Congratulations.
You have been granted the passive ability: Force acceleration.
Force acceleration consumes mana at a rapid rate, greatly increasing the speed of every move you make. Note: this ability may be deactivated at will.
You are currently using 1 active ability slot, 1 passive ability slot, and 0 free ability slots.
Nick had just enough time to process the fact that abilities provided by his class didn’t take up a slot, while the ones granted by ability stones did, before all thoughts were driven from his mind. The moment that the message faded from the air, a beam of light shot out from the rune-covered gem, passing through his skull before piercing his brain.
The System’s ghostly fingers reached out to touch grey matter, rewiring his neural network before attaching the new pathway to his energetic core. He felt hot, cold, then tingly all over before the System’s touch withdrew, leaving Nick changed in a fundamental way.
He was excited to try out his new power right away. But when he got ready to take force acceleration for a test drive, he realized that there was a problem. Unlike when he had learned mana dart, this ability came with none of the knowledge of how to use it, beyond a vague sense that it was connected to his core.
Nick shrugged, wondering if this was an innate difference between active and passive stones, or if his first ability had been a freebie, letting him use its power right away without having to undergo extensive training.
No worries, Nick shrugged philosophically. I’ll just have to figure it out for myself. Since Sophia was still busy consolidating her recent gains, he decided to give force acceleration a quick try here and now. He was low on mana, but he had recovered enough to at least find out what it did.
He took a stance like a runner at the start of a race, braced himself, then burst into motion. Nick came to a skidding stop only three steps later, because he hadn’t felt his new power kick in. After a bit of trial and error, he discovered that he had to concentrate and turn the ability on before it did anything. It wound up being more of an active process than he was expecting, but it made sense considering the ability’s intensive mana drain.
It's like an on and off switch to a machine that’s capable of independent operation. No longer requiring direct input past that point. Hopefully, the rate of drain is proportional to how much I move, so just flicking it on won’t drain me dry.
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Nick realized that he had a bit more mana in the tank than he expected, having forgotten that he’d just leveled from the fight in his excitement. Now that he’d figured out the basics, he willed his force acceleration to switch on.
Then, for a long moment, he simply stood there, judging the rate of mana loss while learning what it felt like to have force acceleration turned on before he tried it out while moving.
To his relief, his mana leeched out slower than he feared. Nick wouldn’t burn through his reserves simply by priming force acceleration for use. Before he inadvertently subjected himself to mana sickness for the second time in an hour, he decided that he would take a quick victory lap, then shut the ability off until he had the luxury of sufficient downtime to experiment with it further. Or at least a victory fifty-yard dash.
Nick braced himself and took his first step… only to find himself streaking straight for the wall ahead, the interior of the cavern reduced to a liquid blur of color and motion. Moving far faster than he had anticipated while staring at the rapidly approaching barrier, he panicked. Instead of shutting the ability down, he tried to correct his course instead.
It only made things worse given his inexperience. He took a pair of hasty steps, increasing his pace in the process, then ran straight into the cavern’s wall at breakneck speed. Although, fortunately for his bones, not literally in this case.
He held his arms in front of his face and turned force acceleration off at the last possible moment, saving Nick from an embarrassing death by shattering his own spine. On a less promising note, he still wound up running straight into a stone wall while moving twice as fast as he could normally sprint.
With a resounding thud, Nick met rock and rock won, which was how he wound up losing his first and hopefully last contest of Nick versus wall.
Thanks to his heavy investment into toughness, the impact left him bruised and dazed but not critically injured, the reverberation from his collision rebounding across the cavern. Sophia must have heard the impact, because she came running out of the refinery a minute later.
“What was that crash? Are we under attack?” She drew her dagger as her eyes darted across the cavern, seeking the arrival of a new enemy.
“No,” Nick picked himself off the ground with a self-deprecating chuckle, face flushed with embarrassment. “Just plain old user error,” he explained his new ability and unfortunate lack of control.
He had to give Sophia credit. She didn’t laugh, although she was unable to speak for a long moment, and he saw her wipe away a tear from the corner of one eye. “Sorry to worry you. I didn’t mean to interrupt your ritual.” He changed the topic, firmly intending never to think about what had just happened ever again.
“It’s fine,” she said, suppressing a final chuckle. “I finished just before I heard the collision.” She walked over and gave him an encouraging pat on the back. “I still haven’t checked out the rest of my notifications, but how about we get the fuck out of this bug-ridden hellhole first?”
“Nothing would please me more.” Nick picked up his bag and slid it onto his back. Together, covered in blood and grime, they walked out of the darkness and into the light, where Darkstone Tower awaited.