Alyssa had found herself in a staring contest with a featherdile, and was starting to wonder whether the dinosaur-looking critter even had eyelids. Her ecology-obsessed phase had been quite some time ago, but she had remembered enough to wonder what good the fluffy feather-looking things might be for a crocodile.

But if it didn't have eyelids, maybe they somehow...

Nope. No ideas.

Its beady, slitted little eye was fixed directly on her as she sat perched in her tree. This one was substantially bigger than the ones she'd seen previously, nearly as long as her arm, but was still just as feathery and fluffy for all that it was clearly grizzled and aged. Her eyes watered, but Alyssa wasn't about to lose against some upjumped, fluffy lizard. Even if it was kinda cute.

Some commotion in the underbrush caused Alyssa to tense up, and the featherdile to shuffle back into the water, its feathers making it look like nothing but floating feathers and leaves. In the process, it of course broke eye contact with her.

Victory.

The disturbance itself turned out to be interesting in its own way, a small scalewolf - about the size of an actual wolf- slinking through The Jungle on its six legs. Alyssa held still, not too keen on fighting the creature but curious to see how it moved. She'd been away from Shelter when a small group of the creatures had attacked, after all, and the only context she'd seen the approximately-draconic creature had been when they were dead and their hides being processed into clothing.

She watched as the scalewolf approached the stream and began to drink.

Tsk, she mentally chided it, Do something cool.

Alyssa very slowly and carefully took a swig of water from her waterskin - taking a moment to appreciate that it was made out of carefully interwoven reed strips instead of ceramic - and went to replace it on her belt when a flurry of movement caught her eye.

While she missed the actual commotion, she saw its aftermath quite clearly: the featherdile's feathery tail pinned underneath the scalewolf's claws, ending in a bloody stump as the larger predator tore into it.

Alyssa's eyes grew wide. That poor little critter! It was too young, too little, and too cute to meet its end that way.

She wasn't worried about the scalewolf as a threat to her, of course. It quite clearly wasn't set up for climbing trees, and with her ⟨Springlaunch⟩ practice, she'd gotten to level 13 in the skill overall. That was enough to let her walk off practically any level of fall so long as she landed on her feet and on Woody material, and... well, almost enough for her to jump all the way across the First River, which had proven such an enormous obstacle for her earlier on.

Almost enough still left her wet, though. She'd found a good crossing point that split it in half, because she would still need a handful of levels to make it the whole way, or to run along the tops of the the trees like a highway - level twenty to twenty five for the latter, though she might be able to push it down some. More for each, when heavily laden. Still, as she'd gotten more accustomed to navigating The Jungle, what had once seemed like a wholly monolithic single layer of foliage was a lot more three-dimensional than she'd thought.

There was just something in the upper leaves that kind of... shimmered, though not really, that made it difficult to see the bits that stuck out above the others. It was, literally, hard to see the trees for the forest. It overall gave her the impression that the forest was camoflaging itself in some way, and she didn't like any of the possible explanations for that particular thought.

The scalewolf continued eating the remains of the featherdile, as well as digging into the soil around where it had been hiding, tearing up the foliage into shreds as it did so.

Alyssa felt like she'd seen enough, and reoriented herself on her branch to face the general orientation she'd been headed. "I seek a place where I can find much iron, bring me there," she whispered.

[Rustlewind]

The skill rippled outwards, a faint pulse of magic that swept along the branch she was on and into the ground beneath, as well as to its leaves and into the air beyond. There was still a lot to learn about the skill, but its basics were simple enough. She informed the skill what she sought, and she received guidance on how to find it. For now, it was limited to physical objects, but she had the sense that would change as it leveled.

It was also limited in range and 'resolution,' the former of which was her primary limitation. She didn't know exactly how far the range was, and it seemed to be variable anyway, but it was forcing her to travel out in an ever-increasing spiral from First Tower as she hunted for her prize. She just needed to give herself a couple of seconds to confirm that she wasn't getting an answer and...

An actual response came a moment later as the breeze picked up, brushing against her face. The faint coolness tickled her skin and let her orient herself towards where it came from. Behind her, the scalewolf seemed to notice her, but before it even had the chance to do anything, Alyssa was gone.

⟨Springlaunch⟩

The wind in her face felt lovely, only made better by the knowledge that she had succeeded! No more weeks-long expeditions to maybe find places that could work for her purposes, she could now easily track down locations with a much greater range than ever before.

Would it work for literally everything? Probably not! But this was how magic was supposed to be, easy and free and responding to her thoughts. An invisible limb that helped her with everything she did and leaped at her desires. What made her feel alive.

And oh, how she felt alive.

She burst through the canopy and took a spiderweb-thing to the face, struggling to brush it off before she landed on the next branch, then the next, and the next. As she went, she kept renewing her [Rustlewind] to ensure she kept heading in the right direction. Every time she did so, Alyssa worked to try and intermingle the mana of [Rustlewind] and [Leafstep], trying to figure out a skill combo.

Skill combinations were the best. Sometimes, they came with a subskill to make it 'official,' but frequently they didn't. That itself was a bit of a mixed bag, because it could be tricky to recreate the combo in those situations, but they didn't take up a skill slot so....

With her being limited to only a single class, so too were her options for combining skills. It wasn't a matter of difficulty per se, because elemental overlaps worked great for a 'hook' to combine disparate effects, but more a matter of... she didn't know the right word. Versatility? There was some official term for it, but she couldn't remember what it was. Skills that had identical elements had difficulty making their combined effect meaningfully different from their separated effects, and that meant it was more just synergy than a meaningful form of 'combo.'

That seemed to be the issue that she was running into. The breeze she was following to iron was easy enough to use in conjunction with [Leafstep], but they just slid right past each other with no friction, no 'bite' for her to leverage into something greater than the sum of their parts.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

What she really needed was something at least a little different, elementally speaking, to get going. The problem was, without having any cross-class skills survive the Jump and no way to change classes, how was she supposed to get something with a different element that she could - woah that breeze changed quickly.

Mid-jump, Alyssa's [Rustlewind] shifted from blowing ahead of her and slightly downwards, to straight down, then behind her as she soared over a seemingly-random chunk of canopy. She flailed in midair, but had no real way to control her trajectory without anything solid to go off. Instead, she had to settle for landing on the branch she'd aimed for - nearly slipping thanks to her distraction - and turning back around.

"Lead me to iron," she whispered again. She really hoped that there wasn't just a single chunk of iron, or some kind of creature that had a bunch of iron in its biology, that she'd been following. Much to her relief, the skill pointed her straight down.

Maybe it fixes on a point, rather than an area? She mused, as she dropped down, slipping down towards the ground and sending the little lizards and birds scattering on each branch she landed on. When she finally landed on the ground, she wasn't entirely sure what she'd expected but it... probably wasn't this.

Her surroundings were still relatively normal-looking at first glance. A couple of lumps in the ground that didn't have any trees on them proved to be rocks after a brief inspection, but otherwise there were trees and bushes and foliage and... well, everything that would normally be in The Jungle. It was barely even rockier than average.

Still, her [Rustlewind] hadn't led her astray, which she confirmed by following it to one of the half-buried boulders and, after dragging away a curtain of moss with her hatchet, revealed some very red chunks in it, interspersed with a couple of black nodules that felt quite Metal to her touch.

Shouldn't any iron be rusted? She idly wondered, looking at the blackish-silver nodes peppering what she assumed was the iron ore. Why's that stuff not?

Grand mysteries for another time, she decided. Even odds that the answer was something neat and magical, or just some kind of mundane chemistry that was still iron. But hey, if it was some super rare and valuable magical metal, that would both be very cool and something that Henrietta would probably be the best at determining.

Still, she'd definitely succeeded, which was great. Now, of course, the challenge was simply to find a route back to First Tower, but even that wasn't too bad. [Rustlewind] easily pointed her in the right direction, and she just needed to find a path that could be walked without too much difficulty by a normal human... Okay, a below average human, thanks to their overall lacking stats. That one might be a bit tricky to hit the right balance for, but so long as she didn't need to actively use [Leafstep] it would probably be fine?

In the interest of actually making it possible to find their way back, Alyssa took her hatchet and heavily marked the trees as she passed them, making a bunch of trail markings. In some cases, she also used [Ignite] to burn through tangles of deadwood and mark trees when her copper axe proved lacking.

Lighting wet wood on fire, let alone living wood, was trickier than her more frequent usage of her skill. But even with that, she was still generating enough mana that it didn't really wear her out.

It was as she kept up her journey back towards First Tower, idly burning and cutting her way through the foliage, that her mind wandered back to skill combinations. It was a bit of a shame that, for all her problems with [Leafstep] and [Rustlewind] being too similar to connect, [Ignite] was too different. It caused things to catch on fire, and that meant there was no real way for her to connect it to...

"Hey, wait a second. It might make fire, but it is a Wood skill," she commented to nobody beyond the blue-feathered critter looking at her. "Could I combine it with my other skills?"

Skill combos worked best with some level of magical and functional overlap, but only if they were different enough that they didn't run in parallel. A purely Wood-type skill should be really easy for her to combine with her other skills, but she still needed to come up with a way to integrate it with her other magic.

Alyssa took to poking at her skills, trying to fit them together as she pushed at them, coiling and releasing them like she was preparing to jump as high as she could, but never actually going through with it.

Alright, so wood into fire... Wait.

Could that be the solution to her problems? That would be hilarious if it did work.

Alyssa spooled up a ⟨Springlaunch⟩, letting the mana it grabbed tense up beneath her feet like, well, a spring. If she released it and allowed the skill to actually activate, it would send her flying into the air, but before it did so there was a lot of Wood mana just waiting there... and she had a skill that turned Wood into Fire.

[Ignite]

A bit of the underbrush lit on fire, and Alyssa quickly stomped it out before it could start to spread. Not that she found that outcome too likely, given The Jungle was rife with the mist that kept everything watered right now, but it wasn't worth taking the chance.

She kept messing around with the skills as she walked, adjusting from specifically using ⟨Springlaunch⟩ to more generally mixing it with [Leafstep], trying to light the Wood mana she was stepping on... which might not have been the best idea, she realized.

So, she swapped back to coiling up ⟨Springlaunch⟩es and trying to [Ignite] them. After an hour of trying, not much happened.

Which was probably why she was caught so off-guard when it finally did work.

In a series of events Alyssa only managed to untangle after the fact and with substantially more experimentation, [Ignite] interwove with the complex and under-tension branches of Wood mana underneath Alyssa's feet, finally recognizing what it was supposed to be working on and successfully turning first a section of the skill's mana structure to fire, then the rest of it.

That Fire mana wasn't able to sustain the same level of 'tension' as the Wood mana it had replaced, but the Force mana it was built alongside demanded that movement would happen. The Air mana in the skill pushed both of the other elements to an even more extreme state, flaring the Fire and pushing the Force towards not just motion, but rapid and upwards motion. The presence of the Fire only pushed it further, the aggressive element wanting to expand and grow, pushing against everything around it.

Faster than Alyssa's unenhanced reaction time could ever hope to follow, the magic she had been working was transformed from one primarily about support and controlled movement into one entirely dedicated to a literal explosion of motion and movement.

The forest around Alyssa suddenly became an enormous tangle of colors and shapes and light and shadow, the ground suddenly no longer beneath her feet. A burst of flame knocked her over into an exceedingly vigorous and unplanned backflip, sending her flying into the air upside down. She barely had enough time to recognize the echo of her new ⟨Conflagrate⟩ subskill in her consciousness before she was slammed facefirst into a tree trunk, her breath being knocked wholly out of her.

Then she peeled away from the tree trunk and fell on her back through the lower levels of foliage, vines and sharp leaves scratching against her as she came to rest on the leaf-covered forest floor, staring at the emerald ceiling of leaves far above her.

Her body tried and failed to groan with pain, foiled only by how little breath was left in her lungs. Instead, the only thing she accomplished was a faint whisper, as a sudden shower of leaves that she'd disturbed fell on her.

"Ow."

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