Chapter 24: Ungrateful fool.

Trent was restless. He wanted to go further up the slope, fighting stronger enemies and leveling up. This was despite the safety and comfort of the Velder village and the fact that he was getting stronger as it was, so there was no need to level up and possibly waste a Skill pick on something sub-optimal.

But still, he just couldn’t stay for much longer. He had gotten bored of the simple and uneventful life, despite how illogical that was. Why? Why was he falling prey to such an obvious and known logical fallacy? There was no reason to rush ahead. But he simply wasn’t strong enough to keep himself focused on upgrading Skills for this long.

So, here he stood, ready to inform Nivulous that he would be leaving. If the old man didn’t already know, of course. Psyching himself up, he spoke the dreaded sentence. “I’m going to leave the village.” Nivulous blinked, then exploded into cheers. “Finally! What are you waiting for? Shoo, Shoo. Get out of here! Finally, some peace and quiet.”

A vein pulsed in Trent’s forehead. “Stop joking around, you little bastard.” Nivulous immediately composed himself and looked at him seriously. “We could all tell. It happens to Velders too, you know. They tire of life in the village and set out on their own to explore the dissatisfying world out there. Normally, we have to persuade them to stay a while, and teach them enough Spells that they can defeat all monsters with no danger.”

“Thank you, sincerely.” Nivulous looked him in the eyes. “You stayed far longer than anyone expected. Not only did you assuage our worries about your ability to survive out there, you have also given us insight into an entirely new style of Spell formation. And, given your Trace Beacon, we don’t have to worry about you regretting the decision.” He grinned, looking fondly at his apprentice. For a short while.

Trent felt a light burning in his eyes. “I… thank you. Now I’m not sure why I expected this to be a problem.” So he left. After Saying his goodbyes and placing beacons on each of his friends, he left his new home to strike out back into the desolate plane of ambition.

Skill Name: Trace Beacon

Use the resonance of your will to place a mark on something. You can tell where that mark is in relation to you from any distance.

He stared back at the walled village, contemplating the events that had led up to this. “Goodbye.” He spoke. “Thank you for taking care of this ungrateful fool.”

After leaving, Trent made a beeline for the next zone. He had learned from the Velders that the level 45 monster was a slime, a Penumbral Slime to be exact. It was basically a blob made out of darkness that looked like you were staring into the void. Interestingly, its only method of attack was to force itself into your body, where it would then poison and corrode your flesh. It also had the ability to dull the senses of anything around it, with the effect intensifying drastically if it touched you.

When he found the first one, he did some tests. As expected, his low Vitality made him very vulnerable to the slime’s body, but he could instantly purge it with just a low-level burst of DESTROY. He could even use Void Attack on it, and that was surprisingly effective at stalling the poison. The effects took a while to start up again after being ‘voided’. The sensory debuff would have been effective against him if Void Beholder was affected at all by it.

The slimes posed no threat or challenge at all. Despite that, they gave good experience and he quickly found himself at level 16. He opened his status sheet for the first time in a while.

Name: Trent

Species: Human

Titles: Prodigy, Runeforger, Trailblazer Rune Manipulator

Lv: 16

Affinity: Abyss

Sub-affinity: Opposition

Stats: 

Physical: 

Vitality: 18

Endurance: 33

Strength: 33

Agility: 20

Mind: 21

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Perception: 48

Magical: 

Capacity: 0

Regen: 0

Power: 0

Control: 0

Connection: 0

Perception: 0

Free points: 0

Skills: Voiding, Power Throw, DESTROY, Flurry Throw, Identify, Create, Levitation, Catalyst of Cataclysm, Void Attack, Condense Will, Void Beholder, Trace Beacon

12 Skills. They probably weren’t equivalent in strength, but the number rivaled what a level 60 human would have. If you looked at it that way, he out leveled these monsters. Actually, weren’t humans a really weak species? So would out leveling these things by 15 levels really be enough to trivialize them? Maybe his Skills were actually better than what a level 60 would have. Something to think about.

Trent went on through the slime zone and reached the level 50 area in just over a week. He ignored most of the monsters, simply flying over them with Levitation. He had also learned a bit about the next monster from the Elders, who had actually ventured to this point and further. It was called a Yellow King, a somewhat interesting evolution of the Yellow Knights. Despite the ‘knights’ having very little in common with his traditional ideas of knights, the King did have some traits reminiscent of its title. Namely, it was the only monster to be capable of rallying other monsters to work together.

They not only had a small entourage of around three to seven Yellow Knights but were also usually surrounded by a horde of Abyssal grunts under their control. This control not only grouped them up, but it allowed the King to direct them in some semblance of battle tactics. The Yellow Knights also worked together, but he had confirmed with Nivulous that his defenses wouldn’t have the slightest trouble with their combination attack. And he didn’t have others with him that they would be able to turn against him.

That was actually a huge problem for Velders trying to tackle these guys. Because this wasn’t the normal jump in difficulty for a new monster. They were pretty much raid bosses, necessitating a large number of Velder Elders to safely defeat. Velder Elders. Velelders? Veldelders? VElders? There had to be a decent way to abbreviate that, saying Velder Elders was grammatically awful.

Anyway, the Yellow King represented a huge spike in difficulty due to the fact that it could group up monsters and make you fight them all at once. This was sort of made up for by the relative scarcity of them in this zone, and the fact that it was so easy to locate and avoid. Despite the King having even stronger invisibility than its lesser cousin, the immobile cluster of grunts made it laughably obvious where they were. There was even a noticeable hole in the center of the horde where the bulbous body of the King sat.

Oh, did he mention that? Supposedly, the creature itself was a mass of black flesh with all sorts of different tentacles coming out of it. And writhing. Like, it was literally an eldritch monstrosity. Gross.

Despite being as pitch-black in form as the knights, these things did have something yellow about them. The magic they used. Throwing fireballs, boulders, cutting gales and ice shards. All of them in a dull, translucent yellow. It was sort of an illusion, but it was also as Nivulous put it: ‘real enough to pack a punch’. The king seemingly had access to a mockery of all the magics that Velders possessed, in a less refined state. It just battered anything that challenged its army with a hail of false elements.

The creature’s magic wasn’t the main threat when fighting these guys, but they could apparently summon it anywhere in a large radius around them and had a good sense of when and where it would be most inconvenient to have an icicle stab you in the butt. Altogether, they supported their subordinates rather well. A real boss fight, fitting for the nice round number of level 50.

Although, it didn’t sound all that satisfying to fight. Which really isn’t what he should be worrying about, but he couldn’t really muster up that much wariness about the encounter. with the information he got from the Velders. If he played it safe, there was nothing it could reasonably do to him. Even if it had some last resort single target attack that it had never used against the Velders, Void Attack would make that useless.

All of this came to a point when he finally found one of the kings. The small army of Abyssal grunts stood out like a sore thumb, and his beholders spread out his range of detection far wider. Between that and his massively boosted Perception from Voiding’s stat will infusion, it was a wonder it took him multiple days to find one. Just goes to show how rare the damn things are.

The plan of attack was as simple as usual. Stand a couple miles away and throw balls at the enemy until the enemy is dead. This time at least there would be multiple enemies to kill, but that just meant the threat would decrease as he dealt damage. He built up a pile of Created ammo and started throwing.

With the level of power he had now reached, a direct hit from one of his orbs could easily kill an Abyssal grunt. And he was launching dozens every second. This didn’t quite equal dozens of Abyssal grunts dying every second, but they were still dropping like flies. He could see the efforts of Yellow King at work, with the grunts spreading out and charging him, and yellow barriers of unreal ice and rock reduced the impact of his barrage. But unless he used DESTROY, his attacks weren’t actually explosive. They just contained so much force that it blasted apart the ground on impact.

This meant that the orbs generally just went straight through the barriers with nothing but a little bit of lost momentum. Also, his attacks were tearing up the land so much that the grunts actually struggled to make much progress. The rock ground had grown tougher as he progressed through the zones, but it didn’t scale quite as quickly as the monsters leveled up. So, his fights still got progressively more destructive to the landscape, just not as fast as they should have.

And this actually affected the grunts, despite them being so physically powerful they could probably fly by flapping their arms. The most efficient method of moving through this place was still running across flat ground, and the ground was most certainly not flat after his Power-Flurry throws hit. So, it actually ended up hindering their progress quite a bit.

They didn’t even make it half the way towards him before there was no more movement that he or his beholders watching from all angles could see. The king could be holding back some troops for a surprise assault, but either way the vast majority of his foes were dead. Now he just had to finish off the invisible ones. There was probably very little danger, but he wasn’t going to get complacent.