NOVEL NEXT Ch. 5: Skills and Stats
She didn’t know how far away she was when she fell out of the wind again. Far enough that she didn’t hear the hound’s baying anymore. Far enough she no longer smelt its breath on the wind.
She knelt on the ground, shaking. Her back screamed in pain.
She wanted to crumple into a ball in the grass. For oblivion to take her and the pain. To faint and be done with it. But she couldn’t. There was no way to know if she was safe. If it was still chasing her. If she had actually escaped.
How had she escaped? More to distract herself from the pain lacing her back, she turned her attention to the system messages she’d been too busy a moment ago to read.
The first was from when she had finally found the will to run from the hound.
Status Effect (Paralysis) Broken
A status effect? Like, from a video game? It hadn’t just been her overwhelming fear that had immobilized her. No wonder it had been so casual about approaching her. It hadn’t expected her to be able to flee.
How exactly had she broken it? Was it something she did or just a result of her stats?
How many other status effects were there? How many could leave her vulnerable like that? If she hadn’t been able to break that effect in time it wouldn’t have mattered how fast she was, there wouldn’t have even been a chance to run.
That said, she hadn’t been fast enough once it was broken. God, her back hurt. She tried to reach around to touch the wound. It felt like it dug right through her, though the fact she was still panting on the ground and hadn’t bled out yet suggested it wasn’t quite that bad.
It hurt like hell, though. She had only been in more pain twice: her spasms while she'd been dragged into the void and the whole race-changing, exploding nonsense. Even breaking her arm back in undergrad hadn’t been this bad.
Distractions. Distractions. She read the next message she missed, this one from just after the injury.
Racial Skill Awakened: Wind Step (Lvl 1)
[The Slyphid are as much beings of the wind as they are corporeal creatures and can transmute their body and immediate personal effects into wind, making them immune to physical damage and allowing heightened speed in the direction the wind is blowing. You are no exception.]
She blinked. And read it again. She tried to be excited about it. It was cool. She could already see several uses for it. But the last four words were freaking her out more than it really should.
You are no exception.
She had known that something had happened when she’d picked a new race in the void. She’d exploded! But she’d also reformed no different than she had been before.
Or, so she’d thought.
She closed her eyes. It only meant something if she let it mean something.
This was good. This gave her the tools she needed to survive. And she didn’t look any different now, did she? Her body was still the same proportions. Her shoes still fit. Her hands didn’t look any different.
She could turn into wind now. That was just a cool magic power. It didn’t mean anything about who or what she was.
It was all together much too early to be letting this kind of existential crisis start.
She took a deep breath. She would use this. And she would get home. It was that simple.
She would use everything the system gave her.
Speaking of, she’d gotten a pop-up for that hound monster when she’d seen it. What was up with that? She’d asked what it was and the system had answered? Just like that? Could she do that on command? Did it work on anything else?
She focused on a blade of grass in her face.
Short Kelmgrass
[A common grass in the Uvana Valley and further.]
She blinked. It did? And it worked on more than just animals. How much easier would that have made plant identification back home if she could just look at a plant and ask the universe what it was? She could know the names of all the flowers, no more riffling through field guides and guessing. Though, that had a kind of charm too.
She shook her head. She wanted to be distracted, but not this distracted. What else could she identify this way? Rocks? Strange sigils carved into rocks?
Was it safe to approach those rock squares? She’d come from one, but so had the hound. Did they spawn monsters? And if they did, what did that make—
Nope. She cut that thought off right there. No existential crises. Not until she was somewhere she could curl up and ignore the rest of the world. And here, bleeding out where the hound and god knew what else could get her was not it.
What else did she have to work with? What else did the system give her? If this worked on video game logic there should be a menu? Or an inventory? Nothing? She knew there were stats.
The stats page appeared in front of her.
Name: Cass
[Race: Slyphid
Lvl: 1
Stamina: 7/18
Focus: 62/108
Health: 17/18
Str - 4 Dex - 7 End - 6
Wll - 16 Ala - 9 Res - 12
Frt - 1 Per - 5 Vit - 6
Free Points: 1
Concepts:
- Wind (Unapplied)]
Right, she had another free point she could distribute. She never did get around to it earlier. She held off another minute.
There should be skills here somewhere too. She willed the system to show her her skills. To her surprise, that worked.
Wind Step (Lvl 1) (Racial)
[The Slyphid are as much beings of the wind as they are corporeal creatures and can transmute their body and immediate personal effects into wind, making them immune to physical damage and allowing heightened speed in the direction the wind is blowing. You are no exception.
Cost: 50 Focus
Cool Down: 30 sec]
Identify (Lvl 1)
[An inquisitive mind is always asking questions. A perceptive mind is always finding answers. Focus on an object or entity for a short description and level.]
It wasn’t an overly long list. And it didn’t look like she had anything more to work with than she had initially thought.
Was there anything else? Map? Options? Settings?
Was that really it? No, she’d gotten something for exploding, what was it? A trait?
Contrary Will (Inborn)
[You have a contrary nature. It's fine, we won’t hold it against you. But may the gods help any who try to make you do something you do not want to do.
You may apply Will defensively when resisting any Social, Coercive, or Manipulation related actions. Additionally, it counts for 10 times its listed value when used this way.
Additional resistance provided proportional to the difference in level between you and source.]
Bloated Soul
[You managed to hold onto all the Potential making up your original body and incorporated it into your Slyphid core. Triple core size.]
Was Contrary Will how she’d freed herself from that paralysis earlier? Probably. Where had that trait even come from? It said “Inborn” next to it, so was she just special? Maybe everyone had an inborn trait and this was hardly unusual. Maybe most people had several.
Both traits seemed a little rude, but what could she do about it?
She flipped back to the Stats Menu. There were a couple of new fields here as well: Stamina, Focus, and Health.
Stamina was at a third and rising. She took a deep breath. How low had that gotten? At least it was already recovering. Every second it was a little easier to breathe than the one before. She watched the value increase, each point seemed to take longer to recover.
Focus was also well below max, but with its much larger pool and at the speed it was recovering she wasn’t concerned. Wind Step used some Focus, but either her Focus pool and recovery was ridiculous or the cost wasn’t particularly high. It was a utility skill, so maybe that wasn’t surprising.
Health was basically full. The pain in her back broke her attention as if yelling in contradiction of the value the system was showing her. The pain suggested she was dying. The stat screen said she was barely injured.
She grit her teeth. Was she overreacting? Was her pain tolerance just that low? Or did Health mean something different from what she expected?
It hurt and it was getting harder to pretend otherwise. She needed to do something about her injury.
If she was home, she’d have gone to the hospital. It was at least that bad, regardless of what the system had to say. There was the concern it was infected too, since a wild animal had done it.
But she wasn’t going to a hospital here. So what was her second choice? Clean and bandage it, she supposed. But again, that wasn’t an option. She didn’t have the supplies for that.
So what did that leave? What could she do about the still bleeding wound on her back? What did she own?
1 rain jacket (ripped)
1 sweater (ripped)
1 fleece PJ shirt (ripped)
1 fleece PJ pants (dirty)
1 flashlight
1 pair of hiking boots
1 pair of hiking socks (sweaty)
1 scrunchy (beloved)
1 unspent Free Point
Was that it?
Was she going to die out here?
No. None of that now. It was too early for that. Besides, the system said it was barely a scratch. It was painful, but she would live.
She took a deep breath.
Nothing here would help her if she was home, but one of these things was not like the others.
That unspent Free Point, there had to be something she could do with it.
Her original plan was to put her additional free points in Dex or End to boost her plan Run-Away-From-All-Danger. But she’d forgotten all about the additional Free Point she’d gotten for becoming a Slyphid when she’d been dropped in this forest.
And now, with Wind Step, maybe that wasn’t needed. After all, she couldn’t die if they couldn’t hit her. And they couldn’t hit her if she wasn’t corporeal.
The words “physical damage” echoed at the back of her mind. But she pushed it aside. The skill also made her fast, so even if there was non-physical damage to avoid it would probably be fine.
So, maybe using that point to make her back hurt less was the best use. If she could figure out which stat that would be. She looked over the stats, weighing the chances each had any effect on pain.
Vit (vitality) likely had some control over how quickly she healed, which should have something to do with how hurt she was. But, would that do anything for the pain right now or dramatically change how long she was injured? She was doubtful.
End (endurance) or Wll (will) might affect how easily she could push through the pain. Res (resistance) might do something similar assuming she was right about what it stood for. None of those stood out as pain mitigation though. All were more along the lines of gritting her teeth and baring it.
What did that leave? Str? Dex? Unlikely.
Ala? She still had no idea what that might be.
Frt? Per?
Per (perception) was likely the opposite of what she needed. She didn’t need even sharper senses. She needed to dull them somehow.
She shook her head. She didn’t know. She could only guess and she only had one chance. Her hands clenched around the Kelmgrass. She had only one chance. She needed her choice to be right.
At the end of the day, Wll and Res were her two highest stat. If 1 point was added, then even if they were effective, that would be a 5% to 10% increase in effectiveness. Not the sweeping relief she was looking for right now.
End or Vit would see a bigger effect if they were right, but was enduring or healing the injury what she was looking for?
By that logic, Frt—with its current value of 1—made the most sense to increase. One additional point would double it. Doubling its effect. Was it worth the risk? Maybe it did stand for Fort. Or Fortification. Fortitude?
Cass blinked. It couldn’t, could it?
Frt 1 -> 2
The relief was immediate. Oh, her back still hurt like hell. But it had dropped from 3rd most painful thing to ever happen to… 5th? Probably less painful than breaking her arm, but more painful than everything else.
Fortitude. She decided. Frt must stand for Fortitude and it almost certainly governed how much pain she felt from her wounds.
It still hurt. But it no longer felt like it was on fire. Definitely wasn’t all-encompassing anymore.
She sat up, wincing a little with the movement. But it was manageable. Gingerly, she reached around to touch the wound. It wasn’t very deep and despite her earlier fears, it had already stopped bleeding.
She was about to close the window when she noticed the bottom line.
Concepts:
- Wind (Unapplied)
Previously, it had said “None”. She still had no idea what that meant. But now she had a Concept of Wind? What did Unapplied mean?
It likely had something to do with her life-or-death flight from the hound. What exactly her wild thoughts about the wind and her stats screen had to do with one another she could only guess.
On a whim, she tried Identify on Concept. Nothing happened. She supposed the status screen wasn’t an object or an entity, and neither were any of the entries on it.
Well, fine. She’d figure it out herself.
She sighed, there was another notification she’d skipped earlier, wasn’t there? Something about a quest?
The Stats window was replaced with another.
Beginner Quest: Conquer Uvana Valley
Beginner Quest (1): Find a Weapon
[Uvana is a dangerous place full of monsters and worse. Arm yourself before you run into something beyond your capabilities to handle barehanded.]
Reward: Bonus Skill Growth, Quest (2)
She frowned. That wasn’t overly helpful. It wasn’t like she was going to find a weapon out in the middle of a forest. Even if she found a good-sized stick or something to use as a weapon, it wasn’t like that would have helped against that hound.
Then again, the hound was four levels above her. Maybe she’d gotten unlucky in running into something so much more powerful than her.
Anything that might close the gap between her and the next awful creature she encountered would be welcome. It wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye open for a weapon.
Hell, maybe they even grew on trees here.