AN: Alright, here is chapter 3, I would have finished it earlier, but the exam session started, and so here we are. I should start by saying that I base myself on what the lore explains it's possible, and when the lore does not explain it or just glides over it, I try to make my own.
That said feel free to comment or give suggestions.
Enjoy the story.
Disclaimer: I don't own Skyrim, it is, unfortunately, the propriety of Bethesda Softworks, if it was mine you can believe your ass we wouldn't need to wait 10+ years for the Elder Scroll 6.
Chapter 3
After the high of finally being able to use magic fell down, Arthur began to understand that, while powerful, the spell was not as good as it seemed.
The proof of it laid on the misshapen piece of wood that was his latest attempt at a crossbow, He apparently needed in-depth knowledge of what he needed to create.
The arrow was easy, a simple change in form, but the crossbow? It was different, it was too complicated, much more than a simple bow on a stick.
"[Alter]" said Arthur, placing his left hand on the tree before him, the wood crawling over his hand until it formed a thick vambrace that extended till his elbow.
He closed his hand, feeling his Magika tick by as he slowly shifted the spell origin from his hand to a midpoint in his arm, using it to morph the vambrace further, thinning it out and expanding it until a smallish kite shield formed.
He let out a sigh, watching as the Magika counter slowly ticked up.
He already felt less naked with a shield, more sure if he had do go into battle now, he'd feel even better if he had something more than a wool jacket and iron gauntlets to defend him, but still 'Small steps Arthur small steps' he thought, putting his hand back on the tree, altering out a chunk of wood, picking up his bow from the ground, guiding the wood over it, using it to repair it and reinforce it.
He looked over it, watching as the two kinds of wood intermixed seamlessly until a whole, unform bow stood where the last one was.
He picked it up, drawing it back, noting with not a lot of surprise the Heavier heft it had, before placing it back gently, avoiding dryfiring it to not damage the string, using the remaining wood and nearby pebbles to fashion himself a full quiver of arrows.
He let out a sigh, feeling a smidge of exhaustion as if he had run a marathon when his reserves reached zero 'so this is what being with an empty tank feels like? Not a good feeling' he mused with a snort, packing up his things and starting to walk again, his direction, as always, was north, with the hope of reaching Winterhold eventually.
He walked for what felt like hours, meeting nothing but trees and trees, with the occasional animal peeking through the bushes, easily scared by him just turning his face to them.
He finally reached the end of the forest, watching on mistified as the immense plain of hot springs and warm water basins extended onwards before his eyes, 'probably the results of the nearby volcanoes on Solstheim' he mused.
He took in the warm air and began moving again, walking through the strips of land that connected the different basins.
He walked for a long while, being careful to avoid the herds of mammoths drinking deep from the waters, with their giant owners never too far away from them, trying to find a way through the steam laden plain, until he ended up before a familiar castle.
"How the hell am I in Mistwatc-UH?!" he screamed, ducking under a rock to avoid an arrow shot from a startled bandit.
COMBAT INITIATED
He took the bow from his back and started shooting, downing one of the bandits with an arrow through the stomach and killing another with one to his neck.
He reached into his quiver, cursing at finding it empty, quickly using alteration on the nearby trees, using the half-formed arrows to try, and downing the rushing bandits, managing to hit the closest one in the leg, throwing away his bow and unsheathing his sword.
He advanced towards the first bandit, simply sliding to the side, and ramming his swords through the bandit's chest, easily breaking through the boiled leather and fur.
"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH" He raised his arm, deflecting the other bandits blow with his shield, using his sword to dig in his throat, backpedaling to avoid the Warhammer's blow from the bandit behind him, stepping inside his range when he failed to return in position fast enough, driving his swords through the bottom of his jaw into the skull.
"Fuck!" he screamed, feeling an arrow hit him in the chest, getting it stuck in his ribcage (-20HP).
He snarled using alteration to enlarge his shield, leaving a tiny slit to see his enemies, the last two standing that is.
He rushed them, deciding to quickly overwhelm the archer on the right.
He made to stab one, when the other hit him from behind with a dagger, making him stumble and drop his falmer helmet (-15HP).
He turned towards them, stabbing the shocked bandit with his sword and turning towards the other bandit, who just fell to the ground covering his face in sheer panic.
Arthur raised his sword high, bringing it down pommel first into the bandit's head, deciding that it was time for yet another language lesson.
Combat Ended
Calculating Rewards….
Blocking 10 - 11
Archery 16 - 17
7 low-level bandits defeated, 210 EXP awarded.
Calculating results… analyzing Fight…
Perk unlocked: Archery Mastery (1/5) unlocked.
But first 'Let's get to Looting.' He thought with a grin, tossing aside the unconscious bandit and starting to loot the place.
He went to the first bandit, ignoring the fur armor it had to rummage inside his pockets, taking back a pouch of gold and the dagger he had stabbed him with.
He went from corpse to corpse, gathering the useful stuff, like a pair of steel gauntlets and iron boots, the first of which he put on, using alteration on the ones he had before to form a pair of vambraces, doing the same on the iron boots he wore, making a pair of greaves, at least now he had decent protection for his appendages.
He looked at the Warhammer that the bandit had, picking it up and swinging it around, scoffing in disgust as he felt its horrible weight, using alteration on it to remove its head, moving on to the other nearby bandit's body, using alteration on it and the leather vambraces of a downed bandit to make a simply closed helmet to hide his face.
He grunted, feeling exhaustion hit him as his mana pool almost reached zero.
He waited a few minutes to recharge and moved towards the downed bandit, grabbing his hands, and using alteration to fuse together the metal iron plates of his gauntlets to form a pair of manacles, before backhanding the bandit to get him to wake up.
"Hello there," he said to the screaming Bandit, waiting for him to calm down "I need help, you help me, you end alive, you don't? Then dead" he said in choppy Tamrielian.
"I WILL I WILL, I DON'T WANT TO DIE," said the bandit, crawling a bit away from Arthur, who started to grin "Perfect, you start begin then." And so, started a painful and terrifying conversation for the bandit, who ended up almost calming down in the end, before getting knocked out again once his useful came to an end.
"…I can't believe how easy that was… I learned a new language in what, a week and 2 training sessions?" he mused, looting the unconscious bandit of all it had.
What, just because he said he would leave him alive it did not mean he would not rob him blind; he was a bandit that made a living out of robbing and killing people, fuck him.
He let out a sigh before going back to the Warhammer's shaft, picking it up and putting it on his bac- he stopped, feeling the quarterstaff hitting something else, something he had forgotten about.
He let the shaft slip from his fingers, picking up the chitinous rod on his back and looking over it, feeling the pinpricks of magic under his fingers "I took a dagger to my back when I could have just blasted them with magic… just because I fucking forgot about the staff, god I am a moron" he muttered, hitting his head against the staff repeatedly in disgust.
He sighed, looking at the staff with tired ey- er… eye sockets "I'll make sure to never forget about you again" he said, grasping the shaft he had let drop before, closing his eyes and letting his magic seep into the staff, letting him 'see' what he was about to change, being careful not to touch what made the staff tick.
He started from the bottom, using his [Alter] spell to change the staff, removing anything superfluous he found, from chitin to charrus guts, leaving behind a thin stick of bone and a powdered substance he was pretty sure was a crushed soul gem.
He picked up the Warhammer shaft, moulding it until the staff was neatly nestled inside, closing it off with one of the daggers he had looted from the bandits, leaving behind what looked for all means and purposes as a very short spear, if one with a small guard where the shaft meets the blade.
Arthur let out a sigh, feeling his mana drain away and ever so slowly replenish, he waited a moment, letting his mana recharge a little before slowly trickling magic inside the newly formed staff, watching with glee as a small ball of fire formed on the tip of the spear, stabbing forward with it, and letting it slam against a tree, charring its trunk and leaving behind a small crater.
Recurring actions analyzed… calculating...
Alteration 1-5
Uncommon action analyzed… calculating…
Perk Added: [Staff-maker] You have stumbled your way into staff creation or staff reshaping, unaware of its dangers. Increases magic potency when using a staff of your own creation.
Arthur stumbled, his head filling once again with arcane theory and memories of lessons taken from thousands of views, only the basics of course, but a wealth of information for one like him.
He looked at his new staff, looking at all the small ways it could be improved if only he had the right tools.
He shook his head, turning towards the Mistwatch keep, asking himself if it was worth it, before shrugging "In for a penny, in for a pound." he muttered, walking towards the ramparts, and using the lever inside one of the half-broken towers to lower the drawbridge.
He sighed, watching the disheveled bridge lower down until it touched the ramparts, proceeding on inside the structure.
He looked inside the stone tower, drawing a sigh of relief when he saw that no one was nearby.
He gripped the staff tightly, moving towards the end of the room, preparing to meet Christner to help with his wife's situation, and… nothing, there was no one, the room was bare and full of dust as if no one had set foot in it in years.
"Maybe I got the wrong doo-" "HEY," Arthur stopped and turned around, hearing the faint shout, coming from the room right after the one he found himself in "Now do you fuckers realize who's in charge?" a female voice screamed.
…'What?' he thought incredibly confused as a familiar voice echoed in the hall "How early am I?" he muttered as he entered the hall, looking at the back of a figure he was pretty sure was Fjola.
"AYE", the 15 or so bandits gathered in the room said in unison, slamming their weapons on the ground in chorus.
"Fucking perfect, every one of you, return to your position, and you!" she said pointing to one of the bandits "Go see what the ruckus was outside and report back if anything is amiss, everyone else, fuck off and don't bother me for the night." She said, going up the stairs and disappearing from the view.
"I can't fight that many people, at least not all of them together" he muttered, running outside before the bandit came, deciding to dispatch him before choosing what to do.
In the end, it was easy, the bandit didn't even realize he was there before he found a dagger stuck in his throat.
+20 EXP
"Now… what the fuck do I do?" he wondered, removing the dagger from the bandit's throat, and dumping the body outside of the keep with the other bandit corpses.
"I think, that for once, discretion is the better part of valor… that and I've already killed enough bandits to really hamper whatever plans they might have had, better cut it here before I get myself killed." He decided, choosing to cut his losses, and just hightailing it out of the area.
Unfortunately, fate had other plans, and so one of the bandits saw him dump the body outside of the balcony, and so Arthur prepared himself to face the bandits in the best way he thought of.
By setting everything on fire.
He tightened his hold over the staff, letting his magic coursing through it, almost emptying his reserves before pointing it at the hallway where the bandits were pouring in.
Combat start.
A ball of fire, no thicker than a tennis ball yet hot enough to burn white materialized on the tip, its heat strong enough to blacken the metal and turning the spear tip cherry red.
"I'm sorry," he said, and with a sigh, released the spell.
What sprouted was less a fireball and more a scorching ray that basted and burned whatever was before it, setting the very air ablaze with its passage, even the staff itself.
Arthur cursed as he dropped the staff, the magic it outputted too much for the cheap enchantment to contain, making it shatter and burst into a thousand splinter, even sending one shard inside Arthur's left eye socket "I've never before been happier to be a skeleton than now" he muttered, removing the wood shard from his eye socket, and looking at his handiwork, it was a massacre, to say the least.
Those who had been hit first had been the luckiest, the spell carved a hole through their bodies and burned out their innards, the others near them or behind them were not so lucky, getting the full burst of the destabilized spell as it exploded, their flesh badly burnt but still struggling to stay alive.
He went near them, giving them mercy one by one until he was the last thing moving inside the room, apart from the quickly fading fire.
Combat Ended, calculating rewards… appraising action…
Reward chosen.
Spell gained: (Heat Blast): a combination spell that requires the use of a staff: created by a novice mage, by outputting more magic than the staff can normally support and shaping the spell in a linear form you can unleash a ray of fire and heat, capable of melting anything not resistant enough to it.
12 bandits killed, 360 EXP awarded.
Level up!
Lv: 4
Exp: 352/800
He put his points into magic this time, raising it from 100 to 110, feeling his… power, for lack of a better word, getting bigger and denser, before stabilizing once more.
He gave a sigh and squared his shoulders, adjusting his body to the new, metaphorical, weight.
He went towards the most armoured bandit corpse, removing the simple cuirass and the clumsy attempt at armour that was its plackart, using alteration the plackart to patch up the hole in the cuirass, remove the leather underneath and reshaping it for his own needs, picking up the metal bits from the other bandits' armours to make a brigandine-like cover for his… well, where his stomach was supposed to be if he wasn't a fucking skeleton.
Arthur almost growled, losing concentration for a second and needing to realter the warped steel plates, thinner than a finger but not by much, put in leather squares and barely enough to reach from the bottom of his chest plate to the start of his hip.
He looked around for anything useful left, picking up a discarded steel longsword, its steel blackened by the fire but nothing unfixable, almost using alteration on a nearby table to make a scabbard before a crunching sound made him spin, saving his head from being carved in by a Warhammer the size of a watermelon, the ground growing misty for a second where it had cratered.
His assailant swung it back again, making space between them and giving him a second to look at her, her body covered head to toe in iron armor.
"So, you are the fucker that has killed my men?" she said with a bloodthirsty grin, taking a step back and readying her Warhammer once again "I'm gonna enjoying killing you." She said with a laugh, advancing once again and trying to smash his head in.
Combat start!
Arthur backpedaled, barely avoiding her swing before slamming his boot on the Warhammer's head, trying to pin it under his weight and render her weaponless, immediately regretting it when the cold began to set in his bones(-5HP), he flinched away, using his sword to hit her arm, feeling the reverb on his arm as the armor parried it.
He cursed as she laughed, swinging at him more and more until his back was against the wall, unable to backpedal anymore, cursing as he ducked away from the swing, stabbing his sword forward to make her flinch back, using the wall as a spring to launch himself toward her, bringing them both into the ground.
He started wailing on her, smashing her face into the ground, cursing as she responded in kind, and tried to use the haft of her hammer on his head, the chilling touch of it enough to lower his heath by 10 with each shallow hit.
He was getting desperate, his hits were having little to no effect while she had already whittled down his health to half.
'WHAT THE FUCK DO I DO' he thought desperate before a damned idea entered his mind.
'Fire, there is so much fire in here, fire which I made, it's still suffused with my magic.' He thought desperate, pouring more and more magic into the air, the fires flailing wildly in the air until, with a scream, he brought them to him.
He pushed back with all his might, grasping the flailing Warhammer from the hand of the now screaming woman, taking the chilling cold, its bite and imprint, and expanding it to all of his body, the fire lapping at his body but barely reaching him, the cold embracing his bones, his mind splitting apart from sustaining the two spells, until, he needed not to do that anymore.
He rose up to his feet, panting, his mana exhausted, his body almost too weak to even rise to his feet, his clothes singed and frozen at the same time, and yet, in the end, he had won.
Combat Ended, calculating rewards… appraising action…
Reward chosen.
+50 Exp.
One-handed 18 - 2͖͖̩̟̖̳̣̈̽͑̊̀1.
Destruction unlocked 0- 5.
Alteration 5- 10.
Trait discovered due to action.
Elemental Weakness: Due to your nature you are more vulnerable to elemental attacks.
Hidden quest cleared: The apprentice steps(One-Handed) level 20 level cap removed.
Perk unlocked through special action: Destruction Mastery 1/5.
Spell gained: [Flames]: Expel gout of fire from your hands.
[Frost]: Expel a cone of frost from your hands.
Arthur dismissed the window with a winch, clutching his head feeling nails digging in his skull, feeling emotions he had never felt, looking at memories he never had, of wars he never fought.
He lived through them, barely snippets of lives fought on the battlefield, of levies fighting heavily armoured troops, dragging them to the ground and massacring them with stick and daggers and stones.
He watched lecture after lecture, on the fire and the frost, on how to summon and launch it, it was beautiful and daunting, and as fast as it came, it went away, leaving behind only faint memories and bits of knowledge.
He leaned against the wall, watching with distaste the burning body before him, waiting for his headache to go away.
He knelt, grabbing the Warhammer, feeling the cold seep into his bones, a gentle cold, the cold of a clean morning spring instead of the harsh cold from before.
He gave it a couple of swings, feeling the horrendous balance and weight "Only thing of worth on this thing is the enchantment." He muttered, using alteration to fix the shaft, letting out a sigh of relief when the enchantment didn't go puff, while the knowledge on staff making did not go all that much into enchantments, it was still its sister branch of magic, and so he knew at least a little about it.
Enough to know that the enchantment should have collapsed right there and there, "What is going on with this thing," he muttered, letting magic coursing through it, trying to find how the enchantment was laid… And there was… nothing wrong.
"You know what, experimenting on something liable to explode in my face is probably not a good idea," he said, looking around the still on fire room "Or inside buildings on fire."
And so, our valiant hero, rapidly ran away from the on-fire building, reaching a bit further out than the courtyard before the top caved in, breaking the back part of the tower in a way that would have found him stuck inside, had he waited for a minute more.
"Holy shit that was close!" he said, using his hands to protect his eyes from any debris that might fall into them.
He gives a sigh once the rubble settled down, turning his eyes back to the Warhammer that gave him so much confusion.
He let his magic suffuse it, finding nothing but a normal Warhammer, again… wait.
"The iron… what the fuck is up with the iron," he muttered, he could feel the Ice within it, the cold and frost trapped inside and suffusing the rest "…This is Stalhrim, how did they even alloy it? And why with Iron? This thing is supposed to be as hard to smith as ebony, And why alloy it with Iron of all things."
He closed his eyes, leaning his head on the Warhammer's own, wishing yet again that he had flesh if only to have a way to deal with the headaches this thing was causing to him.
He was tempted to start messing with it immediately, ideas flowing through his head of what he could do with it, before realizing yet again that a burning and crumbling building would attract people, people who'd come to the conclusion, rightfully so this time, that it was the skeleton that caused it.
Damn his inspiration, why did it have to start in the most unlikely of places, first the shower, and now the courtyards of actively on fire and crumbling down buildings.
He sighed, using the [Alter] spell to at least fix its balance so it will be easier to carry and put it on his back, letting its weight be balanced over all his body.
He stretched and with a sigh picked up the map from the backpack and starting again his trek north.
"Let's try getting it right this time."
.
.
.
"Wait, what do you mean I am weak to magic?".