Slam after slam did the skeletal berserker land as it flailing its six arms and flayed into Kahli, knocking her side to side, to and fro in a dicombobulating miasma - all the while, thanks to her system, Kahli was seeing red.
[You are taking damage]
"We're taking damage, Froufrou!"
Froufrou, that unspeakable, tentacled horror from the depths of the Pit of Despair, was presently cowering as tightly as possible into that fluffy, little handbag Kahli had been carrying it around in.
It was about this point in time that Kahli wished that Omar, crazy old firebrand curator that he was with a literal flaming arm, hadn't been snatched up by that big, scary mega dragon back when they were all floating in the sky using their various system powers. If only he was still alive, and hadn't been eaten, maybe she wouldn't be in this mess!
Still, she had to try, and it didn't seem like the strange goons from the restaurant were going to be of any help to her. Brahd, footless as ever, was just laying on the cobblestone ground. Philhip was swearing with fear as shockwaves jostled him around - of course he'd lost part of a leg to Curr, so Kahli couldn't totally blame him. And then there was Sahdi - what was her deal? Who did Sahdi think she was? She was just standing there and doing nothing while Kahli was getting pounded into the ground. The nerve of her.
[You're taking damage]
Kahli was sick of just taking damage. It was time to find a way to deal some out, and fast. Kahli took a deep breath, and summoned a rock under her big, left foot. She focused her mental energy, and noticed that if she concentrated hard enough she could actually make the rock bigger! Now that was a welcome discovery. Kahli focused and focused, and before long the boulder was even bigger than her enormous left foot. It was time to kick shit up a notch.
"Time to rock your world!" said Kahli, swelling with pride as she was jostled by the slamming strikes of the berserker - she'd never in another moment felt so much like a true stone elemental than at this moment. In fact, she was starting to feel like having a system had greatly improved her connection to her elementalism, and had possibly made her even more elemental than she was before. And Kahli was all for that shit.
"What?" said Sahdi. "Did you say something, Kahli?"
"Shut the FUCK UP Sahdi!" Kahli spat. She quickly gestured a prayer to Theseosus for repentance and focused back on the beast that was presently attacking her. "Time to rock your world!"
"Did you say something again?"
Kahli sighed, rolled her eyes, and kicked the boulder as far away from the berserker as possible.
"Nice aim!"
"Sadhi, you better zip it or start helping me right away or I'll unsummon that rock and summon up a new one and kick it really far away from you!"
Sahdi did not respond to that.
[You are taking damage]
Kahli looked to her rock. She hope it would hurry up and zoom back around already, but it looked like, inexplicably, it had been moving further despite being larger and supposedly harder to kick around. Perhaps she'd gotten stronger? Kahli didn't remember upping her [STR] [attribute] though... Strange. She'd have to inquire about this with her system when she had more time.
[Clarification: The time dilation that you experience when leveling is, for all intents and purposes, at your disposal at will. That is to say that, you can essentially enter a state of near-timeless stillness, losing your ability to move but retaining your ability to think and access to general consciousness, whenever you would like.]
Kahli would've gasped, but of course she didn't because she couldn't.
[Clarification: Elementality is an innate feature of all tauman beings, system or no system. As you have guessed, system usage can be kind of seen as a 'fuel to the fire' that increases your elemental attachments, and in fact those very attachments can also impact your system experience to the point of having, at times, a positive feedback loop wherein your system positively impacts your elementality, and your elementality in turn positively impacts your system - so, as one aspect of you gains in power, the other does as well, and although the magnitude of each decreases slightly with each increase, it can still have a palpable impact. This is the nature of systemic power and elementality, and accounts for why of so many different beings that have systems, taumans are some of the most skilled at using, for lack of a better phrase, skills.]
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Kahli would've gasped again. So her elementality really was improving! And it was because of her system. Of course, this probably never occurred to people that had had systems their whole life, but Kahli was not one of those people, and she had not had any idea what having a system really did to you, mentally speaking, until she [paired] with Froufrou. And indeed, though she still had a lot to learn - her blue skeleton of a father's half-assed tutorial (praise Theseosus, although the word ass was, as far as kahli believed, scriptural - she had a feeling that learning how to use a system as an university student instead of having one from birth opened her mind up to a different style of learning and interpretation that, in part, could open up new questions about what exactly the deal with systems was. It helped that she apparently had this newer system assistant thing, this clarification feature of her system. Kahli wondered how advanced it would get.
[Clarification: Everyone's system, including yours now that you have access to one, is constantly improving - from bug fixes to new development, expect your system to always be gradually changing and improving. The main goal, of course, is for the system to be better at what it does as time passes by. Speaking of which, said updates will never occur when you are semi-stopped in time such as now, for the obvious reason that time does not pass fast enough for any updates to take place.]
Kahli got the hint. It was time to resume time at its normal speed - and at the same time, to begin again her suffering as the berserker slammed her with its fierce, skeletal claws over and over again.
[You are taking damage]
Kahli looked back behind her to see that her big boulder had finally started on its way to zoom back to her. And it was already well on its way to catching flame! It must've been moving faster, too.
Even better, the berserker looked like it had about spent all of its [STM] trying to take Kahli down. Which had to be good news for her attack. It - seemingly like Sahdi even though she'd seen Kahli's rock kicking in action multiple times by now - probably had no idea what was coming its way.
And, maybe Kahli didn't either. She noticed that its flame was glowing blue, then purple, then light green! Had it glowed light green before? Kahli didn't think so, although so much had happened so fast that she wasn't rightly certain. Still, this was different. She could tell that this boulder was going to pack a serious punch.
The berserker was slowing down, thankfully. Kahli was just glad she had enough [HP] to absorb its blasts. From all the system notifications, this hadn't necessarily been an easy moment for her. Then, Kahli wondered something - exactly how much [HP] did she have at this point? It wasn't really clear.
[HP: 11/45]
Oh, wow. So Kahli didn't have a ton of [HP] left, did she? Maybe this berserker wasn't as strong as she'd thought it was, or conversely maybe Kahli wasn't thinking of [HP] in the right way. She genuinely was surprised to see that she only had 45 [HP], and was even more surprised that something like a skeletal berserker hadn't been able to deal 45 [HP] worth of damage with all the times it'd slammed its huge claws into her. Obviously, Kahli still had a lot to learn about systems, how [HP] worked, and how exactly damage scaled. Then again, she previously hadn't really had a need to as her big rock had essentially done all the heavy lifting for her, well, her big rock and - she hated to admit this - her big left foot, too. Still, Kahli definitely felt in her heart a wish that, possibly, her next [skill] opportunity whenever she leveled up might include a [skill] that had nothing to do with her big left foot. Well, maybe that already had happened - she did have the [Tale Teller] [skill], now didn't she? - but she wanted it to keep happening. Kahli didn't want all of her [skills] to be foot themed, especially not if they were themed specifically around her big left foot, which cause so many issues with insecurity that Kahli had almost, for a brief moment, wished that she had really been infected with Curr back when she lied to the evil alien Lloyd and that Curr had forced Omar to lop off her big, left foot like it had mistakenly convinced him to lop off her leftt hand. Kahli looked down at the end of her arm where her hand had been and felt a tinge of sorrow.
[You are taking damage]
Kahli needed to see her [HP].
[HP: 10.5/45]
Ah. So each hit from the berserker was, at this point, only doing about half an [HP] point of damage. That wasn't too bad, was it?
Closer and closer her boulder zoomed. It was nearly there! Kahli took a deep breath as it got closer and closer. The green flame coiled and roared as the rock zoom, zoom, zoomed. The berserker let loose a terrible roar that shook the ground and brought Kahli stumbling to her big, left foot. This event was, coincidentally, perfectly timed - as it caused the rock to fail to connect with Kahli, as was oft her method, and zoom forth further at an increased speed towards the berserker.
And when it connected, flame and bones smashed through the air at a sickening pace as a plume of smoke clouded Kahli's vision. This was, without a doubt, the most massive attack Kahli had ever landed.