An Unbound Soul

We had no-one with the [Basic Masonry] or [Clock] skills in our village, nor anyone who knew how to get them. [Clock] was a bit of an oddity, and I couldn't guess what I needed to do there; it certainly wasn't enough to just count, or learn how to tell the rough time from the sun's position, because I could already do both. I couldn't imagine masonry being too hard, though; given how the other craft skills worked, it should be sufficient to find myself a chisel and hammer and chip away at a block of stone for a bit. So I did.

ding

Strength increased by 1

I successfully unlocked the skill, but only got a single point of strength from the process. Oddly, looking at the shop interface, it wasn't the only new skill in there. At some point since the last time I'd looked, [Basic Glasswork] had shown up, which was odd because I hadn't even seen any glass recently. The workers in the institute had talked about getting the forming a new skill message, so maybe that was it. Heck, I'd had that message too, even though I hadn't been in the glass workshop at the time, so there were probably multiple skills coming out of the place.

Given how many skills I'd unlocked at this point, it was quite possible that the process of unlocking new skills itself was no longer considered novel, in some sort of meta-novelty calculation. Speaking of which, if there was a higher level of [Jack of All Trades], I must be getting pretty close to it. I had twenty-one skills waiting in the shop, and thirty-three purchased, or maybe even more if it counted the skills that had been eaten by higher rank versions. How many more would I need? Or were there more stringent requirements on unlocking set numbers of skills from each category, in which case my lonely trio of covert skills might be the next thing I needed to solve.

The same applied to [Skilled]. I had thirteen skills at level twelve. Would I get an upgrade with two more, did I need more skills, or did some number of them need to be rank two? [Appraisal] was the closest, but my magic skills would likely get there before I maxed out [Body Mage], so hopefully if a higher ranked version existed, I'd get it naturally without needing to aim for it.

Titles aside, that was one more item gone from my list. With the low hanging fruit dealt with, it was time to return to Dawnhold and work out how to deal with those blasted assassins. With my increased stats, the trip was a rather relaxing jog, aside from the small distraction of bumping into a mass of brown creatures swarming around a patch of bushes, stripping them bare. They looked like scaled up rats, almost the size of horses. Despite appearances, [Analysis] informed me they weren't monsters, but local wildlife called kafevoski. From what I remembered, our village actually hunted the things to some extent, but not being able to remember anything else about them, I made sure to circle around at a distance.

Back at the delvers' guild, Ella was on duty, so I stopped by to inquire where I could find some information on the assassins.

"Hmm... Different people detect them in different ways. There wouldn't be much point in... Woah, what are you wearing? Was some jeweller selling off their failed products?"

Downside of not wearing my gauntlets... At least my plain mythril rings didn't stand out as much as the bejewelled dungeon spawned items, but they were very obviously poorly made. "No, I made them myself," I laughed. "Enchanting experiments, now that there's a ready supply of mythril available."

"Oh, I'm sorry... I didn't mean to make fun of your efforts."

"Don't worry about it; my smithing teacher doesn't hold back, so I'm already inured. Anyway, assassins."

"Ah, yes. As I was saying, there isn't much point asking the other delvers, because their strategies are unlikely to be applicable. You'd be better off looking them up in the library."

The library... After the trauma I'd experienced there the first time around, I'd never gone back, even after working out that Lord Reid was harmless and wasn't going to abuse me or have me assassinated. But there was a bunch of information there that I wanted, and heck, I could probably add some comments of my own by now. It was high time I stopped being silly and went for a return visit. It was still morning, so I thanked Ella, dropped off my baggage, and set off for Lord Reid's mansion.

As always, it was Cliff who answered the door, and he let me in without fuss. I soon found myself sitting at a plain wooden desk, placing my hand over the crystal. First thing first, I tried to look up 'goblin assassin', and what I got back was a detailed bestiary entry.

Goblin Assassin (Level: 8)

Health: 20

Stamina: 20

Mana: 15

Strength: 20

Dexterity: 25

Endurance: 15

Intelligence: 10

Wisdom: 10

Charisma: 5

Recorded locations: Dawnhold (Floor 8, Floor 8 Boss Chamber, Floor 10 Boss Chamber)

Goblin assassins are one of the higher level goblin variants. Unlike most varieties, they do not remain confined to a single location within a dungeon, but wander the entire dungeon floor1. They have an innate ability to make themselves undetectable to sight, sound and mana sense2, that costs them no mana or stamina to maintain3. They are unarmoured and wield poisoned4 daggers.

1: Take this seriously; neither the entrance room nor the boss antechamber is safe. The only room they won't enter is the boss chamber itself.

2: They have no defence against [Monster Perception], so keep your scout fresh and alert. They can also be detected by scent. In the case of an incapacitated scout, throw powder, fireballs or even raw mana, look for the voids, and get the hell out of there before you run out of whatever it is you're throwing.

3: On the open floor, they will keep this ability permanently active. It won't even deactivate on attack. The boss version of this monster starts visible, but will hide itself as battle progresses, so don't get complacent. The only way to make them visible is to use a stealth breaking aura or to rend them unconscious. Fortunately, their lack of armour means that you don't need to make precise attacks.

4: Poison is non-lethal, but saps physical stats and causes a small stamina drain. Expect a loss of between 5-20 from each stat, depending on how much poison you suffer, plus a stamina drain of a few points per minute.

Yay for user comments. So I had already been on the right track with my mana x-ray. If I shifted mana around with a mana control skill, the bits I couldn't move contained goblins. But even then, I'd have to deal with them while they were invisible, and keep manipulating mana while fighting. Or maybe I could detect them once, throw some paint or something at them, then be able to concentrate on fighting? No, that wouldn't work; a second goblin could show up and join in mid-fight. That sounded all sorts of not fun, and there was no way I was going to floor eight solo without having had any practice. I'd need to find a group to join.

Since I was in the library, something else I wanted to take the opportunity to look up was the information recorded about my new skill.

[Weapon Style: Flowing Mist] - You are a ghost on the battlefield. Your location, your stats and your weapon can all change in an instant. (Rank 2)

Unlock requirements: [Weapon Proficiency: Unarmed] at level 10, any other melee weapon proficiency at level 10, [Far Step] at level 10, [Far Reach] at level 10, any two out of [Minor Strength], [Minor Speed] or [Minor Dexterity] at level 10, wielding a weapon of your chosen type with a variable weight or fluid form.

Woah, that was some steep unlock requirements, even if they were evened out by the way it didn't need a specific class; someone could pick it up at rank one if they wanted. I'd only barely met the requirements myself, gaining the last level of unarmed at the same time as the new skill. Also interesting was that it didn't just apply to a staff. Someone else could use the same style with a different type of weapon.

There were no user comments, which came as no surprise whatsoever; not only was the skill brand new, but people with space affinity didn't become delvers, and would have no reason to be taking weapon proficiencies. If no-one had taken a space and body complex affinity in the past three hundred years, then they weren't going to have picked up this skill in the past couple of weeks. I added some comments of my own instead, giving a bit more detail about the style and how I used it. Writing turned out to be very much like reading, in that I just pushed my intent at the crystal, and it magically seemed to know what I wanted to do.

The next skill to look up was [Clock], to check the unlock requirements.

[Clock] - View the current time, wherever you are. Higher levels show more information1. (Rank 1)

Unlock requirements: Accurately time one hour.

1: In order of attainment, the information given is hour, ten minutes, season, week, day, minute, ten seconds, year, second, tenths of a second.

Hmm... I suppose I could sit there for a whole hour just counting, but hopefully there would be an easier way of doing that. Listening to the town bells obviously wasn't sufficient. It was a shame no-one had put any comments on the unlock requirements.

I tried to look up titles, but whatever intent based method the library used for bringing up the information I wanted couldn't deal with 'an upgraded form of [Jack of All Trades] or [Skilled]'. On the other hand, looking explicitly for the titles I already had did give a result, and there was a comment on [Jack of All Trades] that getting it at rank one was a prerequisite for getting the higher ranked version at rank two, so now I knew there was one. It was just a pity it didn't use the higher ranked version's name directly.

With the main tasks out of the way, I spent some time researching the various class trees. I couldn't get a complete list of possible enchantments, which was irritating, because that sounded like exactly the sort of thing this library should store. I learnt that the rank four [Spatial Archmage] had a spell to create permanent portals, although not why the guild charged so much to use them.

[Body High Mage] had only a single stat boosting spell that increased all physical stats, with other spells that manipulated the body in other ways, turning skin into armour or nails into weapons. There didn't seem to be any actual transformation magic on the pure body affinity path. That sort of thing was restricted to the [Shapeshifter] class, to which I had no access. It didn't seem like I'd ever be getting the sort of magic I'd been daydreaming about back when the system dropped the [Xenophilia] trait on me. Short of reincarnating a second time, it didn't look like I'd get to try out being a cat-girl.

I looked up the combat artes made available by some of the fighter classes I'd seen, and found that Xander's class mainly gave out defensive auras that buffed allies or debuffed monsters, but it did come with [Blade of Light], which must be what he used to massacre the tenth floor boss. There was another point of interest there; the aura skills did explicitly refer to 'monsters' rather than 'opponents' or 'enemies'. That could be a bit annoying if there was such a thing as a tamer class, but a quick search didn't find one. It seemed like it was hard-coded here that 'monsters' were the enemy, and everything else was not, with the humorous side-effect that he wouldn't be able to debuff wildlife. Not that anyone at rank three would need to use skills to take on any of this world's wildlife, but I still found it funny.

I ended up reading the entries of every other monster in the dungeon too, before starting to look at all the crafting class chains, marvelling at the sheer number of classes and skills on offer. I found my parents' classes, which seemed a little mundane compared to all the magical and combat classes, but on reflection, I could see just how useful they would be in day-to-day life. Mum had access to things like the rank two [Material Manipulation] to cut and stitch fabrics, and now that she was at rank three there were options to dye and pattern fabrics, or resize entire garments. They would certainly save time over having to manually sew everything.

I was in the middle of reading the descriptions of fire and ice spells, looking for inspiration for things I could copy with a crystal, when a touch on my shoulder caught me completely by surprise and made me jerk violently, killing my connection.

"My sincere apologies, but you didn't seem able to hear me."

I'd been completely lost reading, so it took me a few seconds to get my bearings. I quickly recognised the overly formal voice as Cliff and then spotted that the room was darker than it had been a minute ago. Significantly darker. The window shutters had been closed, and there was no sign of light from them, the room lit instead by light crystals mounted on the walls. Okay... maybe it had been a little longer than a minute ago then, if it was already night. It wasn't even lunchtime when I came in! My stomach rumbled its agreement with my assessment. "What time is it? Sorry, I completely lost track."

"Ninth bell has just rung, so we need to close up for today. You can return tomorrow after fourth bell if you desire more time."

Well, that was embarrassing. I rushed out and back to the guild, hoping I'd be able to get something decent to eat before bed. The bar was open all hours, given delvers' habits of coming back at any time of the night, but later on in the evening the menu became rather limited. Alas, I wasn't in time to get the full choice, and ended up with a bowl of overly spicy curry. It took a lot of spice to overcome a high endurance stat, and the kitchen here was happy to oblige.

I spotted Vyre's party among the delvers still in the bar, which reminded me I needed to find an escort for floor eight. The last time I'd seen them, they'd claimed they were hunting that floor, rather than just passing through, so not only could they get deep enough, but they were comfortable dealing with the assassins for protracted periods of time. They'd be perfect.

"Hey Vyre. Are you still hunting around on floor eight?"

He frowned, probably guessing where this was going. "We are, but I thought the guild master had already taken you along for your experiments."

"Nice job there, by the way," one of his party members chimed in, while showing off a simple, unadorned ring around his finger, for some reason worn on the outside of his armour. I'd spent long enough messing with metals to recognise it as mythril without the aid of skills, so apparently some mythril items were starting to circulate already.

"He did, and this isn't about those experiments," I explained. "I need to learn to fight goblin assassins, and I would much rather do it as part of a party that has experience with them than risk fighting on the floor for the first time on my own."

He stared at me, but unlike last time, he didn't look like he was completely against the idea. "Joining us from the first floor gives more time to get used to each other than joining at the bottom, and I know how well you did in the tournament, so I know you can hold your own..."

The other party member snorted. "As if that wasn't obvious from the way we bumped into him casually hanging around all on his own on floor six."

Who is that other guy, anyway? Wasn't he the one who almost sprayed me with beer when we first came here with Warren?

Bluvre, Beastkin, Scout (18/38)

And there was another limitation of the System UI. Now I knew his name was spelled 'Bluvre' in the English alphabet, but how the hell was I supposed to pronounce that? While I'd got completely sidetracked, Vyre had finished considering whether to accept my request.

"You can join with us, but just for practice against the assassins. The loot is ours, and if we aren't working well together by the time we get to the floor seven boss, we're splitting up and you're teleporting out."

"Fair enough," I agreed, and we arranged to meet up the next morning. I wolfed down the curry, doing my best not to taste it, and not at all looking forward to the pain it would cause when it reached the other end, then returned to my room.

Firing off some spells to drain my mana before sleep, I spotted that I had a little more available than I should have done. Did I miss something? Given how deeply I was sucked in to the library, I guess it wouldn't be a surprise if I'd missed a ding.

For your efforts to uncover the secrets of the world, [Researcher] awards 2 soul points.

Intelligence increased by 1

For your efforts to uncover the secrets of the world, [Researcher] awards 2 soul points.

Yup, researcher was seriously overpowered. Even if there was a limited amount of library to sponge off, and I couldn't exactly repeat that every day, four soul points from a day's reading was awesome.