We left the fort on a dirt road that was as bleak as the rest of the borderlands. It was wide enough for us to ride side-by-side, presumably designed with carriages and wagons passing by in mind. It wasn't taking us quite directly to the Everlasting Forest, but it was only a bit windy, and better this than trying to brave the featureless wastes.
As an aside, the fort itself was a bit of a historical relic. The Meditator was a curiosity but not known to be literally the Heir, so despite some early attempts to build around it, the demon raids and such discouraged any long-term building. A fort was eventually built in the general vicinity mostly to defend towns further deep in Kingdom territory from such raids, but the location was poor (far closer to the wastelands than anyone wanted to be), and was readily abandoned during the Long Silence of the Demon King, which to this point has lasted for a good number of years. It wasn't until some militaristic royals in the Pendrack Court decided an abandoned fortress was a blight to the Kingdom's honor that they bothered sending a contigent of mostly new recruits to it, ordered largely just to get the magical defenses up to par and make their presence known in the region.
Why was I monologuing about stuff nobody cares about? To distract myself from Rose. She was facing directly ahead and didn't exactly seem open to small talk, though who knew for sure. She wasn't wearing her helm or ornate plate armor, deciding instead to free up her flowing blonde hair and wear the same body-hugging leather armor from before. I wasn't intimidated by her startlingly good looks or anything, nor afraid of her ice-blue eyes freezing me to death with a dismissive glance, but I did feel at a loss about the gap between us. We were from different worlds, different cultures, and while she didn't know the exact nature of my teleportation here, she knew I knew jack shit about this place. So it was a bit hard to talk. There was a bit of a power imbalance, and I didn't want to accidentally sound stupid or something.
Eventually, though, the stifling silence overwhelmed my hesitation. As pretty as the sprawling dirt fields around us were, I would probably go insane if I did nothing but stare at them all day.
"So," I said. Rose angled her head slightly my way, but didn't turn to make eye contact. "Who are you?"
It was something of a power move. I wasn't trying to play any high-level mindgames here, but I thought it would be fun to ask a question I knew the answer to. The turns had tabled in my favor here, and I wanted to play my cards while they still had any weight at all. Her secret would have to come out eventually, and if not now, then it would probably be when we arrived at the Everlasting Forest.
"The truth is... I'm just a girl."
"Har har. This trip's going to take a good number of days, we might as well get to know each other a little better. How about it?"
The ball was in her court. She could either answer with her paladin cover story, tell the truth, or keep playing coy. I was honestly fine with all three. This was, after all, just a little banter to get to know her better.
Rose peered up at the sky. "About noon. What do you say about settling down for some sparring and lunch? We can talk then."
"Lunch, yes. Sparring, what?"
She cocked an eyebrow. "You may be the Heir, but as we discussed, you are not yet an invincible god-king of infinite power. You would do well to train, and as I am something of a blademaster myself, I will kindly offer my services as an instructor for free." She was already getting off her horse. I climbed off mine, too. She knew I learned fast, due in part to the inarguable fact I had learned the novice spells to four different schools of magic overnight, and in part to me telling her I had no fighting skills when I woke up despite how okay-ish I had held up during the troll fight.
"Fair enough. So what, you'll have me do 100 air-swings until I've mastered the art of the swing or something?"
"Something like that," Rose replied, putting her hair up in a ponytail before rummaging through the saddles on the side of her horse before pulling out two wooden swords. She tossed one my way. "Think fast."
I barely had time to catch it before she was on top of me. I dodged her first swipes, parried to the left, countered to right, but got caught in the neck. If she had been going all-out, my neck probably would have been broken, but instead I just got knocked to the side, breathless.
Skill Up! Dodging Level 13!
Skill Up! One-Handed Blades Level 21!
"Ow," I groaned, mostly for show. Despite getting hit in the end, I had still dodged and parried enough to get a level in each. "Are air-swings not good enough for you?"
"I am of the opinion that people grow the fastest in high-stress environments. The path of least resistance must be to grow, not to weather the storm, and so the storm must be too deadly to simply weather." She flashed a smile. "This will also give you a chance to practice Restoration, no?"
"Fair point." I healed the bruise on my neck and got a level; it was only at 3 before that, anyway, so it didn't take much. "So we talk while we do this?"
"Indeed."
And so we did. At first I was so focused on defending I didn't get a word in edgewise, but eventually I learned the moments when she would step back and pause to let me get my back on my feet. It was a bit frustrating that she had to go so easy on me, but I was a humble man, and I knew I was outmatched the second I saw her backflipping on the battlefield. Backflips were like the ultimate move, if you saw someone doing one of those in a battle you just knew they were a master. Besides, I was leveling up fast enough we would probably be equals... eventually...?
"So," I said, parrying a slash to the left. "Who are you?"
"I am but a humble village girl," she replied, converting her feint to a thrust, "who happened to be picked up by the church and trained rigorously in sword combat and politicking."
"Seems like an awful lot of resources to dump into a single paladin." I tried to dodge the thrust by tilting my head slightly in epic fashion, but got a scrape across the cheek for my efforts.
"The church treats its recruits quite well." She batted aside my revenge-thrust with the back of her armored hand. (That couldn't have been the most effective thing to do. She was subtly pointing out the stab was too slow, and predictable.)
"Where do they get their recruits? Orphans? Willing applicants? Runaway royalty?" This time I actually put my all into dodging her swing, and got a levelup for my efforts.
"Oh, all walks of life. The Holy Church questions not the circumstances of one's birth, but how one serves the Goddess with the gift of life they have been given." She rewarded my epic dodge with a fast follow-up which I neatly parried. Another level up. Interesting that Parry wasn't a skill or anything; it was all combined within One-Handed Blades.
My next move, both in the sparring and the conversation, was a difficult choice. She was playing coy, probably just for fun, and she had the advantage since I knew jack shit about the Holy Church or what have you. Ultimately, I decided to be direct. Like I said: I wasn't exactly trying to engage in a high-level mind game.
"So, what are we going to do about the human part of the five royals? You didn't mention that in your plan," I said, blatantly changing the subject while attempting a half-hearted feint to the right.
"Indeed I did not. Curious. Where do you think we might find such a royal?" she asked, not falling for the feint and going for a thrust. If I didn't know better, her constant thrusting would have come across as symbolic for something, but I could guess that she just wanted me to learn to dodge thrusts, since they were the fastest and arguably most deadly of all sword maneuvers.
I dodged the thrust the same way as before. Repetition made perfect. "I can hardly call myself an expert, but given the brutal battle for succession that apparently rages throughout the Court at all times, maybe I would start by looking for sequestered daughters hidden among neutral factions. Any stunningly attractive and attractively deadly woman would surely raise my suspicions," I said. The flattery was a bit on the nose, but—
Love Point Gained! Rosalyn +1
What.
I eyed Rose carefully. There was no change in her expression, and she continued the sparring as normal. Whatever had happened under the surface, she wasn't letting it show... If anything had happened at all. Maybe it was just an arbitrary marker that didn't mean anything. There was no way to tell.
"That certainly would be suspicious," she replied, perhaps a half-second slower than usual. "We know what to keep an eye out for, then." She upped the ante a bit, launching a flurry of still-manageable swings which I parried one after another. I was both getting better and getting more used to her style, or at least, the style she used while holding back.
Skill Up! One-Handed Blades Level 25! Advanced Tier Reached!
Bonus: +10 Base STR + DEX!
Tier Bonus: You now suffer no penalty for wielding two one-handed blades at once.
"Hold up," I said, lifting a hand. She stopped instead of whacking me over the head, which was nice.
I had just gotten a lot of new information in a short period of time, which I needed to process. First and foremost, my base attribute bonus increased with each tier. There were five tiers: Novice, Advanced, Proficient, Expert, and Master. From what I gathered, the people here didn't think of them as skill tiers, but just general levels of competence. It was still a mystery whether this system was unique to me, but it seemed the skill tiers were matching the hierarchy used in general, so that was a big clue. The increased bonuses over the tiers indicated yet another way in which the level up system was broken, it had somehow gotten even more exponential than before.
Second and not so important because numbers were everything to me, each tier had a little bonus. A perk, if you will. This one seemed pretty nice; I liked dual-bladed swords like Darth Maul's lightsaber more than dual-wielding swords, but it seemed like a somewhat linear increase in power, and I wasn't about to complain about that.
Grinding levels was obviously important, both for attributes and for these tier bonuses, but I only got skill ups when challenging myself, and that wasn't very conducive for training while riding a horse. Casting fireballs into the air unfortunately did not count as challenging myself, though maybe there was room for experimenting with, like... Making complicated shapes out of the fire. I would have to experiment later, but I got the feeling most if not all of my "grinding" would be done at camp rather than during travel. Oh well.
My monologuing was interrupted by Rose taking the sword out of my hand. "That will do for today, I suppose. We need to eat lunch eventually."
I looked at her. Her lightly tanned skin was covered in a gleen of sweat; not soaked, but enough to show this had been a reasonable enough workout. Her clothes beneath her armor stuck to her a bit, and I couldn't help but watch when she turned and went back to her horse to put the swords away. The only thing stopping me from losing myself in the eye candy was the thought she might find it creepy if she turned her head while bending over and saw me staring.
Thus, I averted my eyes, looking back to the way we came to search the horizon for any distraction. I saw... Wait. Was that... a blob? A black... purple-y blob, at the edge of the horizon? I squinted, but it vanished out of sight, as if avoiding my gaze. I...
"See anything?" Rose asked, digging out some dried meat and berries from our saddlebags. She had undone the ponytail; her waterfall of hair was flowing once again.
"I'm going to say no because I want it to not be true."
"Then let us drown ourselves in a feast."
After finishing our meal it was back on the road, and back to mostly silence. I experimented with grinding up Elemental spells by manipulating the form of the elements but got nothing; Elemental was, to my knowledge, a purely offensive Arcana, with the only "defense" they provided being in the form of, say, creating a giant rock to smash someone except because it's a rock it also blocks things well. It stood to reason one would not get better at it without having some foes to take down. Mysticism seemed more promising in general with its Telekinesis and such, but my mind drifted to Cursed Magic. I was so close to Advaned tier there.
"Hey, Rose. Can I eat some of your hair?" I asked, absent-mindedly.
Rose gave me a silent look. There was no emotion in her ice-cold eyes. A second passed, and then she pulled a few long, luscious strands of blonde hair out of her head. "Why not?"
"It's for Cursed magic," I explained as I gingerly folded them before popping them into my mouth. "My esteemed teacher taught me a spell that requires you to eat someone's hair. Their soul, technically, but you know." I gestured.
"I can imagine."
"Cool. You may want to watch this so you know what you're getting into. Tamashinozoki."
A shimmering image of Rose formed in the air. It was exceedingly faint, and the image was fairly blurry. A few strands of hair wasn't enough for a very powerful version of the spell, it seemed.
"Testing, testing, one two three," I said aloud. No sound came from the image.
"Testing testing," Rose said helpfully. I heard her voice through the image, though it was distorted and quiet. Definitely needed more Soul Juice for a clear imagine.
I cancelled the spell and let it fade away.
Skill Up! Cursed Magic Level 21!
It seemed trying out the new spell had earned me a level. I could get my non-combat spells up outside of combat, and since Cursed had combat applications as well, that would be a match made in heaven. Perhaps I was fated to be a Cursed mage all along, to spend my life in the dark with—... With... Nevermind. Let us never think of this again.
I tried summoning and re-summoning it for a bit, but got no extra levels. The system seemed finnicky and arbitrary, but maybe that was just due to my ignorance, and really, I could hardly be mad that it wasn't letting me instantly grind to max level.