As much as Aiden would have loved to go into the fight against Xenith’s champions as powerful as he could possibly be, he simply didn’t have the Essence to. After his ascension, Essence Orbs were about as effective as a means of empowering himself as droplets being poured into an ocean.
The cumulative liquidation of his stockpiled cores and pillars resulted in a meager increase.
Name: Aiden Pearce
Race: Human (Grade D)
(M)Power: 4
(S)Durability: 17
(M)Alacrity: 6
(P)Arcana: 11(+20)
(M)Spirit: 3(+20)
Boosts: Essence Channel XXXI, +20 Arcana and Spirit, Weapon Proficiency XVI, Inscription VI, Mastery Augmentation VI, Needle Storm
Discipline: Blizzard Mastery - Epic IV
Paths: Versatility, the Truth of Adaptation, Truth of Crystallization, Inheritor of the Nebulus, The Absolute, Khione’s Authority
Silver wouldn’t be upgraded, unfortunately. Maybe not ever again, depending on how the near future went. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t for lack of resources. As much as he complained about numbers, they’d become an irrefutable part of his life with the system.
His mind turned to the ascension and how it had made him a Grade D, but beyond that, how each grade increased attribute weight by ten. Even if he didn’t increase his attributes all that much, he had.
Appearances were very deceiving, especially with exponents or whatever they were called.
Math in the apocalypse, geez. It couldn’t rest in peace with Mr. Feriger?
If he multiplied each attribute by one hundred and excluded Silver, his current attribute weight equated to over four thousand. Anybody who hadn’t Ascended could obtain an attribute of one hundred. Considering only five attributes existed to allocate Essence to, their maximum power would be five hundred—equivalent to all of his at one.
His quick upgrade increased his relative power two, three… eight times!
So maybe it wasn’t so meager of an upgrade after all. All he had was an untested status, but when he considered what awaited in Valhalla, he couldn’t help but be worried it wouldn’t be enough.
No matter how hard Aiden tried to wait patiently for Leyla to recover, his restlessness grew. Impatience met dread, while exhaustion longed for resolution. Each second felt like an hour, and each minute felt like a month. Nothing he could think of to pass the time was convincing him it would be worthwhile.
Testing his abilities further seemed productive at a glance, but if they would be going into battle the moment Leyla recovered, he wanted to preserve his strength to be in peak form. For the same reason, he couldn’t go back to train with Nin’Yala and the others.
He’d talked to Oli, and he didn’t really want to talk to anyone else. There was simply too much weighing on this, and he didn’t want what felt like empty platitudes from anybody, nor did he want to argue against why this was a terrible idea.
Because he couldn’t convince himself it was a good idea either, and he’d prefer to keep that tidbit to himself. Despite it feeling like the right thing to do, he couldn’t help but wonder if that was his impatience and anxiety talking.
Knowing as he waited for Leyla to recover his bond to Khione, should she fall in the void due to him being too late to help her escape, being the end of both of them wasn’t something he could ignore.
So when Leyla came flying at him at Mach Five, he couldn’t help but let out a relieved sigh.
“Let’s go!”
—
Valhalla didn’t match Aiden’s expectations.
Great cathedrals dedicated to the greatest warriors of all time, massive training grounds cluttered to the brink and ringing with the sound of clashing steel, warriors bantering and quipping as they engaged in lethal combat… Something deserving of the opposite afterlife to Halla.
Not this.
People everywhere bustled between tasks, and even more formed groups and chatted across a lush field spanning as far as Aiden could see.
Everywhere he looked, people were friendly and welcoming to each other. Fallen mingled without discrimination, to his even greater surprise.
“We are in the correct place, right?” Aiden questioned.
“This is home, sweet home.” Leyla saw the incredulous look on Aiden’s face. “Don’t be fooled, every person you see is a skilled and lethal warrior.”
“That may be the case, but why did I expect for them to try to kill us the moment we got here?” They remained unmolested even as they stood there longer and were noticed by more and more Valkyr.
It took Aiden less than a second to consider his experiences with The Valkyr as of yet. War, being captured, fighting in their gauntlet as entertainment, the Leyla slaying Veletya, and the condemnation of all the Valkyr.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Something about that left an impression on him, to no surprise, but could he apply the limited experience to all of Valhalla?
Clearly not.
So he had a skewed belief of who they were as a people. That was neither here nor there…
But now he couldn't help but wonder if everything he knew about the Valkyr, Valhalla, and Xenith were wrong.
He tilted his head to regard Leyla and tried to recall everything he'd heard about Valhalla, what parts had been from her, what had been from the rest of the Valkyr back in Zion, and wasn’t information from the Valkyr at all.
What he saw in front of him unsettled him in ways he didn't know how to process. “I'm not sure where we are or why we're here. When I teleported us, I did so with Valhalla's Authority as the teleportation location.”
Leyla hissed. “Something’s not right.” She spun in a circle and looked around, waving her hand through the air with black-violent tendrils rending the area.
The illusion dropped. Valhalla was on fire.
Everywhere Aiden looked, death and ash. Blizzy trilled dangerously, blasting a cone of frozen spikes at a charging… Human?
“Die monsters, die!” another shouted as it cast a spell with a wand. The sky rippled as a meteor began to descend on their position.
“Move!” Leyla pushed Aiden, who had yet to stop gawking, out of the way of an arrow. She leaped upward to attack the spell descending on them with her scythe manifesting instantly.
Aiden couldn't continue watching in confusion and got ahold of himself as more arrows continued to blast past him, his instincts keeping him hole-free with a few casts of Ice Wall for cover.
Silver nearly leaped into his hand as he dodged away from a massive war ax, kicking the attacker in the chest and waving his hand to blast a wave of ice spikes in the direction of the archer.
Before he could assess whether he came even remotely close to hitting, he dodged another attacker.
“Stop!” he roared, Apex Predator erupting in full force.
One stumbled, but the others pushed through the intimidation and overwhelm to keep fighting.
As Aiden barely kept himself alive and tried to make any sense of the situation, Blizzy disappeared in the chaotic warzone they'd uncovered.
Leyla's rage powered her scythe as she tore upward, splitting the sky in a long crescent and then cleaved the meteor in half.
Instead of clearing up the confusion, the attackers grew in number and intensity. Aiden became a blur of non-lethal ice flurries to buy space and time, defensive walls to keep his opponents’ vision obscured and his position hidden, and tried to find rhyme or reason, desperately.
Pain erupted in his left shoulder, an arrow halfway embedded there.
“Fine! I tried being nice!” He raised Silver high to the sky. “Needle Storm!”
As the first time he'd cast the Epic weapon skill, the air in the surroundings rushed towards him, but it did so with a savage whistle and hiss that blasted all projectiles and charging enemies away.
Over the tip of his blade, a small ball of pure Essence the size of a pea formed. The pea-sized ball of raw power instantly grew to the size of a bowling ball, then doubled in size, condensed to a tiny sparkle at the top of his sword.
In the next moment, the world knew frost.
To Aiden, it had happened faster than he could be amazed. Little more than an Absolute Zero flash of permafrost twinkling like a beautiful star, but the frozen statues of his attackers and mile radius, maybe more, of frozen death really drove his new power home.
Mercilessly, he raised his hand and shattered the statues of his attackers. “Assholes.”
Pillars of ice scoured the newly formed frozen wasteland to varied effect. Some exploded of contact with defensive skills, and others exploded into a cloud of freezing death. Fragmented shrapnel inhaled erupting from the chests of sturdier enemies.
The temporary silence didn't last long as another dozen meteors began crashing down on his position and another wave of attackers braved his death zone to get to him.
“What is happening?” he muttered.
Leyla didn't pause to gawk like Aiden continued to and began clearing the sky of meteors. Despite her constant motion and far less hesitant approach to adapting to their sudden situation, her head turned north of their position enough times for him to notice.
Something called to her.
“That way it is then.” What other choice did he have after all? Hold this position? For what reason? He whistled loud and called for Blizzy over their bond, raising himself up on a platform.
A storm of arrows and spells flew his way the moment the enemy had a clear target. Blizzy flew overhead and caught Aiden as he leaped from his platform, gliding forward with frost breaths clearing their northbound flight of all projectiles aimed their way. Neither one of them thought to worry about Leyla, as she was confidently doing her own thing.
If Aiden didn't know any better, the display of countless flashes and explosions of one spell or another or whistling of arrows zipping past him could be a concert with a firework show if he closed his eyes and believed hard enough. His biggest gripe with the current situation was his lack of anybody relaying the information of why he was being targeted in the first place.
But surely enough, the barrage of attacks never ended. Several even blasted through Blizzy's frost cones and his ice walls, though their impact never happened after being knocked off course.
It meant some of the aggressive people hunting them packed a punch. He couldn't allow himself to be lax. Not if he wanted the three of them to make it out alive.
When he'd teleported to Valhalla, he expected a lot of things. Now? He took a page from Leyla's book and decided that if people were trying to kill him, he'd no longer give them a chance to explain themselves before he responded with extreme aggression.
He preferred the simple approach anyway. Only the desire to have clarity of the situation before he started with lethal attacks held him back at first, but his opponents' lacking concern for his and his people meant one thing.
"Time to see what I can really do." He dropped from Blizzy's taloned feet toward a waiting and prepared group of combatants. Again, they were all human. Clenching his teeth, he encased himself with a sphere of compact, crystalline ice as he descended.
Axes attempted to cleave his thrown-together defense open. Spears stabbed to little effect. Exploding spells did more harm to those around Aiden than him.
Yet his attackers' relentless vigor and determination continued.
"Morons." He willed the sphere to erupt outward and ignored the carnage he wreaked. He peeled his eyes and watched for the direction the spells were cast for.
Everywhere.
"Well shit."