Master Of None

The night was uneventful and the only noticeable event was that the wind had picked up in to a light constant breeze. This was enough to cause the party members sleeping to pull their blankets around them tighter, unfortunately, it was already time to get up and get moving again. 

"Leader, are you sure you are fine to walk right away?" Su was voicing her worry that Walker was going to be too sore to move again as they had before. 

"No, I should be fine. I just worry that you might need me while we walk and I will be too focused on discovering more about the earth elemental mana." Walker had wanted to ignore training the skills more and understanding them but the others had argued against this while they ate.

"If we need you I will hit you hard enough to get you to focus. Sound good?" Walker stepped a little bit from Remey who was cracking her knuckles. They had already decided on what they would do but she was not having Walker constantly worry about it when he could be improving himself to prevent danger for all of them. 

"Fine, but just be warned I think I will be trying to make things around us with the earth. I have a feeling that I will need to see and feel how it acts." Walker was going to change his style of meditating this time. He wanted to try and feel the changes he was making to the earth elemental mana and what that would cause nearby. 

His idea was to first try and use the high earth sculpting to change some of the features of the area around him. If he could do this then he would be able to not only use the earth magic skills faster but also see the direct changes in the earth elemental mana around them. It would be interesting if he could somehow chain the skills together to cause each other to become stronger. 

This theory came from the fact that the trench skill said that it moved the earth. If the earth was moving then it was expected to go somewhere else. That meant that there may be a spot that if Walker used this skill on it could cause the earth to become higher somewhere else. That would be the ideal situation to make some sort of earth spike or earth wall. 

The party had already gotten rid of their fire and the camping gear they had used. Their breakfasts had energized them and they fell in to the same walking formation as the day before. This time though they were starting the journey in the fields. The forest was long gone in their view but there was a slight reflection of light way in the distance which they could tell was the river from the maps they had seen in the past. 

Walker quickly began to look way ahead and use the trench skill. He could feel the earth shift and vibrate but he wasn't sure where all the vibrations were heading. The feeling was bouncing off of other things in the earth and also interfering with the partys' steps. It was making him feel like it might be an impossible task to track all the earth elemental manas movements. 

Yet as he realized the mana was being influence in this way he felt it was more natural for this to happen. Instead, he tried moving two trenches at the same time and paid attention to the vibrations in the earth elemental mana between them. This resulted in more shaking and the small space between the two trenches to give away and partially fill in the two trenches. 

"I get it!" Walker stopped and spoke for the first time in four hours of walking. The party had been silent for most of it but for a few random conversations and a moment where Gil spotted a regular rabbit to snipe and collect for their lunch or dinner. 

"What did you get?" Remey was the only one to ask this since the others had figured that Walker would just end up telling them anyways. 

"The vibrations in the earth elemental mana make the earth unsteady. So when the two skills are used next to each other it doesn't matter that no skill is used on the earth between them. It loses its' strength and falls in to the trenches I made. That means the same will happen to anything on top of what I made."

Walker was already building strategies within his mind to use this phenomenon. He may not have gained a new skill but knowing this was going to make trapping heavier monsters much easier for them. 

"So you will use two trenches to cause an orc to fall and get stuck?" Su was confirming this since she would be able to move forward and use her shield bash to force an orc in to the p[erfect spot for this strategy. 

"Yes! Then I can try my hand at using the high earth sculpting skill to harden the earth and forcefully trap the orc. If they hold for even a few seconds we will have the time to deal the final blows." Walker was proud of this breakthrough that had taken him a decent chunk of time to understand. 

"Then what about four orcs? Would it work on four?" Gil chimed in with this simple question. 

"Well, yes. It should work since they would just destabilize the earth they were standing on even more, why four though?" Walker found it strange that the number was so specific.

"Well, mostly because there are four of them heading this way right now. Right over there." Gil pointed in to the distance at four large figures steadily making their way toward the party from the river which had gotten much clearer as they had gotten closer. 

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