While the new boots were a welcome addition, as was another upgrade sigil, Alex found himself disappointed with the direction his exploration of the ant hill had taken. When he accepted the quest, it had been under the assumption that doing so would be the best way to maximize his time before heading back toward the city to fight the beast wave. That had been true in multiple ways, while clearing the first tunnel. He’d gained experience, leveled abilities to E-Grade, and picked up a new weapon skill. If that pattern had held, he would have seen no issue attempting to clear the tunnel as he had so far, but it was obvious that wouldn’t be the case.
Sure, when it came to experience gain, some reduction was expected. After all, this was the first prolonged stretch of time where Alex was mainly facing off against beasts within five levels of his own, with the weakest of the bunch even lower leveled than himself. The issue was the reduction hadn’t just been significant, it was near crippling to his once speedy progress.
The majority of experience he’d gathered over the last few hours had been in that last fight; and while the lower levels of his average opponent made each encounter less strenuous, if not easy, Alex didn’t need relaxing battles. He needed power, much of which came in the form of levels, wasting time killing ants for a crumb’s worth of experience wasn’t ideal. He had, of course, already known the experience drop off was coming, it was the entire reason he planned to travel deeper into the forest after the weekly hoard, but the cost was steeper than he’d assumed it to be.
Even then Alex might have still stuck to the original plan, even with the decrease, if his other two methods of accumulating power had remained unchanged, but they’d also taken a hit. Skill experience seemed to hold a direct relationship with normal experience, so a reduction in one was a reduction in the other. That left the progress of the experimental skill Alex had been attempting to build, an ultimate weapon skill, name pending.
Three bladed weapons, the sword, dagger, and axe, had combined to form Bladed Weapon Mastery; and he hoped three blunt weapons, the hammer, arnis batons, and staff, could form a parallel skill of Blunt Weapons Mastery. Gaining his first couple weapon skills had been easy, effortless even, but the difficulty and time required for each weapon increased with each ability he added to his arsenal. Now progress had seemingly halted entirely, with the last four hours of battling with solely the staff having awarded him nothing.
It was odd, Alex had felt like he’d reached some sort of breakthrough near the end there. The sensation had been different from usual, in the fact that there was a sensation at all. His hands had seemed to grow hotter as he fought, not in a painful way, but in something akin to a rush of power; much like he’d felt gaining multiple levels at a time in the tutorial’s earliest days. But the buildup had fallen flat, and that fact was the final factor in his decision to change the way he cleared this quest.
Instead of wasting time needlessly killing each and every ant, before fighting their respective general, Alex would start focusing on the quest targets exclusively. As for how he would go about doing that, well a reread of his recently upgraded skill suggested it might be exactly what he needed. He spent the next hour recovering what little he needed to, and reasoning the most efficient way to achieve his altered goal as he scouted his surroundings with Soul Sight. The ant hill proved to grow only further labyrinthine in nature, the maze-like complexity expanding exponentially from that straight tunnel he’d traveled through to meet the first general.
In the end it took Alex over forty-five minutes to find another general, even with his spiritual skill’s ability to fly through walls. He spent only fifteen minutes trying to map a path back to his physical form's current resting spot, before giving up on the task. The tedium of the effort, combined with the onset of another mana strain headache, was enough to dissuade him from wasting the time. Instead, Alex equipped his new boots. The green polished chitin they were made of clashed heavily with the filthy brown leathers he wore, but they were magical; and he found, as they resized to fit his feet perfectly, extraordinarily comfortable. Finally, he took a real rest, devoid of any skill usage, before attempting his first activation of Planar Phase.
He’d originally planned to restrain from using the skill until explicitly necessary due to the time constraints, though after further deliberation he’d seen that to be a poor choice. The ability was likely to remain viable for at least another minute after he exhausted its free period, and hard limiting his usage to only when it was free would cripple advancement of the skill’s level. It was better he gained some experience with Planar Phase, both in the figurative and literal meaning of the term, so that he was prepared when he needed to use it in battle.
That, and by starting the timer now, even if needed to wait the full twenty-four hours for it to reset, Alex would still have fourteen hours to kill whatever was left in the dungeon. Decision made; he spent five minutes walking to the location he’d determined to be the closest point to the next boss’s room. Taking a seat in the now empty storage room, he sent mana through his channels, letting the power of Planar Phase suffuse his body, his physical form desyncing with reality as he fell straight through the cavern floor.
Well, “fell” is a bit more dramatic than what actually happened. Upon activating the skill, he immediately received a sense of what was and what was not permeable in his astral state. The floor was, but Alex had to actively choose to phase through it before the skill would properly take effect, and the timer began its count. While the process was more involved than he initially expected, it took place at the speed of thought, meaning the delay should do little to diminish the skill’s combat effectiveness. Not wanting to drag the process out, lest he start over thinking his plan, Alex confirmed he did want to drop through the floor, and stone complied, slowly swallowing him up.
The sensation of using Planar Phase to move through once solid surfaces was much closer to deep sea swimming than falling. Gravity seemed to have a negligible effect once Alex became a part of the astral, and he found himself using his arms and legs as the primary methods of propelling himself forward. Instead of wading water, he waded through reality itself, though, that still came with a few more similarities than just the method of movement.
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The most notable were the darkness and disorientation. Sixth Sense technically had a max range of sixty meters, but only thirty meters of that distance was ahead of Alex at any given time, the skill spanning out in a radius from his location. While more than enough for most situations, in this case it left the assassin partially blind as he traversed through the eighty meters of stone between him and his destination. Only partially blind rather than entirely so, since not all the space between the two points was stone. Tunnels littered the area, not so much because they were inconvenient to maneuver around, but enough that Alex had to keep himself from getting distracted by a few storage rooms.
Navigation became much easier after the first fifty feet, and a minor course correction had him touching down in the tunnel he’d mentally marked nearly an hour ago. Abandoning potential loot hurt Alex more than he thought was healthy, but a mental vow to return if he had the chance had him refocused on his actual objective. The trip into the further depths of the tunnel had only taken seventeen seconds of Planar Phase’s daily free minute, but Alex had been wary of using even that much. His goal had been no more than a quarter of the skill’s time, though he was fine with the extra two-second loss. The remaining forty-three seconds would still leave more than enough time for him to return to his starting point in case anything went wrong.
Taking stock of his surroundings as he narrowed Sixth Senseto a consistently manageable range, Alex found little difference from any other part of the anthill. There was breathable air, the walls were carved stone, and there was a constant odor of feces. Mind parsing the data Sixth Sensefed him, Alex only registered two groups of hostels in the ten-meter range he kept as the default. One of those groups was behind him and Alex spent a minute monitoring their movements to see if they were likely to become a problem. Just because he’d decided to take a few shortcuts, didn’t mean he wanted to worry about constantly being flanked from the rear.
Squaring his current observations with the earlier Soul Sightaided conclusion that the space was relatively safe; Alex began walking to the next general’s room. His landing spot had been about two hundred meters away, and though further than he’d hoped to turn up, it was easily the safest spot he could find in a 500-meter radius. There had been seven groups of hostiles between him and his target during his spiritual flight through, but he doubted the reliability of that estimate with how many tunnels littered the area.
Stealth active as he moved, Alex approached the first group of what looked to be normal worker ants ready for battle. Their size and stature matched the beasts of the lowest caste perfectly, but he had no plans to underestimate them, having learned his lesson after his first encounter with the drones. Stopping at a bend in the tunnel a few meters from their location, Alex pulled his staff from his inventory, deciding to give the weapon one more try. Constant use had provided him with enough experience to fight the fodder of the lair with ease, and a large part of him still hoped to unlock the requisite skill despite his pessimism on the likelihood.
Brain switching to combat mode, Alex turned the corner and broke into a sprint, his Strength, and Dexterity eating up the distance. Shifting his body as the ants registered his presence, then the threat it held, he called on Echo Relocation to move him into the center of the group. While not as confined as some higher tunnels, space was still limited, meaning the beasts had little room to retreat to, and Alex had easy access to his targets through the staff’s range.
Keeping his weapon in a two-handed grip, he stabbed out, easily piercing the torso of the ant directly ahead of him. Shifting his weight to compensate for the fatally injured beast’s own, Alex turned his withdrawal into another swing, the momentum catching another Rebos in the head, killing his second of the creatures in as many, well, seconds. Recent experience having honed his fundamental combat senses to a razors edge, he was already pulling a dagger to kill a third when something he was not at all prepared for happened.
Sound hit him like a wrecking ball, and the sensation was so overwhelming it took a few seconds for Alex to realize it hadn’t been vocal but mental. Just as he felt he was getting a hold on things, the intensity redoubled, leaving him unable to do anything but cope with the pain. For a moment Alex remained frozen, standing stock still mid-attack as the alien sensations invaded his mind. Confusion and fear merged with a near debilitating headache, and he began to spasm, his body jerking as he fought against the ant's compulsion. Pain followed his minor movements, as if his own body disagreed with his plans to rebel, but Alex only used it to further fuel his attempt.
This went on for nearly half a minute, one of the creatures backing a few feet from him, while the other, confident in the Planestrider’s inability to escape, exuded mirth. Alex wasn’t initially certain he was understanding correctly, but as what Comprehend understood to be chuckling hit his mind next, he was sure. The little shit was laughing at him.
When another command entered his brain through his connection to the creature, Alex could almost understand the meaning hidden behind the compulsion this time.
‘Drop. Your. Claws.’ It wasn’t a voice, not in the way Alex understood them, but he wasn’t necessarily focused on the not-voice as the chattering hisses roughly translated, he’d just been given a chance to kill the beast.
Complying with the vague order, since movement, even this sort of forced disarmament, was better than no movement, Alex opened his hand, letting the staff fall to the ground. Feeling his autonomy leave him with the completion of his task, he fought for control best he could as he finished what he’d been doing prior to the interruption. A mental call had a dagger materializing into his hands, the weapon getting firmly lodged into the chitin face of the nearest beast before it could think up another command.
Ripping the blade free in a spray of green blood, Alex felt the creature’s control of him lapse then diminish entirely as he cocked his arm back and launched it at the last of the group. More mental pressure hit him as he worked through the motion, but it was obviously weaker than the first ant, and his blade reached the Rebos before it could get its mental hooks into him. Notifications alerted him to the deaths of the beasts, but he didn’t take any chances. Stepping on his staff to store it, before resummoning the blunt weapon to his hands, Alex smashed the heads of each ant in a fit of correctly placed rage.
Breathing heavier than the limited physical exertion of the situation deserved, he tried to figure out just what the hell had happened. Unfortunately, as his notification would go on to show, the simplest answer was often the correct one. He’d just finished fighting psychic ants.