There are times in Vey’s life where he’s felt that time has moved too quickly. The few times he’s felt truly euphoric, for example, were all too fleeting. There are times in his life where he’s felt like time stood still for a moment, for one reason or another. Like when he saw Sera injured, and froze for a moment in a mix of emotions, or the first time he activated Alacritous Cogitation. And there are times where he has felt that time moves at just the right speed, like when he sits around talking with Sera or helping her wash her hair. These moments are not the sort of thing to savor for too extended a period, but are enjoyable enough to let run longer than they actually require.
And then there are times like this. Waiting. Waiting. Agonizing waiting. On second consideration, the multimile trek down to the dungeon from the tunnel entrance might be too long for an advance warning system like the [Skullwatch] chain to be useful, since he also has no way of knowing if the intruders ran away from the noise or if they are still coming down.
The intended effect was that intruders would likely destroy the skulls, thusly letting Vey link the rate of destruction to the distance remaining to their arrival. What appears to have actually happened though, assuming the intruders are even still coming, is a drastic decrease in the speed of traversing the tunnel. Either that, or they ran away. He ought to figure out a way to stop people from running.
Vey looks back at Sera sitting in a circle with Sheo and Zombie squad. About an hour ago she’d said she was kind of bored of waiting, and wanted to talk to the undead. What Vey sees her actually doing is testing Soul Tendrils on them while talking to them, since they can’t actually respond yet. Vey vaguely wonders if talking to them more will cause them to be more intelligent, or otherwise influence their minds somehow, if or more likely when they evolve.
For his part, he’s passed the time by doing some cursory checks over his abilities, skills, spells, everything, really. All said, he wants to ‘clean up some bloat’ as it were, by merging a few skills and such, and maybe finding some better method of organizing his spells. He’s not sure if the system allows tampering with the way your own status is displayed, but he supposes it won’t make a difference to ask it, since it seems like he’ll be waiting a bit more. System help! Editing status formatting!
System Help
Subject; [Error; No suitable answer found within acceptable limits, recalculating]
System Help
Subject; Display Rewriting
An individual is capable of using magic to temporarily change how their status is displayed to themselves or others, and some skills can alter the way it is displayed as well. Additionally, certain types of display changes can be done without the usage of magic or skills. For example, the ‘color’ of the status notifications can be changed once per year.
Vey idly wonders how hard it would be to get a spell to interface with the system so much that it can actually alter the way the system’s information is displayed, but quickly finds that, perhaps, his idea of merging skills and such could get him the effect he wants. Perhaps a combination of Alacritous Cogitation and Layered Augmentation might be able to produce a skill that lets me ‘augment’ my status display? He asks to his own head, and quickly gets lost in thought following it. Or do I do something with Arcane Strike and Overcast first, since both are pretty much obsolete to me? Maybe Flesh Guise, since I’ve never used it?
Just as he is about to actually try and do one of his ideas, the mental gong of one of his various types of alarms sounds in his head. The gong noise sounds six times, so six individuals or less people running through it multiple times for some reason. He runs through the memories of which sounds he set for which points along the path, and remembers the gong was the halfway point from the cavern to the barracks room.
“Fifteen minutes to half an hour till arrival. Six, maximum, but don’t trust that fully.” He gives his somewhat curt update to Dragon squad, who all immediately shift from unsubtly eavesdropping on Sera’s one-sided conversation to being alert and attentive. Woi, Jyu, and Ter even salute, while the archer trio just train their crosshair eyes on the entrance to the barracks.
“Alright, Squish, take the rest of your squad back down to the workshop. Sheo squad, um… Let Vey tell you where to stand…” Sera ends her ramblings with that, and for some reason Vey still doesn’t fully understand, Zombie squad follows her command. Sheo squad does too, though in their case they simply turn to Vey expectantly. As he begins speaking, he mentally commands them to positions beside their mirror counterparts in Dragon squad.
“Sera, we don’t know how strong they are, but we should probably fight with the formation of skeletons. Here.” Vey reaches a hand down to her, which she takes, and pulls her to her feet. “Did you learn anything about Soul Tendrils?”
“I dunno… Try it yourself, here, I’ll put one over to Sheo, you try and do the same.” Sera closes her eyes in visible focus as she finishes, and Vey turns to see the tendril begin its snaking journey through the air towards Sheo.
Vey tries to do the same, concentrating on activating the skill, then trying to direct a tendril to move towards Sheo, but finds it far too difficult to even get it to move in a straight line, nevermind in the direction he wants. Absently, he checks what stat the Soul Tendrils skill is tied to, and, when combining his difficulty with it and Sera’s relative ease, is not surprised to see that it is Charisma. Still, after a full thirty seconds of effort, he manages to attach the phantom thing to Sheo.
The sensation is… strange. He knows the tendril is supposed to ‘connect’ with something, a soul, specifically, but Sheo doesn’t have one, so it shouldn’t work at all. Except, the tendril does attach itself to something, though not necessarily a soul. If anything, the thing he’s connected to is just the densest point in Sheo’s aura.
“Do you feel it? It’s weird, right? Like putting your hand in a pot full of honey but still taking it out dry.” Vey does not understand what that is like, but Sera’s comparison does indeed sound adequately weird.
“To me it looks like we’re just touching the densest point in its aura.” Vey states his observation, and releases his tendril, terminating the skill. “We can fiddle more with this later, though, I want to be ready.”
“I’m going to see if I can’t keep mine attached to all of Sheo squad, just to see what happens.” Sera sends out five more tendrils while she walks to a position behind the melee skeletons, and exhales deeply.
Vey decides not to argue this. If anything, the blessing that gives her that massive charisma score makes any charisma based ability better suited to her use than his. Curse Eater, on the other hand… Vey would lick his lips if he had any, or at least, he’s pretty sure ‘ambitious excitement’ is the correct combination of feelings for such a thing. Completely restoring his mana… He almost doesn’t care what the rest of the abilities he gained do, just once a day getting a full mana reset is tempting enough to take prisoners, just to walk around with them as an emergency source of mana.
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He abandons his fantasy of using people as batteries, though. As tempting as the concept is, he just doesn’t feel like it would be right to keep someone as a slave for no other reason than to kill them later. Sera was… is, special, in that regard, since that was technically the initial plan. With the way that ‘plan’ went, being abandoned after just a few weeks, perhaps it’d be better to think of Curse Eater as a convenient excuse to go completely overkill with magic at the start of a fight, since just one kill could give it all back to him for the rest of the battle. Speaking of battle, he reminds himself that in all likelihood, there’s about to be one, and so double-checks his prepared spells to make his strategy.
Spells Available for Casting: 17(Wzd Lvl + IntMod + 5)
Spell Mana Costs
Acid Arrow
4
Shadow Cloak
4
Mage Armor
2+
Acid Blast
9
Icicle Lance
6
False Aura
4
Wind Wall
6
Dragonskin
6*
Lightning Bolt
6
Stone Shape
12
Greater Alarm
4
Skullwatch
6
Shadow Phase
8
Shadow Claw
6
Forcewave
8
Resilient Sphere
8
Dispel
6+
Of note to him is that [Acid Blast], [Wind Wall], [Lightning Bolt], and [Shadow Phase] are unusable on account of lack of space. [Acid Blast] would just catch himself and his allies in it as well, [Wind Wall] blocks likely more of his ally’s ranged attacks than it will his enemies, and the other two just don’t really do much without open space to maneuver around. [Stone Shape] is also unusable, but only because it has no combat utility. Same for the detection spells, actually. Also mentally noted is his current lack of melee spells, neither [Cutting Hand] nor [Fists of Stone] are present. Sure, [Shadow Cloak], [Mage Armor], and [Dragonskin] give him a notable degree of protection from melee attacks, but he has no real way of dealing damage in melee anymore.
This is on account of his new combat strategy; he plans to act as a support caster for Sera’s melee abilities. She’s monstrously effective at killing someone if she gets the upper hand in a duel, so Vey plans to use his magic to give her that upper hand. He can indiscriminately use [Forcewave] since Sera can resist it with Foreverqueen’s Shroud, meaning she can take free hits on disoriented opponents. His various single target spells can ensure that she never has to fight too many enemies at a time, if enemies start ganging up on her, a [Shadow Claw] or [Icicle Lance] ought to convince any sane opponent to stay out of the way.
[Dispel] is… weird. If anything, Vey doesn’t actually know if it will work the way he wants it to. Dispelling someone else’s spell as they cast it sounds much harder than dismantling enchantments like the spell is designed for, but he can probably pull it off with Alacritous Cogitation. [Resilient Sphere] is a literal emergency safety bubble for himself or Sera. Sure, it leaves the one in the bubble completely helpless, but it leaves them helpless behind an indestructible bubble, so its usefulness is self-evident. He’s also had the idea to try and crush someone with it, which could be fun, if inefficient.
The ‘surprise factor’ of his current arsenal is its greatest tool at present. All of his usable spells are not big or flashy effects, except maybe the sphere or [Icicle Lance]. In fact, for the shadow spells at least, the dim lighting of the dungeon means it’s entirely possible someone with a low wisdom score might just not see them entirely. All of his spells are, if not exactly subtle, very tricky, none of them are outright useful on their own. Being a ‘reactive’ caster while Sera is the ‘proactive’ attacker is a battle strategy he can get behind. The fact that he has six archers, two crossbowmen, two swordsmen, and two spearmen in addition to himself and Sera, and Vey is more or less confident that anything short of individuals with seven or more levels each will be shredded to nothing in seconds.
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Sera also checks over her stored spells, albeit for a completely different reason than Vey had. Namely, she’s not sure if most of them will actually work well in real combat or not. She knows [Stonesword] works, but [Mage Armor] is obsolete because of Aura Armor, [Chill Touch] and [Shocking Grasp] are frankly useless to her at this point, since she learned that neither work the way she’d want them to with Appendage Crusher, and her four new spells…
The best word she can use to describe them is ‘janky’. She’s only heard that word used often by veteran adventurers when talking about hard to utilize skills, so she’s pretty sure it’s correct. [Masochism] is weird. It came from a really, really dumb idea Sera had about reversing the effect of Vey’s [Sadism] into something that wouldn’t turn her thoughts all… like that. Instead, a spell that makes her enjoy taking damage, and makes her more effective in combat for doing so is mildly unsettling.
Still, it pairs nicely with [Blades of Blood], which asks her to take damage in exchange for dealing more damage. Such a spell is, however, terrible on its own, since the damage taken to damage dealt ratio is less than ideal for someone with only fifty six hit points to work with.
This ‘intentionally taking damage’ concept led her to try and find some way to mitigate that self damage. The first thing she thought of was ‘vampire healing’, which had led to [Vampiric Edge]. Its effectiveness is very limited. For one thing, it works by absorbing blood through her sword, and the conversion rate is very bad.
The blood of an entire large rat(which she’d had Ter catch for her, there is no way she would walk into the barracks room with that many corpses and rats in there) only yielded four hp. Still, even four hit points of magical healing seemed to be enough to completely close a small self-inflicted cut on her forearm, so it should mitigate the blood vessel ruptures [Blades of Blood] causes.
Her last new spell is [Heavy Blade], which is objectively kind of bad. Literally all it does is drastically increase the weight of her sword. A lot. Prohibitively so, actually, since even with [Stonesword], she still needs to use two hands to wield it and can’t do any of her usual fast swordplay. She’s disappointed it didn’t work out, but she knows she’s not nearly as good as Vey is at spellcraft, and fully expected it not to be a winner.
However, she’s not sure it’s actually useless. Once in a blue moon, the opportunity to quadruple the weight of her weapon might come in handy, for the extra momentum or sheer crushing force or something. Definitely, if she needs to bash someone to death with pommel strikes after her sword is broken or something, it would be useful then.
Her most useful combat trick now though is simply her newfound raw stat advantage. Having fifty six hit points and ninety six mana as opposed to the pitiful amount of mana she had previously is enough for her to consider herself the strongest melee fighter she’s ever met. She knows that’s probably arrogant, but it’s hard not to think like that after gaining six levels in one shot. She’d probably be less sane if that didn’t go to her head a little, she thinks.
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