Sam lacked his armor, which was a pity, as he could have used its ability right about now. Instead, he packed power into his hammer, and expelled it in a burst of fire, knocking Talnor back. Breathing heavily, Sam recovered, running after his opponent.
Talnor was starting to run out of juice at this point, and his wreath of lightning was beginning to fail. His resources were draining at a rapid pace from this fight, and Sam was still above half left. This was a battle of attrition, and Talnor was losing. The other man had plenty of stat points allocated, but unlike Sam, he had specialized in skills that would allow him to use his sword more effectively, and as a result, his staying power was lacking. He also probably did not have the same incredible title bonuses as Sam. Despite the fact that he was nominally stronger than Sam, he was still losing.
Sam strode forward, on guard for any other attacks. Talnor gritted his teeth and charged, his katana at the ready. Sam wondered why the man just didn't purposefully lose, seeing as he actually wanted to join Sam’s faction. Then again, that would have looked quite suspicious.
Sam slapped aside the attack, feeling the amount of power contained within it to be lacking. He drove his hammer forwards, and knocked the wind out of Talnor, sending him to his knees. Neither man had been trying to use lethal force during the battle, and as a result, this was good enough to prompt a surrender from Talnor, to the sounds of cheering from Sam’s faction.
He looked up briefly at the audience, noting that it was divided into two sides, one of jubilation, and one of indifference. As the aftermath of the fight sank into everyone’s head however, the cheering died down, and everyone recognized that their two factions were now intertwined. Notifications appeared in Sam’s vision, all to do with the faction. He quickly opened them, excited to find what they said.
Your faction has ascended to the F Rank in strength, which now unlocks more options for purchase within the Metropolis Core, greater legitimacy on the Multiversal stage, and prestige among your peers.
The changes to the faction were listed below, and Sam quickly opened them as well.
Faction Name: The Arbiters of Justice
Low F Rank Faction
Faction Leader: Sam Atlas
Faction Captains: 10/25 spots filled
Faction Officers: 2423
Members: 24,586
Treasury: 175,030,540 Credits
The strength of the faction had skyrocketed, and reaching the F Rank now allowed him to add more captains to the faction roster. He was saddened to see that out of his original faction officers, which had been with him since the beginning, quite a few of them had died. However, the overall numbers were in the tens of thousands now, which was quite impressive. Over time, perhaps it would even grow to the millions. Then this would be a faction to be proud of, not that Sam wasn’t already proud of it.
Everyone was settled in over the next few days, and Sam quickly filled the remaining captain spots with people from the Manthox faction, and from his own. Not that the first group was called that anymore, they were all members of the Arbiters of Justice now. Talnor had claimed a space, as well as Okita from Sam’s group. A few others, which had been recommended to Sam by his existing captains, joined the ranks as well, and they gradually worked out a strategy for maintaining order within the factions.
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Most of the Earthlings and aliens got along well, but there were a few who were hostile to each other, and those people had taken some time to straighten out. However, it was almost like a state of harmony now, and the two sides were coexisting peacefully. Sam had decided to let Talnor maintain order among his own group, acting as a sort of liaison between the main body of the faction and the alien part. This seemed to be to the desire of most of the aliens, and when Sam had announced it, they had gone off satisfied with his decisions. Nobody doubted Sam’s ability to lead anymore, or his strength for that matter.
He had been challenged to dozens of duels over the first few days, most of which he had declined, given that his challengers were far too weak. He didn't want to have to injure somebody to get a point across. With peace came many other things however, not least of which was administration work. The sad truth was that there was nothing to fight as of now, which meant that Sam had to fill his weight in another way, which was by organizing the various forces of the city. It wasn't exactly a hard job, what with his superior intelligence, but it was intensely boring.
He was supposed to be out there, gaining power and defeating monsters, not stuck in the faction headquarters with all of the office workers. However, there was a mission coming up, one that Sam had volunteered himself for. There was some clean up to be done with the remnants of the Legion’s assault, with the most important bit being to check on the structures in the ocean that had exploded during the battle. He had neglected his own personal growth over the last few days, and had only briefly checked on his new stats. He had resolved that he would look at them more after this next mission. For now, he didn't need to allocate any stat points and he was content with leaving his free points the way that they were.
More importantly, he had gained quite a bit of power from just the levels themselves, adding more than twenty points to each stat when he factored in his multiplier. In any case, he was even stronger than before, and richer too at that. With those riches, he had been able to find a shady skill dealer on the Interweb, who had given him a healing skill.
Sam was strolling around the city, taking in the rebuilding efforts, and cataloging them for an eventual report, one of his many duties as the faction leader, in a time of peace and limited opportunity. As he walked, he thought about the skill he had gained. Apparently, skills could be sold and traded like any other item, but they were more expensive and much harder to come by. It required some extensive work on the behalf of the seller, with them having to extricate a skill from the fabric of the System itself, and turn it into a skill crystal, which would impart the knowledge of that skill onto its user. Seeing as all that the System cared about for skill formation was knowledge and requisite power, this worked, and worked well at that.
The System itself was mostly uncaring about this practice, but it made it quite hard, at least for stronger skills. For example, Sam had been offered a few common and uncommon skills at the very start of his time under the auspices of the System, by a merchant in that outpost he and Jeffrey had visited some time ago. They had only been a few thousand credits. The healing skill on the other hand, which was Legendary rarity, the minimum amount to have much of a difference on someone of his strength, had cost twenty five million credits.
He had already tested it out, and the results were striking. The skill could regenerate most damage, with enough mana pumped into it, and it had a relatively high upper limit, which was said to last well into the upper reaches of F Rank. Sam would probably hit that sooner than schedule, given his stat multipliers, but he could use the skill as a basis to form more. It used the power of elemental Earth to heal its user, which fit well with Sam’s own mastery of that element.
The skill drew up power from the ground, repairing the user’s body with conceptually aligned strands of elemental energy. This allowed for the formation of what were essentially false body parts within himself, which would eventually meld with his body and turn into natural flesh. He had no idea how the more intricate parts of this cycle worked, but it worked nonetheless, which was all that he cared about. Sam opened up the skill notification as he walked, checking on it one more time.
Earth’s Embrace: Legendary
You may draw upon the power of the element of Earth to heal your own body, up to a maximum of ten thousand points of accumulated damage.