While floating through the air, trying to catch up to his body, Tilly pulled up his notification log and tried to get a grip on what he had just experienced. He scanned over the events, starting with his impact against the Colossus and moving through how the notifications described what had just happened to him. Nothing seemed completely out of place, but events continued to unfold in such a way that he was always at the epicenter of the conflict between Corruption and those who chose to resist it. The more he thought about it the more he realized that while he had chosen his direction at every fork in the road, the events that transpired after each of his decisions displayed subtle evidence of divine interference.
The mutation and adoption of the Microcosm by his Legendary Set of Leather Armor seemed like it should never have happened, and yet here he was. Now the owner of two different armor forms that had manifested just in time for him to face an extraordinarily dangerous environment. Tilly scowled at the thought of being subtly manipulated even if the interventions had resulted in something positive so far. His eyes ran through the list of Log entries trying to pull out the essentials before he made it back to the Bastions.
Through your actions, you have created a Mana--Experience loop, This has not been seen on Nephesh since the third Epoch. This experience has indelibly marked your soul and imparted you with the ability Mana Overdrive. You may perform abilities without paying the Mana cost in exchange for unused Experience stored in the subspace of your soul at a rate of 100:1% while wearing the Nullspider Set. Your Character sheet has been modified to reflect such.
You have defeated a Corrupted Collosus! You have been awarded 539,000 exp. Level up!
Congratulations! You are now level 15.
You have earned 5 stat points to distribute plus 2 points in Endurance and 1 in Dexterity from the class Son of Flame.
Congratulations! You are now level 16…
Congratulations! You are now level 17. 20,000/340,000 exp until the next level.
You have earned 5 stat points to distribute plus 2 points in Endurance and 1 in Dexterity from the class Son of Flame.
You have activated Mana Overdrive. All experience you earn through the use of continuous Mana-based abilities will convert to Mana at a 100:1 ratio until the flow of Experience stops.
Experience consumed by Mana Overdrive: 3,234,907.
Congratulations! By attacking and defeating an opponent more than 4x your level with a suicidal frontal assault, you have earned the title: [A Divine Wind]. When you attack an opponent more than double your level while holding their full attention, you gain a 25% bonus to your attack power.
Warning! Your soul has been reforged in the flow of immense amounts of mana and the trauma of this event has temporarily torn your spirit from your body.
Congratulations! You have learned a new skill, Spirit Walk
Spirit Walk Level 1
Your Spirit Form has entered into an incredibly rich soul environment and has been strengthened by the primordial energies found in its presence.
Spirit Walk Level 2.
Spirit Walk Level 3…
Spirit Walk Level 7
He immediately tried to assign the stat points from his levels but found that he was unable to. Freaking ghost form…
Well, now he had a pretty good idea of his strategy going forward. He didn't want to lose [Resolute] again. If he was being set up as a counter to the biggest bad guy around, he needed to hold on to the one thing that let him survive a hit way above his weight class. That meant that at least half of all points gained would have to go to Endurance. It was painful to even think about, but he just didn't have the luxury of creating some sort of solo adventurer, jack-of-all-trades kind of build. For now, he would dump the majority of the rest of these points into Constitution. He needed to get back in the fight as soon as possible.
Mana Overdrive was insane. The experience price was steep, but the fact that he had the option to keep in the fight even after he hit zero Mana was a godsend. He loved having another option besides relying on his pitiful Mana Regen in the middle of a fight. Gaining levels was essential, but not as essential as staying alive. With this, he always had an emergency fund of Mana if he was desperate and there were enough low-level enemies around.
This Ability in combination with the titles: [Resolute] and [Divine Wind] was going to be the ace of his build. He didn't love it, but it looked like his days as a DPS/Tank were only just beginning. He just had to hope that his reckless min/maxing in Endurance would pay off and keep him alive in his next laughably unfair matchup. Spirit Walk was also super interesting and the DM in him had some ideas of how the skill could be applied laterally to overcome obstacles and gain intel. But it probably wouldn't be useful in the near future.
So, a couple of levels, a new synergy in his Titles and Abilities, and one non-combat skill that should be useful in the future. Overall he had advanced pretty well over the last day... but his progress did nothing to shake the feeling that he was falling behind. It felt like he had been entered into a race that he had no chance of winning, and every step forward just solidified his hopeless prospects of succeeding.
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So much for a tutorial or a nice friendly starting area... Well, there had been horned rabbits, so he shouldn't complain too much.
He minimized the Log and found that he was already moving over the promenade. He allowed himself a smile of dark satisfaction at the trail of destruction left by the moving engine of blades and shields that was the remaining core of the Empire’s Bastions.
Even at his slow pace, he was gaining on them as they dispatched the milling groups of Corrupted who seemed to be pulled in a thousand different directions by the maze of intersecting roads and hiding prey. However, the majority of the remaining Corrupted were drawn into the conflict playing out at the leading edge of the Bastion formation as they continued their relentless march through the middle of the city.
Even with most of the Corrupted accounted for, a horrible symphony of screams and terror began to rise from the rampaging wave of invaders emanating from the front gate. The enemy combatants that had made it through, and avoided engagement with the Bastions were free to sow chaos throughout the city. Tilly was thankful that the true organizers of the city's defense had already concentrated the majority of people at its center.
He scanned ahead of the moving formation to the immense crowd of citizens at the city center. There standing in a thin defiant line was a group of armed refugees holding back the most forward element of the Corrupted. They stood fast against the thin but constant stream of enemies as the quickest of the shambling creatures made it to the concentration of life at the city center. Luckily, the line looked like it would have no problem holding until the Bastions reached it. Then Tilly looked back at the enemy lines and saw the energy radiating from the ritual slowly coalesce into a serpentine physical shape.
The sight renewed his sense of urgency, and with a silent growl of frustration, he pushed forward with his will, while simultaneously pulling on the thread that led to his body. He felt his pace pick up slightly. It wasn't enough...
Tilly narrowed all of his mental focus until his whole world was the task of reaching the moving formation faster.
The gap between him and the soldiers closed and he got a better look at how bad of shape the Bastions were in. The forward line was made up of the least injured of the unit, which meant that they had all their limbs and were not bleeding out. At the center of the kind of Bastions still in the fight was the Commander, covered in gore and limping forward with a clipped efficient gait. Not that those with obvious injuries seemed to be at any sort of handicap. The line of soldiers leading the formation continued to cut down the enemy and ram them out of the way as the whole group moved inexorably forward. The sides were held by spear wielders, using the reach of their weapons like poles on a river raft, thrusting into occasional enemies and pushing them off to the side.
Finally, the rear was almost entirely being held by Threstus who tirelessly dispatched Corrupted who attempted to flank around the sides or catch up with the formation from the rear. The soldiers at the center of the unit displayed an impressive litany of ghastly injuries and seemed to be keeping up pace by spite alone. In the middle of it all was Gorock with Tilly’s body thrown over his shoulder like a sack of flour going to market.
The sight of his body as a burden added even more urgency to his flight, and he used it as fuel to eke out another slight increase in speed. Finally, he was floating above the shambling soldiers. None of them looked up or noticed his presence, confirming his hunch that he was undetectable to most senses in this form. As soon as he reached Gorock at the center of the formation he extended his hand to touch the back of his physical body.
The contact removed any sort of priority between spirit and body and his perceptions doubled. He was suddenly looking through two sets of eyes, one perspective looking down at his slumped form, the other flaring open to take in the sight of Gorock's ridiculously shapely hamstrings. Then both perspectives blurred and merged in a nauseating multidirectional fusion.
“Uuuhhhggg” He gasped, choking back some bile as he returned to his physical form. The muted sensations of his injuries hit him full force as he returned fully to his body and he immediately put 6 points in Endurance 5 in Constitution, and 2 each in Wisdom and Strength. Bringing his non-Endurance stat total to 96 and his Endurance to 97. His ribs were still cracked and there were hairline fractures in several other sets of bones, but all of them were well into the process of healing. The almost 50% increase in his Constitution would be a huge help in speeding that process up.
“Is Baby Man Awake?” Gorock rumbled, his basso voice vibrating through Tilly’s body from its position on the warrior's shoulder, causing his ribs to grind together painfully.
“Guh… Yeah, I am. Mind if I walk big guy?” Tilly gasped out between painful breaths, trying and failing to take some pressure off his mending ribs. Gorock hefted him up and then set him on his feet with surprisingly gentleness. The formation didn't notice or slow at his waking, but Tilly found he was able to turn and adopt the same stumbling, exhausted gait that was being used by most of the members of the unit. A few of the nearby soldiers looked over at him and nodded.
No cheering or thanks. Just a silent nod of acceptance. Tilly knew from experience that the respect of such men was much more precious than praise, and he nodded back, attempting to match the hard, weathered expression of impassivity that so many of the veterans wore.
“You did good Baby-Man. I especially liked it when you exploded. You should do this again very soon!” Gorock exclaimed enthusiastically.
“Don’t think I have any more of those in me for a while…” Tilly ground out, splitting his attention between keeping up the march and trying to get a handle on what had happened to him internally. He could tell he was on track to recover physically, but metaphysically, he was a mess.
He focused internally as he mindlessly stumbled forward and could feel the shattered state of his mana pathways. This caused the normal flow of Mana through his body to slosh out and pool in different sections of his network. He could still move his magic, but the act had become wildly inefficient and resulted in a painful pressure around shattered areas of his nervelike mana pathway network. Hesitantly, Tilly tried to recall his hatchets from wherever they had gotten to. But the wave of anticipated pain never came. Instead, as the magic moved along the pattern it used to recall his hatchets, he felt the presence of a previously undetected blanket of cool energy, underpinning and repairing the broken parts of his network. After a slower-than-normal period of time, his weapons appeared in his hands and he looped them.
His concentration wavered as he tried to get the hang of observing his internal structures while on the move, but eventually, he was able to fall into a shuffling rhythm and turn his attention fully inward to watch the flow of Mana within his body and observe this new, beneficial energy. While he couldn't see color in this state, the energy had a feeling of deep blueness, like glacial ice, or the relief of an ice pack on an inflamed injury. He watched as this strange energy was slowly being absorbed to reknit his pathways. Then it clicked, this energy was the same color as his ghostly form when he Spirit Walked. According to his Log, he had absorbed a small portion of the "Primordial Energy" around the Bloom causing a huge increase in the strength of his Spirit. It must be these gains that his physical body was processing and the excess energy was being used to restore the metaphysical network that made up his Mana pathways.
The spiritual energy was slowly breaking down, and rejoining with his integrated self, fueling the highly accelerated spiritual regeneration he was observing. He wondered just how long this process would have taken without the "chance" encounter in the hidden valley.
“Formation Halt!” Shouted Commander Linus from the front.
The sound of battle had become almost white noise to Tilly as he had found his meditative rhythm. But the sudden call to halt jolted him from his inward-facing state and he found the Bastions finishing the last of the Corrupted between their formation and the ragged but determined line of refugee militia.
They had made it to the Hub.