Class Shift 3- Chapter 3 (Patreon)

Chapter 3- Elevated?

Tim’s first action was to glance around the battlefield. The houses were eerie in their emptiness. It likely didn’t help that the clearing was strewn with the remains of whoever had lived here before as well as three dead monsters now.

Armon was already up and had joined the rest of his team. Tim gave them some space because he didn’t know how badly hurt Lacinia was. Sojourners could shrug off most things that would kill normal humans, but Tim was still learning just what the limits were.

His shoulders drooped a second later as he felt the empowerment of Blood’s Potent Rage leave him. There hadn’t been many chances to try it out so far, but each time this happened, he felt like he was coming down off of a high. His mind struggled to catch up and he had to push the fuzziness away.

Mischief leapt up onto his shoulder. The tiny mouse was back in his base or scout form rather than the much larger battle form. “Are you okay?”

Tim was immediately suspicious of the solicitous tone. Mischief was a true companion. Tim would trust the mouse with his life, but that didn’t mean that the mouse also didn’t enjoy teasing him more than just about anything else in the world.

“I’ll be fine. I just feel like my head is underwater.”

“That might be an improvement, but seriously, I don’t like it when you use that ability. It always feels like there is static in your head and I have trouble hearing your thoughts.”

“I guess that’s because raging is about action rather than thought.”

“You might want to think that through. You already aren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

“Your concern is noted. By the way, what was with you jumping on that monster. I know you’re level thirteen now, but it was still a hundred times your size.”

Tim got the sense that the mouse shrugged, although he still wasn’t sure if that was possible for it. The longer they were bonded, the more human like traits Mischief seemed to pick up. “I guess after it shot off all those icy things that it just reminded me or a really big rat.” Then the confusion left his voice and Mischief added, “Rats that big shouldn’t be allowed to live, let alone attack my familiar.”

Tim groaned. It was still an ongoing debate between them as to just who was who’s familiar. He glanced over at the Silver Eagles and decided now wasn’t the time to take the issue up. Instead, he quickly looted the monsters. Since the battle with Magnor he had discovered that he could not issue loot and other commands related to his soul space just by thinking and no longer had to use words.

The haul was odd, but he figured they could decide what was valuable and what was junk. If Tim had to guess, he would assume that it was mostly crafting materials.

Ice Blood- 2 vials

Dir’glacericus spikes x2

Dir’glacericus eye teeth x6

Dir’glacericus leather x12

By the time he finished looking through the material, Armon coughed softly behind him. Tim turned and nodded. “Don’t worry we’ll split the loot.”

The look of concern on Armon’s face didn’t soften.

Tim asked, “What’s wrong? Is it Lacinia?”

Armon nodded before replying, “Cassie is our new healer. She is a spiritualist as you might guess. She insists that healing the wound isn’t the problem but that Lacinia is cursed now. She says that there is a strange energy which has infested the wound.”

Tim didn’t know what to say. Lacinia had never been his biggest fan but he certainly didn’t want her to die. After a moment of quiet he asked, “Is there anything to be done?”

“Cassie says we need to let her rest here for a while and then we can move her back to the caravan. I know you’re probably in a hurry to get back but she won’t be able to be moved for a while.”

“Maybe another of the healers has some experience with this?” Tim offered.

“Maybe, this isn’t really my forte. It’s odd, but everything about this encounter was odd.”

“How so?”

Armon glanced back at his friends but must have figured that there was nothing he could do for them now, so it was okay to talk. The elementalist loved his theories and even more loved to dig into new things. “You remember when we encountered those dir’ursi?”

“Yeah, how could I forget. My very first quest in Iocusinte was an escort quest,” Tim tried to sound funny despite the general mood.

Armon offered him a weak smile. “Well, they were roughly the size of bears right?”

Tim nodded.

“That’s the way it is with all dir creatures. They are affected by some dark magic which comes from the untamed lands. They gain their aura. Their bodies are often mutated with an elemental aspect like the dir’ursi had fire. But their base size wasn’t changed, or not very much. They were bears before they were affected, and they stayed that same size.”

“Ah, so you are wondering why these dir’glacericus were so much larger than whatever creature they were turned from.”

“Exactly, that and more. They should have been much smaller, something close to the size of a regular porcupine. But they weren’t. They weren’t just dir’ericus which would have been the proper name for such a creature, but instead they were much more powerfully mutated to have ice as part of their nature.”

“Hmm…,” Tim began, “I assessed them as I was running in and they had two status conditions I’ve never heard of, maybe you know more.”

“I can try. What were they?”

“Elevated and Hunting.”

Armon scrunched up his face as he was thinking. “Well, I’ve never heard of Elevated as a status condition although it might offer some explanation for why they were so large and a higher level than we would have expected. The other is really rare, I’ve never seen Hunting on a monster we fought but I read about it. Apparently, it means the monster is searching for a specific target.

“If I remember the reports correctly, they believed that it granted the monster increased stamina and gave it a general sense of the direction to their target. How a monster gets that status or how a target is selected is something that the monster encyclopedia never discussed.”

Tim thought about it for a minute. Knowing that Azmarin or Bal’drock likely had something to do with it made sense. They would have been able to set monsters on his trail if anyone could. That just raised the question of what elevated meant.

On a whim, Tim walked around looking for some of the frozen blood spilled by these monsters. The corpses had disappeared after he looted them, but he hoped that blood they had spilled during the battle might still remain. Once Mischief knew what he was looking for the mouse jumped down and started to help in the search. It was odd for the mouse to be helpful without at least faux complaining about it, but Tim would take it.

It was surprisingly hard to find some despite all the blood which had been spilt. One of the features of magical weapons which Tim had appreciated up to this point now became annoying. Not having to clean his weapons was nice but left him without a sample.

Only when Mischief investigated one of the houses in this tiny settlement did he find some of the blood which hadn’t been destroyed as a sample.

“It looks like one of the farmers stuck a pitchfork into one of them. There is frozen blue blood all over the tines,” the mouse said.

Tim ran over to where the mouse was. “Brave farmer.”

“Dead farmer,” Mischief replied.

Tim wanted to point out that it was better to die fighting than to die running but wasn’t sure his familiar would share that sentiment. The mouse tended to be highly pragmatic. Instead, he bent down and held his fingers against the blood covered tines.

It felt like glass or ice was coating the end of the farming implement. Tim reached out through is trait to try and understand what had been done to the dir’glacericus. The fiends were fond of saying that the power is in the blood. Tim hoped that the clue was in the blood as well.

At first it was hard to focus his mind but eventually he started thinking about episodes of various crime lab shows and how they talked about blood. His mind sank into the blood, and he felt the nature of the beast it came from. Then once he was focused on it, he cast Tim’s Augur and started pumping extra mana into the spell.

The information came bit by bit.

Blood of a dir’glacericus.

Duh… Tim was frustrated. He knew that much, but he kept channeling in the mana and waited.

Touch of the divine remains upon the blood.

That was more like it. He just needed to know how it was done.

Excess Chaos was pumped into this creature. This resulted in dramatic growth and leveling.

Hmm… that matched up with Tim’s guess. Now he had to lean into his trait while still holding the spell. As the two merged in his mind he began to see how Azmarin had modified this creature. He was sure it was Azmarin even though he couldn’t say why exactly. It just made sense and that was the feeling he got from the spell.

Tim suddenly felt a headache coming on. He pulled his hand back and released his focus. Apparently peering into the work of a patron or former patron was not easy. Then again he would have been surprised if it was. He shook his head but his high stats quickly worked to eliminate any pain he was feeling.

As he was trying to relax a thought hit him. No. It couldn’t be that easy. Could it? Thinking about it a bit more he realized that easy was unlikely the best word but simple might fit. This might very well explain the patrons didn’t grant Ephemeral as a trait. Changing himself, powering up to beyond the level twenty cap was making him strong, but then again so was the Crucible and the trait he stole from Magnor.

But if his suspicion was right then he could see why Ephemeral could be dangerous. He laughed out loud, and Mischief asked, “Are you sure you wanna do that?”

Tim shrugged. “Nope, not sure at all, but I’m still gonna try.”