Selena Williams was dead and it was all Arthur's fault.

There was no doubt about it. Perhaps at higher levels, such injuries weren't as fatal, but a freshly classed individual would not survive having their heart destroyed. And Selena had lost far more than that.

Even now, Arthur could see her broken body lying on the ground, boneless and bloody; a massive hole where her chest used to be. Shade stood over her, looking down as if the deceased woman was some sort of odd curiosity he needed to figure out.

She'd taken a blow for his intended target, one that he was certain the healer would have survived and one that had killed her. That was why the monster was confused. His innate instincts told him Arthur would have lived through his sudden strike and yet the woman had foolishly thrown herself in the way and gotten herself killed.

For no reason.

That was why Arthur felt so terrible, a yawning chasm of guilt drowning him in rage and regret. I would've been okay. I have eight thousand fucking health and over 200 constitution. I could've tanked that strike and walked it off. Why did she jump in the way? Why!?

She didn't know, though did she, his thoughts accused. And that was the crux of the matter. He'd kept his abilities a secret, even the ones that he didn't truly care about. And now Selena had martyred herself thinking she was saving his life.

Because I wanted to keep everything a fucking secret, even the stuff people have already started figuring out.

Well, now it was too late. With Selena's demise, the magic that had kept Shade off balance all this time had finally worn off and with it, his team's ability to survive this fight. They were going to die soon and then it'd be only him and this demon left to duke it out.

Against a ghoul, his physical prowess wasn't going to be entirely effective, the first of many monsters he'd face that'd be a bad matchup for his current strengths. That left him with magic. Shadow was immediately ruled out. Against a monster whose very existence revolved around the affinity, it would be a waste of time and that was without factoring the light field that made those skills useless right now.

Soul was still bared off to him as of now and he hadn't yet found a way to weaponise healing. That left him with his water affinity. A few days ago, that too would have been useless without a readily available source of water nearby, but thankfully, he'd gained the water bullet skill which let him directly convert ether into water to use as a projectile weapon.

He pushed his ether into the skill matrix, feeling how complex it was as an Uncommon+ ranked skill but also how limited. It was weak. Too restricted to harm Shade, forced to conform to a rigid structure that prevented it from doing too much damage. To his enemies and to himself.

It was time to change that. Ever since he'd found out about the chains the system placed on level one access from Mira, he'd constantly checked on them, using his soul affinity to observe how they interacted with him on a baser level.

It hadn't taught him much if he was being honest, but it had told him one key thing. They were disappearing. Ever since he'd begun his level 2 system unlock, they'd begun to disappear. Now with less than 12 hours left for it, he had a tenth of the original number holding him down.

It was time to finally break them.

Arthur poured his ether into the skill, using his new perception attribute to try and figure out how it worked. With it, he was able to identify two key points of the spell. An entry point into which his ether was poured, a gateway that limited how much energy he could utilise and a looping matrix he deduced acted as a safety measure.

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He felt his head begin to ache as he tried to break the skill down further and blood began to trickle down his nose.

Shade was starting to look up.

Half a second had passed.

It'd take the now unburdened monster ten to kill his teammates.

He was running out of time.

His half-breed side started to wake up but he tried to ignore its predatory instincts. He needed to be clinical right now, not an emotional beast. Fuck, breaking a skill is so goddamn hard.

Thankfully he had an insane ether pool to throw at it. Channelling more than he ever had before, he felt the skill matrix burning up, its pathways seared by the unstable arcane juice pumping through them. It felt like microneedles of magma splitting the strands of his muscle fibre, a pain that was felt more on a conceptual level than a physical one. It didn't stop him. He poured more energy into the skill and watched as it started to fracture.

Arthur's ether was now more a creature of instinct than a simple fuel source, a raging bull he tried to wrestle into submission. He wasn't altogether successful but his panther side picked up the slack.

Water bullet, despite its utility, wasn't going to cut it here, and so he changed the skill. Well, change was too strong a word, more like poking it aggressively and waiting for something to happen.

Something popped.

It was the safety parameters.

Uncommon skills generally had a hard cap of 250 ether. Arthur used four times that amount and more kept pouring out of him with no end in sight. His reserves were running low but he knew that wouldn't put a damper on his broken skill. He was right. When his ether ran out, his health began to drop at an alarming rate. He pushed through nonetheless.

Arthur visualised what he wanted to do, the power water held in his eyes. From the vast oceans that contained near-infinite amounts of energy to the pressurised water cutters so sharp they could cut the hardest of rocks. That was the image he was currently after. That deadly penetrating power.

A second passed, though it felt like an eternity to Arthur. He couldn't begin to describe what was going on anymore, the magic at play was a tier greater than anything Arthur was ready for. He became the conduit for destruction he couldn't truly understand.

The ruinous attack that he eventually released was so much more than even a level 150 human should have been capable of accomplishing. It was catastrophic, deadly and beautiful, all in a chaotic cocktail of liquid death unleashed upon reality; an unmaking of the physical realm.

She was magnificent.

Every droplet of sweat and moisture, every bit of water vapour in the vicinity was suddenly locked into place and brought under Arthur's control.

It was nowhere near enough.

Thousands of litres of liquid were rapidly generated, not as a single body of water, but as tiny molecular clusters of H2O far too spread out for the naked eye to see. Arthur Ward drew breath and unleashed his spell onto the world. Millions of water bullets, far too small to register in anyone’s perception were released at once, a feat far greater than the Uncommon skill should be capable of.

Arthur paid dearly for his spell however as the ether in his reserves was far from enough to supply such a devastating attack, and large portions of his health were rapidly funnelled into the broken skill matrix to maintain it. The entire process was over before anyone could even blink, less than two seconds since Selena’s death, yet the results of Arthur's unstructured magic were horrifying.

To all onlookers, it looked like Shade had simply ceased to exist, as the trillions of H20 particles obliterated the monster’s body at a cellular level, leaving behind a space devoid of anything besides the life-giving liquid.

Such a large concentration of water could not be crammed into such a tiny space without some adverse effects of course, and a split second later, the now pressurised zone exploded outwards with a deafening boom, sending steaming water vapour flying in all directions at such speeds that the gas covered a half-mile radius in seconds. Arthur naturally was not conscious to see the results of his attacks. The price of his arrogant strike had bought his health down by 7200 leaving him at a measly 800.

Unstructured magic had effectively cost him over 9000 ether, far, far more than was necessary to end a beast-like Shade and arguably anything currently on planet Earth. He'd wasted so much energy. A stream of flickering blue system messages bombarded Arthur’s vision but he didn’t see any of it. After all, he was only a few bumps away from brain death. Arthur's unconscious body crashed to the ground as he rapidly formed a pool of spreading red around him. I need to stop being so fucking impulsive.