Ghosts of the Battlefield

Tom was excited to see what changes had occurred to their status screens as a result of reaching level 1.

Ignoring the others, who had started to discuss some of the notifications they had received, Tom opened his status screen. His heart still racing, both from the fight and the excitement from wanting to see what changes had happened.

Status

Name: Thomas Moore

Race: Human (G)

Class: None

Subclass: None

Level: 1 (0/400)

Attributes

Strength: 4

Agility: 6

Endurance: 5

Vitality: 5

Intelligence: 9

Wisdom: 8

Skills

1 Skill point available

Titles

Selected of Lemures

Affiliation

None

A quick look at his status screen revealed that he finally had attributes. The only problem was that he had no reference for if they were good or bad. He also didn’t know what each of them actually meant. Was 5 strength good or bad? What did it actually do for him? Could he increase it?

Tom had lots of questions, but few answers.

Well, nothing else left to try to poke around a bit. He thought to himself.

It wasn’t long before his poking around yielded some results. Although said results were a bit of a mixed bag.

Strength: 4

Measures your physical abilities.

Affects your physical attack damage and physical strength.

Affects your muscle mass, lifting capacity, and the amount of force you can exert.

Strength was the most basic of his attributes. Lift stuff, push stuff, and punch stuff. He assumed that by affecting the size of the muscles, they increased his strength, or something to that affect. Mark probably had the rest of the group beat here, Tom could fit both his biceps inside just one of Marks and he’d probably have room for more.

Agility: 6

Measures your speed, reflexes, and coordination.

Affects your movement and reaction speeds, as well as your ability to dodge attacks.

Affects quickness of movement, fine motor skills and your perception of actions around you.

Agility also made similar sense, it measured his ability to move and react, but it also suggested that it could impact his awareness. Which made sense to Tom, after all, the sooner you were able to see or sense something, the sooner you could react to it which would improve the reaction speed of the person.

Endurance: 5

Measures your stamina and physical resilience.

Affects your ability to resist the physical strain of actions and to resist fatigue.

Affects your recovery rate, your resistance to physical exhaustion and energy reserves.

Vitality: 5

Measures your overall health and life force.

Affects your ability to take damage, recover from injuries, and resist diseases and poisons.

Affects your durability, overall health and your body's natural healing process over time.

Endurance and Vitality were essentially different sides of the same coin. One handled his body’s endurance and stamina, allowing him to continue fighting or exerting himself over long periods, while the other was responsible for his overall health and resilience, determining how much damage his body could take and how quickly he could recover from injuries.

He couldn’t readily explain how they would do that, and the description didn’t provide much in the way of explanation. He assumed that endurance increased the amount of red blood cells, which would explain the increased endurance, increased white blood cells might improve disease resistance, but he couldn’t think of anything that would directly improve his overall health and durability. But when he considered the remaining two attributes, anything was possible really.

Intelligence: 9

Measures your cognitive ability

Affects your ability to learn and understand, as well as your proficiency with magic.

Affects your memory retention and processing speed, as well as your magic potential and understanding.

Wisdom: 8

Measures your insight, practical knowledge and foresight.

Affects your ability to interpret subtle cues around you and better understand the nature of things.

Affects your magical efficiency, capacity to predict potential outcomes and make informed decisions in complex situations

Intelligence and Wisdom was where things got interesting. He read through each several times, absorbing every word.

He’d always had a good memory and had been able to pick up most things fairly quickly at school, apart from sports, he always spent more time in the library than on the sports field. History, Geography, Maths and Science had come naturally to him, even his English and other languages were pretty good, except for public speaking, which he hated.

Not that he expected being able to speak the few phrases he’d memorized in German or French to come in handy either, not when another Skeleton was trying to skewer him like he was a human shaped piece of barbeque meat.

What he was excited about was the fact that magic was real, at least according to the descriptions.

He remembered as a boy he’d often pretend that he could shoot spells and perform magic, not the children’s party magic tricks mind you, but real magic that he could use to change his life, make new friends and free himself from his parents. These dreams had died a long time ago, but now, he had the opportunity to make them come true.

As his excitement at the thought of magic grew, a thought suddenly popped into his head.

If magic is real, I wonder what powers it. Is it like video games and uses something like mana? How do I find out? What about skills what do they… Oh!

While ruminating about magic and its sources, he inadvertently started to consider the possibilities of the skill window and possible skills, which resulted in another little window popping up in front of him.

New Skills Available

Available Skill Points (1)

Shield Mastery (Basic) (1)

Strike (Basic) (1)

Evasion (Basic) (1)

Sense (Basic) (1)

Fortitude (Basic) (1)

Reinforcement (Basic) (1)

Recovery (Basic) (1)

Resistance (Basic) (1)

Multi-Tasking (Basic) (2)

Processing (Common) (1)

Mana Sense (Basic) (1)

Evaluate (Basic) (2)

Intuition (Common) (1)

Meditation (Common) (1)

His options were interesting, to say the least. Tom hadn’t been sure what to expect, but he was both over and underwhelmed by his options.

But before he could start to investigate any further, the sound of someone calling to him broke him out of his focus.

“Oi, genius, we’re trying to talk to you!”

Tom looked up. The other three were staring at him from a few meters away.

“you’ve been like, thousand-yard staring with unfocused eyes for 10 minutes,” said Dave, who waved his hand in front of his eyes to demonstrate.

“Yeah, you kinda locked up there for a bit; you didn’t respond at all,” added Adam.

“Sorry, had a lot to go over suddenly, I got a bit caught up.” Tom replied. He unwrapped the leather strap holding the shield to his arm and left it on the ground as he approached the others. It was heavy, and his body was still tired and sore from the freight train-like impact he'd taken.

“I’ll bet, we’ve been going over the notifications and other stuff, so what did you find?” Adam asked.

The discussion that followed answered a few of the questions that had been floating around in Tom’s head since the fight. It turned out that all four of them had gotten the same 10 experience points from killing the skeleton. Mark, however, because he had killed the skeleton, had gotten 20 bonus experience points on top of kill experience. All of them had also reached level 1 and been given their attributes and skill points as well.

Tom started to make a mental list of all the things they went over, wishing that he had access to a notepad or a book. Just as he thought that another menu labelled Journal popped up. He relayed this to the others, who tried it themselves.

“This system thing wants to make things easier for us,” Mark drawled.

“I think you're right,” Tom replied. “It seems to want to prioritise fighting; almost every message we’ve gotten so far has mentioned the word struggle, or given us a quest to kill things, or just made it easier for us to get to the killing.”

“Well, why didn’t you say that before?” said Dave. “Oh gee, it sure would be nice if we had a map to get through this shithole cave?” he asked flippantly as he raised his arms to the ceiling of the cave.

The group waited for a moment before Dave lowered his arms. “Well, it was worth a try,” he said sheepishly.

Adam rolled his eyes before looking back to Tom.

“So, what were your attributes?” he asked Tom.

Another short discussion followed, during which each member relayed their attributes to the others. As Tom had suspected, Mark had a 10 in strength, and no one else had come close, with Adam at 7 and Dave at 6. Tom was also the weakest at 4, which hadn’t surprised him.

The closest he’d ever come to a workout was packing his room when he had moved away from his family and into his own place, and his books weren’t all that heavy.

Surprisingly, Dave and Adam shared the highest agility, with 8 each. Adam had handled himself well with his sword, but Tom was surprised by Dave, whose effort against the skeleton had nearly ended with him losing his head.

They quickly worked out that the highest for any attribute the four had gained was a 10, and each person had 2-3 attributes that were in the higher range for attribute numbers. Marks highest were strength and Endurance, Adam had agility, endurance, and wisdom, while Dave had agility and, oddly enough, vitality. The man looked the least healthy to Tom but was the healthiest of all of them according to their attributes.

Adam had burst into laughter upon hearing from Tom that his strength was only 4.

“I knew it,” he chortled. “The way you went flying as you blocked that thing was fucking hilarious.”

“Yeah, it was great fun,” Tom replied sarcastically.

“Ahh, don’t be such a baby; we told you that it wasn’t a good idea to take the shield; it turns out the guy with all the brains didn’t use them to listen.” Adam crowed.

Tom was annoyed at Adam’s gloating when his comment about the shield reminded Tom about the skills he could take.

“Hey, speaking of, I got skill I can take for shields, what skills did you guys get?”

Tom’s question prompted another round of show-and-tell from the group. Many had similar skill options to what Tom had seen, and they seemed to fall into one of several different categories.

There were a few weapon-based skills, like his shield mastery.

Skill: Shield Mastery

Attribute – Strength

Rarity - Basic

Cost – 1 Skill Point

Stopping a blow is the first step to avoiding death. Unlocks basic knowledge of and proficiency with all basic shields. Increases amount of force blocked by shields by 1.5% per level + 1% strength.

Mark had gotten, and already bought, Axe Mastery (Common), which along with also being a strength-based skill like shield mastery, had offered similar bonuses except for being used to deal instead of block damage. The only other difference was that as a common rarity skill, it offered greater bonuses, providing double the bonus of Tom’s basic skill and also came with a secondary effect, allowing it a chance to cause a bleeding, damage of time effect on certain hits.

Going down his list of skill options, he had 2 strength-based (Shield Mastery (Basic) and Strike (Basic)) , while Mark had been offered 3, 2 of which had been common rarity.

Tom wasn’t sure yet, but it seemed that the higher your attribute, the more likely you were to get either more skills or a higher rarity skill for that attribute. He said as much to others, who checked their own skills. By comparing their skills they worked out that any attribute with less than 4 only offered one basic rarity skill, Dave had a 3 in wisdom and only had Meditation (Basic) as his only option for that attribute.

Any attribute between 4 and 7 would get 2 skills, and of those skills, at least 1 they had a chance to get a common rarity skill. Tom, as did the other three, had access to both Evasion (Basic) and Sense (Basic); however, only Dave had access to a common rarity version of Sense.

Skill: Sense

Attribute – Agility

Rarity - Common

Cost – 1 Skill Point

Your eyes can be tricked, but sound and smell cannot hide. Increases the sensitivity of your sense of smell, sight and hearing by 5% per level + 3% Agility

The only difference between the two versions was that Tom’s basic version only had 2.5% per level and +2% agility.

Finally, any attribute between 8 and 10 would get three options, with at least one being common. However, this last group of attributes also gave another benefit. Two of Tom’s skills, Multi-Tasking (Basic) and Evaluate (Basic), both cost 2 skill points instead of 1 like the rest.

Inspecting the skills didn’t reveal any direct reason as to why, but it gave Tom a clue.

Skill: Multi-Tasking

Attribute – Intelligence

Rarity - Basic

Cost – 2 Skill Points

True mastery is processing multiple threads of thought at once. Unlocks the capacity to split focus between various tasks. Increases the efficiency of handling simultaneous actions by 2% per level + 1.5% Intelligence.

Skill: Evaluate

Attribute – Wisdom

Rarity - Basic

Cost – 2 Skill Points

A sharp mind is the first tool in assessing the true value of things. Unlocks the ability to provide increased insights into the world around you by extrapolating your knowledge and intuition. Increases the accuracy, amount and insight of assessments with each level and with increases to your Wisdom.

Both of the 2 cost skills had the names of other skills within their descriptions, and they were even highlighted. Multi-tasking mentioned processing, while Evaluate mentioned Intuition.

Skill: Intuition

Attribute – Wisdom

Rarity - Common

Cost – 1 Skill Point

Gut feelings can be sharper than logic, listen to your inner voice. Enhances your ability to understand or know something without needing to think or reason. Each level increases the knowledge or conviction gained from a situation.

Skill: Processing

Attribute – Intelligence

Rarity - Basic

Cost – 1 Skill Point

A sharp mind can cut through indecision and complex thought. Enhances your thought processes and ability to analyse situations and patterns. Increases cognitive processing speed by 2% per level + 1% Intelligence.

Checking their descriptions, Tom could see that there were definitely some similarities between them, and he had an idea about what it might mean, but he would need to wait and get another skill point to test it and who knew how long that might take.

As he thought that, he remembered about the tasks that they had been given for the dungeon. He opened the information page again to check.

Trial Dungeon of Lemures Level 1

Time Remaining – 21 Hours, 46 Minutes

Enemies Remaining – 49

Dungeon Requirements:

– Reach the end of the dungeon alive 0/1

– Kill Enemies 1/1 (Stage 1)

Just like he thought, the first stage of the Kill Enemies task had been completed. He focused on the task and he heard a *DING* in his head as another screen popped up.

Task Completed

Trial Dungeon of Lemures Level 1

– Kill Enemies 1/1 (Stage 1)

Reward – 1 Skill Point

Trial Dungeon of Lemures Level 1

Time Remaining – 21 Hours, 46 Minutes

Enemies Remaining – 49

Dungeon Requirements:

– Reach the end of the dungeon alive 0/1

– Kill Enemies 1/11 (Stage 2)

The task had rewarded him another skill point for its completion, and the task had changed to stage 2 where they had to kill 10 more enemies to complete it.

Looking back at his skill menu, he smiled as he saw that he indeed had 2 skill points to us. The others nodded as he told them about his discovery.

“It makes sense, kinda,” said Adam. “This whole thing is feeling more and more unreal to me, it’s like a giant video game, like VR or something. At this point I’m just going to roll with whatever happens,” he said, raising his arms in mock surrender.

At this point Tom had suggested that they discuss their skill choices it as a group, so they wouldn’t choose any duplicates or anything that wouldn’t directly assist them through the dungeon. But this suggestion was soundly rejected when Mark had gotten bored and walked off, with Adam and Dave following suit, leaving Tom standing alone.

Well, I tried, he thought to himself.

Looking back to his list of skills, he thought about what he might take; several were interesting propositions. He particularly wanted to get Mana Sense, but that was only because he really wanted to see what magic was like. Strike was also tempting, but his lack of strength would be a bit of an issue, also the fact that his skill level with his sword was about as good as a kid with a stick pretending to be a knight at preschool.

His gaze caught Mark, who had wandered over to where Tom had left his shield. Mark picked it up, strapped it to his arm and began to practice wielding both at once. He was quite good at it, too, Tom thought.

Looks like it’s been decided that I’m not good enough with the shield after all, he thought glumly to himself.

Seeing as that decision had been made for him, he turned back to his skill list. He wasn’t strong enough to pick a strength skill or a weapon skill, not that he could use Shield Mastery without a shield. He might be able to use Evasion to survive, but that wouldn’t help him if he needed to fight, so most of the others that he had access to. He did have one particular skill that the others didn’t have, one that when he had seen it he had been intrigued by the possibilities it might offer him.

If he couldn’t fight, or fight well enough by himself, he could at least see if he could support those that could. That way he could make himself a valuable member of the team, instead of just the fleshy roadblock he had been in the skeleton fight.

It’s time to do some testing, he thought to himself as he spent both skill points on Evaluate.