As the spinning orb of purple light that was his Void Drill skill formed on top of his hands, he moved into the crater that he had formed so as to send the damage deeper into the mountain rather than blasting out the rock into the open air. Drawing his fist back, Jonathan swung, and the orb burrowed into the rock, before detonating with a thunderous bang.
The concentrated Void energy and mana caused the skill to go off like a large bomb, and the stone all around Jonathan crumbled away as the shockwave raced through the rock. The mountain side began to rumble, and a large chunk of stone fell from nearer the top, bouncing down the side. Jonathan watched as it approached, and drew back his fist, ready to shatter it into harmless pieces. A moment later however, a razor blade of wind swept through the air and sliced the rock into tiny fragments. Jonathan looked over at Edgar, who gave him a cheeky grin from a few hundred feet away.
“Watch it over there, Jonathan!” He called out. “I won’t always be there to save you!”
Jonathan flashed the man a rude gesture and got back to training. Edgar seemed to be letting the power from his rank up go to his head. Jonathan smiled grimly. He could not allow for that to happen. To an outside observer, it might appear that Edgar was the more powerful of the two, but Jonathan knew who it really was. It was hard to maintain any sort of an ego in the face of a world where beings as powerful as gods simply wandered around, but it was good to at least maintain some sort of pride in one’s abilities. If that was not present, then what need did a being have to fight? There would be none at all, save for survival, and sometimes that did not cut it. If that was the only motivation to progress, then there would be vast moments of stagnation in between battles where one simply sat still, thinking about their woes. No, there had to be some sort of personal aspect to progression, in order to galvanize one to challenge the heavens themselves. It just so happened that in this case, it was a little bit of rivalry.
In any case, it was time to test out a few of his projectile abilities. By that, he meant test it out a few times, as he sadly lacked more than one ranged skill. Still, it was quite powerful, especially considering that he didn’t specialize in ranged damage. A glowing orb of light rushed to his hand which then was shaped into a small bolt of light. The energy bolt swished off through the air and struck a large rock a hundred feet away, causing it to crack down the side. Its stopping power was quite low, but Jonathan could spam the attacks as much as he wanted with his monstrous mana pool, at least for a melee fighter.
He started to rapidfire them across the divide, and soon the rock was nothing but a pile of rubble. Where this skill specialized was in laying down suppressing fire. He could leave the big guns to Edgar with his powerful elemental abilities.
After that display all that was left was his most powerful skill. His other skills were runecrafting or truesight adjacent, which meant that they had no application here. Instead, he needed to use his Hungering Decay skill. Afterwards, when his stamina had fully recovered, he would be able to use his newest skill to its fullest potential.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
As he summoned the hungering conceptual energy of the Void, a shiver seemed to run through the air in front of him a sphere of pure nothingness formed on the end of his fist. This skill did not have a high area of effect damage but its single target damage was almost unparalleled. There had not been a single enemy that Jonathan had used this skill on that had been fully immune to it.
With a quick punch, he sent his fist into the rockface, and withdrew it before it could make contact. A hemisphere of nothingness greeted him as he did so, showing off the raw power of his skill. If that ability hit a person’s head, there would not be much left of them, as Jonathan had seen many times before.
In any case, it was time for him to move on to his Stamina Redirection skill. The very name of the skill told him that its power was far from complete. If he had possessed any degree of skill in the area, it would have been called something like Stamina Manipulation, and would likely have been of a higher level of power. As it was, the amount of power that he could output seemed absurdly high, but that could have been because his massive stamina pool allowed for him to tank the toll that it took on him.
A single use of his ability took far more out of him than it should have, but he still possessed more than enough power to take the depletion in stride. More importantly, it allowed him to augment his raw physical power, something that he had been lacking for the last few months.
Without delaying for any longer, he summoned a small amount of his stamina to his right fist, and struck. His fist powered forwards far quicker than it normally would, and the mountainside shook as it made contact. His skill allowed him to empower his physical strength to unheard of levels for brief moments of time.
The crater that he left was much larger than before, although that might have been because of the amount of damage that had already been dealt to the rockface by his previous attacks. At this rate he was going to cause an avalanche if he did not stop. However, he had achieved his goal, and had effectively tested all of his attacks of the rock face to the best of his abilities. Now that he was done, he was satisfied with his current profile of powers and abilities.
He left Edgar to his practicing, and headed back towards his cave to continue where he had left off with his training.Edgar was still sending off his elemental abilities at the rock when Jonathan left, as it was the most effective way for the man to gain insights into the nature of his element. Apparently progression in the realm of elemental mastery became exponentially harder for every ten percentage points that one progressed, but it also unlocked the ability to gain new abilities and use your element to its greatest scope.
Jonathan was lagging quite far behind Edgar in his mastery of his element, but he was hopeful about reaching the next level of his mastery soon enough at this rate. He was only a few percentage points away from the next ten percent mark, and when he got there, perhaps he would be able to find some strong new ability that would shore up his weaknesses. However, judging by the amount of time that had taken to get here already, he would need at least a few days of time to cultivate his elemental connection within.