Chapter -2147483639 (Odessos II)

  

  [*ding!* Congratulations! [Cunning Linguist] has leveled up! 8-19!]

  The two women climbed out of the transport wagon 20 minutes later, somewhat disheveled and awkwardly holding hands to find Lucius standing nearby. He looked over, then down at their hands, back up, and then waved to call them over.

  “Ada, Alex, I'm glad I finally caught you two. Is this a good time to talk, or are you both busy?” he asked the pair.

  Alex looked up at the taller woman, who simply shrugged in response, and then said to the man, “Um, I guess we're both free for a while. Though, I could do with some lunch”

  “Right, that sounds fine. Chat over a meal? I mostly wanted to find out more about Ada's class and new skills,” said the mage.

  Ada nodded, replying, “Yeah, sounds good, though I’m not actually hungry.” A grin spread itself across her face. “After all, I did just have more than enough to eat,” and promptly received a punch to the arm from the shorter woman standing beside her.

  “Yeah, I didn't need to know that,” said Lucius. “But fine, the barracks here actually has a pretty decent cook, at least compared to what we normally get, and we can eat here for the bargain price of free.”

  “Let's go, then,” said Alex, giving Ada another punch in the arm.

  Minutes later, they were all seated at a table in the barracks mess hall, the two humans had received a hearty brown bread made from coarse ground wheat alongside some kind of meat stew with some starchy root vegetables that Ada didn't recognize. While it smelled quite nice to Ada, the thought of actually eating any of it somehow repulsed her, and she had not taken any of the food offered.

  After they had finished about half of the meal, Ada spoke, “So, you wanted to hear about the skills I got?”

  Lucius nodded, and replied in between bites, “Yeah, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of [Elementalist], so I am curious how it compares to a more standard [Mage Apprentice] class.”

  “I got the four skills you said were default from mage, [Affinity], [Resistance], [Conjuration], and [Manipulation], but my [Affinity] is already upgraded all the way to [Spirit]. Apparently when you spend a couple decades crafting an entire functional body from the element, the system just gives it to you.”

  Ada received two very blank and slack jawed stares after finishing that statement.

  “Ha ha.. just kidding. That’s me, the big joker,” she said with a nervous laugh.

  Lucius just stared at her. “Uh... huh.. Why don’t we just move on and pretend you didn’t just tell me that. Did you get anything else?”

  “Uh, yeah, since I leveled right up to 32, I got offered skills at 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30, as well as a merge and class skill move between two general skills. I took the merge of [Vigilant] and [Basic Survival] which became [Resolute]”

  Lucius held up a hand, indicating a desire for Ada to wait a moment as he pulled a scroll and a small piece of charcoal from a pouch at his belt. “Just a moment, I’d like to record your skills, if that’s ok.”

  “Actually, I think I’d prefer it if you didn’t write anything down. I may change my mind later, but right now, no,” said Ada. “If I can help people later down the road, I wouldn’t mind sharing what I learn, but I don’t know enough to make an informed decision about something like that right now.”

  “Oh. That makes sense, I suppose,” he said, and the dejected man put the piece of charcoal down. “I.. hmm. Please continue.”

  Ada went through each of her skills, the two general skills merging, the two alloy skills merging together, and the final skill that she declined.

  Lucius rubbed his chin for a moment, thinking. “Your reasoning is sound, though something to consider in the future is that you could have picked up that last skill, [Lesser Reforging], before the [Shards] skill and tried it out, just to be sure it would do what you thought. If it did, you could then simply drop it and pick up the final skill instead, or even potentially merge it into another skill. It’s usually worth trying out skills as long as you have an empty slot to use to do so, which, granted, is less likely to be the case as you get to higher levels.”

  “Yeah, I considered that, but can’t change the past now. All we can do is keep moving forward.”

  “Indeed. Now, I have some ideas for how we can help you quickly level up your skills, and I think the first thing we should do is get you some ingots of iron to practice with.”

  “Right, yeah, I had some ideas about that as well. Do the barracks here have a Quartermaster or someone who is responsible for maintaining and repairing equipment? If possible, I would like to help out with some metal work.... Actually, can I see your sword?”

  “What? Oh, right, your alloy skill, that sounds like a good idea, yes. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious to see what you can do.”

  Lucius stood and drew his sword, being careful to hold the blade steady with his left hand and not point it directly at anyone, and then presented the hilt to Ada, who accepted it and nodded.

  She then said, “OK, let’s see how this goes.”

  Placing the sword on the table in front of her and both hands on top of the blade, she considered the sword. It was a relatively short weapon with no crossguard to speak of, incredibly similar to an early Empire period Roman gladius. The blade was almost perfectly straight, nearly as wide as her hand, absolutely no fuller, and a completely flat grind to the edge, the top four inches angled into a point.

  Using [Alloy], she inspected the metallic structure, which took quite some time to activate, draining nearly a thousand points of her mana in the process. Yeah, there were a lot of improvements she could do with this slab of iron that she thought could only be considered steel in the loosest definition.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  

  [*ding!* Congratulations! [Alloy] has leveled up! 13-15!]

  “Alright, I can refine this to better hold an edge while remaining flexible and durable. I remember enough of a few different alloys that the different smiths I talked to about swordsmithing liked to use to do that. If we can potentially get our hands on some specific ores, I can even change this to be resistant to rusting, even without cleaning and maintenance. I have some thoughts about the actual shape and construction of this, but I assume everyone attached to both the military and rangers use more or less the same type, so I’ll refrain from actually changing the shape...”

  Ada trailed off, thinking, and concentrating on what she wanted to accomplish with the skill and felt it start to guide her on how to refine the existing metal into what she desired.

  The woman placed the palm of her left hand onto the blade. As she held it there, her hand changed, losing the lightly tanned skin tone and became a dark, nearly black metallic appearance. And then it flowed. From the wrist down, Ada’s hand had lost cohesion as the iron sand wrapped around the sword.

  Then, pouring more mana into [Alloy] and bringing [Temper] into play, Ada began rearranging the carbon deposits in the iron structure, breaking the chunks of graphite apart into the smallest pieces she could manage, and then distributing the deposits evenly through the entire lattice. At this point, that was about all she could do with the low level of the skill. It also felt like she should be able to rearrange the grain structure, but she just couldn’t quite grab onto anything that small just yet. Perhaps as she increased her Magic Control stat?

  

  [*ding!* Congratulations! [Alloy] has leveled up! 15-27!]

  [*ding!* Congratulations! [Metal Spirit] has leveled up! 13-25!]

  [*ding!* Congratulations! [Temper] has leveled up! 1-17!]

  [*ding!* Congratulations! You have unlocked the passive general skill [Basic Smithing]!]

  [Basic Smithing] You’ve become a real basic Smith, doing all sorts of basic Smith stuff. Great job! Now do better. Improved blacksmithing tool use and precision per level. Ability to approximate temperature based on color of light emission.

  Ada acknowledged the skill, and felt it drop into her remaining open general skill slot.

  While she was thinking about this new skill, Ada suddenly felt faint, and a wave of nausea passed over her. She pulled her hand back out of the sword, watching it change back to the familiar color of perfectly normal flesh. Ada put a bit of effort into thinking about what just happened to her, and remembered to check on her status, where she noticed that her mana supply had completely run out, and was now ticking back up.

  “Oof, that took a lot out of me. Drained my entire mana pool. Good news, though, is that I think this will hold an edge longer in between sharpening, and probably won’t crack as easily. It felt like I should be able to do more than that with the grain structure, but I just couldn’t grab hold of anything small enough to really make any difference.”

  Lucius seemed to be having trouble with Ada’s statement, but eventually found the words. “.. Right, that’s probably an issue with not enough magic control, though to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t have expected you to be able to do anything like that. It looked like your hand went into the blade.. How did you do that?”

  The dark-haired woman rubbed the back of her head, and said, “Uh, that’s just how that skill works. No other reason, yep.” She then moved her hand around to rub her chin, thinking. “Hmm, alright, I'm putting my free stat points into control, then. I'm going to need to rest for a bit before I can try anything else.”

  “You do appear somewhat exhausted. It’s normal to not be able to do a lot when you’re still at a low level, after all, normally people at your level are still around 10 years old or so. Honestly, I think your situation is unique enough that you should be able to earn a sponsorship to attend the School back in the capital. I’m sure someone would be interested to see what kind of mage you’d become with training at such a low level while also having significant life experience.”

  Two days later, Ranger Team 13 plus Ada and a pair of newly requisitioned horses left Odessos.

  Their visit to the city had been rather uneventful. That first day, Alex took Ada shopping and purchased several tunics which had to be altered slightly to fit her height and ample proportions, along with a pair of sandals and a couple sets of wide cloth wraps for supporting her breasts which Alex had called strophium. Ada had been pleased to learn that clothing was more or less gender neutral, with both the men and women wearing essentially the same style of clothing for their day to day wear.

  Each morning after that, the three women visited the bath house nearest the guard barracks; afterward, the trio proceeded to the market where Alex provided healing services at a discounted rate, Ada posed as her assistant, while Atalanta guarded them from pickpockets and the like.

  In the afternoons, Ada spent her time with whichever rangers were assigned duty at the armored wagon, which had been moved to be displayed prominently outside the barracks for all to see. She practiced her skills, and the rangers took reports from the random people who showed up, none of which panned out to be anything meaningful enough to require ranger intervention.

  At the end of the second day, Lucius approached Ada with an offer to officially hire her on as a civilian auxiliary. This would provide her with some funds and traveling papers that would identify her as such, with some of the privileges afforded to the ranger team. As it turned out, her new skills with metal were worth quite a bit to the rangers, and she had leveled them up rapidly after Lucius showed off what her efforts on his sword had produced. The steady stream of shared experience from Alex using her healing skills had also fed back into improving Ada’s skills, and she leveled many of them at a prodigious rate.

  “Lucius told me he recommended that you attend the school back in Ariminum, and this’ll let you enter the city without too many questions about where you’re from, which I thought you might appreciate. Also you’re cheap to feed, so I don’t mind having you tag along.”

  The next morning, the entire squad loaded up into the wagon and they started off to the next city.

  Please give me feedback! I want to know what you think!

  Based on the world from the original work by Selkie Myth

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  You can also find all of the Beneath the Dragoneye Moons volumes on Kindle Unlimited and Audible:

  

  1 - Oathbound Healer -

  2 - Adventures in the Argo -

  3 - Ranger's Dawn -

  4 - Beyond the Wall -

  5 - Moonveiled Journeys -

  6 - Immortal Moments -

  7 - Return to Remus -

  8 - New Horizons -

  9 - Gladiator Gauntlet -

  10 - Under Ashen Skies -

  11 - Mandate of Heaven -

  12 - The Phoenix Peaks -

  13 - Moonfall -