So survival skills in game don't exactly transfer into real life no matter how realistic it is. Namely because I had relied more on the user interface than I realized. Many of the actions in the game were guided, artificially improved so that even if you had never practiced martial arts, whatever move you did would be enough to pass as combat ready techniques. There are those martial artists who don't need the guided techniques and hold a major advantage over other players but they were more of an exception.
As a result, my clumsy attempts to set up traps to hunt game or harvesting herbs were reduced to shoddy tools that worked 1 in three times and only two thirds of the herbs being useful. Fortunately only needed enough for a days travel If I remember correctly. There was a small town south of here I can rest up and take time to experiment with my book.
With that in mind, I made my way down the mountain and through the snow covered forest. My current location is in the northern part of the northern continent. Not an imaginative name but then that doesn't matter. Had I known what had happened next, I wouldn't have even bothered with hunting and foraging for food so close to the castle.
The moment I stepped outside the castle boundary I felt the presence of a pack of creatures, wolves with snow white fur and Ice growing out of the rear joints. Frost wolves are common in the area and are known for their meat that, though not the tastiest, is decent enough to be hunted regularly by the players. The problem is they often hunt in packs of 20 or more and are well coordinated. Fortunately I have my magic and through some earlier tests, I learned it was one of the few things that stayed exactly the same in game.
Similar to how the martial arts in the game required constant training to surpass the limited guided controls, magic required mental flexibility to not only imagine the spell effect but to guide the spell to follow the laws of physics to reduce the cost. Otherwise you would rely on the system guidance and waste your para, or mana as most people are familiar with the term. (Mana is more of a misnomer in this case as the term actually refers to the energy of the world.) As a spell caster of the succubus race, I had an affinity for dark, soul and illusion magic. As a monk, I gained an affinity towards martial arts and light energy and thanks to the flexibility of the game system, I was able to create a combat style that took advantage of my character's strange build.
From the wolves perspective as I dashed forward, 4 other copies would split off each time I would aim to attack a particular wolf diverting the attention of the group in their effort to defend their comrade or intercept and counter attack. Those that managed to attack the clones would succeed in dispersing them only to stiffen as they received feedback from the illusion, a soul attack that weakened one's consciousness through matching the frequency of the resonance of the astral and physical body. It was one of the more recent spells I developed. I couldn't use it against fate due to how different conceptual boss battles were from regular combat but against these wolves, It was all that was needed to interrupt their momentum.
For those that my real body intercepted, I would not allow myself to take damage needlessly. Light energy suffused my body raising my endurance and reinforcing my attacks while dark energy enveloped my gauntlets dealing curses and debuffs against each wolf I hit. Instead of doing physical damage though, I was attacking the astral body as I didn't want to damage the fur and bones. This was a combat technique I unlocked while training to become a demon monk, one of the few ways to rapidly reverse karma for those in the negative. In exchange for changing karma rapidly, you lose all
monetary rewards for as long as you hold that job but it also takes in the racial characteristics of evil races and fuses them with the combat style taught in the temple. In my case, it interferes with the connection between the astral body and physical body in a way that makes the opponent more susceptible to my illusions. The disorientation is the mark of my success.
Each time I destroy the astral body, the wolves would collapse, breathing but brain dead. It seems even without my staff or daggers I was able to take down the pack without much difficulty. Unfortunately I still received quite a few injuries due to not having enough control over my body, lost in not only the lack of the guided system but also due to the incongruity with reality and my current body, differing from the sensation of the game. In the game, you feel your body as if it were the one that is sitting in your room no matter what appearance your character takes. Now though, I can feel the effects of the distribution of weight in my body. It was enough to over extend or miss by a wide margin while in combat.
I would have to start training my body to get used to the changes. I shudder to how I would deal with all the changes.