Once again, though sorely tempted, he forewent the upgrade to Mana Bolt, hoping it would crop up in a future lottery. It had come twice already and honestly, he seemed so very far from the point where the other person seemed to have reached that he was highly confident there were a great many core compressions between here and there. So with a twitchy finger itching to shoot off upgraded Mana Bolts, he turned his back on that option.
Truthfully, another, different spell would have been much more enticing. Something like Arcane Spark had been. Giving him a wider range of abilities and the option to multi-cast along with Mana Bolt would be a huge upgrade. The other huge upgrade? Investing in the future and the now, with some kickass skills to improve every single spell he had. Would have. He’d just need to get some more working spells, then he’d be upgrading more than just the singular one. Either way it was an investment that would pay dividends, starting from right now!
The question really then became, invest in efficiency and likely improved endurance for Mana Bolt and other spells, or invest in slipping past the notice of his enemies, sneaking in his existing shots without tripping their defenses? A different kind of efficiency that one. He’d gone all firepower with Arcane Spark, particularly when trying to force a power boost on it. That had gone devastatingly not well. Well… he lived. He blew up everything in a huge range. Then the residuals had nearly killed him. Mixed results at best, unless you count how he couldn’t use the spell anymore due to that choice.
So the obvious direction had to be stealth. When raw overwhelming power fails you and efficiency is just boring optimization, go the path of the ninja. Hell, he was basically a pair of gnarly hands sticking out of a cloak made of shifting shadows. Couldn’t get any more shadow assassin than that, could he?
A certain skill option said yes, yes he could.
The efficiency skill and the Mana Bolt upgraded spell faded away as his mental librarian filed the Obfuscation skill into the meager but growing collection. The information flooded his mind. Oh. Oh! It was so obvious now! Really it was almost the same side of the coin as the efficiency upgrade! He wouldn’t actually get any reduced ‘heating’ effect from this, but he would reduce instead the energy he wasted into the environment both personally and from his cast spells. The efficiency skill focused on the spell circuit, this focused on the result.
Almost instinctively, now that the new knowledge was spliced into his mental ‘muscle memory’, he began manipulating his Shadow in very minor ways. Small control was feasible with some concentration. The knowledge helped to make it second nature, like something practiced thousands upon thousands of times. Still, the actual muscle itself was still weak and struggled to achieve the level of control the skill told him it could achieve. Some though, was better than none. The little wisps of Shadow on the edges of his cloak grew more smooth, the tiny amounts which he’d been unknowingly shedding now significantly reduced. Similarly the little bits of Mana leaking from his core were slowed substantially.
Whether he’d been able to notice this much specific detail before the skill was added to his knowledge, he did not know, but it didn’t feel new. More that he’d just never bothered to pay such close attention. Close attention was the word of the day, it seemed, for he was now paying close attention to almost everything he did. Moving his arm, his head, gliding along, all of these things he was far more conscious about. The knowledge informed him how to glide just that little bit smoother, so it emitted less Mana and stressed space itself less. It whispered how to move his arms so that his cloak would not make a noise.
Make a noise? Was there actually air and sound and he just couldn’t hear? No, no he was pretty sure there was no air. When the dirt from the surface was blasted and the dust of it flew into the air, it fell under gravity but never drifted or moved as if by a wind. Never slowed its decent. With his new attention to detail he scanned through his memories and realized that it had always fallen at the exact same rate as larger chunks. He also started to realize a great many inefficient movements, shots he’d taken, poorly chosen targets, and how he’d been broadcasting his strategies. If he’d been facing more than mindless or nearly mindless enemies, he’d have been an open book. Simple.
A great many little ones of Them were approaching again, the Really Big Blob having been vanquished with such terrifying ease and overwhelming power, there was nothing to drive them away or eat them. He smiled, rather he pretended he was smiling because he was still unsure about the whole face or not face thing. The Mana Bolt circuit built within him, maximum empowerment modification to the main circuit elements. It was almost entirely cooled now, which was perfect. The modifications that Obfuscation whispered to him were something he could do even with the built structure. It was about actively manipulating and assisting the spell result which formed rather than the circuit itself. It was a skill that involved general manipulation and not just spell structures.
Beautiful. A perfect compliment to his existing arsenal. The shots started to fly. The energy appeared dramatically dimmer, yet they hit just as hard. None of the little ones ever made any attempt to dodge or shield themselves, so for now he was mostly just observing the differences visually. If he thought about it though, they also felt dimmer, quieter. They felt, well, weak. Really weak compared to their actual power. That was perfect. Exactly as he’d hoped.
It was time to start grinding up some Mana.
--
At first he’d just powered continuously through the smallest ones, never giving them a chance to form into a Big Blob, not even part way. It was great for efficient Mana gathering, but terrible for his mental state. It was frankly far too repetitive. Not feeling physical needs went a huge way towards patient repetition, since the passage of time and the frustration and discomfort of extended periods all sort of faded away from his mental space. It was a bit like sensory depravation, though he could still see and feel things. He wasn’t totally disconnected from it all, but substantially so.
He did start to get bored though. Then he got really, bored. Then really, really bored. So bored that if he was reading this as a story he’d probably be craving for something different to happen. How many times did the protagonist, being himself obviously, handsome fellow clad in slick Shadow and sporting the fastest Mana Bolt in the West, how many times did he have to just keep fighting the same battles over an over?
He figured the readers… er, himself, rather, deserved a little more interesting stuff. So he enticed a bunch of Them to entangle and rise into a Big Blob. When the apparently weakened shots flew out, the BB made only the most halfhearted of attempts to shield against it, barely reacting only at the last moment. What wasn’t even a quarter of a full power shot pierced easily and dealt a devastating blow. The second and third small hits popped the BB while it reeled from the shock of the unexpected damage. All in all, less than three quarters of a full Mana Bolt popped what would have taken an empowered one.
Shadow assassin unlocked!
--
He had another problem. If he really did all of the things the skill told him to do, less than half as many of Them were spawning. He could easily handle them at their normal rate too, so he’d already stopped going ‘stealth’ with his Shadow. With his Mana Bolts though, he pushed himself, flexed that mental muscle as hard as he could, feeling and noticing the minute increases in both his fine control and the strength of his manipulation. Doing it to his Shadow felt like a different, yet similar, muscle. Controlling Mana Bolt wasn’t training the Shadow muscle, but it was letting him power farm. He let a BB form every so often just for some variety, but the real issue was he needed more. More targets.
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He could easily handle the amount of Chaos coming in right now. As he neared the next core level he could always stealth up and reduce the influx. For now he really wanted to increase the spawn rate of Them. So he considered this skill. It told him all of the what to do to reduce his emissions. Could he… do the opposite? Do the absolute ‘not to do’? Hmmm…
--
What he’d thought before, about the whole bored thing? About the not enough enemies thing? Yeah, that was a lie. Boring was good! Boring was safe. Boring was a quick rise to the next core level. He’d already been at more than halfway there already just from the endless waves of the small fry before he’d gotten frustrated. He’d even increased his farming rate dramatically by going against the Obfuscation skill knowledge and actually making himself super noisy. The spawn rate had increased… a lot. It had been good, great even! He dialed it in until he was matching it perfectly to his maximum rate of refinement, with only a small buffer.
Now he was edging up to another core compression and he was starting to notice a real pattern here. The skill even told him exactly what was going on too. As his core reached to the nearly full state, his Mana emission signal started to spike, dramatically. Only it didn’t just increase the rate at which all of Them spawned, it increased their drive to entangle and merge. It increased the aggressiveness of the Big Blobs after they did form, and form they did. There were just so many of Them all spawning at once that he couldn’t possibly clear them out before they grouped up.
In many ways, the BB were actually a saving grace. His sneaky shots still worked wonders. They never seemed to learn from the failure of their nearby kin at all. Only they were also almost as interested in each other as in him, meaning that more than once he’d nearly had a Really Big Blob form. Even with the stealthy shots reducing the amount they defended, the raw thickness of the Shadow layer had meant it had taken almost a dozen full power shots to take down each one of the near-RBBs.
It was easy to tell them apart, because they started eating their neighbors all of a sudden, sprouting all of those whiplike limbs instead of just being much bigger, tougher balls of Shadow and Chaos. Oh, and they got a lot faster too, with the range to make them deadly even if they couldn’t almost keep up with his pace. He’d been determined to keep them from forming into a level that was beyond his ability to take down on his own though.
There was, for one thing, the principle of the kill steal. Every kill that was stolen from him was Mana and Shadow making someone else more powerful. Compared to the only other he’d seen, he was a long way behind. The last thing he needed was to feed others and keep himself weak. Bringing their attention would also make him a target. It was likely there would be others out there who would just kill him rather than simply leave after saving him. Hell, that was downright friendly given that they may lack much in the way of ability to even communicate. Their mere presence might be deadly or painful to each other too, for all he knew. Simply sniping him from a distance with that terrifying spell actually made a lot more sense.
Or maybe he was just left alive to keep Them spawning?
It didn’t really matter now. All that mattered was that he’d just barely taken down that last, forming RBB, and that there was another one forming. Only Mana Bolt was still pretty overheated, so he had dropped the spell to let it cool. Pushing his stealth skills to the absolute limit, he was able to reduce the spawning rate of Them until the near-RBB had nothing to grab and consume. It was in that liminal state between a BB with tentacles and an endless hunger, slow but able to rapidly grow, and an RBB with skin too thick to effectively pierce with Mana Bolt and too quick to truly outrun. Outglide. Whatever.
His mental fingers hovered over whatever pseudo-physical thing that was the spell in his memories, testing the temperature of the unbuilt circuit, feeling the heat reducing rapidly. The BB was whipping out at him, but he was beyond its reach, kiting it along and away from as many of the little ones of Them as he could. They were still spawning, but a little less than the normal rate. That, and they ran the moment they spawned, fleeing from their hungry cousin.
Mana Bolt was finally almost cooled. He spent several seconds building the maximally enhanced spell. His speed at building an empowered circuit was improving a lot. He could do it in a little less than half the ten or so seconds it had taken before. A continuous spray of weak seeming, focused and short shots ripped in trails of strike points along the BB. Many struck limbs instead of the main body, even though it didn’t make much effort to protect itself, just from the number and size of the flailing noodles. The spell started to heat up and he let it go. The BB was staggering, hovering below the level of Shadow and Chaos that would be enough to start the tentacle formation.
Once they’d formed however, they stuck around. They got slow, clumsy though. Like it didn’t have enough processing capacity to handle them. So it lurched, lunging for and sometimes even missing some of Them that were within reach. It ate. It wasn’t enough though, the BB barely started to regain its energetic motion again when another blast of shots went through it. This time it was truly destroyed, popping and spewing forth its delicious energetic internals.
Nom, nom, mutha. He honestly had no idea what that meant, but it felt right to think-say it just then. Also so wrong, so very wrong.
His core filled up. He ignored the smaller ones of Them that were starting to spawn again, no longer driven away. He’d, for the moment, eliminated any BB in the near area. A few smaller ones were off in the distant, now turning to head towards him again, but they were still well within the mindless blob stage and damn slow. Right now he needed to do two things. Compress a core, which seemed like it required some kind of insight, and secondly, not get eaten while he did that. Chaos hadn’t quite Overwhelmed him. That last ‘meal’ had filled him up just perfectly so.
Thus he started forming a warm, but serviceable Mana Bolt to keep the little suckers away, while he mostly concentrated on what it was he could realize. Just a little enlightenment. Easy, happens every day. Just a normal, all the time thing. Some kind of minimally profound realization.
Any… any time now.
Ugh, this wasn’t going to work! He needed to really think about what he was trying to do. Each time it had happened, he’d been determined. Determined to survive. Recognizing something about what survival was, what it required. It hadn’t been just being alive, because being alive was meaningless if you were the only one. He needed to get stronger. He needed to have allies, only, he’d realized, sometimes being alone was much safer. Not everyone or everything would be or could be an ally.
Survive. Get stronger. Not alone, but also, alone when needed. What was something he was missing?
He thought of how the other person had flown off. Just, freely gone off into the empty sky and around the edge of the horizon. If he could do that, he wouldn’t need to worry about constantly fighting Them off, constantly watching out for their spawns. Maybe there were even genuinely safe places? He would just have to survive, because survival would eventually lead to freedom.
Oh shit, turned out it was pretty easy! His core was crushed into a little speck as the pressure of his little moment of enlightenment bore down upon it.
Three volumes were laid out before him in his mental space.
Someone had to be shitting him, whatever that meant. Three familiar volumes sat before him, only one of them was so perfect it would have made him cry, had he the ability.
An upgraded Arcane Spark. He would just take that one, yes and thank- wait, no, he needed to consider his options. After all, the second volume offered was an upgrade to his stealth, his Obfuscation skill. It had already proven very effective. What could it be if he upgraded it? He still didn’t feel though that he was fully utilizing the knowledge he already had, his mental muscles just too weak, lacking precision or strength. Skill though could overcome a great deal of that gap and open the potential even further. How close could he get to totally hiding his presence? His spells? Even an RBB might be doable if it literally didn’t see him, didn’t see his shots? He could just slowly pick at it, so stealthy that none of Them were spawning to strengthen it.
The other was the last time reject, Spell Efficiency. Had it been offered again intentionally? Had it been totally random? It felt… pushy. It felt like someone or something was urging him to take it. Yet the choice was his to make, even if the options were limited. He thought each of them over.
Upgrade Arcane Spark, have a more powerful spell. The spell in the offered upgrade felt complete, not like it would just modify a broken spell and leave him with a broken spell. He’d get it back, but better. That sounded like a big hell yes.
Upgrade his Obfuscation skill. Get stealthier. Control spawn rates of Them more. Maybe hide from bigger enemies enough to whittle them down from nearby and yet from safety. Hide his spells even more, fooling his opponents into a sense of false imperviousness. The path of a badass Shadow assassin?
Increase the efficiency of his spell circuits, cast spells for longer without overheating them, use a little less Mana in the process, reduce the risk of shattering a spell. Long term benefits to his current and future spells.
Three good choices.
It was time to choose just one.