Evil Avalon - Volume 1 - Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Experimenting with Skills

The next day was a bright, sunny Sunday with a cool southerly wind that rattled my windows.

I’d suffered hay fever in my previous world, so the bright sunshine and strong winds had come with a snively nose and itchy eyes. As Piggy, however, I could enjoy this time of year without those depressing symptoms.

Kaoru and the others had set off for the dungeon first thing in the morning.

At the start of the game, the player had many students to choose from to include in their party. Akagi had honed in on the top picks: Kaoru, Pinky, and Tachigi. This grouping was well-suited to tackle the main story, side stories, and events. He clearly had a discerning eye and would need all the help he could get since he’d accepted Kariya’s challenge. Becoming strong enough to defeat Kariya in a mere month was a tough feat, but I hoped he could pull it off. Failure would make Class E a gloomy place.

The remnants of Piggy’s sentimental mind had a more irritated take as he whined, Why didn’t they invite me?! I took a deep breath to banish the thoughts to focus on what I was about to do: a test inside the magic field.

I walked toward the magic field area of the school and passed watchful security guards as I entered through the main gate. Several students still came to school over the weekend to attend club activities, so I looked for a quiet spot. On the way to the second playing field, I found a bench and stopped there. I was sure this area was inside the magic field.

The reason I was here was to perform an experiment on my skills. Though I had Glutton in one of my skill slots, a player could use three other skills without taking up any slots. These were Minor Restoration, Torch, and Aura.

Minor Restoration was a healing skill that scaled with the mind stat, but it only healed minor wounds and drained a lot of mana. It was a worthless skill. A player with a high enough mind stat was better off learning the more powerful Restoration skill. With my current mind score, Minor Restoration would drain nearly all my mana just to fix a hangnail. Such a thing wouldn’t even bother me.

Torch created a small sphere of light in your palm that illuminated your surroundings. This one was worthless too. Coming prepared with a flashlight made more sense than wasting valuable mana.

And then there was Aura. One of Kariya’s cronies had used it when they intimidated Class E. Aura’s intended use was to ward off lower level monsters, though it was effective against people. Plenty of idiots liked to overuse the skill to menace people, which had garnered it the nickname “Dumbass Detector.”

I’d chosen Torch as the subject of my experiment by process of elimination. There were no ailments I needed to heal unless Piggy’s mind counted as a hangnail, and using Aura might startle the people nearby. The Glutton skill I’d had from the beginning was likely a passive skill that was always in effect, so I couldn’t use that for the test either. With that decided, I was ready to start the experiment, but—

“Hang on... How do I activate it again?”

While playing the game, players could activate one of their saved skills by pressing a shortcut button on their controller glove. That did not apply to my current situation. Nevertheless, I tried to will the skill into activating, just like when I’d practiced firing off a Kamehameha in elementary school. It hadn’t worked then, and it didn’t work now.

“Haa... Hoo-ha!!!”

Nothing was happening, and I was getting frustrated. I was supposed to be good at the game! How could I get skills to work?

I couldn’t craft a solution, so I went to the library and borrowed a book called An Idiot’s Guide to Activating Skills. The image on the cover offended me, but the book had pictures and seemed easy to follow.

The guide explained that the first step to activating most skills was to learn how to feel magic. It was apparently simple to draw magic from magical items, and the book recommended using one that released only small amounts of magic.

I rummaged through a shop in the Adventurers’ Guild for one that fit the bill and came across a magical item shaped like a flashlight that shone when active.

“So pressing this switch makes it shine,” I said. “I’ve got that, but how do I get the magic to flow out?”

I disassembled the item to figure out how it worked on the inside. Inside the casing, a small magic gem and a metal plate a few centimeters wide had an inscribed magic circle. The magic circle’s function was probably to convert magical energy into light.

Thus, I scratched off a section of the circle and pressed the button, hoping that I’d broken the circuit. As I suspected, magic flowed from the gem. It was impossible to tell by looking, but when I pressed the gem, I could feel an unpleasant tingling like electricity.

“Huh,” I said. “So it’s completely invisible. Okay, so I need to reproduce this effect myself. Haa... Hoo-ha!!!”

I couldn’t help but strain myself as I tried to get it to work. Yet again, I ended up shouting like I was trying to fire off a Kamehameha.

A student laughed at me as she walked by.

Oops, ha ha.

As I picked the book back up, I noticed the illustration of a monkey calmly emitting magic from its body and reread the instructions beneath it. I didn’t think I’d get it, even with pictures to help... I fixed the magic circle I’d broken earlier and pressed the button on the flashlight to see what would happen.

“It just turns on...” I murmured.

Patiently, I spent the next few minutes using trial and error to activate the skill while repeatedly exposing myself to the tingling magic and switching the flashlight on and off. I knew there was magic in this world, and the nine mana points displayed on my terminal’s stats screen showed I definitely had some in me.

Believe in yourself! I thought. Hoorah!

I was just going in circles, though. Before, I’d been trying to force the magic out. Now, I tried to mimic the monkey more closely, waving my hands as if I were allowing something inside my body to pass through to the outside world. When I did, I felt some force gathering in the palms of my hands even though I wasn’t using the magical item. It didn’t tingle like the flashlight had, but I knew I had something.

“Is this my magic?” I said. “Let’s see if...”

This time, I focused on the word Torch when I let out my magic. A puff of sparkles whirled above my hands and resolved into a small glowing ball, dimmer than a miniature light bulb.

“I did it! Woo-hoo!” Oops, not so loud, I thought. People glared at me again, though they should forgive my excitement. Hitting slimes with a bat had only felt a little good. But casting magic made me feel like I’d truly come to a fantasy world, and I was thrilled.

It was time to test whether I could use Manual Activation on the skill.

The method I’d used a moment ago was Auto Activation. In the game, players could map some of their active skills to a shortcut button on their controller. The ease of use, a single button press, was its biggest advantage. However, this method had a longer cooldown period, larger mana consumption, and limited players to mapping four skills.

Players could also perform certain motions to create magic circles in the air with their fingers to activate skills. This method was called Manual Activation. The game detected these motions using the glove controller and the motion capture camera placed in front of the player. Advanced skills required complex motions that involved the whole body and took a long time to complete, increasing the chances of making a mistake. However, a successful activation greatly reduced the cooldown timer and mana consumption, which made this a valuable weapon in a player’s arsenal. Few skills called upon simple motions, so it was a no-brainer to learn these by heart.

Advanced techniques using Manual Activation were invaluable in PVP and boss fights. For example, a player could use “skill chain” to blend the start of a skill with the end of another. There was also “fake skill,” which referred to performing the skill motion correctly without actually activating the skill.

For these reasons, Manual Activation was one of DEC’s core mechanics and gave players a great deal of freedom in their use of skills. Despite that, there were no instructions on how to use Manual Activation within the game itself. Players would learn how to perform the motions by looking up information on websites, but not every skill was public, and a handful of players knew select skills.

Overall, players used both activation methods in any fight as they each had advantages and drawbacks.

At any rate, I was ready to test Manual Activation. Torch was a magic skill, so activating it required drawing a magic circle rather than performing a motion. I started by waving my hand across an imaginary board in the air in front of me to create Torch’s magic circle and an inverted triangle on top of it. After a few attempts, I realized I needed to channel magic throughout the procedure rather than in one burst at the end. When I finally got it to work, there was the same glittering effect as when I’d used Auto Activation, and the light was more powerful.

For my next experiment, I relocated to a far-off section of the dungeon’s first floor, choosing a spot where I’d be alone.

In the game, players could only use Manual and Auto Activation on skills in their skill slots or the three starter skills. I wanted to test whether I could activate a skill I hadn’t yet learned.

“Which one should I try?” I said. “Let’s start with Summoning Magic.”

In one movement, I drew a complex series of geometric objects in the air. I’d practiced my ass off learning this skill when I’d played the game, but got rid of it to free up a skill slot.

“You shall be my first pet! I summon you, Jörmungandr!!!”

The magic Jörmungandr skill summoned a giant, divine serpent. It had a high resistance to magic and physical attacks with a powerful debuff skill that lowered the level of every monster around it. It had a monster level of 75. I could waltz down the dungeon’s middle section if I summoned it.

As I’d expected, the summoning skill didn’t activate. Nothing was wrong with the magic circle, but the magic I’d channeled hadn’t flowed through. Perhaps I was too low level or had too little mana. The most likely reason for failure was that I hadn’t mapped Jörmungandr to a skill slot. It had been worth a shot.

I moved on to attempt a motion-activated skill.

“Magic Lance is the skill I used most in the game,” I said aloud. “But I might as well try a mace skill and get some use out of this bat.”

Without putting too much thought into it, I performed the same complex, dance-like motions I’d done many times before in the game, aiming at a nearby slime. This was a skill that was learnable from the expert job Weaponmaster.

“Void Slice!!!”

Void Slice was an attack that a player could only activate with a large sword or a mace. It propelled a high-density burst of aura in front of its user, damaging all within a certain radius.

“What?! It worked?! Ugh, I feel tired...”

When the skill activated, there was a thunderous, destructive noise, and my vision turned entirely red. Immediately after, my stamina drained away, and my head hurt. As this skill scaled on my strength stat and the quality of my weapon, none of the slimes in the attack radius died, although some received damage.

The bat crumbled into dust in my hands, and my mana dropped below zero, causing me to pass out on the spot.

On Monday morning, news spread in the school of a group that saved me from a group of slimes that had knocked me out. The student council officially designated me the weakest adventurer in the school’s history.