Chapter 17: My rock is bigger than yours!
After quickly scouting around her to make sure there was nothing nearby that could disturb her, Sarah started following Lucifer’s instructions by surrounding the massive body of the golem with a ring of her blood.
She kept chatting to Lucifer to keep her mind off the grim scene she was painting in the dark cavern.
Cant I just cut myself and use a bit of blood like before? Why am I doing all this?
“That only works for a low-level ritual, and only because you have [Ritualess]. If you ever want to summon something actually strong you will need to do far more than make a simple cut.”
She was surprised about how much blood she actually had. The system must have changed something, because after 20 minutes of bleeding out what must have been several litres of blood she was still going. Eventually, with a fully regenerated mana pool but feeling weary from the blood loss, she had finished her preparation.
And it looked as gothic as she expected. A 12-foot-tall golem surrounded by a circle of blood, with a pentagram drawn over its corpse. At the centre of the circle lay her rewards from the boss fight, a sacrifice that Lucifer wanted to use to boost the power of the ritual.
Golem Core – Tier 3 (Rare)
* Can be used to manufacture a golem up to level 30.
The explanation she got from Lucifer was that each tier of item equates to around 10 levels of power, which made sense when thinking of her tier 1 common and uncommon knives and other weapons she made. A level 1 wielding one of those would easily be able to stand against a level 10, and similarly a level 10 wielding it could face a level 20.
Item skill tiers also had some similarity to ability ranks. Skills at rank 1 provided no improvement, but this changed as they received bonuses from their improvements in rank. A level 1 with a rank 4 skill could face a level 40, although they would likely lose from the difference in stats alone. This kind of situation wasn’t possible though as improving the ranks of skills provided experience. This made sense when she considered how she had gained so many levels at the start of her integration when her ritual magic levelled up. From Lucifer’s explanation, someone at rank 2 level 9 in a single skill but with no combat experience could reach level 24, a practice that was very common across the universe, and would put them just below tier 3 which would give them the ability to face down someone just below level 50.
So, to put it simply, 1 tier = 10 levels of power.
What made skills far better than items was that each enchanted item being used reserved a portion of your mana pool based on its tier to maintain its effect. This meant that there were only so many items someone could equip, and also meant the rarity of each item was important as both a common and epic item of the same tier would reserve the same amount of mana regardless of the difference in strength. Assuming each point in wisdom gave a point in mana, her tier 1 knife seemed to take up around 10 points of that. On Lucifer’s insistence, she had dismissed the enhancement on the knife by drawing her mana out of it, which caused it to turn brittle and crumble apart but now with no rituals remaining it gave her access to her full mana pool.
She felt strangely naked with no weapons or summons with her. Unfortunately, her new skill [Enchanting] was not able to make use of the golem’s core, as Lucifer said that required skills and classes tailored to it. From what he described core would be worth a lot if she could sell it to the right buyer, but Lucifer seemed to care little of that and was instead keen for her to use it now for the instant power. The stronger she was, the faster she could level, and the quicker Lucifer could escape her soul.
Why is it you have been so quiet?
Sarah could hear its sigh as Lucifer contemplated whether he should tell her.
“I am trapped here in your tiny soul, surrounded by walls trying to crush me. I have to both push them away to survive, but also not too far or else it will destroy me. Detonating earlier while not killing myself took far too much energy, so it took some time to stabilise things. It would be far easier if you could reach level 25, then the core would provide me some protection. So hurry up mortal and perform this hell damned ritual.”
Ok but…. How?
Lucifer paused for a moment, before coming to the realisation that Sarah had no idea what she was doing. “Damned integrators,” he cursed, “Just stand outside the circle then push all your mana in. No need to say anything unless there is a being in particular you want to summon, the system will do the rest.”
Following his instructions, she stood at the foot of the golem outside the circle and started releasing mana from her hands. It took only a second before she could feel a ring form along the outside circle, and then another few seconds before that ring of blood started to light up. After around a minute of pushing, the whole circle was clearly lit, and she started running completely dry on mana.
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Only a few seconds later, despite feeling that the ritual wanted more from her, she ran empty. She collapsed to her knees from the instant feeling of weakness that she was struck with, but a feeling in her brain seemed to keep her conscious and made her pay attention to what was occurring in front of her.
Lucifer? She asked, before getting a feeling on confirmation from him.
“I am keeping you awake. After performing a summoning you must either dominate the summon or sent it back. If you cannot impose your will on it, either because you have summoned something far beyond you or you are unconscious, then it will simply drain your ritual of mana and kill you.”
Now that was news to her, although it helped make sense as to why every summoner doesn’t just try and summon something as strong as Lucifer to serve them. It would take them a ridiculous amount of mana, which luckily for her was provided by the system when it was flooding her world during integration, and even then there is little way anyone could force their will on something as strong as the demon which meant it would just kill them afterwards.
As Lucifer originally planned to do.
She felt a shiver run down her spine from the thought, and decided to distract herself with the ritual in front of her. The whole circle was lit ominously, the pentagram lit a dark red that drew in whatever remaining light was in the cavern. The area around her seemed to get darker from the effect, and she could see the golem core at the centre of the ritual start to glow. Then, it began burning. As the core burnt to nothing the mana from it spread out into the ritual and it glowed brighter and brighter. And then came the smoke.
It burst out slowly, before filling the whole ring in only a few seconds and obscuring anything inside of it. Then it started to quickly fade away, revealing the massive figure that now stood in front of her.
[Ritual Magic] Rank 2 Level 1 -> Level 2
Lesser Infernal Golem – Level 28 (Rare)
It cut an imposing figure, standing only slightly lower than the stone golem boss at around 10 foot tall. It was shaped like a humanoid and built from a dark stone filled with cracks and rivets that glowed red from some kind of magma inside of it. It had no hands, its arms instead just large clubs covered in magma that looked ready to bludgeon anything that comes close. It had two glowing red eyes that focused on her, ready to accept her commands as the ritual gave her control over it.
Is that it? To be honest, she felt kind of disappointed. She felt just barely over half her mana pool was now reserved by the summon. If the imps at level 24 cost her 24 points of her mana each, then this golem felt like it took 56, double its level. Was it really worth it?
“You forget the difference between those under level 25, and those above. The mana cost is doubled because you are summoning something above your tier, but with that comes a new level of power.”
Sarah took a moment to recover and do the maths in her head. Not her strongest suit before, but with her new eidetic memory she found it far easier given she could hold multiple numbers in her head easily. Ignoring starting stats, with 21 levels in an epic class she had 168 bonus stats. This put her as the equivalent of a level 33 common class, or 28 uncommon, or 24 rare.
Sure the level 28 rare in front of her might just barely beat her in stats, but was it really that strong. Alternatively, Sarah felt she might have been able to summon 2 uncommon imps at level 24 plus enchant her weapon for the same portion of her mana reserved, and then be able to sell the core afterwards.
What is the difference? She wanted to use whatever advantage the high level summon had if she could.
“The core lets you interact with the world in a different way. For mana users, your control is greatly improved to a whole new degree. For more physical classes they gain the use of their aura. But most importantly, your senses improve to such a degree that you can finally start understanding the laws of the world.”
Laws of the world?
“You don’t need to know this until level 25. Just level up.”
Lucifer’s tone made her frown. She didn’t like the way he kept dismissing her questions, although she could understand his annoyance. He was effectively trapped in the body of what he might even consider a child, given he was at least a few thousand years old based on the myths that dated back thousands of years in human history, who kept asking what he thought were basic questions. not to mention that he was struggling to survive while being crushed by her soul or however he described it.
Then again, she rationalised, he did try to kill her, so this is on him.
Sarah looked back to the golem that was just standing there silently watching her, having not even slightly moved the whole time. She decided to wait and so she could regenerate some of her mana, figuring she should have enough mana for an extra imp to keep her safe while the big guy in front of her punched whatever she liked to death.
She directed the golem with her thoughts to move around. It could move around fine, but lacked the ability to run or move at anything quicker than a fast walk. Its swings were slow but it could easily punch through the stalagmites around her. She could pretty easily guess its stats were all focused on strength, vitality, and endurance. After a bit of playing around with it, she even found a dark tunnel in the ground only 20 meters away from where she fought the boss that she could have sworn wasn’t there before.
But she wasn’t ready to go down just yet. It took about 30 minutes of waiting before she cut herself with a sharp rock and by sacrificing some of her mana she was met with another summon to watch her back.
Imp – Summon Level 24 (Uncommon)
This one didn’t manage to break the level 25 barrier, but then again if it did then it might have cost twice the amount of mana and she wouldn’t be able to afford that. Not to mention she only had access to half her mana pool so there was no way she could have performed a similar ritual again. She felt she had around a fifth of her mana pool remaining, and unfortunately she no longer had any weapons left to enchant due to having dissolved her previous weapon.
She decided to quickly enhance the spear of the imp she summoned to tier one, putting her down to 10% of her mana available. She contemplated using it herself, but the imp was both stronger and faster and the weapon was imp-sized which would make it awkward to use.
So she gripped her rock, the weight of it making her feel a bit safer. Then she kept the imp flying just over her shoulder as her bodyguard and sent the infernal in front. Making her way towards the new tunnel into the depths, she prepared herself to face the second floor of the dungeon.