Toby stepped through the portal and onto a grassy hill overlooking a verdant valley.

The sun was shining down on a virgin landscape filled with woodlands almost as far as the eye could see.

When he strained his eyes a bit, he could just barely make out a track through the trees that were likely to be the place one of the rivers ran down from the mountains.

Turning around, Toby tried to see the mountains of the great spine, but they were simply too far away to even see behind the endless carpet of trees.

“Wow” Toby could hear Ortho exclaim. “This is an incredibly beautiful world....”

“It's a lot larger than I thought by looking at it with the map table” Toby mused.

“Aye, This world is definitely huge!” Urist added with awe evident in his voice.

“I've never lived on a giant-sized world before.”

“pffffttt!!!!” Alice started laughing loudly.

“Didn't anyone of you notice that the token we used was for a max size world?”

Her laughter kept on rolling over them in waves while they watched her dumbfounded.

“H... ho..how large is this world exactly?” Toby stammered.

He had thought that he should at least have been able to see both the mountain range as well as the ocean from a spot like this, but he could in see neither. In fact, The horizon seemed oddly flat and far away.

“It's got about 3 times the radius of your old earth Toby.” Alice finally managed to say after trying to calm down a while.

Toby tried to do some mental arithmetic to figure out what that meant for the land area. But ended up giving up instead.

“how much more surface area are we talking about?” he finally asked with a sigh.

This world was going to be troublesome if his hunch was right.

“9 times as large.” She answered.

“This continent has about as much landmass as the entire surface area of your old earth.” She finished.

“That means, that some of those barrier islands we saw on the map are big enough to hold entire nations in comfort.” Toby groaned. This was going to get really hard to deal with. There was just too much room here.

“We were supposedly dropped fairly close to the embark position,” Urist said deadpan. “Ye recon we can manage to walk there in less than a week?”

Toby took a good look at himself and his companions. They were wearing nothing except a loincloth preserving their modesty.

They had no weapons to speak of, and no rations or water.

At best, if they could actually find water under-ways, they would spend at least a week before getting anywhere significant.

like that river he was sure was causing the break in the forest far down at the bottom of this apparently enormous valley.

They did have their magic to rely on though. Toby figured he should try to cast a spell or 2 to get a feel for it.

With some luck they might find some salvation there

Opting to go for some water first, since that seemed the most useful right now, he started the casting process.

It wasn't hard, all he had to do was imagine himself sellecting the spell he wanted to cast, and he would cast it.

The squirt spell lived up to it's name alright. As soon as he cast it, a small spray of water flew from his fingertip.

It didn't fly very far, just enough that you could probably squirt it straight into your own mouth without spilling if you wanted.

At least the spell is cheap Toby grumbled to himself.

“That's convenient” Ortho snickered. “We have our very own walking water fountain.”

“Ha ha very funny” Toby replied while channeling another water squirt, aiming it squarely at Ortho.

Inspiration suddenly hit him, and he added the gust spell to the squirt to see if it was possible to cast 2 spells at once to have them interact.

It took both his hand to cast this way, but the result was quite satisfying, as the squirting water was turned into misty droplets that flew straight into Ortho's face.

“Take that” Toby exclaimed proudly, To the great entertainment of Alice and Urist, Who was practically rolling on the ground laughing at Toby's antics.

“Alright alright, I give.” Ortho surrendered before Toby could do another shot.

“Do anyone of us have any survival skill?” Urist asked thoughtfully.

“except water making, none at all.” Toby replied, the other 2 just shook their heads.

“I can do some light healing.” Alice said.

“I have a ranged attack skill, but without a weapon it's useless.” Ortho added.

“Other than that, I can stimulate plant growth.”

“I have blunt weapons.” Urist cringed, “but a stripped branch is not a club.”

“What else do you have?” Toby asked. He should have something from his earth/fire affinity at least.

“I can dig a hole in dirt with magic. Useful for digging a latrine at best at this level.”

Urist answered deadpan, earning him a round of giggling om return.

“That leaves me as the DPS then.” Toby sighed after the giggling ended.

“I have several useful spells, albeit weak. I can shoot magical pebbles, conjure fire from my hands, and the party trick I did with Ortho. Also combined with a small puff of dust.”

Toby opted to demonstrate that last one by casting dust with his left hand and gust with his right one. Aiming away from the group.

The result was predictable. A gout of fine dust flew forward from his hands, before the ambient wind took it away.

Figuring that standing around would get them nowhere, Toby urged his group to start walking towards the treeline a short distance away towards where they thought the river was.

“It's official then, Toby is the MVP for our march to the coast.” Urist said with a solemn voice.

“We are pretty much screwed aren't we?”

“It's not that bad.” Ortho consoled Urist while patting his shoulder.

“We have water, a source of fire, and a tiny bit of offensive magic going for us right now.”

“It would have been fine if we could actually craft something.” Urist replied.

“But we can't. We don't have any skills, and the system blocks knowledge without the skill remember.”

Toby felt a sinking feeling in his heart. Urist was right, the couldn't even take a branch and form it into even a crude staff or club right now. Let alone figure out what was edible or not, or build a safe fire-pit for that matter.

“We all lack the survival skill hu.” Toby said into the air. “That was something of an oversight.”

“Alice, Is there an easy way for at least one of us to get that skill within a reasonable time frame?” He asked.

“It's not a single skill.” Alice replied. “We would need to learn either foraging, hunting or trapping for procuring food, the camping skill to set up a campfires and shelter, and lastly, cooking to make food that's actually edible, rather than just eating it raw.”

“That's a lot of skills to get in short order.” Urist whistled.

“We can level up by training though.” Toby added. He had made certain of that, so that crafting classes could level up with hard work rather than having to go out and kill stuff.

They had reached the trees now, and Toby started to look around for a suitable branch to try and make staff with.

Toby suddenly realized something. “I can't innovate skills or tools while in this world can I?”

“No.” Alice replied. “Only reincarnates can do that.”

“So we are stuck without any tools, or survival skills at all then.” He sighed. This was getting frustratingly harder by the minute.

“We could summon your embark tribe right here.” Urist suggested.

It wasn't a bad idea, but it would mean a lot of risk for the tribesmen.

They were still far too weak to confidently keep themselves alive in a fight, let alone protect under equipped and skilled tribesmen.

“At least one of us should reach lvl 2 before we do any summons.” Ortho said, mirroring Toby's thoughts on the matter. “Maybe we should return to the Nexus for now and potentially buy any skills we need from the P2W system.”

“We can't do that either.” Urist groaned. “We can't buy anything that isn't already invented in the world either.”

“.......” The silence between them grew long as they all considered their situation.

“I hate to say this.” Urist sighed. “But we might have to help Toby grind to the point where he can use magic to protect the tribe while they get kitted up for the first time.”

“Let's just get on with the diealot tactic then.” Ortho winced. “This is going to hurt. A lot.”

Toby gulped when the true meaning of Ortho's words sank in. As a combat class, his only way to truly level up was going to be fighting stuff, or cast a lot of spells.

He did have a luxurious 100 MP compared to the 50 normal mage classes started with, but he would only get XP for leveling up one of his skills.

Leveling up all his skills to lvl 2 would still leave him 40 XP short of leveling up.

Not to mention that each level in the elemental magics would cost 100 uses of the relevant lvl1 skill. He had no spell in the Arcane category yet either. He would get light at level 2, but that wouldn't help right now.

With no staff to play with, he was down to 4 skills he could level up. And it would take close to 4 days to do it. They wouldhave been killed by some predator or other by then for sure.

“Alright.” Toby called out to the others, stopping them.

“We need to make a plan if we are to run around murdering stuff for the XP.”

As everyone gathered around, the first Party strategy meeting ensued. Toby just knew that the next couple of days were going to suck.