Melena sat slouched at her table and looked worse than when Degritone first saw her after he came back. She said, "I'm sorry about the delay. By the time this'll be uploaded, I'll have gone back and removed all the inappropriate comments from previous videos and answered the questions in the comments. The loss of my most recent protege just hit home once again. I'm sorry, but I'll live.
"Now, today, I'll be talking about Clashes of Wills, the Level forty mechanic, and Soul Exploration, the Level eighty mechanic. When trying to explain it, it sounds more intricate and confusing than it actually is to experience. You unlock the ability to start Clashes of Wills when you hit Level forty, but you can accept them at any Level.
"Clashes of Wills are a competition to see who has stronger willpower. There also exists a reward if you issue one against someone with higher willpower than you and win, but it is quite rare for that to happen. When you start a Clash, you enter a purely mental space where you are connected to your opponent by a tube of soul material. Typically, while in this mental space, you are simply a sphere.
"Those with very high willpower may have facial features while inside this mental space, but no one has ever reported being anything more than that. To compete, you must simply squeeze yourself down, effectively sending your willpower down the tube of soul material. Whoever manages to completely fill the mental space of their opponent with their own willpower is the winner.
"To issue a Clash, you must have willpower roughly equal to or less than the one you wish to challenge. This is hard to quantify, but the System has had billions of Clashes as data to use. It's rarely wrong, but it can occasionally be tricked, such as when using a drug that makes you hyper focus to increase your effective willpower. Using one with a Clash has been outlawed multiversally, and you will be hunted down and killed if you do so.
"Additionally, Clashes with someone with significantly higher willpower than you can lead to very nasty consequences. Losing to someone with significantly higher willpower when they don't hold back can lead to death in the best case scenario. You may be left completely insane or with your personality completely rewritten to a mixture of yours and the winner's. You should only issue Clashes to someone who can issue a Clash against you to avoid this.
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"Soul Exploration is the ability to enter your soul and view your Class and Skills. This is primarily useful for those who have a hard time making an image, but still want to have their own unique Skills and for studying the structure of Classes. While useless for those who are able to enter their soul through condensing, anyone who can do so is instead granted 3 Free Stats.
"While that is not much, it is something. As my late," she closed her mouth tightly for a few seconds before starting that sentence over. "To paraphrase my most recent protege, 'You should be glad we get any compensation at all. This isn't a video game, its players can't just leave for another, more fun game because they got no compensation. The fact the System gives any sort of compensation is highly generous.'"
She took a deep, wavering breath before continuing, "Anyway, the only real use for the majority of people is the ability to actually train Skills while inside the soul. Since it is your own soul, you can effectively control how much time dilation exists and the body you create inside your soul can move around at a normal to you speed, regardless of the amount of time that passes.
"The only real limitation is how fast you can make it go. Unlike Dungeon time compression, you'll be limited by how fast you can process information, making it effectively limited by how good your perception Skill is. There is also a hard limit of one thousand times normal speed. If you need more Skill Levels in the middle of a fight, it can be useful as a way to get some, assuming you have a good enough perception Skill to do so in the middle of a fight.
"I'd have liked this video to be a little longer, but I do not have the energy to continue. Until I finally get over the loss of my protege enough to not break down for at least a year, I will not continue making videos. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm a mess, I'm sorry this video was so short, and I'm sorry I did not get to translations like I said I would in my first video.
"I might still answer questions, both occasionally in the future and for the first few days of this video being up, but your time would be better spent searching for what you wish to ask on our website. I recommend you do so."
With that, she silently went about clearing out the comments on her previous video as well as answering any questions therein while the video uploaded.