NOVEL NEXT Ch. 50: Ship of Theseus
Level Up!
+ 1 Dex
+ 1 End
+ 1 Wll
+ 1 Ala
+ 4 Free Points
Confounding Mists has reached level 4.
Stealth has reached level 10.
Dodge has reached level 15.
Elemental Manipulation has increased to level 16.
Mana Blade has reached level 8.
Mana Sense has reached level 6.
Mana Sense has reached level 7.
Beacon of Hearth and Home has reached level 8.
Beacon of Hearth and Home has reached level 9.
Beacon of Hearth and Home has reached the First Step! Congratulations!
[Your mastery of this skill has awarded you the following stats:
+ 4 Vit
+ 3 End
+ 2 Res
+ 2 Frt]
Cass collapsed to her knees, the exhaustion from Stamina use overwhelming her. Her core was warm, that warmth still drip feeding her strength. Put it was a drop of water on parched stone.
Stamina: 18/120
Focus: 187/387
Health: 61/104
The urgency gone all Cass wanted was to lie here in muted pain. Technically, she was barely injured. But she’d traded so much of her Health for Stamina and there was so little Stamina left…
But Pellen was actually injured. So there was no time for lying here.
Cass pushed herself up, dragging herself over to Pellen’s side.
“You okay?” Cass asked.
Pellen nodded, wincing. There was a long gash from their right shoulder to their left hip. It cut through their robes, leaving tattered fabric and bloody flesh. It was gruesome, but not deep.
“You’re going to be okay,” Cass promised. She prodded their fire back to life. Its embers hadn’t quite gone out when the Wolf had burst in, and so it lit easily with a little kindling and some fresh air.
Once that was in place and Beacon of Hearth and Home was running at full power, Cass retrieved the first aid kit from her Bag. She applied the poultice along the wound and wrapped her entire chest in bandages.
“Thank you,” she said.
Cass nodded. There wasn’t anything else she could do. Just wait for wounds to heal and resources to tick back up.
“I think you might have saved me too,” Cass said. “That was you, right? Moving me out of the way of that last sword attack?”
Pellen nodded.
“Can I ask how you did that?” Cass asked.
Pellen shrugged and winced at the movement. She pulled a small notebook from the folds of her robe. A dull, grey gem was set in the cover. “This is my tome. I mentioned I specialize in Spatial Magic? And that most of it is theoretical? Well, at the cost of a whole lot of Focus, or even more mana, I have a sigil inscription that can move an object horizontally a couple yards. At the cost of even more Focus or a shocking amount of Potential, I can do the same with a Chant. 2 out of 3 times the entirety of the object moves the same distance.”
Cass blinked at the mage. That sounded like, “You can teleport people?”
Pellen bobbed their head from side to side noncommittally. “A couple of yards at a time with a lot of prep work. And only horizontally. In one particular direction relative to the Chanter or Inscription.”
“You teleported me?”
Pellen nodded. “It was ill-advised. I was preparing to use it myself. The chant is kind of long. If I saw you died or if that thing came after me again, I was going to try to teleport myself through the wall back to the previous room. But, when I saw you still fighting, but about to get stabbed, I figured our survival chances went up if I used it on you then instead.”
“Two out of three times…” Cass said, slowly chasing down the rest of what the mage had said.
“Oh,” Pellen paused. “Yes. The inscription works far more often. I have yet to determine if it’s a flaw in the Chant or if it’s user error. Um. But 1 out of 3 times some parts of the object materialize at different distances.”
“Different distances?” Cass parroted. “As in, my feet might have ended up a couple inches more to the right?”
“Or more. And potentially detached from your ankles. As an example.”
“Or my head?”
“I ran that possibility by a Healing magic specialist,” Pellen said. “He suggested it would be very fatal very quickly if the head or heart was teleported with more than a few micrometers differential but that it would be near instantaneous and not at all painful.”
Cass stared at the mage. “Did you just gamble with my life?”
The mage coughed. “Um. Maybe? They were favorable odds, though?”
“For racing maybe?” Cass shouted. “Not for betting my life on!”
“I mean, it was that or watch that thing stab you in the heart?” Pellen said, her head down, refusing to meet Cass’s eyes.
Cass sighed. She had no idea if being stabbed through the heart would kill her or not and, frankly, didn’t care to find out through experimentation. Where did Health prevent fatal injuries and where did it allow for miraculous healing? How much of her body was even critical as a spirit bodied slyphid?
“Um, can I ask a question too?” Pellen asked.
“Sure,” Cass said.
“Are you really a slyphid?”
“Define ‘really’,” Cass said with a snort. “But short answer, yeah.” Probably.
If she just read what her Status Screen said.
And listened to her skills.
And ignored her common sense. Which was a thing that was becoming increasingly more reasonable the longer she was here.
Pellen bit their lip, their eyes all watching Cass closely. “Then, could you tell me about the Aether Realm?”
“The Aether Realm?” Cass asked. She wasn’t an expert on other realms, but that sounded made up to her.
“Or whatever you actually call it?” Pellen stammered to add.
Cass shrugged. “I doubt I’ve ever been there.”
“But you had to have,” she said. “Isn’t that the home of slyphids?”
Cass shrugged again. “I wouldn’t know.”
“But—“
Cass cut them off. “My past is complicated. Let’s just say there were no slyphids were I’m from and leave it at that, please?”
Pellen nodded. “Then you are from another realm?”
“Yeah,” Cass admitted.
Her many eyes shone with excitement. “I have so many questions. How did you get here? Why did you come? What is the inter-realm space like?”
Cass shook her head. Weren’t those the questions? “I was kidnapped. I don’t know anything about the how or the why. Inter-realm space? Void-ish?”
Pellen had produced a pen from somewhere and was furiously jotting down Cass’s words in their notebook. They looked up at Cass expectantly when she stopped.
“Don’t you have a level up or something to look at?” Cass asked, shoving the conversation away from herself.
Pellen frowned. “No. I think I might be close to level 28, but… Oh! You got a level! Oh! You’re so low leveled?”
Cass snorted. Given where she had started, it was strange to think of 21 as low, but given where they were and the average level of the participants, she could understand it.
“Just focus on resting,” Cass said. Pellen nodded and put their book back in their pocket, their mouth shutting, though a few of their eyes lingered on Cass.
Cass sighed and ignored her. She had a lot to think about, least of all the Free Points from her most recent level. Those were pretty easy to apply. What she needed most right now was more Stamina to use Liminal Dodge more often and more Health to trade for more resources with the Concept of Hearth.
Cass split the stats between End and Vit.
End 40 -> 42
Vit 28 -> 31 (23 -> 25 without bonus 25% Vit)
That came with another boost to her Stamina and Health.
Stamina: 18/120 -> 24/126
Health: 61/104 -> 67/113
It wasn’t a lot, but Cass already felt better. Like she wanted to sit here without moving for another hour or two, but better.
Cass closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall, running over the last battle again in her mind. She’d been so awkward without her staff. It was easy to just accept the changes Staff Mastery made to her movements when it was all that stood between her and certain death.
No, not easy exactly, but it was easier. Easier to ignore her discomfort when she compared it to death. Easier to accept it was necessary.
But if all it took was disarming her for that skill to fail… If that magic competency could be robbed from her so easily…
Cass took a deep breath. The thoughts swirled around her, biting at the confidence she’d forced around herself.
Losing her staff wasn’t the only oddity about that last fight. Before that, she’d already been acting strange. Why had she been so determined to protect Pellen?
Perhaps that in and of itself wasn’t strange, but her thoughts around it were… unusual? What had she been thinking?
‘How dare it (the wolf) walk into her camp and hurt her. Hurt her guest?’ That was a strange way to frame that concern. Would it have mattered less to her if it hadn’t been at her camp ground?
Beacon of Hearth and Home squirmed in her chest. It had been active during that last fight, even though the fire had dropped to embers. Camp and campfires were not technically a one-to-one correlation. You could have a camp without a fire, but a camp with one was just better.
Was Beacon the reason she felt like this? Was her need to see Pellen recovered simply a by-product of Beacon wishing her campground guests would be safe and cared for or was it her own thoughts that wanted that because it was the common and decent thing to want?
Where did the things her skills wanted start and her own will end?
Was the clawing at her guts to retrieve her staff from the remains of the wolf just good sense to rearm herself in case of another attack or was it Staff Mastery begging to be enabled again?
Cass’s guesses picked at the edges of her mind, peeling up the corners and leaving flapping edges.
If she dug too deep at this, would she find she was nothing but a collection of skills in an empty husk? Would she find the Cass of Earth had been replaced piece by piece, Ship of Theseus style, every substitution made to further her survival here, yet all the substitutions taken together leaving nothing of who or what she was?