Chapter 10: Important decisions.

Trent had quite a few new options for Skills, even if a few of them couldn’t be used. A few of them seemed to be based on his Titles—one for each, if you counted Runeforger as all of its referenced Titles—which gave him some insight towards the use of Titles.

He opened the descriptions of the new Skills.

Skill Name: Flurry Throw

Activate to unleash a barrage of throwing projectiles. Increases the speed at which you throw by 1500% but halves the power of each throw. Uses stamina. Can be combined with other throwing Skills.

Skill Name: Prodigy’s Boost (passive)

A Prodigy learns faster, grows faster, and achieves beyond what the rabble can dream of. This Skill increases your talent for most skills and magic. Also boosts experience gain by a small amount.

Skill Name: Rune Manipulation

Enhance and manipulate Skills using mana. Allows the user to apply mana to non-mana using Skills to make changes and increase the Skill’s power. You cannot choose this skill due to crippled magical stats, despite having the requisite Title. 

Skill Name: Marathon (passive)

Allows the user to keep running long after their body should have collapsed. Reduces stamina consumption from running by 95%.

Skill Name: Bombardment

Rain death upon your foes. Use when throwing a projectile to decrease air resistance of the projectile by 90% as well as increase accuracy by 400% and speed by 50%. Projectiles release their force in an explosion on impact.

Skill Name: Skill Sight (passive)

A key portion of any Skill researcher’s skill set. Allows the holder to see metaphysical portions of Skills. Can show the mechanism of some Skills.

Skill Name: Anti-Skill

Activate to disrupt and negate a Skill. Relies on your understanding of runes.

Skill Name: Copy Skill

The ultimate capstone of Skill creation. Sense Skills activated in the nearby area and form a temporary mana pattern that imitates their effects. This may give you insight into those Skills and allow you to replicate them fully. You cannot choose this skill due to crippled magical stats, despite having the requisite Title. 

Some of these seemed better than others. Besides the ones he couldn’t use, he easily discarded the other two ‘Skill’ Skills as he wasn’t even sure the monsters in the Abyss used Skills. Bombardment seemed real nice at first, but it had a few flaws that made it less than ideal for his situation.

The fact that it didn’t boost damage was the key. Even if the speed boost also increased the damage (If basic laws of motion still applied), the effect was only better than Power Throw if the target had a range limit to its aggro or own ranged attacks. This was because most demons would just chase after him, and then get stuck in Voiding where he could definitely hit them without an accuracy boost.

And it being better than his current Skill was key, because it didn’t have the text in Flurry Throw that said it could be combined. That usually meant it either couldn’t be combined outright, or there was some penalty for doing so. Even if he could enhance it with void, Flurry Throw would be better for now.

That left three Skills. The aforementioned Flurry Throw, Marathon, and Prodigy’s Boost. Flurry throw represented an eightfold boost to his dps, but required 16 times the ammunition. Even if he dug up a lot of rocks beforehand, the actual rate of fire would be lower because of the time taken picking up rock after rock, which wasn’t sped up. The Skill was good, but he would save it until he got a dimensional storage of some sort.

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Prodigy’s Boost was really vague, and he didn’t like that. What was talent, and how big was the boost? Also, the flavor text was a bit annoying.

After a while of deliberating, he concluded that he wasn’t going to take the risk. There wasn’t much that ‘talent’ would do for him here besides possibly help with manipulating Skills. It was better just to grab something with an actual usable effect.

That left just Marathon. But did he really want it? A 95% cost reduction was amazing, no doubt about that. He could go full sprint from one religious experience to another without running out of steam. But what was the point of that? If he wanted speed, he could still just take sprint, and a religious experience would heal his exhaustion anyway. Looking at it logically, his endurance was plenty enough for running.

But... that was all of the Skills. He went back to the ones he had dismissed. Bombardment was still sucky, and Prodigy’s Boost didn’t have enough concrete information to rethink. But Flurry Throw... The loss in power was definitely made up for by the throwing speed, even if it wouldn’t quite be an eightfold difference.

And what about the stuff he could learn from its runes? If he could get whatever sequence boosted the speed and apply it elsewhere... Yeah. This would definitely work.

He went over all the other Skills one last time in an attempt to identify anything he had overlooked. There was nothing. So he made his choice, and gained his new Skill- Skills?

Skill gained: Flurry Throw.

Skill gained: Identify.

Skill Name: Identify

Use on another being or object to produce a name or basic description. May show additional information.

Well, that was neat. Basically useless, but it made him happy to have another Skill in his status. He looked inwards towards his mind space.

The two new rune clusters spun into being, one far more complex than the other. The smaller cluster was mostly just a simple sighting and criteria connected to an incomprehensible shifting rune that must represent the system’s database that Identify would access. It gave him a headache just looking at it.

The other Skill was much more complex, containing four interconnected parts. The obvious ones were the conceptual fuel, the empowering/speeding up part, and the application mechanism. But the fourth part looked a bit different. It was fueled by the concept, but also itself fueled the concept. It was also being fueled by the... application mechanism? What could this be... oh.

Trent dug up some rocks, and while looking at the Skill in his mind, activated it and started throwing. All of the rocks flew out of his hands almost instantly. The Skill definitely also had an effect on his Mind stat, but only in the sense of giving him an extra window to calculate each throw.

But the important part was what the extra piece of the Skill did. It drained out energy from each of the throws and gave it into the Skill to boost his speed. If that was the case, what if he altered that part to accept void power instead? It couldn’t be that simple... could it?

It was that simple.

The process still took a few days, but it was fairly simple to connect another bridge of void to the new mechanisms. He even altered the actual inner structure of the Skill a bit to better accept the interesting properties of his energy.

He was so inspired by it that he took a bit of time afterwards to redo the alterations of Power Throw. The Skills looked like this.

Skill Name: Flurry Throw

Activate to unleash a barrage of throwing projectiles. Increases the effective agility for each throw by 1500%. Uses a little bit of stamina and void power. Can be combined with other throwing Skills.

Skill Name: Power Throw

Increase the physical force of a thrown object by 150%. You can focus on this Skill to increase the effect to 642% and make the thrown object damage conceptual effects. 

The results were incredible. Not only had he eliminated the power penalty, but the stamina cost was reduced at the cost of some void power. Which was actually just his willpower, and he didn’t have to worry about running out. A bit of testing proved decisively that the change to effective Agility was definitely a benefit. Now the Skill actually increased his throwing force.

The boost to Power Throw was much less impressive, but it was still nearly a 100% increase. Around one seventh higher than the previous total.

The whole thing still suffered from a lack of good ammunition or a way to store it, but he now had a plan to solve at least part of that. After all, creation always came before destruction.

Trent continued to hunt down more and higher level Abyssal grunts, now much more effectively than before. He was slightly regretting the choice to not take Bombardment, as his rocks suffered a serious range limit from burning up in the air before they reached his target. But unless he could make it work with his other Skills, the rocks wouldn’t even have enough speed to run into that problem.

His own abilities with altering Skills were definitely not up to making things like that compatible. It seemed less like a function of runes and more the system allowing certain concepts to combine better than others. There weren’t any structures in Flurry Throw that would account for that ability, at least.

On the other side of things, he was making good progress on his other idea to improve his combat power outside of levels. He had already managed to make a mass of runes exit his mind and exist in a gaseous state similar to the Morels. It would be a long time until he could make usable projectiles out of void power.