The System Seas

“How are we not there yet?” Marco slashed vines and branches out of his way with his rapier. It wasn’t really built for the work, but the upgrades it had absorbed from dead pirates made that less of an issue than he would have thought. “We’ve been walking for days.”

“Hours,” Elisa said, double-checking her estimate with the position of the sun. “Not even that. Traveling through rough terrain takes time, Marco. It’s not like in the books.”

“And why the hell not? We’re high enough level. We should feel like this is a walk in a park.” Riv brought his club down on a palm sapling in his way, knocking it flat to the ground and ending its tree career for good. “Instead, I feel like a traveling landscaper.”

“This is not that hard.” Aethe continued on as she had most of the way, using her system skills to avoid most of the worst of the terrain as if she was water flowing through rather than a flesh-and-blood person trudging across. “I’ve been through much worse.”

“So have I,” Marco said, “but I think that you have a bit of an advantage over us. How high is whatever skill that lets you do that?”

“It’s level fifteen, I think?” Aethe responded as she showed her grace again and again. “I don’t get much opportunity to level it anymore. And a higher level wouldn’t even make a difference here, since the skill can handle this terrain already. It would just make the skill apply to worse and worse terrain.”

“Huh,” Marco said. “I wonder how much worse this would be without a bunch of points in dexterity.”

“It’s funny. Our levels have been going up, right? I remember at the beginning of this quest we used to stop and check them all the time. We still do to allot points, or at least I do. But we hardly talk about it these days,” Riv said as he made a mock swing with his club. Even to Marco’s untrained eye, Riv seemed to have much more force and precision behind those swings than before. “Here’s this worldchanging power, Riv, and it’s going to get boring soon. If anyone had told me that would be how it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have believed them.”

“Oh, I think it’s still interesting enough. It’s just that we haven’t had to deal with many dungeons lately. We hardly get to pick our battles with the pirates, and I don’t think any of us has gotten any new skills in a while,” Marco said.

“My skills have changed a little over time. But yeah. It hasn’t seemed worth the effort to talk about them lately.”

Marco had a piece of paper in his pocket in which Elisa had put down what she considered to be his best stat distribution for the next fifty levels, unless something major changed. He had popped his points in there as she had told him to, and now couldn’t help taking a much longer look at the list than he had in a while