[Rune: So what are their names?]
[Nelo: Seven Storms, Phantom Squad, Maniac Band, Mystical Company, among others.]
[Gar: You forgot Rising Hope, Surge, Delirium, Training Lunatics, they all are very imaginative.]
[Rune: And did we start to decide ours? A preliminary selection?]
[Utopia: The Beyonders! The Ascenders! The Dimensional Fellowship!]
[Adreana: I’d like our group’s name to be a little more inconspicuous… The Friends Symphony?]
[Astryde: To be more inconspicuous we should take a perfectly common name, like Enigma Company, or Unknown Soldiers.]
[Arik: It would bring even more attention down the line…]
[Rune: We need to find a name that really suits us, something we could simply introduce ourselves with, I don’t want to be annoyed every time someone asks me what’s the name of my adventurer’s group.]
[Rune: Hello, I’m from the Phantom Squad, please sleep on your two ears tonight]
[Rune: I’m vetoing every name with more than 1 word in it too, good luck. Love.]
[Utopia: Don’t run like a coward! Take this! The Omega! The Rapture! The Armageddon!]
[Adreana: The Stars.]
[Nelo: The Midnight?]
[Rune: The Archaic, The Arcanic.]
[Gar: The Prime, The Mysterious.]
[Astryde: Those are just words that passed through your mind! You didn’t put any of your feelings in them at all!]
[Arik: To be to the point, we should create a name not part of the language, more like an intent, this way when we say our name in the future through an intent-infused voice, the word will transform to be what we represent.]
[Adreana: I concur, we should be prepared to be what we name ourselves with.]
The current argument stemmed from some other adventurer’s group naming themselves, and some in their little group didn’t want to let their name be empty.
They wanted to have a sub-identity apart from being members of the Tireless. Which was a really cool name.
[Utopia: Anyway, I came because my mother told me some part of Rune’s theory was correct!]
[Rune: Sound effect, mouth open wide.]
[Arik: Did you just drop the bombshell defining the new era like this?]
[Astryde: Oh my Ether.]
[Gar: What?]
[Utopia: Firstly, the IGS is already prepared to announce the truth anytime, but they want to evacuate the planets first and also cement the authority of the Adventure’s Society, the 3 path organizations, and the patrollers.
You could say that they discovered the truth soon after the “awakening” of the Ether Law and the Ether Wiki became accessible, it seems that this theory appeared multiple times in the assembly and the IGS’s leader office.
And following the saying, one time is pure happenstance, two times is a coincidence and three times is a pattern, it was accepted as truth after 100 eminent leaders or assemblymans contacted the futurology department to say bits and pieces of the same theory.]
[Utopia: And now the crispy part like Rune said, the Ether Law didn’t exactly “awaken”, we are the side who “awoke”, and if you check the intent content of the first announcement, then the fit is just perfect.
You want me to copy-paste the first intent sentence we received? “Fragmented Defective Ether Law successfully patched up.”
The IGS doesn’t have a special research zone that started studying the ether thousands of years ago or something like that, and the reasoning shown by Rune is exemplary from only one of the most important pieces he had found.
Essentially, once the ether density is enough, our information board will connect with all other information boards currently in tier 1 dimensions. Or it has an extremely high chance to happen, what will really happen remains a mystery in the end.
What is quasi confirmed is that there will be discrepancies appearing as we’ll make contact with sapient lifes from other dimensions, be they from other “Universe Dimensions” or whatever those dimensions are.
Do I need to say more? You want a summary maybe? We’re not the first, the apocalypse isn’t coming, soon the greatest upheaval will happen, and nothing has changed concerning having to train our fundamentals and targeting tier 2.]
[Arik: So our home Universe Dimension had nothing special, and we can only wait? Maybe all the spells we are researching are the most basic of the basics for those more advanced dimensions…]
[Utopia: Yeah, nothing changed, just that we don’t know when we’ll have access to their knowledge, and training is still the one thing that will never hurt you long term, it’s not the spell that you’re training, it’s your energy efficiency!]
[Gar: Oh I’m pumped up! When will the primary ether sub-dimension open? If it opened now I would choose to enter!]
[Nelo: We’re all indecisive in this group, so everyone knows we’ll all wait for the second opening, even if it’s in 2 years.]
[Rune: Indecisive… Maybe that’s a good start for our group’s name]
[Astryde: Oh…]
[Adreana: It wouldn’t come out right, the Indecisive Adventurer’s Group.]
[Utopia: Why not use wordplay, and settle for undecided?]
[Arik: I feel that it really transmits what this group is about, who are we? The Undecided Group…]
[Gar: I agree!]
[Nelo: No complaint, I can identify myself in this.]
[Rune: What’s your group name? It’s Undecided sir… Hehe, creepy awkward laugh sound effect. Confusion incoming.]
And so, on this day where the little group of friends learned about what the future reserved for them, they decided on the cool name they would use in the future to refer to themselves..
The Undecided.
…
Exhaustion clouding his mind, Rune kept fighting surrounded by more slimes. His tired but determined face could serve to show what a true veteran dimensional adventurer should look and act like.
He wasn’t worried about his situation and that reflected in his demeanor, the “few” monsters surrounding him were the last, soon, the nest would be cleaned and cleared.
Having recently finished refining his variant fighting style made to target intangible health more than tangible physical weaknesses, he concluded that with his current capabilities, he couldn’t refine it more than he had already done.
Concerning experimental refinement though, that, he had aplenty, like a new reinforcement application he learned from the board. It wasn’t largely used due to obvious cons, but it still existed, and Rune found it to be… Appropriate for his variant fighting style.
This experimental addition to his anti-health fighting style consisted in opening a hole of very little size in his energy pool while creating an annex pocket to contain what flowed out, itself connected to his reinforcement shape.
Then, according to the size of the hole, his reinforcement shape would always be filled by the energy he chose automatically.
While it looked like such a technique would allow for permanent reinforcement, Rune could only sustainably make a hole size and an intermediary pocket to accommodate 10 energy.
That was a permanent strength boost of 1%...
The pros though, he was always in the energy-intensive fighting reinforcement mode, so he rushed toward the closest slime, collided with it, punched, kicked, punched again, ripped out its core, evaded, evaded another time, evaded again…
Evading a lot, waiting for his energy to regenerate after the massive burst of small hits he had dealt, then going at it again to continue ripping the slime into pieces and scattering them with the energy he constantly used.
After he used, he regenerated, after he killed, he didn’t back down, and another slime soon died.
Only 6 remaining, they weren’t a challenge anymore, their attack patterns really too predictable once he had learned it. Worse than software on that front.
Another slime tried to swallow him, he evaded, then 50 strikes later it was dead.
2 slimes approached, he singled one out, and 60 strikes later it died.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He kept close to the remaining slime as he circled around it for 40 seconds, regenerating enough energy to deliver another slime-scattering-killing combo.
The slime reacted but Rune chose to deliver his strike and use one of his uncovered arms to mitigate the damage to his energy armor in exchange for health.
His perception sphere, fighting his permanent push, made another wave of exhaustion appear in his mind.
A 2-second absence and he found himself inside a slime, his body and mind instinctively reacted and he used 200 energy to reinforce a kick, it exploded the slime from the inside.
His energy armor was nearly totally dissipated, so he took the time to refill it from the spell matrix up before engaging with slimes that he played with for minutes.
‘Time to end this.’
He killed one slime, then a second one, the 2 remaining were the last defenders of their nest.
Terminating their mindless life allowed Rune to finally land on the nest, nothing extraordinary, a regular lifeless large piece of rock, he didn’t even want to move anymore.
He simply created a foamy energy mattress and after using his momentum and stopping resisting the push of his sphere, his mind deactivated everything.
It was the end of the second period of Rune’s adventure.
…
Rune didn’t wake up for 3 days, like muscles after having done a marathon, his spirit was damaged from overexertion and needed time to heal and reinforce itself.
It could be seen as natural progress given as a reward for his hard work. Though a much more pessimistic outlook could also be taken.
His spirit becoming stronger would of course have consequences for all his spiritual fundamentals, but it wouldn’t cut the time needed to truly master them, only replace a bit of expertise by pure force of spirit.
The good news was that when he had searched for more info on the slime’s nest, he stumbled upon the still-being-completed Deep Void Dimension map released by the IGS government.
The moment rifts leading to the Deep Void Dimension had appeared, the IGS hadn’t needed long to start exploiting them. The average value of ether resources in this dimension was a little bit higher after all.
And anyways, every rift discovered in IGS space was systematically exploited with outposts built on the 2 sides. From the few pictures he saw onboard, they not only looked super cool, they also looked huge enough to be mind blowing.
Coincidentally, where he hadn’t successfully located himself before, he now could, and it was really a miracle that he was only some “millions of kilometers” from a rift. And because good news never came alone, he wasn’t that far from the dimension’s boundary.
And because never 2 without 3, he could now locate where a nest of peaceful ether beasts was, and it wasn’t that far too, so following his logic of optimization, he prepared himself an itinerary.
Rune also checked his dimension cooldown, and it was gone. If he so wanted or desired, he could return home and take a break for months.
‘I’m far from done yet though, I didn’t observe the boundary, didn’t interact with peaceful ether beats, didn’t raze 7 more nests, didn’t reach 10 000 monster cores, and didn’t gather 8 more rare resources.’
All in all, his adventure had only just begun in his book, so he used the galaxy wings spell and rushed to the nearest monster’s nest according to the IGS map.
And it turned out that he had really positioned himself correctly.
‘So I didn’t use all my luck to encounter a fellow avatar back in the Void Dimension, what a relief…’
The proof that his luck wasn’t void was that he encountered a scorpion-like monster, and it was aggressive.
Just by observation alone, Rune could feel excitement at the prospect of confronting this species that looked forged for slaughter with their multiple sets of sharp-looking limbs, its tail, its jaw…
Everything that could lead to the complexity of their attacks pushing new boundaries on his own fighting style was present.
Rushing in after making sure his energy armor was full, without knowing, he had reached 60% efficiency in his energy compression fundamental, so now he was always protected by a 300 armor layer if he used all his 500 energy to create it.
And he had no reason not to.
The closer he approached, the more he realized that the lone scorpion-like monster he was targeting could scare every child in existence.
Its exoskeleton, a menacing segmented tail ending in a stinger, a pair of grasping pincers and 3 other pairs of limbs rounded up all its sides defense and truly made it to be a much more dangerous monster than the one he had fought with until now.
The scorpion monster rushing towards him put Rune on the defensive, he was in it for the long run, so he wanted to prepare himself to confront this new species of monsters at their best while being alone against many.
‘What could go wrong… This one sure gives me the creeps.’
From the way the scorpion was circling around him, Rune easily concluded it didn’t belong to the stupid slime intelligence level, always the same opening move.
Obviously though, it was still a stupid monster, and he was ready to defend himself against anything. Rune didn’t feel any danger to his life, so he only had to wait for it to come and be his training dummy while he unveiled all its species’ secrets.
After circling around Rune for a good 20 seconds, a time that showed it wasn't mindlessly aggressive, it started moving forward while tightening the circle, and after another 20, it did its first attack.
Giant, from his perspective, pincers approached and they were screaming that blocking them directly was a bad idea, so he could only evade them.
The more he practiced with momentum, the more he realized that he had only scratched the surface of its potential. He would need months more of experience before becoming able to control his 500 momentum stat, and every additional point in the future would expand its possibilities.
In the Undecided Group, Utopia was the expert in momentum manipulation, Rune viewed himself as more and more of an energy compression expert as time went by.
He didn’t choose, but platforms and energy armor, the support pillars of his perfect theoretical fighting style, had made him practice this discipline a lot more than his other friends.
He didn’t know if his regular reports had influenced the fighting style of other members, but he was sure that his emphasis on energy armor was correctly transmitted.
In a blink of an eye, Rune was 2 meters away from his previous position, and the next moment, he was punching the underside of the scorpion.
The scorpion reacted by contracting its 3 remaining pairs of legs, but he had already kicked and escaped their grasp.
It engaged again with a pincer attack, and Rune evaded by the topside this time, wanting to see the scorpion use its tail.
But as his sphere reacted.
‘Hu…?’
Rune found the tail stinger piercing his unarmored leg.
So surprised by the turning of the event, he directly tried to escape, but the pincers from the scorpion were already there.
Having no choice left, he could only use a 300 energy reinforced punch, and with a 50 energy platform, he punched the hell out of the scorpion.
What he didn’t expect to happen next, it seemed that the scorpion tail stinger had reverse spikes on it, and they adhered to the interior of his leg very hard, even though the limb didn’t look like it would have allowed anything of such intensity to take place.
So he was also sent flying by his own strike.
He didn’t know his remaining health, but Rune wasn’t going to risk it, so he used his remaining 100 energy for yet another reinforcement and another platform, but in the opposite direction of where he punched.
The scorpion was again sent flying, but using the platform he just created, he could feel his body being pulled by the stinger grip on his leg as he resisted with all his strength.
Finally, it exploded with muscles and blood as it was forcefully pulled out by force, the state of his leg was miserable.
Rune never thought the situation would degenerate so fast, and to be sure, also to recover from the mental shock, he kept away for 30 seconds.
With his health and energy regenerated by half their maximum amount, he neared the disintegrating scorpion monster body, taking the core.
‘Yup, I’ll absorb this one, also stinger equal apocalypse against unarmored bits, okay. Noted.’
Rune was still in a state of shock, so his emotions were muted by pumping adrenaline. After half an hour of non-stop thinking about what he just got through, he finally decided to take a break and practice his energy fireworks magic.
…
[Rune: That was clearly the most traumatic experience I've had for a long time. If you ever encounter scorpion-like monsters, prepare yourself to enter a horror movie if their stinger pierces into your body.]
[Gar: Our lives aren’t at stake like you, so our reaction would be different.]
[Nelo: Use only spells, from what you’re saying they attack faster with their stinger than you can react.]
[Rune: I tried to search for a bullet-time awareness manipulation but I found nothing, I don’t know how to respond.]
[Utopia: I only recently started my own adventure, but if I were to encounter them I would try and surpass my past self, and only stop when I succeed!]
[Rune: No momentum tips?]
[Utopia: No, but maybe this determination is the key to progress your awareness, if you push your sensitivity beyond the limit of 100% awareness focus, or anything imitating it, it would become easy, and you’d acquire a new heroic technique.]
‘Well, that’s better than going spellcaster or feeling sorry for myself and playing with energy fireworks for days, let’s get to work.’
Making a last 2-layer fireworks go off in an explosion of vibrant red with neon green mini projectiles, he stopped everything and focused on his ether soul, the center of his awareness, his spirit.
The idea of overloading one’s senses was not new, it could be naturally done after cutting every other sense, a basic awareness manipulation trick, this way the remaining awareness would only have one sense for all its power.
For the pre-Ether Law era, the idea of souls and awareness was alien, but now you only had to empty your mind and focus on seeing your inner-self, and your ether soul would point the tip of its nose from where it was hidden.
The ether soul, from Rune’s perspective, was a mass of air, but the air had a very obtuse white color to it, the color of his energy when it was just produced.
He knew it was only his own perspective, others said they looked different, but was it related to one’s specialty? No answer was given by the Ether Wiki.
The awareness was also the same air that constituted his ether soul, and even now, watching carefully, Rune was able to see the places he had changed.
He activated the color sense of his perception sphere, he deactivated his sense of pain, he also deactivated his sense of hearing, taste, smell, even his sight was deactivated.
The current state he was in was optimized for a long period of immersion in a dimension where those senses were useless.
He wasn’t an ether life form with sense optimized for seeing or interacting with the ether, so they didn’t do anything except being activated and consuming awareness.
‘Where to start…’
Thinking about his goal, he quickly realized his current problem was a double issue.
He first had to find the part of his ether soul that corresponded to sensitivity, as the reaction speed sense simply didn’t exist, it was directly linked to his perception stat.
And second, he also had to find a way to overload it without deactivating his other primordial senses like simply his whole perception sphere. Because the perception sphere also had a part of the soul responsible for it. It was also a sense after all.
‘Why did I only focus on perception manipulation training…’
Departing from those 2 objectives, Rune remembered that until now, he had always found other things to do besides manipulating and training his awareness.
He hadn’t been purposely delaying, he had just been setting his priorities right.
It wasn’t the first time doing something like that as he only needed to recall when he had wanted to hear music so much that he chose awareness manipulation in place of farming optimization… That was also setting his priorities right.
‘Back to basics then, let’s observe this empty mass of air for hours while I make changes to it. I’m so lucky as of lately I’ll probably be able to directly do what I want.’