Maybe the red fog was a sign that the wolf was doing something to his health, maybe boosting his health regeneration, he didn’t know.
He just knew that there was always a way, if his damage weren’t enough then he could only increase them.
To increase his damage there was only one way, reinforcement and taking a risk, totally the opposite of his planned and measured fighting style.
Changing to a proactive approach, he waited for the first major opening to appear, when the wolf tried to bite him, it appeared, and Rune rushed into it headfirst, taking the bite full force but using a medium reinforced punch on the wolf’s neck.
It instantly became a catfight and Rune was the one hitting the rhythm, he regenerated less energy than he was consuming but it was a minimal difference.
But still, this loss for him implied that his fighting style was far from mature, whereas before he didn’t suffer any consequences and regenerated everything he lost, now he was dying slowly.
10 minutes later his energy balance was at minus 200, every minute he was losing 200 energy, but he knew that the wolf was also suffering from a higher negative health balance.
But everything became balanced when sometimes the second wolf hit his energy armor, counterbalancing the gap he tried hard to create.
His spirit was tiring from one hour of continuous fighting, but his eyes were burning, in another 10 minutes he would win, and then the second wolf would die 30 minutes from now.
‘I’ll make it happen.’
…
“Sigh… The world wants me to be indecisive…”
During the last fight, Nelo succeeded in killing a tier 3 alone, but as a result, he realized something about his way of using spells that could modify how he had to approach them in the future.
“Be like Rune or Arik and become delusional, this way your problem will disappear,” Astryde was telling him an answer with confidence in her voice as if it was a solution she tried herself.
“I just can’t… Using a laser as a sweeping attack worked too well for me to ignore it…”
To each their own problem, Rune wanted to quit using reinforcement but he had just been forced to use it to win, Arik wanted his punch to be stronger than any monsters, but even with his current boost of more than 200%, he couldn’t beat a tier 3.
Nelo encountered a similar situation, he wanted to achieve an energy laser that pierced through heads like butter, but the energy required for it was too high.
And during his fight he used a new method that made him able to kill a tier 3 alone, a sweep, like a laser-saber, pushing back the tier 3 and giving him some seconds of respite.
“You’ll have to wait till tier 3 to change anyway, experiment with what you got now, don’t act like you're suffering the weight of the whole world on your shoulders.”
Fed up with her brother’s lamentation, she just stopped trying to get him out of his misery.
‘I can’t create more challenges than I already have, it’s a dead-end,’ Rune was thinking about ways to increase the speed at which his unused masteries leveled up.
The previous fight ended up as he expected, a tedious and long fight for great reward.
*Ding* Physical Fundamental: Reinforcement reached Tier 2 Level 59
*Ding* Physical Fundamental: Fighting Instinct reached Tier 2 Level 54
*Ding* Physical Fundamental: Body Control reached Tier 2 Level 58
*Ding* Energy Fundamental: Energy Compression reached Tier 2 Level 64
*Ding* Spiritual Fundamental: Momentum Manipulation reached Tier 2 Level 35
*Ding* Energy Compression: Basic Energy Armor reached Tier 2 Level 30
*Ding* Energy Compression: Basic Energy Defense reached Tier 2 Level 30
*Ding* Reinforcement: Basic Reinforced Armor reached Tier 2 Level 29
‘Maybe I can cut off a part of my energy regeneration and use it permanently for my nurturing form?’
Quitting energy reinforcement was for when he had enough slotted masteries to make it possible, but for now, he still had to train it till tier 3 like all other fundamental masteries.
“Utopia?” Probing his handsome leader who had lots of useful knowledge, Rune wanted to ask something.
“Yes,” it didn’t seem like he was in the middle of thinking about something.
“Is there a way for me to seal a part of my energy by letting it only go towards my nurturing form of reinforcement in a way that makes me unable to unseal it in battle?”
“If you can manipulate your energy regeneration stat then you can command it to regenerate energy at a precise spot, at tier 2, you only have abstinence as a way to make sure to not use what you allocate to whatever you want.”
An underwhelming answer, but it only meant that Rune had to be able to stick to his word even at the brink of death.
‘Tier 3… I only need to keep perfecting everything.’
The key to advancing a mastery fast was to keep using and being perfect in them.
The more perfect you were, the more you could push what you were doing even further.
As a newly connected defective dimension, they were very late in starting their own path, in other established societies, the young were guided by their parents or by specialized schools to prepare for at least tier 3, the minimum tier that could be attained without too much effort.
The Defective Physic Laws Dimension 527 only had the board from their native dimensions to gather information from.
Still, they made quite a big splash compared to other defective dimensions due to the population and total integration into one greater power, the IGS, from their birth.
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Newly connected dimensions should be buried under all the new information and it would take thousands of years just to produce their first tier 5.
For the IGS however, it only needed time, they had an infinite number of entities ready to dedicate their lives to their search for power and gladly accepted sponsored offers to not have to gather EP.
It’s been 4 months since the IGS called for everyone to gather in the Endless and from Utopia’s gathered intel back when they visited, everything was becoming clogged due to an overwhelming number of people who had their ambition ignited.
The billion of immigrated people had already been surpassed, and more came by the day, by the tens of millions.
‘And that’s why we need to keep our distance from the link, but now it’s becoming too dangerous for the 2 cases,’ Rune noted.
At their back was an infinite number of tier 2 who wanted to progress, and before them was an approaching border to a tier 3 zone.
As for what the Undecided were currently doing? Running away from a squad of 40 tier 3.
That's simple.
Using their own path, Rune and Arik were pushing the other out of the way as they were running with grins on their face.
“Go stop them with your infinite strength!” Rune tackled Arik to try and make him fall, but he reacted immediately.
“No! You go stop them with your infinite armor!” He grabbed his leg and sent him flying like a ball towards the pursuing squad of tier 3 monsters.
“Ah! No! I’m too young to die, I'm only 25!”
Dramatizing the moment more than necessary was typical Rune’s behavior, they knew that as long as the pursuing squad wasn’t full of peak or late tier 3, then he would be able to run.
“I knew it Rune! You have heroic blood in your veins! Sacrifice yourself to slow them down! We’ll have a very long ceremony in your honor!”
Utopia passed by Rune flying in reverse after being projected by Arik, so he thanked him for his sacrifice.
Seeing Nelo by-pass him in the air Rune reflected an outraged persona, “How dare you Nelo! Where is your legendary stubbornness?”
But he didn’t even deign to respond, then as he stabilized himself he saw Astryde, Gar, and Adreana pass-by too, without glancing at him.
“Are you all really that confident in me or do you all just don’t care at all about my well-being???”
His outrage melted, replaced by utter confusion, next, he started to run again as soon as he could.
The good news was that the tier 3 zone they found wasn’t a forest, or it was a forest but not the same as before, it was a jungle forest, a primitive jungle forest.
And the squad of monsters pursuing them was a squad of purple snakes that emanated poison elements and melted the surrounding vegetation like paper with water.
Now that they found a tier 3 zone, they deduced where they had to hang out to find lots of challenges.
Rune wasn’t stupid enough to charge alone against a squad of 40 tier 3 monsters, but he hoped he could in the near future do it for fun.
It was only now that Utopia’s plan to max out their stat really shined because they could run at any time without caring about the hundreds of cores they left behind.
Once he caught up to his friends, the pursuing squad of monsters already gave up on their chase to return where they belonged, letting the group stop their frantic retreat.
“Oh my dear friends, I killed the whole monster squad alone just so that you all escaped without a scratch, was my sacrifice worth it?”
They were all silent and were probably waiting for him to catch up, so Rune allowed himself this joke.
“Happy to see you alive fellow hero Rune, anyway, I was thinking of establishing another camp here and then that’s it, everyone’s free if you happen to be chased down by a squad of tier 3 that just won’t let go, then come back to this camp and maybe one of us will be here,” Utopia seemed strangely happy announcing that.
Maybe it was because all their objectives were complete? They had a tier 3 zone, they had a challenging zone, they were isolated, all their stats were maxed.
Or maybe Utopia was happy to announce the end of their path paving expedition? Now they were all free to do what they desired without following the main group.
“Is there a deadline before going back to the IGS foothold?” Astryde asked something that had an impact on when they had to go back, and subsequently when they would reveal the tier 3 zone to the IGS.
“We already paid our debt to the IGS, if they follow our path then they’ll end up coming to us, more precisely, they’ll arrive at this camp, so we’ll report our mission there, but the most probable situation is still other adventurers coming here, and in this case, we’ll simply welcome them, this place doesn’t belong to us.”
Utopia started the question and answer forum of the Undecided, he already planned everything.
“Is there a sleep schedule for when we…”
…
Soon, the 4th month since Rune first stepped onto the Endless would end.
For everyone, it was only a transitory period. The IGS managed all the newcomers, tried to put them to work with incentives behind, built the basic infrastructures, mapped their immediate surroundings, everything was being done.
The IGS was building the future home of every adventurer, and the adventurers helped by simply existing, they were enterprising and had ambition.
An economy was beginning to form, research institutes dedicated to new ether technologies were sponsored, and new services appeared every day.
Young talents and old veterans all had a chance in this new era.
Alone or in groups, the IGS was deploying everywhere, and the surveyed and explored territory accounted for tens of thousands of square kilometers, with surveys finding all the necessary raw materials to accelerate their civilization level.
The end of the fourth month marked a turn in how the IGS operated because they finally reached all-encompassing control of their domain, the basic criteria before truly colonizing a zone.
When you had an army of millions of intelligent people who could follow orders with the efficiency of state-of-the-art contemporary tools, didn’t need to be fed or entertained and were capable of critical thinking and autonomous behavior, lots of steps could be bypassed.
Complex supply chains were adapted to become optimized material supply chains, with every step of the way being supervised by the greatest specialists the IGS had.
The patrollers didn’t need to absorb cores personally anymore, they only had to raze an entire tier 2 zone with military efficiency.
Then, let the support units gather all the cores, have them be absorbed by other people paid for sitting all day, be given a salary if they were not that motivated, or receive 2 billion of EP at one time for their patriotism.
Adventurer groups like the Undecided had to do everything by themselves, but the IGS could act like a massive hive mind managing how every core it gathered was sent to be transformed, like raw materials transformed into complex ones, there was no difference in its management.
Civilization was a beautiful thing, and now that it started its engine, only major natural disasters could slow it down or make it crash into a wall.
That’s why new plans were made every day, in particular for those exterior to the government, those that had dreams of adventure, power, and riches, and today, the major plan of the IGS was released to every adventurer passing by an outpost.
The plan was called “Universal Contribution”.
It allowed the truly dedicated adventurers to demand governmental assistance, this demand had to be reviewed based on how the mission’s accomplished by the person impacted the IGS development.
The incentives for this plan were free lending of an ether pocket dimension, sponsored by Catastrophia Corporation, access to the exchange of monster cores for EP with 95% of the core value being sent back, sponsored by Archanic Company, and being put on the list of privileged adventurers.
Those on the list would be the first to receive newly manufactured equipment such as connected lenses.
They would also be able to ask for a loan from the government with an extremely low interest rate, the loan that was announced was one of 9 000 000 000 EP, which represented all the EP necessary to cap a tier 3 entity ether stats.
At tier 3, every stat could go up to 5 000 points, and every stat point had its price increased to 300 000 EP.
From tier 1 to tier 2 the price increased by 90 000 EP, from tier 2 to tier 3 it increased by 200 000 EP, a little more than double the difference.
The announcement and diffusion of this plan motivated every aspiring powerhouse to push their limits more than before, more adventurers than ever decided that it was a golden opportunity and risked their lives by entering into the surrounding tier 2 zones.
And coincidentally, groups like the Undecided already made ready-to-use paths.
Those ambitious and excited adventurers used those paths to enter into the tier 2 zones, but few of the true professional groups like the Undecided came back to inform them of the true misery that took place in those places.
It was like this that 2 weeks into the 4th month, a first adventurer group arrived at the Undecided’s camp bordering the tier 3 zone, with only Rune sleeping there.