Level 1 Fallen

Over dinner, I told Diane about the new skills that I had evolved, and she seemed quite interested. Especially when I told her about the evolution of Poison Shot, which was a skill that she herself was currently working on.

"How about you? Has your solo leveling been going well?" I asked, to which she nodded her head.

"It'll be better now that you're able to join me again, but yes. It takes a little more time than before, but I can use my agility to solo hunt a giant. Having the poison to apply to my blades has helped. From what I can tell, I can use channeling to change the type of poison I want to produce, with effects ranging from paralyzing, weakening, or pure damage. There are probably more that I haven't discovered yet. You'll probably be able to do the same thing with your Poison Bomb."

"I'll experiment with that when we hunt tomorrow." I nodded. There was quite a lot that I would want to experiment with, now that I had new skills at my disposal. However, first we would need to set up camp for the night.

"I'll look up any information that Karlson posted on the forums when I log out." Diane promised, to which I nodded again, thinking.

"I… might actually know Karlson." I spoke up, surprising her. "We never added each other to our friends list, but I met a halfling boy named Karlson back in Brita when I was in the library. Even on the second day, it felt like he had read a lot of the books in the library."

"Interesting…" Diane thought it over, before shaking her head. "It won't do much good right now, either way. Even if he is the one you met, I can't risk sending him a personal request for information, given our circumstances."

That made sense, sadly. I let out a sigh, turning to prepare to set up camp after cleaning the dishes from dinner. Thankfully, by now the pit of poison where I had originally died had long been cleaned up, so it was safe to remain in the cave overnight.

Or, at least… that's what I thought. After Diane logged out, and her Chosen set up the camp for the night, placing the alarm stakes at the mouth of the cave, the two of us went to bed in our respective tents. Roughly an hour later, a piercing screech snapped me out of my slumber, and I jumped out of the tent, Diane doing the same not far away.

Neither of us were equipped for battle, but that was about to change. Standing at the mouth of the cave was a large spider. And by that, I didn't mean it was as big as my palm. Rather, its body was roughly a meter long, with red, glowing eyes. It reminded me of the monsters I ran across in the forest of Athua, only… bigger… oh no…

My eyes swept back beyond the mouth of the cave, to the giant forest behind it. Thanks to my Scout skill, I was able to clearly see the shifting in the trees, the thick, spindly legs tapping against the ground. "Sorry, Diane, but it looks like we picked a bad spot to camp." I said while gritting my teeth, immediately equipping my armor.

Wordlessly, Diane nodded her head, doing the same. However, she didn't pull out her daggers as I might have expected, but rather, a black staff. I arched my brow, but there was no time to question her decision, as the spider was recovering from the ear-piercing screech of the alarm stakes.

Since it seemed that Diane wouldn't be entering melee combat, I stretched my arms out, simultaneously casting two of the skills that I had enchanted on my arms prior to going to bed, having been planning to test them in the morning. First, Poison Bomb, which shot out a thick glob of poison that landed on the spider's face, causing it to screech.

Since it was a direct hit, I didn't burst the poison yet, but rather followed up with the Thunderstrike skill, focusing on creating the cloud outside. We were about to have a lot of company, so any kind of diversion would be appreciated.

The cloud was… larger than I expected, stretching out nearly twenty meters from the mouth of the cave. With a thought, a thin bolt of lightning struck down, striking one of the figures skittering towards the cave. It seemed like I didn't have control over where the lightning struck, only when. Still, the clap of thunder further stunned several of the insects, with the one in the cave blinded by my poison.

This gave Diane time to do whatever it was that she was planning. "Darkness beyond the night sky, piercing net of thorns. Rise, my shadows, and guide them to oblivion." She said as multiple magic circles began to overlap beneath her feet.

When Diane struck the staff down against the spell circle, a magical darkness seemed to settle into the area, before condensing into two figures. These figures appeared identical to Diane, but were covered in thorn-like protrusions. The two animated shadows lunged for the spider, piercing its abdomen before throwing it out of the cave.

Once they had done so, I detonated the poison bomb, which erupted in a viscous explosion, scattering poison across the battlefield outside of the cave. The two shadows rushed out, forcing the spiders to flee together with my constant lightning strikes. "How long can you hold that up?" I asked, glancing over at Diane, who shook her head.

"Not long." She muttered, gritting her teeth. Thankfully, the spider monsters were already starting to flee from both the danger and the noise. As soon as they were gone, Diane let out a deep breath, the magic circles beneath her shattering as the animated shadows faded.

"So… you're a mage now?" I asked, keeping the storm cloud established outside. At the same time, I created a crystal wall at the mouth of the cave, leaving only enough room for air gaps.

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"You're not the only one that wanted to learn magic as a kid…" Diane admitted, glancing off to the side. "I asked her a while ago if I could have a staff to be a magic user when she was logged off… we just never had enough magic for me to play with, so it was always easier to just stick with the skills that she had already trained."

I gave a small nod at that, glancing back at the mouth of the cave. "That wasn't just a channeled Animate Shadow, was it?"

Diane shook her head at that question, the adrenaline of the fight starting to fade away. "That was… a channeling technique that Diane learned about a couple of days ago. Whenever she sees something like that, she'll tell me so that I can be a proper mage whenever I get the chance."

"The technique is called Fusion Cast, apparently. It's where you channel multiple skills into a single cast. Just now, I channeled Darkness, Animate Shadow, Shadow Stab, and Dark Embrace together. It's a bit cheaper than casting them all individually, but… I haven't mastered most of those skills enough yet to use them freely like you do." Diane couldn't help but look at the still-present storm cloud hovering outside of the cave, rain starting to fall from it. "That's not going to keep going off if I go back to bed, will it..?"

I chuckled slightly, denying the question. "No, I'm just leaving it up to deter any other spiders from trying to come back. You head back to bed, and leave a message for Diane to let her know what happened. I'll stand watch."

Diane nodded her head, moving back towards the tent, glancing back at me in concern for a moment before disappearing into the tent. As she slept, I couldn't help but think about the Fusion Casting that she had told me about. Obviously, I couldn't cast spells like that the same way that she did. However… would it be possible to fuse the spells onto a single enchantment slot?

Looking over my current magic skill list, I began to make a list of combinations that I would like to try. First was my full shadow set. If I could cast all of them in one, I could save space and create a sort of shadow knight. If I swap Shadow Blade for Arcane Arrow, maybe I can make a shadow archer. And since my shadow clone can use my martial skills, it would be able to use Ghost-X…

Aside from that, the only combinations that I could think of were mixing Fireball with… well, various things. It could combine with Arcane Arrow, Sand Lance, or Poison Bomb. Either way, I wouldn't know anything for sure until morning, since doing the enchantments now would only wake Diane up again.

Luckily, the storm cloud outside the cave worked as a deterrent against further ambushes, and Diane's sleep wasn't interrupted. However, there was one matter that was surprising to me. Seemingly out of nowhere, as dawn was starting to break over the horizon, I obtained the skill, Poison Resistance.

At first, I wasn't sure what to think, before suddenly blinking. I had spent twenty-four hours being poisoned, although not consecutively. Was that a requirement for this skill? I would need to tell Diane if that was the case, since I was sure that she would want this skill as well.

Perhaps because of the events from the previous night, but Diane slept in for the first time since I had known her, not waking up until her player had logged in. "What's going on…?" She asked with a yawn, emerging from her tent. She was already dressed in her ninja attire, and looked at the crystal wall in confusion, as well as the storm cloud beyond. "Did it storm overnight?"

"She said that she was going to leave you a note." I pointed out, dismissing both the wall and the cloud. Diane blinked again, looking through her notebook.

"...Ah." Apparently, her Chosen hadn't been able to get back to sleep easily after that fight. "Give me a few minutes, and I'll go work on hunting…"

I simply nodded my head at that, busying myself with the new enchantment work on my arms. First, I had to disable Myriad Strikes-X in order to refresh the list, and then started from my plan to combine two skills into one enchantment while Diane was hunting. For this, I used Sand Lance and Fireball.

It… didn't go well, at first. The enchantment slot was wasted, and I had to start over each time after healing my arm. So, I tried again… and again… and again… each time, my arm was scorched with the backlash of a failed enchantment, but I forced myself to grit my teeth through it. Finally, on the sixth attempt, the enchantment settled. When I checked, the enchantment's name had changed, becoming Scorching Spear.

Relieved at this change, I launched the enchantment at a tree outside of the cave. A thick spear of sand appeared, cracks forming on it that released small puffs of flame. When the spear was launched out, it exploded on contact with the target, severely denting the tree.

So, it's possible. I thought to myself with a grin, moving on to my shadow archer plan. This… didn't go as well as the first one. When I failed the enchantment, I had to start over, removing the Scorching Spear that was already on. Even then, I tried more than twenty times to no avail, so I started to cut back on the number of skills that I was putting on at once.

For more than an hour, I all but destroyed and healed my arm in a vicious cycle. Eventually, I managed to get the enchantment to work by narrowing the number of skills down to just Animate Shadow, Arcane Arrow, and Shadow Spear. Anything beyond that seemed doomed to failure for now, but it gave me the Summon Shadow Archer enchantment.

Of course… I still had to go through the process of doing that all over again every time Scorching Spear failed to enchant, though I was rather lucky this time to get it on the first attempt. The last slot, I channeled the Thunderstrike skill, wanting to make its lightning effect more targeted, which gave me Homing Thunder.

When I finally finished enchanting, I saw Diane at the front of the cave, staring firmly at me as I sat in a pool of my own blood. She was… very clearly unhappy, seeing me hurt myself so much for the sake of enchantments, but this was definitely worth it.

I decided to lighten the mood, smiling towards her. "By the way, I found out how to get the Poison Resistance skill." I told her, which caused her eye to briefly twitch. She wasn't immediately willing to overlook what I had done, but she nodded her head for me to continue.

"I got the skill overnight, probably because I had spent a cumulative total of twenty-four hours being poisoned. If we both train this skill up, we won't have to worry about getting caught in our own poisons anymore." When I said that, she nodded her head.

I watched as Diane pulled her sleeve back, condensing a bit of poison on her finger, and then touching it to her arm. Clearly, she was going to work on training that now. "What you were working on. Show me." She said, standing and gesturing for me to follow her out of the cave. Something told me that we weren't going to be eating for now, but that was something that I was long used to before teaming up with her.