With his arm angled oddly he cut upwards and met the turrl midflight. It wasn’t enough to completely take it out, apparent by the fact that it bit his arm repeatedly.

Kent cursed expletives as he repeatedly plunged his kitchen knife into the slowly dying body. He knew he was on the clock and had to be fast.

Not being able to wait for the turrl to completely die he rushed back towards the cave, too late did he think of using the distorted space as a safe zone. As he kept running he was glad about that. He deemed the risk too large and continued dashing and stabbing until the notification he was waiting for finally appeared.

New Notification Log Entries:

You have slain “Somniferous Turrl” Level 8! Experience has been awarded.

…

You have slain “Somniferous Agitator” Level 13! Experience has been awarded.

His progress to the next level was extremely close to the next milestone, yet he would not be able to finish it today. A nap was in order.

He held on to lucidness for surprisingly long. What had at first been a count of fifteen had changed to a count of forty the last time he had been poisoned.

By the time he had passed out in the cave his count had reached eighty. His speculations on why he was able to tolerate more had been muddled by a decrease in brain activity.

***

He shot up, woken by the unlikely events of a dream. His exposure to turrls must have screwed with him thoroughly, as he had seen himself, climb trees and jump people to bite them. It had been odd.

Driven by hunger, he decided that right now would be a good time to eat some provisions and consider the implications of how much time he had spent under the venom's effects without passing out. Furthermore, he hadn’t even regenerated the complete rest of his Mana, and even less Stamina than during his latest nap.

That led him to conclude that he had slept for around five to six hours instead of the previous eight. The turrl saliva had thus less effect on him in two ways.

Either I’m building a tolerance, which is unlikely or something else is going on. Could it be willpower? It’s the only stat that has really been growing. The rest has increased by little margins at best.

Seeing as it was the only stat that had really changed he’d imagine it to be the more likely candidate. Though how or why Willpower affected this in any way was up in the stars. He knew that several of the wealthier people in the village used capped turrl venom as a sedative frequently, so growing resistant seemed unlikely.

Wait, or maybe it is because my last shuteye happened like three hours before I passed out. That could be it.

Well, he would dwell on it another time when he didn't have stuff to do. He wanted to reach level 5 and maybe six this time around.

He still had six health potions so he felt rather safe in his endeavors, even should his pools run low.

Considering which skill would be his best choice he left the entry cave again.

***

New Notification Log Entries:

You have slain “Somniferous Distributer” Level 12! Experience has been awarded.

You have reached level five. A new skill point is available! Three free stat points are available!

You have slain “Somniferous Agitator” Level 15! Experience has been awarded.

…

You have slain “Somniferous Agitator” Level 13! Experience has been awarded.

Of course, Kent had promptly drawn the corresponding sigil for the Willpower increase on his body and taken a quick break before continuing. As things stood now, he had made loads of progress but was now suffering from having extremely low resource pools again. He would focus on other stats as soon as he was happy with his regeneration. Though in the light of slowly approaching the other end of the pond he would put a few points into Vitality on the next level up. Just in case.

Kent Larsson [Level 5] [95%]

Pools:

Health: 67/67

Health Reg: 14 – 21 /d

Stamina: 10/150

Stamina Reg: 45 – 59 /d

Mana: 28/48

Mana Reg: 51 – 79 /d

Stats (0 Free Stat points):

Vitality 14

Toughness 11

Endurance 27

Strength 23

Agility 21

Senses 12

Mind 11

Magic 24

Willpower 51

Regeneration 14

Skills (1 Free Skill Point):

Accelerate Metal (2/10) (44/100 Exp.)

Penetrate (3/10) (21/150 Exp.)

Metallic Affinity (2/10) (52/100 Exp.)

He would have liked pushing for the sixth level, but with his current pools that was a poor idea at best, deadly at worst.

The skill decision was difficult. The main contenders now were Mosquito, Slippery Blade, and Death by ten thousand Punctures from the Daggers tree, for different reasons each. Mosquito for more melee fighting skills and thus to reduce the time combat took to save more stamina in the long run. Slippery Blade to hopefully deal more damage, and Death by ten thousand Punctures for obvious reasons. Though Kent couldn’t help but feel it was too early for the latter. He could never accomplish ten thousand cuts anywhere, especially not in a creature that was strong enough to survive that.

Analyze Metal and Metallic Presence were both not ideal, but it was worth taking a skill in Metallic Insight just to get the specialization. The lack of immediate power reduced the urgency of both skills, so he would probably hold off on the tree until he got his last skill point before his evolution. Analyze Metal was definitely the less interesting one of the pair. The other could at least help him earn money.

Metallumancy was a bit harder. Rotate Metal could be interesting, but he quite frankly couldn’t afford the additional mana cost. Eventually, it would be an interesting skill that might be able to help with the size of cuts, inflicting damage in combat, and increase the control as well as the effectiveness of tools at range. Metallic Extension seemed to be the best contender for now. It would start out weak, but at no increased cost, it might be a helpful tool.

Kent envisioned him shooting daggers charged with Penetrate at turrls, causing devastating damage at the first attack.

Yeah, that will do just fine.

Metallic Extension (0/10) (0/50 Exp.)

Attuned Metal is an extension of your body. You can use fitting skills through attuned metal

Effectiveness: 10%

The idea of shooting daggers at monsters from a distance was still fresh in his mind, and he was very keen on testing it.

Sacrificing one of his daggers this way was probably not the best idea, since he hadn’t brought more in his flight from Blueleaf and the successive military camp encounter – a mistake in hindsight, though justified at the time. Speed had been more important back then, and carrying anything heavy would have greatly impacted the number of leagues he could have walked in a day.

He looked at his canteens, one dented and leaking past the halfway mark from earlier experiments, the other still whole.

What if I… He grunted and got up. By the dim light coming from the dungeon sky outside the cave, he began looking for different stones. He found a couple that might just do the trick. For some reason, all the stones here had been round, without sharp edges or other major deformations. Some carried imperfections that might work as weak spots to break the stone to have sharp edges, larger ones would serve as heavy counterweights, and others to break the stones on.

Over the next few hours as his resources slowly grew again, Kent sweated over an assortment of stones.

After first experiments, he quickly learned that he would need dozens if not hundreds of sharp edges to get anywhere with his goals. As his pile of sharp-edged stones grew, his patience dwindled. It was not the number of stones that made him stop in the end, just sheer boredom and the fact that he had clipped his hands a couple of times too often.

In his next steps, he tried several methods of how to best cut the metal through the use of the rough stone edges. The issue for the most part wasn’t the sharpness, even though he had expected it to be. The majority of extra work was caused by the brittleness of the stone's edges. Often times he would only get a few cuts across the surface of the metal canteen before the stone got blunt all around or shattered in his hand.

Yet, with time came a little bit of experience and understanding. Several methods worked better than others and blunt force at the edges of the canteen seemed the be the best way of reducing the metal to formable sheets.

He regretted not taking the Crude Tools skills from the Survival tree a bunch of times but prevailed. The work wasn’t strenuous for the most part, just tedious.

After what felt like ages, but probably was only an hour or so, he had six sheets of metal in various conditions in front of him. One sheet, the one with the nozzle, was basically completely ruined. The pieces of remaining pieces of metal would only suffice for shivs at best. Though Penetrate might work with shivs, he wasn’t sure whether his final skill in the Daggers tree would do so as well.

Of the other five pieces, two were decent. The sheet he had taken from the bottom was curved inwardly at a slight angle and might not be ideal, though he would try bending individual blades fashioned from it. The two others where heavily indented and the metal showed real structural damage, so he would not use them for the upcoming tests. The other two were mostly flat and in good condition.

It was time to see what he could do with those.