-Napoleon Hill

Quest Completed - "Not Yet, My Young Blade"
Reward: +972 XP

John has leveled up!
John has reached levels 2 and 3!
+2 to all stats

"Was wondering when that was going to kick in," John noted. He'd just finished going over his options with Evellyn, after sorting through the monsters that provided the most relevant resources to his quest to craft a bathtub. Seras and Sophia had both returned, Sophia just slightly ahead as her wings carried her across the land, although Seras seemed driven to keep up as she jogged her way into camp.

"Just in time! I'm without a weapon, so I really didn’t want to get into this myself… you two ready? I figured we'd start off with something relaxing, so we can farm some materials in a relatively safe way."

"Sounds like a piece of cake!"

"Please, please remind me why we picked these goddamn piles of sludge."

"Well, Master Newman, you requested the enemies which would provide the most clay. I merely-"

"That was rhetorical. Sarcastic. Something, I dunno, but this is beyond frustrating. They're level three for Gaia's sake."

John had only set the level of the dungeon to three, thinking that they could scale up rapidly after learning a little about their foes, but instead they had spent nearly thirty minutes slogging through this dungeon while dealing with the fact that these creatures did not die. They were apparently called "Terra Anima", and aside from the smell, they were virtually impossible to kill. The only thing **** in them was a tiny core which could shift damn near anywhere in their body.

Seras and Sophia were tearing into them with bare hands, searching through the piles of muck that they were made of. The creatures inflicted very minimal damage, only a point or two, mostly relying on suffocation judging by the way they tried to swamp over the girls. They were so slow that even with his newly reduced level John had no issues whatsoever avoiding them. Unfortunately, no matter how slow they were, finding their cores - small, semi-physical spheres of mass and energy they had located on accident as one slurped its way up one of Seras' legs - was incredibly time consuming.

"Right, got anotha one," Seras grunted as she pulled one of the small, white orbs out of her newest foe. It glistened for only a moment before she crushed it in her palm.

Party Member: Critical Hit! 78 DMG

The slime coating Seras fell away, leaving only a thin veneer of mud and griminess on her lower torso. She grimaced all the same, as John swooped in to loot the creature's remains.

"Thirteen ounces of Clay and a Kaolinite Shard," John said, just the word shard giving him a bit of a chill despite the fact that the first one he'd picked up had been easily identified as a simple mineral.

"That makes seven. 'Bout anotha seven or eight an' we oughta have the biggie come out," Seras noted, glancing around at the nearest three that were all painfully slowly crawling toward them.

"Yeah, but this took twenty minutes already, including the time to make the damn Barrier," John grumbled. "This was not what I had in mind for a quick start to the grind."

"Perhaps we could abandon this for a time, or search for another foe?"

"No," John replied immediately. Somehow that had never been an option for him. Perhaps it was his Gamer instincts responding to a challenge, or maybe it was just some of the Wisdom he'd lost fading away, but John didn't want to leave. The surface level idea was that he wanted to learn how to fight enemies like this which weren't affected by physical attacks, but really, John would've felt awful giving up on the one solid idea he had for a gift. Sophia, Maera, and Mithra had all asked for nothing significant at all. Lunaya didn't seem to want much - or didn't have anything she could easily communicate with her new magic. Seras was the only person with a real idea, and John was not going to give up after a few slimy bastards got in his way.

Unfortunately, he didn't have much for this situation. Lightning Bolt probably wouldn't penetrate the earthy shells well, Fire Orb would lose most of its percussive effect blasting through the piles of mud, and he didn't even have a weapon. His strength wasn’t even high enough that he was confident he could wade into them like Seras and Sophia were without getting swamped down and suffocated.

"Maybe I could figure out a new spell?" John thought as Seras and Sophia began to engage the three approaching them. "Fire and lightning don't work. Something pure, something arcane, something that can be controlled from a distance, maybe. Something that can shatter an enemy's whole body, yeah!"

Without an element to picture in his mind or a tutor to show him the basics, John had to focus on what he wanted to do. Shockwaves, like an earthquake almost - but just shaking them wouldn't do anything except jiggle the masses of muck about a bit and then dislodge the core to somewhere else. John needed to strike everywhere - simultaneously, or at least very close to it. John pictured waves of **** and pain emerging from the center of the creature in front of him like a piece of glass shattering - spiderwebs of cracks and points of shattering radiating out of the creature’s innermost pieces.

Mana flowed forth from John, or so it felt. His vision shattered into a million fragments around the ooze sliming its way toward Seras, then reconstructed itself. A splitting headache tore John from his concentration, so powerful he knelt down and grasped futilely at his head to squelch the pain.

Skill Innovation Failed!

"Ow, fuck- fuck-" John grunted, the pain not fading for several seconds as Seras and Sophia dealt with the last of the slimes. It had also cost him thirty mana, apparently, despite no spell being cast to the best of his knowledge. Given his current levels of mana, that wasn't exactly an insignificant chunk.

"Have to save that for later…" John muttered. He wasn't even sure what kind of technique he would get or how useful it would be - it wasn't worth wasting all of his mana when his friends were taking some damage he was still capable of healing. John did his best to top off the minimal hits and damage Seras and Sophia had taken from the oozing menaces just in time for the marshes around them to begin shifting and shaking as a massive glob of mucous mud snotted its way out of the ground a few dozen yards away.

"Fucking. Gross."

"Bloody disgustin'."

"My mouth tastes of bile."

John and his companions emerged from the Barrier tired, minimally rewarded, and - in the case of the other two - disgustingly coated in something only Gaia could likely identify. John might have been physically capable of doing so, but every fiber in his being screamed at him not to. The only plus sides to their excursion were that he was fairly certain he had enough of the materials he’d been looking for… and that he had managed to get another level out of it.

"Uhm, 'ow about that bath, Master?" Seras grunted. "I was gonna wait 'til we were done, but this is somethin' outta my nightmares. Twice as bad with vampire smell!"

"I have never felt truly free without my wings, but… I refuse to release them in this swill," Sophia noted gruesomely, staring at her own limbs as if they had betrayed her.

"Right, I should have more than enough Clay. Hopefully for a lifetime, until I figure out a faster - and cleaner - way to kill those things. When we go back for more, we will definitely face something else."

"Okay, I'm just… gonna stay out 'ere 'til you're ready. If somethin' goes wrong, just lemme know an' I'll go 'op in the lake."

"Hopefully that's not necessary. Evellyn, do we have enough?"

"I can in fact construct a bathtub out of one-hundred percent porcelain of approximately average dimensions given the materials in your inventory. You will have a small amount left over, depending on the exact design perhaps a few pounds."

"Good enough for me… now to figure out where to put the bathroom."

John opted for the simplest choice - he modeled his recreated house after the original and decided to build the tub in the upstairs bathroom across from his room. Craft popped up a simple recipe that, true to Evellyn's estimates, left him with about 10% of his materials and took up most of his mana. The blueprint looked like a plain but relatively pretty claw foot bathtub, snuggled up in the corner of the wall where John's shower had been back home.

By the time he filled the tub up with water using his Elemental Control ability, he was almost completely out. He was going to have to rely on food buffs and gained points from levels to recover fast enough to keep up when they went back to it, but he did have enough to do something else...

Craft Successful!

"Okay, it all went pretty smoothly! Who's going first?"

"I would never think to step in front of my Mother," Sophia swore, taking a knee for emphasis.

"Uh, I guess me then? I'd be a bit redder about it, but the sooner this stuff's off, the bettah."

“The water's going to be cold, but… I couldn't really heat it up without setting a fire, which didn't seem like the best idea in an all-wood house.”

"No problem. Everythin' feels pretty warm to me now, honestly. Am I that cold?"

"Eh, room temperature at worst. Never stopped me from wanting to feel as much of you as I can," John said with a shrug. Seras smiled as she strolled into the house, beginning the lengthy process of undoing her jacket. Part of John wanted to follow after - the last time John had caught Seras as she stepped out of the shower, the sight had been seared into his retinas for days. But he managed to suppress the power of his boner with sheer will and began tracking down Lunaya. She had gone outside but hadn't gotten far, sitting lazily in the grass watching Maera dance and play in the long grass, still overly excited from learning about the coming expansion of their world.

"Lunaya, I decided I was going to do something for everyone while I was here. I didn't really have any good ideas for you before we went into the Barrier, but I figured with what I had left I could make you something nice. I wasn't sure what you'd like, but I saw something like this in an art shop a while back at the mall… made to my tastes, kinda. I don't know if you really identify with them, but I thought you'd at least think it was pretty. Sorry, it's just pure white - I didn't think about getting any paint."

From his inventory, John pulled free a small porcelain sculpture. It was of a dire wolf, straight out of Alaron's Journey: A Magus Reborn. Towering over a fallen sword still clutched in a stiff arm that looked ridiculously tiny in comparison to the scale of the great wolf, the beast was reared back in a howl over its freshly fallen prey. Lunaya blinked a few times, staring at the statue but not moving to take it.

"I figured you could put it in your room, maybe up on the windowsill? Just something nice, I dunno. If you don't want it, I can probably give it to… to… oh god, what?"

Lunaya hadn't moved to accept or reject the statue. Instead, simply staring at the sculpture and refusing to break her gaze away even to glare at John, Lunaya's face was tearing between rage and sorrow, tears welling up in her eyelids. John froze in complete shock, this being one of the only reactions he completely did not expect. At worst, he thought she'd smack it out of his hands in disinterest or offense at getting her species wrong, but instead she looked torn by a loss John did not fully comprehend as his brain tried to process what he was seeing.

"Lunaya, I don't know what I did, but I'm sorry, I-"

Lunaya stood and in one fluid motion wrapped both of her palms around John's temples. Recognizing the motion, John only had a brief instant to brace himself before an image assaulted his mind.

A forest. Not John's forest. Soft footsteps echoed, the sound of bare feet padding across well trodden dirt. Around NotJohn a dozen other pale figures strode in the dark moonlight, his precise eyes seeing every movement of flesh even in the cloudy night. A half-dozen children, two or three that couldn't have been much older than John, and an older couple, all of them with the same pale-blue hair and mismatched eyes. All of them engaged with their own activities, all scattered around the grove that must have been so deep within the forest that nothing outside could reach them, for there was no sound but what they made.

The clouds above them broke, only for an instant. One by one each of them turned their head to the sky, NotJohn's eyes flickering up with them. A moon as blue and luminescent as their glistening hair shone through a part in the cloudy night, shining a full and complete circle of light into their clearing. Around John a dozen voices rose up, joining together in a chorus of only one simple, elongated note. Howls, rising and joining together as a family. NotJohn tilted his head back just a little bit further.

It was beautiful. A sound like the perfect note, sung at the very climax of the most satisfyingly sad song John had ever heard. It resonated in John's bones and gathered in his soul, filling places he had never known to be empty. Gathering with the rest of NotJohn's family, it became like a living being, echoing across the forest and-

John flinched awake, pulling away from Lunaya's fingers as a shattering crash rang out at his feet. John was so caught up in what he was seeing that his grip had loosened entirely, allowing the wolf statue to crash to the ground and scatter across the dirt. John also realized, as his eyes traveled from the broken shards back up, that his eyes were as wet as the Canid's.

"Lunaya… I'm sorry, I didn't think- I didn't know-"

Lunaya broke away and turned toward the forest, sprinting at full burst. John's mind screamed at him to follow, but with her recent training and due to John's Reincarnation, he had no hope of catching her. All he could do was pray she would return.

"Fuck, I'm stupid. And Intelligence is my highest score… what a fucking joke," John griped, fighting the urge to slam his face into the porcelain-covered ground until the pain overwhelmed his self-hatred.

"This stuff breaks way too easily," John noted as he started adding the pieces to his inventory, hoping there might be something that he could salvage from them. "This statue shouldn't have broken just hitting soft dirt and grass… and- wait, I've got two very feisty women about to use…"

John abandoned his efforts to salvage the lost statue, rushing up to the house as quickly as his feet would carry him. Storming up the stairway John came to the bathroom and burst through the empty doorway, eyes immediately locking onto the nude vampiress.

"Seras, listen- whatever you do, don't-"

"Wha- are we under attack?!" Seras shouted, panicking at John's sudden and energetic entry. She then did the worst thing John could have imagined, slamming her palm down onto the side of the tub in order to sit up and reach for her clothes. Given the woman's incredible strength and lack of restraint, Seras immediately sent a massive crack through the side of the tub, which quickly escalated into a full-blown structural breach as she put her weight on it. The porcelain bathtub cracked in half and the gallons of water John had filled it with immediately flowed out, leaving a very wet and very shocked Seras awkwardly swaying as she tried to keep her balance without peeling off more of the tub's exterior, still holding a piece of the railing in her hand.

"Uh, I didn't- I didn't hit it tha' bloody 'ard!" Seras gasped, staring at the piece of the bathtub clutched in her hand.

"No… you didn't, I just-" John sighed, using the last of his mana to fling as much of the water out of the room and through the open window in the hallway as he could. For his efforts the hissing sound of a very angry Maera echoed, a wailing scream of surprise and hatred, followed by sprinting footsteps.

John blinked at the noise, then did the only thing he could think of. He broke down, laughing so that he wouldn't cry as he leaned into and then collapsed against the bathroom wall.

"Fucking Gaia, I'm a mess. I can't do anything right except fight and level up. Guess this is why I stuck to video games. I'm such shit at real life."