Chapter 4
They now walked a forest path, straight and safe and pleasant. Luna hummed a random tune, and Alsen felt like it was a good opportunity.
“You’re really good at this adventuring thing,” Alsen remarked. “I’ve got half of my muscles stiff and everything hurts, but you’re walking just fine.”
“I can also feel it… I’m just used to the feeling, I guess.” Her voice dropped lower. “Plus, the new body is decently prepared for it.”
“How was your old body?”
She scanned him with a side glance. Yes, he was prying, and he wasn’t all that subtle about it. So what? “You first.”
He smiled. Good. That implied she would share something. “I lived in a massive city, and spent pretty much my entire life researching how to get out of my world. So, I didn’t move much. I wasn’t fat, just skinny and generally frail.”
“I was like six feet nine. Maybe more, with most of it in the limbs. When I kicked, it sounded like someone cracking a whip.” She stepped forward and jumped into a spinning kick. “Now, it sounds like nothing.”
“It still looks impressive.”
She shook her head. “Unless I can find magical boots that massively increase kick damage, it’s useless. I’m too small, too light, and too fragile. You saw the last monster we fought. It was made of rock. The only things I could break with a spinning kick were my own ankle and shin.”
“Were you that much tougher in your previous form?”
“So much tougher… and I could regenerate.” She sighed. “Do you know the word werewolf?”
“We had legends about beings like that in my world.”
“Where I’m from, a werewolf was a combination of two souls.
The human and the wolf. The wolf was bound to the human, granting powers of partial or complete transformation.
” Her eyes watered. “I hated the furry flea bag. But he gave me powers, and in the end, it was his soul Dreamwalker used to repair mine. Now, for the first time in my life, I’m alone in my head. ”
Which was why she constantly produced sounds. And why she cried herself to sleep every night. She didn’t just lose powers. She lost her lifelong companion. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks.” She tried to flash a smile, but failed.
“It’s weird. I always argued with him. I wanted soup, he wanted the roasted bear paw.
When I wanted to talk to a guy, he wanted to eat him and go hit on some girls instead.
Whenever I wanted to negotiate with someone, he wanted to shift into me and tear them all to shreds.
But he was always there, whining that I ate less than twenty pounds of meat that day, so he was hungry. ”
This hurt. Not him directly, but every word she said sounded so painful it spilled onto him.
“I was born into a world with a great history of magic, but almost no mana left to go with it. I was the last archmage to ever be named in my world, as I had to close the mage guild, and the mage colleges within a few years of my leadership. No way for there to be mages without mana.”
“Is that why your spells are so random?” she asked with a glint in her eye. “That you haven’t properly used them before?”
“Mostly,” he admitted. “What do you mean by random?”
“I’ve spent pretty much all my life around mages, some of whom were actually strong. Your spells work, but in an unrefined, raw way. They’re so predictable that I wondered if you were doing it on purpose to show off.”
His cheeks heated up. He did not think that. “So, when I cast the lance of annihilation, you can tell I’m casting it and where it will hit?”
“Yeah. Where I come from, mages are usually extremely sneaky about what they’re casting and how. That teaches one to see the subtlest of clues that someone is even casting a spell. The only thing you’re missing is an incantation with the spell’s name in it.”
He rolled his eyes. Yes, well, probably, he might need to work on that to be as readable as possible.
He understood the logic pretty well, too.
If mages fought against each other, then the more subtle the spell, the more difficult it is for the opponent to counter.
He might have to work on that. “My world was largely peaceful, and with the mana slowly vanishing, we had priorities other than combat magic.”
“Lance of annihilation, heh?” she asked, tone a notch more playful. “That’s a decently long name, and somewhat hard to pronounce too. But it’s not all that long and not nearly hard enough. You could make it a lot longer and harder with a bit of creativity… the spell, I mean.”
Oh, no, she did not. She did not just turn his main attack spell into a dick joke.
“Think about it. A lance of complete annihilation is longer and harder than just a lance of annihilation. You could add to the start, too. Divine lance of complete annihilation. Now that’s better.
Or, you could go for the actual kill with something like the supremely divine lance of complete annihilation.
That’s so long and hard it’ll make all witches and sorceresses fall to their knees. ”
He chuckled. He turned red from the embarrassment, but still, the image amused him. “I’m never telling you a name of my spell again.”
“You will.” She laughed. “Mages love talking about their spells. And don’t worry, it’s pretty much impossible to name a spell in a way that one can’t make fun of.”
“Oh, really? What about fireball?”
“Aww, you named one of your balls. That’s so cute. Is the other one named ice? Is the bigger ball fire or ice?”
He slapped his face with his palm. “Fine, invisibility.”
“You don’t need to bother with that. No one wants to look at you, anyway.”
“Shield?”
“Trying to protect your virginity? Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe already.”
He rolled his eyes. “Okay, you’ve got a point.”
“And you’ve got the supremely divine lance of complete annihilation.” She chuckled.
“Anyway, what were the fights between the strong mages in your world like?” In particular, he wasn’t sure what to do with his stats in the System, and she seemed to have experience with combat-focused mages while he did not.
She rubbed her chin with her fingers, thinking. She kept smiling though. “The actually strong mages each have some power or spell that’s absolute bullshit. It’s what makes them strong.”
“Bullshit?”
“Right, so for example, Astril Hellwind. You see her, she looks like a warrior in scale armor, flies in on a wyvern, and she slashes at you. So, you raise something to block, a weapon or a spell or whatever. And you get cut in half at the waist, because what you’re looking at is a perfect illusion while the actual Astril is somewhere to your side, doing a completely different attack with so much power your passive defenses can’t do anything about it.
That real Astril is invisible, makes no sound, and can’t be detected by magic. ”
Hmm. “That sounds very warrior-like.”
“A magic-infused weapon strike is a really good way to get past shields. In the case of Astril, nobody had shields that could block the attack. She has the spell active at all times, it doesn’t exhaust or drain her, and it’s so difficult to fight against that even if you know that she has it and how it works, you still can’t do anything about it.
That’s bullshit, and it’s what makes Astril strong. ”
“I see.”
“Or, Raven, he could destroy the toughness of any object by just being close to it, so he hits a demon with his shield, and its head blows apart. Oh, and he can stop time, so he will get to you.”
He could see the pattern.
“And then there’s Dreamwalker, who can create a black hole in his palm. Getting a black hole shoved in your face is a really harsh reality check on how strong your shields actually are.”
“So, in terms of the System stats, they’re all strength builds.”
Luna waved her hand. She jabbed the air with her finger a few times, clearly checking something out in the System menus.
“Yeah, strength translates into spellpower. The way I see the stats from how I’ve lived my life, there are only two ways to use them.
Either spend most of the points on strength and the rest in speed or do like an equal spread between dexterity and speed.
Endurance, willpower, intelligence, and charisma look completely useless to me. ”
That sounded awfully simplistic. Though he got the general idea.
If end-tier mages were all in on spell power, then anything other than more spell power or enough speed to dodge was useless.
But… one didn’t start at the end-tier.
He needed to think more about this. “That sounds like an extreme oversimplification.”
“I don’t know. Imagine we fought against each other. If you plunge the supremely divine lance of complete annihilation into me, then I’m getting undone in a split second, no matter if I’ve got some points in endurance or willpower.”
He sighed. “Please, stop calling it that.”
“It’s the name it has now.” She chuckled. “I don’t know how things work in this world. But I don’t think it’s all that different. At least, your magic isn’t. It’s all the good, familiar stuff I’m used to.”
Hmph. Thanks. He didn’t say that, though.
Instead, he pondered his future stat build.
With the shrines checked out, all that was left was actually heading for the town.
The road to Ambervale stretched before them. It took them another five days to get to the one day to Ambervale sign, but that wasn’t their fault.
It rained for a day and a half, so they hid in a cave to avoid getting wet, as they had no spare clothes.
Then Alsen saw a patch of trees that didn’t make sense given the forest’s structure, so they searched it for irregularities.
That took a day, as Alsen needed time to fine-tune his scanning spell to determine that the ground here had a specific mineral composition, which led to the growth of different trees.
They could probably mine some interesting ore here, were they to build a mine, or even care in the first place.
And then there were the beautifully colored birds they spent half a day observing, until Luna decided she had seen them all and moved on.