Armaments of the soul was an incredible skill, limited only by Arthur's inability to use it properly. That didn’t matter much when he shot his crude soul spear at seven times the speed of sound via water shot. It was on a direct collision course with the largest Bloodbeast a seven-and-a-half-foot behemoth that was bounding towards him at a speed nearing three hundred Km/h. Its running technique was the mirror image of what you’d see in an Olympic ad and on something so obviously non-human, it looked downright uncanny.
With less than a hundred metres between them, Arthur's aim was true. It collided with the monster’s skull with a deafening boom, sending rubble and dust everywhere. Physics held little sway here and despite the negligent weight of his spear, it was the massive behemoth of a monster that was sent careening backwards. A quick use of Homunculus' eye showed how much damage he’d dealt.
Health:270,081/310,000(308,000)
40,000 damage with a single attack. Arthur let out an appreciative whistle. No matter how morbid life got, he’d always take out the time to appreciate how much he’d grown. With 5% of all damage he dealt with his armament counting as true soul damage, he’d permanently decreased his enemy's health by 2,000 points. That just left- Arthur quickly did the maths- another 155 attacks of similar strength to put down the beast down for good. It was a daunting task when he looked at it like that, especially when he had another three Blood beasts of similar strength to face at the same time. Considering that attacks made with an armament ignored 50% of a target's defence, his remote bombardment was significantly more powerful than the base number suggested.
True to his hopes and predictions, his weapon suddenly appeared before him, hovering in the air for a second before gravity brought it down to the ground where it pierced the earth and remained standing upright. He hadn’t seen it teleport, one moment there was nothing but air and the next, his weapon was there. Checking his health reserves, he saw that the armament recall didn’t cost him any additional energy whatsoever, it seemed to be a simple function of the skill that wasn’t mentioned in the description.
Was there a maximum distance? Would it work all the time? Why did it happen in the first place? Was the name Armaments of the Soul a lot more literal than he’d initially thought? These questions filtered through Arthur’s head as he grabbed his spear and darted forward. They were all important questions, and depending on their answers, he could potentially completely change his fighting style. This was all stuff he’d have to worry about later though. Right now, the monster he’d just downed- who he’d dubbed juggernaut, courtesy of its size- was getting back to its feet.
His attack had blown a massive crater in its skull which was healing at a rate visible to the naked eye, almost comparable, perhaps beyond the prodigious regeneration displayed by the [lesser] Hydra he'd defeated. Arthur estimated it’d take around one-hundred-and-thirty seconds before the blood beast was completely healed, which put the monster's regeneration at an insane 300 per second. Turned out that sacrificing your life for five minutes of power actually gave you a shit ton of it. Shame it came at such a steep cost.
The other Bloodbeasts hadn’t remained idle, two of them rushing towards him whilst the third stayed behind. Ashley remained where she was, wailing an awful keening sound that harmonised with the cries of her unborn child, creating a symphony of pain and sadness he wished he'd never had to hear. Before the Bloodbeast could stabilise itself, Arthur water shot his spear once again.
This time, it collided with the monster's chest. Without the monster's forward momentum amplifying his strike, Arthur was very surprised to see that he’d still done a respectable 32,000 points of damage which permanently knocked off another sixteen hundred health from his enemy. Had the monster's constitution permanently decreased with his previous attack? Stat reductions were a powerful, albeit rare sub-effect his skill provided and he was surprised he’d gotten so lucky. Arthur mentally revised his predictions. It wouldn’t take 155 attacks. He’d get it done in far less time.
Once again, Arthur didn’t see the moment his spear appeared, it simply just… was. Grabbing it, Arthur prepared for another strike.
Sadly, the stationary bloodbeast chose that moment to make its move. There was no warning, no prelude to the destruction it would unleash and it was more luck than anything else that prevented Arthur from tanking the hit with his face. The attack came in the form of a crimson orb the size of a small marble, launched from the creature's mouth at speeds that made his attacks look slow by comparison.
By the time his bestial instincts told him he needed to duck, it was already too late. The crimson pellet clipped his spear and ricocheted into his shoulder instead of his chin. For the first time since unlocking his class, Arthur took substantial damage. His arm exploded in agony. It was like someone had taken a real hot poker and gouged it into his flesh. The ball of destructive energy pierced almost two inches through skin and muscle before coming to a stop. If only that was where things ended. The red pellet exploded, the mass of corrosive energy doing far more energy going out than it had going in.
For the second time that day, Arthur was sent flying backwards, this time a conservative distance of only a dozen or so metres. It hurt far more however and for the thousandth time, Arthur wished he had a skill that numbed pain. Groaning, Arthur sat up and looked at the damage. His shoulder was a bloody mess of gore like someone had taken a serrated ice cream scooper and gouged out a few balls of flesh. No matter how many injuries he’d seen, it hit differently when it was on his own body.
Stolen novel; please report.
At least the bones aren't damaged, Arthur tried to be optimistic. He had to be when he was covered in so much blood, especially considering most of it wasn’t even his. Arthur had landed on the corpse of a young man, perhaps even a teenager. He could hardly tell when their skull was pulped to fine soup courtesy of Arthur’s elbow using it as a landing pad. Turning back to the situation at hand, Arthur came to a decision. There was no way he could keep fighting with a limb crippled. As incredible as his regeneration was, his arm wouldn’t be operational before the five-minute timer for this fight came to an end. I need to heal this shit.
A Homunculi’s Healing was a legendary skill that would get the job done in an instant but he had a different idea. Something he’d learned through experimentation, was that health he’d converted to ether to fuel his skills could not be recovered through healing magic of any kind. The spent energy had to be recovered the natural way. Unless of course, he had a way to augment that recovery.
Augmented Recovery (Epic+) Level 1- The perfect Homunculi is a creature of Alchemy, an amalgamation of thousands of processes and reactions. Its recovery is a thing of legend, a memento to the fires of creation and destruction that forged its flesh.
Effect- Increase health regeneration to ten times its base value, ether regeneration by two and stamina regeneration by five times for one Hour
OR
Increase Health regeneration by twenty times the base value, ether regeneration by four times and stamina by ten for 10 minutes. Cost:10,000 ether.
Cooldown: 24 hours (This number shall not decrease and is a hard limitation of a soul's base ability to generate those energies. The cooldown is immune to any cooldown reduction effects of any kind. This skill may only stack once with a similar regeneration boost of a high enough level.)
Approximately twenty seconds had passed since the soul explosion that had begun this fight. That put the bloodbeasts on a 280-second leash before they perished so the skills longer version was immediately discarded. Arthur quickly ran some numbers in his head. With a 25% reduction in cost to use it, it would take 22,500 health to increase his regeneration by twenty times for ten minutes. Since it’s currently halved, that’ll give me 223,600 health if it ran for the full hour. That's 7,453 health a minute so around 74,500 health regenerate in the full ten minutes the skill runs.
Taking away the skill's high activation cost, it’d net him a profit of 52,000 health. As bad as his injured shoulder looked, it had done less than 5,000 damage to his total health pool. With augmented recovery online, he’d be good as new in forty seconds. Healing it outright could be done in ten seconds, so there was a half-minute difference there. Arthur was okay with that delay. He cast the skill.
Health: 221,875/263,835-> 199,375/263,835 (60,520 Health converted)
Health regen:7,453/minute.
It felt like someone had injected caffeine directly into his bloodstream and his skin took on a pinkish tinge. Arthur didn’t have time to get used to the strange sensation before his enemies were upon him. Leading them was the juggernaut, still with a portion of its face missing. Its lack of eyes didn’t hinder its vision in the slightest and it launched a combination of claw strikes at him, each of them aimed at a vital spot. As fast as the beast was, however, Arthur was faster, and even with an arm down, it was trivial to dodge the wild swings.
Three seconds later, his task became a lot harder when the other two Bloodbeasts joined in. Fighting two opponents wasn’t twice as hard as a one-on-one battle. The difficulty grew on an exponential scale, not a linear one. Against three monsters where each of them posed a threat to him individually, it was all Arthur could do to simply survive. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Seventeen. That was how long it took for Arthur to regain the function of his arm. It wasn’t fully healed yet, but it was enough to move.
No matter how strong he was, Arthur was forced to constantly make concessions, and choose which attacks to dodge and which ones he’d be forced to tank. As fast as they were moving, it meant he was hit thrice every second, oftentimes more when his attention slipped. He dished out as good as he got though, punishing every attack that landed on him with two of his own, his ugly spear a bolt of lightning as he cut and sliced bloodbeast flesh. With his every attack dealing over a thousand damage, it meant he’d permanently decrease a healthpool by 18,000 points in a minute's time. That sounded like a lot on paper, but when it was split across three monsters, each with 300,000 health, it might as well have been nothing.
This isn’t going to work, is it, Arthur thought morbidly as he was launched backwards from a particularly vicious punch. His body had yet to touch the ground before he was forced to defend himself again. Half a minute of fighting and he was already covered in wounds, mostly bruises from blunt force trauma but he was bleeding from a dozen or so cuts too. None of his injuries were fatal, the cuts closed up fractions of a second after they formed but it showed how much damage he was taking that the effects of it were visible even for the briefest of moments.
With augmented recovery active, his health was steadily ticking upward but not fast enough that he was willing to spam his most expensive skills. Four minutes and thirty seconds left before the blood beasts died on their own. He was ninety-nine percent sure he’d easily survive that long against them, but he wasn’t confident he’d be able to kill them in that time frame either. If Arthur wanted to go through his first refining and finally level up, he needed the experience killing them would grant him.
Something had to change.