I paused at the corner of the zone. There were darklands to the West of the zone I had just cleared with the ruined town dungeon. It was just after midnight, so they looked quite scary. Well Acid Shot had sixth upgrades and I wanted to see how bad the darklands were at night.

As I approached them, they were dark. Even with my Perception stat being at 5,000 it was very hard to make out anything. I entered the darklands and looked around for the monster. Danger! I leapt backwards as barely visible spikes erupted out of the ground. Acid Shot x5. That cost 800 energy. I would have to watch that going forward since my tank was only 10,000.

The spikes disappeared back under the ground. Danger once again and I moved already targeting where I had moved from. Acid Shot x5. This time the spikes shot out of the ground entirely. There were six of them and they had quite a wide base. They were also dark in color which made them hard to see. They flew at me and splintered apart into hundreds of smaller spikes.

“Aqua Sphere,” they impacted my skill and were swept to the side. I released the skill after a couple of seconds. Acid Shot. They dived under the ground. Seriously!

I realized why zone level 4 monsters were harder than the ones in the dungeons in level 3 zones. They didn’t follow the basic animal or creature theme. They were just crazy monsters that could do crazy things.

Acid Shot. Acid Shot. Acid Shot. I kept using the skill over and over and pressured the spikes back after they burst out of the ground where I had been standing once again. They began to melt and then one of them dropped a point crystal.

That had been annoying, but not too difficult. I quickly left the darklands before any more of those Spikes of Doom showed up. Could I just have a big t-rex or something instead? Not these annoying monsters that gave me headaches.

I made my way into the new level 3 zone to the Southwest. Level 4 zones sucked, and their monsters sucked. I could win, but it was a slog and a half if the monster was annoying. Also, the terrain types were annoying as well.

But that was exactly what I needed. I needed to fight varied monster types to learn any tricks that might come up. Level 3 monsters and below were type based, but level 4 monsters were just crazy and were incredibly varied.

Level 4 still remained a great step up. In the past these types of fights would have been life or death. Now it was life and annoyance. A lot of annoyance. That splitting up, going underground, and flying around, were just a pain. The monster was very weak to my Acid Shot, but it was a pain to hit.

At least it gave me a benchmark on what I could expect to hit the Divine Empress with. It wouldn’t be simple either. I couldn’t over spam Acid Shot, but I could still spam it once the cost went up to 320 energy at 10 upgrades.

I needed the advantage of the gestureless upgrade to have even a hope of keeping up with her. I could also make my own bombs since I knew the design from the one Doctor Katz had given me. Just put in higher level crafting crystals for a bigger boom.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to stock up on some bombs if I did go into a tower. Having more bombs never hurt anyone. I wouldn’t prime them unless I planned on using them, but it would be great to have some if I met up with a monster that had a type advantage over me.

At least the terrain feature of this zone was easy to spot. A large stone tree. I would have called it petrified, but it had never been a real tree. At least I didn’t think so. It was hard to say what this place was or came from, but I considered everything fake and new.

Like one of those homes some recently rich person purchased and then made it look like they had always been rich, compared to rich people who had been rich for a long time. There was just something different about the styles chosen. I guess one was more dated.

Regardless, I treated all of this as a layer of paint and stage props. Also, I was loving the monster in these stonelands. Black sloths were too slow to catch up to me and give me a hard time, so I could just charge forward, leaving them in my dust.

If only all travel was so easy. I missed the roads and wanted an airship. But I was never going on another road while the Divine Empress lived. That was just asking to run into her and getting killed. I reached the giant stone tree and began climbing around the path up its trunk.

Sloths came at me, and I felted them. At the top the level 4 sloths were fast, but not fast enough to dodge a wave of Acid Shots. They even had some sort of shield skill which didn’t do much. There was a clear difference between crazy level 4 monsters and level 4 monsters based on creatures. That difference was esoteric combat abilities. Other than that their strengths weren’t that different.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The skill crystal appeared and offered Death Wave and Force Wave. The second option was interesting. I considered it. It was day 800, and just before noon. Why not? I took the skill Force Wave. It cost 500 energy and created a wave of force. The hand sign was some weird finger wiggling exercise with both hands, one on top of the other.

“Force Wave.” It let out a wave of force pushing the air back in front of me pretty hard and got a breeze going. Now to try something. “Force Wave.” Acid Shot. Nope, I had to do it the other way. I played around with the skill for a bit, and finally got the two to collide by arcing Acid Shot into the air.

There were flashes of white light. The annihilation effect. Well, that was good confirmation I could combine skills like that and considered Force Wave closely. I didn’t really like the skill since it wasn’t an attack. It was a defensive skill, and a bad one at that.

It was a wide range skill, and the annihilation effect didn’t even consume all of the Acid Shot. The amount of energy from each skill was imbalanced. With my Sense stat I could see Force Wave was more spread out and less concentrated. It wasn’t a perfect mixture. But it did react to Acid Shot that was lingering on the stone tree.

If I hit the Divine Empress with Acid Shot, even if she had a way to resist its effects Force Wave would deal massive damage as a follow up attack. I considered this as I left the top of the tree to wait a bit until midday.

It was a tough decision to make if I wanted to keep this skill. I really didn’t like it. I wanted a concentrated ranged attack skill with force type energy to combine with Acid Shot. It wasn’t concentrated, which was the issue I was having with it. If I upgraded it all the way to be silent and gestureless it would cost a whopping 2,000 energy per use.

It wasn’t that good of a trump card for that much investment in my mind. But if I could use both skills at the same time and multi-cast Acid Shot I could have a huge wave of annihilation effects that would be very hard to dodge. One combined attack like that would run around 4,000 energy.

I hadn’t found anything better yet and I hadn’t taken a look at a skill from a level 4 zone yet either. Was it good enough to be my fourth skill?

Midday came and I decided to keep it. The annihilation effect was too powerful to ignore. I hated the skill, but I couldn’t leave that skill slot open. I wouldn’t upgrade it until the very end with the hope I found something better.

But beggars couldn’t be choosers unfortunately and I was feeling pressured since the Divine Empress had returned. I left the tree and headed Southwest. There was a void zone directly South, but I wanted to check out the corner of the zone in the Southwest to see what the two zones to the West were before making a decision.

As I ran, I practiced the new motion for Force Wave. It was stupid having to place my right hand on top of my left and wiggle my fingers in a specific pattern. What did that even have to do with skills? It seemed like an arbitrary restriction.

There was probably some underlying principle, but there was no way I was going to figure it out. That was going to be someone like the good doctor having compiling hundreds of skills and doing a lot of cross referencing.

Perhaps there were secret symbols that could be used. Doctor Katz had speculated on that and I didn’t have enough time with the books written by the UCS to see if they had mentioned something like that. But it was a possibility.

Or it could just be the Almighty System doing everything with its infinite power. Now those would be skills to have. Golden Annihilation Beam or Monochrome Counter Wave. Just start throwing them left and right and plow my way through this place.

Level 10? No problem, have some Golden Annihilation Beam to the face. Whoops just took out the zone. Another monster with a ranged attack, Monochrome Counter Wave, goodbye attack and goodbye monster. You no longer exist.

It was a fun thought to have. But I had a long ways to go to get there unfortunately. I reached the Southwest corner of the zone and there were two level 3 zones. I pulled out my die. I would use my second method this time.

“Even, I go north, odds, I go south,” I said aloud. I then rolled the die three times, 1, 4, and 5. If the first number was odd, I would use the second number, if it was even I would use the third number. That meant four was the number so I would be going to the zone to the West of the one I had just cleared.

I put the die away. I hadn’t seen anything, but it hadn’t escaped my notice that both times, that my method caused me to go a different way than the first die would indicate. But the second time if all the die were added up it would be even. No wait. The first number was 1 and the second number was 4. That meant if the Avatar was using the previous method to alter the die in some way, then I would be going with what she wanted.

I shrugged. The fact I was even confusing myself at this point was exactly what I wanted. If I didn’t even really grasp the decisions, I was making then there would be no way for the Avatar to grasp what decisions I was making.

I set off into the new zone. The monsters were dark blue flying swordfish. I just melted them as they showed up. Not a big threat unless I let them get in close with me.

“Avatar, your father was a donkey and your mother threw up when you were born.” Not a zinger, but I was dredging up the bottom of the barrel for insults. She would just have deal with them being subpar.

“Oh, you know why you like McDonald’s Avatar? They serve your family, nuggets,” I said. Okay that was really bad and she would definitely suffer critical damage from hearing that one.