บท 39: Are Class VII Rapids a Thing?
Recorded and proven ways of how affinities are gained:
1. Race change. Most races have a specific, innate affinity. In the cases of some births, the child may have one or multiple affinities of the parents.
2. Crystallized Concepts. One of the only natural occuring treasures that have any value, a T1 slime in certain environments can form a small, glowing crystal that will grant an affinity on consumption.
3. Training. With enough effort, some affinities can be learned. It is worth noting, however, that some of the most powerful affinities have proven to be impossible to learn without special circumstances.
4. Personal Epiphanies. Some of the most powerful people in the world learned their trademarked affinities from moments of self realization and introspection about their role in life. Affinities earnes this way cannot be searched for, but gained in happenstance. Evidence suggests that this way occurs most often when a person completely changes his/her outlook on life and usually fights their inner nature suggested by one or many of their race's [Path]s.
5. Exposure. Many try this route, but few succeed. It is possible to learn an affinity after enough time subjected to it. It is most commonly gained this way from a significant period of being tortured by another's affinity.
-Wikipedia entry on Affinity Acquisition
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Sophia Shells, wanderer, explorer, and escort extraordinaire knew what was happening the second the water temperature started to rise.
Maybe, if she was more focused on her enemy, he would have been dead in no time. It was just a Gob after all. Who cares if it had power and manifestations, it still lacked finese.
But, Sophia had the trait that most all mermaids share. As a race, they would rather live through others than themselves.
Her predisposition towards watching others first-hand was a bit of an oddity among her kind, but not all that uncommon.
She loved to watch. Not just in a lewd way, but it was just more interesting to see other people act than to actually make the effort to do exciting things in the first place.
Like this battle for instance. It was so boring! A random sharky was a big thug. It punched things. That's it. No finese or strategy. No cool comebacks during a fight to the death (not that she knew how to make snappy remarks mid battle, it was a hard skill to learn).
Now, watching Trafaul try to convince the bandits to change sides and lifestyles? That's a riot! Especially when he and Odd were too busy arguing with each other to finish it off quickly!
It just goes to show, that peoplewatching is always better than doing. You never know what you'll see!
Most other mermen and mermaids are perfectly content to sit on rocks and watch passing ships. They spend all their off time talking to the little critters of the sea, asking them to talk about their life stories.
Sophia wasn't most mermaids, so she travelled alone and afar to see everything she could. It was much more exciting than the accounts of prepubescent crabs and dumb flounders.
So, in her travels, storyswapping and various jobs, Sophia's seen and heard a bit of everything.
And, in her experience, this wasn't the first time the river water had heated up so quickly.
So, instead of pushing herself to immediately end the battle between her and the big fish, Sophia decided to protect her livelihood.
If the people she escorted died, then it would be even harder to make a living by swimming through the ever-changing river systems of Eastern Canada and the Great Lakes.
If her clients died too often, she would be forced to change careers! There were a limited amount of other options, as treasure hunters and adventurers were jobs for fools that wanted to die early and be in the MIDDLE of chaos at all times.
Sophia just wanted to watch chaos from afar, thank you very much.
So, when the water started to hurt her skin, she further strengthened the barrier around the noncombatants.
They were the paying customers, after all. She liked Odd and the spikey, friendly fishman, but she had priorities.
She pushed out as much mana as she could while she was multitasking offense, defense, and protection to push her foe forward. The opposite happened to her as well, as the force of the magic-powered push sent her hurtling back into the group of the weaklings.
Sophia's body was thrown into the group while Odd and Trafaul were on the other side of the river near the flustered bandit.
*CRACK*
The loud sound sent shivers down the spines of every living thing in the area as they felt the powerful quakes being transmitted through the water.
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It was on the first day of this journey, that Odd learned something important about himself.
His curiosity was not insatiable.
As he had mused often lately, Sophia liked to talk a lot. It was on the first day, that she spent an entire afternoon droning on about the ecosystems and villages along the riversystems that cover the entire continent.
At least her lecture wasn't completely useless, for he tuned in whenever she talked about terraforming.
In the last couple millennia, people of all races found that with enough Power Stones, anything was possible.
Humanity lifted most of Australia out of the ground, the Demon King scorched the earth, the fishmen and mer heated up a bay the size of an ocean, and the Holy Empire consecrated the western seaboard.
The civilized races weren't alone in their actions.
Gobs have an innate desire to gain Power Stones and when a leader smart enough to think to use them properly emerges, territories are created in earnest.
Pits underground, mountains covered in snow in the middle of deserts, deserts in jungles, and swamps replaced beaches. Biomes of all types sprouted as if from thin air as overbosses took land, dragons created caves to dwell in, and the occasional hermit or group subjected lesser creatures.
Why was all this important to Odd when lava was coming from the ground, instantly hardening and melting again while the small tributary near him split open and nearly tripled in sized?
The unnitended consequences of anyone with a treasury of Power Stones shattered the landscape.
Sure, the continents retain the general shapes that they had before the Gobs arrived, but the plates underneath them?
The world used to rest on top of fifteen major, 100 km thick, tectonic plates.
Long story short? They have a lot of damage and cities have to perform rituals to keep themselves safe from subterranean activity.
Out in the middle of nowhere, it only took a moderately powerful, T3 bandit striking a weak fault line to provoke a reaction from the Earth.
Odd was screaming at the top of his lungs. Or was it more like roaring?
It's an odd sensation, having bubbles come out of your mouth while you try to get the cries of anger past your lips.
Odd's body tumbled back and forth like a rag doll, he had no idea how or why the water was pushing him so far, so fast, but he would be damned if he dropped his dagger. He held on to them with everything he had.
Once or twice, he felt the enemy fishman's body slam against him, but the weakened foe hardly had enough energy to actively fight him. He was tossed and turned in thrall to mother nature just as Odd was.
The living ghoul felt no remorse, however, when one of his blades 'accidentally,' stabbed into Trafaul's shoulder. The fishman started it when his spikes 'accidentally,' skewered him while they were spinning around against the walls and bottom of the river.
It was equally as 'accidental,' that Odd was channeling his yin lighting while his dagger was in his 'friend's' shoulder. He didn't particularly enjoy watching the pained expression as the black energy attacked his life-force, but he didn't particularly dislike savoring his pain either.
[Yin Lighting Affinity] rose from 3.0 to 3.1
'It was all for the mana,' Odd told himself, the grin on his face wasn't wiped away when he hit a particularly nasty rock that cut him open again.
A sense of vertigo hit him and he realized something.
"Holy shit," the Odd gasped.
Somehow, the three of them were catapulted into the air and were hundreds of feet above the water, falling directly into a giant whirlpool.
Odd, high on his favorite drug, adrenaline, didn't think his body would survive the fall. Those currents looked deadly.
Trafaul looked as if he was deeply in thought, completely ignoring their immintent peril.
The fishman bandit looked pale, his eyes were half lidded, and he looked to be wheezing with his arms hanging weakly to his sides.
Odd needed to ride one of them like a boat, he figured it was his only option to reduce the impact and ferocity of the water.
Trafaul was closer to him, but obviously out of the question. He still had enough spikes on his body to kill him on accident.
However, much to Odd's irritation, the other midair man was far away from the other two.
So Odd acted recklessly.
Using the last of his mana that he was able to absorb directly from Trafaul during their forced journey, Odd was hit with several flashbacks as he channeled his magic into his feet, forcibly exploding them and propelling him forward.
[Soul] rose from 3.2 to 3.3
He struck his daggers with all his force, but they glanced off the sharkman's sides, drawing blood, but doing no major damage.
So here Odd was, falling to his death, profusely bleeding from his ankles, with his 'prey' falling just out of reach.
'Mother, some help here would be nice,' Odd thought about his necklace, but nothing was happening.
Odd had a stray thought that Cirrha may have been right when she claimed he needed protection.
'I will not let her say, "I told you so!"' Odd screamed in his head.
He opened his jaw and bit down on the falling half-fish and latched on.
[Mind] rose from 2.7 to 2.8
Thinking himself an idiot, Odd activated his [Vital Points] skill and plunged his daggers down again.
This time, Odd felt the penetration of soft flesh as his daggers struck true.
He kept biting and chewing more flesh, activated his yin lighting with every point of mana he regenerated, and shifted his daggers a bit against a hard fins until the fishman hit the whirlpool.
[Body] rose from 2.5 to 2.6
Odd's body was lifted back up into the air, but he continued to hold on to his daggers as he choked while trying to eat himself back to full health.
The living ghoul would have been killed if his prey wasn't weakened by Sophia, but at this point, it couldn't harness the energy to open his eyes, let alone resist the jaws of death.
Odd felt his body travel downwards even faster than it had while he was in freefall. At times, he brushed up against the sides of the underwater tunnels and at others he took the spikes of his aquentance, who he was really starting to hate with a passion, but the living ghoul continued to stubbornly hold on.
[Soul] rose from 3.3 to 3.4
In the back of his mind, he felt his feet knit back together, but he continued to eat and drain as he was thrashed around. Feeling like his wounds were healed enough, his willpower started to weaken, and tiredness overtook him as he traveled for who knows how many miles up, down, and sideways while underwater.
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