Alyssa swung off a branch like it was a trapeze bar, arcing through the air and landing on another branch several feet off the ground.

[Leafstep] activated, supporting the piece of wood as it creaked underneath her feet, and Alyssa metaphorically held her breath as she tried to shove as much Wood and Force mana through her feet as she could into the branch, trying to reinforce it and enhance its tension such that it wouldn't break, but instead-

The branch rebounded back with a magical twang, launching Alyssa into the air, high enough for her to get up to another branch, and she then used that as a step, coupled with a burst of magic coming from her foot, to launch her all the more into the canopy.

That's the stuff, she thought triumphantly. That triumph quickly turned to shock as she nearly collided with a pseudowyvern, but both her and the little critter managed to avoid one another. It did mean that she missed the branch she'd been aiming for, so Alyssa suddenly found herself in freefall.

A branch came up within arm's reach, and Alyssa snagged it. The sudden stop jarred her arm, but [Leafstep] made it more of a solid yank than anything too bad. She easily pulled herself up onto the branch to catch her breath and give her arm a bit of a break.

It really was amazing what just a few stat points could do. She'd made it to level 6 according to Oliver, and that had let her get a very nice distribution of stats. Two points went to Dexterity and Cohesion each, improving her control over her body and magic, and the last two... well, those had gone to Skill.

She hadn't really expected it, when first planning things out. Oliver's System node had been pretty crude, and only officially worked with assigning one stat point at a time to one of the eleven stats. But after her first two points had gone to Cohesion, she'd realized that the magic in question that shaped her soul into stat points was really basic.

Sure, it was impressive that Oliver had managed to make it, yes yes, but still. It was pretty basic, which even Oliver didn't disagree with. But that meant that there was some flex, where normally there wasn't. Enough flex for her, with her superior control over her body and magic, to... nudge her soul a little bit.

Not a ton. Just a bit. Just... enough to twist her Skill points in ways that felt to her like a substat. She hadn't known for sure what it would do for her, but when Oliver had transcribed her stat sheet for her, she had been quite happy to see the results.

Class: [Ranger of Far Lands] (Air, Force, Wood) Level: 6 Major Stats: Dexterity 8, Recovery 4, Resistance 1: (Physical 3) Regular Stats: Mind 0: (Senses 3), Strength 3, Aura 0, Skill 2: (Subskills 1, Movement 1), Power 0 Minor Stats: Generation 0, Cohesion 1, Capacity 0 Skills (2/6*): [Leafstep] 11, [Ignite] 6

It had actually worked! She'd managed to specialize her Skill points into Subskill and Movement substats, which doubled their effectiveness.

Yes, yes, technically it wasn't truly doubling. And those two skill slots could only be filled by a subskill, and two others that could only be filled by a movement skill. But she really wanted subskills and she really wanted movement skills. Those were where she shone. And that left her with an entire skill slot open for anything!

It would probably be a sensory-tracking Skill, because that was what her job relied on second-most, but it could be anything! Also, Jacob had said that he knew some tricks for making overlapping substats extra-potent, so she might be able to squeeze even more movement subskills into her soul with some coaching from the veteran.

She'd tried to explain how she'd pulled off the manual substat assignment to Jacob and Clark, both of whom had gone after her, but neither had really managed to figure it out. She really would have expected Jacob to manage it, honestly. He was the experienced one.

But he hadn't, and it was amazing. Because that meant she officially had something that was uniquely hers - substats! Nobody else was able to do it, which meant that she could absolutely leverage that for a solid effective stat advantage.

It was nice, being the best.

Of course, in order to leverage her substats, she needed to actually get the subskills she wanted. [Leafstep] had a ton of subskills that would be great and useful, and right now she was trying to unlock ⟨Springlaunch⟩, which did exactly what the name suggested. It would dramatically increase the speed at which she could go, and give her a magical option for a pseudo-attack.

She just needed to actually make it work. She'd never personally unlocked a subskill manually before, but she knew the theory and knew she could do the exercises, and Jacob had given her a bunch of tips, so it should be any minute now that she'd get the subskill.

...hang on, how did she know she didn't have it yet? How certain was she that she'd get the skill-echo or whatever it was, like she'd gotten after earning [Ignite]?

⟨Springlaunch⟩? she tried.

Nothing happened.

Okay, she hadn't gotten it yet. Curiosity sated and her breath well in hand, she jumped off the branch she was on and bounded deeper into The Jungle.

"You're big," Alyssa muttered to herself.

She'd been staying relatively close to First River, to make it easier to find her way back to First Tower when she was done, and in so doing had noticed when the water stopped being quite as waterlike.

The creature was easily the size of a house, was covered in glistening mud, and had an elephant-like trunk sticking out of its face, pulling an entire tree almost entirely over as it ate at the leaves and branches connected to it. It was... a bit rounded and looked almost friendly were it not for the enormous fangs larger than Alyssa was tall.

It's like a hippo elephant, she thought. And wasn't that a scary thought?

It didn't seem like it had noticed her, so Alyssa carefully worked to turn around before that could change. Unfortunately, it didn't seem like she was careful enough, because a whip-snap sounded out behind her as the hippophant bellowed a roar of challenge and started charging directly at her.

Why are you so fast? Alyssa thought with panic as she saw just how quickly it was approaching. She threw herself fully into her run, pushing as much mana into the skill as her massive 0 Power and 1 Cohesion would allow.

⟨Springlaunch⟩

Suddenly, she felt her mana almost click into place, and a bunch of coiled-up mana blasted out from the bottom of her feet. The step she was taking suddenly became way, way stronger than anticipated, and she flailed in midair to try and recover, narrowly landing with the aid of her hands on the riverbank, and the hippophant was still gaining and...

Oh wait.

Alyssa turned and ran into the woods, away from the river.

The territorial creature didn't follow.

Go me, Alyssa was a bit frazzled from the amount of adrenaline that had just been coursing through her, then the reason why she'd even tripped hit her. "Ooh! Really go me!"

She tapped her foot, activating the skill again.

⟨Springlaunch⟩

She found herself tumbling head over heels into a nearby bush.

It seemed like this might take a bit of practice.

Adjusting to ⟨Springlaunch⟩ when her stats were way lower than they had been the last time she'd used the subskill didn't take that long. Just... long enough for her to be very glad for her points in Resistance. She was fine.

Thanks to those points.

The hippophant didn't follow her into The Jungle itself - she wondered if it even could leave the water, between the steep bank and the thick trees - and she traveled a bit further downstream before returning to the First River and making her way back home. As she did so, she grabbed a few more nuts and fruits as she saw ones she recognized and liked because why not?

Henrietta was still asleep by the time she got back, which let Alyssa know she hadn't been gone that long. Jacob was also asleep, which narrowed the window down even further. She'd taken off not long after waking up, and Henrietta typically went to bed about four hours after that, meaning it had overall taken her less than twelve hours to unlock and practice with her new subskill. Jacob in turn slept for the latter half of Henrietta's night, putting her at somewhere between eight and twelve hours for the full excursion. That, she felt, was an appropriately fast time to figure out a subskill from scratch.

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"Aren't I awesome?" she triumphantly crowed to Oliver and Clark as she dropped herself on a rock. It hurt a bit, but she wasn't about to make it look like it.

"You are!" Clark eagerly agreed, which deflated Alyssa's sails a little bit. It basically didn't count when people just said you were awesome, that didn't mean anything. Unearned awesomeness was worse than boring uselessness. But Oliver wasn't easily impressed, so if she could just get his approval then it would still be good.

He didn't say anything, instead engrossed in his unseen System screens, casting some kinds of spells and not paying her any attention whatsoever.

"Thank you, Clark!" she said a bit pointedly, "Wouldn't you agree, Oliver?"

"Mmm?" he looked over at her, clearly not paying attention, "Why's that?"

"Because I got my subskill! And so fast, too! Bet you didn't see that coming did you?"

"Oh, good job," Oliver replied with all the enthusiasm of someone being informed they were on garbage duty for the week.

"Jacob said that while he was fighting the tree, he managed to unlock his ⟨Piercing Strike⟩ right as he was about to use it!" Clark managed to rub salt in the wound. "I really hope that someday I can learn how to control stuff to use something for the first time by unlocking it!"

Oh sure, that seemed to get Oliver's attention. "That's not... really how that works? You need to prove that you can do something before it becomes Significant to you. Did he... no, that wouldn't work that way. Um. Well, no. But maybe..."

"Mission control to Oliver?" Alyssa waved her hand near the spacing-out Artificer's face, which caused him to jerk with enough surprise she almost thought he'd forgotten she was there.

"What were we talking about again?"

"Getting subskills!" Clark eagerly provided.

"Oh yeah! I really should ask Jacob how he did that. Though I don't know if he'd actually know the physics behind it. Hmm. I should get him in a divination focal chamber once we have one of those and have him get a subskill that way. I'm really curious how that works."

Alyssa fought back her annoyance at her actually-awesome accomplishment being completely sidelined. Maybe if she poked Oliver enough about tangential things, he'd realize the timeline she'd worked in and actually be impressed? She didn't want to wait until Henrietta woke up. Their Commander would definitely be appropriately impressed by her accomplishment, but that was hours away and she'd managed it now. She didn't have any better ideas, anyway.

"Don't you know all about subskills? You're a Systemic Engineer Archmage or something?" Maybe if she needled him in the right way she'd get him emotionally invested in the conversation?

"System Engineering. One of the first Archmages for that specific field, incidentally," he preened.

"Wait, really?" Clark beat Alyssa to the question that prompted in her, "You're the first?"

"One of the first," Oliver sighed with exasperation, "Also, the original creators all have basically honorary Sys-E archmageship, which would put me as somewhere in the several hundredth to get the qualification. It's a young field. There's still a lot to learn, a lot to refine."

"Oh? Such as?" Alyssa asked before realizing they were drifting off-topic.

"A more robust local interface, for one," he grumbled. "I feel like it should be possible to cram way more functionality into the basic package, at the very least local [Status] support. Maybe if it were packaged as a skill itself? That... what would a [Status] skill look like?"

Alyssa tried to find the words, but Clark beat her to it, "Wouldn't it just look like a Status?"

"Well." Oliver scowled, "Yes, but I meant what would it look like magically speaking. [System Enchanter] is Arcane, Technology, and Significance, but its skills are much more focused around the creation of System infrastructure, rather than personal usage of the System. Maybe Arcane, Knowledge, and Significance? I don't know what kind of class that would be off the top of my head, but it's got to be tested."

"Don't you make the classes?" Alyssa felt somewhat lost. They were supposed to be talking about her, damnit!

"Well, kind of. There's lots of engineering and specific tweaks going into make things work better, but most of the System is emergent phenomena. More robust that way, more able to adapt to user development, and it won't shackle your growth. Nobody gets to control that." Oliver's voice grew steely, and Alyssa felt like she should offer a toast to The Emperor.

"We fought those wars already," she settled for, "And we won."

"Let None Be Greater," Clark piped in as he dumped a bunch of freshly-cut and cleaned vegetables into the soup pot.

"Let None Be Greater," she and Oliver echoed, but only she finished with, "And may we be the first of many."

That kind of killed the conversation, but after a moment, Alyssa felt like it was safe to try and reignite it in the proper direction, "So, I managed to get my movement subskill that I was going for already. ⟨Springlaunch⟩ is just so much fun and so useful, and I managed to already get it."

"Oh, so you want to move on to learning how to get your tracking skill?"

Alyssa sighed, trying and failing to resist the urge to bury her face in her hands before recovering and saying in a false-cheery voice, "Sure! That sounds just great. How do you do divination?"

"I'm not sure it's actually divination?" Oliver mused.

"It's magically getting information, what else would it be?" Alyssa really didn't want to accidentally set Oliver off onto some random and completely irrelevant tangent, so she quickly pivoted, "Not that it matters. I don't need to do your call-and-response thing. Just... how do you do tracking with a spell?"

Spell construction had never really interested her, it was way too much book-learning and that was always so dreadfully boring and slow. Skill usage was way more where it was at, because you figured out what worked for you and it was far more dynamic and interesting. But it seemed like 'someday' had finally caught up to her.

Unfortunately, her teacher was now Oliver.

"Well, divination as a field is largely based off of the skill with one's arcanoception, filtering and reading the Tapestry such that it can be used to learn about the world around you. Because the Tapestry is a layer of reality overlaid and both affecting and affected by the material world, the spiritual interactions of the nonphysical, and even the past and future. It's sometimes confused with the Akasha, but they're actually quite different phenomenon."

Bound gods, I do not care about this. How does anyone find this interesting?

She still tried to pay attention as Oliver kept droning on and on. An Archmage he may be, capable of commanding the world to stop and listen to his words, but the manner of speaking to humans... or any other sapient creature, probably, was apparently drastically different.

Eventually, his meandering explanation made its way to actually relevant stuff, not just the theory that she was almost able to pay attention to.

"So while a divination is mostly passive, a related class of spells are more active in their action. [Appraise] and other [Identify]-type spells are like that, actually. They send out a packet of magic which is capable of measuring the interactions it has with whatever it comes in contact with, then sends a messaging pulse back to inform the user of their findings. It's like the difference between a radio and Radar."

"Really?" Clark seemed way too enthralled... or maybe his glazed-over look of boredom just bore a resemblance to amazement, "What are they called?"

"Diagnosis, locator, or identifier spells, depending on the exact one... but they're sometimes collectively called divination spells."

"Really." Alyssa flatly stated. "So are they, perhaps, divination?"

Unfortunately, Oliver didn't notice how much her voice was all but literally dripping with sarcasm. "Not on a technical level, no. They rely on a radically different skillset than divination, which is more of a puzzle. It's the difference between seeing the waveform of a sound being made and understanding what's being said. Divination is, as I said, more an extension of arcanoception than a classical 'school of magic,' for all that the idea of 'schools of magic' is a drastically oversimplified and inaccurate kind of classification, one steeped in the historical oppression which free mages regularly faced. Much easier to just handwave drastically different elements and learnings into one broad category which Tyrants might claim dominion over than actually address the deeper nuances of the slices of reality they claim to embody."

"You sound like Jacob," Clark said in what was probably meant to be a compliment.

Oliver sniffed, "There are worse people to sound like. Now, the exact ways in which divination does work is quite different depending on the person, for all that the basic principles are the same. Hearing-type is probably the second-best, because with the appropriate setup you can ask questions and get responses. I'm trying to get something like that set up with my System, but that's not something I'm really trying to get into here and now. What Alyssa wants is going to be a locator spell, if she's going to be tracking down metals."

Alyssa leaned forwards, glad that they finally got to the good stuff, "And how are those set up?"

"That depends on if you're trying to get a more generalized location skill or something specific to finding metal. The latter is definitely easier, because all you really need to do then is to work with a long-range but weak spell which acts differently once it finds an appropriate amount of metal. So, for a simplified example, you could make a spell that tries to very gently push away metal and lets you know where it's pushing things away because it draws more mana from you in a directional orientation. That would be inefficient, but you get the idea. Because you have Wood mana, you could send out a pulse of Elemental Wood primed to be 'chopped down' and then sense where it splits itself on a chunk of metal."

"Can you teach me how to cast it?" she asked. It wasn't ideal, but it was a start.

"Oh, that was just an example. Also, I'll probably need to create a focus for you no matter what you do. You aren't a caster, I don't know how you'd expect to unlock a new spell completely on your own?"

"Couldn't you just make me your focus again, like we did with [Ignite]?"

"Maybe? But making fire is unbelievably simple, magically speaking. I'd definitely need to create something dedicated for its casting no matter what."

"Could you help me get some new skills?" Clark asked, "I want to get my attack spells back!"

"You're our Healer!" Alyssa protested, "And we're barely fighting anything these days anyway. Why the hells do you need attack skills?"

Clark shrugged, "Because they're useful?"

Alyssa and Oliver shared a glance. "Maybe at some point," Oliver replied, "But I need to help Alyssa with her actual job first, because she needs my help to get things working."

Alyssa's look turned harsher. Well then. If that was how it was going to be, she was just going to have to figure out how to get a locator skill on her own.

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