Chapter 2 #2
For a split second, he saw himself stabbed with a dozen daggers, his own throat sliced apart.
He blinked, and the vision vanished. All his senses screamed danger.
Hair stood up on the back of his neck, his sweat turning cold.
With his body unable to use magic right now, at least as far as the failed lance suggested, she actually posed a threat to him now.
He had been in danger before, but never quite so direct and open, not face to face with murderous intent so intense he could feel it.
“I am also from another world,” he said.
“I used a spell to transfer my soul into this world, and this Dreamwalker of yours hijacked my transference tunnel to get you here.”
All the suspicion from her face vanished, replaced with a beaming smile and open eyes. “Oh, nice, then you’re fine. He would have killed you if he didn’t like you. So, anyway, do you know anything about white letters that floated around? Was that your spell?”
So she knew nothing of the System. That made two of them. He looked over the valley once more. He was going to enjoy every view he could get of this magnificent paradise. But the System intrigued him, and he had the perfect guinea pig on whom to test whatever he needed.
He focused his thoughts on the symbol of a star, conjuring the System menu. “Think of a star,” he said, looking at the floating hologram-like screens.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: YOU ARE LEVEL 1]
Shone at the top.
[AVAILABLE STAT POINTS: 5]
[STRENGTH: 10]
[DEXTERITY: 10]
[INTELLIGENCE: 10]
[WILLPOWER: 10]
[ENDURANCE: 10]
[CHARISMA: 10]
[SPEED: 10]
He focused on the individual stats to see some details.
So, strength increased both physical and spell power.
Dexterity also worked for both attacks and spells, focused on critical rate and damage, and had some relation to evasion.
Intelligence allowed ignoring damage reduction and resistances.
Willpower provided resistances and strengthened shields.
Endurance was both durability and stamina.
Charisma had a weird line about the ability to influence both the living and everything else.
And finally, speed was the ability to accelerate.
A warning also shone underneath the stats section: [STATS MULTIPLY THE USER’S BASE].
With five points to allocate per level, there were either many levels to be had, or there had to be other ways to increase stats. In any case, seven stats times twenty perks was too many to go over right now.
He glanced over the other screens, seeing a floating SKILL TREE button. He focused on it, and a skill tree opened before his eyes.
Ah, so just like on Earth.
He stared at the monster of a skill tree, starting from the center, branching into thirty-seven classes, each of which had two to three specializations.
The skill paths of different specializations stretched for dozens of points, also branching and intertwining ahead.
This had easily over five thousand skill nodes.
He had one skill point to assign, and the ends of the branches required level seventy-five. He wasn’t going to get all that many skill points, so this had to be a careful decision.
Back home, he stacked intelligence and focused on spell-research and transportation-focused classes and skills, devoting his life to finding a way out of his world.
In a mostly peaceful world with no monsters, having basic shields, a wide-area sleep spell, and one attack spell sufficed.
That was not going to be the case in this world.
“Yo!” Luna shouted, disrupting his concentration. “Why are dexterity and speed separate? That’s absolutely bullshit. How can you be dexterous but slow?” She turned her glare towards Alsen. “Is there a way to summon whoever made this? I’ve got something to tell him.”
Seeing her white knuckles on the dagger she held, Luna also had something to share with him.
The thought got a snort out of him. Why were dexterity and speed separate?
An intriguing puzzle, yet with a very straightforward answer.
“I suppose it’s because dexterity is a highly offensive stat, because it affected critical hit rate, but it also dips into defense via evasion.
Speed also works both offensively and defensively, while none of the other stats do.
So, I believe it’s a balancing decision to not have a single stat with a full package of offense and defense. ”
Luna rolled her eyes. “This is so annoying! If they were together, I could put everything into dexterity and have all I could ever need.”
He drew a sharp breath, which transformed into a resigned sigh. Why did she ask him when she reached ninety-eight percent of the way towards the answer? He refocused on the skill tree.
So many classes, but most were irrelevant to him. Berserker, assassin, archer, beast master, all meaningless to him. The bottom right section of the tree had the mage-type classes.
He found the class for himself at first glance in the section.
Archmage.
That looked beyond promising. He read the first skill:
Skill name: Spell book
Required level: One
Description: Any spell inscribed into your spellbook gains fifty percent increased effect and costs twenty-five percent more mana.
Usage: Passive.
With a world as rich in mana as this one, mana cost felt insignificant to him, but a fifty percent increase in spell power was going to be great.
Did he even need to read other classes?
He sighed. This was too good to be true. “Luna,” he said.
“No, I didn’t… I mean, yep?” she asked, flustered.
What was that about? He couldn’t tell, and didn’t have a spell for that. “Have you looked at the classes yet?”
“A bit.”
“Do you have an archmage class there?”
She focused, pointing with her finger at the air. Not like when one used a tablet, though. She jabbed the air with her finger as if trying to hit the floating white text.
He chuckled. It looked ridiculous, but it clearly worked, because she wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t. “Nope.”
“Can you read me your classes?”
“Sure. Warrior, berserker, sword master…” she kept reading the classes, and Alsen verified them against his skill tree.
She hit all classes except for one, except for archmage.
So, hidden among the plethora of choices awaited a class only he had access to. Splendid. With a broad smirk, he chose the archmage class, selecting the first skill.
A vision filled his gaze. He saw a blonde woman dressed in a simple, white robe, six massive feather wings spread out from her back. She knelt on a pillow by a simple table, and in beautiful calligraphy, she wrote runes he couldn’t decipher onto a page of a thick tome.
“Many consider writing spells down unnecessary,” a melodic voice, obviously hers, narrated into his mind as she wrote.
“But there is a benefit to the method. By writing the spell down, one is forced to arrange the thoughts into a writeable form. The resulting clarity lends itself to refinement, and refinement is the foundation of perfection.”
The vision vanished. What was that?
He scanned his surroundings for magical residue. Nothing.
Well, great, but how did he have a vision then?
That was obviously a spell, so why couldn’t he find any residue?
A frown took over his face. Actually, he should have found the residue of the System in the first place.
With Luna furiously jabbing the air, clearly reading skills one by one, there was supposed to be magical residue all over her and the surrounding space.
But he could detect nothing. He toyed with the detection spell, stretching out the scan, altering the frequency. Bit by bit, he moved through the frequencies the scan allowed him to scan.
Nothing.
He couldn’t find absolutely anything.
That meant the scanning spell he used couldn’t detect the type of magic the System was made of. He needed to invent a better scanning spell.
A loud clang pulled him back into reality.
What was she doing now?
He glowered at her. She kicked through the pile of loot, sending a gauntlet flying, hitting the dead knight to produce another clang.
Could she stop making noise for ten seconds? “What are you doing?”
“Looking for something useful. The ogre bled all over their camping supplies. Actually…” she glanced at him. “Do you have a spell that can clean stuff?” She pointed at a pile by the dead ogre.
A backpack lay crushed under his throat, drenched with blood.
“We could get the backpack out, but there’s no point if we can’t clean it.”
Hmm. No. As embarrassing as it sounded, he didn’t have a spell for that. A blush passed over his face. A lifetime of studying magic, and he found himself not having the needed spell on the first day of his new life.
Well, at least he had a reason to invent more spells.
A broad smile spread over his face. Yeah. He could do that. Figure out the System. Find out about Dreamwalker. Invent entire schools of magic.
“Guess not,” Luna said. “Got any food? All their supplies are in that backpack.”
No. And while he could summon water and food, those only functioned as an illusion. They couldn’t actually sustain someone.
Alsen walked over to the loot pile. Weapons, pieces of armor, a rope, a pickaxe, nothing of value. “Do they not have any gold, gems, or any currency?”
“Nope,” Luna said, dead serious. “No gems, no shiny metals, not even a single coin.”
That was an obvious lie. Or… was it? He didn’t see any filled pockets on her, or really any place on herself where she could have hidden a pouch of gold.
He pondered taking the rope. He didn’t know how to fly… yet, but there was no way he wouldn’t figure out a flying spell soon.
He sighed. “Fine. Did you find anything useful?”
“Two daggers, the rope, and this.” She held up a waterskin. “It’s empty, but it might be functional. Most likely. At least, I didn’t find any holes in it.”
Alsen glanced at the mountain path stretching upward into mist. Then down toward the valley, where the tree line began. “We should head down. It’s unlikely for us to find a village higher up in the mountains.”