When Devon awoke he had to get up and stretch, and the act of doing so felt so immensely good after his muscles had been regenerated. He looked at the soft light coming in from the cave entrance and smiled, an entire night had passed while he’d been in recovery sleep.
Still, he wasn’t sure there was much he could do today. He looked at the ladder and frowned when he saw he was still on it. He was actually more than just on it, he was in the 4th spot.
Honestly, entering the ladder hadn’t even been an eventuality he’d planned on. When he’d come down from the mountain he’d expected his growth to slow or even stop entirely for a few days. Instead, he found himself in the middle of two prime opportunities to level. The dungeon was obviously the greater of the two, but the fact that the overseer he’d killed had given him a level on its own was still significant.
For a while now he’d thought of the ladder as a boon, a way to keep an eye on things that he couldn’t always see. Now he realized it also worked against him.
He hadn’t been entirely sure that the overseers could view the ladder until now, but after last night he was positive. There was simply no other reason for that overseer to have deviated from their mark to tail him.
So long as I’m a high enough level to register on the ladder my movements are extremely limited because any disguise I use will be called into question and I could be exposed.
It was enormously frustrating. He needed to gain levels to gain enough strength to contend with the upper echelons of the overseers, but if he gained too much then he’d put himself in their crosshairs and wouldn’t be able to act out in the open.
There was always the option of going the Eve route of acquiring as much power as possible before the tutorial ended and ignoring everything else, but Devon had the distinct feeling that was the wrong way to go about it. He and Eve would simply find themselves bearing almost the entire brunt of the enemy’s forces, and no matter how much strength they acquired, he felt certain it wouldn’t be enough.
Still…
He gripped his fist. The frantic fight against the overseer had been extremely helpful in gauging their strength, as well as his own. Irin hadn’t been a good sample for determining how strong he truly was because the brewmaster hadn’t been a combat specialist to begin with. Also, Eve had been distracting him, so even if the system counted it as a solo kill, it didn’t really feel that way to Devon.
But the fight against the overseer had been different. It was just the two of them, and even with Devon’s drained mana and extreme muscle fatigue he’d managed to overcome a gap of 4 levels. His strength had been a far cry from the Vishan’s, but that was to be expected when everyone else could specialize and he couldn’t.
Devon had been gaining stats as though he had a rare class, and he had the extra level’s worth of points from his plots. But the real kickers were his titles.
Giantslayer, Lord of Massacre, and Independent in particular elevated his stats way above what he felt an ordinary level 33 should be at. He was pretty certain Eve also had them, minus Lord of Massacre, but Eve too was somebody who threw themselves into situations no rational person would expect to survive.
Might as well go over it all since I’m thinking about it.
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[Status]
Name: Devon Wells
Race: [E-Grade Human]
Level: 33
Class: [Cursed Warrior]
Profession: [Cursed Schemer - Level 3]
Mana: 210/210
Talents: [Spear Proficiency - Level 6], [Sword Proficiency - Level 5], [Hammer Proficiency - Level 5], [Dagger Proficiency - Level 3], [Axe Proficiency - Level 7], [Quarterstaff Proficiency - Level 6]
Skills: [Sever], [Shatter], [Quickstab], [Lacerate], [Split], [Bone Breaker], [The Mask], [Refine], [Jammer]
Abilities: [Respite], [Small Presence]
Magic: [Light], [Fireball], [Lightning Imbuement], [Adrenaline], [Boost]
Titles: Initiate, Cursed(3), Vicious, Ambitious, Giantslayer, Lord of Massacre, Novice Dungeoneer, Independent, Discoverer
Strength: 183
Dexterity: 179
Vitality: 172
Endurance: 171
Arcane: 175
Spirit: 46
Free Points: 160
Talons: 3186
All of his stats had shot up a fair amount since he’d last looked, but the real kicker was the amount of talons he had. He took a quick glance over at the talon leaderboard and winced when he saw himself in the number one spot.
Well, it’s not like they can identify me by the amount of talons I have, so whatever.
He’d been running low on talons anyway, and the spirit dungeon hadn’t given any. Still, looking over the talon ladder was quite interesting. It was a stark contrast to the level ladder, as almost none of the rankers from high up on the level ladder were on the list of talon rankers.
In a way it made sense, all of the rankers most likely spent most of the talons they accumulated on new gear. Nix and Trey in particular most likely had more taxing finances than anyone else as leaders of their respective camps.
Devon did find it interesting how the second place on the talon ladder was another ranker by the name of Ray, but he didn’t think much of it. There were likely to be martial artist types out there who had less need of equipment as they relied on their bodies.
He looked at the skill he’d acquired as a reward for finishing his second plot, the jamming ability. Frankly, it was far beyond Devon’s wildest expectations of what his class would give him.
It made any user’s system within 20 meters fritz out if they tried to use the messaging function, and it even reported back to him when someone tried to send or receive something.
This meant that if he wanted to, he could perform targeted strikes against overseers assigned to monitor the humans. If he picked his battles right it wasn’t unreasonable to imagine he could decimate a large number of the level 20s and perhaps even the level 30s all on his own.
But that idea wasn’t without issues. He’d already ruined his advantage of surprise twice over now. Devon couldn’t even imagine the possibility that they hadn’t raised their level of caution through the roof overnight. This was the third now he’d killed. There would not be any more easy opportunities.
If he still tried to isolate them and systematically eradicate them then his movements would become predictable in the extreme, and it would only be a matter of time before he fell into some kind of trap.
If only I hadn’t been forced to act last night… Well, no use crying over spilled milk.
He looked at the tile still lying next to him and finally opened it. Unlike the second dead overseer, this one didn’t have anything interesting on them. Even their axe was the exact same, a Savage Axe with a minor strength affinity. He’d have been happy to have another if he didn’t already have the most reliable weapon in the tutorial, most likely.
He still had the rest of the crafting materials stored in the spatial bead, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to distribute them. Any action he made with the overseer’s possessions could have consequences, so it was better to just hold onto them for now.
Devon sighed, once again looking at the level ladder. Until he went down in the rankings so that he dropped off the chart he was stuck. He couldn’t hunt, or he’d only slow his descent, and he couldn’t warp back to Plainstown yet or he may get singled out.
So there was nothing he could do. Nothing except wait around for the others to catch up to him on the ladder.
What a waste of time…