Chapter 25
After killing the second minotaur with a swarm of vipers and asps, both Jessica and Sevin insisted on being involved in killing the rest of the humanoid beasts. Antoine was nervous about letting Sevin back into the action, as the lad was still low on health, but he was also proud that the young warrior was willing to get back on the horse rather than cowering away from danger.
The strategy was the same otherwise; Tom flooded the room with the venomous serpents. While the strategy was effectively a suicide mission for the slithering reptiles, the method was effective. Once the beast was awake and envenomed, the others harried it until the snake venom stopped its heart.
With Jessica blinding the minotaurs with a blast of her napalm magic to the face, there was even less danger to the party members who kept the beast busy. There were several reasons to harry it after the snakes had done their work; mostly to kill it in a controlled manner and to spread out the experience between the party and the monsters. However, Antoine also believed that if they allowed the creature to simply rest one the initial ambush succeeded, there was a possibility that the minotaur’s awesome vitality would overcome the poison and the beast would survive.
Reducing the danger, somewhat, was Lo’s level twenty skill. Paralyzing Glare was a potent skill, allowing him to focus on a target and causing it to freeze up for a short time. The ability did not even require eye contact, and Lo saved Jessica once and Sevin three times by using his new ability at a critical moment, causing one of the minotaurs to stumble and trip while charging the humans. Unfortunately the Korgoath could not use the ability consecutively, it required a cooldown. And he believed it was rather less effective on the powerful beasts they were facing than it would be on something closer to his level.
While kiting the bovine humanoid was dangerous, it was also rewarding. Sevin acquired a level for each of the three that they slew, as did Jessica. Lo gained another level, and Tom gained two, bringing him to level eleven.
Sevin was the first to gain a level ten skill; Target Weakness. He described it as an intuition; when he targeted someone or something and activated the skill he understood their anatomical weakpoints and ideas formed in his head on how to exploit them. Of course those weaknesses were pretty much the same for all humanoids, and the minotaurs overcame many of those weaknesses simply by being huge and unwilling to acknowledge any injury that was inflicted on them. Sevin learned, however, that the Korgoath’s largest weakness was their large eye. Which seemed a little obvious when he thought about it.
Overall he was less than impressed with the skill until he used it in combat and crippled the final minotaur’s knee. He had tried that tactic several times before, but this time the Skill had activated and he’d instinctively adjusted his spear by an inch, causing the weapon to lance straight through the bull’s kneecap and hobble it for the remainder of the fight.
Antoine advised him not to rely on the skill like that too often; the skill could become a crutch that would hamper his analytical ability and make him complacent in battle.
Jessica, upon learning that most classes gave new abilities every ten levels, had been looking foreword to a new combat option and eager to find out what her Sorceress Subclass would give her. Napalm was a potent ability, but she wanted something in her toolkit to solve problems more deftly than a literal flamethrower.
The name of her new ability was Sonic Sovereignty. She gained an instinctive knowledge on how to use the skill as soon as she felt Tom’s Alpha Core writing it into her soul, and for a moment she felt a sliver of disappointment. While she had been hoping for something with a finer touch than Napalm, she’d still been hoping for something that she could use offensively.
That disappointment was short lived, however, as she experimented with the skill. She could create regions of intense noise and deafen her opponents, and she knew that as she explored the nuances of the skill she would find all sorts of other applications. As it was, the final minotaur died not only blinded by her fire, but with its eardrums burst by her magical foghorn.
The best part of it all was that it cost only a sliver of mana, compared to Napalm which, although it was becoming more mana efficient as she gained control over that Skill, ate through her reservoir at a prodigious rate.
Tom, for his part, gained the level ten Skill, Seed. After experimenting with it for only a few moments, he determined that it was not an active combat skill, although he remained uncertain of exactly what sort of ability it was. He put it aside for later consideration and focused on the task at hand.
Once the final Minotaur was dead, the Core room was unguarded. Tom approached the gargantuan crystal, larger than any of the cores he’d seen before except for the Tilluth Village Core. It shown a dull red color. He touched it to see its status.
Core Name
Unnamed
Controller Options:
Claim
Level
41
Link
HP
46/46
Level
Mana
3410/3579
Expand
Territory
9534 M^2
Reduce
Floors
1
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Evolve
Inhabitants
4 Humans, 5 Korgoath
Summon
Experience
1.9*10^6/4.1*10^5
Spawn
Customize
Seed
Tom relayed the crystal’s status to the others, reading out the entire menu. When he finished, he turned to Antoine for advice.
“It’s quite high leveled, I’m not certain that I can Claim it without going crazy again,” Tom admitted.
Antoine nodded. “You have an advantage now that you didn’t have back in Tilluth valley, Tom. Two advantages really. The first is the simple knowledge that the Cores can and will effect your decision making abilities. The second advantage is your allies. If you begin to descend back into madness, I’ll vanquish your Cores and we’ll start from scratch with lower leveled ones again.”
“Right,” Tom said. Tom pressed his hand against the massive core and activated his Claim Skill. However, as soon as he did so, he felt a resonance with the Alpha Core, as well as the distant Beta Core, and he realized that although he had meant to Claim the newly conquered stone, he was using Link instead.
He pressed all of his mana into the high level stone. When he was depleted, he relied on the Alpha Core until it too was empty. He felt the resonance of the far off Beta Core and used some of that mana as well, until finally the Skill activated and he was thrown back.
Antoine had been paying closer attention to the mana flows this time, so he was not caught by surprise when the shift in the local mana happened this time. Just as before, there had been a discordance between Tom’s Core and the wild one right up until Tom’s Skill activated. Then a wave shot through the area, bringing the local mana field into harmony. The wild core also instantly changed color, switching from its rusty appearance and gaining a light blue hue.
Antoine helped the boy back off the ground. Tom wavered, feeling light headed, although he was no longer low on mana; although he had dumped everything he’d had into Linking the wild Core with the two he’d previously tamed, after the skill had activated the mana had come rushing back into him. Which provided a heady rush all of its own.
“How do you feel?” Jessica asked him.
“Fine so far,” Tom said. “Let me know if I start acting weird.”
Tom pulled up the new Core’s menu once more and Customized it’s name, changing it to Gamma. He noticed something concerning while he had the menu up; the core had lost ten HP. More concerning, however, was when he examined the status of his other cores and learned that the Alpha Core was down to a single HP, while the Beta Core was fairing only slightly better with six HP remaining.
He had nearly lost Alpha while claiming Gamma, he realized. He should have realized that Linking Cores cost them HP, as this had happened to a lesser extent when he had linked Alpha and Beta. At that time, they had each lost five HP. But those two Cores had been nearly the same level; Gamma Core was significantly more powerful. He wondered what would happen if a core reached zero HP.
He mentioned his concerns to Antoine, who frowned.
“I don’t have the answers, Tom,” Antoine admitted. “I know that Sundering a core results in child Cores that do not have full Health, and I believe there is some method of restoring the lost health points. But I do not know what it is. I’m certain that King Fenard will, and I suppose you’ll have to ask him when we get to the capital.”
“I think this means that I can’t Link any more Cores,” Tom said. “I don’t want to bring Gamma Core with us because it’s so high leveled it might impact my sanity, and if Alpha core is about to break then I don’t have a way to link them to the rest of the network.”
Now that he had control over the local dungeon, Tom drilled a hole to the surface so that the others could get some fresh air. It was late at night, but Antoine found a stream with fresh water while Sevin worked on building a fire. They made a strange sort of tea; strange to Jessica at least. It was spicy and tasted faintly like oranges. None of the others commented on it, so Jessica simply sipped hers down, grateful for the refreshment.
They slept in the dungeon, each taking a shift at watch. When Tom settled down to sleep, Klein made himself known again, snuggling up next to the teen Controller and purring. On a whim, Tom examined the Tree-cat’s status, and he was surprised to find that the creature was level eleven, just like him. He wondered if it had been busy hunting during the times when it was away, or perhaps something of the familiar bond siphoned some of Tom’s experience to the animal? That was perhaps another question for king Fenard, once they finally met.
As he was stroking the Tree-cat’s fur, Tom felt the Evolve skill tickling, asking him to activate it. He considered. He was uncertain what would happen if he used that skill on Klein. Would the Worsican turn into a hulking beasts, the way that Burrowers turned into enforcers?
“Should I evolve you, Klein?” Tom asked the creature as he scratched behind its ears. Klein purred and leaned into the scritches. “I think it will definitely make you stronger. Maybe not strong enough to help in a fight, I don’t know. But I worry about you; I know you have Stealth, but we’ve been going through dangerous dungeons and I don’t know if you’ll get caught out by Dungeon Spawn while the others and I aren’t around to protect you.”
The animal simply continued to purr.
“I hope I’m not going to regret this,” Tom said, and he activated Evolve.
He knew that Evolve was a powerful skill that required a lot of mana. Klein was a small animal, however, so he wasn’t expecting it to take that much. So Tom was surprised when the Skill took not only all of his mana, but he was forced to drain both the Alpha and Beta Cores, as well as a significant portion of Gamma’s Mana charge, before the skill finally kicked into place.
Klein shone brightly, the light a cornflower blue. The light was so bright that Tom was forced to shut his eyes and look away. When it faded a moment later and he looked back, Klein had changed.
Before, the Worsican Tree-cat had looked something like a giant flying squirrel with over sized eyes. While the Evolution didn’t change the fur patterns of Klein’s black and gray swirls, the animal’s skeletal structure had shifted significantly. It now looked more like a real cat, slightly larger than the pet animal, but its natural weapons were more pronounced than the domesticated pet. Tom examined his familiar’s status
Familiar
Klein (Worsican Lynx)
Level
1
Health
100/100
Stamina
100/100
Strength
10
Dexterity
10
Constitution
10
Endurance
10
Abilities:
Stealth
Enhanced Claws
Tom breathed a sigh in relief when the Evolved Klein rubbed up against him, trying to coax the boy into petting him more. Klein’s body might have changed, but his personality did not seem to have.