Chapter 22: Learning together.
Trent continuously formed supports using Create to hold up a teetering stone structure. Every now and again Niv would shift the weight distribution of the giant disk to throw him off. But all in all the task was relatively simple and easy. Or it would be if that was all he was stuck doing. Nivulous had really shown himself to be a wise old mentor. Which of course meant that Trent was stuck doing impossible tasks as he figured out how to upgrade his Skill. He had to admit, it was going a lot faster with the expert advice and rigorous challenges.
The current regime he was on included hunting down two Mentai, leading five Abyssal grunts along a complex pattern, holding a debate with Niv, and making supports out of void to prevent this damn disk from falling over. All through Void Beholders while his real body sat in his room. Upside-down, because why not.
It took a lot of work, but he had upgraded his beholder Skill in record time, with his biggest upgrade so far, and only a week since he created the Skill in the first place.
Skill Name: Void Beholder
Form your will into a sphere. The beholder can fly freely and hide itself from all senses. It is completely controlled by you. You can project all of your senses through the beholder. The beholder acts as an unlimited channel for all your Skills. Enhances the effect of physical Perception used through the beholder.
The updated description didn’t fully do his Skill justice. Not only had it become far easier to create, control, and coordinate large numbers of beholders, but he could also project sound and even light through them. He wasn’t too sure why that wasn’t in the description. They also flew much faster and could go twice as far away from him. The range was still dependent on his stats though.
He had also upgraded his Create Skill with a little advice from Omoz. He was annoyed that he hadn’t figured it out himself, but they did have multitudes more experience. Really, he was lucky that their knowledge of common pitfalls applied to runes as well as Spell patterns. It would have taken forever to figure out on his own.
Skill Name: Create
Mold and solidify the power of your will into physical objects. You may manually form your will into flexible shapes. You can also make molds for certain objects that are saved within the Skill. Current saved molds: Throwing ammo, sword, Armor, wall, small house.
Oh, and he made a new mold, again with the help of Omoz. It took a lot of willpower to create, but if he spread it out along twenty seconds it was easily manageable. And who needs to make a house in less than twenty seconds? If he needed defensive fortifications, his other new mold would fill that role with sufficient speed.
Speaking of which, the defense afforded by his wall was absurd. He really should have made it earlier, but it didn’t fit into his combat style, so he let it lie for a while. But considering he could now play around with Morel Mentai like they were children, he could self-reflect enough to see that was a mistake. Just trapping them in a cube took less than ten seconds to make the six walls—and he could do it through a beholder that they couldn’t sense when it was right in front of them.
For some reason, none of the monsters had an immediate violent reaction to void creations. So even if his beholder wasn’t in stealth mode, they didn’t attack unless he used Voiding from it. And when he used the Skill while in stealth, the monsters just flailed wildly at the air, having no idea where the source of their pain was. Unless Trent himself was within a couple of miles, in which case they locked on and charged him. That was interesting, but he had already learned a lot of that stuff on how these monsters worked from the Velders.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
They had a lot of interesting knowledge about the creatures in this place, which was stored in a ‘library’ of compiled knowledge. Due to the way that Universal Language Comprehension works, they actually needed their own language for that because it only told them what words meant and sounded like, not what they looked like. But the Skill did allow them to learn languages easily once they saw a word written down. By telling them what the word meant and some of its phonetic rules. So after one person came up with a language, anyone who looked at it became totally fluent.
Also, his hypothesis about Velders being completely selfless and full of kindness looked quite likely right now. Every single person he met in the village was kind, generous, and friendly. Some of them, particularly the Elders, had a bit more personality. Not to say that the majority of Velders felt hollow or fake, but they didn’t have much experience with the world or really understand the concept of things different from how they knew them. It made for interesting conversations, although he cringed whenever he knew someone was imagining Earth with a black sky because they didn’t know anything else.
Due to the lack of selfish and harmful tendencies, the Velder village had a lot of the qualities of a paradise, despite being located in a desolate hellscape. And according to the Elders, this was just one of many villages occasionally dotting the slope they were on.
Trent decided that he had suffered through enough of Niv’s training. He called a stop and flew out of his beautiful house to meet Niv with his real body. The pseudo-sadistic saint grinned at him. “Had enough already? I’m certain you can go further.” Trent crossed his arms. “I’ve gotten enough out of Void Beholder that I think I could make more progress with something else. I’m not making modifications anymore, just familiarizing myself with the ones I’ve made.”
Niv nodded. “What do you think you want to work on next? I personally think you should take advantage of the differences between your Skills and Spells. Making more things like your Condense Will and Void Attack will essentially be a straight upgrade to your combat power. Something even Med struggles with immensely, not to mention the rest of us. We have so many limiting factors that you don’t have to worry about at all.”
It was Trent’s turn to smirk. “I guess I’ll build a couple dozen more Condense Will structures. That should keep me occupied for a couple weeks, and it’s a direct boost to my power like you said.” Nivulous raised an eyebrow. “Sure. Of course, I’ll be having you regularly ambushed to train your Void Attack.” Trent vehemently shook his head. “Not everything can be trained. Void Attack is automatic, so that won’t accomplish anything worthwhile.”
Nivulous sagged in exaggerated disappointment. “Ok. I just can’t get used to someone not getting any inherent benefits from pushing themselves…” This referred to one of the advantages that Spells had over Skills. Due to the way they were created more naturally, every time they would cast the Spell it actually refined it a miniscule amount. Especially in stressful or challenging situations.
Trent’s Skills didn’t have this advantage, with their effects based solely on their own structure and any power sources he connected it to. Even the concepts were drawn from by runes, leaving the only upgradable part of them as his own stats. And obviously, upgrading those wasn’t fast or significantly impactful.
Of course, this didn’t equalize the board between Skills and Spells. Maybe if Skills were way harder to create, as his Titles implied, the contest might be closer. But as it was, he would probably be dealing with a lot of jealousy if Velders were capable of sin. Huh, generally demons are associated with sin. Maybe there was something really weird like the Demon Physiology siphoning any sins to fuel itself. Why did he randomly speculate like this?
Anyways, the point was that Nivulous’ training methods were formed around the principle that using the Skill in a difficult and high-stress environment would produce real progress. And possibly also the sadistic tendencies of said Elder, only barely suppressed by his nature. So, while it was useful practice for using his Skills, they didn’t actually get better from the intense training. Nivulous knew that, but he was just being Nivulous and pretending he forgot. These venerable and wise Elders made it really difficult to respect them.
But despite that, he held out some hope that the Skills he would work on next would be a relaxing endeavor. After all, Nivulous couldn’t be THAT evil. Right?