Chương 15: Back to The Sculpture Garden

It's tiring but rewarding to run back the sculpture garden. It only takes me about an hour to get there, and I move at a jogging pace, something that I didn't expect to be able to keep up for a full hour. I've always been someone who cannot run all the way to Isengarde, but keeping up this pace is actually not that hard. I get into a pattern of breathing, and I'm able to just keep up the pace for the whole hour. My vigor goes up to 21 from all the running.

I even get super lucky and come across another giant, sneaking my way around it. It might be the same giant I got around on my way to the falls. But it's worth another thousand experience to sneak past it. I think the reason I got that experience and not from the wolves in the park is that I didn't need to sneak past the wolves. I didn't get close enough to them to need to be sneaking, maybe.

I'm not entirely sure how it works, but the experience I get for sneaking around the giant – and I easily come within striking range of it and still slip past it – is enough for me to get back to level 10. I don't get another talent, but that's okay. My dark vision talent has more than paid for itself just over the last night. I do have six points to spend on my stats, and I decide to put two of them each into manipulation, charisma, and awareness. I'm still a bit off from where I was when I died, but I'm close.

I think I'm down two total attribute points from where I was. And those I will hopefully be able to train up over the next two days before the tutorial period ends. Plus I'll get more as I level up more. I'm not the only one who had a multi level night. Ashley, Gigi, and El are all level 9, and even Vinny made it to level 8, and is a spellslinger now. That's pretty impressive. It means he got more spells too.

Speaking of spells, I've got three new ones to learn, unless I want to share them with Vinny and help him get more spells. Maybe I'll do that with the lightning spell. But he already has a healing spell, and I really think it would be good if two of us had those. I've got a lot of MP now, so I can probably handle that spell. And maybe the dart spell too. I want to have more aggressive spells while I'm at it, and I want to qualify for the advanced casting classes too. Spell: Healing Touch. Common spell 1/5.

MP cost: 50. Casting time: 3 seconds. Cooldown: 1 minute. Touch a target to heal 30% of their maximum HP. Spell: Magical Dart. Uncommon spell 1/10. MP cost: 10. Casting time: instant. Cooldown: instant. Fire a magical dart that automatically hits the target and deals your Spellcraft skill +1 damage. Your have gained Spellcraft 5. So right now, the magical darts only deal six damage. But I can improve that faster than I can probably improve anything else. But I'll work on all that tomorrow.

The sky is already starting to lighten up, and I'm going to get a few hours of shut eye before I collapse where I'm standing. I find a statue that looks like a little bit of a three dimensional maze. Something about that appeals to me, and I lay down on one of the larger pieces, looking up at the sky. I don't know if I'll be able to really sleep here, but I might get a bit of a doze, a bit of rest before the sun comes out.

I roll up the wolf pelts that I've retrieved from shadow wolves and make both a mattress and a pillow for myself. I don't trust it to be dry enough to work as a blanket, but it's not that cold in the park, and my body is still warm from the run. The next thing I know, the sun is in my eyes, and I'm waking up. I blink away the light and focus on the corner of my vision, where the countdown clock is continuing. 47: 49: 41. Still about two days. So I didn't sleep that long. Maybe five hours.

Strangely, I feel perfectly rested, and not sore at all. Though I decide that I want to get some more comfortable sleeping gear before sunset tonight. That leaves me with a lot of time, though. Time that I can spend getting these last few skills that I need to qualify for more classes and to finish that quest. I'm close. Really close. If I focus on the right things, I'll be able to get there. I need three levels of Shield to qualify for the squire class.

I need one more level of scrapping to qualify for the crafter class. That would put me at five classes that I'm qualified for since my earlier death. Hopefully, that will be enough for a secret quest. And if it's not, I'll work to get my other skills higher until I at least complete the skill quest. I look around and see that I'm the last one awake. It seems like we need less sleep than we used to all told. I'm still a bit tired, but I can doze later, maybe after I've built a better bed.

For now, I turn the hides fur side down so that they can dry in the sun and go over to where Gigi and Ashley are sparring with one another.

"The key to the shield," Ashley tells me as I put on Gigi's old shield, "is to push back against the blow. So when they slam into you, instead of just absorbing the blow you actually push back a little bit. It helps to push them off balance, and can let you take your return attack more easily." She swings with her mace, and I push into it. She nods.

"Yes, like that. You're stronger than I expected you to be," she says.

"I would've thought you'd put all your points into agility."

"I put a lot into agility," I agree.

"But I want to get my strength up to twenty so that I can qualify for the barbarian class." She swings again, and I duck behind the shield, pushing it into the swing and forcing her back a step.

"Why?" she asks.

"I want to qualify for as many classes as possible," I say.

"I think there might be a secret quest for doing that. I've already qualified for seven total classes, three new ones since we died. I'm hoping that four or five of the new ones will give me the secret quest again. It was worth two thousand experience last time."

"That's a lot," she says.

"I can see why you want to complete that one. I was thinking about going out and trying to find some other people to complete the friend quest, and that's only worth two fifty."

"Couldn't hurt to find a sixth member of our party," I agree.

"We've got three front line fighters and two ranged attackers. Another ranged attacker would balance us out nicely."

"And another front line fighter would let you guys attack from range more easily," she says, swinging against the shield again. This time it makes me stagger back a few steps, and I realize that Ashley is a lot stronger than I am. That feels like it should bother me, but it doesn't. I don't care that she's stronger than I am. I know El is. My ego doesn't demand that I be stronger than them because I'm a man and she's a woman. That's just stupid. We're focusing our points on different things.

Maybe I'd be upset if she was stronger than me and the same class, but it seems stupid to get upset as things are. We all put our focus in different things. We're all way beyond what we were capable of before the gamified world started. Maybe that's another lesson I needed to learn as part of the tutorial. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Hey, why do you think the tutorial didn't tell us anything?" I ask as we continue to spar. I swing back at her, and she blocks my attacks on her own shield, pushing me off balance if I don't follow through just right.

"Do you think there's someone or something missing that's supposed to be here?"

"That's the prevailing theory, isn't it?" she asks.

"I mean, if we have to go through this again, we can at least rest assured that leveling up isn't nearly as hard the second time around as it was the first. We don't have any penalty to skills, and they make a huge difference at starting levels."

"I know what you mean. It took me twenty four hours to catch back up to where I was before we ended the tutorial last time. It's pretty amazing."

"You're doing a pretty amazing job, Caleb." She swings again, pushing me off to the side as I stagger with the hit on my shield. She got me good, and in a real fight would probably be able to hit me with that mace.

"So are you, Ash," I say.

"Have you qualified for the knight class yet?"

"Not yet," she says.

"It takes a lot. And there's a footman class between it and squire. I've qualified for that one, but I'm close enough to knight that I'm not going to bother wasting my time in that class."

"So knight is an advanced class?" She nods.

"I need a lot of skills to get to that one."

"Getting skills is kind of fun," I say, noticing that my shield skill is already up to level two, after barely ten minutes of us sparring and her giving me pointers.

"Keep your shield up high, so I can't swing above it," she says.

"It's easier to drop the shield than it is to raise it."

"Right," I say, adjusting my grip and my stance as she comes at me with a flurry of blows.

"Hey, what's that thing you guys do where you bang your shields to get the monsters to focus on you?"

"That's a special skill for the squire class," she says.

"It's called Attract, and it gets the monsters to pay attention to us rather than other people. It's meant to allow us to protect you."

"It also works great for flanking and sneak attack," I say.

"Do you still have sneak attack?"

"It still works, but it only deals double damage now."

"Yeah, there's something to be said for sticking with the rogue class."

"I'll say. I'd get quadruple damage with sneak attack at level ten in the rogue class. But I still want to see what the other classes offer. If need be, I can always downgrade."

"I find it hard to believe that the upper echelon classes aren't better in every conceivable way," she says.

"Otherwise, it just seems like bad game design." We keep sparring for another hour or so, until my left arm is numb from all the impacts on the shield. I've got a better hang of fighting with the shield, and the third level in the skill, but I don't know if I'll be adopting it to my normal fighting style. Maybe a smaller shield, like a buckler or something that I can wear without it getting in the way of my bow. That might actually be a good thing to try to find or make.

Right now, I want to focus on the making of things. I have given my recurve bow to Ashley so she can learn a few levels of it, but I still have my skull blade and the bone blade to take apart so that I can try to improve the ranger's blade. It's already stronger than either of my other swords, and I want to make it as strong as possible.

While feeling returns to my left arm, I take apart the other swords, studying the way the ranger's blade is put together to make sure that there's nothing I can change out to make it more effective. I debate putting the skull blade hilt on the ranger blade. It's a hilt and pommel as a single piece, and makes for a good bashing weapon in a pinch. But it doesn't quite fit and I'd need to drill holes in the skull blade hilt to get it to fit the pins in the range blade tang.

So I just work on tightening the ranger blade, on sharpening it, and on straightening it with the other blades that I have. The system takes over at some point, and I manage to improve the ranger's blade up to level 5, increasing the damage from 21-31 up to 25-35. Seems every level I increase the blade adds two damage. That's significant.

I also get another level of scrapping for taking apart my swords, and another level of smithing when I tighten the bow string on the hunter's bow, increasing it to level 7 and increasing the damage to 18-30. I've also qualified for the squire class and the crafter class. Class: Footman. Progress: Bow 6/3, Dodge 5/5, Shield 3/5, Sword 6/10, Strength 14/15. Class: Smith. Progress: Smithing 5/10, Armorer 3/5, Scrapping 3/5. You have completed a secret quest: Classist.

Earn entry into five classes, at least two of which are advanced classes. Reward: 2500 experience. That's enough for me to get to level eleven, the highest level I've hit so far. I get six stat points again. I decide to put one into strength, two into agility, and three into manipulation. That puts my manipulation back to pre-death levels, and leaves me with only my charisma below level 10. It's going to be a while before I level up again, I think.

I need three thousand experience to get to level twelve, and I only have 252 right now. The skill quest will get me a goodly portion of the way there, though, so maybe it won't take as long as I'm afraid it'll take. I should be able to get the skill quest finished in the next few hours, without even leaving the park. So maybe I'll be able to level up before the end of the day. For now, my HP is 231, which means my shell is worth another 92 points. My MP and stamina are both 165, and my defense has reached fifty.

I don't know if a lynxith can even hit me anymore. I have 72 points of skills. I'm going to work on throwing and spellcraft to get those last three points. I can use the same target for both skills, and can go back and forth between throwing a knife and shooting a magic dart. I could practice longer with the flame ball, but something tells me that spending more MP on the spell is going to improve my spellcraft faster.

I can't very well cast heal on people if they aren't injured, but I can shoot sixteen times with my magical dart and hope that it increases my spellcraft, and hence the damage the darts do. Then I can switch to throwing knives or shooting my bow while the mana recharges. Or I can try something else. I shoot sixteen darts and throw twelve throwing knives at the target. I can tell I'm getting better, and my spellcraft does increase to 6, but my throwing is stubbornly holding at seven.

Rather than continuing to throw, I sit down and close my eyes. Mana must be flowing through the world, not just through me. If I pay attention to the world around me, if I focus on the mana around me, maybe I can infuse myself with it and recharge my mana faster. More importantly, I can boost my meditation skill from three to four doing this, and get that much closer to the skills quest.

As I focus on the world around me, feeling the mana flow through the park and through my body, I feel myself rebuilding my mana stores much faster than I would otherwise. Instead of taking nearly two and a half hours to refill, my MP refills itself in about ten minutes. I smile and go back to shooting my magic darts, then back to meditation, repeating the process over and over again, until finally it happens. My spellcraft increases to seven, and I get a notification. You have completed the quest Skill Mastery.

Reward: 2000 experience. I meditate with a smile on my face, and my meditation increases to five while I'm at it. Quest: Skill Savant. Get 200 skills. Reward: 7500 experience. That's going to take me a good while, but it's another goal. Speaking of goals, I should get back to the goal of opening up the Tracker class. I need to improve my bow skill, which I can do here in the park, and my tracking skill, which probably means leaving the park. I should see if anyone else wants to go out adventuring with me.

First though, I want to finish improving my throwing to level 8 and see if I can improve magical dart to level 2. When magical dart improves to level 2, it adds a second point of damage on top of my spellcraft skill. That's not all that impressive; the spell only does 9 damage now. That's less than its cost in mana. Maybe I should stick with flame ball. It at least does double my awareness in damage. That's 20 points of damage, and for a mana cost of only 5.

I don't know why I like the magical dart skill so much; it kind of sucks when I compare it to my other spell. But maybe it's just a spell I'll keep in my back pocket for when my spellcraft is really high. It's going to increase no matter what spells I cast, after all. So it might end up surpassing flame ball. When my throwing hits level 8, I decide to go back to practicing with the bow. Now it's my turn to help Gigi, who has moved from the compound bow over to the recurve bow.