Chapter 5: Deprived

Chapter 5: Deprived

I breathed a sigh of relief and stopped pushing Mana into Noxious Grasp, letting it fade off. The Wood Wraith’s corpse fell out of my arms as I leaned back, exhausted. That was not a good way to start the morning. I looked at my arm, which was still bleeding. Luckily, the Wood Wraith hadn’t gotten through enough of my Health to start doing any real damage to me.

Contrary to what a lot of Unclassed civilians assumed, Health operated slightly differently from Stamina and Mana. Instead of being a numerical representation of how much damage your body had taken – like how the others were representations of how much more you could exert yourself, or how many more Spells you could cast – Health was like a shield that protected your body from damage. The more Health you had, the more it would take to start seriously harming your body.

That didn’t mean that as long as you had some amount of Health, you were impervious to damage – the blood coming out of my arm was proof enough of that – it just meant that someone with a higher amount of Health in their pool was going to be harder to cut open. You could still die when you had some Health left, and survive despite having it all drained away; if your Health dropped to 0 from getting tiny cuts on your arms and legs, it wouldn’t kill you, it would just make it a lot easier for you to die from something else.

So, with that said, I was a bit worried by the current state of my Health. At 33/120, it wasn’t like I was three fourths of the way to being dead, but another bite to the arm could very well break the bone instead of just cutting the skin open. However, despite that, my mind was largely occupied by something else.

I’d Leveled up! It hadn’t gotten me nearly as much as when I first got my Class, but still, every Stat counted, and getting more Mana regeneration from Conjuration would mean I could Rank up Noxious Grasp even faster. I’d also gotten my first point of Intelligence, but it didn’t seem to be doing much. I assumed I must need more of it to actually start feeling the effects. I also knew that Intelligence increased Mana and Mana/Minute, so at least it was helping me Rank up my Spells. And speaking of Ranking up, the System notification also said something about Time Loop ranking up. I went ahead and checked it out.

Time Loop – Rank 1

Type: Activated

Go up to2 minutes back in time, resetting your Health, Stamina, Mana, and other Talent cooldowns – as well as the rest of the world – but preserving your memories and the rest of your Status.

This Talent activates at will, or automatically when you would die.

This Talent may only be activated once per day.

Ah, so not a huge change in its functionality. I mean, proportionally speaking, I had just doubled the extent of my time traveling powers (it still felt absolutely wild to say that – time travel) but realistically, an extra minute wasn’t going to make a huge difference. It would be a different story if, say, the Rank up allowed me to use it twice a day instead of once, but maybe that would come sometime later – at least, hopefully it would.

And speaking of Time Loop, I had just been reminded that I could go back in time to kill the Wood Wraith again for double XP. The prospect tempted me. I checked my Status to see that the XP requirement for my second Level was 100. Killing the Wood Wraith had gotten me 32 XP, so it wouldn't get me all the way there, but still. In my situation, an extra 32 XP could make a huge difference.

That said, though, it was still early morning – the sun had only just come up over the horizon, in fact. That meant that it’d be a long time until Time Loop would refresh again. When I checked the Talent, I found that I had over 16 hours until it would refresh again. That was a long time to live in the forest without a safety net. If I was randomly attacked by a monster... Yeah. I wanted to have a second chance for at least the majority of the day. If it were the evening and Time Loop was about to be reset anyway, I’d probably go ahead and use it. But right now, not so much.

And before I forgot, I sat down and closed my eyes, focusing inward to assign my Stat Points. I’d thought it over, and I figured I should stick with putting them all into Conjuration. I was on the verge of not being able to kill the Wood Wraith back there – I was left with only 8 Mana to spare – and that was one of the weaker monsters in the forest. So I felt like increasing my maximum was as important as possible. And on top of that, there was what I mentioned earlier – increased Mana/Minute translated to an increased speed at which I could Rank up Noxious Grasp, which in turn translated to even more damage I could deal over the course of a fight. So, with that in mind...

You have used 3 Stat Points to increase Conjuration.

Your Conjuration value is now 10.

Name:

Arlan Nota

Age:This chapter's initial release occurred on the n0vell--Bjjn site.

20

Strength:

10

Class:

Minute Mage

Level:

1

Endurance:

12

Class Type:

Magic

Ok. I was complaining too much. I’d actually been getting a lot more proficient with my Mana control, thanks mostly to the intensive regimen I had been forcing myself under, so the whole practicing thing wasn’t quite as bad as it had been before. Really, I was just very, very thirsty, and it was really starting to affect my thoughts. Who knew being on the verge of death would make me so moody? Speaking of being on the verge of death, by the way...

You are suffering from Dehydration.

All Stamina regeneration has been disabled.

Yeah. My Stamina was currently resting at 30/66, so a bit below half. And I’d have to make due with that until I got some fucking water down my gods-damned throat. ...Sorry. There was that moodiness again. But hey! It wasn’t all bad. Because of my practice with Noxious Grasp, it was now at 5/11 XP, which was nice! Plus, I’d been killing any small animal I could catch while I walked, so I’d gotten a decent bit of XP of my own. I’d gone from 10/100 to 23/100, so 13 in total. Part of me felt like I shouldn’t be going through so much effort to kill things when I was on a tight Stamina budget, but the concept of just giving up on that free XP felt criminal.

Speaking of my victims, I was still in the process of considering whether or not it was a good idea to drink their blood. I remembered having read something about drinking raw blood not being enough to sustain a Human. It’d been in a book about this group of power-hungry serial killers that’d cropped up a few years back in one of the bigger cities. They acted like Vampires, and actually convinced the authorities that there was a group of the blood-suckers hiding out in the city because their behavior matched up so well, but they turned out to just be Humans who wanted to be Vampires. Anyway, the authorities never ended up catching them. Instead, since they drank the blood of their victims, they started having so many health problems that they all just died off naturally.

I’d started reading the book because I was trying to research monster types and the library was sorely lacking on anything having to do with Vampires, but the book didn’t actually have much on that, instead focusing on the Human killers. That said, it was still so interesting and weird to me that I finished the whole thing. I’d always wanted to go to one of those big cities in the Kingdom, so it was a nice glimpse into the inner-workings of those densely-populated areas. Anyway, the book ended up coming in handy anyway! I learned that the Human body absolutely could not survive when blood was used as a replacement for water.

But... maybe it would be fine for just a day? Meh, whatever. I’d try drinking blood if it was a last-resort situation. It seemed pretty gross, so I really didn’t want it to come to that in the first place.

Oh, I was full on Mana again, time to cast Noxious Grasp for another second or two. ...Agh. It still really hurt my head to do that so often. In fact, I was pretty sure I was beginning to have problems with my vision again. For a second there, I thought I spotted a gigantic bug-like figure through the treeline, scuttling across a nearby clearing.

Wait.

Shit!

I dashed over behind a rock, peeking out from around it. What was that thing? It was, like, a giant scorpion or something. And when I said giant, I meant giant. With its claws held out and stinger hovering above its head, it was easily twice as tall as me, maybe even larger. It didn’t even need venom; the sword-length stinger would be enough to decapitate me, not to mention those claws that could snap my entire torso in half!

I’d never heard of a monster like that living near my village. I guess it just went to show how far out I really was. The forest was massive, and had little ecosystems and territories within it. So, if I was seeing stuff I’d never heard of before, I must’ve stumbled into one of those smaller areas. I knew that was a possibility, but still, it was unsettling to see something that I just had zero knowledge of. I didn’t even know what Level it was! It could’ve been 5, it could’ve been 20. Who knew? The only way for me to find out would be to damage it, and that was not happening if I could help it.

In fact... yeah. I slowly started creeping away from the giant scorpion monster. Thankfully, I’d noticed it soon enough that there was a good bit of distance between us, so there wasn’t too much of a chance that it would notice me. Still, it was a good reminder that dehydration wasn’t the only thing trying to kill me out here.

Once I was sure I was out of its sight, I relaxed and kept walking, this time a bit more warily.

Another few hours of walking passed by, these much more uncomfortable than the last. It wasn’t that anything had changed, just that all of the things from before had been getting progressively worse. My legs were killing me, the constant casting practice was making me feel like someone had cast a miniature Star of Extinction inside of my head, the sun was beating down on my skin, and the dehydration had progressed to the point where I wasn’t even sweating anymore, my body apparently deciding that it needed that fluid elsewhere and relegating me to suffer under the unmitigated heat.

You are suffering from Severe Dehydration.

-1 Stamina.

Those had started popping up about once every thirty minutes, constantly draining my already-low Stamina reserves. Right now, I was working with a measly 12/66, and it was dropping faster than ever. By this point, it was a constant struggle to even stay standing. A groan escaped from my cracked, dry lips as I trudged up another hill, hoping the vantage point might let me see something.

Nope.

I remembered that morning when I’d fought the Wood Wraith. Specifically, I remembered the two glare attacks it had made on me, and the 12 total Stamina they’d drained. It hadn’t seemed too bad then, but now... I would have done anything just to get a single point of that 12 Stamina back.

I wouldn’t die if I ran out, not immediately. Instead, once your Stamina hit 0, your body would shut down, and you’d collapse. You wouldn’t be able to physically exert yourself in any way until enough time had passed that your Stamina had regenerated itself a bit. And due to the Dehydration effects, I couldn’t regenerate Stamina at all, no matter how much time passed. So if I ran out, unless somebody set down a bucket of water next to my face to let me lick it up like a lapdog, that’d be it for me. I sighed and began stumbling my way down the hill.

Just a few more paces, I thought to myself. That’s it. Just a few more.

On the brighter side of things, I was really starting to see the fruits of my effort with my Noxious Grasp training. I mean, I seriously felt like a Level 30 Classer had taken a warhammer and slammed it into the side of my head, but I was also getting faster and faster with activating it. Hopefully, next time I was in a live combat situation, it wouldn’t take so long to turn on, like it had before. Oh, also, my Spell XP had crawled upward to 9/11, so I was really getting close to seeing some numerical fruits of my labor, too!

Fuck.

My foot caught a root, tripping me halfway through my journey down the hill. I fell straight to the dirt and tumbled and rolled all the way down, hitting a hard rock at the bottom that stopped my momentum in its tracks.

You have been slammed into something. 4 damage.

Your Health is 49.

I coughed weakly, drawing a raspy breath as I lay down on my back, looking up at the canopy of leaves above me. Hiking through these gods-damned hills and trees for hours upon hours on end while malnourished and dehydrated made the idea of just lying down and fucking dying very appealing. At least then I wouldn’t feel like shit anymore.

But I planted my hands down onto the ground, and pushed myself up. Shaking and struggling, I slowly got to my feet, holding onto the rock for stability. I drew another anemic breath, and started walking.

I would push on. I would find water. I would live.

I would do it.