Frostbitten Wayfarer

The months flew by and by the time Zoe knew it, another year had passed. Most of her time was spent in the higher tiers, fighting the groups of mages. The Abomination was, as much as she didn’t want to admit it, a pain to fight outside of the crater.

It respawned quite quick, but killing it over and over was just running marathons around the rocky cliffs trying to get to wherever the dungeon decided to spit it out at. And then even after she found it, fighting it outside of the crater essentially boiled down to peppering it with projectiles and letting her Adaptive Torrents drown it.

There was no joy to be gained from it, no new experience to learn from. So when the dungeon spat it out near the crater people kept it trapped in, Zoe lured it to the edge and collapsed the cliff so it fell in.

Just below the Abomination was a much nicer forest filled with an abundance of reasonably high leveled zombie mages that Zoe could hunt to her heart’s content with new magics she could study and learn from.

None of the zombies had new resistances for her, but she did spend a bit of time letting them pummel her with their magic to bring up some of the resistances to more comfortable levels. Her highest was still Cold at level forty one, but her list of resistances was looking less and less like a failing magician’s scores in school and more like a list of resistances that could one day save her life.

Many more of the mages at the higher level had rarer magics — or maybe it was just that there were so many more of the mages, and she even managed to get the Wood skill after spending some time studying it.

Wood was less fun than she expected it to be, however. When she first saw the zombies summoning chunks of wood and firing them off at her, Zoe thought she’d be able to just make whatever wood she’d like for furniture. But after acquiring the skill, she was rather disappointed at how different the created wood was to wood she harvested from trees.

It was harder to manipulate with her hand tools and felt like it was fighting back against her when she tried to cut into it, even if she wasn’t consciously doing so with her skill. If she let the mana bleed out of the wood then it behaved like normal wood, but it took almost a week to empty out even just enough raw material for a simple stool.

And if she tried to make it go faster by pulling the mana back out of it, then at best she’d damage the structure of the wood and leave it brittle and scarred. But at worst, the wood dissolved away as she reclaimed the mana she spent on it back.

Of course, she could use the skill itself to shape the wood how she wanted instead of working it by hand, but that created a noticeably different end result. Her Carpentry skill was up to the low sixties now, and the wooden furniture that she made looked nice and felt great to sit on or touch. The surfaces were smooth and splinter free, and she was even able to add fine engravings to the wood. Patterns and designs so intricate that even her higher level Frost skill struggled to maintain the same level of detail.

It made her think back to her failure with the smelting process, and whether that was truly a bad bloomery or if it was because she used hematite that she summoned. If she had instead grabbed some of the hematite she mined, would it have had a better yield? What about the hematite that she’d summoned and left in piles around the hill? Would that have been better than mana dense hematite she’d just summoned?

Zoe wasn’t sure, but she thought it wasn’t too outlandish an idea. Even with the Wood skill to make her own wood, there was just no way that Zoe was going to stop harvesting trees and cutting them for her furniture. Maybe for the wooden frames internally she’d get away with using created wood, but for anything visible? For the walls she’d lean on, the chairs and tables she’d sit at? Raw, natural pine was just so much superior to her created wood.

Having the skill confused her for the first few days, too. Her theory of how she would get the grass manipulation skill was Earth, Water and Wood. But even after getting them, they still didn’t combine. With the knowledge of Eliza’s Space and Time skills not combining into Cosmos despite a somewhat reputable source confirming that they could, it wasn’t as confusing as it may have been.

But it got her wondering what made skills combine. Even after more zombies cutting into her flesh with blades of grass and vines rising from the ground, she never got a resistance to them. Which just continued to help confirm her theory of resistances being basic.

Not to mention all of her affinities from the Seasoned classes. Seasoned Torrents gave a water affinity, not a torrents affinity. It lent even more credibility to her theory when she thought about it.

But what that meant for Zoe was that with her selection of skills, there should be something else she could get. Fire and Water should make Steam, maybe. Earth and Water could make Mud or Flora. There was simply no way for none of her skills to have possible combinations at this point, Zoe thought. She just had too many of them.

Zoe spent some time thinking about grass after she got the Wood skill. It just seemed like the most obvious combination she could make. It was something she knew existed, at least in some form, and was likely to be made of skills she already had.

Earth and Water both made sense, and Wood did to at least some extent. It was a part of the life cycle. Why would Wood be a base element, but Grass wouldn’t be? Was it just a more powerful flora skill, controlling the vegetation rather than a specific piece of it? The groups of zombies whipped vines at her just as easily as grass — something the lower level zombies never did.

But the ones that controlled wood never used the other vegetation. And the ones that controlled vines and grass never used wood. There was a difference there, she knew. A line that the skills just couldn’t cross, or at least that the zombies wouldn’t.

Even Zoe with her Wood skill wasn’t able to control anything other than wood, not that she expected to be able to anyway. One day, Zoe was sitting in a tree and trying to force something to work. She focused on her Earth, Water and Wood skills to flood the vegetation around her with mana. Leaves in the trees, grass sprouting from the ground.

She pushed her Earth skill to enforce and protect the roots that stretched into the ground. With her Water skill she flooded the earth with moisture, and used her Wood to try and push the vegetation to grow.

*Ding* The general skills; Earth, Water and Wood, have been combined into the Flora general skill.

Zoe almost fell out of the tree she was in when she got the notification. The skills had combined! She shouted with joy, and pulled on her new magic. It had lost much of its capability from before. The trees around her were unaffected, the earth and water she flooded the area with didn’t care about her magic. The the plants moved to her will. The leaves in the trees, the grass and flowers poking out of the ground below her.

Everything stretched and grew at her command, twisting around each other and coiling up in thick vines that covered the forest floor beneath her. Zoe smiled at the sight, and then pulled out her notebook she used to note down everything she learned.

She turned to the page for her Earth skill, and refreshed herself on the patterns of mana that made it up, then tried casting the magic again. As soon as she did, she was rewarded with another notification.

*Ding* You have unlocked the Earth general skill.

Zoe repeated the process for both Water and Wood, and couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed at the progress lost from combining the skills. After regaining them, they were stuck back at level one despite Water and Earth having been in the low thirties before she lost them.

But her disappointment was quickly replaced by a euphoria from having combined her skills for the first time. Zoe thought about what the difference was with her now, and Eliza with her Space and Time skills.

Why was Zoe able to combine hers into Flora, while Eliza couldn’t get cosmos? Did Eliza just not have an understanding of how space and time themselves worked together to form the web of reality we lived in?

Zoe supposed it made sense. Education here was lacking in many ways, and the wrench of magic diverted a lot of the focus away from practical physics and into the mumbo jumbo of mysticism which, Zoe admitted, was a lot more relevant on Abyllan anyway.

But if Zoe had the Space and Time skills, would she be able to get the cosmos skill? With her more earthen understanding of spacetime? Zoe never understood much about theoretical physics, but it was surely more than most did from Abyllan. Would she be able to combine them together just because she understands that there is a connection between space and time, even if she wasn’t sure exactly how it worked?

And Eliza was unable to, because to her they were just fundamentally different things? And what would that mean for Richard, for whom it was so simple to combine that the process wasn’t even worth a mention?

Though, Zoe thought, there wasn’t a reason to believe everything he said. Maybe he left some things out intentionally, or maybe he just forgot some information when he was writing it down.

By the time she reached her level goal, both her Water and Earth skills were levelled up enough for her to feel confident with them again. She sat at the table just past the Abomination’s zone with a handful of other people. In total she had another one thousand eight hundred and thirty four stat points to spend from her years and levels. The four she got from Patient Decider and Vampyric Immortality went into Vitality as she got them.

Three hundred she put into her Wisdom to bring it up to five hundred again. Six hundred forty six went into her Vitality to get it to a comfortable seven hundred fifty. Thirty and fifty into Strength and Endurance respectively to get them to one hundred. And the remaining eight hundred and four she pushed into Intelligence which brought it to a humbling one thousand, three hundred and six.

There was a group of three standing ahead on the path who were next in line for the boss. Levels one hundred thirty three, one hundred forty five and one hundred forty six. All dark blue to Zoe’s identify. The lowest level was a mage and the two others were warriors. They all wore casual clothes, and didn’t seem to have any weapons visible.

A muscled woman covered in scars and far too few leather straps to provide any meaningful protection was up next and sat at the other side of the table from Zoe. She was a dark blue level one seventy eight to Zoe’s Identify. Her massive axe rested on the ground next to her, and she drank from a porcelain cup with a picture of a couple kittens wrestling on the side of it.

Next in line was a group of six, all dark red and in the low one hundred thirties to Zoe’s identify. Contrary to the previous group, they all seemed nervous and wore heavy mail armour with weapons strapped to their waist. The two mages had large staves, with gems strapped to their armour. And the four warriors all had heavy shields and spears.

And finally, there was Zoe. She knew from talking to people that there was one more group ahead — whoever was up next would go and wait at the entrance to the final fight of Moaning Point. When the previous fight ended, they rang a loud bell to let the people down below know it was their turn and then entered the fray for themselves.

Zoe asked what the point of the bell was and why everybody didn’t just wait up at the entrance when she first learned of how the process worked and was told that it’s about respect. Not everybody wants to share their pre-fight prep. Maybe they have buffs or skills they use that they don’t want everybody seeing. Maybe they just give themselves an awkward pep talk before they enter.

The line moved slower than even the worst amusement park lines Zoe had ever been in before. Sometimes, people would enter and just an hour later the next bell would ring. Sometimes it took an entire day before she heard the bell ring again.

But in time the line shortened, and Zoe was next. Her nerves grew as she waited for the previous group to ring the bell. As soon as they did, she’d get to head up the mountain and get her first view of what the final battle might look like.

Forty minutes after the group left, Zoe heard the familiar bell ring from above and started walking up. She was the muscled woman walking down not long after, covered in blood and grinning from ear to ear. The woman nodded at Zoe as she passed, but Zoe hardly noticed over the anxiety that wracked through her.

What she found at the top was nothing like what she expected. There was no peak for her to peer into and watch the previous group fight their battle. Instead, there was a shimmering blue barrier that cut into the mountain and stopped her from seeing anything beyond it. Next to the barrier was a tall wooden pole with a large brass bell hanging from the top. A rope dangled from a ball that hung inside the bell.

Zoe sat down on the rocky ground next to the pole and waited. Would the barrier open when the group was done? Did she need to push mana into it to open it? She wasn’t sure.

Three hours passed as she sat on the ground next to the barrier without a sign of anything from inside, and Zoe began to grow worried. Was she messing something up? Was she screwing up this carefully made system people had for fighting the boss?

A few more hours passed, and Zoe’s anxiety was peaking. Were people going to run up here and yell at her for doing things wrong? Should she knock on the barrier? Should she try and break through it? The only rule people desperately drove home to her was to not pass the bell until the last group left.

Just as she was about to stand up and try to knock, the barrier shattered and fell away. Beyond was the top of Moaning Point. A vast, empty plateau covered in cracks. The group from before stumbled towards her and down the mountain. Zoe offered to heal them, but they insisted they were okay.

She took a deep breath to calm her nerves, rang the bell and walked forward.