Zeroth Moment: My Cheat Skill Is Stupid, So I'll Just Ignore It

Topher staggered back to the inn in a daze; he retained just enough awareness to know that beer might help him sleep, drank three mugs, and half-crawled up the stairs to his room. When he awoke the next morning, he was annoyed to discover he was still super high on magic graphs; guess the only way out is through. Sighing, he unrolled the scroll Tok had given him, then began reading; his brain twisted around itself and threw a few gears trying to switch from Mage-magic to Priest-magic, got tangled up, and eventually broke down entirely. He went back to casting Mending on random things, solved a few of the confusing edge cases that had been bothering him, then went back and re-read his beginner prayer scroll to refresh his memory; in doing so, he discovered a large number of additional similarities between the two magic systems that he'd missed the first time, got stuck on documenting and resolving the conflicts, and lost another two days before he'd even noticed. If it weren't for Remove Fatigue, I'd probably have accidentally killed myself by now, he noted absently, but didn't have time to dwell on it; each spell mishap was another step closer to a successful casting, and each successful casting was another step closer to a reliable casting. Remove Fatigue hit Rank D without him even noticing, and he was starting to discover to his immense dissatisfaction that he had independently derived coordinate math in some of his analyses; there was simply no way to explain the relationships between the various runes without charts and graphs, and systematically mapping the differences had caused coordinates to emerge from the morass of sample data like termites erupting from a woodpile. Grumbling, he put his head down and decided to just get it over with; if he had to reinvent math, he'd reinvent math, and he'd do it better than whatever dorks had done it before, with hookers and blackjack. No weird symbols this time, I'll just fucking use words for stuff.

His first major breakthrough came when a rudimentary and crude version of Lesser Yashfii emerged from one of his comparisons between Mage Light and Summon Light; with a groan, he realized that some of the more complex visualizations were just coordinate transforms of the series the runic paths described, and that that meant there were generalized solutions that would produce a lot of the more complicated elements when worked through, which was probably what the original authors of the spells had done in the first place. With tremendous distaste, he realized that he was going to have to master Minor Illusion to create three-dimensional visualizations of the calculation results involved -- he vaguely remembered the mage in one of his classes talking about "the meta-extrusion of the Arzash topology" which he supposed must have been what all this was about. Furiously, he put his nose to the iterated grindstone, struggled, solved it, and immediately began using it in lieu of paper to perform coordinate calculations; passers-by could occasionally catch Topher with his door open, staring at globes of twinkling stars that rotated and morphed while he scribbled down numbers and plotted points on graphs. Curiously, he noticed that his Disrupt Illusion Skill didn't seem to interfere with the results; maybe it only works on disguise-type illusions? He briefly considered trying to disguise himself with it, realized how much work it would take, and promptly forgot about it in favor of continuing on with the work he was doing.

Eventually, he found that he could draw the resulting runic circles (cross-sections of the projections) and save those as a sort of shorthand for deriving the visualizations -- and was again made very angry that he had reinvented the wheel a third time, since this was obviously what the original authors of the 'easy-to-understand' versions of the spells had done. And so, painstakingly, Topher cleared out most of his Ledger, started over, and produced a crisp and clean set of notes on how to cast all of the spells he knew, his most common and flexible runic circles for doing so, and a series of shorthand notes on the necessary calculations and mappings required to get, for example, the coordinate transform corresponding to Dahf from Ehn through the hyperbolic projection into Vahraj-space. Satisfied, he slept; and when he awoke, he checked his Status and became even more confused.

Name:

Christopher Bailey

Level:

6

Class:

Clerk

HP:

18/18

MP:

24/24

SP:

6/6

Strength:

Rank F

Dexterity:

Rank F

Constitution:

Rank D [+1: Rank D]

Intelligence:

Rank D

Wisdom:

Rank D [+1: Rank D]

Charisma:

Rank F

Skills:

Literacy (Rank D)

Mathematics (Rank C)

Cooking (Rank F)

Customer Service (Rank D)

Data Entry and Filing (Rank B)

Packaging and Shipping (Rank D)

Home Appliance Repair (Rank F)

Pen Spinning (Rank A)

[Cold Resistance (Rank F)]

[Heat Resistance (Rank F)]

Special Skills:

Disrupt Illusion

Conjure Shield (Rank F)

Conjure Light (Rank F)

Improved Status

Summon Ledger

Remove Fatigue (Rank D)

Minor Sorcery (Rank D)

Unique Skill:

Attract Object

Topher frowned. What the shit happened to Flame Jet and Frost Ray and all the others? Did they all get collapsed like Mage Light and Summon Light did? But if so, why are Conjure Shield and Conjure Light still separate? Shaking his head, he put it out of his mind, bathed, and puttered downstairs; Gropp was serving breakfast in the common room, since Elara was still apparently having non-stop sex with Varissian or whatever it was newly-wed couples did in this world. Topher yawned, ate a bland but filling bowl of porridge, and idly checked the calendar which hung on the wall above the Adventurer's Guild notice board. His blood froze.

The calendar showed that seven days had passed since Tok's wagon had almost run him over in the street; he had three days to master Create Food and Water. He also wanted to kill all the goblins in the encampment near the village, but that was a stretch goal at this point; he needed to finish learning that spell now. Wolfing down the rest of his breakfast, he mumbled a thanks to the innkeeper, dashed back upstairs, and unrolled the scroll Tok had given him yet again. Time to stop fucking around.

It gave him trouble for the first hour, but eventually he realized that the concepts and tenets it described could be mapped onto the emotions and virtues from his beginner prayer scroll by performing a particular vector transform; the fact that he could make math out of theology trickled deep into his brain and tried desperately to connect with other ideas, but he shoved it aside and focused on what he was doing. By midafternoon, he could conjure a cloud of mist that smelled faintly of wheat; by the next morning, he could conjure a bowlful of something that looked like a glass of water and a corn muffin had stepped into Jeff Goldblum's teleporter from The Fly (and thus could probably be fermented into corn mash and then moonshine, but he didn't have time to explore that at the moment). It wasn't until it was nearly noon of the second day that he managed to create a glass of cloudy, foul-smelling water and a flat, lumpy cracker of unleavened matzoh; good enough. Probably gourmet to a dwarf. He collapsed in exhaustion, woke up, ate, went back to bed, slept, awoke, bathed, and grabbed his staff with grim determination; he had about sixteen hours of daylight to kill every goblin in Frostford. Time to make the Murder Donuts. He did pause, however, to grab the job posting for "Kill Five Goblins" from the notice board; no sense not getting paid if I'm going to do it anyway.

Arriving at the goblin village, he did a quick headcount and determined that there were, conveniently, five goblins remaining; he did a little grim math, trying to figure out how many MP that meant he could spare per goblin, and came up with an exceedingly scant four MP per kill, plus a point or two for any necessary Remove Fatigue to keep himself from having a coronary during the process. Flame Jet cost 2 MP, Magic Dart cost 1, and he hadn't even had a chance to try out Entangle (it needed a living target, and he hadn't gotten around to terrorizing any wildlife, chickens, or fellow residents of Frostford yet). He was going to have to do some fieldwork.

He waited until one of the goblins went into the forest to hunt, then followed, eyes narrowed in furious thought. He couldn't afford to get into melee with the little green wrecking balls -- absorbing a single hit with Conjure Shield would eat half his MP, and he was going to need every point to clear the village. Ideally, then, the objective would be to keep them at a distance, but he hadn't had the chance to build any traps this time, and the deadfall trap he'd used to kill the previous goblin was too far away and had probably fallen down by this point to boot. He was going to have to pin all his hopes on Entangle.

As the goblin sniffed around the forest, turning this way and that, he carefully positioned himself; taking his spear in hand, he crept up as close as he dared while still giving himself a thirty-foot space in case things went sideways. As the goblin began stalking a large badger, he raised his hand, sucked in his breath, and intoned, "Lhei Viak Elrr Gadiph!" while pointing at the goblin's back, which quickly whirled around with a snarl. The result was beyond his wildest dreams.

Instantly, lashing ropes of burning ash erupted from the ground, ensnaring and restraining the little green figure; it yowled and screeched, struggling against the strands, but could not break free, and Topher saw smoke and steam erupting from the places where it was grappled by the filaments of his spell. Wow, that Eht -> Mii -> Gadiph transform worked even better than I thought it would. Following up, he launched an empowered Magic Dart against the creature (empowering it with Dahf to get "Bwin Zom Zefekk Korpu") and was astonished to see the creature drop immediately to the ground, its body riddled with burning punctures as though he'd shot it with heated rods of steel. Holy hell. Exactly how much stronger is Magic Dart when I use it like that? These things shrugged off everything but dropping anvils on them before. He stalked over, poking the goblin carefully with his spear to make sure that it was dead, then checked its corpse for valuables; it had a Magic Stone, but it was only a small one. Still better than nothing, he thought as he pocketed the tiny gem. One down, four to go.

Checking his Status, he found that he had spent four MP exactly (and that he was now Level 7); two for the Mii-transformed Entangle, and two for the Dahf-enhanced Magic Dart. From that, he was pretty sure he could assume that Entangle cost 1 MP normally, but he didn't have time to find out; if this combo could reliably take out a goblin, then he'd have enough MP to clear the village with a nice margin of safety. As long, of course, as nothing went wrong.

After another long hour of scouting and tentative probing, he managed to catch another goblin hanging about the edge of the village a bit apart from the others; he threw a rock at it, ran away from the village a bit to get as much distance between it and the other goblins as possible, then gave it the same treatment he had the previous goblin. This one seemed, if anything, weaker; he was pretty sure that if he'd left it alone, the burning ropes of his Ash-aspected Entangle might have killed it on their own, but he was in a hurry and didn't want to leave anything to chance. This one didn't have a Magic Stone at all (although it did have a shiny gold coin buried in its filthy loincloth, which Topher wasn't going to complain about). That only left three goblins, but he could tell they weren't going to be pushovers.

For a start, all three hung out near the center of the village at all times; they seemed to always move as a group, and Topher was pretty sure he was going to have to fight all three at once, which was a fairly terrifying prospect. If even a single one managed to reach him, he would have to abandon the whole endeavor -- and if two or more reached him at the same time he'd probably die almost instantly, because his Conjure Shield couldn't absorb more than one hit no matter what happened at this point. Worse, all three of the goblins were bigger and stronger than any of the goblins he'd fought thus far, and one of them was even larger and more intimidating than its companions; it wore the skull of some larger animal like a hat and wielded a rusty axe, and Topher guessed it was the local King Goblin or whatever. This isn't going to work; I've only got 16 MP left, and I'll eat my hoodie if that big fucker in the middle can't take more punishment than the last two gobs combined. There was also no guarantee he could Entangle all three of them before at least one closed the distance, either, and he wasn't willing to bet that the big one couldn't potentially just rip through his spell and turn him into Topher-steaks before he'd even get the chance to try again.

Logically, he really should have just given up and left; the odds were slim, he was operating with virtually no safety net, and there weren't going to be any second chances if he made even a single mistake. Everything in his brain told him that the risk was not nearly worth the reward, that he was literally gambling with his life for the sake of a nebulous goal that wasn't even his primary objective. Unfortunately, the last two goblins had lulled him into a bit of a false sense of security; he was feeling strong, he was feeling powerful and wizardly. I can do it. Flame Jet has a wider area; I can empower everything with Dahf. It'll probably make Entangle less likely to be broken, and keep them all still so they can be clustered up; then spray the whole area with the most powerful Flame Jet I can, twice if I have to. 6 MP for three empowered Entangles, but I don't know if an extra-strong Flame Jet costs 3 or 4; let's assume 4, and I can cast it twice to be sure if I have to. 14 MP. I've got 16. This is doable. This is totally doable.

"This is fucking dumb," announced Topher, and he went home and went to bed.