Chapter 29

Ethereal Marmots were aptly named. They were hard to find, and even when I did find them, they were elusive and hard to hit. Yet, with my Wheel of Magic nearly maxed out, they swiftly went from being a danger to being fast, yet manageable nuisances. It became a game, yet one where I had become the hunter, not the hunted.

To me, every single frustrating encounter with the insanely murderous critters was one of sequences and balance. The first stage inevitably revolved around my attempting to block enough damaging air assaults to max out the retributive damage of my Wheel of Magic. The balancing part arrived when I went on the offensive, actively hunting my opponents down. That part was easy. Trying to ensure that the restoration offered by Self-Heal almost matched the inevitable return damage from the tiny murderbeasts wasn’t.

The ‘almost’ in that sentence, by the by, wasn’t an error. At this point, I’d come to the conclusion that my immense health pool was a gift. I know. Not the hardest conclusion one could arrive at. Yet, I wasn’t just talking about the lovely ability to not die. Rather, the real gifts were the knock-on effects from not dying.

Taking damage and either out-healing said damage through Life Steal or simply restoring the damage naturally through Self-Heal was just the start. The real gift came through self-improvement. Sure, a lot of skills improved automatically through your actions on the battlefield. Yet, a lot of them took blood and pain to improve.

Any resistance skill, my Armor, Resilience, Shield and Self-Heal skills? Most builds wouldn’t let you just keep on improving those. You’d need a healer, dedication and constant downtime to recuperate health and mana before going back to it.

It was the same for me, of course. I couldn’t just keep on going eternally. I was no machine. Yet, the balancing act – keeping the damage flowing in balanced with my natural and talent-based healing was slowly become easier.

Hence, I worked the balance. I sometimes took a hit or two deliberately, to keep my Self-Heal active and working. Similarly, I used Spot every chance I had to keep my stamina down and Higher Endurance improving. It was a risk, but a calculated one. Keeping my reserves constantly at around sixty to eighty percent ensured that my skills would keep increasing.

And increase they did. My defensive skills were improving in leaps and bounds, to the point where the annoying Marmots were becoming less and less of a challenge. They’d managed to ruin my plan for Burgeoning Aggression – but eventually, I was forced to admit that this approach wasn’t the worst either.

My talents also took practice. Those, of course, didn’t automatically improve. Yet, they could be applied optimally, if you knew how they worked.

My Wave of Reflection needed direction. I’d already known as much. Yet, I hadn’t yet realized the possibilities in controlling that black wave of intangibly damaging energy. The wave would course straight through enemies, causing damage along the way. Yet, that wasn’t all it was. The damage and effect depended entirely on how and where I aimed the wave. Once, I managed to hit a Marmot in its hindquarters, and the energy actually crippled the overtly cute beast. I felt my heart leap with pity at the sight, right until it used my distraction to nearly carve my ear off with an aerial missile.

I also trained Wheel of Magic. At first, I’d assumed its attacks were entirely automatic. Then, I learned that I was able to influence tiny things. Not direction or damage type. Yet, I found that I was able to change the tightness of the attacks, influence if the missiles should arrive straight at the targets or scattered. I felt like there was more to it as well, but I couldn’t quite decipher it. Not yet.

I felt, for the first time since fleeing the Ever Steady, in control. I knew there were tons of things out there that’d be able to take me out without issues – but right this moment, I was on top of things.

While the Marmots were excellent practice partners, I learned that they were perpetually low-level. The highest-levelled Marmot was Level 12 and still went down with almost infuriating ease. Their health was negligible, too, typically below a hundred. In short, the experience stemming from my murder spree was limited.

At the end of the third day after stumbling on the ugly buggers, I was looking into a few conclusions, all of them frustrating.

The first conclusion? Extinction. Just as I had run out of Millipedes, the prevalence of tunnels in my surroundings was thinning out – and the Marmots along with them. The past four hours, I’d only found a single Marmot, and that one had already been wounded by something. Nearby feathers hinted at something airborne, but I never saw what. Regardless, I was running out of beasts to kill.

Second conclusion tied to the first. Levels. I managed to make it to Level 17, barely. Yet, I was nowhere near the five points needed to unlock my Burgeoning Aggression and finally get some real battlefield control.

The third, and most frustrating conclusion tightly tied in to the two first. As I slowly progressed in a westerly direction, skinning and grilling the local wildlife population, (And hating every bite. Why were there no mutated pigs in this damn world? Magical cows?) the landscape slowly altered. The tall ridge running alongside my progression in the northern direction slowly, but surely, veered off in a southern direction, cutting me off.

The scenery expanded ahead of me. I’d located a small hillock on the otherwise flat landscape and climbed it to take in my possibilities. They were, unfortunately, both simple and frustrating.

The ridge did indeed cut me off. Just a kilometre or two ahead, the highlands made it very clear that my future travels westward were drawing to a close. Southward, the shift in the terrain remained as constant and disgusting as they’d been since day one.

Swamplands, or climbing. That was what it boiled down to. Did I want to shlep my ass through stinking, muddy water or risk breaking my legs, leaving myself crippled in hostile lands?

That sounded like a difficult decision. It really wasn’t.

My personal inventory was, right this moment, stuffed to the brim. A large part, of course, was the Millipede skin, every bit as tough and unbending as the moment I’d skinned it. To that, I had added a dozen Marmot furs. They were soft as blazes, with a subtle glow that indicated some sort of magical effect. Only, there were no convenient item descriptions to be had here. Maybe that stuff was Crafter-only? That, or there were no convenient shortcuts.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Anyway, in between those items I was saving for the future lay charred Marmot meat, enough for a week at least and my waterskin, recently filled from a tiny, ice-cold waterhole.

In theory, I’d be good to go in the swamp. Fresh water might become an issue some days in, but I was good for now. Sure, I’d have to be wary of things that were optimized for fighting underwater – being dragged or subdued underwater would effectively ruin my chance at defending. Yet, that wasn’t the real issue here.

My shield was strapped onto my left arm. Its weight had become less of a burden, and more of a comfort, a reminder that, anything this world might throw at me, I’d be able to fend off.

Only, during this last battle, the comfort had become a few centimetres shorter. Parts of the upper edge of the shield, already hugely destabilized by the Higher Skreeling’s bite, took an aerial missile and simply flaked off.

My shield was falling apart. Little by little, its structural integrity was deteriorating, and there was nothing I could do about it.

On top of that, my swordbreaker, never impressive, had been dulled by the constant skinning work, and I had to put increasing pressure on the spindly thing whenever I used it. One of these days, it would simply snap apart.

This was to say nothing of my armor, which was scuffed, pierced, broken, burned and abused in more ways than I could count. The strap holding the armor in place around my midriff had died a few fights back, and I’d been forced to improvise a replacement from dried strips of Marmot skin.

Some annoying prodigies would be able to keep going, using their knowledge to craft tools and replacements. I… was more likely to end up fighting buck naked.

Hence, entering the swamplands was not a possibility. I’d watched a bunch of survival videos before entering Ademia, of course. I’d need to be able to survive in medieval fairytale land. But somehow, shield creation had not been on the agenda.

I needed to find somewhere with civilization. Or, at the very least, find some hostile semi-sentient asshole with a shield who would attack me and kindly serve me a replacement. The simple solution to this conundrum, of course, would be backtracking and waltzing up the incline I already knew was guarded. Except… I didn’t like the idea. At all. Simple logic would ensure that the people put there to guard it would be high-Level. They’d also have the advantage of height against me, and, with my luck, would be sporting ranged weapons. Nope. As insane as it sounded, I would rather take advantage of my high stamina and arrive somewhere less likely to be guarded.

That notion found me, twenty minutes later, staring at the bottom of the cliff face leading pretty much straight up in the air. I was very much having second thoughts.