Skills and Trouble

『Chronicles of the Blood Tower』

Rasmus walked through the streets filled with nightlife in Eden as he found himself a cleaning magic function on his way back from the hunting area. His blood-red tomato appearance had disappeared and he was back to his usual self.

The bright lanterns dimly glowed while he directed himself through the streets towards the inn to get a good night's rest.

As he was walking by the several shops and stores that were starting to close, he did a double-take with his eyes as he walked across a store with a sandy-mesh colored exterior. The windows were closed below the sign as it read : Tony's Tower Skills.

'Hmm..' , Rasmus pondered to himself whether to go in, since it was already late and the store was about to close.

Rasmus rolled his eyes around berating his laziness and walked towards the store.

Inside he found himself looking at rows of stones with little name plaques; next to them a sheet of paper describing a skill in the Tower.

The stones looked similar to the skill stone he had found earlier for taming and he skimmed over the descriptions of the several skills.

In all honesty, as he was looking at the skills, Rasmus didn't see anything too eye-catching as they were all rather childish sounding or exaggerated. Not only that, but he could pretty much guage how much practicality they had from the descriptions and the pricing was rather… ridiculous when thinking about the practicality and usefulness they really had.

As Rasmus continued to skim through the descriptions, he didn't really have much of an aim in coming inside because he just wanted to window shop around and learn more about this place called "The Tower".

A man could be seen in the back shifting boxes around with a somewhat hurried expression and Rasmus took a guess and assumed it was the owner getting ready to close shop.

"Uh…. Hello?", Rasmus uttered out with a somewhat expectant voice.

The man quickly jerked his head around from looking at the storage he was in and met his eyes with Rasmus'.

He raised an eyebrow and examined Rasmus with an inquisitive look.

Rasmus looked at the man who was obviously giving him a weird stare. The man had a rather messy appearance with frizzled gray hair and split ends apparent. His wrinkles under his eyes made it quite obvious that he had quite some age on himself as Rasmus gave him an expectant look to urge him on to reply.

"Ah! Yes what can I do for you sir? Just a warning we're closing shop rather soon…", the old man's voice waned as his expression clearly showed tiredness and some fatigue.

"Just looking around. I'm just trying to see what skills and spells are popular these days.", Rasmus replied nonchalantly to the old man.

"Hm..", the old man tilted his head and thought about Rasmus' question with a pensive expression.

"Well I can suggest a few skills, I'm assuming you are part of the warrior branch of classes?", the man asked Rasmus, pointing at his silver spear.

"Something like that…", Rasmus let his voice trail off to keep his answer somewhat vague.

Rasmus was trying his best to keep his identity somewhat secret as he didn't know how much was okay to reveal at this point and what wasn't. For all he knew maybe he was just overthinking all of it.

"Right this way.", the man turned around and led Rasmus around the store as he pointed out and explained several skills that were selling well.

Rasmus took his time looking over some of them earlier and wasn't all that impressed with the skills on sale. It seemed like he wasn't going to get much help last minute from this place as he thought about the upcoming Floor Test.

However, Rasmus did learn a bit of information about the origin of skill stones and how they worked.

Essentially, skill stones acted as bits of recorded information from inhabitants of the Tower, about the way they utilized their mana. The Tol would record the information automatically to the regular and served as a medium of sorts to allow the regular to receive immediate functioning of the skill.

Rasmus was about to give his farewell to the shop manager and was about to wave him goodbye as he had a sudden thought and decided to ask the old man for some information about the skill he received earlier.

"Hey mister! Before I go, I received a skill stone today called "Taming" it doesn't look all that useful but I was wondering if you have any advice about it or anything you've heard related to it.", Rasmus quickly spoke.

The old man's eyes shook for a brief moment as it seemed as if he got distracted for a second when Rasmus mentioned the name of the skill.

"It's not entirely an uncommon skill. In fact some people do use it especially certain classes related to it like tamers and summoners. But, overall it can be very hard to find a specific animal or monster that has a correlation with your own distinct mana signature."

"Are there any kinds of popular monsters that work like a 'jack-of-all-trades' in that case?", Rasmus asked as seemingly this Tower was much larger than Earth it seemed.

"Yes and no. There are some creatures that do work like that and the most common ones were slimes. But unlike what one might think, they were actually incredible monsters to tame and had infinite kinds of potential. But eventually one of the 9 Great Families felt threatened by their existence and almost wiped out the entire species. Or really they felt threatened about a certain individual who used one that had evolved several times to be threatening enough to take care of several High Rankers." The old man replied at length.

Rasmus inwardly was a bit shocked as in rpg games of sorts slimes were supposed to be utter and incomptentent trash. To hear that they worked as not only a great monster to tame and had high compatibility rates was exciting to hear yet depressing as he thought of the entire species almost being wiped to oblivion by some pretentious family.

"Thanks for the information. Are there any other types of monsters you might suggest with a high compatibility rate?", Rasmus asked as his voice sounded a bit hopeful.

"Well… Not really since you seem to be of the warrior class. If you went down the caster's route and more specifically down the dark magic route you could work with chimeras. But those take a lot of work and tend to be artificial creations with no sentience. I suggest staying away from that kind of thing in general. Anything else I can help you with before I close up here?" The man asked Rasmus with a bit of an anxious expression.

Rasmus smiled faintly noticing the man's expression and waved him off as he left the store.

'I've got quite a bit to work with. It also seems that taming isn't completely useless, but still it's rather conditional.'

Rasmus collected his thoughts and set back out towards the inn under the dim lighting of the street lamps and floating light orbs in the night sky.

---

As Rasmus checked the time via his Tol, he was coming up on the end of the street where the inn was located.

He heard a bit of ruckus which was rather unusual for this time, coming from inside the entrance which also worked as a bar and diner. Rasmus creased his brows with a bit of irritation since he liked peace and quiet but decided he would do his best to ignore it as he walked towards the door to enter.

"Hahaha! Hey there missy, we want a couple more drinks over here!", a young and rowdy voice could be heard as Rasmus walked inside and spotted the owner of the voice sitting at the bar.

The owner of the voice was a seemingly young adult male with slicked-back, golden hair and a pompous expression that didn't match well with his clothes which seemed to try and scream "I'm rich and spoiled!"

What was even more disturbing to Rasmus was where the man's hand was. He had a group of friends around him that looked like a bunch of rich playboys and in the middle of them was Melody. She had a disturbed and perplexed expression and her eyes were anxiously looking around for an escape out of the situation.

The blonde haired man's hand however, was on her waist slowly going downwards as he started to group Melody's plump butt. Rasmus was disgusted and couldn't even keep track of how fast his facial expression changed to a rather calm but irritated expression, to one of pure disgust and rage.

"Sir.. Sir! Please!" Melody's cries were drowned out in the disgusting laughter of the men surrounding her that were getting more and more brave with their actions.

Rasmus unknowingly gripped his spear.

Suddenly the air in the room started to heat up to an excessive temperature and the noise started to die down extremely quick.

The blonde man, the ringleader of sorts shifted his eyes around in annoyance at the sudden increase in temperature.

"Oi bitch what the fuck is wrong with your heating system?!" the young man shouted at Melody as he retracted his hand from her bottom and held it up in the air as he was about to slap her.

As he brought his hand down in a motion he started to grin but his arm was caught short by something.

"Hey.", a chilling voice resounded in the suddenly quiet inn.

Chapter 12 - Fin