Alyssa narrowed her eyes, stomping her foot down on the layer of reeds she'd propped up between two small stacks of bricks. Frustratingly, the reeds only bent slightly without breaking.

It wasn't that she wasn't strong enough to break the reeds. She was, and suspected that holding herself back enough that she didn't break them was part of her challenge. Broken reeds from previous failures were scattered all around, but she didn't care about those.

She just wanted to break the stupid reeds properly.

It was... fine. Really, truly fine that she wasn't the standout member of this Expedition. She'd known that wouldn't happen as soon as she'd been assigned Henrietta Inq as a Commander. But she refused to let her capabilities slip away even further by being more useless than their spoiled noble brat who was somehow already twice her level.

She wasn't too worried about that though. She was awesome enough to give herself substats, and competent enough to actually use them. Even Henrietta and Oliver hadn't managed to fill up all of their skill slots... though it wasn't like she'd managed it herself. But that was because she was actively working to get more slots to work with!

Class: [Ranger of Far Lands] (Air, Force, Wood) Level: 7 Major Stats: Dexterity 8, Recovery 4, Resistance 1: (Physical 3) Regular Stats: Mind 0: (Senses 3), Strength 3, Aura 0, Skill 2: (Subskills 2, Movement 1), Power 0 Minor Stats: Generation 0, Cohesion 1, Capacity 0 Skills (6/8): [Leafstep] ⟨Springlaunch⟩|* ⟨Tumbling⟩ 15, [Ignite] ⟨Conflagrate⟩* 11, [Rustlewind] 5

She'd made the effort to get ⟨Tumbling⟩ before she tried much more ⟨Springlaunch⟩-⟨Conflagrate⟩ exercise, and had managed to get it quite easily. Not that it was much of a surprise, ⟨Tumbling⟩'s main purpose was to extend [Leafstep] coverage across her entire body, and because of how awesome she was, that was something she could already do if she tried. Earning the subskill was simply a matter of, well, tumbling with the skill, rather than just enhancing her hands as she climbed up a tree or rock wall or something.

Really, it would have been worth the skill slot just to keep Henrietta off her back with needing to be careful. Now that it basically didn't matter whether she landed on her feet or on her head, their Commander had substantially toned down the number of lectures about proper caution. But it also opened up the opportunity for Alyssa to get actual attack skills... or skill combos, anyway.

Right now, she was trying to get ⟨Blowback⟩, which was about as attack-oriented as [Leafstep] got. Normally, using the skill reduced and diffused the Force her movement generated, but when using ⟨Blowback⟩, it was instead magnified, redirected, and concentrated where she landed. With proper control, that could either be a razor-sharp chop... or an overwhelming crush. She'd had good memories of absolutely flattening some monsters in her training after landing on them from a high enough drop.

Her goal, once she got it, was to use ⟨Blowback⟩ and ⟨Tumbling⟩ in conjunction for an enhanced punch, possibly even with ⟨Springlaunch⟩ added in for extra fun. Then, toss in ⟨Conflagrate⟩ and some way to extend the skill effects to her hatchet, and she'd actually have a half-decent attack!

She'd also get the ability to karate chop down a tree once her level got high enough, which would be both immensely cool and quite useful when it came to clearing out The Jungle for their various production stations. But if she was being honest with herself, it was mainly the attacking capabilities she wanted. It just felt... weird, not having any offensive skills. Also, no matter how often she kinda forgot it, they were incredibly deep in untamed and assumed-hostile terrain. She needed better self-defensive capabilities in case she came across an enemy that she couldn't just outrun.

With her latest attempts not really coming to anything, Alyssa instead circled back around to using ⟨Springlaunch⟩ as a bigger part of her attempts. It had been the first thing she'd tried, back when she'd decided to get ⟨Blowback⟩, but had been stymied by it consistently launching her.

Go figure.

Alyssa balanced on one foot on the reeds, then closed her eyes and tried to feel out how her magic coursed through her.

Mana started in two places. The first was on her skin, where the eddies and roils of the ambient mana collided with her skin. The breeze, mostly made of Air and Force, also carried alongside it motes of Wood. Fire and Technology and Nature and Earth and Water and even a few traces of Bread thanks to the nearby 'kitchen,' all of them lapping against her skin when she focused hard enough. But of those, only the elements matching her class and therefore soul - Air, Wood, and Force - mingled with the mana on the outer layers of her spirit and began to seep in.

Honestly, there was a lot more Wood than she would have expected being carried to her on the breeze, but that was living in a thick forest for you, she supposed. Getting mana from the surroundings directly was a bit of a novel experience. It wasn't completely new, but it wasn't something she'd gotten much of back in her comparatively mana-starved home.

The rest of her mana, then as now, instead was created by herself, made as her soul roiled and pulsed in on itself. It wasn't clear if mana was some kind of waste product, the point of the soul's existence, or something far different, but even with Generation as a minor stat and with a grand zero in her status, it still suffused her very being. As a semi-blind guess, Alyssa felt like about half of her mana was coming in from the environment, and half being produced 'in house,' but she really had no way of knowing.

All sorts of things could affect your mana production and how much mana would be needed to fuel a skill, and trying to estimate how close you were to your 'maximum' without [Status] monitoring was about as pointless as trying to guess your current blood oxygen level. But Alyssa felt pretty good. She sensed the mana swirling around the parts of her body, from the crown of her head down through the spine, flowing around her heart in time with her breaths, snaking through her gut and out her limbs.

The strongest pulse was near her right leg, of course. That was where [Leafstep] was active, keeping her foot anchored on the reeds it balanced upon. As the mana left her body, she could feel it twisting itself, getting complicated as it interacted with its surroundings in a bunch of ways she could intuitively understand even if she couldn't do all the math-work to prove it.

The momentary flash of annoyance might have upset someone else's sustained skill usage, but not Alyssa. She felt the pulse pass through her, the... probably Passion mana generated by her emotions causing the other streams of power within her to waver ever so slightly.

Whatever, it was behind her. And she was on another world now, doing awesome Forerunner things anyway, so it turned out she wasn't wasting her potential after all, now was she?

Her mana pulsed approvingly at her resolve, the false-limb that was [Leafstep] taking it and forming a place for her to stand accordingly. She was standing more on the skill than on the reeds, really. A twisted strand of Force and Wood suffused the harvested plant, while Air functioned as a cushion while also... it wasn't really lightening her body. It wasn't counteracting gravity. It just made gravity less relevant to her.

Skills did have limits for how far they could be stretched, even with subskill assistance. [Leafstep] would never allow her to simply will herself into the sky, but it could allow her to run on the winds. That point seemed like it might be coming a bit sooner than she had expected, which she didn't entirely understand but could easily enough chalk up to the more vibrant mana of the Material Realms.

Oliver may have known the technical side of skills, but their practical use was going to be her dominion. Even Jacob, an outright veteran of The Binding Wars, couldn't compare to her skill with her skills. The guy had been max level and was practically as old as the System itself, but he hadn't been described as being an expert with skill combos.

No, that was her.

Annoyance and pride caused her mana to waver again, but Alyssa gripped her skill tightly, then bent her knee. Still balancing on one leg, she grasped the sides of the reeds she was putting her weight on. With a hint of ⟨Tumbling⟩, she reinforced the reeds from the edges as well, trying to push the mana her foot was exuding back into the center.

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

She couldn't really check if she was succeeding, but it didn't seem like she was experiencing enough resistance for it to be doing much of anything. That was probably her lack of Cohesion hurting her, but she kept trying anyway. It might have also been a function of her trying to do something that the skill wasn't really for. She couldn't reinforce arbitrary pieces of wood, it was just a byproduct of her actively trying to use the reeds to support her. Skills did things, and trying to do a different thing with it, rather than just a different expression of the core idea, never worked very well.

Either way, with three points of contact established on the reed, Alyssa began charging ⟨Springlaunch⟩ on her foot only. She didn't give it too much power, but she did her best to sculpt her mana in such a way that a tremendous amount of force would be applied to the very center of the reed, while putting preserving its integrity in direct opposition to her ability to move.

Because [Leafstep] was a movement skill, if the two goals came into conflict then her ability to move would be distinctly prioritized, and if she did everything right, the reed would splinter as she flew away.

Let's give it a go. ⟨Springlaunch⟩

A sudden yanking feeling in her hands and a jolt from her feet disoriented Alyssa, but she somehow ended up on the ground with semi-broken reeds clutched in each hand.

⟨Blowback⟩? she tried.

There was no reaction.

Bah.

It took her a few more tries to get right. Based on what had finally worked, the problem had been rooted in her approach. Specifically, she was trying to use it as a weapon... which as far as she was concerned it was, but mechanically it was simply an offshoot of natural movement capabilities, and that needed to be accommodated. Magic didn't really care about what was wanted, so she needed to physically set things up such that the reeds were acting as an 'obstacle to her movement' by simply existing, and that had gotten her to the point of success.

She punched a tree in celebration.

⟨Tumbling⟩ ⟨Blowback⟩

"Ow...."

Right after she'd been thinking about how it was a movement subskill, too. It had caused a chunk of the wood to splinter off of it, but just because she had the subskill didn't mean that the use for [Leafstep] had changed. ⟨Blowback⟩ would be most useful when she was coming up against something that would arrest her momentum, 'punishing' it for attempting to impede her motion.

On her next attempt, she had a running start. She didn't have any subskills that would unilaterally boost her speed yet, but a few angled ⟨Springlaunch⟩es did the trick for now. She shoulder-checked the same tree this time with the intent of simply going through it. And even though she still came to a complete stop, her momentum carried on and caused the trunk to fracture in a dozen places, then creak, groan, and begin to fall.

Away from her, fortunately. But she still retreated a healthy distance just in case.

With her testing accomplished, Alyssa bounded back into the First Tower living area. It was surprisingly bustling considering there were only five of them, but when a half-dozen living drawings were scuttling this way and that as part of their brick-making production line, and a handful of pseudowyvern inklings were dropping off their foraging prizes in the 'incoming food' basket, it made a certain degree of sense.

Oliver was doing some maintenance work on their sleeping hut, Clark was tending to one of the charcoal piles, Henrietta was doing something delicate looking with a half-made inkling, and Jacob was... somewhere. Probably tinkering with the ballista he and Oliver had been working on lately.

To avoid the general bustle of the camp, Alyssa made her way over to an empty area near the upstream wall, close to the open area that Clark was working in. She needed a decent amount of space, but still wanted to work in First Tower itself as much as possible. Most of the time, she was away from their tiny little flicker of civilization, and seeing things like campfires and buildings soothed her.

It was frustrating that she needed such a pointless gesture. She was a Ranger, she was good at this, being in the wilderness was her element. But she was just too weak to actually spend as much time as she nominally should be able to, finding beasts of burden or fibrous plants for Henrietta and copper deposits for Oliver and...

Didn't matter. She had new magic, and she was going to use it.

⟨Tumbling⟩ created a thin barrier of Air, Force, and Wood mana around her entire body. Alyssa constrained that to around her hand and triggered ⟨Blowback⟩. While being stationary sharply curtailed the effect of the subskill, a half-step forward and a directed punch still caused a plume of her mana to extend outwards and out of her direct sensation.

And that was what she needed.

[Ignite] ⟨Conflagrate⟩ ⟨Blowback⟩

This time, a plume of fire blossomed off her fist, hot but not burning, and traveled forwards a couple feet before dissipating. A smile bloomed on her face, and Alyssa did it again. And again. And again. It was hard on her mana, but she never seemed to run particularly low. She was throwing fireballs around without a single skill needed, and her combos were finally paying off.

It was definitely something she needed to practice, because it could sometimes react a bit unpredictably with what she assumed were the same clouds of ambient mana that were feeding her extra Generation, but she could adapt.

"I was unaware you could cast spells! This is fantastic!" a voice pulled her down from her emotional high, and she glared at Clark as he interrupted her revelation.

"Well, you know," Alyssa tried to play it off as nonchalant. Clark got too excited about this stuff, because she wasn't spellcasting. Combos were nowhere near as bookish as actual casting required and therefore weren't exclusively the domain of nerds. "I've got my talents."

"Yeah, but casting isn't one of them." an annoyed voice chipped in. Apparently Oliver had also overheard Clark's statement and decided to be a spoilsport. "That's not a spell. A spell is magic worked by leveraging knowledge as to how the Tapestry works, plucking at its strings without the aid of a skill to enact some form of change in material reality."

"But you utilize skills when you cast your spells though? Or is [Scrollcast] not a skill?" Clark asked, causing Alyssa to furrow her eyebrows in thought, but a smirk started to trace itself across her lips.

Oh yeah...

"That's different," Oliver dismissed. "Casting skills are tools same as any other. Simply using a casting skill won't accomplish anything unless it's used in concert with other forms of magic."

"Then I guess I am a spellcaster," Alyssa triumphantly shot back. "Because using ⟨Conflagrate⟩ without any other magic won't do anything."

Oliver turned his glare towards her, "Meta-skills are also different! Spells require dedicated and directed control to shape the mana into a receptive state, sometimes with the assistance of a casting aid, which may be either a physical focus or a skill acting as a proxy, and then directed towards a specified end with purpose and accomplishing a feat that isn't directly the offshoot of combining the effects, but needs to be individually tailored based on the surroundings."

Alyssa paused for a moment to pretend to think, tapping her lip. "Check, check, check, check, and... check!" She shot a wry smile at Oliver. "Are you sure you weren't just describing what I was just doing? Because I need to really heavily control my mana, filtered through skills and subskills, then combine it with a casting skill - ⟨Conflagrate⟩ - to get a result that isn't the direct outcome of combining the inputs like a caveman."

It was only obvious that she was a spellcaster. Casting was the best thing ever, and all of the coolest people ever were spellcasters. Really, why was Oliver trying to deny it? But oooh, was he ever turning such interesting colors. The lines that had replaced his eyebrows were glowing the reddest she'd ever seen them, and he almost looked like a disco ball from all the colors strobing across his skin.

"No! You're not a caster! Casting requires... gestures!"

Alyssa punched the air in the way she'd found worked best for the spell.

"Practice!"

Alyssa simply raised an eyebrow, but Oliver didn't slow down.

"Chants! Flexibility! Creativity!"

On a bit of a whim, Alyssa held her hands together, directing a ⟨Springlaunch⟩ into each of them and concentrating mana into the space between her palms. "Lemme... castaa.... fireball!"

She flung her hands apart at the same time she used her normal fire-blast combo, and the ball of mana she'd accumulated shot forwards and impacted the ground, where it burst into a fountain of flames.

Oliver seemed to have fully lost the ability to speak.

"So!" she said brightly, "Now that I'm a caster, you should teach me some more spells!"

"You're not a caster!"

"I think this will be tremendously helpful, thanks for the help! When do you want to start?"

"No!" Oliver seemed to be somewhat broken and it was glorious. "No, no, no! You are not a caster! I'm not teaching you anything!"

"Very enlightening," Alyssa stroked her chin, "Truly, us casters are such wise people."

"No!"

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.