Death Cap - Three - Testing the Limits of One's Capabilities

The following months passed in a blur.

I know, intellectually, the routine was dangerous. Doing the same thing over and over again would just lead to a complacency, to me developing habits that might not help me in the long run.

Still, in some regards, I had no choice.

Mom had to return to work. She said she was fortunate that the girls where she worked pitched in and covered her shift for a couple of days. She couldn’t let them continue to do that. That left the home empty most of the time. She’d complained one afternoon about the bills. We’d have to dip into our savings for a while. She didn’t say how our need to dip into those would end.

We had one less mouth to feed, but the cost of rent was still the same.

So I got back to work, but not as often as I once had. I turned my mushroom-selling into a weekend thing, and I gave up on selling over by the dungeon, at least for the moment.

That left me the other six days of the week to train.

Surprisingly, the first thing that levelled was my [Running] skill. It was likely long overdue, having sat at 19 for such a long time.

[You have unlocked a Sub-Skill!]

[Congratulations! Your [Running {Common}] Skill has unlocked the [Surefooted] Subskill!]

[Surefooted]

You will find yourself tripping less often as you push yourself to run faster. With practice, you will no longer lose your balance and momentum as you run.

A nice little boost. I earned it by tripping over a loose rock on my way back to the farm. I flipped twice before crashing onto my knees and skinning both of them on the messy dirt ground. It wasn’t the best way to gain experience, but it finally pushed my skill up a level, so I couldn’t complain.

Besides, I was young. Were I in my thirties or forties, the pain to my knees would have been abysmal, I knew.

My training didn’t just rely on [Running] though. I had three new skills that I didn’t know how to use yet, at least initially. [Aura of Growth] I figured out early on. All that was left was some experimenting to discover the limitations and possibilities of the skill.

The aura could be projected all around me, and if I just concentrated on using the skill without anything more behind it, that’s exactly what would happen. But that was wasteful. I could burn through nearly all of my mana in the space of five minutes just by passively leaving the skill on.

The effects on the mushrooms growing in my farm were obvious though. They sprouted, grew, and flourished far faster than they would normally. Even with my previous skillset I couldn’t get them to grow quite so quickly.

Once I put my mind to studying the skill though, I discovered that I could more or less vary its strength. It was like having my hand on the tap. I could turn it up or down to control how much would flow out from the skill.

Then, I started to focus on different things. In my mind, the aura came out of me and formed a sort of circle. But my farm was square. I started to imagine it as merely filling the entire room, without any excess leaving, and after gaining a level or two from concentrating on that image, I started to experiment further.

Could I split my aura to only cover half the room?

Yes. Yes I could.

Could I concentrate it all on one, singular fungal body?

Yes, but not easily. And if that body was pressing up against another, chances were the skill would bleed through.

Over the course of two and a half months, I gained two new subskills with [Aura of Growth]. It didn’t quite bring me back up to where I’d been before, but it was getting there.

[Congratulations! Your [Aura of Growth {Rare}] Skill has unlocked the [Shaped Aura] Subskill!]

The first subskill I unlocked. It essentially allowed me to more easily shape the aura. I went from having some mild difficulty pushing the aura into any shape but a circle to being able to push out around the room with only a stray thought.

I couldn’t see the aura, but I knew where it was, and what shape it had, more or less. What was unfortunate was that I couldn’t feel it interacting with things. Not yet, at least. I was hoping to gain some sort of… malleable radar type of skill, but maybe that would come later.

[Shaped Aura]

You can more easily move and manipulate your aura. With practice, you will be able to move it entirely away from yourself, to bring growth to all that need it.

It was a good subskill to gain.

[Congratulations! Your [Aura of Growth {Rare}] Skill has unlocked the [Careful Casting] Subskill!]

This one was a little less expected, but no less welcome.

[Careful Casting]

You become more aware of how much assistance all natural things need in order to flourish, and in doing so, are better able to conserve your own strength. Practice will increase your efficiency.

The part that let me sense how much assistance something needed to grow was… extremely vague. Nearly useless, even. I could tell from a look that a mushroom had not sprouted yet, I didn’t need some vague sixth sense to tell me as much. Knowing how much humidity or what kind of temperature change a fungal body needed was nice, but I couldn’t do anything about that most of the time. The added efficiency though, now that was a bonus.

[Ritual of Sporemageddon] was… an enigma. I was actually kind of annoyed by the skill. It was taking up a slot that I had other uses for, and I didn’t know how to activate it, or what it did, exactly. Still, it was a legendary skill, and I had the impression Feronie really wanted me to use it.

[Blight] was more immediately useful.

It took some focus, and the first time I managed to use the skill properly I immediately doubled over and lost my lunch, but… but it wasn’t something I could ignore, not once I saw what it did.

Using [Blight] on a piece of wood rotted it.

That was maybe an oversimplification, but it was accurate. The wood darkened on the edges, it cracked, and parts of it turned to dust. The entire piece went… almost soggy as [Blight] continued to spread across it. After five minutes of focused use, I could turn a log the size of my forearm into a rotting carcass.

I tried it on mushrooms next, and the effect was similar. The mushroom darkened on the edges and crumbled apart. It wasn’t all terrible though. The samples I tested the skill on tended to flourish once the skill was stopped, something I only discovered when I returned to a mushroom the day after I’d used [Blight] on it.

I needed access to some sort of library. There was so much I didn’t know about how skills worked that I couldn’t learn just through trial and error. Why and how did [Blight] make it easier for fungi to grow on things affected by it? Was the effect some sort of time-acceleration, or was it something entirely different?

Using the skill on metal made it rust. Using it on organics like meat or wood made it rot.

Was it just some sort of… forced oxidation? That didn’t quite match what I was seeing, and things affected by [Blight] weren’t warm after I deactivated the skill, which I’d expect if I was dealing with some sort of forced chemical reaction.

I had… no idea how [Blight] worked.

What I did know was that the skill’s mana cost was prohibitive and it took a long time for it to work. Just rotting through a log took multiple hour-long applications where I had to guzzle down mana-infused mushrooms to keep myself going.

It might have had potential as a combat skill, but for the moment, it was better as a skill used to prepare locations for fungi to grow.

I imagined that combining [Blight] with another attack might make it far more effective. A cut across someone’s skin combined with a light application of the skill would almost certainly leave someone with necrotic skin susceptible to infection.

I continued to prepare for my eventual trip into the dungeon, but the more time passed, the more I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to fight my way through one without a lot of help, or a lot more training.

My skill set just didn’t lend itself to straight combat.

So much for being a Crusader. Where was my heavy plate armour and big two-handed longsword?

No. For the moment, I decided to focus on something else while I continued to practise and learn.

Three months after my father’s passing, just as the warmth of summer started to fade away, I discovered where Ratesco’s Union was holed up, and now I was going to pay them a visit.

***