The mayor's house was very familiar to Cecilia.
((I… I built this house myself.))
It was designed to be the official house of the mayor, who was a player at the time. He had his own base that he built himself in the capital, but his skill level in masonry and carpentry was too low. For that reason Cecilia had taken upon herself to build the official residence for him.
She used the best quality stones that would fit in the aesthetic the guild had defined for the country and applied her max-level skills and the eye she had for building to create a beautiful yet not extravagant building.
She could have created a palace if she wanted, but that wasn't the goal at the time. They didn't want the house of a border village's mayor to be competing with the palaces and manors of the capital.
She was suddenly very curious about who would be living in this house right now, but she waited for Mutt to knock on the door and call for him.
A few moments after, the door opened, showing a man in his fifties, with his hair beginning to turn gray. He looked sturdy and vigorous, despite his age.
"Good day, Mutt. Oh, and I see you brought yesterday's lady. My name is Otmar, and I'm the mayor of this small village. I'm pleased to make your acquaintance."
His voice was calm and decisive, yet warm. The inflection of a person used to making decisions on the fly without losing sight of the big picture.
((Now, this is a decent and capable man. A good choice for mayor, though seems wasted in a small village like this one.))
"I'm glad to make your acquaintance. My name is Cecilia, and I plan to stay in the village for a few days before resuming my journey. I'm very grateful for being rescued and taken care of."
She bowed gently, with the grace and politeness of a proper priestess. In that moment, she was so beautiful that it was almost a crime, even without activating any technique.
But the man was unfazed by it. He smiled and gestured as if dismissing the topic.
"No, no. It's nothing. We just did the right thing to do."
At that moment, Mutt intervened to add one more bit of information.
"Cecilia is an adventurer and offered to help with the hunting."
"Indeed. I'm capable enough to deal with the monsters. You don't need to worry about that."
Otmar frowned, then asked.
"Are you sure about that? There's no guarantee of safety out there, and we can't be rescuing you every time."
"Oh, the reason I was unconscious yesterday doesn't have any relation with my combat prowess. It was something related to a higher order, and it won't occur again."
The mayor was perceptive enough to recognize a capable person when he saw one, so he had no reason to refuse.
"All right, then. I give you my blessing."
Hearing those words, Cecilia bowed again, smiling.
"Thank you so much, Lord Otmar."
:::
With the case settled, it was time to hunt. Mutt expressed his desire to go with her, but she dismissed him and told him to be with his wife. Reminding him of her weakened state and the need to give her proper food was a decisive argument.
Cecilia headed to the forest, glad that Mutt was too flustered to pay attention to the fact that she wasn't carrying any weapon. She first opened her inventory and took a bow and arrow out of it.
"This isn't really my forte, but my skill with it isn't too bad either. I'm eager to see how skills and techniques work in this world now that it isn't a game anymore. Okay, let's check my stats one last time."
In the game, skills and techniques were two different things. The set of skills was big, but not too big. They ranged from things like fishing and herbalism to swordplay and mana manipulation.
As a game that mixed RPG and Survival, the skills covered weapon usage, magic, 'knowledge,' survival, and crafting skills.
The techniques, on the other hand, were the specific actions that could be performed. While skills had levels, techniques were only unlocked, and their effectiveness derived from the skill level.
That's why there was only one swordplay skill, but each move was its own technique that had to be acquired and unlocked separately.
Similarly, there was only one masonry skill, but there were several different things one could build with it. Each required its own materials, and the blueprint had to be unlocked. Techniques were like blueprints, but for combat.
She opened the stats panel and fiddled around with it. Only after some minutes did she notice that there was an important menu missing.
There was no Journal menu. Not even grayed out, it simply didn't exist. That means no quests.
"So that's why even when I said the words that would normally trigger quests, nothing happened. This world has no quests, even though the game system is here. That's odd."
Cecilia got back again to her stats. Her archery skill was level 31, which was so low she wouldn't ever use it in combat in the game. But it was okay to hunt game every now and then.
She also had three archery techniques. Serpentwind Arrow was a honing technique, while Aimed Shot increased her range and damage. Crippling Shot was a good way to prevent game from fleeing, at the cost of reducing damage.
"All right, let's get going."
She put on a quiver with around thirty arrows on her back, notched one on the bow, and ordered the local map to open with a mental command.
The map immediately appeared in a corner of her vision, like it would in the game. It was zoomed in, but she was still close enough to the village that the palisade was within the map range, to her south.
To her north, there were some small gray circles. Gray circles meant neutral units, and, being small, they were probably some animals. There was no red circle in sight.
Then she did a mental command to activate 'Perfect Veil' to dampen her presence. It wasn't true invisibility, but just something that made her unnoticeable by sight, smell, or sound, to a certain extent.
It was a technique of the 'stealth' skill, but with some weird unlock prerequisites. It was only available to priests of a certain set of deities, after a long quest chain. And Ephemerys was one of those.
She walked for some time. She had to proceed slowly, because if she went faster, the Perfect Veil technique would be broken.
The technique consumed stamina over time, but, with her level, that wasn't a concern.
After a couple minutes, she arrived at a clearing in the forest, where the first gray dot was on her map. It was a deer, tall and majestic.
She used a mental command to use Appraisal on the deer.
[Nome: -
Race: Deer
Level: 21
HP: 107/107]
((Okay, maybe I can take it in one shot, but maybe not. Let's use the crippling shot first. 'Crippling Shot.'))
She felt something warm on her arms. It was a tingling sensation, as if there was something guiding her movements.
((Oh… that must be the technique's effect.))
She took aim at one of the front legs and shot.
At the same moment she released the bow, a big red dot appeared from the dark border of the minimap, rushing towards the deer.
The deer tried to get out of the way of the huge wolf that jumped at it, but the arrow had lodged in its leg, killing it instantly.
The wolf didn't seem to notice the arrow and sank its fangs into the deer's neck.
"No way… Wait, that prey is MINE!"
Cecilia had never seen a wolf as big as that one. To be fair, she had never seen a wolf in real life, at most some dogs.
Yet, she had watched enough documentaries to know that that size was far from natural. It was bigger than a cow. And it was going to eat her prey if she didn't act soon.
"Nypharion. Ephemar nythea, aelys skeltha, phaneros ny-thera!"
("Passage-lance. Soul to death, wing to tear, light to the death-way!")
She used a mental command to cast the spell Nypharion, the Sunder of the Passing, but her lips moved on their own and chanted the incantation.
She knew the incantation. It was the same as in the game, and the casting time was exactly the same as well. She was very familiar with it, as it was one of her favorite low-level offensive spells.
Exactly when she finished chanting, a narrow lance of cold light burst from her hand towards the wolf, hitting it in the head. The wolf had heard her chanting and was already coming in her direction at that moment.
The wolf died instantly, and its head started putrefying in a ghastly sight. The spell inflicted immediate necrotic damage to the enemy.
While in the game it only meant a type of damage for resistances, multipliers, and damage reduction calculations, in this very real world, necrotic damage meant exactly what it said.
Luckily, the rotting only affected the area where the ray hit, so the wolf's pelt and meat could still be salvaged.
She took a sword to cut off the rotten head from the torso, then opened a hole on the ground and buried the head.