Seth stopped his attack a few steps before reaching the hulking man. Does he not want to fight anymore or something? Should I even care?
Debating whether or not to strike regardless of Ty’s comment, Seth finally settled on dismissing his weapon. It seemed he had made the right decision, as Ty bent down and retrieved his armor piece, only for it to crawl back into the default plates he had seen earlier. The man’s helmet peeled back all the way as well, showing the familiar glare he was used to.
“So, you do remember me.” Seth claimed with an annoyed huff. “Then why the hell did you attack me in the first place?”
Ty’s eyebrow cocked for a moment as his expression relaxed the slightest amount. “Look where we are, there aren’t too many reasons not to attack anyone you see.”
Seth’s expression also softened, “I guess you have a point there.” His face suddenly became annoyed again, “So you already hit tier three. Seems fair.” Seth finished with a face that made it completely clear he didn’t think it was fair at all.
Ty crossed his arms and turned to look at the plate at the center of the arena, totally ignoring Seth’s previous statement. “I suppose it doesn’t matter why you’re here. Were you about to do this challenge?” Seth felt a sense of loss as Ty blatantly didn’t seem to care about him at all. He still hadn’t even asked him his name, and this was the second time they had talked.
“Yeah, I actually was. Are you gonna let me, or are you going to fight me for it?” Seth’s hand tensed as he prepared himself to attack at a moments notice.
Ty just shrugged without even looking at him.
“I would rather not kill a fellow citizen of Earth. Despite my sentiment, do not attack me again, or I won’t hesitate to send you to Hell. How about we make it fair? Whoever has cleared the lower number of challenges can have this one. It’s not like they are hard to find.” The goliath said with disinterest.
Seth couldn’t help but feel like Ty was giving him charity.
“Whatever you say man. I have cleared three technically.”
Ty finally turned back to look at Seth. His eyes were finally full of something other than disdain.
It was pity.
“Three… you must be joking. We have been hear for over two weeks and that is all you have completed? Well then, I guess you can have this one. This would have been my thirteenth cleared challenge had you not shown up.”
Ty waved him on to go ahead.
Embarrassment burned up Seth’s face at Ty’s claim of completing twelve challenges already. Although Ty had already begun to walk back toward the wilderness, Seth did not go to start up the challenge yet.
“I had a lot of things going on man! Plus I had a puzzle challenge that took me damn near a week to finish, it was complete bullshit!” he yelled at the large man’s back.
Ty did not turn around at his outburst, seemingly deciding to forget about him altogether.
DAMMIT! It’s not fair man! He gets a huge boost because of his Umbra and he must’ve gotten a bunch of super easy challenges to have done twelve already! He’s not even royal either, how the hell did he get inside this event?!
Even if it wasn’t really true, Seth decided to convince himself that Ty was having an easier time because of luck. To think about it too long would make him lose any remaining dignity that he had left.
As Ty disappeared into the wilderness, an errant thought tugged at Seth. Should I follow him? With only a second of hesitation, Seth dismissed the thought. “Wouldn’t be smart to get the big guy mad at me. It pays to know one person won’t try to kill me here, even if he is kind of a dick.” Seth cast one more glance in the direction Ty had gone before heading toward the plate.
“Not to mention, I seriously need to catch up.”
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The last ice golem shattered into a hundred pieces due to an explosion caused by Seth’s kick. The challenge had been a horde battle, where tens of tier two golems had spawned from spatial rips and rushed him. Unfortunately for them, Seth’s new body was incredibly effective against the golems. The concussive blast of his hits made beating them easy as pie. To make the situation even better, Seth had received another quest at the beginning of the fight, meaning he was rewarded with yet another low-quality tempering. With barely any fatigue, Seth quickly claimed the reward and put the boost into resolve, heeding the advice of Lord Dick.
Pulling up his Status, he watched as the attribute rose to Class A, though he honestly didn’t feel any different. It was unsurprising though, he never really bothered to learn what exactly resolve entailed before he left Ethin. Something told him that it was important, besides just what Rich said. The challenge itself did not come without its pitfalls though. Upon activation of the plate, a shimmering dome had encompassed the disk, locking him inside. This was yet another challenge that didn’t have a one way in, one way out design. It seemed like his hopes of locking up all the other participants was not very realistic.
Welp, that kinda sucks. But I guess it isn’t that big of a deal. I should focus on completing challenges to get stronger anyway. Although, that won’t stop me from locking them up when I can. He thought with a smirk.
“Speaking of which, should I head back to the tree yet?” He questioned allowed.
A picture of the royal trio hopelessly banging against the silver door made Seth laugh to himself.
“Nah! They can suffer for a couple more weeks,” he decided.
Dismissing the thoughts of the trio, he finally came back to the task at hand.
I need to work through challenges more efficiently, but how can I do that?
He walked over the edge of the disk and found another place to hide for a moment. Thinking about how Ty completed twelve already felt off to Seth. He mulled over the last four challenges he had just gone through. One was a puzzle, one was a feat of intelligence, and two of them were combat challenges. The idea that he had already experienced all challenge types was certainly false, but that begged the question of how many types there actually was. Seth struggled for a moment before a light bulb sparked into existence above his head due to Fear Itself.
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Wait a minute, it doesn’t matter how many types there are. The combat challenges were the fastest and easiest to complete, and it doesn’t seem like there is reward scaling based off of difficulty. I mean, it took a week to do the puzzle and it didn’t give me jack shit, but this ice golem horde gave me a tempering and only took a half hour. The realization dawned on Seth like a punch in the gut.
“I have to prioritize combat challenges! Jeez I feel like such an idiot.” He groaned in shame.
It would make sense for Ty to have completed so many challenges if he was only picking the easiest ones to do. But damn, he must know something I don’t if he can pick out the easiest challenges to complete first. Although there were some telltale signs he could use to identify combat challenges, it seemed that Ty was a lot more efficient at doing so. It’s possible he found some sort of treasure to identify them, so I might just have to use my intuition from here on.
It was a bit annoying, but this new method seemed like a much more promising path to follow. Luckily, he had originally made notes with each ping he left on the map, meaning that he had a good idea of which ones were combat oriented already. With his eyes set on a new goal, Seth took a couple more minutes in his hiding spot to have a snack and some water, as well as check on his gear. After he was satisfied, he plotted his next destination, then set off at a superhuman speed. It was time for him to push toward the third tier.
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Infected rats, shadow beings, a bus sized tick, panthers made of sludge, and even more repugnant creatures all fell to Anar’s blade. Finally finding his stride, Seth was like an executioner over the course of a week and a half, barely stopping for small bouts of rest and to bleed himself out every now and then for Fool’s Errand. His new strategy had gone off without a hitch, and he had been clearing challenges like a madman. Now he was finally caught back up with Ty, sitting at fifteen cleared challenges, although Ty definitely would have surpassed even that by now.
For the first two days, he had gone after anything he suspected might be a fighting challenge, but after a couple misreads and getting caught in a challenge where he had to balance a log on his nose for eight hours, Seth had decided to solely go after challenges that consisted of arena-like, open areas.
It turned out, Ty had been right, there was a stupid number of challenges to go around, and there was no shortage of the open combat types that he had been looking for. Even better was the fact that he also had not run into any more participants for the entirety of his streak. He might have thought that strange if he hadn’t been caught up in exhilaration of running from challenge to challenge and racking up a slew of rewards.
Although over half of the loot he had gotten so far were just random trinkets of limited use, he had managed to acquire a couple useful items, as well as four more quests with tempering as the completion reward. Even now, Seth was hiding in a small building roughly a kilometer away from his next target challenge. His clearing adventure had brought him to the outskirts of the large city he had originally seen at the beginning of the event, which so far had only consisted of fallen buildings and the occasional Sckriz’Ul, which was a particularly tricky monster that could phase in and out of reality for small periods of time.
The first time Seth had fought one, he would have lost his head if not for his enhanced reflexes and the unconstrained energy signature of the creature. On the bright side, the city was easier to traverse, and lacked the horrible stench of the swamp, so Seth was happy dealing with the occasional assassination attempts. The unfortunate part of it was that Seth himself seemed to carry enough stench to make up for the lack of swamp, for he still had not found a natural source of water anywhere, and he didn’t want to waste the time it would take his eyedropper to fill up a bathtub for him to bathe in.
Seth sat on the ground of his new hideout, contently chewing on a freshly cooked piece of snake meat he had plundered a while back. A couple days ago, he had earned a little Class F black lava rock called a Magma Lens that emitted a varying amount of heat based off how much energy he fed it. Although the hellhounds he had to fight seemed like a little much for such a lame reward, Seth wasn’t complaining as he now did not have to rely on his personal food stores for nourishment.
This was especially useful as Seth had been burning stamina like a lunatic while rushing from challenge to challenge, so he often had to eat on the go. But right now, he had just settled down for his every-couple-days break that he needed in order to sleep. It seemed that the stronger he got, the less he felt like he needed to sleep, but in the end, he was only a tier two, so he still had to stop often for rest. Plus, giving up a liter of blood every day had a drain of its own that wore on his energy.
Luckily, it looked like he was a little past halfway with Fool’s Errand, so hopefully he would be finished within another month or so.
Seth had also worked out a bit of insight as to what exactly the item was for as well. After around his twentieth use, Seth had noticed little spots of black mixed into the crimson of his blood. He wasn’t exactly comforted knowing his blood was turning black, but after thinking about it, he realized that his new race might have had something to do with the phenomenon. After ruling out poison or some curse, Seth had remembered that his hair apparently contained a few strands of black as well, meaning that his body might still be changing to accommodate the new Fiend DNA that was introduced through the anomaly.
The closest thing he could think of that made sense was the Earthly practice of bloodletting, where you would bleed out a patient to cure an illness. In this case, it looked like the illness was his old crimson blood, and the new black blood was seemingly replacing it. Whether that was a bad thing or not, Seth honestly had no clue. The key to surviving in this new reality of monsters and supernatural abilities was embracing change and adapting constantly. So far, he had not noticed anything wrong with his body from the new influx of black blood, so honestly he did not think it to be that much of an issue. Not to mention, there was plenty of other stuff to worry about, like just surviving on a day-to-day basis.
Finished with the piece of snake, Seth tossed the remains into a small, floating, blue wisp that lazily flew around his head. It was yet another reward he had acquired over the last week and a half: a Class D storage system that acted similarly to his cache. It was called a Wisp Pocket and had the ability to carry ten items, and it would follow him around hands free.
It even had a built-in illusion array that concealed the wisp in case he needed to hide. The downside was that it stole a trickle of his constant energy to hold the array, which was mildly annoying. He gave the wisp a playful swipe that it lazily danced around before checking his attributes in the Status tab.
Level: Tier Two (Progress: Late)
Intellect: Class B
Constitution: Class B
Might: Class A
Intuition: Class B
Resolve: Class A
He smiled at the respectable menu of attributes. Might had risen two grades on its own, due to the constant fighting and traveling. As for intuition and intellect, Seth had poured three of his quest rewards into the former, barely pushing it past the threshold for Class B. As for the latter, he had used his last tempering reward to make it Class B as well, mostly because it looked nice in the menu for all of his attributes to even out.
Raising his attributes was still relatively easy due to the tempering rewards, without it, he would probably not have made even half of the gains he gotten since entering The Incubator. This dimension was still nothing to scoff at, as it alone seemed to expedite his growth, allowing him to raise might twice in not even two weeks. Even he knew that his progress was incredible by normal standards, but Seth still wasn’t satisfied. Tier three was probably one or two more weeks away, even with his breakneck speed of clearing challenges.
The bad thing was that everyone else was making gains of their own, and for all he knew, Ty might have already leaped to late-stage tier three. He needed to continue racking up tempering rewards, but he also needed to do his best to progress the rest of his abilities and seize any advantages he could find too. Building power wasn’t just about raising attributes; Grayson had mentioned that back during one of their talks. Will had mentioned something about classes, and there was also the Concept System that he had learned about.
For now I have to sleep though. I can barely keep my eyes open.
With a yawn, Seth dismissed the screens and checked his camouflage array one last time before closing his eyes. Within seconds, he was set adrift into the world of dreams, or at least one dream in particular.