After a brief meeting with his friends, Seth used his free time to roam the now vacant shops and other amenities that populated the sealed space of the challenge. It was mostly a waiting game now, as he wanted the stress and desperation to build up more.
Seth had decided to wait for the last half day of the challenge, as he assumed that was when people would be at their most manic for points. He would’ve liked to continue watching matches in the main hall, but he also didn’t want to run the risk of running into Galdir Ruminold again. Seth was unsure why he had attracted the attention of such a big player in the first place, but he wasn’t keen on finding out. The idea of a bunch of higher tier royals on his ass was not something Seth wanted to think about. He was quite aware that grudges or other negative impressions could result in ruin outside of the group challenge, as The Incubator itself didn’t protect against murder unlike the sealed space he was in now.
Random items and creatures flashed in and out of existence around Seth as he absently practiced his Fear Itself ability. He found that it advanced a lot faster when used properly during his matches, but when he used it passively, it was still a good method of practicing control and continuous output. Seth was also attempting to further his control over his personal energy, as he had learned a few tricks originally, including pulsing and retracting.
After his weeks of new training though, Seth learned that his energy was more potent due to his tier up, but also harder to handle. It seemed like energy control was a skill that needed to be practiced daily, as if he continued to tier up at his current rate, then his energy might become something he was unable to wield efficiently. Moreover, if it became too powerful to conceal, then his fighting technique would suffer as well as his stealth capabilities. This was not to say that Seth was a slouch in energy control though, as he showed a talent for it during his time with Origin, and his continued practice allowed him to manipulate it on an acceptable level without heavy concentration. As he continued to mind his business in the empty halls, a new screen appeared before him.
-There are (48) hours remaining in the challenge.
-Matches will be closed in (24) hours. The remaining time has been reserved for the bonus challenge. All participants that do not qualify will be transported to a viewing area outside of the bonus challenge.
Seth studied the new screens before a wry grin spread across his face. With the newly shortened timetable, people would scramble even more desperately than before for points. This new scenario meant that Seth should have an even easier time of finding willing participants to duel with. He dismissed the screens with a wave before striking a pose in triumph. His hands were thrown out in front of him as he used Fear Itself to create an illusion of a beam of raw energy erupting from them not unlike a certain move from DBZ. No one was in the halls anyway, so his display wouldn’t draw any odd looks or confrontations.
Despite his illusions not usually having any tangible effects, Seth was surprised to feel a large stream of energy run through his hands. In his left hand, the energy hit some sort of blockage and dissipated back into his body, but his right hand did not follow suit. Instead, the energy he had been practicing with sunk into the whirlpool of the onyx hand, causing the constantly changing pattern on his forearm to coalesce into a series of myths. The reaction did not stop there, and within less than a few seconds, a stream of black oil leaked from the appendage and formulated a familiar large skull with tattered wings erupting from its temple. Seth just stared at the floating black Fouler for over a minute before it evaporated into nothingness.
“What the fu…”
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Within moments of the Fouler disappearing, Seth jumped back into action and began funneling energy through his arm like before.
Multiple copies of void black Foulers poured from his hand and onto the floor in front of him. Yet again, they floated ominously without action after formulation. Seth cut off the energy flowing toward his hand and stood as motionless as the monsters he had summoned. With a brief thought, he pointed at the wall in front of him, and the handful of Foulers sprung into action and lined up against it. After another thought, all of them crashed against it with a surprising lack of noise. The wall remained unscathed as was a characteristic of the entire sealed space, but the Foulers were not so lucky and quickly evaporated just like the first. Seth absently watched the particles turn to nothingness, still dumbstruck at the event.
HOLY SHIT!
Dust kicked up into a cloud behind Seth as he used his explosive speed to barrel through the halls toward his room. Finally after arriving, he quickly threw the door closed behind him and started cycling energy through his body. He felt so stupid as his onyx hand open up to the energy without issue.
“That was it the whole time!” He screamed at no one.
It seemed his energy manipulation practice had unconsciously sent his energy through his body after he struck his victory pose. Seth couldn’t help but feel completely idiotic at his unimaginative use of his energy so far. So far, he had only been manipulating it outwardly into small shapes and tendrils. In reality, doing so didn’t achieve anything other than satisfy his own curiosity. He hadn’t even thought about streaming the energy throughout himself, even though that’s exactly where the energy was produced. And now, he finally noticed that when cycling his energy throughout all his body, he found multiple focal points that absorbed his energy readily.
One was his hand, and the others were his left eye and the ethereal red mist of Fear Itself that was housed in his body. Apparently he had been instinctively imbuing each of them with his energy to activate his abilities. The only outlier had been his dark appendage, the reason being that his hand had been cut off before receiving Presence of Doom, so his body seemed not to naturally recognize the new hand. Unlike the physical representations of his abilities, the rest of Seth’s body didn’t absorb the energy at all. He could run energy through his muscles and veins, but they did nothing to increase his physical attributes.
“Was that seriously it? The only thing that stopped me this whole time was because I’m a fucking idiot?” He admonished himself.
Once again, Seth couldn’t help but be annoyed with his lack of free time. More than anything, he wanted to experiment with all aspects of the Foundation he had built so far. Right now, his abilities, race, fighting technique, and Anima Influence were all just a bundle of random crap thrown together. Seth had been working harder than ever to fix this issue by trying to understand all of them better, but he was still coming up short as new powers kept cropping up. He was happy to grow his arsenal, but he continued to find himself lacking the power to fully wield them all effectively. He was also still missing an entire aligned ability, which made his lack of control over the rest an even bigger issue.
This small breakthrough afforded him a molecule of optimism though. A minion type ability like Anima Thief would boost his combat power considerably by providing a distraction for his opponents as well as multiple other sources of damage. Seth could already see a huge synergy between the minion ability and his illusion ability. Unable to hold down his patience, Seth bolted from his room toward the crowded main hall. Although dragging the attention of multiple other participants, and even receiving some duel requests, he didn’t say a word and instead made his way to the nearest console to sign up for a few matches.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
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Seth flung himself down onto his bed with a disgusted sigh.
“Ten matches and not a single useful application for Anima Thief.” He growled.
After summoning one of the anima he had stored, Seth had tried all kinds of ways to factor them into a fight. He tried using them as a decoy, a direct attack, a shield, and even as a method of transportation, yet none of them worked. It also didn’t seem to matter what tier of anima he used either; they all were unable to affect any of the monsters, or even the physical space around themselves.
All of his efforts had afforded him nothing in return, as any attack the conjured animas made didn’t bother the target monsters in the slightest. After realizing this during one of his matches, Seth had waited until the next to use multiple of them as decoys for him to attack the monster unimpeded. Imagine Seth’s surprise when the high end tier three monster he had fought completely ignored all of his minions and instead used his own blind spots the anima created to deliver an iron knuckled blow that punched through his entire gut in a bloody black-red shower.
In his desperation, Seth killed the monster with a point-blank Black Mass after pinning it with Anar. Despite his apparent oncoming death, Seth’s body did not share the same realization as he looked down at his grievous wound. Although there was a huge amount of blood being shed, there were no familiar organs or innards spilling out like he had expected from such an injury. Moments later, a large crimson halo rose above his head as he used the most expensive recovery potion he had stolen off the royal boy’s body in the swamp.
This was how Seth discovered one of the secret changes that augmenting his constitution granted. It seemed his body no longer retained the same biology as a normal human’s. His race as a Fiend seemed to change his blood and hair, but his new constitution changed his body entirely. Now it seemed what would’ve been fatal before no longer applied. His body had excised itself of his normal organs, leaving only the bones, veins, muscles, and nerves from before. He still had the ability to pee, which was odd, but Seth was quite sure his bladder, lungs, kidneys, liver, and the like were no longer part of his anatomy.
All of this was all well and good, but that didn’t take away from the sense of loss that came from his lackluster Anima Thief ability. The matches allowed him to discover that living beings like the monsters couldn’t see or interact with the anima he summoned. This worked both ways, as the anima couldn’t do anything to the monsters either.
So, what’s the point of an ability that only gets more ammo to use the ability? I mean, I can use the monster anima I capture for Anar’s Anima Prison, but I have hundreds of them now, so what’s the point of keeping all the small fry?
Seth’s pensive expression softened as he tabled the problem for the time being. It’s not like it hurts to have them. Maybe I will figure some use for them later. So far, he hadn’t been able to identify a limit for the amount of anima he could absorb into his hand, but continuing to devour them didn’t seem to hurt him in any way, so there was no reason not to take them. Also, he could continue to build his arsenal of tier four animas, which would allow him to gain different boosts by inserting them into Anar. Regardless of the usefulness or uselessness of these new discoveries, Seth still had a job he needed to do. With a wave of his hand, a timer appeared above him.
-Time until challenge expires: (01:22:13:42)
“Man all this waiting is making me antsy.”
Seth sat upright with a grunt and ran a hand through his hair. As he twisted a strand between his fingers, he noticed how long it had grown since being thrown into Origin’s experiment. Beforehand, he had a short but messy haircut with a near buzz on the sides. But after over half a year of deadly battle and less than ideal living conditions, Seth had a clean but completely unruly mop of unevenly chopped hair. He had cut it every now and then with Anar just to keep it from spilling down his neck, but that didn’t mean it was pretty. Now, Seth had better control over Anar so he could form only the tip of the blade from his finger. He used this skill to clean up his hair as well as his scraggly goatee and mustache that had been growing.
Hmmm… Maybe I should clean up some other areas too.
After fifteen minutes of careful cutting and styling, Seth was left with a respectable head of hair. He had cut down the sides and back, leaving it short enough not to touch the back of his ears. The top was trimmed down so much that there were only a couple inches left, making the entire cut look reminiscent of a military fade. It was still longer than normal, messy, and streaked with random black swaths, but he didn’t think it looked half bad.
The cleanly shaven face also showed off his tier up changes. His skin was clearer than ever, his hormonal acne nowhere to be found, and his previously sharp features had become even more so. He knew that most became better looking as they progressed through the tiers; an effect of becoming more like Licht and Null. Seth’s appearance changed in small ways to follow this trend, although his appearance was individualized just like everyone else’s, so while one person might get a ridged jawline and another smooth cheekbones, Seth’s face seemed to become more sharp as he grew.
His crooked nose had gotten slightly smaller and more streamlined, while his jaw and chin had became more prominent without jutting out unfavorably. He ran a hand over his face, feeling out the newer features while inspecting the faded scar down his lip. Since hitting tier three, the scar had faded to nothing, but Seth had been biting away at it like normal because of his constant training, leaving a newer, fledgling scar behind.
After he was done looking himself over, Seth once again sat back on his bed, wondering what to do next. Soon enough, an idea came to him, and his face drew into a soft grin. A black notebook dropped from the air and landed in his lap. He picked up Fool’s Errand and began leafing through the pages.
“Looks like we got three left. I might be cutting it a bit closer than I want to, but it's going to take a good few hours to replenish this much blood. Oh well.”
Seth drew a plain blade from his cache and quickly sliced open two wounds on each wrist. With a pained grimace, he rested them upside down against the paper where the mostly black blood began to absorb into. It would take time for all of the blood to flow out of his body, especially since each page took one liter each. This meant that Seth would be releasing over half of his total blood at once, as humans only had four to five liters at one time. Now a normal person wouldn’t survive losing that much blood at one time, but Seth was no longer normal. His experience with getting a hole punched through his gut had shown him that his body had much more to give than before, with less blowback from losing so much blood.
The process was no less disorienting and painful, especially since Seth had to continuously re-open the cuts because his body kept trying to coagulate the blood and stop the flow. Although he almost lost consciousness a couple times, he was still able to finish the job with the help of a few lower classed recovery crystals. They couldn’t replenish the blood, but they could reinvigorate him enough to stay awake. Finally, the rest of the blood required was drained out and Seth swiftly used another recovery crystal. He watched with woozy eyes as the entirely black page finished absorbing his blood. Next, the book closed in his hands and melted into a stream of black oil that dripped down his lap and onto the floor where it disappeared into the shadow beneath the bed.
“Well, that wasn’t creepy at aaalll.” He slurred.
Upon the book disappearing, two new screens popped into view.
- Fill each page with one liter of the recipient’s blood. (Reward: Concept Treasure (Class A)) *Claim?*
Seth drunkenly nodded his consent before dismissing the screen and pulling up the next.
-Congratulations! You have received the Title of “Descendant of Crona” due to the successful inheritance of the Ragnarok Bloodline!
Descendant of Crona:
-Grants Black Blood
(Only achievable with one of the following prerequisites: Race: Fiend; Meister)
Black Blood:
-The user’s blood had been replaced with a high-density variant that increases all damage resistances.
-Grants significantly increased resistance to blunt impacts, physical curse immunity, significantly increased recovery rate.
Seth was so out of it he didn’t even notice the silver light of the title taking effect. After the light finally settled, he couldn’t keep himself up anymore and fell back onto the bed and began drooling on the sheets, asleep.