Chapter 8 The Way Of Fire

Fortunately, the cost of living in this place wasn’t bad, so while the amount of money I had decreased, it was still at a healthy amount. I have now been here for nearly two months, and I have yet to enter a single map, trying to figure out what build I wanted to go with. At least I have figured out what weapons suit me; the problem is, well, they weren't really the best types of weapons.

While I’m pretty sure I could be good with any weapon if I trained enough; it seems that I was talented with sticks and staves. Not even spears—why couldn’t it be spears? There are literally thousands of builds for spears, and while there are a decent amount of builds for just sticks and staves, none of them were really recommended as they didn't have the physical damage to fight at higher levels.

So currently, I’m thinking that perhaps I should go with magic and become a caster. I didn’t feel like I wanted to be someone with a wand who just attacked from afar. Now, there could be a compromise. There are pretty famous classes like spell-blade, where you mix magic and physical fighting, but as the class name says, most of those builds are for bladed weapons.

What’s even worse is that while there are thousands upon thousands of builds available, there is no guarantee that they’re actually viable; only the truly popular ones you could be certain work.

Perhaps I’m too technical about it. I’ve spent my time in the library researching the best ways to do things, but even if I found a perfect build and the perfect way to advance, who could say that I would have the skill crystals or any of the other things I would need available to me.

There are also items that you could consume that would refund your skill passives. Now, they are expensive—really expensive—but they are only expensive to the current me. If I can reach level 50 and start clearing blue maps, getting the money needed shouldn't be too hard. I guess it’s time to go to the market.

My journey took me to a weapon shop. I still can’t understand why the only proper talent I have is with weapons that are basically different sizes of sticks. There are blunt weapons, which aren't really recommended unless you're going with hammers. Now, I could use them to cast magic if I had the skill crystal that would go into these kinds of weapons, but not every skill crystal accepted every kind of item.

I looked it up, and the fighting staves—the ones that had a bit of metal in the ends of them to make them at least a little bit functional for fighting monsters—weren’t one of them. For some types of fighting sticks they did work, but mostly the metal ones—the ones I would like to use—also didn’t work for casting. Of course, wooden ones were sometimes even stronger than metal, but they needed more monster materials infused into them, which brought the cost way up.

The crafting process itself was fascinating; all kinds of crafters could use monster parts and infuse them into more regular materials, making them monster-forged items capable of holding sockets and being empowered by crafting items. If you're invested enough into one, you could make a truly dangerous item.

"Can I help you in any way?" a young-looking girl asked me, who had a name tag and a shirt with the store logo. Well, it couldn’t hurt to ask.

"Yes, I’m having a bit of a problem, as I want to cast and use staves as my weapon, but they don't seem to mix very well." She paused for a moment and tilted her head, thinking.

"You should just use a staff. It's like a stave that isn't crafted for physical fighting, but you should also not buy magical staffs crafted so they would be better at casting magic. Both of those start with the simple staff, so you should buy one before further crafting steps are taken. Here, we have some stock near the back."

I followed behind her, thinking about her words. I mean, she was right; spell blades were also purposely made—it was just another step in the crafting process.

"Here we are. Now, all of them here only have one socket, as anything above that usually is crafted into something beyond a simple staff. If you want anything better, you would have to commission it, with which we would be happy to help you with."

"I thank you for the help, but commissioning something is a bit over my price range, currently." She still smiled but took a few steps back to leave me to it, and from the corner of my eye I saw her move on to other customers. Every single one of them had a price tag, and they were around 15 to 30 gold coins.

That was an acceptable price for an item with a socket. There were ones for all three colours: green, red, and blue. Well, now I know that there were purple, white, black, and yellow coloured skill crystals as well, but they were a lot more rare, and you basically didn’t run into them before level 50 or so.

I tested them out a little bit, but there wasn’t much room to swing a staff around in this shop. They seemed solid enough. Before I bought one, I needed to find a skill crystal that would actually work for what I’m after.

It wasn’t a long walk to get to the section of the market that dealt with skill crystals. Everything here looked a bit more put together and a bit more fancy, but there were still plenty of fresh-looking adventurers trying to sell off a skill crystal that they perhaps got in a lucky drop.

The prices here were a lot higher; the cheapest skill crystal I saw was 130 gold coins. Yet as I continued looking, I saw some skill crystals with weird warnings on them, and some of them, because of those warnings, were cheaper. Perfect examples were fire-type skills, especially ones that you didn't cast far away. One thing skill crystals didn’t do was grant immunity to their effects to their user.

So if you decided to cast a fire tornado on yourself, well, you would get as damaged as any of the monsters would—perhaps more, as most wouldn't have those kinds of defenses as monsters did. I might have to buy one of those skills for me to be a perfect last-minute defense, as I wouldn’t be hurt by the flames but anything else would be.

Perhaps properly specializing in fire would be the best idea. I could make myself like a fireball that nothing could come close to. That might be a good idea, but I don’t think the flames my current self could cast would be strong enough to incinerate everything immediately. For example, even just a regular bear—while I think it would still die if it had been charging, his mass would still crush me if it was alive or not.

Skills could vary quite a bit even if they were basically named the same, so I stopped when I saw an interesting one. Flame Tips was its name. I knew a more common version of it that didn’t have the ‘s’ at the end. The common version was a skill used by many builds that focused on heavier weapons, as the skill made the entire head of the weapon covered in flames, which added fire damage to anything you hit.

Flame Tips, however, seems to add flames to both ends. "If I were to use this Flame Tips skill with my hammer, would my handle burst into flames?" The seller didn't look happy about the question and he looked around with a little bit of panic. "Don't be so loud, and yes, it would."

"Would it also burn a wooden handle?" He was taken aback by my question. "No, the skill doesn't hurt the weapon itself. What happens is that whatever you hit, the flames you touch get onto them, and the stronger the hit, the deeper it penetrates."

I mulled over those words. It could work with my staff, but wouldn’t I be fighting monsters in fire-type areas? Perhaps I should focus more on skills that those types of creatures were vulnerable to.

I had been thinking a little while when I noticed the merchant getting a bit more nervous. Then again, if I were to mess with other elements, I couldn’t be completely safe from them. The asking price was 250 gold coins. "I’ll give you 175 for the skill." The merchant choked back whatever he wanted to say after I made him an offer.

"You want me to take 75 off the top? Are you crazy? This is one of the most sought-after skills for fresh adventurers!" He stopped talking when he noticed my eyebrow raise. "Fine, but 180?" I looked at him for a little bit but decided to give in.

"Sure, can I pay with the bank token?" That surprised him a little bit, but he brought out a shoebox-sized device. I used my token and thumbprint and entered an amount of 180 gold coins.

After about 10 seconds, the machine beeped happily and the merchant handed over the skill crystal to me. Now that that was done, I started to head back towards the shop. The skill crystal was red in colour, so I would need a red socket in my staff.

I was interrupted when I noticed quite a lot of people crowding around an enormous stall where four people were working behind and there were even guards holding the crowd back.

I wondered if they got new stock, so I went closer, but I did notice the owner looking at another stall owner with a smug look. The other stall owner didn’t seem pleased with this development. His stall was also quite big, but there weren’t nearly as many people around it. As I got closer, I realized what their popular stall specialized in: it was minion-type skill crystals.

They were one of the more popular builds, and because of it, quite expensive, as minion skills were quite rare. Their advantages were quite obvious: you could continue to use your magic to make more and more monsters that fought for you.

The most popular kinds were goblins, zombies, and even skeletons. It was one of the safer builds if you had enough magic and didn’t go up against too strong of a monster who could overwhelm your summons quickly.

To be able to build that, they required you couldn't specialize in a certain affinity, as to make it work properly you need the original magic passive tree, not the one you got if you choose an affinity.

I would be lying to myself if I said that I wasn’t tempted. At the start, you would only have about ten minions, but that number got bigger fast, and if you build it properly, each individual minion would become a lot stronger.

Looking at those prices, I was glad that I didn’t want to go with summons, and sometimes commanding too many summoned minions was a bit troublesome. I was a bit curious about the other stall owner, so I walked closer to look at what he was selling. There were some pretty good skills, but around half of the stall was occupied also by summon skills; however, these were not the popular kind.

The other kind of summons were elite summons; the difference was the numbers you could get. While they were a lot stronger than regular minions, numbers counted for a lot. While a monster could kill, let’s say, three of your minions, an elite minion could fight that monster to a standstill. The thing was, at the beginning you could only have one elite minion, you already had ten regular minions.

Smarter people than me long ago figured out by any metric you could measure that just running regular minions was simply better, and they scaled enough at higher levels that they were actually viable past level 100. Perhaps you could take elite minions that far as well, but they certainly didn't scale that well.

That being said, quite a few books recommend buying, if you had the capital, one elite summon skill, as it would only take one skill crystal slot. You could use it as a distraction, extra damage, or as a tank to take hits for you.

At that point, my question was why not just use a regular minion skill, and the answer was pretty simple. Elites were basically autonomous, so you could focus fully on battling yourself while getting all the benefits of someone a bit weaker than you helping you out without having to worry about someone dying.

The prices here were quite heavy, with a lot of skill crystals costing in excess of 1,000 gold coins. Mainly those were skill crystals for elite minions that were dire animals. It seems that the merchant was able to read my face well enough to answer my unasked question.

"It's because they still have their animal instincts, but they also borrow some of your smarts, and the combinations are quite lethal."

"I will be honest, they are a bit out of my price range. Do you have anything cheaper, like, I mean, a lot cheaper?" I asked.

The merchant sighed out loud. "You know, with every other skill type or weapon type, if it’s called an elite, it usually costs a lot more than its regular counterpart. Not with summons, as elite summon skill crystals are actually cheaper than the regular kind, and by a decent margin. To answer your question, yes, I do have some cheaper ones."

He pulled out a box from beneath the store and showed it to me. There were three Goblin Chieftain ones, 500 each. One for 100 gold coins, but it was just for someone called Striped Sloth.

"I have tested that one out; it really is slow, and it can’t even take that much damage. I really don’t know why it's elite."

The last one was Greg the Stone Golem.

"That one is a big bastard, extremely slow, but it can take a lot of physical punishment, and because it’s rock, it also has quite higher natural resistance to elemental damage. It should cost a lot more, but basically the only viable attack it has is when it's started to run because stopping it is quite hard, but it can only go in one direction."

It cost 285, but could I make use of it in any way? I didn’t think so, so I started to shake my head before the merchant spoke up.

"Don't be too hasty. You have a build of a physical fighter, so there are ways of using your summons a bit differently. These don’t work for regular minions, but elites get to use some more specialized skill gems."

The merchant then showed me the different skill gems; most of them seemed to be meant for summons.

"See, look at this green one. What it does is give you a bit of the defensive resistances your elite summons has. It even works on multiple summons. Now, the transfer amount isn't much, but that golem is quite resistant to physical damage. It could be a great combination for a physical fighter."

Now he was completely right, but the problem was the price—the green gem cost more than the summon. The gems, however, were quite interesting. I had purposely sought out one when I just got here to just look at one.

They were quite small, perhaps the size of my fingernail, but every single one of them had some effect if you slotted them into your passive skill tree. The one that I looked at way back then was a yellow one that gave 3% faster movement speed. Even that one was way too costly for right now, and it wasn't even a good one.

This merchant mostly had blue ones, as they are mainly the ones that modify your minions. He also had the other colours of the passive tree as well, and I decided to look at one of the purple ones.

‘Elite summons are 10% more resistant to all elemental damage.’

That seemed like a good one.

‘Elite summons share your elemental resistances.’

It took a moment for me to understand what that meant. Elite summons could share my elemental resistance, which meant they would also be immune to fire. Well, shit. Possibilities started to run through my mind.

"I’ll take the golem for 210."

It seems like the merchant had accepted that he wasn't going to make a sale, and while he didn't seem happy about the price, he seemed interested.

"And what about the gem?"

I shook my head. "It’s out of my price range for now, but I will be back for it."

The merchant thought for a little bit before answering. "If you promise to come back here for the gem, I will sell it to you for 210."

I extended my hand and shook his. Fortunately, I was also able to pay here with my bank token, but that also meant that I needed another piece of equipment that I could fit this blue skill crystal into. Fortunately, there were plenty of items that were not in the best condition that I could make use of.

I ended up purchasing for 15 gold coin leather wrist guard that was pretty damaged, but its blue socket still worked, and that was all I needed. I also went and bought for 28 gold coins a strong-looking staff with a red socket.

With everything purchased, I finally went back home. I had spent weeks agonising over my decisions, and it seems like all I needed to do was go to the market to figure out the beginning of my build.

I was still in a bit of a daze that I could share my elemental resistances with my elite minions. That was a game-changer. It meant that I would not be the only one completely immune, and not just that—my other resistances were quite high as well. This was something incredible.

So currently I was thinking that I was going to have to make a workable elite minion build while still making myself strong enough that I could fight on my own. It would be a tall order, but my plan was to be something similar to a spell-sword, so I would have to go into the magic tree heavily for both parts of my build, which should work out well enough.

Perhaps I will change things in the future, but right now I think this is the best course of action. One thing I wasn’t going to do was summon my minion in my room, as I didn’t want it destroyed. Also, summoning minions wasn't really allowed inside the city limits, so I should be a bit careful about that.