March 28, 2026 — 1:33 am

Once everything was packed away, the group set out on the road. Hegar hadn’t retied Rain’s hands and had pretty much been ignoring him. That was fine as far as Rain was concerned. He was content to walk in silence as he poked around menus, looking at stats and skills. He had noticed a few more elements of the skill screen. Apparently, he could spend experience to unlock information about the next tier of skills. The descriptions for the first tier weren’t particularly detailed and he wasn’t expecting it would be any different for information he paid to unlock. He had decided against trying it. Instead, he was paging through the tier zero skills and trying to get a feel for what each tree was about.

There were various trees for physical and magical skills. They ranged from general ones, such as the boringly titled ‘melee weapons’, to specific ones, such as ‘fencing’. In fact, there seemed to be several complementary skill trees available. Investing in both melee weapons and fencing seemed to make a lot of sense, as did other groupings like ‘fire evocation’, ‘evocation metamagic’, and ‘magical utility’. ‘Firebolt’ could be boosted by the evocation metamagic skill ‘guide sending’ to add a sort-of aim correction, while ‘intrinsic clarity’ from magical utility would allow for slightly faster mana regeneration.

There were even trees for things like ‘weapon crafting’, ‘chemistry’, and ‘alchemy’, which was apparently different from chemistry. The skills in these trees seemed to be of the passive variety, at least at tier zero. +x% sharpness to crafted axes, for example. Rain mentally divided the skill trees into two categories: active and passive. Active skills were actions you could take to affect the world. For physical trees, these were straightforward, mostly fancy names and variations on stab, cut, throw, and shoot. None of these really stuck out to Rain after he had seen Brovose and Ameliah throwing magic around.

He had spent some time trying to figure out what skills they had been using. Brovose had probably been using ‘firebolt’, which was pretty self-explanatory. There wasn’t anything at tier zero matching the magical shield he had raised, though. Ameliah was a bit of a mystery. Her strength made him think that she had some points in the skill ‘strength of arm’, but he still wasn’t clear on whether just adding stat points to strength would have that effect anyway.

The skill she had used after the battle might have been ‘purify’ from the utility auras tree. The description simply read: “Purify poison, corruption, and contamination within 1 meter.” Rain assumed that the range would increase with level as Ameliah’s aura had extended much further than that. Either that, or she had invested in ‘extend aura’ in aura metamagic.

Those two trees were one of only a few pairs that were clearly meant to be used in conjunction. Pairings were usually more general, such as the ‘evocation metamagic’ tree which would boost ‘firebolt’, but not ‘ice shield’. The aura metamagic tree had Rain’s long-dormant munchkin senses tingling. That one tree could boost three others: the offensive, defensive, and utility aura trees. Specializing in auras would allow a great amount of versatility without sacrificing too much power, depending on what was lurking in the higher levels of aura metamagic. The tier zero ‘amplify aura’ was already promising. It added 10% to the intensity of any aura. The cost was a 20% increase in mana consumption, but it was metamagic, so it would probably be a toggle.

He almost invested his points right then and there, but he resisted the temptation. This wasn’t a choice to be made lightly, and there were still tons of trees he hadn’t even looked at. There were options for any type of combat you could think of, unless you liked Bards, that was. There wasn’t anything even remotely like a charisma tree, though there was ‘psionics’, which looked like it might turn into something like that eventually. Hard to tell when the only tier zero spell was ‘mental blast’, which appeared to be just a different flavor of firebolt.

Rain was jerked out of the rabbit hole his thoughts had been exploring when his foot detected an absence of the road. He pitched forward, shouting as his foot struck the ground about thirty centimeters lower than he was expecting. His ankle twisted and there was a horrible snapping sound as he fell, shortly followed by a sickening crack as his nose slammed into the earth. He hadn’t even tried to protect his face as the still open skills menu was blocking his view.

“Huuururr,” Rain tried to scream through a mouthful of dirt. He suddenly felt himself being hoisted up and set gently down. His ankle immediately rolled and he started to fall again. Whoever had lifted him guided him down, so thankfully he didn’t end up with a broken tailbone to go with his nose and ankle. Through the pain, he heard Hegar’s grating laughter.

Seriously? Holy fuck this hurts. Not funny. Owwww.

He heard Ameliah say a word and felt her hand on his ankle. Suddenly, the pain was gone. She repeated the word and he saw her hand pass through the floating blue skills screen to touch his nose. He felt it pop back into place as the pain receded. Healing Word, tier zero, restoration. Rain thought, still in shock.

His face started to turn red, though it was hard to tell given that it was covered by blood and dirt. Now that the pain was gone, he realized that maybe Hegar had a point. He had done the fantasy equivalent of walking into a light pole because you were glued to your smartphone. Chagrined, Rain dismissed the skills window and looked up at the group of faces staring down at him. Expressions varied from impassivity to tears of laughter.

Stolen novel; please report.

Rain blushed furiously as Ameliah lifted him up with one hand without any apparent effort, setting him on the ground and then taking a step back.

“T… Thank you,” Rain stammered. Ameliah shook her head.

“Rain,” she said, gesturing to him. “Ameliah,” she indicated herself. Then pointing at the hole, she said another word Rain didn’t recognize.

Brovose burst out laughing at this, joining the others in reveling at his expense. Even Ameliah was smirking at him. Rain was still a bit flustered, but the sudden removal of the pain let him appreciate what had happened from the perspective of the others.

Ok, I guess that might have been a little funny.