Chương 23: External Skill

Time until next Elemental Storm: 6 Days and 23 Hours Before any one of them could use their skills, Ethan stepped in between them.

"Stop! He's friendly!" The shadowpanther sat there licking its paws, while Jeffrey scoffed.

"You're protecting a monster? Do you know how much that thing's pelt is worth?" Jeffrey asked. He hadn't really looked up much more than its name on the forums, but Ethan could tell from Jeffrey's reaction that it was a sizable sum.

"No, but we can't just kill him! We could… we could use his help across the shrine!" Ethan said instead.

"And it listens to you?" Jeffrey asked.

"Not exactly, but—" Jeffrey didn't wait. He moved Ethan out of the way. Boost, he was about to fight back on instinct, but stopped himself. The panther had sunk back into the shadows and out of sight.

"Fine, keep your pet," Jeffrey grunted, putting away the massive steel sledgehammer he wielded. The others followed his lead out of the dome, with Penny giving Ethan an apologetic look. Ethan let his Boost go too, and huffed. The hell is his problem?

"Not off to the best start, eh?" Penny chuckled nervously.

"... It's not your fault." The problem was the one leading the group. But Ethan didn't say that. They only had seven days to clear the shrine, and wasting time on arguments wasn't going to help any of them. Instead, he and Penny walked in a pair behind the main group. At least there was something else to take Ethan's attention during the walk. After they were a mile or two out of Ashenai, he brought his Skill Stone out of the duffel bag, ready to crush it.

The sight of it turned everyone's heads, and he saw greed light up in a few eyes.

"What are you all gawking at, huh?" Penny said, and that turned them away.

"Thanks," Ethan offered.

"What kind is it?" she asked.

"External."

"What do you think'll come out of it? Blood manipulation?" Bradley asked from up ahead.

"Maybe?" Though Ethan wondered if he could just do that with his Internal Skill instead. There wasn't much fanfare to be had about the Skill Stone. What information the party had on the next shrine didn't seem to favour any one Skill type over another, so Ethan didn't feel the need to change out the Stone he had. Nevertheless, excitement filled his heart. He'd done so much with only one skill, and he couldn't wait to see what the second one would deliver. Would he be able to shoot out death essence more easily?

Maybe Bradley was right, and he was going to get blood manipulation? Or maybe even the ability to move around his own flesh! He pressed on it with his hand and mind, and the cracks came much easier than the first time. They spread across the surface, and the team paused to watch the dust strike at Ethan's heart, unlocking a new ability within. [External Skill: Bone Generation - Rank F Description: Allows the User to manifest and shape structures out of bone. The User can generate these structures on the surface of anything they are touching. If these bones are heavily damaged or left for too long, they will disappear. Progress to E-Rank: 0%]"What'd ya get?" Bradley asked excitedly.

"Bones."

"What?"

"Got bones." Ethan replied. The others stared at him similarly confused. He tried to demonstrate it, only to realize he had no idea how to. It took a few minutes to see what had changed in his body, feel out his Talent once more, and bring out the new skill. His first success came in the form of a thin plate, an inch long, appearing on his skin. It wasn't attached to it or anything, so he could lift it off and take a look at it. It had a smooth white milky colour to it with no blemishes.

With his bare hands, he couldn't even seem to break it. But a small rock or a little bit of life reinforcement, and the plate shattered. Just as the Skill had said, it puffed away into the magic it was formed from, leaving Ethan with a loss of soul stamina.

"It would've been better had you given one of us the Stone, lad," Jeffrey complained. Ethan himself was a bit disappointed in the new skill. It seemed just a bit weak, and took too much stamina to make a small amount of bone. But with time, those limitations would go away. All Ethan had to do was find a use for it first. And for the rest of their journey, that's exactly what he did.

A card of bone appeared between Ethan's fingers. He flicked it, and it hit a flower near him. But it was barely strong enough.

"That was a mint attempt?" Penny offered, but her platitudes only annoyed him further. Come on, Ethan, you're trying to make this work. Think! He tried punching while forming the bones over his hands. They did carry the momentum with them, but their trajectory was always random, and they moved too slowly to really damage anything. He tried making bone needles to throw, but his came out misshapen and he wasn't a great marksman.

DE Shot was the only ranged ability he could use regularly, and that was much easier to control than this.

"Why are you only throwing it?" Emma chimed in once while Ethan was trying to make a bone arrow.

"External Skills are usually about throwing essence, aren't they?" Ethan replied. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. Emma shook her head and raised her right hand. A gauntlet of shimmering metal formed out of nowhere to cover it down to the elbow.

"This is… this is an external skill too," she said. Oh… From then, Ethan's single-track mind shifted from making another weapon, to finally solving his armour problem. What do I need a long-ranged option for anyway? I'm a frontline fighter. I just need to make sure I survive the role. He started by forming a layer of bone underneath his shirt. That bumped up his chest and made Bradley giggle, but served no purpose as armour.

Since it was under his clothes, it would get ripped first, and then it'd just fall out, since he had nothing fastening the plate to his chest. He pulled up his shirt, popped the small chestplate off and threw it to the ground. A Boosted stomp eradicated it, and he iterated on the design. The second one might've worked as armour, but it chaffed Ethan so hard he had to use his life essence to heal himself. It had two bone plates on his chest and back connected to each other.

There were four holes for his legs, head and arms, and he'd thought he'd made them wide enough. But the chestplate wouldn't let him bend, and what little movement Ethan felt like it was doing more damage than the monster's would. He had to take off his shirt fully to remove that one, and afterwards, he decided not to form the chestplates over his body directly. He tried making it bigger, but that made the entire thing hang off him awkwardly. Any smaller and it would chaff again.

The only benefit the repetition brought him was in the size of his bone constructs, which kept increasing in size slowly. After a day of tweaking the second design, Ethan was still struggling to figure it out. Night had fallen over Skiland, and Jeffrey and the group set up camp in a small clearing.

"There's no deadly weather that's going to creep up on us here, is there?" Ethan asked.

"Nah. Why? Afraid of a little shock?"

"Uh, no, no, it's… something else." Memories of being swept away in a rainflood flashed in Ethan's head, and he scooched closer to the campfire. Mia had a stew going, but Ethan stuck to his calorie bars. Or he would've, until Penny offered him a bowl.

"You haven't just been living off of those, have you?" She asked. Adding that he also took vitamin pills would've only made her worry more, so he just shut up and accepted the bowl. One chunky spoonful in, and Ethan knew he could never go back to his peasant meals again. Smokey, sweet, spicy and savoury flavours filled his mouth. The stew was loaded with soft beans, sausages, carrots and onions. He downed the first bowl quicker than he'd ever eaten something before, and asked for seconds.

Penny offered her own bowl to him, and he wolfed that down quickly too.

"Save some for her too, lad. She's got to eat," Jeffrey admonished him as he picked a bowl for Penny.

"Right, sorry," he said, pulling his mouth from the stew. How had he gone so long on tooth-hurtingly sweet calorie bars? Real meat and vegetables were a thousand times better than anything he could find on Unimart under a budget. He wanted to keep eating, but after the second bowl, he stopped. He couldn't waste the night on food, no matter how good it was. Instead, Ethan sat with his back against a tree and continued his training.

He wanted to have at least a working prototype of a technique with his new Skill before they reached the shrine. He was about to reach into his Talent once again to materialize the Skill, when Emma sat down beside him.

"I saw you working on the armour earlier. I… I could help," she offered.

"Really?" Ethan asked. She nodded, and armour materialized around her chest. Unlike Ethan's blocky designs, her armour was sleek enough to wrap around her figure, and had grooves and openings where she needed to move. The whole thing was in segmented pieces all attached to each other somehow, and even had the tiniest bit of filigree in it.

"You're making the entire armour one bit. Don't do that. Just… join them together," she instructed. Then she asked him to make a joint out of two bones and even showed him a design for it. Basically, he'd make two small balls of bone attached together by a small stick of bone. Then, around each ball, he formed a second plate of bone, with a groove that fit it and only it perfectly.

"A ball-joint? Like they have on toys?" Ethan asked.

"Yes! But it'll be stronger than plastic," she replied. The first few times, the ball joint broke because the stick wasn't big enough, or it slipped out of the groove. But with practice, Ethan got it working with two plates. He moved them around, and the joint worked like a charm. Now, he just had to make it work for a piece of armour around his entire body.

Most of the trek the next day passed in a blur, as Ethan made more and more bone joints, fitting them together for an armour. He even tried bone chainmail, but a single yank from Jeffrey, and half the armour fell apart. Individually, his pieces weren't strong, he understood that. Which is why he was focusing not only on the design for a bone armour, but the speed in which he could make it. After all, it didn't matter how many times they broke it as long as he could keep rebuilding it, right?

While he worked on that, the others passed the time talking.

"Look at this! Someone on the forums is selling a Quronite sword! If Jeffrey hadn'ta gotten that nasty cut, we coulda bought it!" Bradley complained. Mia was arguing with someone on a different forum post, but Bradley's conversation caught Penny's attention.

"Come on, Brad, he needed it. How else was he supposed to heal?"

"I getcha, but damn if those potions don't cost an arm and a leg," Bradley sighed, swiping away the post he was seeing.

"Still have a few nasty cuts that could use a healing potion," Jeffrey added.

"This shrine's harder than the last. Bound to give us better goods," Penny assured him. Each one of them nursed old wounds while they walked. Mia's was the worst, she had a still raw scar running down her left eye, and she never opened it. Jeffrey was second to her in cuts and blemishes, but most looked like they didn't bother him much. Some of their party would heal faster than the others, but Ethan thought that he might as well take a break from his External Skill, and make sure they were at their best.

For that, he had to get in close and analyze them. He could control life essence up to four whole metres away, but he preferred to work up close. Other humans' life force wasn't too different from Ethan's own, so he found the irregularities within easily. Mia's hand was still healing, so he sped it up just slightly. Penny and Bradley were mostly fine, but the wounds they still had, Ethan closed up. Jeffrey was a project by himself. Ethan almost didn't want to heal him, but he thought better of it.

Being petty would only get them all killed. He healed all the wounds there slowly, so that no one around him would catch onto what he was doing. It wasn't a perfect maneuver though, and they did flex or scratch wherever Ethan did his magic. Their reactions weren't too extreme, and they most likely chalked it up to their Talents helping out.

"Hey, Ethan, you never told us how you cleared the first shrine yourself?" Penny asked while he was still working on the healing.

"It was hard. A few times I thought I wasn't even going to make it but… somehow, I did," he said. The night in the caves was the worst, but escaping it made him feel like a man born again.

"And the rest of your team?" Jeffrey chimed in.

"Team?"

"Wait, what's that mean? You saying you cleared the first shrine all by yourself?" Bradley asked in disbelief.

"Bollocks," Jeffrey replied. Even Penny was a bit stunned.

"Well, did you?" she asked.

"I… there were a few others, I suppose. And we had a map. But I wouldn't call us a team," Ethan lied.

"And where are they now?"

".... I'm the only one that made it out," he said. Jeffrey shot back a glance, but if he was suspicious of anything, he didn't show it.

"Poor thing…" Penny said. No one else pressed the issue of his survival after that, so they continued on in relative silence, broken only by smalltalk here and there. After a few more hours of walking, they finally reached their destination. On the map, it was a tiny line, but in real life, it was a massive ravine, with a lake of lava flowing underneath it. A stairwell was carved into the side of the ravine, and it would end at their destination. Ethan looked back up at the clouds, which were crackling together.

Everyone's hair was slowly floating upwards, and the air smelled slightly of ozone.

"Nothing left to do. Return crystals ready, Bradley?" Jeffrey asked. Bradley patted a small pack, and nodded.

"Ready!"

"Let's head down, then!" Jeffrey ordered, and the rest of the team fell in line. The further down they went, the hotter they felt. The stairs were wide enough to hold all of them, and they thankfully ended several feet above the lava itself. At the end was a giant set of ornate metal doors, with no key or knob to pull it aside.

"All at once, touch the door," Jeffrey ordered. Everyone nodded, and on his command, placed their hands against the metal.