The Dive: Birth of a Wordsmith (23 page)

She laughed a bit, “You
know, you’re pretty devious.”

“
I am. It’s
one of my best qualities.”

“
Maybe. So, I take
it we want to keep a low profile for a bit?”

“
Until we build up
our abilities more, yeah. Aside from Kevin, I don’t want us to
team up with any other foreigners for a while. I might still be the
only true foreigner mage, and if so that would just bring a lot of
questions.”

“
Well, there are
still the ones who learned magic but dropped out, right?”

“
Yeah.. I’ll
have to hide my grimoire. Someone could identify me through it. Also,
keep an eye open for any caves or hidden doors when we are walking.
If we can find a dungeon, that will be an easy way to grow stronger.”

“
Alright. I noticed
that there was one in the elves’ forest, but I don’t
think we should go back and fight our way through there.”

“
Right. They said
that killing the animals of the forest is looked down on. Let’s
just keep moving. With the nature magic I learned from the book, it
seems that I can use all of the elements now. So I want to come up
with a few new spells while we move.”

She nodded, and we quickly
made breakfast before packing up camp. While we travelled, I did
indeed make a few simple spells, and was surprised at how easily they
came to me now with my Nature Magic talent.

After getting one of all
of the basic elements, I stopped making spells.
No
point in flooding myself with spells I haven’t mastered yet.

Slowly, the landscape
began changing along our path. We were running out of grassland, and
entering.. a desert? “Well… good thing we don’t
have to worry about running out of water.. But the hunting will
probably get harder, as well.” I couldn’t use some of my
spells because of the terrain, so this was a good time to train the
ones I could.

And sure enough, off in
the distance we saw something that we hadn’t come across yet.
At first, we couldn’t clearly make it out, but then a shape
quickly emerged from the sand and began running away. My eyes quickly
focused in on it with the aid of a scan spell. Combined with my
Discovery talent and Worldlore, I was able to find and identify the
creature.

“
It’s a
lizardman. Looks like a scout.” The lizard was wearing metal
armor, and carrying a scimitar.

“
Can you hit it from
this distance? Lizardmen are notorious for ambushing travelers.”

“
Alright, let me
try.” My spell told me that the Lizardman was nearly a hundred
meters away, so this was going to be a longshot, literally.
Let’s
go with lightning. All that metal should make a great conductor, and
it’s my most accurate long range spell.

“
Warriors of the
thunderstorm, bestow upon me your spear. Shock bolt!” I fired
off a burst of lightning that flew towards the fleeing reptile.
Although it only clipped him, the shock was enough to trip him.

“
Let’s go,
Midnight. Don’t want any surprises if that guy gets away.”
Denise patted Midnight’s mane, and the horse ran off towards
the downed lizard. Though, the stun didn’t last for long and by
the time we had covered ten meters it was already up and moving.
“Think you can do that again?”

“
Let’s try…
Shock bolt!” I sent another quick bolt of lightning, but this
time the lizardman anticipated it and jumped to the side. “Damn,
he’s learning. Okay.. how about this. Raging ghosts of battles
past, lend your aid in this time of need. Calling the Iron Falcon! Go
and stop him!”

A blue circle appeared in
midair about twenty meters ahead of us, and my iron bird shot out of
it, soaring like a spear towards the lizardman.

“
You know, I’ve
never tried this before, but it should be interesting.” I
grinned. “Raging ghosts of battles past, lend your aid in this
time of need. Become, Calling the Armored Bear!” Denise looked
at me in shock, and then grinned. A green circle appeared in front of
the falcon just before it impacted with the lizardman.

As the falcon flew through
the circle, what emerged on the other side was a bear easily as big
as the fleeing lizard. Of course… the bear still had all of
the momentum of the falcon, and crashed into the target like a
cannonball. “I… I think that was overkill.”

The impact damage from
colliding with the lizardman and the ground was enough to forcefully
dismiss the bear, but at the same time it proved to be enough to
separate the creatures upper and lower body. A trail of green blood
was all that connected the two.

“
Let’s..
remember how to do that.” Denise said with a smile, still
stunned by the effectiveness of the cannonball bear.

Hot damn, three levels.
And finally increased Navigation again. I guess fighting in new
terrain is helpful.
After spending my points,
I got another message barrage of messages.

Wow… so, just
increasing stats should grant talents as well.. does that mean that
Denise will get something when she hits 200 agility? Or does she get
it now, because I got mine?
I decided to go
ahead and check both of our character sheets, as well as the grimoire
for its new ability.

I… have mana
armor now… okay, then. I guess this is more incentive to focus
on Intelligence and Wisdom, to up my defenses.
The idea of a surefire defense against a killing attack was nice as
well. Though I was curious about the Hawk Eyes, I figured it was
Denise’s Agility-based talent and was used for long distance
aiming.

If I raise my mana
enough.. does that mean I’ll become a tank? I should invest in
recovery items while we’re in Coatin, to maximize that.

Denise seemed to notice
that something was up, because she looked back at me curiously.
“What’s the matter? Did something happen?”

“
Oh.. yeah, sorry.
Looks like I hit that goal Dariel told us. Got a powerful ability in
my book now.”

“
Oh? What’s it
do?”

“
To put it simply…
mana armor. I take less damage based on how much mana I have left.”

“
Well, they did call
it a Guardian Tome. I guess something like that is to be expected.
Still, that’s great though.” She smiled to me, and I
nodded. Though, the fact was that either due to us being high level
or because of our teamwork, nothing had managed to actually hit
either of us for a couple days.

I had a feeling that
wouldn’t last much longer. Now that we were farther from the
starting zones, the difficulty level should rise exponentially.
Curious if there was any news, I sent a message to Rusty to ask if
he’d heard anything. Until we met Kevin in the game, or at
least got close enough that I could use my divination magic to find
him, we still had to use Rusty as a middleman for communication.

And.. it was a good thing
I called.

“
Yes, he’s hit
a bit of a snag. He says everything he eats ends up poisoning him,
and he’s died a few times already. Ignorant kid didn’t
even bother to get a basic survival skill.”

“
Yeah, I tried to
warn him about that a while ago. So, he’s still only training
his battle talents?”

“
Seems that way. It
will take him a bit longer to get there, but he’s managed to
join up with a caravan. He says that way, he gets fed, and they get
protected. But since they stop for a couple days at every village to
trade, he’ll be a bit late.”

“
That’s
alright. I wanted to see if we could find a dungeon before we met up
with him anyways.”

“
Ehh? Is that safe?”
Rusty was concerned, since it wasn’t clear whether or not
Denise and I could respawn.

“
We’ve gotten
quite a bit stronger now. And I’ll be picking up more stuff
once we get to Coatin. We should be fine.” Though, since we had
been fighting cautiously, we were likely a bit behind the levels of
other people that made it this far. Still, with the two of us
together, our effective level increased considerably.

“
Alright… but
be careful.”

Chapter
11

Having been thinking about
dungeons, I had to ask myself.
In The Dive,
when you clear a dungeon, does it stay cleared? Or is there a monster
respawn system? Or… maybe as long as enough of a given species
aren’t killed within a certain timespan, they can repopulate an
area? From what I’ve seen, this game is realistic enough that
hunting monsters to extinction could very well be possible..

“
What’s
wrong?” Denise looked back at me as she held the reins for
Midnight.

“
Huh?”

“
You suddenly looked
like you were deep in thought.”

“
Oh, I kinda was.
Maybe it would be something you could answer for me?”

She smiled at that, “You
know if I can give you an answer, I’d like to.”

“
Okay… well,
in some realms that the foreigners visit, monsters are capable of
reincarnating. That means that, for instance, if someone cleared a
dungeon, they could go back the next day and it would be back to
normal.”