Corvayne pretended to need help to get back to the bar, and Bayou and Little Spur worked to basically pretend to fuss over him including ice on his head and so on. The Horsespit boys were already loaded up into the truck, and Big Red Bramble was rubbing his forehead over the death of the three monks.
"The boss aint going to be too pleased with them blowing their fool selves up." He muttered, having collected a few scraps of red robe from the blast site. Lots of arm folding and shaking his head. The other Fistful of Dao stablehands didn't seem very broken up at all, with at least one helping the bartender with his nose.
Corvayne himself acted like he was nursing a few broken bones and muttered loud enough to be overheard. "I wish they had blown up before picking a fight with me." He noted that Bombshell had returned to the bar and now was pointedly ignoring him to latch onto Bramble. Which was probably a good thing, as he could feel at best a few stabs of pity aside from Little Wing and Bayou, whom were sort of confused.
Corvayne pretended to need Little Spur and Bayou's help to get into the cab of the big truck, opting for the backseat where he smoothed over the damage he had done to himself with a moment of letting [[Vitality]] return, then made himself comfy on the worn seat.
Bayou tried to punch in codes to unlock her dead crushes jade tablet twice before others started getting into the cab of the huge truck. The smell of drinks and a bit of cigarette smoke filled the cab. The three Horsespit cousins came in and one of them gave Corvayne a glance, and there were a lot of different emotions there that made it hard to sort out what it meant. He was pretty sure there wasn't hostile intent in it, so he pretended to sleep while considering what to do.
First, he needed to leverage more freedom. If it meant 'signing up' more, it seemed there was a path to do that for outsiders to the sect. His [[Unity]] links would hopefully speed that up.
More freedom meant he might be able to link up with his friends aside from just Gylwin. Until then, he needed allies, and he felt like Bayou and Little Wing, for the faults they had, would both be good candidates.
The ride was subdued. Traffic and the number of lights quickly fell off, the sect not a part of a spiderweb of lights running off in the distance. Perhaps connected to the roadways all the way down on floor 20. He had a pretty good view of the landscape, as the huge cab was cruising above the trees. The lights were harder to see once the clouds part and let the silvery light of a bunch of moons in. The celestial features, including a gas giant with a ring, were sort of drifting across the sky like clouds might on a windy day. He was starting to get a sense of which mountains marked where the Sect was, even without his compass latching onto friends and family. Gylwin had parked something on the bottom of the truck that was her but not her. She tended to have little backup plans and likely had a copy somewhere in Neo Nashville.
When he got back he was 'greeted' stepping out of the truck by two irate guards. He just strode towards his cell without giving them time to try to grab his arm or anything.
“You aren't supposed to wander off, you dung head!”
Corvayne looked back. “I have to follow Big Red Brambles orders, don't I?”
One of the guards lagged behind, as if she needed to stop walking to think up a counter-argument. The jail had both a light outside that was swarming with bugs trying to run into, and warmer light from the cells. He went to his cell and sat, one guard giving him a dirty look, and the other giving him a different kind of dirty look as he found the warmest spot on the inhibitor to settle in. The guards shut the lights off aside from a few red lights that followed him and kept the place from being completely freezing.
He had sort of an itchy feeling, but couldn't feel any shards that he needed to guide to his ring. He tossed and turned a little before the system wormed it's way into his vision.
[Evolution Frenzy!]
It was always jarring when the thing talked to him directly. He felt [[Understanding]] was doing something to fish the notices up.
[Please direct your Frenzy: Skill, Weapon Skill, Power, Class, Race, Pact (Level and Stats disabled)]
He sat up a little bit. A choice! He considered just throwing it into [[Unity]]. It would help his current plans. But, he also didn't want to accidentally push it up 20 levels and start a cult.
[Pact Evolution acts as an additional multiplier for Pact effects by adding a second word.]
He wasn't sure he would be smart enough to modify a Pact with a word that wouldn't screw everything up. He was worried also he'd start brainstorming words and end up linking everyone's colons - spiritually.
[Evolution energy is not that volatile.]
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Sure it wasn't. Corvayne guessed that throwing two words together could probably make a Pact that was something like how two Pacts combined for strung together effects. Or perhaps focus a concept. But he had done most of his selection of Pacts under Gylwin, and he wasn't sure if, for example, adding 'Self' to [[Growth]] wouldn't cripple the benefits of [[Unity]] by cutting party benefits. He had hints that some pacts worked against others.
Next was Race, which was sort of tricky as well. He guessed since the system liked it, he could somehow move 'up', but there was a chance moving away from humanity would change who he was too. There was a common theme in the tales he read about people who gained power losing touch with the real world, and he wanted to have a sort of anchor to his friends and family. It would be hard to live in a human city if he had giant tentacles with spines that shot acid, or if he left a trail of slime everywhere. It felt more like a monster pick, and there was a bit of resistance to it.
[Are you sure? There are echos of striving for self improvement in your form.]
Class sounded like he could tier up?
[Class Frenzy improves your options and may give rarer classes, or increase the rarity of your current Tier Class.]
Lots of things that probably were critically important for getting strong fast.
[Evolutions for available Tier 5 Classes:]
[Blurred Armsmaster – Activate Multiple Skills at once, and create hybrid skills to make your enemies totally unable to keep up. Evolves to Spectral Armsmaster – Increases hybrid weaponskills to include a third weapon skill.]
He had seen that, and it felt like a sort of natural evolution of his current class. Doing the same thing, but doing it more often every moment. It might be a good idea just on the basis that he might soon be fighting Cowtivators, all whom seemed to have tremendous vitality. Orbital Bombardment wasn't the kind of tool he could use more then a few times before someone figured out to not let him jump a mile into the air.
The werewolf in the other cell started growling and banged on the bars, he heard one of the guards push him back towards the center of his cell. Corvayne looked back up at the dim red light trained on him and closed his eyes again.
[Focused Armsmaster – Deepen your understanding with a single weapon type, trading the ability to pick up any arm for far more efficient use of your chosen weapon. Evolves to Bonded Armsmaster – Increases Weapon Skill advancement for the chosen weapon. Increases likelyhood of developing a signature move.]
Greater focus: Giving up some of the flexibility he had with switching up gear to instead improve his spear-work. There was no question in his mind that that focus was best applied to his favorite type of weapon. If 'advancement' and 'signature moves' were things like [Orbital Bombardment] or [Back Biter]... he wanted more of those. However, it felt like this class was better picked in conjunction with a stellar artifact weapon. Something like his Jam-Jammies in weapon form. The guy at the bar who had the class had a fully leveled up sword artifact.
[Arms Caller – Lean into latent Summoning talent and a wide breadth of weapon skills in the ability to call living weapons to assist in battle and to effortlessly summon and dismiss weapons as the situation requires, increasing efficiency with Cross-Skills. Evolves to Caller to Arms: lets the summoned weapon use Cross-Skill from the weapon the user has.]
Babs class, he had seen it in action and wasn't sure why it was in the list, but she favored buffing either the group or herself rather then having a flying sword cover her back. The gold covered woman had gone over her class both with him and had Wick grill her over a few months of dungeon diving. Corvayne could certainly roll with buffs into a leadership role, or try to build his library of combos with weapons, or look at the line that gradually moved to ranged attacker.
[Combofiend – Deepen your understanding of using weaponskills to trigger explosive effects by targeting weaknesses. Improves understanding of what attacks to pair with allies and ones own weaponskills, and what timing to use them in. Evolves into Combofriend: Increases chance of instinctive weapon skills off of allied attacks.]
A new class. The power of those combinations tended to sweep fights, and he only knew a scant handful. Some of them he couldn't do alone, the most basic being X-whatever which triggered based on timing and position on basic weaponskills. He could do X-Thrust with Lady Blood Claw about 20 percent of the time on a large enough target, but it was harder then it looked even cheating with [[Unity]]. Certain monsters resisted the combined energies turning into a storm, so to speak. He didn't like how uneven Combos were compared to having hard to use but universally effective attacks like [Mass Driver] or [Backbiter].
There was also something about not advancing tiers.
He decided to look at the other options.
[Weapon Skills can be pushed to Evolve, becoming Master, Advanced, or Signature]
He could feel that Master was something like [Flows-Like-Water] and that Signature was something else, but also that the fourth level was something that would take much longer then a few lucky essence frenzies. The most tempting option was to see what [Flows-Like-Water] or [Storm Thrust] could evolve to.
[Powers and Skills can be expanded. Many skills evolved have unusual benefits. Evolving and changing Powers can give off class-powers unique to the person using them and turn them from incidental benefits to the core of ones arsenal.]
[All weapon related Skills are currently unable to evolve.]
[Shadow and Gravity powers cannot evolve.]
Well, nevermind! He could try to boost the entire Pact system by pushing Adept up, and Compass was something that paired well with know-it-alls like Wick and Gylwin and even the elf super-investigator Leigue. If he had one who knew what object that would solve his problems, then a fully powered Compass probably had aspects that would help him get to it.
He got a sense from [[Understanding]] and [[Growth]] that the former was too broad a target to show massive benefits, and the later wasn't what he needed. He guessed Gylwin could swoop in and rescue everyone, but something told him that despite laying on a warm floor in a cold room alone, he was actually where he needed to be.
Powers didn't feel like the right way if he couldn't just put it into two that really helped him the most, and it would be marginal on the third. Non weapon skills like evolving evasion might be worth it, but why was he in jail, shoveling poop, and trying to slowly become the guy in charge through system trickery?
It was because he needed to grow to fight his curses. He had to push at the boundaries he had made for himself.
He went back into Classes, but instead of trying to push into a new Tier 5 class, he instead went into Armsmaster itself.
It was a weird class. It broke rules about what a weapon should do, even as much as weapon-skills broke rules about what weapons did. It was flexible, required creativity in battle, and had a few out of combat benefits for moving around. However, he was in a situation where combat was usually the worst option. In his head, for a moment, he saw a future where he was really good at fighting and that was it, and how every time there was a problem it'd be a binary yes or no if he could fight his way out of it.
For a moment, there was a girl, racing ahead of him, and he felt like he couldn't catch up to her the way he was going.
There was a reason too he was offered Arms Caller too. The Librarian, or the Magus's mom as Corvayne sometimes reminded himself, had given him a book of summoning that he had been forced to read and transcribe. [[Understanding]] had planted the basics into his head. She had known he was good at it.
[Evolutionary Frenzy activated on Class Armsmaster!]
Of course, as soon as he thought he had the answer, the system suddenly sucked a huge amount of energy out of him and knocked him right out.