NOVEL NEXT Chapter 27: A Moment to Breathe
<Alex, Real - Prepare, High School Gym>
Alex had tried to use his new knowledge—gained innately from the two skills that allowed his energy to enter his weapon—to extend Basic Life Transfusion out into his dadao, but he had failed utterly.
He did think that he'd figured out how to repair the blade, however, which was actually more necessary than he'd previously realized.
After about ten minutes of trying to use Basic Life Transfusion through the blade once again, he'd thought to use it on the blade to see if even that was possible.
The dadao had still looked pretty good, even with more than a couple of chips along its edge.
Regardless, it had worked.
System Notice:
Basic Life Transfusion
All that is not Undead contains life.
You have imparted some of your very health to repair an inanimate object.
Deeper spell understanding, achieved.
Experience Earned.
System Addendum:
Repairing the non-living will take 4x energy, damaging the non-living ¼.
Repairing that which was never alive—such as mundane metals—will take 4x greater than that, damaging ¼ as much.
Apology Tutorial Addendum:
This applies to materials without inherent magical properties. Don't try to obliterate a Tutorial Boss's sword with this skill…
Or do; after all, death comes for us all in the end.
Alex waited for the spell to update, or change, or evolve, or become rarer…
It didn't.
Then, he reread the spell's description, noting the new text at the end, which was just an explanation of what he'd already learned.
Basic Life Transfusion (Uncommon):
Spend Mana to send Life into the target.
Damage or Healing at the Caster's discretion.
Damage or healing done is equal to the Caster's Health Points (HP) sent.
Costs half that amount of Magic Points (MP) to impart.
Repairing the non-living will take 4x energy, damaging the non-living ¼.
Repairing that which was never alive—such as mundane metals—will take 4x greater than that, damaging ¼ as much.
Well, son of my uncle, it just says 'target.'
It was built into the spell to be able to use his HP on pretty much anything now. Though, he would bet that it would have varying effects depending on the item affected.
System Notice:
Life-based spell past the level of basic comprehension detected.
Not associated with Life-based class.
Would you like to make this a class spell?
Y/N
Alex had no idea. "Natasha?"
"Hmm?" She looked up from her book. "What's up?"
"You've read the System Basics book. Why would I want to make a General Skill a Class Skill?"
"Oh! From what I've gathered, it prevents you from being offered another class that's too similar to the one you already have. Additionally, it will be easier to upgrade either manually or through Class Skill and Spell selection. Even just moving it can cause a synergy upgrade."
"Huh. Thank you." In that case, he'd want to try to get at least a few others into Class Skills too. Starting with Advanced Kinesthetics and Great-Blades Basics - Dadao.
"Sure." She looked back down to her book. "I've already gotten almost all of my skills and spells into my class, and the results are pretty great."
"I'll look forward to seeing you fight, then."
She smiled but didn't look up or respond.
Alex considered for another moment, then shrugged. "Umm. Yes? I would like it to be a class skill."
System Notice:
Basic Life Transfusion (Uncommon)
Spend Mana to send Life into the target.
Damage or Healing at the Caster's discretion.
Damage or healing done is equal to the Caster's Health Points (HP) sent.
Costs half that amount of Magic Points (MP) to impart.
Repairing that which was never alive—such as mundane metals—will take 4x greater than that, damaging ¼ as much.
→
Basic Life Transfusion (Uncommon)
Spend Mana to transfer your Life between yourself and a target.
Damage or Healing at the Caster's discretion.
Damage or healing done is equal to the Caster's Health Points (HP) sent.
Costs half that amount of Magic Points (MP) to impart.
Repairing the non-living will take 4x energy, damaging the non-living ¼.
Repairing that which was never alive—such as mundane metals—will take 4x greater than that, damaging ¼ as much.
He blinked at the shift, only taking a moment to recognize the change in the first line 'send Life to the target' had changed to 'transfer Life between yourself and a target.'
Did that mean that he could pull life out of people, now?
But, no. It said 'your Life,' so it only applied to Alex's life energy…
That was… interesting. The rest of the text hadn't changed, likely because he hadn't actually explored the skill, yet.
It was worth testing out… when he had a moment and enemies to experiment on, but that wasn't now.
Still, he was holding his dadao and playing with the skill, that testing it had led to this development. He might as well finish. Thus, he shrugged and imparted his health into the dadao.
It took… more HP than he would have liked. The System's Addendum had warned him of that, but it was still unfortunate.
He ended up putting 200 HP into the blade to fully repair it, and at that point he only knew it was done because it wouldn't take any more Life from him, at least not in the manner he was attempting at the moment.
It seemed that he'd actually been rather hard on his weapon, and it might have been in danger of breaking.
He wasn't exactly sure, as he'd really only repaired 12.5 points of whatever the weapon had for health. Integrity, maybe? But it seemed useful regardless.
The parts of the blade's edge that had been replaced looked to maybe have a verdant tint, but it could easily have been a trick of the light, too.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
He then glanced at his mana pool and winced.
I did not really consider that…
He'd spent 75 MP, or more than he'd regenerate in half an hour.
Alex sighed.
If they were overrun at the moment, he'd be dangerously low on magic even if he only used it to clean up the corpses.
That in mind, he stood. "Thank you, Natasha. I think I'm done attempting that for now."
She shrugged, not getting up. "I still have more reading to do, and this is as good a place as any to rest and wait." She smiled up at him. "The current thought is that we'll try to clear the school after the quest timer runs out."
"Really? We're going to leave all those people to the mercies of whatever monsters are still in there?" He knew that no new monsters could get in, but even so.
Natasha shook her head. "On the purely practical side, we all need to rest and recover our resource pools. If this were Earth—and those real people—we'd happily risk it, but this isn't, and they aren't."
That rubbed Alex the wrong way, but she wasn't done, so he decided to just listen.
"Besides, they're safe. The defenses are either up and running on any given classroom—and it is therefore safe for those inside—or they aren't, in which case those within are most likely already dead… or undead. Anything capable of cracking those defenses in the short term would kill us outright."
Alex frowned. "But what about…" Then he stopped. "Right, Individual Quest." He sighed. "I'll talk with Kaylee in a bit. I might want to go out and try to get at least a few classrooms worth of people rescued. I don't know if they'll count toward my quest, but it can't hurt."
Natasha nodded, considering for a moment. "I'm not overflowing with mana and stamina, but I have enough. I'll have more if you wait a bit before going, too. If you need a spear, I'll happily come with you." She smiled mischievously. "I still get greater experience if I pull your bacon from the fire, after all."
He smiled in return. "Thank you. I may just take you up on that."
But for now, he needed to get his body used to moving with his Advanced Kinesthetics skill.
Toward that end, he found an empty side room and began simply moving slowly as his skill indicated, correcting his posture and limb placement as needed, forcing his body to obey, even when it stressed muscles that weren't used to being used.
It was odd.
Under the System's influence, he knew that his muscles were massively stronger, but many still had latent issues from lack of use.
But he finally had time to work that out, and so he did.
Over the next two hours, he moved and stretched and practiced, and while he improved his range of motion and the utilization of his skills, he seemed to not have pushed hard enough to earn any stat points.
When he was able, he read the surprisingly short spell book for Detect Unlife, netting himself that skill.
Notice!
By means of a spell book, you have learned a spell.
Reward:
Detect Unlife (Common)
Apology Tutorial Addendum:
That looks dead… but is it…?
Let me check.
Detect Unlife (Common)
Spend Mana to get a snapshot of the unlife around you.
When he'd gotten the notifications, Alex had waited for a moment and then sighed. No cool combination with Detect Life or anything like that.
They even had basically identical descriptions—or they had before Detect Life had gotten the synergy bonus—but that seemingly didn't matter.
Maybe if I get more of the 'Detect X' spells they'll combine… or something.
The book had turned to dust, however, allowing him to devote his full attention back toward his stretching.
But, before that… Maybe it's paranoid, but better safe than sorry.
He cast Detect Unlife with ten mana, and got a snapshot of the unlife in the gym and a bit outside of it. Thankfully, it was actually the lack of unlife in the gym, highlighted by the presence of a lot of unlife outside of it.
Well, at least I know we don't have anything hiding within the walls… at least not yet.
After he had gotten back to full health—which took less than three minutes—he had purposely forced his body to move past the points of pain, and well into the range of damaging his muscles and connective tissue, trusting his regeneration to heal it once more.
It worked beautifully, even if it was exceedingly painful.
He had to use walls, and he even stepped out into the hall in order to ask Natasha for help on a few occasions to force the motions.
Doing anything like this without his healing would be insane, but because he did have his healing, it worked as he'd hoped.
When those two hours came to an end, he was as flexible as someone who'd been stretching properly for decades, and he'd retrained his unarmed movements as much as he'd been able to in that short time.
He honestly wished that he had another few hours to do the same with his dadao movements, but time had run out.
Group Quest [Prepare]:
Create a base of operations from which you can survive the end of the world.
The outbreak has begun.
Survive:
01:00 hrs
It was time to chat with Kaylee, and see what he could do about the school in the time he had remaining.
He looked over to Natasha who had just been rereading the System Basics book. "Are you ready?"
She snapped the book closed before making it vanish into her Inventory. "Let's go save some fake people."
He huffed a laugh. "Yes, let's, but first, we talk to Kaylee."
Alex and Natasha returned to the main gym room.
The last two hours had been rather uneventful as while the horde outside was acting with some intent, they didn't seem to be actively breaching sealed doors and such.
Or the System is preventing them from putting too much effort into getting into here… He hoped it was the former, as if so, it likely meant that more people within the city had survived.
Alex was a bit confused about how it worked, partially because apparently not all the zombies were turned people. Some were System created, in a process meant to bleed off gathered undeath magic… or something.
So, the size of the horde was not indicative of how many people had died from the plague.
Unfortunately, that also meant that there was an effectively infinite supply of new undead until whatever source of undeath had broken across the city was dealt with.
The school's defenses apparently meant that the city considered it all 'claimed' space, preventing the spawning of additional creatures within, but it did nothing about those already inside.
That's what we're going to do.
They checked in with Kaylee, and she let them know that everything was going reasonably well.
James was still on the roof keeping a look-out.
He'd been able to get an Uncommon class that let him spawn sets of throwing knives with mana, and he'd been using that massive supply of weapons to kill off a lot of zombies from the fringes. Not that it had actually thinned the horde much.
Still, he'd occasionally stepped inside and locked the door to the room to get into a 'safe area' according to the System, allowing him to level both his race and class further.
Closer at hand, it was decided that Grant would go with Natasha and Alex, all while Lenka continued her work, which was apparently the creation of easy-to-deploy traps.
As they were discussing, John and Pilar came over, and after a quick discussion, the two decided to come with Alex's group as well.
Alex was glad for the ranged back-up, honestly.
Lenka had no interest in clearing the school at the moment, but she agreed to be on-deck in case they needed extraction or back-up.
Truthfully, Alex was once again floored by how well they were all taking all of this.
Mental Fortitude for the win, I guess.
With the levels they'd all gained—even just the Racial levels—they should be nearing or exceeding 10 in that stat, making them theoretically very nearly as mentally stable as the greatest stoic or saint from pre-System Earth.
We're putting all those psychologists out of business, I guess.
He fingered his wedding ring absently as he considered. He definitely could have used that fortitude in the past, but that was neither here nor there.
Everything arranged, he took the front position for their little group, with Grant bringing up the back.
Alex and Natasha would try to lock down bigger threats, allowing Grant to step forward and bring down the hammer, quite literally.
John and Pilar would be behind Natasha but in front of Grant most of the time, ready to offer support at need.
It wasn't a perfect configuration, but it kept their squishiest members in the middle, so that was at least a good start.
When the five came to the men's locker room door, Alex did a quick guess at how big the space was, and cast Detect Unlife with a forty-foot radius, costing a miniscule 4 MP.
They were deep enough in the gym that that didn't extend outside. It did cover both locker rooms and the hallway outside though.
There were close to ten undead clustered against the locker room doors.
"Company in the hall outside the locker rooms, not in the locker room itself."
After receiving acknowledgement, he pushed open the door and walked through the murder-hall.
It took them about a minute to walk through the space. The only evidence of his previous battle there was damage to the lockers, his own dried blood, and some ash in the corners, which Natasha toed and put into her Inventory. His Basic Life Transfusion had removed any of the gore from his opponents, after all.
They came to the outer door and found the thing cracking and clearly broken, but still well supported by Lenka's construct.
"Well… isn't that disconcerting." Alex whispered as he indicated the door. "I thought these were strong enough to stand up to the basic enemies…"