Frostbitten Wayfarer

Zoe covered herself in a sheet of ice with her Frozen Arsenal and then summoned two daggers to her hands. They were the only weapons that she had any knowledge of how to use, but did that mean that they were still the best options here?

She thought about it for a moment, and then replaced them with a sword and shield. Even if she didn’t know how to properly use them, having a solid sheet of ice between her and the undead was probably going to be more useful than having a dagger. And the extra reach on the sword was probably going to be better than having to get up close and personal with them, even if she didn’t know how to use it properly.

She laughed, and then replaced her sword with a spear. If more reach was her argument, then she may as well go all the way. Even if she had no idea how to use them, it couldn’t be that hard to just stab something from far away and move the shield in the way of whatever attack she ends up getting hit by, right?

And for that matter, she realized that she really should have spent more time getting skills when she was back in Flester. She had tunnel visioned on the bow and dagger being the only weapons she’d be using and completely missed out on getting Swordfighting, Spearfighting, Hammerfighting. Whatever other fighting there were. Probably even unarmed fighting if she thought about it. Next time she was back in town she made a promise to spend her money on getting lessons for a bunch of different weapons.

Especially when she had such a generalized weapon summoning skill, there was really no reason for her to not at least have some degree of competency with a large variety of weapons. Daggers wouldn’t be the best option for every scenario, and neither would spears. If she were fighting in a tight corridor, daggers would thrive.

But here on Moaning Point where the shambling zombies would mindlessly approach her, at least on the earlier levels, a spear made the most sense to her. And then as she ascended, she might end up preferring something in between. A long sword, or short sword maybe. Something with more reach than a dagger but more manoeuvrability than a spear might be nice.

And maybe one day she’d fight something that was heavily armoured, where sharp edges and points wouldn’t pierce through its carapace or metal plates. Maybe then she’d prefer using a hefty hammer to smash through. She could see a number of use cases for a bunch of different weapons, and mentally smacked herself for not realizing it earlier.

She didn’t regret her choice, she stuck in town and levelled a bunch of skills as high as she could get them. And she got a feat out of it! The feat didn’t do anything practical for her, and neither did having a bunch of high level skills. But she could see the benefit of doing so, it was there. Getting another ten skills? Maybe she’d get a cool class out of it, but maybe she’d get something she wouldn’t enjoy like Skilled anyway.

There was really no way to know if she made the right choice or not without going back in time and redoing it. And that was just something she couldn’t do. So she put the thought aside for when she got back to town and continued carrying on up the mountain.

From what she’d read, the entrance to the mountain was a little ways from where the actual dungeon started, so she’d have a bit of time to prepare herself for it. One thing that she was curious about was how effective her Frost skill was in combat.

Being able to enchant her Frost skill meant she might be able to create projectiles, flash an Archery enchantment onto them with Enchanted Mirror, and then fire them off from a distance. It was worth a shot at least.

Zoe moved to the side of the path so she wouldn’t be in the way of people rushing up the mountain and turned her attention inwards to the Mirror in her soul. She put two enchantments onto it — Archery and Frozen Arsenal’s explosive effect. Her hope was that with the combination of Archery and her Frost skill pushing a shard of ice forward, it would have a respectable piercing power. And with Frozen Arsenal’s explosion, it would deal some respectable damage to whatever it hit.

She summoned a small cone of ice and flashed her enchantment onto it. The mana within was already degrading, so she added as much spin to it as she could and fired it off at a nearby tree. With the combination of her Frost skill pushing it forward and her Archery enchantment blasting it through the air, it took off surprisingly quick. The archery enchantment’s lack of accuracy was also comfortably resolved through redirecting the force in the direction she wanted with her Frost skill. It was a perfect combination, she thought.

The cone rocketed forwards, pierced straight through the tree and exploded in a cloud of frost on the other side. Zoe’s eyes widened in shock. She expected it to be powerful, maybe leave a scar in the poor tree. But she’d drilled a small hole straight through the foot long trunk.

Zoe had never used her skills for actual destruction before. She had gone hunting, but that was just firing a bow off or stabbing at something with her dagger. And she was extremely competent at both by now, but she’d never truly understood just what it meant to have classes and high level skills.

Now, she thought she might. She could create one of those cones and fire it off in less than a second. It didn’t take long to make one with her Frost skill, the ice would already be saturated with her mana and her Enchanted Mirror let her flash the enchantment onto it instantly.

If she tried it, she could probably even make a few of them at the same time and fire them off like a machine gun of destruction. It was incredible, and a little terrifying. She had begun to realize just what exactly higher level people were actually capable of. It wasn’t just some fun flashy magic, it was raw power capable of things she couldn’t even imagine.

She wondered what other skill she might want to include in the Enchanted Mirror when she managed to get three working. Alacrity was a possible contender. If it made the Archery enchantment act faster than she’d get more velocity on her projectile.

But Cold Affinity was also a strong option, since it would compound Frozen Arsenal’s explosive effect. It already had plenty of piercing power, so more explosion would be good. And for that matter, she might want to try out different effects with Frozen Arsenal.

An explosion was good for obvious reasons, but she could probably get more piercing power through it as well for the particularly hard targets. Maybe even more blunt force? That would be strange with a piercing projectile, but she supposed they didn’t all have to be conical anyway. She could fire off bricks of ice too with just as little effort.

One thing she’d never tested was what Archery and Meditation did together. Meditation helped the Enchanting enchantments build themselves up, but what did it do when it was combined with some other enchantment that used mana?

Zoe grabbed one of her coins, and enchanted it with Restoration and Meditation together. At first it did nothing more than make the colourful wisps swirl around it, like she expected. So she scratched the surface of the coin with one of her claws, and watched as the mana rushed into the coin and repaired the scratch.

So Meditation didn’t just help repair enchantments, it also helped power them. That should maybe have been an obvious thing in hindsight, but it was good to know. So then with Archery, in theory it should power the enchantment and keep it flying for longer.

She tested it out with a shard of ice she created. Which, she realized, is how she should always test her enchantments. It’s much easier and doesn’t risk damaging her money. She changed her Mirror to Archery and Meditation instead, and then flashed it onto the shard of ice.

Immediately, she felt the ice try to propel itself forward as the mana was drawn into it. But it wasn’t a very powerful pull, the mana that was being drawn into it just wasn’t enough to completely saturate the enchantment. She released the ice from her Frost skill and let it fall to the ground.

It kept pushing forward across the ground as it inched forward. It might make a small difference, but at least with her current level, Meditation wasn’t enough to completely power an enchantment like Archery at full power. Maybe if she also tied in Alacrity to speed up the Meditation effect?

But at that point, it seemed better to just add two Alacrity enchantments if she could do that and one Archery skill anyway. And sacrificing the explosive power that Frozen Arsenal provided for a tiny bit of extra speed seemed like a bad trade anyway.

Zoe returned her Mirror to Frozen Arsenal and Archery, and then started walking back up the path. It was a comfortable walk, the path was well trodden and easy to follow. The trees surrounding the path were lush and provided a nice ambience. Birds chirped in the trees, and the smell of the sap that dripped from the odd wound was almost intoxicating.

It was a pleasant walk, and she almost wished there weren’t danger lurking at the other side. But there was, and she was excited to try out her new ideas on the zombies as soon as she saw them.

The first thing she noticed was the mana. At one point, it started behaving strangely. Most of the wisps that she could see floated around aimlessly like she was used to. But there were so many others that were being dragged together and forced into the ground in groups.

Zoe tried to grab control of them with her Mana Manipulation, but was completely shut out. She could still grasp control of the aimless mana that floated around but the portion that was being dragged beneath the ground may as well not have existed to her Mana Manipulation.

It was the first time she’d seen mana behaving so strangely. She’d seen it rush around when people cast spells, but there was nobody here to cast spells. No obvious enchanted objects drawing mana in. It was just earth, and the dense mana was being pulled into it at an alarming pace.

Nobody else that walked by seemed bothered by it though, so Zoe just wrote it off as being the mana anomaly part of the dungeon. Maybe zombies were being created below the earth and the mana was needed to power them, or something. That made sense to her.

It didn’t take much longer before she encountered her first zombie. A shambling human figure with dark green, rotting flesh. Bits of its face were falling off and splattering on the ground, several of its deep black bones seemed to tear through the droopy flesh. It looked over at Zoe and started dragging its feet towards her.

[Zombie - 13]

Light blue level thirteen, she saw with her Identify. Did that mean that the zombie had its first class? It would have Zombie and then… ZombieButMore? What kind of classes did monsters get. What skills would it have? Could it have magic?

She had no idea, but now wasn’t the time to question it. She created another explosive cone of frost and fired it off at the zombie. The cone pierced through its chest and exploded in its rib cage. Frozen bits of flesh scattered around and shattered as they hit the ground.

The black skeleton fell, and then sank into the ground with a surge of mana. Did she win? Was the zombie dead? Or was it a skeleton now? She had no idea what just happened.

But as before, nobody else seemed bothered by the occurrence so she just accepted it as normal and continued on. Most of the zombies she found were already fighting somebody, usually groups of younger teenagers or kids being escorted by their parents.

Zoe left them alone and continued up. The hordes of people thinned out as she continued climbing. Almost everybody seemed to stay around the lower areas and just wait around for the zombies to be created, or whatever was happening. There were a handful of people who still came up farther, but they were all much higher level than her and rushed past the zombies as they continued up the path.

Maybe it was just a sweet spot of too high level for the novices, and too low level for the experienced climbers? She hoped that was the explanation, and used the opportunity to practice her Frost projectiles. All of the zombies at this point behaved similarly, with the only difference that they tended to be around level eighteen to twenty instead of the low tens.

But for Zoe’s skills, that was functionally the same thing. She didn’t expect to get much experience from this, but there was more to life than just skill levels. With each zombie she slew, she grew a little better at forming and firing her projectiles.

Zoe hadn’t used her spear or shield at all yet, but still kept them on her just in case. It didn’t cost her anything to maintain and she’d rather have them if she got surprised by something. She wasn’t even sure how effective they would be in actual combat, so before she got too confident she wanted to at least gain some experience with them.

The next zombie she found, she decided to take down with her weapons alone. She let it approach her and it slammed its arms down towards her. Zoe brought her shield up to block the attack and stumbled backwards from the impact. Her arm stung with pain, and she shook her head.

Zoe took a few steps back and let the zombie approach again. Right when it got to range of her spear, she stabbed out with it. She managed a light scratch across the zombie’s bones, but it staggered forwards and smashed into her shield again.

She grimaced from the stinging pain in her arm and stabbed out with her spear of ice again. It pierced into the zombie’s gut and scratched across its bones, and then she took a step back to dodge its powerful slam.

The zombie missed her and fell to the ground. Zoe took the opportunity to stab into its skull from behind, and the corpse was sucked into the ground shortly after.

Zoe sighed, and replaced her spear and shield with two daggers. With proper lessons, maybe the spear would win out. But as she was, the spear was tiring to wield and lacked the precision that she had with her daggers. At least with the daggers she wouldn’t overextend and let the zombie slam into her arm.