His finger stabbed down in relief when he spotted what he wanted.
Humans - Page 8
Almost buzzing in excitement, he flipped the pages open. This was it. Finally, he was getting his answers!
Humans.
Possess Three Racial Traits
He read the heading in a state of disbelief. After almost three sessions, he had finally found it. What he had been secretly hoping to uncover the whole time but had been too afraid of the answer, too terrified of disappointment to dedicate the time to search for it.
But he shouldn’t have been. He had been wrong. His fears misplaced.
There were three traits!
They had done it, and finally he could see a description of what his team had achieved in his absence.
Directable Fate: Can actively direct fate.
Tom’s eyes skipped over that first trait. It was better than the words suggested; a doozy of an ability, of course, and the key to his future success. However, for him it was boring. It was exactly what they had already before he had died.
Community Fate: Fifty percent extra fate is generated and then automatically split in equal parts to provide a revenge pool* to protect the individual, the community and the species. These fate pools decay at ten percent per day.
Additionally, if the entire fate pool is emptied, regenerated free fate can be directed to the community benefit and have the usual stickiness penalty reduced by 75%.
*The revenge pool acts independently, and is dedicated to causing bad luck to any non-human sapient that hurts the members of the pool. The backlash aims to duplicate, with interest, the negative impacts inflicted upon the human victim, from maiming to death. This can extend to killing sapient creatures through the created misfortune many months after the initial transgression.
Intrinsic Fate Link: Provides a number of benefits:
Fate is 20% more potent.
Bloodline fate properties are improved.
Receive +1 fate per level.
And, fate specific traits, skills and spells are 30% easier or cheaper to acquire.
Tom stared at the two extra traits that had been added since he was last alive.
A huge grin split his face.
He clapped in excitement.
They had done it!
He had suspected they had. But this… this was evidence.
Clare and the others had done it.
They had been successful. He couldn’t tell if they had managed it in the first year, two, four, eight or sixteen years, but they had definitely done it. Humans had stolen another species’ traits during the competition!
It was a massive achievement.
All those years of planning, the sacrifices he had made to see this through – it was all worth it, since they had been able to succeed. Following the plan that he had laid out for them, without DEUS’ Chosen to keep them on track. It was incredible.
And what a success it was! It almost made him feel less guilty about dying due to a stupid mistake.
Tom knew he had skimmed over the exact wording, but the additions had all felt powerful.
He focused on Community Fate to try and understand the precise benefit it brought.
There were two parts to it.
The first was the revenge shield component. The wording was confusing, but nothing that a bit of mathematics in the pseudo-system room couldn’t resolve. What it did was create three pools of fate over time, each of which was one and a half times the size of the person’s personal fate pool. That storage would then act as a direct and collective threat to anyone who hurt any humans.
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“A revenge shield,” he repeated those words while his mind was striving to understand the intricacies underneath the broad description. If a sapient attacked, and then either materially hurt him or killed him, some of the fate that had built up in his pool, the local community storage and the species dam, would be unleashed to eliminate them. It wasn’t stated explicitly, but he suspected that if the enemy was killing multiple people, the species pool would release a lot more fate than if someone had only killed one person. The released fate would not act as a protective shield – rather, it was dedicated completely to offensive action.
The part of the description that made the racial trait special was the section that said ‘many months after the initial transgression.’
That addition made all the difference.
If you killed a human, you would create a pool of fate that wanted to kill you. Most of the time, that wouldn’t be enough. But if you kept killing that hostile intent following you would only grow. Eventually, you would get in a seventy thirty fight or a sixty, forty fight where you would expect to win, and then that entire pool built-up over months would be out to get you. Everything that could go wrong, would, and you would die.
The idea was insidious.
A pool of fate that could wait until the killer of humans fought someone near its own strength, and then the world itself would turn against it. The ground would slip under their feet, magic with a low chance of failing would implode, the monster would dodge the right way and, when they themselves have to guess the safe position to dodge into, they would choose wrong. Each error like these had only a small influence on the battle, but when you added them all up, they guaranteed the killer’s death. And given how the trait worked, you were not necessarily talking about small amounts of fate, either. He remembered Bir during their most recent bubble session. She had only been spending a few points of fate, but it had made such an extraordinary difference. She had gone from average to dominating as a result.
That was with less than five points. The Revenge Shield worked on a level orders of magnitude higher. If someone killed a handful of humans, it was easy to see the combined contributions from all three pools building up to the point where thousands of points were acting against them. They would die fast.
Despite its strength, it was a deterrent, not a shield. Once other species discovered that humans had this trait, they would be very hesitant about attacking. Until then, humans would remain fair game to all those stronger around them.
Tom remembered the ladder and the consequences and benefits of each of the seven spots.
This new trait functioned the best when humans were together. The importance of getting into the top four was only increased by the presence of this racial trait. This revenge pool would not matter if you were up against a single human. Yes, the hostile revenge-fate might, on occasions, be problematic. But if it was someone strong eliminating the weak, then the low levels of revenge fate would not be able to get through the natives’ natural fate reserves. But if you had to fight ten million humans, even if they were pathetic and unlevelled, a small amount of fate multiplied by thousands would make powerhouses that would give even a terror race pause.
One often-quoted rule in Existentia was that quality trumped quantity. One powerful person could defeat a hundred weak ones. However, this racial trait turned that paradigm on its head. It didn’t matter now if you were many times stronger than humans - if you killed enough of them, that revenge fate would build up until there was so much of it that it would kill you. Where once someone might have been able to kill a thousand humans a day without any issues, with revenge fate in play, even eliminating a hundred would become a death sentence.
“You’re the best, Clare. You’re amazing.” The words slipped out. She had done it without DEUS’ Chosen to help her with her strategies. She was completely missing his aid and the benefits of his preparations, and she had managed to pull off a victory anyway.
This! This was exactly what he had wanted.
A real future for humanity in Existentia - and that’s what that trait did.
The secondary component of Community Fate was not as interesting to him, though his strategic mind disagreed. It was happy to remind him that removing the stickiness penalty was a massive upgrade to the flexibility of the primary trait. His team had performed the impossible and beaten the dragon, and a lot of that success had been achieved by stacking fate for months until it was effective despite the loss of efficacy normally caused by using fate away from themselves. What they had unleashed against the dragon would have been four times stronger if this trait had been in existence.
Nevertheless, while it didn’t create any excitement, it certainly explained why all the adults had empty fate pools. The town was clearly taking advantage of that part of the racial trait. With a thought, Tom created a note in his to-do list. He was definitely going to find out what the fate of ten thousand people was being directed towards, because that sounded awesome. Some of it would be directed permanently to security, he was certain of that. Another chunk, he was sure, would be used to protect the reincarnated ones, but Tom wondered if they were using it for more exotic purposes. Say, like occasionally applying it to supercharge crafting, or to help everyone in the orphanage to improve their abilities. It was safe to assume that a lot of strategic minds would be guiding the plan. Unfortunately, he guessed, it would be awhile until he was able to uncover those exact details. Still, it was nice to imagine what such a massive amount of reality-defying potential could be directed at accomplishing.
Asking those types of questions as a four-year-old, or even an eight-year-old, was definitely a no-go, though.
Finally, the Intrinsic Fate Link was also interesting because of the variety of actions that it supported. Curiously, he flipped through the book to get an idea of the racial traits that different native groups had received.
He wanted to understand how powerful Intrinsic Fate Link was, because, unlike Directable Fate and Community Fate, Intrinsic Fate Link had values that he expected he would be able to compare against the racial abilities of other species.
With mounting excitement, he checked what the other species had. This was good, maybe even great.
This gave humanity a real chance.