Chapter 66: Unnatural Skills (Patreon)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mgfis1TYwZM5Suj5lR36wQGCyp7rOPVHMr4FaZlgBI0/edit?usp=sharing

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Luckily for Cayden, class was almost over, so he was only left to stew in the residual awkwardness of his interaction with Delphia for a minute before Instructor Barry called them over with a clap of his hands, giving time for the last of the injured students to get healing.

“I hope you’ve all learned something during this time: something about yourself, something about your classmates…” For the smallest moment, the instructor’s eyes paused their sweeping over the class, landing on Cayden. But just as quickly his gaze moved on as he continued, “...something about the monsters you may face, and hopefully even something about those you’ll be trusting to heal you! Regardless, it’s not my job to hold your hands for every lesson, so I’ll leave it to you to figure all those somethings out for yourself. Dismissed!”

Instructor Tilda looked less than pleased with the way Instructor Barry wrapped up the lesson, but the frontline students had become used to their instructor’s brusque nature, and quickly broke apart and began leaving the arena.

Cayden looked around the crowd for Jeremy’s distinctive form, as they shared their next class as well, but was surprised to hear his name called out from a different source.

“Cayden!” Cayden turned to the voice and was surprised to see his slitherkin opponent from the first day’s class jogging towards him.

“Oh. Hey…” his voice drifted off.

“Ignar,” the boy said, not looking insulted that Cayden hadn’t remembered his name. “My next class starts soon, so there’s not much time, but I have a quick question for you: want to be my sparring partner?”

True to his slitherkin race, each of the ‘s’ sounds he made was drawn out in a slight hiss, and it took a moment for Cayden to focus beyond his strange accent on the words themselves. “Oh? Like, in class? Are we supposed to find a partner?”

“No, no, this would be for outside of class,” Ignar said, shaking his head. “Not today, but maybe tomorrow afternoon? And perhaps a few other days throughout the week?”

“Why me?” Cayden asked suspiciously, and Ignar sighed.

“You remember my [Echoed Blades] skill from when we fought, right? Well, I need to practice. One of the benefits of the skill is that it can bypass many shields and defensive skills, but that makes it difficult to train without risking hurting my sparring partner, and my skill can’t exactly be dulled like a normal sword. My family’s tutors could of course withstand my attacks, but I haven’t been able to train as well as I am used to since arriving at the academy.” He looked pointedly at Cayden. “You, however, were able to withstand my attacks with ease and provided a decent challenge, and I believe I would benefit from sparring further with you. Of course, I’m sure I could find something to aid in your training as well. Or perhaps I could pay you?”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” Cayden hurriedly replied. While sparring with a fellow student for training seemed reasonable, trading that sparring for money felt…demeaning, somehow. And while training with Jeremy was fine, Cayden could imagine the benefits of training with Ignar. He remembered how the slitherkin had fought in their match: not just with skills, but with skill – something that Cayden was sorely lacking. “I’m willing to at least give it a shot. Tomorrow, you said?”

The slitherkin smiled. “Yes, at tenth bell, if that works for you?”

Cayden nodded, and the slitherkin was quick to give his thanks and then leave.

“That was amazing!” he heard as Jeremy finally found him while the rest of the class trickled out of the arena. “I didn’t even realize how far along you were until halfway through the class, but once I did…wow. The early assailants were bad enough for me, but you didn’t even look like you were struggling! I know you said you were tough, and I believed you, but still…that was some impressive stuff.”

“Thanks,” Cayden said, rubbing the back of his head. He wasn’t sure how to deal with the excessive praise, as it wasn’t exactly something he was used to. Elise would already be focused completely on the next challenge while Tiana was happier teasing than praising. “It’s probably not quite as impressive as what you’re thinking, though. Most of my skills are passive and defensive in nature, which worked perfectly for this lesson. I’m sure plenty of the other students will do great once they’re allowed to use active skills.”

At this, Jeremy grimaced. “Yeah, well not me. I don’t have any active skills that increase my defenses, so I’ll be stuck repeating the first dozen assailants when that class comes.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask about that,” Cayden said. “And I hope this isn’t offensive or anything, but why are you in the frontline class anyway? With your skill, I’d have thought you would be a better fit for the support class.”

Thankfully, Jeremy wasn’t bothered by the question, taking it with the same easy affability with which he seemed to respond to everything as they walked side-by-side across the campus. “Honestly, it could have gone either way. Or potentially even the damage dealer class – really anything but the rogue class. It isn’t as cut and dry as it sometimes appears.” He shrugged. “I do have some skills to dissuade monsters, just none that’ll work against the assailants. The skill I showed you is handy for buffing a team and would normally put me under the ‘support’ classification, but it’s something I can use once and then mostly forget about. The support class focuses more on battlefield management while staying behind the team’s frontline.”

“That makes sense,” Cayden said. “What role did you fill on your adventuring team?”

“We didn’t really call it that, but I was mostly a frontliner, which is probably why I am where I am now. But we always had another frontliner who I worked with to keep the monsters off our damage dealers.”

“Huh,” Cayden nodded thoughtfully. “So how did–”

A bell rang out, interrupting Cayden’s question. This wasn’t one of the city’s bells marking the turn of the hour, but was rather a smaller one just for the academy, letting students know that the next class was about to start. Their conversation temporarily forgotten, Cayden and Jeremy picked up the pace to their next class.

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“More than any other, it is the skills which make an adventurer. A class can be good, but what is it about a class that makes it good? It is the skills that the class offers. It is imperative that you learn to maximize your skills to the utmost efficiency. That includes general, racial, and class skills…”

Cayden pulled up his status menu in an effort to stay awake.

It wasn’t that his Skills teacher was bad or that the information he taught was not useful. Cayden agreed with the man’s philosophy, that skills were the most important part of a build.

Yet that didn’t stop the class from being unbelievably boring.

If a subject could be covered in five words, Instructor Ponce would insist on using twenty. Of Cayden’s classes, this was the one with the least student interaction, as the instructor would continue to talk for the full hour in a non-stop drone. It was still early in the semester, but Cayden was inclined to believe that even if no one showed up to class one day, Instructor Ponce would continue without deviation, giving his same lecture while staring out over the tops of dozens of empty chairs. Coupled with his tiredness from his previous day’s training, Cayden was struggling mightily to keep his eyes open.

He could only be thankful that he was healed using Delphia’s magic rather than with a healing potion. Healing from healing potions always left him tired, and he couldn’t imagine how much more of a fight it would be if he’d been dealing with that on top of everything else.

Some of the other students had obviously already fallen to the same temptation, their heads bobbing as their eyes drifted shut. One elf-girl had obviously given up entirely, her head down on the desk in front of her, a small amount of drool falling from the corner of her mouth. Cayden was oh-so-tempted to join them – it wasn’t like Instructor Ponce would notice or care – but he fought the urge. If he gave in once, he knew it would be even harder to stay awake in subsequent Skills classes, and he was sure the instructor would have something worthwhile to say eventually.

In the meantime, though, he scanned his status, and he was pleased to find several changes.

Both his strength and endurance had increased by one to thirty-four and thirty-three, respectively. He didn’t get a notification when his stats increased, so he couldn’t be sure when it might have happened, but he had to assume that it was sometime during his previous evening’s flurry of training.

It was somewhat disappointing that after all his consistent, focused training, an evening of raging at a training dummy was what pushed him over the edge in two of his stats, but he wouldn’t be dissuaded from his normal training routine. He was getting close to the base limits of his stats, boosted by [Personal Training], but strength and endurance had been overdue for an increase. He would have to work hard if he wanted to increase them naturally one more time before his class reached level ten and he upgraded it, potentially losing [Personal Training].

“...and one of the biggest questions is in regards to how one acquired certain types of general skills. Specifically, those skills that cannot be mimicked via normal actions – those that are considered ‘magical’.”

Cayden dismissed his menu, refocusing on the lecture as he realized Instructor Ponce finally seemed to be speaking about something he was interested in.

“It is easy enough to acquire a skill that we would consider ‘normal’: simply perform an action enough in a specific way, and the system will offer a skill that corresponds to that action. Weapon skills are a common example of this that most of you have already been offered. For ‘unnatural’ skills – those which cannot be acquired via mundane repetition of normal abilities – there are four different ways of acquiring them. The first is the method that is theorized to be the origin of abnormal skills among our ancestors, thousands of years past: skill-stones. An extremely rare dungeon drop, these have the ability to teach you any random skill at level one. But this method is the one you are least likely to encounter, as even for those with power, skill-stones are prohibitively rare and expensive, and this only increases as the skill contained within the stone increases in rarity. If you have the good fortune to find a skill-stone within a dungeon, I would suggest either using it or selling it immediately, and not spending too long haggling for a better deal. Most powerful skill-stones, until they are used, have bloody histories of betrayal and theft towards each of their previous owners.”

Cayden reached over and nudged Jeremy in the seat next to him, whose eyes snapped open at the contact. The formine looked at Cayden questioningly, and Cayden nodded towards the front of the class. This subject was interesting enough that he was sure his friend would want to be awake for it as well.

“The last three methods of acquiring unnatural general skills are, in some ways, the same method. They all involve acquiring the means to perform the action of the ‘unnatural’ skill via another method. The first of these, and most rare, is the case of wizards. Now, many people use the terms ‘mage’ and ‘wizard’ interchangeably, but this is incorrect. A ‘mage’ refers to any who uses ‘unnatural’ skills and is typically associated with a build focusing on the magical stats: mana, mana regen, magic power, and magic control. A ‘wizard’, however, is one who performs the same effects of a mage’s skills without possessing those skills. Often, they will use runes or high-level mana manipulation to mimic those effects.”

Instructor Ponce nodded as if agreeing with his own assertion. “Now, becoming a wizard is not a popular route for adventurers like you. While it offers unparalleled flexibility, the effects created by a wizard will never be as powerful as those created by a mage with a high-leveled skill. Most of those who study wizardry do so only to learn to produce a certain, specific effect, and then they quit after being offered that skill by the system.

“The last two methods of acquiring unnatural skills are similar to the method of wizardry: learn how to simulate the skills desired via other means until the system offers you the skill you want. The means of simulating the other skills is where they differ: one uses racial skills to acquire the desired general skills, while the other uses class skills. For example, someone who works as a blacksmith might be offered a [Heat Manipulation] class skill. Using that, they may practice manipulating heat and fire in a specific way until the system offers them the [Fireball] general skill – a skill that is mostly impossible to acquire via ‘natural’ means. And the same can be done with racial skills, which is why so many have builds that build off of their racial skills. Using our own healing instructor, Instructor Tilda, as an example: it is extremely difficult to acquire magical healing general skills. But, building off of her racial skills as a unicorn, she has gained certain general skills which would be impossible to otherwise naturally acquire.”

Cayden thought of his own situation – what could his own racial skills build into?

Honestly, he couldn’t think of anything. Even if he wanted more boosting or defensive skills, all his racial skills were passive, and he had no idea how to push or train them in a specific direction to get him a similar general skill. And neither could he think of anything he might want that he could spin off from his class skills.

It was definitely something to consider, though, especially as his class evolution drew closer. He’d decided he needed a better way to attack enemies, yet he had no idea what form that might take.

This lesson helped clarify his steps forward: he first needed to decide on what effect he wanted to produce, and then he needed to find a way to emulate that effect enough that the system offered it to him as a skill.

Unfortunately, knowing the process did nothing to help him decide the specifics of the steps of that process. And so, as the class wrapped up after a few more minutes of Instructor Ponce’s droning, he came to a realization, one that he had come to many times before over the years of his life.

He needed to talk to Elise.

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