Morning comes and I'm ready to register as an adventurer. My parents have given me their blessing in becoming an adventurer. They were going to let me be if I have a good talent in combat but when they learned that my talent is not related to combat, or so they believed, they were worried to let me go. But I managed to convince them.
I dress up in casual clothes with leather armor protecting my chest. I have a long sword on my waist covered with leather scabbard. My boots are a pair that the store owner recommended for adventurers. I bought them all yesterday before going to the church.
I go to the adventurers' guild to register. It's near the gate leading outside the capital city. It's to make it easy for adventurers to come in and out for missions. It also helps people from outside the city to find the guild and make a request.
The event where a senior adventurer approached me to mock me for registering as an adventurer… doesn't happen. I register normally at the counter.
The receptionist kindly told me everything. I just need to write my name and age on a paper. I can also add if I'm a mage, a swordsman, a healer, or if I want to put in my talent. But just my name and age is enough so I do that.
Name: Miroslav
Age: 15
That's all I wrote on the paper. And it's time to look for a mission.
Although I trained swordsmanship, I don't have enough confident in a fight. So I thought of just do as I told my parents. Using slip magic and kill my enemy in one strike for my mission. And there's a mission that suitable for that.
This is the capital city of this country so monsters subjugation missions are always there to keep the city safe. Some of them are repetitive missions which mean that you can take them as many times as you want.
Rather, it's no longer a mission. You can just show some proofs of subjugation and bring them to the receptionist to be appraised and you will be rewarded for them.
I read some missions about bears, wolves, goblins, and orcs. They can be repeatedly taken so I decide to just go out of the city and move around to find them. Kill them and when my mana is running low I return to the guild.
So I left the city. And if the game I used to play was an exact replica of this world, I know exactly where there are a lot of wolves. They will be my target first.
I thought of goblins as well but I might have a bit of reluctance in killing something humanoid. So I decided to get used with wolves first.
They're not far from the city so I find them easily. I find a group of three wolves and they're good to be my first experimental subjects.
The first wolf rushes at me. And I use slip magic to make the wolf slips and falls. It falls right in front of me and I pierced my sword right at its throat to kill it. Two more to go.
The next one, I dodge its charge and then I use slip magic afterwards. I'm trying to see if I can manipulate where my target is slipping toward. And I want to see if I can make the wolf slip to my direction after passing me by.
And it does. The wolf slips and slides to my side before I kill it.
I feel that manipulating the direction costs me more mana but it's good to know this. I still have a talent in magic even if it's slip magic. It means that my mana capacity can increase many times faster than ordinary people. That's how it is with talent after all.
But I still need some ways to improve it faster. I know some ways thanks to the game so I'll do that later. For now I have to focus on the last wolf.
This time, I want to test using my swordsmanship without using magic.
The wolf is more cautious. It probably thinks that the previous two wolves fell because the ground was slippery. The monsters and animals of this world are more intelligent than those in my previous world so I could be right.
But even with all those cautions, the wolf can't bear to let the meat in front of it be and rushes at me. Using the sword, I thrust it forward to the wolf's head.
The sword's quality is good. Because it can pierce a wolf's skull well and kill it.
"Well, it's just a wolf. My swordsmanship skill can't be seen with it as my enemy."
I take a brief rest before continuing. For today I'll focus on slip magic.
Since I can manipulate the direction of where I'm going, what if I use it on myself to travel? Then I don't need to have a ride if I want to go somewhere far as long as my mana is enough.
Using this magic to manipulate the direction where I slip, or in this case slide, takes more mana than I thought. I just traveled for about fifty meters before I can feel mana draining from my body. But that's good enough. Because I managed to reach this distance in less than three seconds.
Maybe I can even increase the speed. Maybe I can change the direction midway.
…Or maybe this is not just slipping. It's manipulation of friction.
Slipping happened because there's less friction than what you can grip when you walk. The shoe doesn't have enough grip to the ground and then you slip.
So what if I increase the friction instead? To do what? Climb on vertical wall like my favorite superhero in my previous life.
I look at a tree next to me. It's a bit crazy since I just learned how to use magic yesterday but I really want to test it.
I concentrate on my whole body to increase the friction on anything I touch. And then I carefully touch the tree with the palms of my hands.
Right hand, good. Left hand is good as well. And then my right foot before my left foot. I can climb on a tree without hugging it! It's painful because only my skin is sticking and my whole body is too heavy for just a few parts of my skin to hang on to. I need to do more test for improvement. I should test it on a vertical wall but since it works, this is already amazing!
"…Shoot!"
I make a certain hand gesture with my right hand and aim it to another tree hoping that something comes out of my wrist. But nothing comes out.
"I just want to try it. Argh! Oh, just two meters fall. I'm out of mana."
I fell from the tree. I'm out of mana and the friction level on my body returned to normal making me fall to the ground. Good thing I didn't climb too high.
But this is great. I can climb on a vertical wall. Although there's no skyscraper, there should be some use in the future like climbing a steep cliff. Well, I just need to be more creative.
I'm out of mana but I can still move so I grabbed the wolves' fangs which are their proofs of subjugation. I put all three fangs on my small backpack and go to my next destination.
There's another reason why I chose wolves first. They're close with something I want. A place with a lot of red grass.
It looks magical if it's in my previous world but in this world, red grass is not rare. You can find them in many places even inside the capital city and in any season. But this is one of the places where it's everywhere.
There's no known effect for red grass according to researchers and scholars of this world. But I have knowledge of the game so I know something they don't.
If you smoke using red grass like a cigarette, you can increase your mana capacity. But the increase is so miniscule it's pretty much almost non-existent.
The smoke is tasteless, odorless, and non-addictive. At least that's according to the game. So no one really thought that this red grass could be something amazing.
Well, it's not that amazing. You need to smoke a lot to see their effect. Sometimes you need to smoke for a whole month before noticing the difference.
But in the game, you can only smoke once a day. This is real life so I hope there's really no other side effect of this red grass cigarette.
So I try it. I grab a piece of paper and cut it into a small square. Then I pluck some red grass and put it on the paper before rolling it. Using a matchstick, I light up the cigarette in my mouth with the spark.
Huff.........
Alright, there's no taste and it's odorless. I don't think it's addictive. But since it works to increase my mana, I will start smoking from today.
I put more red grass on my backpack before returning to the city. On the way I encountered a bear which I killed after making it slip using the last remaining mana I had.
The result of today's harvest are three wolves and one bear. Not bad for a newbie.
I got the reward and then I return home. It's great that red grass cigarette is odorless because if it's not, my mom would have barged into my room and beat my ass.
…I smoked ten cigarettes in one day. Good kid shouldn't do it.
…And I'm thinking of increasing how many cigarettes I can smoke in a day. As much as possible, I have to improve no matter how little because of the unknown future not even in the game.