'...I Told Him To Not Be A Skooma'

Papi and the others were already online again when we rode our new mounts into camp. To keep her father distracted from the fact that she had gotten to spend the entire time fighting and traveling with me, Lil gave Papi a thorough report on the types of event locations and beasts we fought as well as captured.

When she was done, Papi briefly questioned me about the remaining mounts in the clan shop before I told him to not to be a Skooma. He decided to just wait until tomorrow when he would be part of the scouting vanguard using our riding familiars and could collect his own. This, of course, would be much harder for them than it was for my scouting team.

However, for those who wanted them we did offer to retrieve the normal frostingale birds from the clan shop. Skooma decided to fill his third slot with this elemental flying familiar, as well as Stonewall whose race came with an extra familiar slot similar to Oleander's. The halfling giant was supposedly the top druidic race behind dryad-hybrids.

While Lil took the time to teach their familiars how to cast their ice mana scales on other bodies or use for various forms of attack, the rest of us spent our early night hours training their magic to develop ice armor skills. These would be invaluable in protecting against the attacks of this regions mobs. Even though I already had the ability naturally do so.

Instead, I spent the nest few hours of training working on my self-enchantment skills by constantly manipulating and fluctuating the amount of mana enhancing my body. In the first twenty minutes I had upgraded the skill to level two from Uninitiated. After the first hour of depleting and replenishing my mana, the self-enchantment skill reached level five.

I had already unlocked the ability to use elemental and other magics at my disposal to influence my self-enchantment before reaching level five, but at level two the 'influence' or affinity was literally '(subtle)'. At level three it became small, then mild, and at level five the affinity influence became '(moderate)'.

Now I was willing to experiment with the effects of using elemental mana, channeling first fire energy into my body. Not only did my Strength stat gain an increased buff from self-enchantment, all of my physical attacks had at level five had a burning shockwave effect upon successful damage. Both ice and earth elements raised my Endurance and physical attack rating, but while earth reduced knockback effects ice element also increased my physical and magical defense rating.

Water increased my Willpower and MDEF as well as my MATK, lightning raised my Agility above the other stats and added a paralysis effect to my physical attacks, wind raised my movement speed itself by as much as the self enchantment level in percent, and the light or darkness elements I had yet to acquire… did whatever they did.

However, I could use healing mana in my self-enchantment to double my already heavy recovery rates at double the cost of usual self-enchanting.

Unless I found myself surrounded by elite enemies, though, I could not think of a time in which I would need to use such abilities. Or, of course, against other skillful players. If we ever pissed off a well founded clan with good numbers, which I or my team were prone to do, my abilities would probably really be put to the test.

After reaching level six just through experiencing the different forms of enchantment influences, I stopped that skill training and created a handful of simple Elder wood rings on which I practiced manipulating the different levels of strength, pliability, and other aspects of the ring's material. Then I practiced my actual enchanting rather than just transmutation while working on developing a skill itself.

After twenty minutes of effort, I finally used the healing magic influence from self-enchantment to not only create a regeneration enchantment that passively raised health one percent every other second but also a much stronger Regen skill that healed myself and others within ten yards of my for three percent of health every other second for ten seconds.

This was only fifteen percent of health, but I had healing buffs that brought the actual affect to five percent every other second for increased range. Now that I had a new healing skill, which had a three-minute cooldown that was shortened to two minutes and ten seconds with my buffs, that could affect everyone within reach of me the survivability of everything in the party had just gone up by folds.

I could now worry a little less about our familiars while the different teams were out and about without power players like Cweeper, Hermes, and I.

Once I had accomplished my goals for the evening, I settled down with my newly level thirty-five familiars to make a large meal of roasted mama bear meat and magical plant seasonings while also preparing three pounds of healing jerky for every member of the clan. This jerky came out worth thirty health and mana apiece, but the jerky's effects would last longer than the steak sticks and more of them could be overeaten with ease.

Even though I had not used Overeating since the sepulcher, it was still a valuable asset in its own right and I needed to be prepared to use it at any time. The jerky itself came with a mention of being able to consume seven strips of jerky at once with my current level five Overeating. Seven times thirty was two-ten health and mana in a single mouthful.

Soon after everybody and our familiars had eaten, we retired to the Winter Wood resistant pavilions to rest for the night while leaving the more rested characters who had been offline to keep watch.

When we awoke the next morning, we dismantled the camp and then set about preparing the wagons for off-road travel by adjusting its 'tongue springs' supporting the axles as well as briefly replacing the tired with reinforced metal and paper versions. They were a little heavier on the dragons, but the little bit of weight resistance would not matter much when it made the terrain easier to traverse with their toothy outer linings.

Riding on our scorpions that were not needed for the familiars, Papi and Oleander and Merch rode one scorpions while the enormous Stonewall was forced to walk. Once they had managed to not only clear the brush ahead but blaze a trail for about three hundred yards, we set the wagons in motions. It was also around now that they started getting confrontations.

Ivana rode on the front wagon with me, practicing her archery skills in the hopes of offering support to the scouts while Hermes and Cweeper practiced their own divine hunting skills in the same fashion. Their arrows had much more dramatic effect, though. Eventually, though, I had to send them out to the flanks and vanguard the wagons while the scout positions constantly fluctuated.

We on the wagons did not receive much attention from the wilderness, thanks to our collective numbers and firepower. This did not hold up for very long, though. After traveling for an hour to only cover about a mile and a half of distance while letting the scouts set the pace for safety, the wagons finally met their first confrontation. As expected, it was not a small one.

Unlike in our previous fights, the 'caravan confrontation' came with immense numbers of one very dangerous type of enemy. The supposedly rare frosted tree dragons. These tree dragons were not much different from the armored versions except that their bored the pale blue and white colors of ice and snow in their tightly packed scales.

As well, these elemental varieties had a very dragon-like attack, opening their mouths from the surroundings to unleash strong gusts of frigid winds that made ice develop on the wagons and leading dragons. When those of us in the caravan and our familiars finally found targets, though, the assault on our transportation quickly ended. We returned fire with literal fire that blinded our reptilian enemies while overlaying a massive outward web of electricity from all of us players.

The web paralyzed at least twenty of more than thirty ice lizards, forcing those still capable to rush into melee range before their crippled comrades could be abused and wiped out. Even then, though, the eight of the impaired lizards fell before the melee fighters and familiars had their feet on the ground.

Disregarding the fact that I would end up hogging kills, I met the enemies ahead of the wagons with a brief set of Spirit Slashes, dropping three of the ice lizards with as many skills before sending out my trademark silk.

[+125x3x1.25XP]

[Leveled Up]

[All stats raised by 1]

Instead of aiming at the beasts themselves, I simply started laying dozens of twenty-foot lines of silk out over the ground every other second. As the ice lizards fought to get into positions to attack me or the dragons, they inevitably ended up stepping on my adhesive silk and wrapping their legs while moving.

One these handful of creatures were ensnared, the other lizards who were recovering from their paralysis began attempting to join the fray. However, they were much slower than their previous brethren. They became the perfect victims for my silk threads.

By the end of the fight, eleven frosted tree dragons had been captured and stored in the clan inventory, netting me the usual ten thousand contribution for a mount being added to the clan store after the rest of the party without a mount had claimed one. Then we finally got our own mounts back.

Now that there were more familiars that could travel with the wagons, the familiars and my people were more even distributed about the wagons in defensive positions. I, however, remained in the driver's bench of the lead wagon while Ivana rode her scorpion alongside Cweeper and Hermes in the vanguard. Now, Go, Lil, Skooma, and Conansson all rode scorpions or ice lizards with their familiars beside the other two wagons while their familiars rode lizards and maintained a rear guard position.

With a little less weight on the wagons and the scorpions who could help in trailblazing, we easily increased our rate of travel to two miles of coverage an hours.

The trail we rode was uneven and winding in many places where rocks or fallen trees forced us to travel wide, but for the most part we were making decent speed. I remember there being stories of pioneer caravans from earth who died in their efforts while only being able to travel a few miles per DAY.

Compared to that, our beasts and magic allowed us to travel at least ten times as fast and far. Of course, this rate of travel and the conditions of the Winter Wood took a heavy toll on the land dragons. They needed to be rested and fed three times a day and would simply stop traveling when they were ready for that food.

Luckily, during the first day, the wagons were only confronted another two times even though our scouting parties were confronted constantly. Our two other confrontations were once again made of of immense numbers of a single type of enemy. The first being a flock of ice birds and the second being a nesting group of sting kings we had no choice but the fight through with the entire party called together.

The flock of ice birds ended up adding eight untamed pets to the clan store while capturing sting kings turned out to be somewhat hard with multiple dozens of enemy numbers. Worse, still, was the presence of a dozen emperors who acted as elites for the event location we were forced to pass through. However, these became the main target of our capture.

Once I stopped trying to catch the lesser mobs and focused on the higher grade versions, the others quickly swept through their numbers under the leads of Cweeper and Hermes.

Ten infected scorpions entered the clan store after a full fifteen minutes of combat. Of course, I ended up adding five sting kings to the inventory because I had nothing else to do with them. However, once we started accepting people into the clan, somebody was sure to want them.

After this event location was scoured for any loot or magical materials, we ended up using it as our camp site since we were less likely to be disturbed by outside intrusion in a cleared event location. Camp was once again made up of a circle of wagons and pavilions encircled by a rope corral and numerous sets of repellent incense. Instead of training for the evening, though, everybody merely rested their characters and familiars around the fire before retiring for the night.

In the morning, we once again set out in the same fashion but this time I lead the single scouting party of three people and familiars.

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