Natalya stared blankly at her father for a moment, then took a long swig from her glass, emptying it.
“What?” she said.
“Ekaterina was the incarnation of the Demon God Pride.”
“But- I- What?”
“She passed away protecting you and I from the Demon King of Sloth.”
Natalya sat in silence as her glass was refilled, then emptied it again before speaking.
“So the reason you don’t want to kill Lucy… is because she reminds you of Mom?” she asked.
“That is certainly part of it. I am not completely blinded by sentimentality, though. I have been keeping a close watch on her. Your mother saved countless lives, both before, and during the attack of Sloth. I believe that Lucille has many of the same qualities that she did. If she is guided properly, then we will not only have nothing to fear, but we will gain a tremendous asset in the fight against the other ones.”
“... I need some time to think,” said Natalya.
“Of course,” said Anatoly, standing up. “Take as much time as you need. But please talk to me again before you come to any kind of decision.”
“Ok.”
Anatoly resummoned the bottle of liquor, set it down on the table, and stepped out of the room, leaving Natalya to contemplate.
.
.
.
I woke up some time later with the worst headache of my life. It was so bad that at first, I couldn’t even take in my surroundings. I was vaguely aware that I was lying on something soft, and that there was a light source somewhere nearby, but when I had opened my eyes, the light seemed to double the pain in my head, and moving around tripled it, so I lay still. I think that there was someone in whatever room I was in with me, because I thought I heard someone talking.
Well, I didn’t really hear them talking. It sounded more like a jackhammer being applied directly to my eardrums. I tried to tell them to be quiet, but I could barely even moan. The pounding happened again, this time even louder. I put in as much effort as I could to tell them off, but still could barely say anything.
“Staaahh,” I moaned.
Whoever it was didn’t seem to noticed what I was trying to say, and continued speaking. Their words were starting to sound more like words, but I still couldn’t make them out. It was definitely a woman’s voice. Probably Natalya’s, though the thought that it might have been Sylvia did cross my mind. I activated [Meditate] to try to tune out the pain, and it seemed to work. As I drank in the mana from around me, my head started to clear.
Suddenly, as I absorbed the mana around me, I felt someone’s hand on my abdomen, and a huge amount of mana entered my body. I drank it in greedily, and soon, the pain had lessened enough that I felt safe opening my eyes. When I opened them, I was greeted by the sight of a smiling Natalya standing over me.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Undead,” she said.
“Ugghhhh. What happened?” I asked, my speech slightly slurred.
“You did something incredibly dumb, and that probably should have killed you. You’re lucky to be alive.”
I tried to sit up, but before I could get my head more than an inch from the pillow, my head already felt like it was going to split in two, so I slowly lowered myself back down. My mind was still fuzzy, and I couldn’t quite remember exactly what had happened.
“If I had known you were going to do that, I wouldn’t have left you alone,” continued Natalya. “I thought you were going to keep trying to stick the shields together. You would have gotten it eventually that way. But splitting them like that?” She clicked her tongue in disappointment. “I thought you were smarter.”
At her words, the memories of what had happened suddenly came rushing back to me. I remembered what I had been doing, and why I had done it. I immediately opened up my spell list in the System to see if I had gotten the skill. When I saw the brand new [Hex Shield] in the unattributed magic section, a grin spread across my face.
“I did it,” I said. “I won the bet.”
She frowned. “I suppose you did,” she said. “But never do something that reckless again. I assume you have the [Perseverance] skill, because without it, you would have died, but even so, relying on that skill for taking huge risks is not a good way to go through life.”
“Yeah, I’m never doing that again,” I agreed.
Hearing her reference my [Perseverance] made me curious about my health. I wasn’t sure how what I had done would have affected my [HP], but if Perseverance had activated, then it must have.
[HP]:
896/3300
[MP]:
4736/6600
[AP]:
3300/3300
[Life Energy]:
42/100
[Pawn of the Gods] enemies remaining
5/6
I took some blood out of [Greater Inventory] and streamed it into my mouth to replenish my Life Energy. The effort of using those spells didn’t feel great on my head but once I had drunk my fill, I was feeling much better than before.
“How did that affect my [HP]?” I asked.
“That little stunt you pulled would have reduced any normal person’s [HP] to 0. With [Perseverance], fortunately you were only left at 1, in exchange for a decent-sized chunk of [MP]. By the way, you’re lucky you have that heartbeat skill running constantly. If you didn’t I would have thought you were dead and cremated you.”
I grimaced. “Damn. I’m definitely never doing that again.”
“Good,” she said. “Does that mean you’ll listen to me next time I tell you not to waste your time learning something on your own?”
“Maybe. As long as you’re not being a condescending bitch when you’re telling me,” I said.
At that she started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Nothing, nothing,” she said, waving me off. “Alright, I promise not to condescend you anymore when I’m teaching you.”
I didn’t want to leave it at that, since she clearly wasn’t taking it quite seriously, but my head was still hurting, and I didn’t have the energy to argue with her. Hopefully she would at least somewhat stick to her promise.
“Good enough,” I said. “So how long was I out?”
“Not that long, considering how close you were to death. Only about 8 hours. It really screws up the training schedule I had made for today. You heal fast, so you’ll probably be back to normal in a few hours, and we can start again, but we’ve already wasted most of the day at this point, so we won’t be able to do as much as I wanted to. If you hadn’t done that, we probably would have been able to move on to some offensive magic, in addition to your defensive magic.”
“Don’t you have any healing skills?” I asked. “My [Rapid Regeneration] is good, but Alyona’s healing skill did it way faster.”
Natalya shook her head. “I don’t have anything like that. I have a few minor healing skills, but nothing as potent as even your self-healing skill, let alone Yona’s skill.”
“But you’re an elf,” I contested. “You’ve had thousands of years to pick up a better healing skill.”
“It’s not a question of time. Even if I had a million years, I couldn’t get that skill. Actually, having that much time would make getting the skill even more difficult.”
“Why is that? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Because to get that skill, you need to devote your life to one of the gods. And for us, who have eternal life, that’s a big promise. And if you break your promise, the consequences are… Well, you met Yona. She’s one of the strongest people in the world. I’d be surprised if there were more than a thousand people who could win in a fight against her. But she’s stuck running an Adventurer’s Guild branch in a random town where the next highest level is 50.”
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
I thought back to my interactions with Alyona up till now. I remembered the first time I saw her, and how I hadn’t realized she was a half-elf at first, because one of her ears was lopped off. I recalled the sight of her clutching her stomach where I had stabbed her, even after she had healed the hole that went straight through mine. I had vaguely wondered why she didn’t heal herself if she had such a healing skill. I thought that maybe she had limited uses of her skill, and had used it all on me or something like that, but after hearing Natalya’s words, it all made more sense.
“Oh,” I said. “She… can’t be healed anymore.”
“Not through skills,” said Natalya nodding. “And that’s just one of many penalties to breaking an oath to a god. It’s simply not worth it for us immortals to pledge ourselves like that. We don’t change as rapidly as the short-lived humans, but we do still change over time. We are not the same from millennia to millennia. A binding oath like that is something we could easily come to regret a few hundred years down the road. There are still a few elves who opt to serve the gods anyways, but they are few and far between.”
“I see,” I said. “Are- no, nevermind.”
“Are what?” asked Natalya.
“Nevermind,” I repeated.
Natalya gave me a strange look, then shrugged. “Whatever.”
I had wanted to ask if those penalties were considered negative status conditions, because in that case, they might be nullified by [Pride]. It would be convenient if I could pledge myself to a god to get some powerful healing skills, and then ignore the oath in the future with no penalties. But that would be a very strange question to ask, and a very dangerous one to ask the person who was constantly accusing me of being a Demon King. If I wanted to know, I would have to ask elsewhere, at a time when my every move wasn’t watched over by a paranoid archmage.
“Well, I think that’s enough conversation for now,” said Natalya, taking a step backwards. “I’ll leave you here to finish your recovery. It will probably go faster once I’m gone. When you’re feeling better, just go out the door knock on the door at the end of the hallway on your right. That’s my office, and it’s where I’ll be until you’re ready. Then we’ll head back to the training field to further your education. And once again, don’t try to escape. I’ll know.”
“Alright,” I said, and she walked out of the room.
Two hours later, the two of us stood out on the field just like we had in the morning, though now with the sun on the other side of the sky.
“Show me your new shield,” she said, and I obliged.
[Hex Shield] at level 1 was not very advanced. I was limited to 10 hexagons, and they weren’t as flexible as I would have liked them to be.
“Good,” she said. “Fortunately, you figured out that hexagons would be the best all on your own. You could have done the same with triangles, or squares, or any other shape if you had wanted to, but hexagons are the best. Now, let me show you a little bit about how it works, and why it’s so useful. Move your shield off to your side. I’m going to fire some spells at it, so I don’t want you behind it.”
I did as she commanded, and took an extra step off to the side as a precaution.
“For this demonstration, I will show you how the shield behaves when hit with different types of attacks. First, I’ll hit it with a powerful, unattributed piercing attack.”
A second later, a bullet of condensed mana shot out of her finger and hit one of the panels of my shield. The panel instantly vanished, and the spell kept going, but the rest of the panels remained intact. A moment later, I willed a new panel into existence to replace the old one
Ding
[Hex Shield] lvl 1 -> lvl 2
“As you can see, although it was unable to stop my attack, the other panels were completely unaffected by it. In a situation where you were being bombarded with attacks from many different sources, this would mean that even if one panel vanished it would not compromise your position entirely, and you could fill in the gap fairly easily. If that were a [Magic Shield], the whole thing would have collapsed from that.
“Now, I am going to use a few different types of weak attacks to show you what type of attacks this kind of shield is weak and strong against.”
She then used a weak spell of each element against my shield. The shield held easily for Unattributed, Wind and Fire and Light, almost as easily for Water, and was shaky for Earth. She skipped Spatial magic, because according to her there were no weak Spatial attacks. In the process, my skill leveled up three more times.
“I used the same amount of [MP] for each of those attacks, but you should have noticed that the shield handled some of those spells more easily than the others,” she said.
I nodded in response.
“Unattributed shields are excellent for defending against magic, but they have a slight weakness against attacks with greater physical components, as you noticed with the Water and Earth attack spells. Now, watch this.”
As she said this, she telekinetically lifted a stone the size of a grapefruit from the ground and floated it into her hand.
“Though I am not an aura specialist, I’ve been around long enough to pick it up. Right now, I’m going to imbue some aura into the rock and throw it at your shield. It should have about the same amount of power as a level 20 fighter would be able to put into such a throw.”
My [Aura Sense] wasn’t quite as refined as my [Mana Sense], but with [Enhanced Senses] boosting my [Perception]. I was still able to detect what was happening in her hand fairly easily. She gathered a small amount of aura– less than half what I was capable of– and put it into the rock, then set up like a baseball pitcher and flung it at my shield. The rock made contact, and just barely managed to break through one of the hexagons before falling to the ground, its energy spent.
“Point for point, aura is much stronger than mana,” explained Natalya. “Usually, the best way to defend against aura attacks is to simply dodge or redirect them, but if you absolutely need to block it with magic, use an earth shield. That at least has some mass of its own, and will be better able to stop the aura. For you, you may be able to use your own aura to defend, but it may be difficult to mentally switch between the two types of energy.”
I should be able to figure it out, I thought while nodding.
“Now, there are a few other subtypes of those attributes that have slightly different interactions with the shield, but the general rule is, aura trumps mass, mass trumps mana. The more aura or mass an attack has, the less likely your shield is to be able to defend against it, and the more you should be looking for ways to preemptively prevent, redirect or dodge it. I’ll teach you more about redirecting tomorrow, and dodging a bit later, so for now we’ll focus on blocking. For Earth spells…”
I spent the next two hours learning the most efficient way to block nearly every conceivable type of attack. It was best to counter Earth and Water with Earth. Earth was also more slightly more effective than unattributed mana at blocking Wind, and Unattributed spells, but the difference was small, and it took much longer to cast, so it was not worth it to use earth to block those two elements
Water was better at blocking fire than unattributed mana was, but Wind was even better. If I used a slight variation of my [Vacuum] skill to make a thin vacuum wall, even at low levels, it would be able to completely nullify mid-level fire spells.
Light was uncommon to see used for offensive spells, but if I did encounter it, I could also block it by using a Light spell of my own to essentially create a mirror and reflect the laser.
For aura attacks, I would need to practice strengthening individual tiles of my shield, as well as either using multiple shields, or folding a single shield back on itself to make multiple layers. Earth magic worked as well, but aura attacks most often came from very close range, where it would take too long to cast any Earth shield spells
For purely physical attacks, like large boulders or collapsing structures, I should use Earth magic. Usually, that type of damage was not the result of a direct attack, and was much easier to see coming, so the casting time was not an issue.
By the time she finished covering everything, the sun had gone down, and the world had turned the dull grayscale that came with [Night Vision].
“Now that you know all that, I’ll give you your homework for the night,” said Natalya.
She waved her hand towards the storage shed full of animals and dummies. There was the sound of rumbling, and a few crashing noises which caused Natalya to wince, and then a man-sized object came flying out of the shed and landed right next to her. It was one of the training dummies I had seen, though the most rudimentary and dumb-looking one. It looked like a snowman made of boulders, and it had a crude smiley face drawn on its head.
“Meet Jerome,” said Natalya, patting, its… not shoulder, but the top of its middle rock. “He’ll be your ‘sparring partner’ for the night. He’s the result of one of my brother’s apprentice’s experiments. He was meant as a sentry golem, but he is slightly defective, so they threw him out. I saw Jerome’s potential, and… acquired him for my own personal use. I even gave him a face. The poor guy didn’t have one before.” She traced her finger along its uneven mouth.
“Defective how?” I asked, eying the rock-man’s poorly drawn face with apprehension
“He can’t turn. He can only detect and shoot what is directly in front of him. This makes him a terrible sentry golem, but amazing for power-leveling shield skills. Here, allow me to demonstrate.”
Jerome was lifted by an unseen force and slowly turned and started floating out towards the center of the field. As he floated away, Natalya patted him on the back of the head as he went. She set him down facing perpendicular to us.
“Now, watch this,” she said with an eager smile.
As I watched, a stone pillar emerged from the snow directly in front of Jerome about thirty feet away, and immediately, a hole opened up in his middle boulder, and a rock flew outwards, reducing the pillar to dust. The projectile moved so fast, that even with my incredibly inflated [Perception], I couldn’t see it move.
“What the hell,” I said.
“Amazing, right?” said Natalya, grinning. “All you need to do is make your shield in front of him, and then make a stone pillar behind the shield, and you get free levels in your shield. Just make sure you don’t walk too close in front of him. He has a range of 200 feet. Or was it 300? I don’t remember. You can try to figure it out if you’d like. You have all night, after all. I expect you to have your [Hex Shield] at least at level 25. If you manage to layer it enough to block an attack from Jerome, it should give you quite a bit of experience.”
She put her hands on her hips and smiled with satisfaction as she looked out at Jerome.
“Well,” she said after a few minutes. “I’m gonna head in. Good luck!”
And with that, she walked away. I watched her float back towards her mansion, and then suddenly stop and backtrack back to the shed. I heard some clattering around inside, and a few muttered curses as she tried to fix whatever Jerome had broken on his way out, and then a few minutes later, she reemerged and disappeared in her mansion.
I took about three quarters of the night to get [Hex Shield] to 25, and by then, I was more bored than I could ever remember being. When I had been training alone, I was able to vary my training, and keep it interesting, but with Jerome, there was no variation. It was just an endless loop of shield, pillar, shield pillar, shield, pillar, shield, pillar… I tried to keep myself entertained with my [Phantom Piano], and even made a new skill called [Phantom Violin], but using so many skills at once made my head start hurting.
When I got that last level up notification, I let out a whoop of relief, and immediately started making my way away from the training field. I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but I was done training for the night. Natalya’s library was an option, but after sitting around, leveling skills for 8 hours, I wasn’t too keen on sitting around even more, so I instead went out the front door and decided to explore the city for a little while again.
I wandered aimlessly for about an hour until I found myself back in front of the church. I still didn’t get too close, but it was a very interesting building. I sat on the roof of a building across the street from it and used my enhanced eyesight to take a closer look at the intricate carvings. My eyes slowly made their way up the seven massive towers that lined the front of the cathedral, looking at the swirling, fractal patterns until they reached the top where there was a statue of a woman in a ragged dress, hair blowing in the wind as she looked out over the city with tears streaming from her face.
I looked at her curiously for a few moments, trying to figure out why there was a statue at the top, when there were no clear images anywhere on the rest of the tower when I realized with a start that she wasn’t a statue. The woman raised her arm up to her face and wiped her tears on her sleeve. I squinted up at the precariously perched person hundreds of feet above me so that I could get a better look, only to receive an even greater shock when I recognized her face.
It was Sylvia.