Lizzy immediately activated her skill for the first time and was quite surprised when her hands suddenly turned draconic and large phantom dragon claws appeared around her, following the movements of her arms.
“Oh?”
She thought that [Dragon Claw] was an instant use skill when she read the description but that wasn’t the case at all.
Skill Name: Dragon Claw Level: 1 Rank: A Description: Slash with a dragon’s claw, dealing (5 x STR) Damage to an area 5 meters ahead of the player. Inflicts [Stun] for 2 seconds Cooldown: 60 seconds Cost: 10 Dragon Force
Reading it again, it never did say that it was an instant use skill. Most of the skill descriptions in Unitale were just plain with most of them having no underlying meaning behind them, however, if one were to look deeper into the skill, they’d be able to find quite a lot of hidden uses and applications. Lizzy made a mental note of this and tried experimenting a little, “Okay, since there’s a lot of test subjects, let’s try it out.”
From just an observation, she had two dragon claws so it seemed that she had two attack charges and could use them at any time. Each dragon claw phantom was pretty large, and by large this meant that they were the size of an adult dragon’s claws―they were much bigger than Lizzy’s body. Not only that, but they were also corporeal despite being ‘phantoms’, so this meant that they had substance and since they had substance, Lizzy was actually able to use them as shields as long as she didn’t lash out with the intention to attack.
A few spiders tried jumping at her but she easily repelled them using her large dragon claw phantoms floating around her. As long as she moved defensively, the actual [Dragon Claw] attack wouldn’t be activated. This was the beauty of Unitale. The game was so flexible that many things that were unimaginable or incomprehensive could be applied to this game. The only things that mattered were the flexibility and knowledge of the player. After finding out the defensive uses of [Dragon Claw], Lizzy now wanted to see its offensive capabilities.
She lashed out with her first dragon claw in a wide arc in front of her, crushing a large swab of spider monsters 5-meters ahead of her along the path the dragon claw traveled before it dissipated. All the monsters hit by the attack were immediately killed so the 2-second stun effect didn’t even apply. There was a small window of time where she could move the dragon claw in any direction she wanted before it disappeared which allowed her to potentially expand the intended AOE like she just did now.
If she were to use the skill normally, there was no way she would be able to complete the feat that she had just done now. This required delicate control of one’s skills and Lizzy had this control. In her hands, the [Dragon Claw] skill became something more than just an AOE attack skill. She could use it defensively and offensively, only geniuses and people willing to experiment in the game were capable of achieving feats like this that ordinary players could never comprehend.
She destroyed a large number of monsters in front of her but there were still many more rushing at her from behind so she turned around and with her second [Dragon Claw], repeated the same motion she did with her first [Dragon Claw]. A large string of EXP messages poured into her [Log] and thankfully, she always kept that muted except whenever she or one of her skills leveled up, else she’d be bombarded with so many notification rings that it’d distract her.
“Nice, [Dragon Claw] does have a lot more potential than I thought. Too bad it has such a long cooldown...”
The 60 second cooldown was quite a long while to wait. If she didn’t have any more AOE attacks, Lizzy would be in a rut right now with so many monsters swarming at her. [Dragon Claw] bought her some time so she continued rushing down the path while clearing the monsters ahead of her with 1-2 slashes of her greatswords. However, even though she had killed so many of these monster spiders, more just continued to take their place. She continued rushing down the pathway for a good few minutes but the spider wave seemed to have no intention of dying down as they just kept on coming at her.
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“What the heck, why are there so many of them? Are they inexhaustible or something?”
******
While Lizzy was having a hard time trying to complete her Awakening Quest, elsewhere, another young lady was struggling to complete a quest of her own.
“Ugh...this is troublesome…” A certain Scylla-race player said as she cut down an aquatic monster.
Sky was currently in the ocean of Gaia and trying to find a lost city that was said to have sunk underwater after the great clash between the higher beings of the Pantheon and the Celestial Order. There used to be many continents on the planet of Gaia, but only one remained and that was the one where the current player base was on.
As Scylla, Sky was able to receive a few hidden race-specific quests from the NPCs of Gaia. These NPCs were on neither side of the two factions at war and they also weren’t part of the Goddess's faction. They were neutral NPCs that could be interacted with by only those who have met special conditions and managed to get in contact with them. Sky had received a chain quest from Eur that led her to Uqualoc before receiving another quest that continued on to Gaia.
The chain quest seemed pretty important considering that the reward for the current quest gave her access to the Void Sea Realm without any hindrances cropping up like the Black Shadow or in-fighting amongst players. Now, it all depended on her if she could finish this quest ahead of time and get a head start in the Void Sea Realm.
Naturally, she wasn’t the only player that had come into contact with these neutral NPCs. Many other solo players or adventurer parties that hadn’t joined a faction were able to acquire their own quests and methods to make it to the Void Sea Realm like the other players.
Sky had brought along her friends for this quest because it was a shareable quest. Naturally, the friends she brought along were Bee and Jin. Being her 2 IRL buddies, they naturally stuck together like glue even before Sky was revealed to be one of the 3 Awakened players in the game. Bee and Jin were naturally a little angry that their home-girl had kept this a secret from them for so long but they were happy for her since the misfortune from last time had turned into a great boon for her.
After her Awakening Quest was completed and she completed her full awakening, Sky had been partying up with the two in hopes of maybe acquiring a quest or an item that would also help them awaken. Naturally, it wasn’t easy but thankfully, one of the rewards from completing the chain quest to find the lost city on Gaia was an Awakening Catalyst Item. The quest only rewarded one such item but Bee decided to let Jin take the item under the guise of ‘ladies first’.
“Hey, Sky...are you sure this is the place we should be looking in?” Bee asked as he approached his friend who was now taking a break from killing monsters.
“Yeah, this should be the place. The map the NPC gave us pinpointed in this general area…”
“Me and Jin, we’ve been searching for days! Even when you went to the IGC―without us, mind you―and still, we couldn’t find anything!”
Sky had already apologized to her two friends for not taking them along when she left the U.S. to head over to Italy to participate in the IGC. Of course, they forgave her, but Bee just loved bringing it up from time to time.
“Oh, shut it, Bee. You know as well as I that there was a ban during the IGC period. No main quest-related progressions were allowed. I’m sure we’ll find something now that the IGC period is over!” Jin said as she approached her two friends after having no luck in finding the lost underwater city they were looking for.
“Dang, this quest is hard...there aren’t even any ruins that can serve as a landmark for us. Normally, if there are ruins, then that’s a sign of civilization, right? If we found them, we’d be able to explore from there...” Sky said as she tried racking her brain for a solution.
“Ruins? Wait, I’ve seen ruins down here before, you guys never noticed them?” Bee suddenly said as everyone found a rock to sit down on for a break.
The two girls turned to their friend who just brought this up now and glared at him.
“Dude, are you kidding me? Since when?!” Sky exclaimed.
“A-A few days ago?”
“You’ve already found the ruins and say it just now?! I’m going to strangle you!” Jin yelled.
“W-Well...we were looking for a city so I assumed that―”
“Bee, zip it. Just lead the way for us, now!”
“A-Alright, jeez, you don’t have to bite my head off…”
“If you told us about this sooner we wouldn’t have been stressing out so much!”