Chapter 91: Eightfold Strategy (Patreon)

Sorry for the delay! I was traveling this weekend, and so I had to edit this chapter last-minute before posting and it took a bit longer than anticipated.

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There was something thrilling about willingly going into a dangerous situation prepared for anything. It reminded Edwin vaguely of the build-up to a rollercoaster, a hint of adrenaline spiking his bloodstream and shutting down extraneous bodily functions. If he turned his Perception inwards, he could actually feel his body directing blood to his muscles and away from his digestive system.

“I want to try and do this on my own,” he told Inion, who was poking her head over the side of the cart, “I’m not going to get sloppy like I did with that one bandit. I genuinely want to see how well I can handle myself.”

She shrugged, “’Kay, but if you get badly hurt that’s on you. Only so much I can do this far from water anyway.”

“Do you need to do something about that?”

“Hm? Nah, it’s fine. Doesn’t hurt too much, basically just itches.”

While ostensibly still steering the cart, Edwin left his stick sitting next to his hand and an array of alchemical weapons inches from his other. All he needed to do was figure out what danger was present, and he’d be all set for a proper alchemist strike. His first instinct, his firevine cocktail, was no fireball… but it would do. He also made for himself a helmet out of solid apparatite, leaving only a tiny slit by which he could breathe out of.

Edwin’s carriage rumbled along, and his eyes landed on the scene in front of him, immediately letting him know that he was right to be on guard. It wasn’t quite a massacre, but there was a lot of blood. From the looks of it, a group of four had been traveling along the road, only to be set upon by… something. Bandits, maybe?

No… not quite. All of their possessions seemed to be basically untouched, which wouldn’t match if they’d been killed by robbers. An animal, then?

Edwin disembarked from the carriage and signaled for Bill to wait while he investigated the bodies. Even the birdsong faded away as he got closer, the somber mood extending even to the wildlife.

None of them- one halfling, two humans, and something that looked like a human but didn’t register as one to Almanac- were slain by a weapon Edwin recognized. Or maybe, he realized, they were stabbed by needles and then allowed to bleed out. That was what Anatomy was telling him, anyway. What sort of creature killed like that?

Heck, what kind of creature killed its prey and then just let it sit out? They must have been killed some time ago unless they all died without a sound, which seemed… unlikely…

Edwin straightened as fast as he could, head whipping around as he prepared to confront…

Nothing.

Just the silence.

Was he being paranoid? He didn’t think so, but he cast furtive glances at the surrounding woods while he rapped upon the stone path with his stick. If he was lucky…

Nope. Not lucky.

The stick struck the stone without so much as the faintest clack, as Edwin’s suspicions were confirmed. Whatever was here, whatever was responsible for these deaths was still here, and it was dampening all sound to the point of near silence. He was literally deaf to whatever threat might be lurking nearby. What sort of creature was he dealing with, and what had he gotten himself into?

Edwin pulled out his firevine cocktail, ready to throw it at a moment’s notice…

A blur of motion caught his eye, and Edwin leapt out of the way as a barrage of reddish-purple quills flew through the place he’d been standing just moments before. Tracking them back to their source, Edwin didn’t see anything…

Until he unleashed a blast of Identifies, anyway. Then he at least found out what he was fighting, even if he couldn’t see it quite yet.

Adult Titan Bear-Eater

That doesn’t sound good, Edwin thought as he rushed to the side, Longstrider barely taking him out of the way from the next volley of missiles. He could see some sort of ripple in the air from where they originated, and he threw his prepared firebomb as hard and as accurately as possible at the spot.

There was an unholy screeching sound as the silence and invisibility effects broke simultaneously, unveiling a very large, very on-fire spider, covered with violet-red hair lurking just off the side of the road, barely ten feet from Edwin. Worse, it wasn’t a full spider either, but had legs that reminded him of a cat, long, lithe, and covered in thick violet fur. Its head wasn't the normal mandibles of a spider either, but instead had the head of a lion- no mane, though.

It reared back onto its back legs and hissed, the demonic noise screeching like so many metal rods being twisted and broken. Edwin recoiled on instinct, and retreated even further from the massive threat.

It dropped onto all eights, and Edwin’s mana senses informed him of the colossal amount of magic the creature was holding the moment he activated them. It felt like…. It felt like a dark, dry desert littered with time-bleached bones. It wasn’t hot, just expansive, dry, and desolate.

The magic flared and it was extinguished, the flames burning on its back ceasing to exist without so much as a whimper. That... wasn’t great, and didn’t bode well for the fight ahead. Still, Edwin reaffirmed his mind. He wanted to redeem himself. So far, not a single fight he’d been in on Joriah hadn’t left him not critically wounded in some way, or close to it, and it didn’t matter how big the spider was, this time he was going for a clean takedown.

So… time for a plan. He was more mobile than the spider was thanks to Longstrider and Athletics, but it still could travel way too fast, as evidenced by the speed at which the monster leaped forward, its paws blurring into motion while it jumped at him.

It was only because he was ready for something that Edwin was able to get out of the way, and he pushed his physical Skills as much as possible to pull him off to the side, letting the spider jet past him and into the treeline on the other side.

Wait, what? It was way bigger than the space between the trees. How did it fit inside the forest?

It lunged back out at him, and Edwin caught a glimmer of the answer- a Skill surrounded its body, letting it squeeze between the trunks almost like it were made of liquid rather than legs. As it pulled itself into the opening of the road, the spider leaped at Edwin once more, and he had to pull on Longstrider to get him out of the way.

The process repeated a few more times, the spider not apparently learning that Edwin could easily dodge it, at least so long as he didn’t have anything else to distract him. He appreciated it, though, as it gave him time to properly formulate his plan.

So, should I focus on the legs? If I had slipstone, this would be way easier… Hm. I have magnesium now, I should probably make more lime. But okay. Legs. Chop, slip, or trip.

The legs were muscular and enormous, so he probably couldn’t cut them up. Slipping would be preferable, if he had something that might work for such. Also, Edwin was moderately sure that he had seen claws at the end of the catlike limbs, so that was a further complication. That left tripping, which suffered from the same problem as slipping, namely that he didn’t have anything to trip it with, to say nothing of the troubles that came with attempting to trip something with eight legs.

Unfortunately, he didn’t really have access to Sapper’s Apparatus. Oh sure, he had the Skill. But even though he’d brought down the time it took for him to use it, anything that would be large enough to go under the spider’s legs would take him a few minutes of concentration to make, let alone eight of them.

Okay, so its legs may not be as much of an exploitable weak point as Edwin had hoped. What about ways to kill a spider? It seemed more like a tarantula than a black widow, and Edwin hoped that similarity extended to any weak points it may possess. Which were….

He drew a blank. Tarantulas had never really interested Edwin, which meant Memory would have to do a lot more work to pull up any relevant bits of information than it might otherwise need to. Work that he couldn’t really manage while focusing on evading the enormous arachnid. He wasn’t going to have a repeat of his encounter with the Reaper, where he got so distracted he took a perfectly avoidable wound.

Well, spiders were arthropods. While it may have been half cat, the arthropod portions seemed to be basically the same. So, what did he know about arthropods?

Still not much, honestly. But, their exoskeleton was probably weak in the joints, and Edwin would do well to focus his efforts there. Maybe he could stab it with some kind of poison? Set it on fire from the inside?

Edwin’s brain kept racing at a hundred miles an hour, and he realized that despite all of his vague combat alchemy preparation, he’d never actually trained with or practiced actually using his alchemy in combat, and this was perhaps not the best time for a live run, but here he was and so he’d just make the best of it that he could. He’d make more definite plans after this fight.

He spared a glance at the carriage, and noticed that Inion, Bill, and the wagon itself were encompassed by some strange bluish-green Skill bubble, sustained by the fey. Huh. Was that why the spider didn’t seem to notice them? Still, he was kind of glad that the spider was focusing on him rather than them, as he was much more capable of dodging than his hard-working pony and slacker friend.

The spider rushed at Edwin once more, and he finally got a chance to really study it. The bottom side of the spider’s abdomen was free of the glowing violet hairs that shimmered across the rest of its body. Seemed a bit odd, given its size, but he wasn’t going to complain. While no giant glowing eye, it was, hopefully, still a weak spot.

Now, what would he use to hit it? He doubted that poking it with a stick would do much, and most of his arsenal probably wouldn’t be too effective… or he could try his firevine cocktails again, and hope that it could only extinguish itself where it had hair? Or maybe it would recoil again and Edwin could throw a rock at it or something. He did have some apparatite crystals pre-made for that exact purpose, after all.

Okay. So, grab a cocktail and set it off against the underside of the creature’s abdomen. When it recoiled backwards, he’d take one of his crystals and throw it at the section between its abdomen and… main body, whatever that was called. With luck, it would be enough to penetrate through its exoskeleton and he could go from there.

The monster lunged at Edwin again, and landed with all eight legs skittering across the ground, trying to hit Edwin. Fortunately, he was outside the creature’s (admittedly massive) reach, and was able to easily dodge even further away with just a tug on Longstrider.

With the creature’s next lunge, Edwin led the beast further away from the treeline and more onto the stone road. He didn’t want to set the forest on fire, after all. As it approached close enough… there!

A solid underhand lob of his weapon brought it slightly off-center of the spider’s body, breaking open perfectly and igniting the underside of the monster in a massive fireball. Edwin triumphantly waited for the spider to rear back again…

Instead of standing on its back legs, the spider hissed again, and the violet hairs seemed to vibrate. Within moments, the screeching had completely stopped, the sound vanishing alongside all other ambient noise in the area, just like the monster had been doing when Edwin had first approached the area. If that weren’t bad enough, the light around the monster began to shimmer and become hazily obscured. Within a few seconds, the spider was a shadowy blob. Fortunately, it didn’t become invisible, but it still made it hard for Edwin to properly track the creature.

Annoyingly, it extinguished his fire as well. Great. There went that plan, and that hypothesis. He couldn’t even properly throw his apparatite rock because of how shadowy and murky the spider was! No way he could pull off a precision attack when it was like that.

Okay, so what was plan B? There had to be some other great weakness that he could exploit. It was just so big, there had to be something.

Hmm. Square-cube law?

It was commonly known that spiders and ants were absurdly stronger, proportionally speaking, than a human. Except, that wasn’t actually a product of their biology, but rather the result of their size. Anything that small would be much stronger proportional to their anatomy than something of a larger size, and that was pretty much entirely based on the mathematical principle that was the square-cube law.

While magic may have messed with it somewhat, the basic premise should hold. Muscle, being functionally two dimensional, squared in size as a creature became linearly larger- length and width of the tissue expanded. However, volume of both the creature and their surroundings were all cubed­- height, length, and width all expanded.

Thus, it might be more accurate to say not so much that smaller creatures were stronger, than it would be to say that everything around them was way, way lighter. Lifting ten times their body weight simply wasn’t as impressive at those scales.

All that was to say, the massive spider in front of him was definitely on the wrong side of the square-cube law. The fact it could even exist was already something of a violation- the respiratory system of arachnids couldn’t scale to those sizes- but Edwin wagered whatever magic allowed it to exist didn’t extend too terribly far. Even from an evolutionary standpoint, why would an ambush predator that was already the size of an elephant need to be magically strong as well? No, much more likely that it couldn’t take that much more weight.

So the update to the ‘make it fall’ possibilities was ‘squish it.’ It… was probably easier than the others, if nothing else, and had the benefit of reminding Edwin of squishing a spider with a newspaper. He could drop his carriage on it perhaps, but that was an awful idea for so many reasons.

A gleam caught Edwin’s eye from where the fallen travelers lay. The one not-human of the group had a sword. It was still sheathed, and the hilt was somewhat obscured, but it might still work. He may not have any actual training with a sword, but he didn’t exactly need it for a direct weapon, did he?

Two steps with Longstrider later and the blade was in his hand. It wasn’t anything too special, but it looked well-made enough to serve Edwin’s purposes. He dodged out of the way from the spider attacking him once again, and a halfhearted attempt of swiping at its legs later, he was by the tree line.

He’d never tried something quite like this before, but Edwin had made sure to pick a tree large enough around that he could feasibly pick it up, but not so large that its diameter was longer than the meter or so his sword was.

The spider lunged at him, but Edwin dodged out of the way and the monster vanished back into the undergrowth. He prepared for its return, but was caught off-guard by, instead of a lunge, a volley of violet hairs being shot at him. There was a Skill involved, he could see, but it looked more like one for accuracy rather than a ‘give yourself the ability to shoot hairs as a projectile’ Skill, and wasn’t that something of a scary thought, that this was just something it could do naturally?

The hairs struck Edwin flat-footed, and while a lot of them stuck in Edwin’s sturdy jacket without penetrating all the way, a few still hit him in his extremities, peppering his arms and legs with hairs. There were a couple that hit Edwin in the head, but his helmet fortunately protected him well enough there.

Well there goes my perfect battle, Edwin thought ruefully. Fortunately, none of the wounds he took were too severe, though they did go a fair ways into explaining the method by which the unfortunate victims of the spider had been killed. Perhaps the hairs disintegrated naturally after a short period of time? It wouldn’t be the strangest thing Edwin had seen.

Still, it did put a slight damper on Edwin’s plan, predominantly because the spider had yet to emerge back out into the opening. Hm. He didn’t actually need the spider out, did he? Not for the first part of his plan at least.

Edwin returned to his tree, hefting his sword into a two-handed grip and planting his feet on the ground and anchoring himself in place with Flight, pushing Harvesting and Athletics as much as possible as he swung the blade at its trunk.

It worked much better than Edwin had anticipated- while not quite as smooth as butter, Edwin’s strike did pass through the entirety of the tree in a single stroke, though the reverberations traveled up the blade and into Edwin’s arms, predominantly his right thanks to his grip. Surprised, he released the blade and watched his weapon fly into the woods.

Well… he didn’t need that anyway.

Before the tree could fall to the ground, Edwin grabbed it, holding it with only a bit of difficulty thanks to Packing. The weight and inertia was a bit of a pain, and Packing didn’t help with rotational momentum so he’d need to be careful, but he could manage.

The spider tried another salvo of violet hairs aimed at Edwin, but with his own personal tree to hide behind, managed to stop pretty much the entire attack.

Unusually, the spider seemed to fairly quickly realize this tactic wasn’t working and reemerged onto the road with a flex of its spatial Skill. Unfortunately for it, it wasn’t able to properly identify the trap waiting for it.

Edwin hefted the tree as much as he could, then dropped it right where the spider was due to arrive- thank you, Numeracy- allowing the full weight of the trunk to crash down onto the spider, pinning it against the ground and slowly crushing its abdomen. It screeched, trying to free itself, but the tree wasn’t going to stop crushing the arachnid’s body just because it complained…

Edwin’s thought died as the tree was eaten through by the creature’s destructive magic. He readied himself for round two, but was unexpectedly relieved when the bottom half of the tree rolled off the side and onto the creature’s right side. Three of the creature’s legs burst immediately, revealing themselves as normal spider legs just disguised as those of a feline.  The other was struck flat, and the monster splayed out, helpless and immoble as Edwin hefted the top of the tree and dropped it onto the monster’s body.

Within thirty seconds, the horrible hissing had finally stopped as the spider finally died.

Edwin sighed and dropped onto the ground. That had been… quite the fight, and he was glad he was still in… basically one piece. It was nothing a potion and a night of sleep wouldn’t fix, anyway, so he counted it as a win.

Congratulations! For slaying an Adult Titan Bear-Eater, you have unlocked the Titan Spider Hunter Path!

Level Up!

Skill Points 692→697 (Average level: 40)

Bomb Throwing Level 49→50

Flight Level 37→38

Longstrider Level 30→32

Numeracy Level 35→36

Ritual Intuition Level 25→26

Oh cool, another Trophy path. He idly wondered what sort of Skill it might grant as he fished out a general-purpose healing potion and downed it. The hairs stuck in his limbs had vanished at some point towards the end of the fight- he hadn’t noticed when- leaving him bleeding at a steady rate. Once he took the potion, though, his bleeding began to slow and he could feel the itching of skin beginning to scab over at high speeds. The apparatite container he’d kept the potion in dissolved away with just a flex of his will, and the glittering motes of light drifted to the ground.

He looked at the battlefield with unwounded eyes, coldly wondering what to do now. He should bury or burn the spider’s victims, of course- it was just the polite thing to do, if nothing else- but what about the spider itself?

The violet hairs still glowed slightly even in death, which suggested that it might have some kind of inherent magical properties. That meant alchemical ingredients! He really wanted to see if he could isolate whatever annihilation or desolation type mana the spider was using to delete stuff like sound or light in the area.

Well, he had a Skill for it- two if Alchemical Dismantling and Harvesting counted as different- and he may as well put them to work!

Edwin’s eyes caught the bodies of the spider’s last victims. Fine, he’d take care of them first.

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While all four of the travelers had a coin pouch at their belt, it was predominantly filled with ves and ager, not a single grai in sight. Still, it was money and Edwin didn’t have any better alternatives to dealing with it, so he pocketed it all. The halfling wore a small, nonmagical silver pendant in the shape of an upside-down ‘V,’ and the not-human had an intricately carved wooden bracelet, filigreed with silver as well.

They were both probably a bit valuable, but they just weren’t terribly helpful to Edwin personally, and he felt awkward about looting bodies for personal artefacts besides. Money was one thing, but he just wasn’t comfortable with taking semi-valuable trinkets to pawn off at a later point.

The rest of their belongings fell in a similar situation. None of the humans or the halfling had any weapons beyond a knife on them, not counting the lost not-human’s sword. Beyond that, other than some food, which Edwin gladly took, they predominantly just had some miscellaneous travel gear and their clothes that wouldn’t be that helpful to him. He just didn’t need bloodstained clothing with holes in it. He’d be spending enough time repairing his own outfit after this fight, and he didn’t want to take on even more.

The burials were easy enough. Inion didn’t help, unsurprisingly. Instead, she spent the time poking at the spider, making inane comments about whatever flitted through her mind. Well, she also spent a bit of time supervising his digging efforts, but it was primarily spent at the spider.

By leaning on his old trick of reframing his digging as ‘harvesting dirt,’ he could get the Skill to engage with his task and make every single shovel cut through the ground and even tree roots with ease and help him quickly grow the size of the pile of dirt next to the hole. Stamina helped even more, and meant he could continue at nearly full effort for the half-hour it took to dig out enough dirt that his eyes were level with the ground.

Properly dug, he set each of the bodies inside gently, spending a moment of silence for each fallen, and filled the hole back in. Edwin was glad he’d done so first- they were already attracting flies.

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He made sure to be fully geared up when he finally approached the corpse of the spider, gloves, goggles and hood covering every inch of exposed skin. It was basically inevitable that he’d poke himself with one of the spider’s hairs at some point, but he still wanted to minimize the frequency of that occurring.

And so, armed with an apparatite knife and box, he began to slowly try and cut through the hairs.

At first, it was slow going, as he needed to angle his hand in an awkward angle to shave away the pokey quill-like protrusions, but as he kept at it, and felt his Dismantling skill level more and more, he fell into a bit of a rhythm.

The spider was large enough that he would never manage to get all of the hairs cut away, but it also meant he’d have more than enough for pretty much any purpose he could think of. In the end, he filled up a good-sized box with them, and they found a nice corner of his carriage to live in, casting their faintly sinister glow through the crystal.

After the hairs came the venom, and while Edwin wasn’t entirely sure if the spider had venom, given its lion-like mouth, he was glad that he had checked (and wasn’t bitten). There were no less than six fangs which had a channel for toxins to run along, and a corresponding venom gland hooked up to them. Getting to the venom gland was a bit of work, but Edwin managed it in the end via careful use of Flying to hover above the spider’s body and cut into its carapace after it had been cleared of hairs (which he naturally added to his box). It actually required him to Infuse Dismantling to get it to work properly, much to his surprise.

The Infused skill cut through the carapace like butter, and he seriously wished he had made the discovery during the fight, rather than afterwards. Well, next time he fought an enormous magical creature he could try to use his Dismantling skill as a weapon.

…That was probably why he’d gotten it from Alchemical Warrior, wasn’t it? Seemed kind of obvious in retrospect, if he could use it as a weapon to pierce magical or alchemical defenses. Ah well, now he knew for the future.

Getting the venom out was… tricky. Normal tarantula venom wasn’t particularly potent from what Edwin could recall, but he didn’t trust that information in the slightest. Beyond the issues that might arise from him misremembering, it didn’t necessarily apply to lion-headed 10-foot-tall monster spiders whose hairs could just straight-up destroy stuff, and he wasn’t keen on experimenting on himself for this.

What he ended up doing was creating a bit of a closed syringe with Apparatus and using Improbable Arsenal to expand the interior of the container, pulling in the venom as the space expanded. Cool! He hadn’t expected that to work.

He repeated the process another dozen times, until he had a respectable collection of the gray/purple liquid stored away, the syringe replaced with a more appropriate sealed container.

He also checked to see if the monster spider had any silk glands. Sadly, at least as far as Edwin was able to tell in his limited experience, it didn’t. It was a shame, because if he had been able to get giant spider silk it would have been amazing.

The last thing to deal with was the carapace itself. It was fairly strong for its weight and thickness, after all. And while Edwin didn’t have the space to deal with all of it, he did still take a few sections of the material just to try and do something with it at some point.

By the time he had completed everything, it was late afternoon and he was tired. The fight had left him running on pure adrenaline, to say nothing of how sore his arm was. Then, digging graves for the victims and now dismantling the spider? Sure, he could keep going for the rest of the day thanks to Stamina, and if he had some talsanenris rations, he’d be even better off, but those were more crutches than a true solution.

He heard a clattering down the road, and he turned to see a wagon pass by him, pulled by a pair of horses and driven by an avior who looked around at the carnage- a downed tree, a massive spider, and Edwin standing in the middle of it all splattered with blood and spider-detritus, before wordlessly looking at Edwin with horror, then wasted no time in snapping their reigns and encouraging their horses to pick up the pace.

Edwin couldn’t help but chuckle a bit at the idea of the Gilded Feather trying to figure out what was going on, and was kind of glad that nobody had seen him earlier while he was still… engrossed in harvesting the carcass.

He had totally missed a bunch, hadn’t he? It wasn’t like there were that many people on the road, but he still tended to encounter one or two each day going the opposite direction of him.

“Inion?” he asked, slightly dreading the answer, “How many people have passed by us while we’ve been here?”

“Hm?” she yawned, “Oh, I don’t know. Five or six? I was napping for a while though, don’t know if I missed any there.”

Well, at least he wasn’t embarrassed at the time, and now he could just take and bury that thought as deeply as possible. Memory only worked with active recall, after all. It wouldn’t keep reminding him of the time he’d been so engrossed with dissecting a spider he outright missed a half-dozen people passing within twenty feet of him.

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As tempting as it was to set up a temporary lab right there and start messing around with the spider venom and quills, Edwin knew it would objectively be better for him to work slightly closer to civilization. The massive spider carcass was bound to attract scavengers, and with the recent reminder that animals could be massive on Joriah, he didn’t particularly care to meet any of them. He could have burned it, but that seemed like it could relatively easily result in a forest fire. He settled for carrying the body off the road fully and propped up against the trees, its Skill allowing it to slip between the trunks no longer active in death.

So, he carried on. Once he was out of the light forest, he could revisit the proposition. It had already been a couple days, and surely he’d leave the tree cover soon, right? He liked the forewarning that the vast, open plains afforded him when it came to people approaching. Sure, the road may have been straight as ever, but the shadows and moving foliage in the distance meant that it was still tricky to see people far away.

His thoughts were, ironically, broken by the sound of light pattering on the road behind him. He spun around, expecting another attack and his hand finding its way to a firebomb. Lack of concussive force or no, most creatures would still probably run away if set on fire.

What he wasn’t expecting to find was a medium-sized brown and white dog running up towards him, short and clean fur gleaming even in the low light of the forest.

“Why hello there, pup. What are you doing out here?” he greeted the dog, extending a hand out for the canine to sniff.

Unexpectedly, it didn’t approach, instead holding its distance and looking at Edwin with keen, curious eyes.

Stalwart Defender

…Hold on, was that a Class? Dogs could get classes?

“Kyni! Kyni! Come on, boy! Where’d you go?” a young voice called out from a bit further back, and Edwin looked up to see a boy running in his direction. He was still a ways back, just barely approaching earshot, but the dog didn’t react immediately. Instead… ‘Kyni’ stared at Edwin, not baring his teeth or growling, or even hiding his tail between his legs, just… looking at him, before turning around with a bark and, with a clatter of nails on stone, dashing back to the boy, nearly bowling the kid over.

Huh.

Edwin gently pulled Bill to a stop. The boy must have been barely ten at most, and he wanted to make sure that he would be alright. Also, dog. He hadn’t been able to spend nearly as much time with the objectively best kind of living creature since he’d been on Joriah, and the Stalwart Defender was a riddle wrapped in a mystery.

Looking again showed there was a cloaked figure a bit of distance behind the boy and his dog, the two now walking side by side.

Okay, so they did have an adult with them. That was good, at least. As the trio reached his Identify range, Edwin caught a brief glimpse of gold from the adult, and a quick Identify confirmed his fears. With a sigh, he rubbed his forehead in preparation of a future headache.

“Edwin! It is so very good to see you, my friend! It has truly been far too long!” Lefi exuberantly called out.

Level Up!

Skill Points 697→719 (Average level: 41)

Watchful Rest Level 27→28

Improbable Arsenal Level 26→30

Anatomy Level 32→39

Alchemical Dismantling Level 18→27

Sapper’s Apparatus Level 46→47