The ramhog charged, shattering a small tree and crushing foliage beneath its heavy hooves. Treepo chitter-grunted angrily, drawing the beast around in a long loop. I telepathically apologized again for using him as bait, and I faintly heard him grunt in triplicate as he often did when he was upset with me.
Treepo veered back toward me, the ramhog slowing a bit to match the change in direction before accelerating, attempting to bear down on my little buddy. Treepo shrieked and ran as fast as he could between two massive tree trunks which I had attached the rope to.
I had needed to double back to Bosh and sell some more meat in order to purchase the rope after spending all my money on parchment products. I hoped the rope would suffice.
As soon as Treepo was through the trees, I pulled the rope as tight as I was able and braced. The ramhog followed quickly and, as planned, tripped over the rope, temporarily taken down by my simple trap. The force of the ramhog hitting the rope pulled me forward and I flew to the ground onto the damp jungle foliage and humus.
I quickly cast a haste buff on myself and threw myself at the fallen creature before it could get itself upright, pulling the other prepared piece of rope, tied into slipknots, out of my inventory. I slid the nooses onto each foot and tightened the whole tangle, hogtying the ramhog as best as I could.
I felt a familiar pressure and checked my metasystem, surprised.
Skill acquired: Knotting
I groaned a bit, wasting a skill point on a useless skill, but then giggled a bit at the situation. I had seen plenty of sailors with the skill, as it was incredibly useful at sea, but to gain the skill from tying up a creature… I had to wonder how many people might have the skill for private reasons of their own.
With my new skill I could see how to subtly improve my hogtie and ensure the beast wouldn’t easily escape, so I made the adjustments and stepped back. The ramhog was angrily squealing, but unable to get up. It was bucking its head, but couldn’t really do any damage in this position. I gently stroked its side–the wiry coat rough on my hand–hushing it, hoping it would calm down.
It did not calm down. It continued to buck and squeal on and off between bouts of heavy breathing. I began to worry it was going to make enough noise to attract the guard, and I didn’t like the feeling of being the source of so much fear in the creature. If only I had a way to calm it down.
I paused, deliberating. After getting the parchment, I had started sorting through all the things I wanted to write down, which included a grimoire for 6-point magic. In a similar fashion to how I had realized I wasn’t making full use of 5-point magic, and started integrating barriers into my combat style, I had begun to realize I was not using 6-point magic to its full potential.
I almost exclusively used the so-called “positive” aspect of divine magic, which included healing, cures, and buffs. There was a whole secondary trifecta of “negative” divine magic: smiting, curses, and debuffs.
Originally, I avoided things like that because I worried about MP costs, but I had developed a lot more control over my MP expenditures and gained a lot of additional available MP from leveling up. Perhaps I could use stronger and more interesting pieces of magic now. I still had 2 SP from my previous level–I had unintentionally used a point on my negotiation skill while buying the parchment and map from the shopkeeper through the natural method–so I dropped the remaining points into 6-point magic first, both to get a little stronger with the skill and to bypass the issue of worrying about the automatic assignment of skill points that happens through the gain of experience.
Smiting wouldn’t help me here, but I immediately started to regret not using it in the dungeon. If anything would be weak to divine magic attacks, it seemed like it would be a cursed place like that.
I thought through what might entail a curse and what might entail a debuff. They seemed fairly similar. When Vorel, my mother’s master from the magical research institute, had first taught me about this kind of magic, he had called the two points “weakening and magic ailment.” My mother, Sharma, stopped him from telling me anything more, since it was forbidden by the Church. Everything else I knew about 6-point magic was self-taught. My own terminology for the spell types derived from video games and ideas from my old world.
A sleep spell, as an example, would be a magic ailment. A curse. Other curses might include poison or paralysis. A slow spell, on the other hand, would be a form of weakening. A debuff. It reduced the natural abilities of the opponent. Something which reduced strength, healing potential, or magic recovery would also be in this class.
What about a calming spell? I wondered. A calm status condition might be a curse. From another perspective, a spell that reduced the ability of the creature to get emotional could be seen as a weakening, or a debuff.
I decided to try to cast “calm” as a curse, an ailment. I opted to channel 10 MP at a time into my 6-point magic circle, up to 50 MP max to test it out. I had the stone magic circle in one hand and my other hand on the beasts side, with my eyes closed, casting carefully until I felt my magic flow through the circle at a cost of something between 30 and 40 MP.
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I opened my eyes and watched the ramhog stop fighting so hard, and stop squealing in favor of heavy breathing. After a moment, the breathing started to relax as well. Treepo looked at me curiously and I smiled at him.
“New magic,” I whispered to him, winking conspiratorially.
Curses and debuffs like this would be a huge help when it came to starting battles with opponents and with taming other beasts. It was expensive, but extremely useful. The haphazard trip-rope method could likely be shelved right away, despite my new knotting skill. I was sure I would find uses for that eventually. I turned my thoughts away from rope and back to 6-point magic.
I wasn’t sure there was a real difference between curses and debuffs. I wondered if I was missing some detail since all 6-point magic was forbidden and hidden by the Church. On the other hand, the two could have been forcibly split, semantically, just to fit the idea of 6-point magic having 6 distinct points. I had come to the conclusion that this world used magic circles as a form of language to describe magic, rather than it being a true representation. 5-point magic had two distinct sound and silence points, after all, and one was really just the absence of the other.
There wasn’t anything wrong with that. It simply meant that, as is often the case in science, this world was still on the journey to understanding the true nature of magic.
Magic circles were a way to simplify knowledge, for teaching but also for bypassing the limitations of the skill point system that guided human growth. Before magic circles, people had to specialize in distinct elements and could only cast taught, practiced spells. It was actually an impressively smart idea given that no one was aware about skill points, as far as I had discovered.
Although… Since I had reincarnated here, it stood to reason that other people probably reincarnated here as well. Other reincarnated people might also have had access to the appraisal skill in some fashion. Perhaps the original creator of magic circles was from another world, like myself. If possible, I would try to learn more about who developed magic circles and when. That might help me learn more about how and why I was here.
The ramhog had calmed down, so I pulled some berries out of my inventory and started channeling my magic into them, and gently sticking them into the beast’s mouth. After a while, he started swallowing, and a short time later, I untied and greeted my new familiar.
* * *
“I name you Buda,” I declared formally, and appraised him.
[Buda] Ramhog (Lv 3)
HP: 68/73
MP: 6/6
Status: Calm
EXP: 166/300
I wasn’t sure how long it would be before the calm status dispersed, but I didn’t think it really mattered now that he was tamed. I pulled out a selection of pre-cooked meats from my inventory, notably griffator meat as they were the ramhog’s main predator in these parts, but also cuts of striking vipis and ratman. I didn’t produce any ramhog meat, though. I didn’t want my familiars to be unwitting cannibals.
“Bon appetit,” I said, infusing and placing the various meats on a leaf in front of the large hog.
I watched as the big guy made short work of the food, and gained enough experience from the new foods to push through to level 4. Meat would rapidly have diminishing returns when it came to experience gain, but it was an easy way to gain some levels from the jump.
What I really needed in order to powerlevel a familiar was higher rank meat, which in this case meant rank D beast meat. The only rank D beast I had in my inventory was the shagloth. I had kept it whole in case I wanted to study it more, since it was my only lead when it came to learning more about skillfruit and how they related to dungeons. I had no one I trusted with that kind of information, though, and I wasn’t able to learn anything else on my own, so I had hit my limits with this corpse. I shrugged and finally dismantled the beast, further dismantling the meat yield with my butchery skill into specific cuts.
I motioned to the familiars and we marched through the jungle, out of the greenery and onto the beach. Buda grunted happily and waded into the surf, laying down and closing his eyes with his head up as the cool seawater washed over his back.
I got Treepo and Gregory to collect some wood–Treepo collecting the majority, and Gregory handing off a few sticks before curling up and going to sleep–and got a small fire going to cook the shagloth meat. I glanced at the other pieces of beast loot in my inventory. In addition to meat, bones, and offal there was the hide, which I pulled out and examined. It was fairly impressive as a hide, so I didn’t turn it into leather, which seemed like it would be a waste. Perhaps I could turn it into a fur coat, for if I ever made it up to the mountains in the far north. The carcass also produced the claws, which were quite interesting to examine when they weren’t attempting to tear into my body.
I had a massive collection of beast parts, and would have to eventually figure out how I could use them, if I could use them at all. I was very happy with my stingknight armor, but wasn’t sure what possible use I could have for some of the other stuff. If I found no uses for the loot, I hoped I could find someone interested in buying it all whenever I made it to another city.
When the cuts of meat finished cooking, I served most of it to Buda, as well as some to Treepo and Gregory, although they wouldn’t gain anything from it beyond a full belly since they were already max level for their rank. I reserved a small piece for myself, unsure if I would like it. I took a bite and chewed consciously, thinking.
It wasn’t terrible, but it was nowhere near as good as ramhog meat, which made me feel guilty as I watched Buda happily munch his meal. I hoped I hadn’t just ruined some of my favorite and best source of meat for myself by taming this guy.
It did feel strangely powerful, though. I wasn’t sure what kind of effect the meat would have on me beyond MP restoration, if any, though the MP restoration from the meat was substantial. I finished my snack and re-appraised Buda, happy to see that the meal had earned him another few hundred experience points. I would likely feed him shagloth meat at least a few more times to get the most out of it, and then reserve the rest for other future familiars as needed.
I watched Buda return to the sea and lay in the surf, contented. What a chill pig. I was pretty sure that after another high protein breakfast he would be level 5 and we could dive headfirst into training. Starting off half of the way to max level was a boon. From there, all we had to do was battle.