Dan awoke with blurry vision and a splitting headache. Luckily, the worst of his injuries had more or less healed themselves, but even the nanites of the System struggled with head wounds. He sat up and tried to blink away the vertigo. About six feet from him, the rest of the party sat around a campfire where they were roasting a shank of the creature. Hunger warred with physical weakness for a couple seconds before Dan pulled himself to his feet and took a couple wobbly steps towards the fire. Yep, definitely a concussion.
“Ah, the dreamer awakens,” Nora stated, waving to him with a grin that matched the fire’s warmth. “Come on and get some dinner. It may surprise you, given the primitive accommodations, but with a little seasoning and some proper cooking, the meat tastes terrible. Still, it’s free and it’s protein. We’re going to need some energy to keep exploring.”
“The meat will help.” The world wobbled as Dan tried to nod. “But I took a bit of a hit to the head there. It might take a little bit before I’m ready to fight, and I would prefer it to be against something much smaller than whatever the hell that thing was. I don’t really have much control over fire, and I can really only use it to start myself and something near me on fire. Not really the most useful expenditure of mana.”
“Is there any way that you can polish that up?” Nora asked with a glint in her eye. “We wouldn’t need you to jump on the back of the next monster if you could throw fireballs.”
“I could work on it?” Dan replied with a weak shrug. “I have some affinity with fire, but I can’t say that it’s an area of focus. Practicing with fire had a nasty tendency to leave me covered in burns and soot, so I tried to stick to affinities that were less likely to physically harm me.”
“Don’t you just have a class skill you can use?” Emily asked, taking a bite from the greasy, charred meat. “It might take some practice to be any good with it, but you can always work on it while we cut our way through this place.”
“I actually don’t…” he began, only for Nora to cut him off.
“Maybe you should just practice on the monster’s corpse,” she suggested pointedly, warning him into silence with a pointed look. “Subterranean monsters are often weak against light and fire. You should’ve alerted me to your affinity, so that we could have figured something out before we left.”
“You do realize that you basically kidnapped me, right?” Dan asked as he wandered over to the corpse, shank of meat in hand. “I mean, you tricked me into a fight, and then woke me up the next morning to tell me that I had to go on a mission of some sort. We never even talked about what I could or couldn’t do.”
“Wel,l Dan,” she questioned sweetly as he tried to focus on creating just a small amount of fire out of his free hand. “What can you do?”
There was a flicker in the darkness as his mana ignited, but it quickly guttered out as he lost control of the stream of mana feeding the flame. He frowned and pushed again, and this time the fire remained, lighting up the misshapen and burned corpse of the beast. It danced about an inch above his palm for ten seconds before he accidentally fed it too much mana, causing it to flare and die. He tried again, creating the flame and walking the delicate line of ensuring that it received enough mana to stay lit while avoiding oversaturating it. As he stared at the soft red flame hovering over his hand, Dan thought back to his chemistry. Fire consisted of a fragile mix of combustible gases, oxygen, and heat. If he added too much of any category, the flame would either smother itself or burn all available fuel in an instant.
He focused on the magic flowing through his attunement stone. After a second, the gases and heat produced by the ignition of his mana warmed him. Almost immediately, he became lost in the sensation, and the flame burned out of control, singing his hand before disappearing. Frowning, he shook his hand to dull the pain and tried again. He could almost feel the System kicking in and dealing with the heavy lifting of moderating the flow of energy. Struggling, Dan maintained the small red flame for almost a minute before he was distracted by the System.
Detecting new skill. Tentative name Create Flame assigned. Would you like to designate Create Flame as a skill?
The flame wavered, on the verge of him losing control. Instead of relying on the system, Dan created a jet of oxygen and combustible gas, pushing them both forward through the flame. This time, a burst of flame erupted from his open hand, fully illuminating the chamber as it traveled almost five feet before it faded. He frowned and looked at his hand; the heat from the blast had burned him, too.
“No,” he whispered, dismissing the System prompt. He needed something more than a flame to light a candle. He needed to fire the combustible gas through the flame with enough speed that it only truly started burning away from him. He needed the speed of the combustible gas to carry it into a target while it was still burning. What he needed was a flamethrower.
In the back of his mind, a voice shouted at him. This same process had taken days of experimentation and burns back on Earth, but he didn’t have that luxury. He needed something flashy, and he needed it now. Desperation might not be the best kind of inspiration, but it was all he had in stock.
He recreated the dim red flame with a thought. Then, he created the mental image of hydrogen gas and imagined throwing it as fast as possible through the open flame. This time, the fire first appeared almost a foot and a half ahead of him and shot forward almost fifteen feet before it dispersed into nothingness. This time he nodded in satisfaction, the slight wobble of the vertigo lost in the rush of elation over achieving his goal.
Dan could still feel the fire through his attunement stone. It was still something cold and weak, little more than an explosion given direction. It would do for now, but deep down, he hungered for more. To let his mana run wild and create a pure flame with no effort wasted to guide or shape it. Something with the heat that could burn through all adversity, that could melt the very bedrock of the world itself. He smiled to himself.
Detecting increase in Fire Affinity. Fire Affinity is now 2.
Detecting new skill. Tentative name Flame Jet assigned. Would you like to designate Flame Jet as a skill?
“Yes,” Dan said quietly. His whole body tingled for a second as the self learning nanites of the System updated themselves. An unpleasant feeling, but still much better than the unending waves of pain he was used to when Samantha updated the System. He turned back to the party sitting around the fire, a strange lethargy settling over him. Even with double his previous mana pool, those experiments had almost run him dry. He’d need to work on his fire affinity if he wanted to be able to use it in combat.
“That is what I do,” Dan said with a bit more authority than he felt. “I learn quickly. If I practice Flame Jet enough, I should be able to use it a lot more freely.”
“Did you just teach yourself a skill in a half hour?” Andrea asked, her previous wariness having given way to surprise. “I just watched you go from being unable to maintain a basic flame to firing a beam of fire, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” Dan shrugged. “It’s still a weak ability and it hogs mana every time I activate it, but the more I work on it, the stronger and cheaper it will become. I really should have developed my fire affinity more. Electricity is tantalizing, but it just takes too much energy to get it to arc properly. I’m sure it will be powerful later, but right now I need some firepower, and ‘Flame Jet’ seems to fulfill that need.”
“I suppose different classes have their strengths,” Nora said through gritted teeth, staring at Dan. “Now, are we ready to head out, or do you still need to rest your head? As far as I can tell, the stone you landed on is dented and you are fine, so I don’t possibly see why we would need to delay ourselves.”
Dan felt the slight wobble of vertigo and winced. He had been so excited by the idea of creating a flame skill that he had forgotten about Nora’s rather explicit warnings not to let anyone know that he was casting without a class. She didn’t exactly seem happy with his demonstration, so he avoided complaining about his still-throbbing head and the lethargy of his mana exhaustion. It just seemed like a better strategy to hope that he didn’t get jumped by some sort of bug-eyed terror before his mana regenerated than to brave the storm of annoying her any further.
The next hour or so of exploration went smoothly. Although Nora noted a couple creatures, most of them scuttled away rather than approach the four-person party. Dan was a little disappointed that he wouldn’t have a chance to test out his new skill, but no one other than Nora could see well enough in the dark to get anywhere near the monsters as they ran away, so pursuit didn’t seem like the best idea. He wasn’t disappointed, however, with the silver they found. Silver ore might be a better term for it, but many of the creatures dwelling in the caves would dig in the walls for the stuff. Already, they had collected almost 15 pounds of silver-laden stone. Not quite enough to pay off the Cragson sisters’ contract for the expedition, but they were only a couple hours into the cave.
“I still can’t figure out why they dig this stuff out,” Dan spoke as he hefted a fist-sized chunk of ore. “I get humans coveting it. It doesn’t corrode and it’s relatively rare, giving it value. I just don’t understand why a breed of monster, let alone all monsters we’ve run into, would mine for the stuff.”
“It’s a magical catalyst,” Nora replied from just outside of the circle of light cast by Andrea’s torch. “Silver conducts mana better than anything but gold or mythril. That’s why you see so many magical weapons and armor made from silver or silver alloys. It’s not the strength of the metal, that’s for sure. Steel or copper will do in a pinch, but products made from them break down fairly quickly and are generally considered inferior. Runescripters are rarer than silver, so it’s strange for you to see a magical tool crafted from anything less powerful than silver.”
“As for the monsters…” A shuffle of fabric from the darkness indicated a dismissive gesture from Nora. “Biologists believe that it helps them with their mana in a similar way. We do know that magical creatures tend to rank up faster if given access to silver, even if it doesn’t have any mana of its own. No one has bothered to look much deeper into it than that. We know that they love the stuff to the point where you can bait traps with it, but beyond that, who cares? They’ll mine it for us; we just need to kill them and take it from them before they can actually ingest it.”
“I suppose,” Dan pursed his lips as he replied. He might not be the scientist that Doctor Weathers was, but he was still inquisitive by nature. Simply accepting a dead end and ignoring it because there was no immediate profit just didn’t sit right with him. Still, he didn’t even know where to start on pursuing that piece of knowledge. What could he do, monitor what deadly captured monsters did with silver to see why they mined it?
“Shh!” Nora interrupted his thoughts as she put one hand up, indicating that the party stop. “Quick, put out the torch; I think we’ve found a nest of some sort.”
Dan peered ahead, but he couldn’t really make anything out. He did hear an occasional clicking that might be associated with something walking across the stone floor, but even with the torch, he was relatively helpless in the cave. Then, the torch went out, plunging the entire chamber into absolute darkness. He shifted uncomfortably, images of the creature that greeted their journey into the cave sneaking up on the party playing through his head.
“Ants,” Nora whispered. “Big ants. It looks like they’re carrying some silver into the nest. Probably for their young. The good and bad news is that ants have a lot of young. There are almost certainly hundreds if not thousands of ants in that nest. On the other hand, there is almost certainly an insane amount of silver in there.”
