Pieces of Sonder

Freya thought the mushrooms looked cute.

Pale white and covered with dirt, they hopped about aimlessly. The mushrooms came up to knee height when they stood up straight. When hopping, their top-heavy heads squished down into their stems.

She heard rumors that mushroom demons haunted this patch of forest, but she had checked it out previously and discovered nothing. However, today there were quite a few.

They were fairly harmless compared to other demons. Given the opportunity, they would jump on their victims until they lost consciousness, then attach to them and slowly leech out their life. However, they were only a threat to young children, as most adults could easily survive bashes from their pillow-like bodies.

“Ready?” Infamous Biscuit asked, taking his staff out of his inventory.

Freya nodded, rubbing her hands together. She was still unused to not carrying her shaman’s staff. Today she wasn’t wearing her black shaman’s cloak either. Instead, she picked more slim-fitting clothing that would allow her to move better.

Infamous Biscuit stepped aside. Freya walked out into the meadow.

Immediately one of the mushrooms bounced towards her. Freya let it get close. Then as it jumped to attack, she punched as hard as she could.

It flew back but immediately jumped upright. It aggressively bounced back to her.

[Lesser Fen Mushroom]

[Lvl 3] [25/30 HP]

Steadying herself, she waited for it to come back to her.

When it jumped up at her, she hit it again. 

Despite having never practiced throwing a punch, she found the movement natural. When the mushroom approached her for the third time, she tried something different.

Infamous Biscuit told her to read her innate skill descriptions on the way over to the practice field. In order to activate them, she had to understand what they did. 

Recalling one of her innate skills, she prepared to replicate the description. 

Taking a solid stance with her hands up, elbows in, and feet angled should-width apart, she waited for the mushroom to attack. As it jumped in range she snapped a punch with her left, then used her full strength to hit with her right.

The mushroom flew back with a bit of damage, but nothing else happened.

“I don’t think my innate skill activated,” Freya said to Infamous Biscuit.

He casually swatted away a mushroom with his staff, “Skills can be hard to activate the first time. You got lucky with that Shockwave skill. Try saying it out loud. Sometimes that helps.”

Feeling a little ridiculous, the next time the mushroom came at her, she called out, “Light Jab Heavy Straight!”

The first jab didn’t feel any different, but the second made an impact.

The mushroom sailed back and then disappeared into a cloud of black smoke.

[Light Jab Heavy Straight]

[Lvl 0 → Lvl 1]

Freya grinned.

She repeated the process with her other martial artist’s innate skill. The mushrooms were easy to get a knockdown on.

[Sweeping Kick]

[Lvl 0 → Lvl 1]

By this time, they had attracted a lot of mushrooms. Infamous Biscuit wasn’t killing any of them, mostly just batting them Freya’s way. As he had warned her, all her skills had a cooldown time, so she couldn’t repeatedly use them. But she could use regular punches and kicks as much as her stamina allowed. 

Once the cooldown timer on her Light Jab Heavy Straight skill ran down, she prepared to use it again.

She could picture the motion perfectly in her mind. Additional pointers even popped into her head. While throwing the first jab, she should not move her body, but she needed to rotate her hips through the second punch.

Taking everything into mind, she tried the skill again.

This time she didn’t call out the skill, but she still felt the burst of extra damage in her cross punch.

Poof!

The mushroom she hit evaporated into smoke. But there were still plenty more in the practice field.

Eventually, with so many mushrooms a few hit her. After the fourth one jumped on her, she checked her status bar.

[198/200 HP] [90/100 MP]

It wasn’t going to have much of an effect, but she could try out her last innate skill. She used her Shockwave skill to kill off one mushroom and knocked down another with a Sweeping Kick to gain herself some time.

“Self-healing!” she said, holding a hand over her heart. The skill’s description didn’t leave any hints on how to activate it but focusing on herself made sense to Freya.

A rejuvenating wave washed over her.

[200/200 HP] [78/100 MP]

[Self Healing]

[Lvl 0 → Lvl 1]

Now with all her innate skills activated, Freya focused on getting rid of all the mushrooms. 

Had she found this many mushroom demons a week ago, Freya would have thrown a lulling potion to calm them and then exorcised them with her staff. Now she didn’t need all that extra gear. 

Grinning from ear to ear, Freya cleared out the mushrooms in the meadow. Unlike Infamous Biscuit, she preferred not to call out her skills. It was just as easy to think about them in her head and go through the motion. As the last mushroom poofed out of existence, a chime sound went off and a line of text blinked at the top of her vision.

[Level Up!]

[Lvl 13 →  Lvl 14]

“Nice job,” Infamous Biscuit nodded his head. “That demon you and Azer took out and the event we did must have primed you to level up.”

“So you really do ‘level up’ by killing demons,” Freya said more to herself.

“You already had a high level for an NPC. The highest I’ve seen is some NPC demon hunters that had a level of 15 or 16.”

“Oh, you mean demoniclasts? I know some of them. One apprenticed along with me to gain some shaman knowledge before he entered into the Hunter Trials.”

“Hunter Trials?”

“In order to get a demoniclast permit, you need to pass the Hunter Trials. They’re held every three years in Corrin.”

“Huh, I wonder if there is a game event related to that,” Infamous Biscuit shook his head, “Anyway, let’s move away from here. The field should reset in a few minutes. I want to try my vine-pine and that watermelon bombs skill book out. Also, do you have any other pointers on Meridian Manipulation? I tried what you said about directing energy into my staff, but nothing really happened.”

Just as Freya was about to respond, she felt a tickling sensation on her wrist. She pulled up her sleeve. A short message appeared in black ink.

{How is the bad idea going?}