22
1190 Words
From the moose boss itself, Liz got the Tier 20 skill [Skewer], which paired extremely nicely with a [Return Weapon] she had been holding onto. [Skewer] was a straightforward spear or javelin skill which let the user launch their weapon at a positively enormous speed, with a degree of added homing and durability for the weapon to survive the impact.
Matt hadn’t been too impressed until he watched a video of a Tier 20 blow a hole as wide as Matt’s torso through a same Tier dragon from thirty miles away. After breaking through two layers of shielding. It was a railgun of a skill, if a bit too slow and predictable at close range, and the hope was it would make it through Liz’s skill conversion without changing too much.
[Return Weapon] was a mainstay of archers everywhere. Reserving some mana would tag a weapon, and teleport it back to the caster when the mana was unreserved, with the cost scaling with estimated distance to teleport. Archers needed to modify the skill to better apply to multiple smaller weapons, but Liz could use it straight away, and was combat-usable even in her outer spirit.
She would likely be using some of their many looted spears for ranged battle until it had settled in her spirit. Matt wanted the skill as backup for his sword, but [Crescent Sweep] was better suited for killing monsters than people anyway, and they didn’t typically try to steal weapons.
Aster found [Brittle Cold], a debuff skill that sapped durability from a person’s skills, making their skills easier to break, along with making Concept powers slightly more vulnerable. The second portion wasn’t quite as strong as the skill portion, but in a close fight, it could quite easily make the difference. She’d also ended up with the singular [Side Slide] skill shard they’d found, which Matt had initially tried to claim for himself. However, she’d eventually won that argument on the basis that he already had a way to teleport himself, whereas she had nothing.
Entering the next floor, they found themselves in a fog-covered field with limited visibility and spiritual range, but almost immediately recognized the people they were standing across from.
Themselves.
Wispy versions of the four of them stood in the mist and almost immediately attacked them.
A sixth floor Folded Reflections.
Matt couldn’t be happier.
5
Alvin looked at the cluster of buffalo with various elemental horns and contemplated how he could kill them.
Things had changed.
His team had earned enough Genesis Energy on the fourth floor, but with his repeated injuries and captures, he had been stuck in a rut. If not for those blasted extortionists taking all his Genesis Energy for a single potion, he could have left with them, but no.
They had left him.
If that had been the only problem, it wouldn’t have been an impossible rut to get himself out of, but when his team up and vanished one day, that rut became more of a canyon.
So, he decided to risk it and head deeper into Minkalla.
It was always a risk to head further in, where the planet got smaller and the people were closer together, but the monsters gave more Genesis Energy per kill as well. That combined with the exit reward not scaling meant he could, in theory, get away with a few dozen kills. Then, he’d just have to find cleared areas to push through the three levels of the next floor and exit without too much fighting.
Except he once again had awful luck.
Taxing Skills was never a good floor but, considering he had been robbed of most of his belongings besides his weapons and armor, he was faced with an issue.
How was he supposed to kill monsters this tough and durable?
If this was a rift, he would simply attack one of them at the edge and kite around them until he could whittle it down. But this was Minkalla, and things were never that easy. The monsters here weren’t necessarily different, but these were herd creatures, and the first time he had tried to split the group, the entire pack had chased him down.
He had been forced to exit into the adjoining ruin to get them to break off the chase.
That tendency to group up and attack also explained why those monsters, in particular, weren’t killed like everything else on this floor.
Despite this floor being the antithesis to large scale magic, Alvin couldn’t walk ten feet without seeing the signs of battle.
Large swaths of forests were burned or uprooted, deep pits littered the landscape, slowly filling with water, and in one particularly noteworthy area, a large portion of a desert was glassed.
Whatever fire mage thought it was worthwhile to spend that much mana on a floor that made skills more expensive with each cast was either desperate, or dumb.
Either way, Alvin avoided that ruin in case the monsters that would eventually respawn were stronger than the average.
So, he pushed on and eventually found the ruin with the buffalo.
As far as he could tell, it was the only ruin without most of its monsters killed off. And he didn’t know if he would be able to find enough monsters to satisfy his Genesis Energy needs without killing at least some of the buffalo.
He estimated that he was about eighty percent of the way to his goal, after a long, long time spent killing Fae, but the creatures here were so few and far between, he’d be hard-pressed to close the gap.
Sighing, he decided against trying to fight the buffalo, and instead decided to look around for the few monsters that would have respawned in the meantime.
While Minkalla would boot him out at the end of the cycle, he had, at a minimum, four more years before the earliest time the cycle could end, so he had time.
As someone over a thousand years old, he could be patient.
Even when he didn’t want to be.
It took him almost six weeks, but he found an out-of-the-way ruin only accessible by a single entrance, next to a lava-filled ruin which few people were likely to stumble upon by accident.
Better yet, the monsters in the ruin were a physically strong, but magically weak type of zombie, which meant he could fight them without resorting to skills. After more than a year of slow farming as the monsters respawned, he slowly gathered up Genesis Energy to the point where he was halfway to his goal.
If he ventured out of the undead ruin, he could have gathered more Genesis Energy faster, but he knew he still needed to leave the floor and might need to cast spells during that time to beat some of the bosses on each level, so chose the slower-but-safer method.
Even with nobody around to hear him, he complained to the thin air about the slow respawn rate, averaging just under a single monster per day.
Still, it was safer than remaining on the fourth floor and risking getting captured once again.
- Writer
