Chương 3: Skill Quests

I detected her the moment she broke through the dimensional barrier and arrived in Laika. She landed in Baleria, a remote corner of Aaron's lands. It was always a given that another hero would be called. We were not the first, and we won't be the last. Not as long as the conflict still raged, the balance unbroken. Yet, when I saw her face, my hands shook for the first time in a century. I almost let my scrying spell falter. A familiar one. How interesting. Too bad we are bound to disappoint her.

Excerpt from the notes of Raymond Ludval, The Iron Vein Magus. The journal had appeared the moment she was summoned. Shining leather, no clasp, no markings.

"So how does this work, exactly?" she muttered.

"Do I just... carry you forever?" She froze. What if she lost it? On a whim, she thought about putting it away. Not setting it down, not tucking it somewhere. Just away. It vanished. Alexandra stared at her empty hands for a long moment.

"Huh." She thought about it again, pictured the cover, the weight. It reappeared between her fingers without drama or fanfare.

"Okay." She dismissed it again, watching her hand close on nothing.

"That's actually very useful." She stood there a moment longer, opening and closing her fist around empty air like an idiot. Then she sat down. Magical world or not, her legs were protesting. The journal fell open to its last page, and she got back to the task at hand. Four skills. She started with the least offensive one. Basic Herbology: Study herbology to the level of apprentice (0/1). Naturally, Alexandra was starting from zero. Well, not quite zero: she knew the name of one plant.

Yet, while she could now recognize the Silver Star Daisy, she knew nothing of its characteristics, distribution, habitat, and all the jazz that would come with a proper education on the subject.

"So, yeah, about zero." She flipped through her journal, looking for a description of the skill. Most pages were empty, but to her delight, the last one held what she needed. Basic Herbology: Grant basic knowledge of herbs you interact with. Each level increases the depth of knowledge. These two sentences raised more questions than they answered.

"What is the point of this skill if I already need to study herbology to unlock it?" Presumably, she'd have basic knowledge of most herbs by that point. However, while she complained, Alexandra wasn't blind to the benefits. Basic Herbology would give her data on any herb she interacted with. Even ones she had never heard about.

"If it works as I expect it to," she murmured. With no skill to compare it to, she couldn't be certain. Who knew how this whole magic thing worked? One thing was sure, it held little resemblance to Lone World Online's system. The second line implied that skills had levels. Good to know, but there was nothing she could do with that information for now. Above the description of Basic Herbology, three other skills filled the final page of her journal. She sighed. Summon Lesser Fiend, Dark Bolt, and Inflict Weakness.

Names she'd almost forgotten in favor of the keybinds she'd assigned them to. The three skills were hallmarks of the Warlock archetype she played in Lone World Online. Alexandra rubbed her face with her palms, instantly regretting it as pollen and dirt sneaked into her eyes.

"Fuck, it burns." She blinked, cried, shook her head, and after struggling for some time, the sensation subsided.

"Let's not do that again." Anyway, the warlock skills were welcome. The associated quests were not. The worst among them was clearly Summon Lesser Fiend. The skill's name was the gist of what it would do, which in itself was a little concerning. Just a little. In the game, summoning minions was as easy as pressing a button. In reality, she didn't want to see a Lesser Fiend, even if it was her minion. The skill quest was worse. Summon Lesser Fiend: Make a deal with Valudipan, Demon of Tides (0/1).

Suffice to say, making a deal with a literal demon sounded like a terrible idea. Alexandra wasn't looking forward to selling her soul. She was honestly tempted to discard all three warlock skills, but she knew better. Perhaps she was being paranoid, but she expected Laika to be dangerous, teeming with monsters, bandits, and all sorts of nasty encounters. At least, that's how it was in Lone World Online. She needed a way to defend herself. So, she checked the description and quests of the other two.

Dark Bolt: If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Sacrifice lifeforce to cast a needle of dark magic that corrupts the lifeforce of its target. Each level increases the power behind the needle.

"This is going to kill me." In the game, the warlock archetype was built on three pillars: summoning, curses, and dark magic. Emptying her health bar to damage enemies was fine when it was virtual. Obviously less so in real life. As for the last pillar… Inflict Weakness: Applies a curse of weakness to the target. Each level increases the duration and potency of the curse. This was better. Useful. Not a danger to her health. But the skill quest was nasty.

Inflict Weakness: Damage a living being enough to reduce their strength to 0 without killing them (0 /1). Her frown turned into a grimace. There was no universe in which this quest would be enjoyable. She could think of a few ways of doing that, none of them ethical. Though it would depend on how attributes worked. Maybe there was a harmless way to achieve this effect. A potion, perhaps? She shut her journal with a thud and sighed.

She was about to send it away when she was interrupted by a loud, drawn out gurgle coming straight from her stomach.

"Ah…" She hadn't eaten today. While she was looking for the flowers to complete her daily quest, she'd spotted a few berries that looked edible. Keyword looked. Alexandra knew better than to feed on unknown plants. Especially unknown, potentially magical plants. It was asking to get poisoned. Instead, she set off in search of a settlement. In game, Baleria was centered around a port city, and sported a few villages scattered in the flowery plains.

She couldn't count on them existing for real, but she figured that there had to be people living in the vicinity. Should she follow the coast, or go further inland?

"If I chose to follow the coast and pick the wrong direction, I'm done for," she muttered.

"If I go inland, I should meet a road eventually." A flawed reasoning, but she discarded her doubts and started walking inland. Indecision was dangerous, and both paths could either lead her to salvation, or doom. She had to pick one, so that's what she did. The sun had dropped a hand's width since she'd set off, and the plain showed no signs of ending. Alexandra walked. She kept her arms close to her body, brushing through the flower stalks, trying not to think about the dryness coating the back of her throat.

She'd tried to ignore it for the first hour. The second hour, she'd started counting her steps in an effort to redirect her attention. She'd given up somewhere around four hundred. Her feet ached. The shoes she'd been summoned in were the ones she'd been wearing at her desk, meaning they were slippers. Not designed for this.

Each step pressed the ground's unevenness directly into her arches, and she'd started unconsciously shifting her weight to the outside of each foot, which was already making her ankles complain. The creatures she couldn't see were growing bolder. That was the other thing. At first, it had been the occasional rustle, something darting between stems ahead of her. Easy enough to file away as small, harmless, none of her business.

But the light was going amber now, slanting low and long across the flower heads, and whatever lived in the growth beneath had started to move with more confidence. A sustained shuffling to her left tracked her for nearly fifty steps before it vanished. Something let out a short, wet sound to her right and went quiet. She kept her breathing even and didn't look too hard at any of it. She was very thirsty. The inland choice had felt logical when she'd made it. Roads were inland. People were inland.

All sensible things lived inland. But the plain had given her nothing, no rise she could use to orient herself, no sound of wheels or voices, no smoke threading up in the distance. Just flowers, and more flowers, and the sinking sun painting it all a color she'd have found beautiful under different circumstances. What if I got it wrong? The thought had been circling for a while. She'd been shooing it away, but it came back with more confidence now. She ran the decision again. Follow the coast, or go inland.

She'd gone inland because roads. That was the logic. But roads ran along coasts too. Maybe. Should I turn back? She stopped walking. Behind her, the light was already failing in the direction she'd come from, the shadows long and pooled between the flower clusters. She could try to retrace her steps to the coast. Spend the night on the open clifftop, in the wind, with no water and no food, having given up whatever ground she'd gained. Or she could keep going. She looked forward. The same.

"It's too late," she said out loud. Committing to it.

"Keep moving." So she kept moving. The shadows were merging by the time the texture of the ground changed under her aching feet. Firmer. She looked down. The growth had thinned. Tracks, two shallow parallel ruts in the earth, emerged from the gloom. A road. She stopped in the middle of it, breathing harder than she'd like to admit. She turned slowly, following the ruts in both directions. To her left, they curved away and disappeared behind a low roll of the plain. To her right, the same. No sound.

No smoke rising from a chimney over the horizon. No sign of what lay in either direction. She stood in the middle of the road as the last of the color left the sky, her feet throbbing, her mouth dry, her stomach empty. Pick one. Both directions led somewhere. It didn't matter which destination was closer. She couldn't know. She just had to push forward. Alexandra picked a random direction, having already forgotten which way was the sea. Her mind was a blur, but she walked. It was easier. The road wasn't paved.

Calling it a road was generous. It was a path carved by the wheels of carriages and the beasts that pulled them. Nothing more, but nothing less. The road bent, and the horizon gave her a light. One light, orange and distant, but stationary. She walked toward it with the single-minded focus of a person who has stopped thinking about anything except the next step, and the step after that. Then there were two lights. Then four.

Then the dark shape of a roof against the not-quite-black of the sky, and another beside it, and another. Alexandra let out a breath. The village was larger than she'd expected. That was her first coherent thought as the shapes resolved into something she could read. In the game, Baleria's outlying settlements were small, scruffy affairs. A handful of buildings clustered around a well, easy to cross in thirty seconds, populated by a handful of NPCs with three lines of dialogue each.

What she was looking at now was something else. The road widened as it approached, and the buildings that lined it were real buildings, with real dimensions, wood and stone and thatched rooftops. Firelight leaked from shuttered windows. She slowed without meaning to. She had found people. She would not spend the night in the open plains with the creatures that rustled in the dark. Those two facts alone were almost enough to make her eyes sting. She kept walking.

The gate was just a gap in a low fence, barely waist high, more symbolic than defensive. She stepped through it and made it perhaps a dozen paces down the main road when a figure detached itself from the shadow of the nearest building.

"Hold." He was not large, but he had placed himself squarely in the middle of the path, which had the same effect. A man, young, twenty something, skin tanned by sun. Rough-shaven. A jacket of thick, dark wool, patched at one elbow. His calloused hands held a woodsman's axe with the handle resting against his shoulder, the blade up, not raised but not put away either. His eyes moved over her once, and then stayed. She watched him take in her clothes. He started at her feet, the slippers, and moved up. Her jeans.

Her zip-up hoodie, dark blue, with a small logo embroidered on the chest.

"Who are you?" His voice was even, not hostile. Not welcoming. Alexandra opened her mouth, then closed it. Who was she?