Chapter 85: Chapter 85 – Natalie: I believe in magic

I felt strangely excited as Hugh turned his attention toward me, and, for once, it had nothing to do with sex. This was what the system had been preparing us for. Combat. Subjugating a dungeon. I was ready.

“Alright,” he said, “I’m assigning you the subclass.”

A notification soon popped up.

I relayed the information to them and concentrated on “Yes.” My selection was immediately followed by another popup.

Something that Hugh had neglected to mention was that the starter equipment was given by the ENF system and was gender specific. That made me worry a little bit. I hoped I wouldn’t end up going into battle nearly naked.

I seriously doubted that I would have to, though. That made no sense, right? I needed coverage for defense.

I was sure it would be fine. I was just worried over nothing.

“I’m pretty sure your charisma just increased,” Hugh said.

Really? I pulled up my status.

“You’re right,” I said. “It looks like I got three stats just like you did. One each in mental and charisma and a free one.”

“Why charisma for a mage?” Amy asked.

“Maybe she’s something like a bard?” Hugh shrugged. “Let’s keep going.”

“I got the same trait that you did, Dungeon Body,” I said. “Hey, since you told me all your attributes as well as your health and stamina, I think I can compare them to mine and figure how these values are calculated.”

“Cool,” he said. “Do you need me to repeat mine?”

“Nope. Just give me a few seconds.”

Between my high mental score and Enhanced Memory at Level 2, recalling exactly what he’d said was trivial. All I had to do was some algebra. A week ago, there would have been no way I’d have even been able to begin to do so much math in my head. Now? No problem.

Soon, I had it all figured out.

“I think it would be easier to write out the equations than trying to tell you. Do you have a pen and paper?” I asked Amy.

She was able to quickly supply me with some.

“I had to make some reasonable assumptions, but I almost positive these are the formulas used.” I wrote it out and showed it to them.

“That’s awesome, Nat,” Hugh said. “Way to go.”

I grinned. It felt really good to be praised for my intelligence. There certainly weren’t many times that had happened to me in my life.

There were quite a few interesting takeaways from the equations that the group ended up discussing. Endurance and Constitution increasing their respective pools by twenty points seemed significant, as did their impact on the respective regens. Given the likely importance of these pools, it was going to be hard to ignore slotting free points to those attributes. The fact that each level of Lesser Regeneration restored one health every twenty minutes was also called out.

“Do you have a mana pool?” Amy asked.

“No. Should I?”

Hugh frowned. “There has to be some resource cost for using spells. Usually that’s mana.”

“Hmm. Let’s see,” I said. “There’s an X for the number of combat subclass skills that I can add, and it’s clickable.”

I concentrated on wanting to know what that X represented.

Obviously, I read all that out to them.

“So, it’s a type of spell slot system,” Hugh said. “That’s kind of rare.”

“It definitely will lead to interesting decisions,” Amy said.

“My current mental stat is six, and I have two free points,” I said, knowing that the question was coming.

“Can you pull up a list of spells that you can learn?” he asked.

“Sure.”

After I read out the list to them, I pulled up each description, read it to myself, and quickly moved on to the next one. When finished, I said, “Okay, Antidote cures poisons and venoms. Barrier absorbs one hit from a non-magical source. Bind binds a target’s limbs. Cure heals diseases. Dispel removes status effects. Heal restores health. Invigorate increases a target’s endurance. Refresh restores stamina. Shield absorbs one hit from a magical source. And Strengthen increases a target’s constitution.”

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I wasn’t into games or litrpg like Amy and Hugh, but I had to admit that the thought of doing actual magic was kind of cool. If I picked up Cure, could I go into a hospital’s kids’ cancer ward and save their lives? Could I use Heal on a regular person to fix paralysis? I didn’t know, but I was sure going to try.

“Interesting mix,” Hugh said. “Mostly support spells and buffs, but it’s got that one crowd control option in there. No offense, though.”

“Yeah,” Amy said. “Definitely intended to be a support mage, if not a heal bot. I wonder if she’ll get options for fireball or something at higher levels.”

“Not sure, but it might be a good thing. I mean, if aggro works like in video games, we don’t want our healer drawing attacks.” He kind of grimaced, probably concerned about me getting hurt. “Anyway, we’ve got to work with what we have at the moment.” He turned to me. “Obviously, Heal is going to be your bread and butter. Can you get any more details about it?”

I tried, but the system didn’t reveal anything new. “Sorry.”

“Okay, I say you take it and see what happens.”

“No problem.” The selection was easy to make.

When I pulled up my status again, Heal Level 1 was listed as one of my skills, but there was also an addition. Beneath my MEN stat was a new row – Casts: 5/5

I, of course, relayed that information to Hugh and Amy. Then, I noticed something else interesting, Heal seemed to be clickable now.

I told them the new information and said, “My charisma is four, so, at Heal Level 1, I restore 14 health per cast. If I use my skill point to level that up, I’d double that to 28.”

“I don’t think we have a choice but to do that,” Hugh said. “Restoring as much health as possible has to be the priority.”

“So does she use her free attribute points on charisma or mental, then?” Julia asked.

I was pretty sure she just feeling left out of the conversation, a rarity for her, so I took the question seriously.

“Putting a point into charisma adds 2 points of healing per cast, so, for 5 casts per day, 10 total health. If I put it into mental instead, that’s another cast worth 28 points, almost three times as many.”

She nodded. “So both points in mental?”

“I think so.” I turned to Hugh and Amy. They both nodded their assent.

“Great. That gives me seven daily casts of Heal or I can learn another spell.”

“Quick question,” Hugh said. “Can you tell what Meditation does?”

Oh yeah. He’d really wanted me to take that one, and I’d pretty much ignored it since.

“It’s clickable now,” I said.

I swore that it hadn’t been before acquiring the mage subclass.

“Ugh!” He exclaimed. “Not what I was hoping for. You can restore all your casts with six hours of sleep, so that’s not very efficient. And you’d have to level it way up to get any real benefit.”

“What if it let you level it to 13?” Amy asked.

Hugh and I looked at each other. That might be an interesting exploit.

“To be honest,” I said, “my gut is telling me that the system will prevent that from happening. Maybe there’s a cap on levels?”

That made devoting skill points to Meditation a big risk. If I could get it to Level 13, I’d essentially have no limit on the number of daily casts I could do. If there was a limit, though, I’d end up with a fairly worthless skill compared to being able to add a direct multiplier to Heal or another ability.

That consideration was for future Nat, though. Present Nat needed to determine whether or not I was sticking with just Heal.

“Should I pick any of these other spells?” I asked.

“That’s tough call,” Hugh said. “I’m sure all of them would come in handy, but I hate, hate, hate the thought of losing even a single cast. What if that one less Heal causes one of us to die?”

“What if not having Barrier or Antidote causes one of us to die?” Julia said.

“True. Ugh.”

“Honestly,” I said, “isn’t this one of those things that I could do on the fly? If we really need cure and I have at least two casts left for the day, I can just take it, right?”

“Yes. Great point,” he said. “Stick with just Heal for now. Everyone agree?”

All of them did, so Hugh turned his attention to Julia.

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