NOVEL NEXT Ch 83. A Quick Excursion
Without any witnesses around, I felt I could be more experimental in my approach.
Taking out a few things I had collected over the past weeks.
A battle hammer, battle axe, staff, throwing in my crude dagger for good measures... and last of all a bag of poison, the dense liquid contained within the leather pouch. I got the idea from looking around Cal's place. He had poisonous materials everywhere, and even if I wasn't particularly keen on using poison, getting another class could never be a bad thing.
Materializing my full armor, and picking the two-handed hammer out from among my options, storing the rest for later. It wasn't exactly light, but given my strength I should have no problems swinging it freely. Clicking my tongue when I noticed the mangled scales around the sleeve of my armor again. The wound was already mostly healed, the scar beginning to recede, but the armor remained and I would need to get this fixed. Something that we didn't really have the time for at the moment given our impending trip to the capital.
Searching for the easiest to kill muck rats. Never a hard task with the little critters skittering all around the plains, and before long spotting a small colony of them rustling through the grass, likely foraging for food and searching for prey. The rats chattering away between themselves.
One... two... five... the perfect number of them for my purposes.
Rushing in with a charge, the rats immediately noticing my presence and scrambling to load their slings and loose their rocks in my direction. The harmless projectiles falling flat while I closed the distance, the first muck rat's face turning to panic just before the hammer met its face.
Setting down the warhammer, deciding what to do while the rocks bounced off my visor harmlessly. It'd be trouble if they ran, unsummoning the hammer and bringing out my sword.
Within a few moments I was standing over the moaning legless bodies of four muckrats, piling them next to each other, allowing me to deal with them with the appropriate weapon type at my leisure. Putting the monsters out of their suffering in turn, left with only the poison and one remaining rat.
Looking at my mirror once the deed was done to confirm that the classes had been successfully obtained.
For [Poisoner] was it was obvious enough which weapon was responsible, examining the skill [Poison Constitution] which appeared like it probably gave me some resistances to handling poisons. Useful for most people, but given I was already a constitution main I already had a great deal of resistance to things like poison. Unless I was submerged in poisons, or there were some incredibly potent ones I doubted I would need it anytime soon.
[Rogue] was definitely for using daggers; the skill it gave out was [Dagger Mastery]. Given the similarity between my existing skills I already knew how it would work. The other classes were much less obvious though.
[Barbarian] was for using an axe... or was it the hammer? The skill didn't tell me much either, [Instinct]. My most similar skill so far was fighting sense, but that only pertained to actual combat as far as I could tell, while this seemed more generalist in nature.
[Brutalist] was for the staff I suppose. I had never even heard of the word, but it made a degree of sense. I basically clubbed the thing to death, and there certainly was a degree of brutality to that act. The corresponding skill was [Crushing Blows], seeming like it helped out with amplifying the effects of blunt weaponry.
In the end I only gained four classes, so there was an overlap somewhere. Either between the two-handed axe and war-hammer, or between the hammer and the staff. I wasn't quite sure where the logic was in these classes, but I didn't have much choice other than to feel it out over time.
Reminded of a sore spot of mine regarding the class system, that despite my near constant use of a shield I had no defensive class to show for it. This was extremely frustrating to me because constitution was my primary stat focus and I had no class that could really complement it. To be honest this may even necessitate me contacting system to figure it out.
Bael and the church would certainly know better, but I didn't dare ask. It was hard to tell what knowledge was considered common sense to them, and I was afraid that asking too many questions would set off flags.
The morning was young, and there were plenty of monsters to kill without needing to venture too far out. I didn't feel like trying the forest again after how disastrously it had went last time, but I didn't want to go back just yet.. sweeping through the muck rat colonies like a plague, the experience they gave was rather paltry at this point, but through numbers alone I could make up for quality. Heaping up corpses in my inventory as I decimated the plains.
Stopping to rest when I had filled up one of my spatial inventory rooms, hundreds of bodies contained within. When I didn't have a group with me, I could actually hunt a lot more efficiently. Moving around with a group basically ensured we could move no quicker than a walking pace after all. With my new pace, it really had only been about two hours, not enough time that Tammy and Belle would get suspicious.
Running back to the wall, only stopping at the base to store all of my gear. A quick look was all I needed to know that I looked absolutely filthy, the blood caked onto my clothes underneath, needing a quick wash before getting back into town. The inventory saving me once again as I tried to get as clean as I could before wiping myself dry with a towel; summoning out a fresh change of clothes from my inventory and climbing over the wall just as I had done before.
