Chapter 184: Even Exchange

Since the wagon was going to take weeks to complete, Jadis used the time to prepare as much as possible for the potentially long trip as well as get as much training in with Noll as she could. Since she and the old therion were on better terms than how they’d started, she told him about their planned trip to the north during one of their regular training sessions. While he was more than willing to offer advice, he also made it clear that he wasn’t going to join her on the expedition. He’d been sent to spy on her by the second prince and he’d decided to give her some instruction on his own initiative, but he wasn’t being paid to babysit Jadis and her team. He was content to wait in the city and enjoy the comforts of civilization while she and her cohorts froze their tits off out in the woods, as he put it.

Jadis couldn’t really fault him for wanting to stay where it was warm. Every day that passed the nights grew longer and the weather grew colder. No real snow had come down so far, but light dustings and flurries of snowflakes were becoming more frequent. Keeping that in mind, she made sure her supplies were stocked with cold weather gear.

Aside from commissioning several sets of warm clothes from Karla, the seamstress who made all of her clothing, Jadis visited an enchantment shop and purchased a large round stone that functioned as the Oros equivalent of a portable heater. The item was a smooth globe of some kind of granite stone and weighed about ten pounds. It reminded Jadis of a bowling ball, except without the finger holes and covered in indecipherable runes. The model she’d bought was a cheap, single use item that couldn’t be recharged. She couldn’t afford the more expensive rechargeable enchanted items with how much silver she was spending on the wagon and other items, but the heat stone would functionally act as a large bonfire without any flame for a full twenty-four hours before draining completely. That kind of backup could prove invaluable while out in the wilderness depending on conditions.

Other than her personal preparations and the heat stone, Jadis didn’t have to concern herself with much of the grittier logistics. Aila handled ordering the necessary food supplies and other necessities since she had experience dealing with supply trains and the like. Jadis didn’t ignore the process, she was actually quite interested in seeing how such tasks were done, but she was more than happy to let Aila take control in an area she had background and training in.

Aside from her training with Noll and her prep work for the expedition, Jadis still found time to head out into the Broken Hills and hunt down demons with her team. It was on one such foray into the field that Sabina approached her about her class details.

It had been about a week since the day Jadis had told Sabina and Bridget about her classes and they were all currently somewhere to the northwest of the city hunting down demons. Even though Jadis was fairly certain she could get both of her newest teammates up to level twenty much faster, she hadn’t been pushing as hard as she had when she’d helped Aila level up. Partly that was because Bridget still hadn’t decided on whether or not she wanted to partake in Jadis’ powerfully beneficial but lewd rituals, but also Sabina spent most of her time in the public smithing workshop, working on Thea’s new armor as well as various components for the wagon, plus whatever other crafting ideas caught her fancy as she toiled away. Thus, she didn’t have as much spare time to commit to being out in the field for most of the day. However, on the day that she did travel with the team out into the hills, Jadis made sure to take her off separately from the rest of the group so she could focus on power leveling the exuberant smith. It was in the quiet moment between battles with demonic forces that she brought up her primary class.

“Jay? Er, Jay-Dys-Syd? Is that okay?”

“Just Jadis is fine when we’re alone,” Jay corrected Sabina. “But you can call me any of my three nicknames you want if that’s easier for you. I’ll answer you either way.”

“Okay, right, Jay-Dys. Oh! I get it now, you split your name Jadis into two parts and then you reversed Dys into Syd to make a third name which is clever but if you ever make a forth copy of yourself I’m not sure you should reverse Jay because Yaj is a slang term for Yajina and she was a famous cultist that murdered a past Hero’s companion so it’s kind of a slur now for traitors in some parts of the world.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jay murmured as she jogged along. She was carrying the talkative half elf while her other two selves were spread out, looking for demons. “Was there something you wanted to ask me, though?”

“Oh! Yes, there was,” Sabina shook her head to reorient herself. “Well, sort of. Actually, I wanted to tell you something. See, it kind of bothers me that you were so open with your class and skills but you don’t know anything about me. So… um… would you like to know about my class?”

Jay slowed down and shifted Sabina so she was supported by just one of her arms while she lifted the visor from her face. Meeting Sabina’s gold-tinged eyes, she could tell that the smith was nervous.

“You don’t have to tell me anything about your class if you don’t want to,” Jay told her gently. “I told you what you needed to know. That doesn’t obligate you to tell me your personal information. If you’d rather keep those details private—”

“No, it’s fine, really!” Sabina cut her off with some emphatic waves of her hands. “It’s not like I have anything super special skill-wise that I’m trying to hide. Plus, I guess I just, well, I guess, I want you to know.”

Sabina’s face flushed as she muttered the last few words, turning her eyes away from Jadis. Then she suddenly rounded on her, speaking a mile a minute.

“Besides it would only be fair for you to know about me since I know a lot of personal details about you and since I could blurt out your secrets that you don’t want told to anyone which of course I won’t do but I could and you’re putting your trust in me that I won’t I think it would be the right thing to do if I gave you my details as a sign of my own trust and also because it’d be a more even exchange and it’d also make it so that if I went back on my word you could tell people about my class as punishment which wouldn’t really be comparable since my skills are nowhere near as rare but it’s the principle of the thing that matters and—”

Jay put a gauntleted finger against Sabina’s lips, silencing her nervous ramble.

“If you feel you need to share your class details with me, I would be honored to hear about them.”

Pulling her finger away, Sabina blushed even more furiously, but nodded once.

“Okay. Um. Starting with my name…”

“You have Focus and Will but you don’t have any points in Arcane or one of the other magic attributes?” Jay asked after Sabina finished explaining her base stats. “That’s surprising.”

“Yes,” Sabina nodded. “When my primary class unlocked, that’s just how it was for me. I never put any points into the stats because I wasn’t sure what kind of enchanter class I wanted, just that it lets me enchant. So I kind of just let it be open. That might not have been the right call, honestly, but I’m hoping it wasn’t a mistake.”

“I’m not sure what difference it’d make,” Jay admitted. “I don’t know all that much about enchanting.”

“Enchanters can come from any of the three magic type attributes. Some even have multiple, though I don’t think many do. Then there are some who don’t have any magic attributes at all and instead have skills that let them copy existing spells that other people cast into their enchantments rather than knowing the spell themselves.”

“Oh, is that how it works?” Jay tilted her head in curiosity. “Enchanters normally have to know a spell enchant it into an item?”

“Usually,” Sabina confirmed. “Or they can copy from others, or they have a specific skill that lets them make just the one specific enchantment that does the one thing. Those are the most common. Skills like that aren’t very versatile, but they usually make crafting the enchantment cheaper and faster in exchange, so a lot of enchanters like those kinds of skills.”

Jadis could understand that position. If a person was trying to make as many as one item as possible, a skill that made it quicker and cheaper to make would be pretty damn useful. If she had to craft a hundred copies of the heat stone she’d bought earlier, she’d want a skill to make it go faster. On the other hand, if she was a crafter making custom items, she probably wouldn’t want to waste her skill slots on a skill that could only make one specific enchantment, not unless it was something that could be easily used in combination with other more custom enchantments.

“Ah, but those are just my attributes. Let me tell you about my skills…”

“Huh,” Jay processed all the info Sabina had laid out for her. “They’re all passive skills…”

“Hmm? Oh, yes, they are. Active skills are useful but the first few that were offered to me weren’t that great and my father recommended that I stick with passive skills unless the active skill would be super useful since if I use up my Endurance on a few uses of an active skill I won’t be able to resume crafting until I rest.”

“That makes sense I guess,” Jay nodded. “I guess that Fervent Smithing one explains why you’re always up all night in the forge, huh?”

“I don’t sleep much anyway…” Sabina shrugged with a nervous smile.

“But you didn’t take any attribute improvement passive skills? Like, the regular one that everyone has access to. Your stats seem kind of high for your level, I figured you must have taken one or two of those at least.”

“I didn’t really need to,” Sabina shrugged again. “I have naturally above average attributes. Not amazingly high or anything, but more than normal, which is more than enough that I felt safe to focus on a range of passive skills instead.”

“Some of them seem kind of redundant though,” Jay pointed out. “I mean, do you really need Forging I and Armorer I? Aren’t they basically doing the same thing for you?”

“Not at all!” Sabina shook her head fervently. “I mean, they all help with my crafting, but in different ways. Forging I improves any of my smithing work, regardless of what the project is. Even if I was working on an iron kettle, it would still apply. Armorer I and Weaponsmith I only apply to armor and weapons respectively. But Forging I stacks with Armor I, so if I’m working on crafting a helmet, I’m actually getting the benefit of two different bonuses. And if I’m using a hammer, it’s three bonuses thanks to Hammer Expertise I. You see?”

Jadis did see. She hadn’t known that passive skills that affected a person’s ability to perform a task worked that way. She had known her attribute boosting skills stacked with each other, but the interaction between equipment related types of passive skills were unknown to her since she didn’t have any herself. When she looked at it from a combatant’s perspective though, she could imagine a fighter taking a skill that improved their ability with a polearm, then a skill that improved their skill with pikes specifically, so they could get stacking bonuses. Getting a boost from both skills would be a major benefit.

 “So, you basically have some general skills that you can use for anything and some specialized skills that are for specific things, and the general skills are always active even when you’re doing the more specific things,” Jay summarized what she’d learned.

“Exactly!” Sabina beamed at her.

“Cool,” Jay grinned back at the happy half elf. “Thank you for sharing all that with me. You taught me something new there, plus it’s all just interesting anyway. I really respect what you do, being able to just make amazing things like this armor I’m wearing with your hands so easily. It’s really impressive.”

“Oh! Um, thanks,” Sabina smiled shyly back at Jay. “I wouldn’t call it easy exactly, but, um, yeah. I’m glad you like what I do.”

“You certainly make it look easy, at least compared to how I know I’d fare trying to make anything more complicated than a stick with a rock on the end. But hold that thought. I spotted a few demons.”

“Really?” Sabina sat up straighter on Jay’s left arm, looking around wildly. “Where? I don’t see anything!”

“East of us,” Jay chuckled. “My other self, Syd, sees them, on the other side of that hill. Come on, let’s go get you some more experience points so you can get that awesome enchanter class as fast as possible.”

“That’s so bizarre,” Sabina mumbled as Jay took off into a fast jog towards her mirrored body. “You can see on the other side of that hill because you’re actually on the other side of that hill except you’re right here carrying me. Magic is so strange sometimes.”

Jadis couldn’t help but agree.

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