(DHF)Chapter 3: Races, shedding rust and Falna (Patreon)

Amazons were a strange race that at first glance appeared human but a key difference was that they ALL had a single defining feature, they were female. Every single amazon was a woman and as a race they made more of themselves by mating with the males of the other races. The scary part however was that despite being human in appearance they were nearly twice as strong physically as any normal human woman with the exact same built. The next race I felt worth mentioning was one that if anything were actually disadvantaged rather than gifted as a whole, the pallums.-

The only greater than average innate trait that pallums had over humans that were considered the weakest race was that they all posses sharp eyesight and can see in the dark. Unfortunately however the race was also on average four feet tall and had thin wiry bodies that were even weaker than any average humans. Other than that there were the usual fantasy races such as elves, high elves, dwarves and beast folk. Elves of all types were much like all of earths fantasy depictions, typically fair skinned magic wielders with long ears and a dislike of other races.-

Mind you this was a cultural thing in this case and not an innate one but I think it hardly mattered as racism was racism. Dwarves were also short sturdy folk with an affinity for alcohol and earthen based activities and magics. Beast folk were, and I am not being racist here as I asked, basically humans with animal features like ears and tails and sometimes rare innate traits related to their animal side. So yeah cat girls were a thing and they also had the whole meow speech tic as well in most cases.-

There was also a whole list of crossbreed species that tended to have an uncomfortable amount of human halves involved as well but those were a dime a dozen and typically had traits of both their parent races and as such not really worth talking about. Anyway after leaving the forest I was ple4ased to find out that the road that ran between the dungeon city of Orario and the outside world next to the forest was cobble stone and thus much easier on my feet. We were apparently a good weeks walk away from the city and had nothing between here and there beyond the great plains that I learned was to the north of the city.-

At the end of the first day I decided to see about shedding my gut before we reached Orario. Like I had stated previous I wasn't fat or anything like that but I did have a slightly protruding belly. My smart Idea was that since I had about a week of travel ahead of myself with the Artemis familia who obviously had their shit together I should ask if they can help me get in better shape before we got to the dungeon city, they agreed and my torment began.

They are fucking demons I swear to whatever is higher than a god. I had to run until I collapsed and if I slowed down at all they would hit me with arrows that had the pointy bit removed and then padded. AFTER I collapsed from running it was hydration and then push ups, so fucking many push ups. FINALLY my day ended with crunches and sit ups until I literally couldn't move any more. A single sip of potion later and all that bodily destruction was fixed into working order for the next round of torture.-

It was a hellish training regiment and I would have reeked to high heavens if it hadn't rained and washed off the stench on me the day before we saw the city on the horizon. Despite this however the absolutely brutal amount of exercise and protein rich meals from meat they had previously hunted had gotten rid of my protruding gut entirely, now I was just thin and weak. A week wasn't enough to make a qualitative improvement in my fitness but it did "shake off the rust" as Rethusa put it.-

Speaking of potions I definitely asked about that and learned some really interesting stuff about both the alchemy and oddly smith professions involved at an adventurer level. Alchemy was basically medicine making using herbs and other ingredients found in the dungeon or even in the normal parts of the world. The "mortal" stuff was just normal medicines but the adventurer grade shit like what I kept sipping over this last week had downright miraculous properties when used on a normal person. Overnight overexertion repair, flesh regeneration, disease instafixes and even in the high level adventurer grade stuff limb regeneration.-

There was a downside however that put a damper on any outlandish plan I could come up with was that potions stopped working that well on adventurers as they got stronger and reached higher levels. I don't mean levels figuratively or metaphorically here either as the blessings of the gods were called "Falna" and operated on a level system suspiciously similar to a video game characters status screen. Artemis was kind enough to show me what a status sheet looked like after removing any information that was private from one she had from the last round of updates she made.-

Name: 

Race: 

Level:

Strength:

Endurance:

Agility:

Dexterity:

Magic:

Spells:

Skills:

Apparently the lowest a stat can be was "I" rank and the highest was sorta unknown but the minimum need to level up was a single stat at "b" rank or 800 as each letter rank came after a hundred points were in the stat all the way until you hit "ss" rank which jumped up to 250 points above "s" which was 901 to 1000. When you leveled up your status reset but it wasn't like you lost that progress or anything so much as it became your new base or foundation. Each stat point also counted for more at a higher level as at level two each point was worth 1 and a quarter of the same point in level one.-

It was something about coming closer to divinity according to Artemis but was she was rather cagey about the details of the topic so that was the best answer I got for why that was. Moving on you had skills and magics which was where things got blurry. See skills were sort of like buffs or in some cases debuffs that manifest out of the power of the falna in addition to the traits of the person whose falna it shows up on. They can also be earned through great effort and seriously dangerous activities like soloing a boss or overcoming a crippling phobia, again vague as hell on the details about that topic.-

Anyways skills could be plain like a flat bonus in a certain scenario to downright broken such as giving a whole ass magic system or even making the laws of reality your bitch to a minor level. I was almost willing to bet my right leg that my cursed technique will get counted as a skill when I get a falna for myself and if not it will be a spell. Speaking of, spells were magic , no no seriously like it's kinda that simple. Someone could TECHNICALLY only have three spells in total(that emphasized word is very important to remember here) and what they did depended on the spell in question. In most cases spells worked in a three step manner, speak the incantation, pay energy, cast the spell.-

This was where the emphasis on the word "technically" comes in as if there is enough of a resonance between ones spells you can mix them to create new spells that aren't actually counted as a spell beyond the three you have. The best example of this was the high elf Riveria Ljos Alf who had the moniker "nine hell" for this exact reason as she turned her three spells into nine. Anyway spells are magic as simple as that and are either innate or you earn later via two methods, leveling up or magic grimoire. The later of which basically just forces a spell to manifest for you to use and has unpredictably results.