The first thing I did when I finished Sammael was head out into the woods to test it out. First, I started with my strength. It was hard to check out the specs on it without equipment, but the easiest was was to use the trees. Since the older, larger trees were all C-rank, it was tough to put a dent in the damned things, which made them the perfect metric for my field test.
I didn’t use my staff this time, since I needed to verify what I could do. I took up a position in front of a tree, set my feet, and brought my fists to my hips, chambering them. I didn’t do much in the way of unarmed combat, but you don’t learn from someone like Abel for a few years without picking up a trick or two. After a long, slow breath, I unleash a punch, my gauntleted hand smashing into the C-ranked tree like a battering ram.
The tree shook slightly, leaves drifting down, but was otherwise mostly undamaged. That was fine, I wasn’t starting full tilt. I needed to work up to it, get a good baseline for my normal strength and exactly how much damage I could do at each basic level of effort.
Which was why I activated Dantalion, triggering my information gathering form as I threw my second punch, making sure that my plant senses through Rhythm of the Wild were active as I used it as a metric to figure out a benchmark for that first punch. I didn’t know how to calculate force or what formulas or units of or measurement to use, so I just decided to call a single, forceful but casual punch “a Shane”.
Repeating the action, I ramped up, and was able to establish that my maximum force output was nineteen Shanes. With that confirmed, I triggered Sammael, and almost fell over on my ass as the absolutely colossal upswing in processed information made me nearly black out from shock.
Wheezing, I lay on the ground, trying to pull back on Dantalion, muffling my access to the form as best I could.
That was the really scary thing about Sammael. It was a base form. It amplified my stats at a flat rate, pushing me closer to middle of D-rank than the first quarter. Dantalion worked through Focus, and the massive upsurge in the stat pretty much knocked me on my ass.
Once I was able to quiet some of that information (by essentially shutting down Dantalion to a trickle) I stood back up, flexing and testing out my power. I didn’t feel unleashed, like I would on a lower rank world, but I did feel less inhibited. I’d gotten used to the suppression here by now, so I hadn’t even noticed how stifled I was until I could feel it melting away.
Taking a deep breath, I beat my wings, grinning as I felt myself lift into the air. Flight. Theoretically I’d been capable of flight for ages now. D-rankers could fly in lower ranked worlds, where their personal Impact was equal to or greater to the planet and could allow them to overpower the suppression of gravity to a higher degree than just not being affected.
Sadly, Rackham was a B-ranked world, so flight was far from possible for someone at my level. At least…that had used to be the case. My face split in a massive grin as my wings beat the air, carrying me straight up into the sky with a powerful burst of wind. I triggered Bael as I lifted, not wanting to be noticed flying around, but once I got up above the clouds…I stopped caring.
Flying as a person was far different than flying in a shuttle, the feeling of rising up over the world with my own power, carrying myself into the sky as the ground fell away below me…it reminded of the flight all those months ago off the mountain in the Moonsong Glade, when my friends and I had glided out over the dungeon. The thought reminded me of Benny, Jessie, Abel, and most of all Callie.
Which stopped me dead in my tracks (figuratively speaking, I was mid flight, if I’d actually stopped I’d have fallen several miles and hit C or D-ranked ground). Sammael was a form. Callie could use my forms, and it provided a strong baseline for other abilities to work off of. She would be able to use it to boost the power of her Dance of the Abyssal Fairy, and hopefully some of her other techniques. Excitedly, I reached out to her, sending a quick message about the new form and the possibilities.
She seemed to be busy right now, probably training, but she agreed to check it out later, and I was in an excellent mood as I sung around, plummeting to the earth below only to pull up at the last second.
I still had tests to run. So I returned to my tree, and got back into position. I started with my original punch of one Shane. My fist slammed into the tree with three shanes of force, the bark groaning. My face split into a vicious grin and I started chambering and throwing more punches, trying to work up to my full force blow.
Sadly, I’d apparently just been using more raw power than I meant to early on, because my max seemed to be twenty five Shanes, but still, that was more than double my baseline fist force. I’d amplified all my base stats at a resting rate of nearly two and a quarter. I’d have had to do math to calculate it, which wasn’t my thing, but as a base? It was…fantastic.
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I flipped through my forms, seeing what they could do. Rather than just a basic stat boost, I’d designed this form to enhance the usage of my other forms. It was the firm foundation of my entire staff art, and it showed.
Mornax was twice as hard, Belial twice as corrosive, Mephistopheles could output double the flame, and the flame itself had mixed with the Enshrining Darkness to become…something else. Something worse. I’d even tried the mix of Belial and Mephistopheles that made the super corrosive destruction flame, and mixed with Enshrining Darkness, it was pretty absurd.
I needed to focus on it, using Cosmic Collapse to condense the power, but once I’d built up a strong enough blast…I burned the tree. A fist sized chunk of bark and the tree flesh under it was seared away. I could hurt C-rankers. Granted, probably not for long, because the tree started to recover visibly pretty much immediately, but at less than a quarter of D-rank, I had a blow that could harm C-rankers, people who were multiple times more powerful than me in raw stats. If they stood still. And were facing the other direction. And looked back just in time to get hit directly in their unprotected face and eye holes. But still. It was something. I could work with something.
And the more I grew the less of a gap there would be. At peak D-rank I would be able to fight C-rankers directly, even with their large gap in Impact. I’d be capable of ACTUALLY punching up a rank.
The other forms had boosts too. Zagan healed better, Agares did more dust stuff, the only one that didn’t benefit was Beelzebub. Sadly I still only got twelve clones, though they were Sammael clones, which was nice.
It just felt…good. Being so free, so powerful. I felt like I was really capable of holding my own against anyone in D-rank. I wasn’t, some of the stronger peak D-rankers would still kick my ass from the sheer stat difference, but I loved the sensation. I wanted to stay like this all the time, but I was pretty sure suddenly having black hair and wings would be noticeable so I was forced to resume my normal shape.
The difference was apparent, if not overwhelming. I felt like I was moving through water. Nothing debilitating but enough to be inconvenient. It barely took me the time to walk back to the Heart to readjust, but it was something I’d have to work on.
My next task, and the most important one, was to create my one final stance. I wanted to make sure that Bella had a full system of martial arts to work on when I was gone. She’d be safe on the Acheron, but probably either bored or very sore after being beaten by the equally bored crew. I could probably avoid that…but they were good training, so I'd leave it be.
This part was hard. Reactive defense had taken some doing to come up with, but trying to create a new foundation art was…complex. It required a systematic breakdown of all my other stances, learning what they had in common, how they worked and what element they all needed to function as a system.
It took most of an hour, but I finally managed to come up with an idea. Adjusting my base footwork and my grip, I shifted through about a hundred different permutations, using Dantalion to study the way my feet impact the ground, the way my staff cut the air, and to check how it worked with each of my other stances.
Sammael, I’d decided, was going to be an underlying stance that threaded together all of my forms. Bella would be using Sammael all the time when using the Skill, which would do for her a less impressive version of what it did for me, enhance every other stance.
While she couldn’t use the full forms, and wouldn’t have access to a temporary racial trait like me, it would bring her closer to being able to properly mimic my forms for a longer period of time. Presumably. When I found one that worked, I was thrilled to feel something else shift in the Goetia Staff Art, as it solidified even more, finally becoming whole not just for me, but as a complete and established Skill.
I was pretty sure that someone could train Goetia to S-rank now, even if I didn’t get there first. This was a real, full, completely legitimate Skill now, in a way it really hadn’t been up to now. Which made Bella my real first successor, and it made the three Skill shards I’d picked up even more valuable to me.
So, I was in a good mood when I got back to the heart, ready to take on the world. What I was NOT ready for was…a surprise party. I stared in shock as I walked into the secret base to find a dozen familiar faces. Simon, Elena, her daughter, her husband, Mnemosyne, Harper, Chester, Bernadette, and basically everyone I’d met since I got here.
“SURPRISE!” yelled no one except for Bella and Ray. They both sulked as everyone else chimed in late or not at all, but my apprentice quickly blew past it and raced forward, appearing in front of me with a bright smile. “Happy leaving day, Master! Now you get to get away from all these nutjobs and never come back.”
Ray gasped, hand to his chest in exaggerated offense. “Hey! I resent that. He’ll never get away from me. I’ll haunt his nightmares.” He paused for a second. “I think we both will.”
“False, I’ll never sleep well enough to have dreams again worrying about you idiots,” I said fondly. “Now, since this is my last day here, I was planning to call you all together and treat you to a meal…but since you were the ones who planned this I don’t have to pay for food, so I hope you guys got me a cake. I’m starving.”
With a laugh, Bella and Ray both grabbed me and dragged me inside. I shot Chester a grateful smile, knowing he had given a bunch of people his secret base location so I could have this party. I guess we were even for me making it in the first place. Before I focused on the festivities though, I focused on the cake, and took a big bite, sending the sensation across the bond to my wife. Then I cut the connection, reveling in the split second of outrage. Had to keep things interesting for her while I was away.