Village of Noobtown: A LitRPG Adventure (Mayor of Noobtown Book 2)

by Ryan Rimmel

  That wasn’t all, though. People in the village had family in Narwal they wanted to contact. I was currently carrying a small post office’s supply of letters that I was expected to deliver. Narwal also had some supplies that were difficult to impossible to come by in Windfall. I had been given numerous silver coins to buy bits and pieces of things. In total, the townspeople had given me nearly 6 gold pieces to buy the goods they wanted.

  I could totally have charged rent.

  Mar knew how to set the tax rates and fees in town. The town’s gold that I thought was only going to last 5 days was going to last around 9. That would actually give me time to make the trip with a bit of a cushion.

  The plan was, thankfully, pretty simple. I’d leave on foot, as we currently lacked any riding animals fit for humans, and travel towards Narwal by the old road from the valley. Once there, I would meet with the king’s representative. Fenris and SueLeeta would be busy getting the trade goods ready to go. After the meeting was completed, I was to join them and the wagon at the Western Fortress. If I had been successful in setting up trade, we would all escort the wagon to Narwal. If I somehow failed this ridiculously easy mission, we would simply return to Windfall with our goods.

  Simple enough.

  I left Mar some unnecessary general instructions that amounted to “Don’t burn the place down.” Then, I departed, walking the western road somewhat stiffly due to my still slightly injured leg. There was a procession with everyone waving to me and wishing me luck. Everyone, that is, except the work detail. They were quickly repairing several carts, so that we could complete the trade if the discussion was successful.

  With the cheering crowd at my back, I departed Windfall and started walking West towards the Western Gate Fortress and, beyond it, Narwal.

  “Are we there yet?” asked Badgelor, as we crossed into the forest west of town, finally losing sight of the village. He had changed back to his larger form to impress the villagers as we left. He felt it was the least he could do for the adoring public there to see him off.

  “It's going to be all day,” I replied, feeling my leg out to see how well it was healing. Overall, I’d decided that it was going to be okay in the next day or so, as long as nothing else serious happened.

  “Well, that’s enough of that then,” stated Badgelor. “I’m changing back to travel size.” Suddenly, he shrunk down to his smaller form.

  “Won’t your shorter legs make traveling more difficult?” I asked, hoping to avoid the inevitable.

  “Nope. Not at all,” replied Badgelor. Before I had time to react properly, he’d leapt onto my back and crawled up to the shoulder opposite of Shart. I had modified my leather armor to give him a point to lock on to.

  In this form, he didn’t weigh much. As he settled down, he started to doze, I took it as a blessing and kept on walking.

  After a while, Shart said, “So, aside from the trade mission, what are your plans in Narwal?”

  I considered for a moment. “Well, I’d like to see if there is any better equipment for me, but, mainly, I’d like to see if there are any spells that I could buy.”

  Badgelor stirred. “Is there something wrong with the spell you have?”

  “I can’t cast any spells, Badgelor,” I replied.

  “I can smell a spell scroll. What’s wrong with it?” asked the badger.

  I pondered my inventory for a minute. I didn’t have any scrolls on me. The only thing I had that was even paper was a piece of parchment that I’d found the magical crystals in. Dumbly, I pulled it out and looked at it. The only thing I’d noticed about it so far was that it was durable. I unfolded it several times, until it was just a bit smaller than a sheet of notebook paper. It was blank, aside from the smudges.

  “It’s just blank parchment,” I replied.

  “What happened when you tried empowering it?” quizzed Badgelor.

  Shart chuckled, “You think he didn’t empower it?”

  Badgelor said nothing for a long moment, as we continued walking.

  “He can’t possibly be that stupid,” said Shart, quietly. “My boy, my dear, dim, idiotic boy, tell me you fed Mana into the scroll. You’ve fed Mana into everything else. You’ve been like a teenage boy with his first hard-on about everything else with magic.”

  “Um,” I replied, again dumbly, as I started feeling out for the scroll with my mind. I could best describe what I found as a magical on/off switch, which I flipped. The formerly blank scroll immediately shone with glowing magical characters.

  “You really are as sharp as a marble,” stated Shart, as Badgelor giggled wickedly. It’s just great to see those two getting along. It didn’t last long, though, before the demon harrumphed and vanished in a puff of smoke. He was most likely off to his demon realm full of blackjack and hookers, wherever that was.

  I had found a magical scroll days ago and hadn’t known how to use it. I hated this place sometimes. Sighing, I began to read the thing.

  Wind Break… wind breaker?

  The arcane writing was in Goblin. My Lore skill allowed me to read Goblin, but this document was a highly technical mess. The script was 15 rows of blocky text that were crushed together, with only every other line making any sense. The title was only legible because of how stylized it was. The rest looked like a single page of one giant run-on sentence that I could only read half of. It broke my heart to imagine anyone subjecting another person to that kind of horrific grammar.

  As I walked, I read. Badgelor snickered occasionally, and eventually went to sleep to the sound of my mutterings. The first line explained succinctly that it was a spell. I was pretty certain it also said that one had to draw power from your ‘cores’ to power the spell. The next line was gibberish. The third line, which began in the middle of a thought, explained how to draw energy from your … lungs?

  Another thing I recognized was Mana vs Magic. Mana was a power source for spells, but actually using Mana was Magic. The scroll would call for you to harness your Mana and use Magic.

  I considered that. I had the Mana Control skill, which allowed me greater control over my Mana pool. I looked inward. I could sense my Mana reserves as they flowed throughout my whole body. Now that I was truly focusing on it, I could also sense that there were different parts of that Mana. I found my lungs, or, more accurately, a Mana Core inside my lungs, and drew power from it.

  Once I’d pulled out the Mana, it promptly flowed throughout my body’s internal Mana pathways, before being reabsorbed. Those pathways looked like a glowing representation of some old chakra diagram, though, the bands connecting them were strange. Everything joined below the heart, with connections rippling out and between various organs.

  I found separate cores for my lungs, heart, loins, brain, intestines, and calves. Those were just the bigger ones. Examining my hands, I found small nodes on the tips of my fingers on my left hand. There were none on my right. However, both palms had a larger, more elaborate node in the very center. Likewise, both forearms had a point between the Ulna and the Radius.

  That was neat but didn’t really help with learning the spell. The fifth line started midway through an explanation of how to pull energy from your intestines. I tried that, too, and was able to draw more Mana. It also got caught up in my internal Mana flows and dissipated.

  The seventh line was useful. It explained that the three elements of the spell, of which I’d only seen two, needed to be formed and dumped into an active node. I gathered the Mana from my lungs again and tried to combine it with the Mana in my intestines.

  Feedback damage: 3 points. You have miscast a spell, causing yourself 3 points of damage.

  Pain flared in my gut like a particularly nasty bout of IBS, causing me to wince and exhale sharply. While that didn’t work, I had moved the Mana into my intestines. I decided to try again, only moving the Mana elsewhere, like my hand. Magicians cast spells with their hands, right? My left hand had more nodes than my right, so I gathered up the Lung Mana and the Gut Mana. I concentra
ted and moved both kinds of Mana to my left hand, converting it to Magic.

  The Magic stayed there, held in my left hand. It gave off a faint green glow, but nothing more. I managed a smile before the Magic dissipated and I noticed my Mana bar drop slightly. That meant that moving Mana to my hand got it out of my internal system.

  That made sense. All I needed to do now was figure out what the third symbol was. Reading through the remaining instructions on the parchment, I found the last line. It was an executive summary of the Mana components of the spell. It used clipped, precise technical terms, as well as the word of power to activate the spell.

  In simple terms, the spell was one part Lung Mana and two parts Gut Mana. Each piece of Mana had to be formed, however, into magical runes. As I looked at the symbols describing the Mana flows, I realized that they were showing the patterns the Mana had to be formed into. It was a bit like using multiple 2d images from different angles to make a 3d image. All the symbols were complicated, to the point where I didn’t think it was possible to stumble onto them at all. Then again, I didn’t know enough about how Magic worked. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed them.

  I focused on forming the Mana for the three symbols and moving it into my left palm. That took several tries and quite a bit of Mana, as I worked through the spell. Forming each of the Mana took time, and the window where I could do that before they dissipated was pretty limited. Finally, I realized that I could do all three symbols at once and throw them into my palm, simultaneously.

  Fifteen or so tries after that, I actually managed to do it successfully.

  My hand suddenly glowed a greenish blue color, and my palm began to itch as the spell formed. I was literally itching to use my newfound magic. I quickly scanned for targets and spotted an unsuspecting tree nearby.

  Even as I brought my hand in line with the tree, I could tell it wasn’t a valid target. The Magic ‘spoke’ to me. However, it was doing it, I could instantly tell that my spell wasn’t going to affect the tree in the slightest. Searching around, I spotted a bird. Slightly regretting its horrible demise, I pointed my now quite itchy hand at it and called out the word of power!

  “Hoopie!”

  You have learned the Skill Biological Aeromancy, you are unskilled. A spell by any other name wouldn’t smell as sweet.

  A greenish aura surrounded the bird for a moment. Its body quivered violently, startling it. Then, the bird flew away.

  “Did that bird just fart?” asked Badgelor, sniffing. He was now staring over my shoulder, giving me the appearance of having a second, albeit furrier, head.

  “No, I cast a spell at it,” I replied, glancing through the confusing scroll again. A Level Up prompt flared in the corner of my vision. However, I was too focused on the scroll, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, to pay it much mind.

  “What did the scroll say?” asked Badgelor.

  “Can’t you read?” I said absently, trying to decipher the other parts of the scroll.

  “No, it's in Goblin. All I know about Goblin is that they write serpentine,” stated the badger.

  Serpentine? I looked at the scroll again. I read to the end of the first line, going left to right. Then, instead of going back to the start of the second nonsense line, I read it right to left. That didn’t make sense, either, until I mentally started flipping characters over. Suddenly, each line was perfectly legible.

  It was a simple spell, the least powerful form of magic. It was designed to cause a deep disturbance in your enemy. Bring a thunderous terror to them. A deep calling to the bowels.

  I glanced back at the title. The serpentine didn’t start at the first line of the spell. It started at the title. This wasn’t Wind Breaker. It was a Break Wind spell. I’d learned fart magic, and it had finally leveled up one of my magical classes.

  Glorious.

  Chapter 21: Biological Aeromancy

  Badgelor had actually fallen off my shoulder after he’d realized that I had, indeed, learned a ranged Fart spell. He was absolutely inconsolable at the moment. Shart had materialized shortly after I cast it, his look of pride shattering as he realized what I’d just done. Also, the parchment had crackled and fallen apart as I tried to read it. That was apparently normal after one learned a new spell.

  “Magical languages are almost always written like that. How did you not know that?” declared Shart. “On Earth, how do you morons write Spell Scrolls?”

  “We don’t have Spell Scrolls on Earth,” I shot back. Shart knew that, somewhere deep in the recesses of his dark, addled mind. It was just unheard of here, so he forgot.

  Badgelor laughed louder. “Earth sounds great.”

  I reviewed the spell.

  Break Wind: Biological Aeromancy spell, Damage 0. Causes the target to break wind uncontrollably. Can be cast with either hand. Verbal Casting can be quieted at double Mana cost. Simple Spell. Cost: 3-9 Mana.

  Baring my teeth in what could possibly be described as a smile, I said, “It's not the worst thing in the world. I was trying to learn magic, and now I know some. Hell, I unlocked the Mage class. That’s got to count for something.”

  Shart just bowed his head. “You are an idiot. Mages focus on a SINGLE type of magic. Most of them learn about the Elemental schools like fire, for offense, earth, for defense, air, for movement, or water, for healing. You are focused on Farts!”

  The demon had figured it out in seconds. The unused spell scroll had been something the goblin had kept specifically because it was a joke spell. It was the kind of spell you’d show your friends at a party, because it was funny. I had learned it, because I didn’t know any better.

  The problem was that I’d learned it first. We finally figured out why I couldn’t level up my casting classes. Shart had initially thought that if I spent enough Mana, I’d be able to level up one of the magical classes. That wasn’t it, though. The issue had been that I didn’t know any spells. Mages started off knowing one spell. Sorcerers and Wizard s knew more. However, that was the crux of the issue.

  When I’d learned my only spell, it had caused me to instantly level in Mage. Since Mages focused on a single school of magic, one generally wanted to pick a school with many spells of multiple types. Taking fire, for example, gave you a great deal of offensive spells, some mobility and defensive spells and a handful of healing spells.

  “You could have learned any of the Elemental schools, and it would have been useful,” cried Shart. “But no, Mighty Freaking Jim decides he needs to go off and do something insane.”

  “I didn’t realize that if I read the scroll, I’d get locked into a single school,” I replied, hotly.

  “Of course, you didn’t. You never think before you do anything,” growled Shart.

  “Hey, you left, you floating pig,” snarled Badgelor. “You know Jim is an idiot, and you left him with a magic scroll.”

  “I was gone 15 minutes!” cried Shart. “I didn’t actually think he could walk and read at the same time.”

  Badgelor flinched. “Point.”

  “Now, he’s learned Biological Aeromancy! Where on Ordinal are you going to find a library that’s going to have any spells in this school of magic?” called Shart.

  “There is bound to be some in Narwal,” I stated.

  “Hardly! There might be one magical academy on Ordinal that even does any serious research into this,” responded the demon. “And, it's not even on this continent!”

  “I’ll just level up Swashbuckler, then, and get a boat,” I growled.

  “You really are the one your mother should have swallowed. If someone was giving out prizes in idiocy, you would win every time.” Shart exclaimed.

  Thankfully, Shart was not presently on my shoulder, or I would have removed him. Violently. Badgelor had decided to scurry away a safe distance to watch the ensuing discussion.

  Magically, I was the functional equivalent of someone who specialized in 13th Century Renaissance literature from the eastern provinces of Poland. There was some inter
esting stuff there, but no one was working on it. There were just not very many spells to choose from. A traditional Mage could walk into a magic shop and leave with many books of magic. I’d be lucky to find any. The cherry on top was that the one freakin spell I did know couldn’t actually hurt anyone.

  “How do you even manage to find your dick to piss?” shrieked the demon.

  I growled and reviewed the prompts.

  Level Up, Mage 1.

  You have selected the Mage Class. Please chose two stat buffs for yourself at first level!

  You have gained Amateur rank in the following skills: Light Armor, Mana Control, Magical Implements and Daggers.

  You are focused on Biological Aeromancy: Good for you!

  You have gained the skill tree: Barrier!

  You already have skill with Light Armor, Mana Control, and Daggers. Please select other skills

  Your Hit Point total is increased by 10. Your Mana is increased by 10.

  I had been intending on dumping both of my points into Willpower, to increase my Mana pool. Now, since my only spell was actually useless, I thought about it for a minute. If I got to Narwal, I could learn more spells, so, having some more Mana might be useful. Also, I hadn’t really done much to my Spirit lately. I decided to put points into those stats.

  That raised my Spirit to Very Good and my Willpower to Above Average. The Spirit decreased the timeframe for all my powers to regenerate, including most of my talents. That was very useful. Willpower granted more Mana and better resistance to some magical damage.

  First level of Mage didn’t grant a perk, so, I didn’t have anything to do there.

  The Barrier Talent looked somewhat interesting. I held up my hand and concentrated. A smoky, green disk about 3 feet wide shot out in front of me. That sounded more impressive than it was. I tossed a rock through it, idly, and then read through the talent description.