CHAPTER 213

There was another thump. The team guarding the entrance was visibly pushed back an inch before collectively they strained their muscles. They wobbled, two forces colliding against each other, briefly locked in a stalemate.

“Push.” Thor grunted.

There was a jerk, and the shield clanged back into position. They were mid battle and sort of not. Tom knew they were lucky the draconic lizards were lacklustre in the extra’s they brought to the fight. If they had a more rounded set of abilities, something like the very common charge skill or the fire breath of their draconic heritage, their blocking tactic would have failed. The shield would have been melted or been blown aside and Tom would now be fighting twenty monsters simultaneously. That would not have been a death sentence, at least for him. For the others? With twenty attacking, he would have no ability to protect them.

They had been fortunate. The lizards, instead of possessing burst attacks, only had their aura. Against many teams, that would have been sufficient, but his water elemental was more than capable of countering it.

Now he was going to replace that water elemental with an ice one. The lizard’s singular, nonphysical trick would be hard countered. Tom focused on casting his spell. Unlike when he had summoned the water elemental, he planned this contract out in more detail. There were extra aspects to consider.

The personality type remained irrelevant as it was going to be slotted into a utility role not a free flow combat one. Instead, he concentrated on the concept of longevity. It was about maximising the duration of the cooling per point mana spent.

It would be wise to supplement his power, Tom decided as his soul bound mana crystal appeared in his hands. He flipped it while he thought. If he used its mana sparingly he could get a significant boost in how long the ice elemental would be available. There was a sweet spot for summoning, and he would need to invest the trapped mana to get his spell into that zone.

Tom focused on the crystal and the contract terms, balancing them off against each other. There was no buying extra mana for him to use, no topping it up mid fight. The mathematics did not work. Even in the best case, every minute spent recharging would only support forty seconds of the ice elemental. It meant that the crystal in his hand would buy twenty minutes of extra time, which was valuable.

Thirty extra mana per summons, he decided. That would let him repeat the action five times, which was all they would need to clear the monsters waiting to get in.

With his mana pool allocation determined, he focused on the details in the contract. Mentally, he tweaked the parameters playing off the contract time versus the energy invested into the elemental. He wanted both aspects to run out simultaneously. A lot of it was guesswork because he lacked hard information on the ice version’s efficiency versus the lizard’s aura. There was no way Tom could accurately calculate the right value, but through experimentation, so he chose what he thought was the best ratio and began casting.

His title immediately activated to guide his steps. This time when he pushed the contract through there were only two ice elementals bidding but they got into a price war and in short order there was a snap and a tiny piece of ice appeared in front of him. He could feel its presence as a wave of cold washed over him and dispelled the growing heat that was causing sweat to run down his face.

At his direction it settled on his shoulder while he recharged using Harry’s ritual.

Everlyn facilitated a quick debrief but there was nothing to learn from it. They all knew how to kill the lizards. There was no other strategy apart from tank and wear them down and no special insights to be gained. Tom did not resent the debrief. Who knew when someone might have noticed an unexpected vulnerability.

Midway through his recharging, the water elemental ran out of power and so was switched with the ice.

Then with his mana at full. Tom stood spear at the ready in front of the entrance.

The countdown started and when they reached zero; the team yanked what was now crumpled metal away and threw it to the corner.

Three monsters burst into the room and Thor slammed a fresh shield down straight after them to block the gap.

Tom sprang into motion.

He taunted them and then spent the first thirty seconds scrambling to stay ahead of their attacks. Then the battle stabilised for a period before it turned sharply in his favour and he was back to being nearly invulnerable.

It took a little under ten minutes till the last was taken down. Collectively, their ability to chip away at the scales and then destroy the monsters was improving.

“Tom, you good to keep going?”

“Yep, my mana is full.” He answered her immediately.

“Then we go again.”

This time four snuck through.

Tom fell into the same rhythm. He could feel his skills improving and almost felt like he was on the verge of a skill up for Fate Weaponised Black Dodge.

It was a tier five ability and Tom knew that levels for the more complicated skills needed to be earned both through use and inspiration. Particularly if it was a threshold level… At lower tiers, level four was not important, but tier five skills especially one with multiple sideway evolutions were different. He would probably need an inspiration for every level now.

By this stage he had plenty of insights into the skill, but he was not sure they were the right ones or strong enough. However, it was almost like the Skill was prodding him a certain direction. There was an inspiration there around linking the dodge skill to a teleport but instead of focusing on teasing out that thought his mind was drawn into the start of the battle.

It was his subconscious at work. There was no point in enhancing a defensive skill to perform better when things were easy. No, what had to be strengthened was when he was failing. The beginning of battles where he took injuries that was where he needed a boost.

He let himself exist in the moment. His body perfectly balanced as he sought to avoid the spinning whirlwind of claws that were reaching out to shred him. He dodged through space, shifting from spot to spot. His muscles continually contracting to alter the angle of his torso or limbs. His Spark domain was around him to predict the movements of his enemies. He could feel it when a lizard moved behind him and attacked from his blind spot and when they did so, he already knew how to move to avoid them and every now and again he used his teleport to relieve the pressure.

But… could he do better.

His acrobatics were carrying him out of the reach of most of the strikes. There were no obvious changes to his approach that would let him avoid more of the cuts. Ultimately, the human body, even enhanced by magic, could only do so much and when your surroundings were filled with deadly slashes, some of them were going to get you.

Tom snarled as a claw dug into his arm, scratching bone. He had been dodging two other lizards and after avoiding all their limbs there was no capacity to dodge this last one.

A teleport let him disengage, and he used Touch Heal to remove the damage. The deep cut took ten mana to fix.

That was too much… and it reminded him of his earlier question.

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Could he do better?

That claw had hurt him even with Black Dodge reducing the damage. But for its presence, Tom was sure the attack would have sheered right through the bone and potentially a second one too. Instead of that occurring he had only been left with what was effectively a flesh wound and, if he was being honest a clean cut at that. Without Black Dodge, the claw probably would have taken a chunk out of him, which would have made it far harder to heal.

He was only fighting up against creatures with a seventy percent advantage in attributes and he had a tier five defensive ability helping him. For him to end up that hurt, it had to indicate a flaw in his technique.

Tom went through the motions, puzzling on ways he could supercharge his performance. Was there a way to avoid that damage.

There was a crack, and a lizard collapsed. Abruptly he returned to dodging the enemies on auto pilot. With only three of them, he wasn’t going to learn anything.

Two minutes later the last of them fell, and they stood sweating in the oppressive feat, with Tom and Rahmat chests heaving as they sought to bring their breathing under control.

“Bad and good news. Another eight have joined.” Jingyi reported.

“Stupid monsters.” Thor cursed angrily.

“And the good.” Everlyn asked mildly.

“That was the good. That should be it. Either the circular is blocked up again or the pack has moved on.”

“Eight more is not a problem.” Tom interrupted. He thought about his skill and that feeling that a revelation was just out of reach. He needed a challenge to bring it forth. “We need to speed things up.” He nodded to the teams on the shields. “This wave we should let five or six through.”

“I don’t see how that would help.” Everlyn observed immediately. “That many will merely hamper your ability to hit them. You’re doing a third of the damage, so I’m not eager to lose that.”

“I’m on the edge of an inspiration.”

Everlyn nodded in response. “Well, that changes things. We’ll target four or five with the next round. Let’s do this.”

Once more, the thoroughly broken shield got disposed of by being launched into the corner and five of the monsters rushed through when they opened the gap.

Tom fought the lizards. But he was far more analytical about what he was doing. He entered his battle trance and leant heavily on his experience from the tutorial. Time slowed down. Three different arms from one side and then a snapping jaw on the other. His skill encouraged him to dodge the multiple strikes, but that would open him up to the deadly mouth.

Those teeth would do far more damage than the claws. What happens if he did a middle ground. Willingly accepted some wounds to avoid others. It was what he would have done without hesitation in the tutorial. Tom resisted the subtle pressure to dodge the multiple attacks and allowed the three arms to tag him. One set hit his pant and was deflected another his stomach and left four long scratches. His skivvy, his only upper body protection, did nothing to stop them. The last attack landed on his bicep and left only two lines. The wounds severity was reduced by Black Dodge till they were barely deep enough to create a line of red. But even if the skill hadn’t activated, they were all superficial.

The dangerous teeth he had avoided slammed closed on empty air.

Another flurry of attacks came at him. The five monsters were relentless, but something had shifted. The dodging became easier and that freedom let him land blows even though he was now fighting five.

Tom easily avoided all of them simultaneously, and that was not a consequence of fate build up. It was more than that. The skill had upgraded, and as he weaved between suddenly far less troublesome enemies, he attempted to quantify the improvements. It was not a situation where one aspect of the skill had received a massive boost rather it was apparent that all of it had been enhanced slightly. Time dilation was larger than usual. He had a claw strike him and instead of cutting his skin; it bounced off and Tom wasn’t even sure if it left to bruise. The extra time and speed the skill granted allowed him to land more blows.

He focused on eliminating the immediate enemies.

The last of the five died.

“I need time.” Tom said immediately and summoned an ice elemental. Then Tom sat on Harry’s ritual circle and dropped straight into the system room.

The wall displayed the key changes to the Fate Weaponised Black Dodge skill in front of him.

He skimmed over the information, not at all surprised to see that everything had got a reasonable size boost. A single level of a tier five spell was, after all equal to thirty-two levels in something like Spark.

All the different aspects of the Skill had a boost of between ten and twenty percent. What that meant for the skill was significantly more. When you added up all the ten percent boosts across all the lines, the effectiveness of the skill had probably doubled. Which was consistent with what he had learned in the tutorial. For example, Spark at level thirty two it had been more than twice as good as basic spark. So in terms of relativities, it all made sense.

Finally, he focused on the threshold benefit that had been revealed.

Threshold Bonus 4: The user will be granted a sense of the relative danger of the attacks likely to hit him. This guide to damage will respond to planned body movements, allowing the user to forecast the effective damage reduction of different strategies.

This is not an oracle derived ability. It is limited to the user senses, understanding of the enemy with a slight modifier of partial access to monster knowledge inherited from other people who have received this threshold benefit in the past.

It was not a spectacular boost. It was what he had already been doing naturally. Despite that, Tom did not feel cheated. It was a threshold benefit of a tier five skill, and he was excited by its potential utility. Before he could assess the benefit, he would have to see how it worked in actual life and death situations.

It was, in a way a cheat. It gave his mutated version of dodge something closer to the danger sense the more traditional versions received.

He opened his eyes.

“What did you get?” Everlyn asked, and Tom was surprised to find that the corpses had been moved to the other side of the room. They must have all chipped in immediately when he shut his eyes.

“My dodge skill levelled up.”

“It did not, that’s ridiculous.” Michael said immediately.

“I’ve been fighting monsters much stronger than me.” Tom pointed out. “Getting rewarded is not that…”

“It’s ridiculous.” Michael interrupted. “But I’m thrilled for us.” The other man grinned at him.

“I’m not sure about the threshold benefit. Some part of me suspects it might be overpowered, but it might also be really crappy. It’s an encyclopaedia that measures how much damage attacks are going to do.”

“That’s sounds super powerful.” Everlyn said.

“Limited by my knowledge and senses. It mostly just provides an easy way to calculate stuff I can already do.”

“Interesting. What’s that about an encyclopedia?” Everlyn asked.

Tom’s face scrunched up as he recalled the wording. “It provides partial access to monster knowledge discovered by others who have the threshold benefit.”

There were knowing looks around the room.

“You can’t judge the bonus till you’ve run into monsters.” Michael observed.

“I know. The benefit might be exceptional or shitty.”

“There is one other thing,” Everlyn told them, “improving your sensing skills supercharges this new ability. If it’s a special benefit, you should consider buying something to supplement what you’ve got.”

“Or you could use your existing earth sense skill,” Michael suggested.

“What? No… You know I can’t use that in combat because the information is overwhelming.”

“You’re right and wrong. You can run the spell and have your conscious mind ignore it. I know you’ve practised dampening it to nothing.”

“True.”

Michael grinned. “But even if you’re not actively registering it, the information is still there. Your threshold benefit can use that flood of data.”

He scratched his ear. “I’m hearing lots of maybe, possibly.”

“Tom, you know the answer.” Michael interrupted him.

He threw his hands up in the air in response. “Yes, I know. Testing. It always comes back to that. I need to do more testing.”

Everyone chuckled, which died off when there was a particularly loud thump from those holding the shield.

“I think that’s a signal,” Everlyn declared. “Time to keep fighting.”

The shield was opened up to allow more lizards to charge through. Tom taunted them and entered an unexciting dance. Less than ten minutes later they all perished. They had failed to hurt him even once meaningfully, and his healing requirements had been nearly non-existent. The difference a single level made in his dodge skill was extraordinary.

They repeated the process another four times.

“This is the last group.” Jingyi said, sounding exhausted. “There are only two of them.”

Four minutes later it was over. They had become experts at killing the draconic lizards. They now knew exactly how many blows were needed to open a gap large enough to put an arrow or spear through chests and pierce the heart.

Cheers went through the room as Tom’s spear plunged home.

“Good job everyone.” Everlyn said. She abruptly stopped talking her mouth falling open. Tom followed her gaze to the entranceway. He froze as he caught sight of what had captured her attention.

He, too, blinked in disbelief.

Their passage backout to the canyon was blocked.

A trial had appeared. One that was different from the three trials he had used so far in Existentia. It was not a permanent trial or a temporary one. A memory triggered, a second-hand one, from his True Dreaming.

It was happening.

The others thought they had a choice.

Tom’s heart was thumping in response. Their debates, the discussions, they had all existed in the context where the need to make a choice might never happen. He was sure most of them had assumed they would never find the trial. To them it had been intellectual exercise rather than a reality they had to face.

Tom had thought differently, but seeing the portal caused emotions he hadn’t realised he possessed to crash down upon him. It was real. The dragon, the insects and the two potential allies… they were not a dream.

The portal was here…which in turn meant…

He wanted to scream at the heaven’s but instead clenched his jaws and closed his eyes.

He was going to slay a dragon.