Frostbitten Wayfarer

Seasoned Gales when Zoe already had Seasoned Persistence was an interesting choice. The main purpose of it was to give her all of the class effects — even more experience with the passage of time, a healthy thirty stat points per level and a very powerful regeneration bonus.

But the skills themselves were largely redundant. Another Restoration didn’t do much for her, nor did the Echo, Arsenal or Adaptive skills. Both of the affinities were still quite useful, and while her Alacrity was still quite low levelled it didn’t hurt to have a second one either. Even Haste was more useful, and heck Eternal Elegance was a great place to get her cleaning skill so she could have another Enchanting skill slotted in long term.

Zoe turned her attention to her unused Stat Points, and there were quite a few of them to go through at this point. Six hundred ninety, to be specific. She put one hundred thirty each into strength and dexterity to get them to a comfortable one hundred fifty. Brought her endurance up to one hundred with another seventy five points. One hundred eighty five went to vitality to get her to five hundred, which left her with ten thousand health to play with. The remaining one seventy five she split evenly between intelligence and wisdom.

She took some time as she sat on her bed to try out her new skills. Enchanted Mirror was much the same as she remembered, but it seemed more solid in her soul somehow. The structure that made it up felt more substantial than she remembered, and she was curious to see what that meant eventually.

Enchantment Amplifier did as it said on the tin — she could flood one of her enchantments with mana and send it into a sort of overdrive where the effect was drastically increased. As an enchantment, it did much the same but Zoe supposed it wouldn’t specifically require her mana. It created a pocket of space within the enchantment that could be filled with mana, to push the other enchantments beyond their normal state.

Everlasting Enchantments was also quite straightforward, but it differed in that its effect as an enchantment was not quite serving the same purpose. As an enchantment, rather than creating a pocket of mana that would power the enchantment for a while as she expected, it simply pulled mana from the other enchantments to maintain the enchantment. As a result, the enchantment would be weaker, but naturally last longer as some of its mana was recycled back into itself.

It ended up with the same end result, but the means was very different, and Zoe’s mind raced with possibilities of some of her more powerful enchantments that were just a little too mana hungry being tamed with Everlasting Enchantments paired into the enchantment with them.

Enchantment Bestowal was quite useful, as she tried enchanting one of her shirts with Fire resistance and then put it on. She half expected the system to give her a little notification telling her that she’d been given the fire resistance, but it was much more subtle. There was a pull that was hard to ignore in the back of her mind when she put the shirt on, screaming of fire resistance. It wasn’t distracting, but it was very present.

As an enchantment itself, the skill did exactly the same thing. So much so that she wasn’t sure if using the skill wasn’t just pushing it as an enchantment onto whatever she was using in the first place anyway.

Mana Surge was quite boring, to Zoe’s disappointment. It would have been one of her favourite enchantments but it required far too much mana to be useful. Enchanted onto something on its own, it sent out a weak pulse of mana that burned through the entire enchantment in an instant. Combined with Mana Storage, it managed to be a little bit more significant but even then the enchantment just couldn’t store enough mana to have as much of an effect as she’d wanted — barely even capable of pushing the clothes she’d scattered on the floor around.

Zoe stretched and looked out the window — the morning sun was beaming down on The Weary Rest and lit up the city. The suns rays poked through the window and shone on Zoe’s face, leaving half of her face feeling pleasantly warm and contrasting the faint chill from inside the inn.

It was as good a day as any to say goodbye to Korna for a while, and Zoe left the inn. Her first stop was a nearby clothing store to pick up an order of clothes she had placed a few days prior. An abundance of colourful clothes for herself, as well as enough to fill the rest of her storage items including the blue ring she’d got from the dungeon. Zoe had taken some time to test the ring out and it didn’t seem to have any immediate obvious effects at least, so she was comfortable using it to store an abundance of clothes to bring back to Foizo.

Maybe it would help bolster the economy in the area or something. Zoe shrugged, she didn’t really care either way, it just seemed wasteful coming all the way out to Korna then going back with so much empty storage space in her items. Maybe the clothes would be useful, maybe it’d just be fun for a bit. It only cost her twenty seven gold in total, so Zoe didn’t mind the cost. She could go clear Moaning Point again if she ever needed money again, probably.

Did the dungeon give the same reward each time, anyway? Or would it give her a reduced reward next time, since she had already cleared it once? Maybe she’d go wait in line to clear it again someday and see what happened, just for fun.

Her next stop was Nora’s home, on the other side of Korna. Even so long after, Zoe never quite forgave Nora for what she did. It was hard to do really, and Zoe didn’t think she ever would. She was young, naïve and lost in a world she didn’t understand. And Nora showed her the darkest part of it. Trusting the woman was difficult, much less going out of her way to see her without anybody else with her.

But Zoe wouldn’t be able to forgive herself if she didn’t at least check on Emma’s mom before she left, and made her way over to say hello. Nora opened the door, and Zoe had a brief chat with her from outside. Nora was doing well, she’d retired from her job recently and was living off of the vast wealth she’d accumulated over her life. She asked Zoe to tell Emma to move to Korna, which Zoe agreed to do but probably would only mention as an offhanded comment. Emma was her own person, and could make her own decisions.

And her final stop before she left was Rizick and Isla’s store. She’d avoided visiting them, and felt a little bad about that. Whenever she thought to visit, she had her embarassing moment of freezing up during the bandit attack rush back into the forefront of her mind and always ended up with some excuse to not visit. She was too busy working on her skills, too busy trying to get levels, needed to visit Eliza to worry about her Space skills, whatever. There was always some convenient excuse she managed to make up to keep her from feeling too bad in the moment about never seeing them.

But today she was leaving, and it was her last chance to say hello again. So she stood outside their quaint little store, a small building with the door swung open and a sign out front beckoning people in to view their wares.

Behind the counter was an older woman — Isla, Zoe assumed. Zoe walked up and said hello.

“Hello, can I help you?” The woman asked.

“Hi, are you Isla?” Zoe asked.

“I am,” Isla answered. “Why do you ask?"

“Oh, I’m Zoe. I met you and Rizick in Flester a long time ago. I was just going to head out today, and wanted to come say hello. And goodbye, I guess.” Zoe said.

“Oh!” Isla’s face lit up. “I see now, I thought you looked a little familiar. Wow! Rizick said you looked exactly the same but my goodness, you don’t look like you’ve aged a day by my memory. How lucky for you.”

Zoe smiled. Lucky felt a bit off. Was it lucky? It was in a way, she supposed. “I guess, yeah. Is Rizick around?"

“Oh! Yes, he’s just working in the back. I’ll go grab him, just hold on a moment.” Isla said and left through a door just behind her. She came back out a few minutes later with Rizick at her side.

“Hey Zoe, how’s Korna been treating you?" Rizick asked.

“It’s been well, thanks. Sorry I didn’t come visit sooner.” Zoe said.

“Oh don’t worry about it, we’re not going anywhere anytime soon anyway.” Rizick laughed.

Zoe laughed, and the three chatted for a while about their lives. Isla was quite interested in Zoe’s life and her home back in Foizo, while Zoe was fascinated by the stories they told of different towns and dungeons they’d explored. She said her goodbyes as the sun began to creep down towards the horizon, and headed towards the same gate she’d first entered Korna through.

The gate was closed, and a short line was leading up to the checkpoint out of Korna. Zoe waited in the line, thankful it moved rather quickly and spoke with the guard for a while. She was nice and quite interested in everything Zoe had to share, and then Zoe was out of Korna and back on the road.

For a moment when she was outside Korna, she worried about bandits, but the worry quickly passed. She was quite quick at this point, and pumped her strength and dexterity high enough to help her with that just in case too. With a constant casting of Haste, both of her Alacrity skills working together, her high dexterity and her Expeditious feat, Zoe was able to move quite quickly. Even if she couldn’t kill the bandits — which she wouldn’t want to do anyway, she’d be able to escape.

Zoe got in one last stretch, and then started the long run back down the road towards Flester’s ruins. If she was being realistic, the journey would take her probably close to a week and a half. She moved quite a bit faster than Rizick’s carriage did, and didn’t need to take nearly as many breaks as they did.

The journey back was relaxing, Zoe found. Not needing to worry about disturbing people in town meant she was able to let all of her skills loose finally, and she had so many new ones to play with too. Her Enchanted Mirror was amazing to have again, and combined with Enchantment Amplifier flooding her enchantments with mana meant she had an enormous firepower at a moment’s notice.

And there was this odd pressure that seemed to release after she was gone for a week, like some overbearing presence had been baring down on her for so long and finally let up. She felt free and comfortable in ways she hadn’t even realized she wasn’t before.

On one of her dinner breaks, Zoe decided to replace her Adaptive Elements with Elemental Manipulation to try and get the general skill equivalent of it. But the attempt was quickly quashed as she saw how much more complicated the mana pattern was compared to the individual elements. When she was back in her safe home, she’d try again.

The Aura of Seasons effect from her Seasoned Persistence was a lot of fun to play with too, now that she was away from people who might be mad at her spewing elemental energy around her. She had control over which elements were being used — though notably, it was restricted to the four the class was based on. Cinders, Gales, Torrents and Frost.

Each element on its own did much the same as their individual classes, but the compounded with each other in a way Zoe found surprising. When she pushed it as far as it could go, she felt like she was walking around in the eye of a devastating hurricane. Rushing winds tore through the ground around her, ripping branches from their trees. Burning bits of ash drifted through the twister, scorching everything they touched. A torrent of water and hail was hurled from the twister, smashing into everything nearby.

She felt like a walking disaster when she pushed it as far as it could go, but even with her incredible mana regeneration she wasn’t able to keep it running at maximum power for very long. It would be fun, she thought. To wander through some lower level dungeon, maybe the lower areas of Moaning Point someday and just let her aura alone devastate the creatures.

As grand as the aura was, she had much better uses for her mana that weren’t quite so indiscriminate. But it was a bit of an eye opener to just how much more powerful Seasoned Persistence was to the normal Seasoned classes for her. Even if she pushed the normal auras as far as the system would let her, they would only ever be deterrents. A downpour of water or a chilly zone around her. But let alone being more than a deterrent, the Aura of Seasons was a downright mimicry of natural disasters, with all the destruction that came with them.

The rest of the run was uneventful and Zoe was grateful for that. No bandits throwing her emotions into disarray, no wandering Okiu destroying the lands and longing for company in their final moments. Just her, the beautiful wilderness and the odd traveller who she passed. Most were heading from Korna towards Flester’s ruins in caravans, though there was the odd person running back towards Korna dragging their magic along with them, and even another small caravan on their way to Korna.

Most of the time she spent dumping all of her excess mana into whichever skill she felt like at the moment, dragging clouds of ash and frost behind her as she ran down the dirt road. She got a few levels on the run, but not nearly as many as she would have expected for how quick she made it to level fifty three, only making it to sixty nine by the time Flester’s ruins were just poking over the horizon.

All of the stat points she got, she pushed straight into dexterity as soon as she got them. Her Seasoned Gales class wasn’t sticking around for long, and her priority was to get home as quick and safe as possible. She smiled as she saw the now familiar scorched trees of Kaira library and turned a bit north to head towards home and see what Foizo was all about after she’d been gone for so long.