cafe regularly.
We made sure to take plenty of days to ourselves. I personally used those to practice Meditate and Focus. It was half because I wanted to continue increasing the effects on those abilities, but also because those abilities passed the time quickly.
For the most part besides the events mentioned above, nothing interesting happened for around 7 weeks. As the 8th week approached, Mister Pink called all of the human servants for an emergency meeting.
“Hello everyone, I hope Slime City #531 has been treating you well. As many of you might know, it has been 530 weeks since the last time a monster invasion was scheduled for our city. For the ones who have only recently arrived, this is the preparation week for the combat-oriented individuals in our city to earn merit and experience on the battlefield.”
Mister Pink vibrated a bit, and papers materialized on the ground next to him.
“Please take these assignments. You will be organized into parties of four. I have done my best to structure these in a way that makes the most sense. Each party will have your standard Tank, Support, Ranged and Melee Specialists. Try to get along with each other, but if you believe you are unable to, please let me know immediately.”
The papers flew towards us, and neatly landed in most of our hands.
“I’m going solo. Don’t bother me with this party nonsense.” A teenager dressed in all black snatched the paper out of the air and tore it half.
“Sir Francis, Sir Gintley, and Sir Raskha. It appears that you three have the option of opting out of this monster invasion. Is this okay?”
Huh. I recognized those three as the ones who had an impressively high Rating in Mana Donation.
“Yes, Master Pink! I would be more than happy!” The three of them snapped to attention and saluted towards Mister Pink.
I caught the familiar jiggle of disappointment from Mister Pink.
“Sir Joh- I mean, Master of the Blade. You have the option of splitting your rewards with Sir Francis, Sir Gintley, and Sir Raskha. Is this okay?”
“They can have everything but the experience that I earn.”
“Understood. Any objections, Sir Francis, Sir Gintley, or Sir Raskha?”
The three men shook their head, and bowed in unison towards… Master of the Blade.
“Fred, can you use Focus on that guy?”
Fred’s Focus was a higher level than mine, and let him see extremely basic info of the people that he used it on.
“I already did. His name is John Tony. He’s Level 15 with a title called ‘The Wannabe Protagonist’.”
“That... makes complete sense.
“Yep.”
~~~
Party #17
Tank: Hua Feng
Melee Specialist: Grant Friedom
Ranged Specialist: Fred Schwinn
Healer: Cecilia Dandelion
~~~
I read the paper, and two colored bars shimmered into life above Fred’s head. I saw him look above my head, and I assumed a similar phenomenon was happening there as well. We both looked around for the other set of bars.
“Hi! Are you two Fred and Grant?”
A short blonde girl waved at us, with a large brunette man standing next to her. The colors floated lazily above them.
“Hi! That’s us. I’m Grant, and he’s Fred.” I pointed at Fred, who waved back in response.
“Ya’ll are so cute and young! I’m Hua, and he’s Cecilia.”
The man nodded towards us. “You two look reliable. Master Pink is always good to us.”
Cec-... no, Hua beamed at… Cecilia, and then beamed at us.
We went ahead to the cafe near the forest to talk more about our abilities. Cecilia and Hua were curious about my axe usage, but since I had only practiced against trees, I wasn’t able to tell them about how much damage I was able to do.
“I have also never shot a living target.” Fred chimed in, while they were questioning me.
The upcoming invasion was Cecilia and Hua’s seventh invasion. They had been sent to this world over a decade ago, and were not actually servants for the slimes. Mister Pink had saved their lives during their second invasion, so as a return favor, they would come to help out with invasions at the towns that Mister Pink resided at.
To say the least, it was reassuring to have veterans accompany us on our first monster invasions.
After giving us some hitting moving targets, Cecilia and Hua thanked us for our time, and left for their inn. Me and Fred stayed a bit longer to plan out the days leading up to the invasion. We decided to not bother with our joint training sessions, and instead focus on the advice that Hua and Cecilia had given us.
I’m not the best when it comes to gore and violence. While I did play my fair share of video games, it was always disconnected. Mister Pink had mentioned that there were plenty of training fields past the forest which served as the homes for less intelligent and less organized species. He offered to accompany me if I wanted to go, but I had been putting it off.
Fred had mentioned his trip to the training fields with Mister Pink being an oddly calming experience. Probably because Mister Pink captured the monsters for him to “farm”, which sounded weird to me. I asked him how the clean up went, and apparently Mister Pink absorbed the corpses and extracted all of the important drops.
All in all, it was a clean process. Fred had gained nearly three from that trip alone.
Speaking of levels, I was level 13, and Fred was level 18. Hua and Cecilia were 58 and 55, respectively. It seemed that we were in good hands, but I couldn’t help but wonder if me and Fred would end up doing anything meaningful.
And before I knew it, I had gotten back to my room while musing to myself. It was still early in the day, but I decided to take it easy and work on Meditate and Mana Donation.
After all, no point in exhausting myself before I even started training for the invasion.