novelraw Chapter 174: POV Kalina -8-
Chapter 174: POV Kalina -8-
Weeks turned and Kalina’s life split into a rhythm that would have sounded insane to anyone who didn’t live it.
She’d wake up in her apartment in Istanbul at seven, answer emails until nine, take calls from distributors and import lawyers until noon, then leave her office at one and meet Eren at a predetermined location where he’d open a portal and they’d step into Evon together.
Yuppiii, Intergalactic- or maybe even Inter-universal travel.
Maybe I need to watch some documentaries or hire a professor of cosmology..
She’d hunt for two hours near the perimeter, level up, check her stats at the Totem, eat whatever Selena had cooked that day and then spend the rest of the afternoon doing one of two things: taking notes about the village economy and resources or being pinned against a wall by a man whose physical abilities made her previous romantic experiences feel like garbage.
He was almost always horny, and that made her almost always horny.
It was a paradox of the best kind in her opinion. Being fu*ked by the man she adored and waited for so long in this exotic environment.
Eren was getting more possessive by the week and Kalina could feel it in the way he held her now. Not just playful grabbing or flirty pulling but actual territorial behavior of a cat. He tried to explaing something about a clone or a inheritance of bloodline but Kalina wasn’t even a gamer before this. So his way of explaining ruined her understanding even more. Evon System and so much details were confusing for someone like her.
But she was sure Eren was changing with his new bloodline.
His hand would settle on her back when they walked through the village like he was marking her. He’d pull her closer by the waist when other elves were nearby even though none of them had shown the slightest interest in her. He’d started calling her "mine" in casual conversation without seeming to notice he was doing it.
"Hand me that rope and kiss me" he demanded like a command once before while tying down a barricade support and it took her three seconds to realize he wasn’t asking someone else for a rope, but he was calling her...
She grumbled about it on the outside because that was what Kalina Ferraro did. She pushed back and argued and rolled her eyes and pinched him when he got too cocky.
But inside her chest something warm and stupid was growing every time he did it. Something that felt like the romance novels she’d read as a teenager, the ones with the possessive hero who claimed the heroine as his and wouldn’t let anyone else near her.
She’d always thought those books were ridiculous and unrealistic and she’d been absolutely right about that because here she was living one and the reality was even more absurd than the fiction.
I’m a thirty-year-old woman with a degree in international finance and I’m swooning because a half-elf stupid man calls me "mine".
My younger self would be so proud and excited..
It was the day twenty-nine when things get excited once more.
She bacame Level 14 from hunting a pack of three magical deers and Eren was seem to have a personal agenda againts all of deers and would look for their living areas for a whitish tree but it was nonsense to her. She just killed some magical creatures without thinking about it too much. Or some slimes and bunnies that had gotten too brave near the burned orchards around the village.
She’d killed them herself with a short blade Eren had given her, a light elf-forged knife that fit her hand better than anything she’d held on Earth. The experience was decent for small kills and the system had been generous lately, almost like it wanted her to reach the next threshold.
Kalina could feel it coming.
Level 15 was close enough that her whole body seemed to hum with anticipation whenever she touched the Totem to check her stats. Eren had told her that Level 15 was when the system unlocked your class and assigned your first real skills and every time he mentioned it his eyes got that specific excited shine that reminded her of a child waiting for a birthday present.
It happened on the morning of day thirty like a good omen.
She killed a slime near the eastern barricade while passing by. It was pure reflex actually. Even she herself didn’t think a slime was important in her experience bar. But it filled the column and level up notification came.
Different from the others a sligtly more noticeable notification appeared before the slime finished dissolving.
[Congratulations! You have reached Level 15]
-You acquired 1 Stat Point to use
[Class Unlocked! You are now eligible for Class Assignment]
Her hands were shaking with excitement. This time she could see her screen for once and hear the robotic voice of the system with more power. Normally level up notifications were like whispers. Almost too hard to hear.
Apperantly just Eren could hear and even use them without a limitation but Kalina wasn’t envious.
She turned and Eren was already walking toward her from the barricade line where he’d been watching. The grin on his face was so wide and so genuine that she did the only thing her body wanted to do which was run straight at him and throw herself into his arms.
He caught her like she weighed nothing and she wrapped her legs around his waist and kissed him hard enough to taste blood from where her teeth caught his lip. She pulled back and looked at him from above with her hands on both sides of his face.
He didn’t put her down. He shifted her weight to one arm like she was a backpack, crouched slightly and then jumped.
The ground dropped away beneath them.
Eren launched himself upward and forward with a force that made her stomach flip.
He caught a thick branch with his free hand, swung forward and released, sailed over a gap between two buildings and landed on a stone wall without breaking stride.
He jumped again and the wind hit her face and she could see the entire village below them as he bounced between rooftops and tree limbs and ruined walls with the kind of inhuman agility that made her think of a cat crossed with a superhero from a movie.
Kalina felt like a secret girlfriend being carried by a superhero across Metropolis and the absurdity of that image made her laugh into his neck while her arms tightened around him because the speed was genuinely terrifying and wonderful at the same time..
They landed in the village center in about twenty seconds. A trip that would have taken ten minutes on foot even with her slightly upgraded stats.
"Show-off but thanks." she whispered against his ear.
"Always for pretty ladies.." He set her down gently next to the Totem and she could see his breathing hadn’t even changed.
The village center was quiet. Most of the elves were at the sea side farm property now, settling into the farmhouse and the surrounding land that Eren had bought. Only a handful remained in Evon, maintaining the barricades and monitoring the Totem, houses or some warehouses from old centuries. Long living elves had so much stuff from the past.
Kalina pressed her palm against the bark of the small pretty tree.
Heart of the Village, they would call it. A totem.
I don’t even know what a totem is but they don’t seem to know it too..
There was a warmth and it was getting familiar now. She would always touch it for at least once before going back to the Earth.
But that living pulse beneath the surface that felt less like a tree and more like something old and tired trying to keep its eyes open. The whisper came and went and the blue text materialized inside her vision.
Moments like this would remind her that this thing wasn’t just a tree but an actual living creature.
She allocated her stat point evenly as she’d done fourteen times before and this time she used it on her mana stat to make it three.
A new notification appeared just after that.
[Class Assignment Complete]
[Your class is: Fireproof Mage (Rare)]
Her breath caught.
[Class Passive Ability: Eternal Flame’s Friend (Rare)
- You cannot sustain permanent fire damage. Burns from any source, magical or natural fire won’t leave lasting marks or effects on your body.
-This passive is always active.
[Active Skill: Crimson Inferno (Rare)
- Channel mana to project powerful magical flames from your body. Flame intensity and coverage scales with skill level.
[Passive Skill: Heat Resistance (Basic)
- Passive resistance to fire and extreme heat. Reduces incoming fire damage.
She stared at the blue text for a long time.
Mage.
A real mage class. It was even a Rare quality class like Eren told his to be the only one in the whole hundreds of elves.
And it was a fire-based class.
The elves had been right. Her natural Mana stat of 1 had been the system’s way of saying she was built for magical stuff.
In a village full of hunters and ranchers and farmers and one man whose magical class was about making people fall in love with him, she was the first person to receive an actual combat mage designation.
She turned to find Eren standing right behind her, close enough that she could feel the heat from his body. He was looking at her with that focused intensity he got when something excited him.
"What did you get?"
"Fireproof Mage." She couldn’t keep the smile off her face. "Rare class. Fire-based with a rare passive and a rare active skill."
His eyes went wide. "Rare? The whole class is Rare?"
"The class and two of the three skills."
"What are the skills? Tell me exactly."
She described them and watched his face shift from excitement to something that looked almost like awe. Behind him Selena had appeared from the direction of the restaurant and Lyra was walking up from the bakery and even Thadric stopped hammering at a nearby barricade to listen.
"Nobody in this village has a mage class," Eren said quietly. "Nobody. Rabbu-i’s class is Herbalist combined with controlling plants, mine is..." He trailed off because everyone present already knew his class title and the look on Lyra’s face suggested she was about to start laughing again.
"I know what yours is," Kalina said with a flat voice and the tiniest curve at the corner of her mouth.
Eren cleared his throat. "Point is, mage classes in the Evon System are incredibly rare. Even in whatever civilization existed before this village, actual elemental magic users were almost unheard of. You might be the only fire mage on this entire forest continent."
She looked at her hands. They looked the same as always. Long fingers, neat nails, no calluses because she’d only been holding a knife for a month. But somewhere underneath the skin the system had put something that could apparently set things on fire with her mind.
The doubt crept in immediately because Kalina’s brain never let her enjoy anything without questioning it first.
What if the skill didn’t work right and I burn myself in an actual dangerous situation..?
Also her Mana stat was 3, which meant her total pool was only 30. How long could she sustain a flame with thirty points of mana?
Just try it. Stop overthinking and try it.
She raised her right hand palm-up and focused on the skill the way Eren had described focusing on his own abilities. Like reaching for a muscle you didn’t know you had, he’d say.
She tried to will the skill to work and..it kind of did?
The flames came out wrong with a lot of pain all over her body!
Oucch!
It was bigger and far, far more than what she expected. She’d braced herself for a small flicker on her palm, maybe the size of a candle flame. Something modest and beginner-level that she’d have to train and grow over time.
Instead blood-red fire erupted from her entire body in a single explosive burst that lit up the village center like a flare. The flames roared outward from her hands and arms and shoulders and torso, wrapping around her in a cocoon of deep crimson heat that she could see but didn’t hurt her because the passive was already doing its job. But the pain part was a surprise and that when she realized why she felt some weird tension while reading the skills.
They all said how much her body wouldn’t be permanently injured with fire but what did that mean, to some degree she had to feel the fire, bear the pain and overcame it to level up the skill..
The air around her distorted and rippled and every Koen vine within ten meters flared brighter in response to the heat.
It lasted about three seconds before her mana bottomed out and the fire collapsed inward and vanished, leaving her standing in the same spot with smoke rising from the ground around her feet and her clothes completely burned.
Her hair was untouched but she was naked with a lot of elves around.
"..."
There was an absolute silence while Kalina run to the side way and then inside of the nearest garden gate. She hide away her body and looked at Eren.
He was staring at her with his mouth slightly open. Selena had taken two steps backward with her hand over her chest. Lyra had dropped her basket full of different baked delicies. Thadric had his knife raised in a defensive posture he probably didn’t even realize he’d taken out.
Kalina looked at her hands. She could remember some pain all over her body but like the passive skill said, all the pain was gone after she stopped the active fire skill.
There were no burn, pain left luckily.
Her Mana stat was 3. So her total mana pool was 30. And a pool of 30 mana had just produced a full-body eruption of rare-quality magical fire that lit up the village center for three seconds like a signal flare.
What happens when my Mana is 30? Or 50? Or a hundred? And it says the power, density and the amount will be bigger with every level up!
Its..too strong.
Eren lowered himself from whatever half-crouch his reflexes had thrown him into and looked at her with an expression of concern.
"..so," Kalina said quietly, staring at the smoke curling up from the scorched earth around the place she burned with just her head was visible from that angle. Being nude and talk in this situation was a hassle.. "..that happened."
Nobody said anything for a very long time.
But somewhere behind the shock and the silence and the lingering heat, the Totem’s pulse beneath the earth was getting slower than before. It was somehow weaker and the barrier that protected this village from the things in the forest had pulled back another three meters while nobody was watching.
The flames she’d just unleashed were beautiful and terrifying but fire alone wasn’t going to save this place from what was coming.Eren felt all of it and acted like he didn’t know the changes around the village to not terrify the elves.
Kalina was the star of the day and there was no need for worry.
"I’am a fire magician now, huh..Unlike some other fake magic users..." Kalina showed a smug face to Eren and smiled.