Mana uses

Chapter 36: Mana uses

/Woooooo, Skill shop time! The thing fucking sucks!

No, but seriously, hear me out there. The Skill shop is a total piece of shit. So, first of all, for a system that prides itself on fairness and equality, it's pretty dumb that some species will just be able to get Skills for cheaper, but you know what, FINE. We all start at different levels after all, and since everyone is affected by these requirements, it's still somewhat fair.

My biggest problem with the Skill shop is how clunky it is. There is no filter function, so you're basically locked into whatever you find while browsing, though it is alphabetically sorted. Also, the Skill shop can at absolutely ANY point in time be filled up with new Skills, whenever you meet conditions to unlock them. But you won't be told when you do, because why would you?

Also, no one knows the conditions. But people have tried to map them! Without success. Because they can vary from person to person. Maybe someone need to touch a rock to be able to buy something like <Iron Skin>, meanwhile someone else would need to meditate in the mountains for a thousand years while fasting to do the same!

It's inconsistent and absolutely stupid.

But you know my favourite part? You can't even appraise the Skills before buying them. You need to spend exorbitant amounts of time finding the Skills you think might be necessary for you. Then, you need to buy them, whatever their price may be, because that price is uniquely linked to you. And if you don't find a Skill, double check, you might just not have unlocked it yet.

To top it off, it's a fucking scam sometimes, too. Some Skills do little to nothing, and you need to spend tons more points to even get them to be usable! It's bullshit!

Alright, I'm calm again. See you in the next issue, motherfuckers. Don't croak./

Issue 4 of "This System Sucks!" by an anonymous "heretic and scoundrel"

- - - - - -

Mercury was feeling quite rough after having walked back to the gloryhall. He had a headache, his knees were weak, his vision was blurry, and he felt sick to his stomach. All that kept our cat-hero going really was simply a sense of dignity. There was no way that he would let Avery see him be this shaken by a simple attack.

Willpower: 54 -> 55

Well, it was something. He still had little idea of what willpower did though, as unfortunate as it was. Still, for now he simply had to focus on getting back to base.

And so, he did it. A little wobbly, but he managed to stay on his feet the entire time, trying his best to not lose any details of what happened after Avery left the scene. Ugh, his fucking head. Why did that piece of shit have to knock him out.

Avery looked at Mercury with a hint of concern, but he respected his decision to walk himself. After all, as a guild master, he was supposed to support and protect his members, not try to force them to do anything. If Mercury insisted on hunting down a dragon, Avery would not stop him, though he sure as hell would try to knock some sense into him.

But he wasn't doing that. He simply wanted to walk on his own. As long as Mercury wasn't about to endanger himself or anyone around, Avery could easily let it slide. Everyone wanted to be respected, after all, and many people were much more prideful than some small act like this.

The guild master had always found pride a little strange. It was right there with honor. Both of them were concepts, and rather flimsy ones, too. Pride amounted to a simple feeling of respecting one's own actions, yet why did that mean one had to be respected by others? Was pride in oneself not enough for some people?

Avery didn't understand, but he could respect it nonetheless. He supposed that if someone had pride in being seen as something like heroic, that was fine. As long as it worked for them.

But what he understood even less was honor. Honor was sometimes an obstacle to oneself. It stopped many things in life, and it could place huge restrictions on one's actions. Why care about honor? Who cares if your dad wants you to marry a noble's son? Fuck him, run away, marry whoever you want to, or don't marry at all.

Who cares about being nice to everyone? Or even being polite? If people don't like your rules, they don't have to play by them, and you don't have to play by theirs. Honor wasn't something to be glorified, honor was a chain in Avery's mind.

So was pride, too, but to a lesser degree. Pride forced oneself to push harder than usual, or it could make one arrogant, but it would never truly chain one's freedom down.

But honor did.

It chained you to family, to tradition, to the dead. No, that wasn't freedom. That wasn't even close to freedom.

And still, honor was worse than that in combat. Giving your opponent a chance to speak last words. Introducing your techniques and explaining them, even the little act of giving your own name. Where was the excitement, the thrill, the adrenalin? Where were the ambushes and the tricks, all the foul play and the dirty mindgames?

Avery could understand sometimes giving techniques names. It made it easier to link them to muscle memory, and sometimes could even create an entry for them in the system, allowing you to level them up. But Avery had always been a fan of mindgames, so all his jumping kicks were named after punches. He even had a punch he liked to call <Bootlicker>.

Why would you ever give your opponent even the slightest advantage in battle? Still, he couldn't just name all of his techniques randomly, some of them were absolutely true to their nature. A <Facecaver> would target a face. If he handed that one out after an <Asswhooping>, which actually targeted the shoulders, it always worked so well.

So why would anyone ever fight honourably?

Avery shook his head to get back to reality, realizing that by now, both he and Mercury had arrived back at the gloryhall of Stormbraver. The guild master smiled to himself.

"Alright, Mercury. Let's get you a bad, eh?"

The mopaaw next to him only nodded in reply, as Avery delivered him to sickbay, where one of the nurses made sure to get him back to proper health. They did a quick magical scan on him, to see if all the mana in his body was still tame, then repeated the same for stamina. All healthy.

Rudimentary reflex test, and he was looking okay. Pupils and reflexes normal. No brain hemorrhages, no major internal damage, some issues with vision and balance. It should heal over time, and he would probably be ready to get back out there tomorrow. They gave him a small dose of ridroot syrup to help with the pain, and get him well on his way to recovery.

"Alright," Avery said, after the medical examination was done. "Is your memory intact Mercury? If you feel dizzy or need some more rest, let me know, we can also deal with this later."

"No, it's alright, I got this," Mercury gave a slight nod, the blanket of the human-sized bed a little heavy to him, but his Strength was high enough to manage comfortably.

"Good to hear. So, what happened?"

"After you left, I continued searching for any objects of interest, and my smelling Skill levelled up. After it did, I could catch a hint of lemon from one of the drawers in the storage room."

"A drawer? What was in there?"

"Just documents. I found them after cracking the lock, literally. But the smell wasn't coming from the documents, but from something under them. So, I tested to see if there was a second compartment, below the bottom of the drawer."

Avery leaned forwards as he heard this. False bottoms weren't uncommon, but you wouldn't expect to find them in a normal merchants' store. "What was in there?" he asked.

"Well, vials. Tiny ones, about a centimeter high and wide." Luckily, the system translated measurements. It would have been a chore to learn new ones. "The had glass stoppers at the top, so I thought that whatever was in there was probably dangerous. It was a yellow liquid, with the faint lemon smell I had been sensing."

"Did you appraise it?"

"Of course, it was my first instinct as well. Unfortunately, my <Appraisal> is still not very high level, so it only told me, and I quote: 'Small vials filled with yellow mana (liquid).' Unfortunately, that's all I got about those. So-"

"Liquid mana? You're sure it said that?"

"Uhm, yeah, pretty sure."

"Ugh..." Avery clasped his hands together and hung his head for half a second, before focusing on Mercury again. "What a chore. You know how liquid mana is gained?"

"I don't, no," Mercury replied calmly.

"Well, liquid mana doesn't really appear much in nature. Most of the mana outside of living things is gaseous, and very rarely can we find liquid or solid mana in arches. But the major sources of liquid mana, especially places where you'd find enough to fill some vials, even small ones, are cores."

"Cores? Like the one inside me?"

"Exactly like that. The problem with natural liquid mana is that it is very rarely even remotely pure, and even more rarely does it have an attribute, and mana without an attribute is useless outside a core."

"Why is that?"

"Well, you can shape your mana with your thoughts, yes?" Avery asked, trying to see how much Mercury knew about it.

"Yup, and channel it through my <Mana Veins> to enhance my physical strength, what about it?"

"Well, the mana inside your body is much purer than on the outside, since it is evaporated and condensates again and again. It doesn't do so when it occurs in nature, so it is contaminated. And it doesn't bend to anyone's will when it's outside of a host body. So natural liquid mana is rarely useful."

"So you get liquid mana from cores?"

"Exactly. Cores are usually attributed to some degree. The mana inside them is pure, and whoever used the mana probably cast more of a certain type of spell, though it can vary from person to person. Now, to get this liquid mana out, you have to get the core. And you get someone's core out by killing them and cutting it out their corpse."

Mercury flinched at this. "That sounds... gruesome."

"It is," Avery nodded, "but it's standard work. Any monster with some strength to it, meaning one that isn't a wild animal, will have a core. These cores slowly change shape after being removed from their hosts. They become less rocky, and change colour, eventually looking like a shiny pearl. They form affinities usually during this 'ripening' process, depending on their surroundings, or mana channelled into them, though in rare cases you have hosts that already use mana with an affinity."

Mercury found this a little gross, but continued to listen.

"And then, when they have ripened, the cores are cracked open like an egg and release a small amount of attributed mana, which can be used for potions. Yellow can mean a few things, but usually, when outside a host, it means lightning mana. Mercury, the vials you found are most likely bombs."

"BOMBS?!" This wasn't what he expected with a medieval world, what the fuck?! What did he mean, bombs? Did he just find a casual stack of grenades or something? Huh?

"Yeah, bombs," Avery continued, keeping his composure. "Usually these are weak, if not borderline harmless, since most cores drop very little liquid mana, and if it isn't from an exceptionally powerful individual, the mana is also usually impure and not very useful. Most of the time, the mana would then be further purified, before being mixed with other ingredients to make a variety of potions."

"So then why are these ones bombs?"

"Well, potions wouldn't be kept in such tiny vials. They are usually much more diluted. You drink some of them, and depending on the potion, you splash some on yourself. They do a variety of things, strengthening, curing poison, healing, heightening reflexes, whatever you can imagine. But why would you hide those? They are perfectly legal after all."

"... tax fraud?" Mercury suggested quietly.

"No, I mean, yeah, that too. But potions need to be made by experts and those usually sell them themselves to build credibility of good work. Also, potions don't have liquid mana as an absolutely necessary ingredient. But your appraisal listed it simply as liquid mana, which leads me to believe it's undiluted. What level exactly is your <Appraisal>?"

"Level 2."

"Yeah, just reliable enough for me to guess it. I think that whoever it was that knocked you out wanted these vials of liquid mana. Because it reacts very, very violently with pretty much anything. Mana wants to be kept in one large unit, after all. This means that for the liquid mana to reconnect with the one in the air around, it needs to become gaseous and shed its affinity. It then releases all the energy that keeps it liquid, and its affinity, very rapidly and violently."

"So it explodes?"

"Exactly. Do you remember how many vials there were?"

"Uhm... I think like 8 or 9?"

Avery sharply sucked in some air at this. "Alright, that's a lot. If I imagine an average lightning bomb going off 9 times that would be highly problematic for Stormbraver."

"Wait, so this family was illegally selling bombs?!" Mercury realized. Maybe the church had been right with wanting to execute them?

"No, I don't think so. If they sold bombs, they'd need much more equipment to refine mana and so on. Even if they were to just sell them, they'd be much more wealthy, and at least spend some of their wealth, but they lived humble, quiet lives. I think they were used as a station for handing the bombs over to a buyer, kind of as an unknowing middle man." The guild master crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair.

"What a pain in the ass. Sigh. Alright, Mercury, we might need you to get healthy sooner rather than later, because when the city council shows up for the trial tomorrow, they might wanna hear about this."

"I'll do my best."

"Let's hope it's enough, because if it isn't, I might still have to drag you there," Avery said, giving Mercury a crooked smile. "But that's all for now, I guess. I gotta go set up someone to track whoever it was that decided I'd look better as a porcupine. See you tomorrow, my guy."

And with that, Avery was gone.

"So this is a grenade, huh?" he murmured to himself, looking at the small vial of yellow liquid he had in his inventory.

Avery had been gone for an hour, and while it took Mercury some time to find the drawer and crack open the lock, he still had more than enough time to read through the description of the vials and sack one of them before he was knocked out. When he saw a glowy thing, he would take it, but he wanted to make sure it wasn't too illegal to have one of these before he told Avery about it.

He still decided to keep quiet, not because he didn't trust the guild master, but because he thought it might be a good idea to have this handy, just in case something nasty ever tried to go after him...

Well, he wouldn't need to use it in a while, at the very least. For now he was safely in a bed at the hospital. Though he didn't quite know if the people who wanted to have the bomb in his inventory would go after him.

Ah, it didn't matter anyways for now. Not like he could change it. If he gave it to Avery, he'd just put himself in more danger, and this building was probably one of the safest places to be in the city right now. After all, Avery was still in the building, and so were multiple seasoned godseeker veterans.

Damn it, he regretted it now. There had to be some way for him to call Avery back, right?

"Hello? Anybody there?"

Mercury called out at medium volume, but luckily someone still heard him, as a male nurse came in.

"Yeah? Anything you need?"

"Sorry to bother you again so soon, but could you get Avery back here for a moment, I have something to show him."

"Alright, I'll try my best. One moment."

Just like that, the nurse was gone and Mercury was alone in his room again. This was awkward. He didn't quite know what to do now. Should he do mana practice? No, Avery might come in anytime soon...

Booooring. Maybe he should do calculations in his head? No, wait, he still had his backpack full of scrolls in his inventory! This was the optimal time to try and get into some reading!

Mercury was barely a few paragraphs into one of the bits of writing he had on him, when he heard footsteps come up the stairs. Good, hopefully Avery wouldn't be too mad at him. Nah, Mercury thought he probably wouldn't be, the man was pret-

Just as Avery was about to enter the room, there was a huge explosion downstairs, and the entire building shook. Ah, fuck.

In a split second, he decided to rush up the last few stairs, simply kicking the already debilitated door off its hinges, as he tried to get to Mercury as fast as possible.

Right there, in the window, sat one of them. The exact same guy who had already put an arrow in Avery's shoulder. And just as he entered, they shot another one, directly towards his stomach.

Mercury barely had time to react, only to scream.

"NO!!"