Chapter 124: Traveling
When I woke up in the morning, one of the first things I did was check my Status, looking at Noxious Grasp. Over the night, it’d garnered an extra 667 Spell XP! Up to around 700/1.13k, which meant I was already pretty close to Rank 14. But that new Spell XP requirement of 1.13k was getting pretty steep. Even with Exponential Reclamation, a four-digit requirement for my next Rank was quite a massive amount. Still, if I kept going at my current pace, I’d most likely be able to finish this Rank by the end of today.
I’d used the same method from before to gain as much Spell XP as possible throughout the night, having Erani and Ainash, while they were on watch, wake me up whenever they saw Light Plate disappear from my body so I could put it back on.
Really, they said it helped them out too, since Light Plate allowed them to see in the dark night. Normally, the only source of illumination was the moon, which naturally put them at a distinct disadvantage against the nighttime predators that’d come out when it got dark.
We didn’t get attacked by anything during the night, though, thankfully—I suspected the Demons had probably gone out and slaughtered all of the monsters around their wall during its construction, so I wasn’t too surprised at that. But as we continued to leave the site of the wall, I was sure we’d start seeing some more monsters. Especially once we began entering the territories of the other Dragons.
So, we got up and got moving. Our goal was to get to the Barinruth Empire within the next couple days, and we couldn’t do that while stationary.
It took a few hours before we encountered our first monster. This one wasn’t one of the Drakes that’d become familiar in this mountainous land—and it luckily wasn’t a Dragon, either. Instead, it was a monster that was only really seen deeper into Kingdom’s Edge. A Shadow Panther.
Because of the high stone walls on either side of us—the path we walked having been cut straight into the mountains—we were almost constantly in shade, only ever seeing direct sunlight during noon. And Shadow Panthers seemed to use this fact to their advantage.
They looked how they sounded like they’d look—large, feline creatures with dark fur covering their bodies. Their fur was so dark, in fact, that it allowed them to completely blend in with the shadows the tall stone walls around us created. It seemed like they had some sort of invisibility-adjacent ability to make them almost impossible to perceive while they were cloaked in shade.
I hadn’t heard of them before, but Index filled in the blanks where I couldn’t quite intuit things. They didn’t like hanging around the outskirts of Kingdom’s Edge, near the wasteland, because of the Ghouls that resided there. Since Ghouls sensed with smell instead of sight, it made the Shadow Panthers’ invisibility near-useless against them. So it seemed like they stuck around over here, where the Ghouls rarely wandered out to.
Still, despite their near-invisibility, they weren’t too difficult to fight. It made them hard to spot at first, but once they attacked and made themselves known, I could pretty easily keep track of their movements. The additional Stats I’d been building up with Recursive Growth—specifically, the extra Dexterity—gave me the enhanced senses necessary to be able to spot the small distortions in the air and soft patter of its paws on the stone ground. And Erani’s explosion-based magic didn’t really need her to have a perfect idea of where our enemies were, anyway.
I did decide to use the Shadow Panthers as an opportunity to experiment with Sanguine Bond, though. I’d Ranked it up all the way to 9 already, but I hadn’t used it in true combat yet. So I felt that fighting against some agile opponents would give me good practice with what the Spell would demand me to do.
The thing about Sanguine Bond was that it’d break and prematurely end if I ever let my enemy get more than ten paces away from me. And it was expensive enough that a single failed cast of the Spell could mean big trouble for me. Of course, a successful cast of it was good enough that it was worth the risk, but I’d need to get used to keeping people within that radius.
Now, my build was pretty catered toward doing just that. With Crippling Chill, Ray of Frost, and Gravity Well to slow my enemies down and Expedite to speed me up, as long as I had the Mana for it, I could always ensure I was more mobile than my opponent. And if I had better mobility, I could be the one in control of who was positioned where.
So I started my practice against one of the Shadow Panthers. I let Erani and Ainash know that I wanted to try using the next monster that came to work with the Spell, and to keep from engaging unless it seemed like I was in trouble.
Within an hour, we had a hit. I caught a rippling in the wall next to me—a sign of the Panther’s imperfect camouflage—and readied myself for an attack. The moment it saw that I’d noticed it, it pounced straight at me.
Once it got within a pace or two of my Light Plate, the invisibility from the shadows melted away, and revealed the monster’s looks—pitch black fur and beady eyes, with razor-sharp fangs and claws shining in the newfound light.
I’d activated three Expedites on myself in preparation, so despite the creature’s own blistering speed, I was still able to sidestep and narrowly avoid its swipe. Then, keeping my eyes on it as it landed and turned back around toward me, I hit it with both a Crippling Chill and a Ray of Frost to push its Stats down to a more manageable range, keeping Gravity Well ready to be activated at any time.
The Panther, after being hit with both of the Spell effects at the same time, seemed to realize it was outmatched, and instantly turned to try and flee. That was the issue with trying to use a wild animal to train my skills against; if it realized I was effectively toying with it, it’d obviously run off. But that was why I had Gravity Well ready to activate.
The moment it attempted to run off, I toggled the Spell on, crushing the Panther under a 60% increase in gravity. Then I charged in and turned the attack back on it. While it swiveled around to face me, I tapped it quickly and cast Sanguine Bond—and Noxious Grasp too, while I was at it.
You have cursed Level 14 Shadow Panther with Sanguine Bond. For the next 10 seconds, or until Level 14 Shadow Panther is further than 10 paces away from you, the following effects are true:
It loses 6.21 Health, 7.76 Stamina, and 9.31 Mana per second.
You gain 1.55 Health, 3.55 Stamina, and 4.65 Mana per second.
135 Mana Cost. Your Mana is 882.
One thing I knew about curses was that, generally speaking, the person being cursed would be informed of the curse effects, duration, and, most importantly, any conditions under which the curse would be prematurely ended. Well, other than the usual method of killing the caster. And anyone, Human or monster, could understand the System. Meaning the Shadow Panther would know that it needed to get away from me if it wanted to stop getting its Health drained.
It attempted to flee once again, burdened by the extreme Dexterity penalty, gravity increase, and now the combined Stamina-draining effects of both Crippling Chill and Sanguine Bond, both being doubled by Venomous Grasp. Altogether, the Panther was losing around 28 Stamina every single second, not counting the Stamina it spent on physical activity. That’d bottom me out from my maximum in less than eight seconds, not to mention an Unclassed person, who would lose the entirety of their 60 Stamina in barely over two seconds. Though, they’d also be paralyzed already from Crippling Chill’s effects, so that was a bit of a moot point.
But either way, the Panther was at least attempting to run off, no matter how easily I could keep up with its pace and keep it in my ten-pace radius of effectiveness. One thing I hadn’t realized when I was getting it to max Rank before, casting it on those Lava Slugs that it’d instantly kill, was just how good it felt to have my Health, Stamina, and Mana all being magically refilled at the same time.
My Health was already at 460/460, so I didn’t feel the effects of that, but the feeling of instant rejuvenation of having my Stamina restored—my body literally regaining all of its expended energy over the course of seconds—was amazing. It was like sleeping while running, somehow expending my energy while feeling the effects of resting.
Not to mention having my Mana regeneration suddenly quintuple. Spending too much Mana too quickly could sometimes result in headaches—something that I’d trained out of myself, for the most part—but it seemed like regaining that Mana would effectively have the opposite effect. My mind was suddenly clearer, I didn’t feel distracted, and all of the slight mental cloudiness that naturally happened from focusing your mind on casting disappeared in an instant.
And I was sure the Panther was having the exact opposite experience, having all of these things drained out of it.
It turned and started running off toward the cliff faces that surrounded us. I could’ve probably killed it already with Ray of Frost, or tackled it and finished it off with Noxious Grasp, but this was practice, not a real fight; I wanted it to last as long as I could so I could get the most out of the monster. However, once it leapt up onto the wall, using its sharp claws to cling into the stone and try climbing up the vertical surface, it seemed to me like the practice session was over.
So I grabbed its leg that was still in my reach and yanked it back down to the ground, where it snarled and tried biting at me. I had Noxious Grasp active from the moment my hands touched it, and I could tell the Stamina drain was already starting to tire the monster out. Its movements were slowing, the attempt to get away from me weak and sluggish, and I could see the light fading from its eyes.
Before it could even take a second swipe at me, it stopped moving, falling limp. I took a breath, keeping my hand on it while I drained away the rest of its Health. Generally speaking, most beings had less Stamina than Health because of the way two values were calculated, so when I almost exclusively used abilities like Crippling Chill and Sanguine Bond, that drained away more Stamina than Health, or Noxious Grasp, which, thanks to its Upgrade, drained the same for both, my opponent would almost always fall to paralysis before death. Leaving me with the awkward job of finishing what I’d started.
“Gods, Arlan,” Erani said as she approached me, “I’m starting to barely be able to even keep up with what you’re doing in a fight, at this point.”
I frowned and looked up at her. “What do you mean? Why not?”
“You barely even did anything that fight! The thing jumped at you, then you touched it once, and suddenly it started running off and slowing down with every step. It was moving all awkwardly, and then it tried jumping up to a wall, where you just pulled it off and suddenly it was dead. I mean, really, Magic-Types are well-known for being a bit difficult to follow the fights for, but at least some of their Spells fire off projectiles. To me, it just seems like you look at something wrong and then it just dies.”
“...Huh.” I hadn’t really thought of it that way, to be honest. I had Status screens and notifications to give me feedback for all my Spell casts, but I supposed to a bystander, Spells like Crippling Chill and Gravity Well were effectively invisible. Even Sanguine Bond and Venomous Grasp only needed me to tap someone once for their effects to take hold for the next while. When I thought about Erani’s fighting style, with the bombastic, flaming explosions, it definitely struck the difference into me.
You have slain Level 14 Shadow Panther.
You have earned 112 XP. Your XP is 562.
“Ah, there we go,” I took my hand off of the Panther. Compared to the required 2200 XP for my next Level, they didn’t give too much, but it added up. My days of getting enough XP for an entire Level by killing a single monster or two were most likely behind me, at this point. At least, until the day I decided to start hunting down Dragons.
“You done?” Erani looked down at the corpse.
“Yep, it’s dead,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”
Over the next few hours, we continued to travel, with me practicing Noxious Grasp along the way. I also decided that it’d probably be a good idea for us to all use the time to try and get used to a few more stacks of Expedite—especially me, considering I felt like I was always pushing my limits with the Spell during fights.
I still spent most of my Mana practicing Noxious Grasp, but every now and then, when we were sure there weren’t any monsters nearby, we’d all take turns with as many stacks of Expedite on us as we could handle.
We also tried casting the Spell on Ainash for the first time. Because of her already high Dexterity, it hadn’t been necessary for us to waste my limited Mana on her in the past, but for now, we were dealing with some slightly lower levels of danger, so I felt like it was justified to at least try to experiment with her.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ainash seemed like she was able to handle just about as many I tried to throw at her. She barely felt a difference at one stack, same with two, and still felt totally comfortable with three, four, and five. At the levels of six, seven, eight, nine, and ten, we started seeing noticeable improvement in her abilities, but at that point, it didn’t really seem worth it. Really, if it was going to cost me 400 Mana just to increase her speed from “extremely fast” to “even more extremely fast,” I could probably find better uses for the Mana.
The thing about Stats was that, especially when considering their physical effects, they had diminishing returns. Going from 10 to 20 Dexterity would feel like a massive change; even though they only added on to one’s base abilities, getting that addition doubled would still be huge for just about anyone. But going from 50 to 60? From 100 to 110? It wouldn’t feel like too much of a big deal. So for Ainash, who already had such extreme levels of Dexterity, she wouldn’t actually get much from Expedite until my Mana rose to much higher levels.
We did still see improvement for me and Erani, though. I managed to push the limit I was comfortable with up to around five—my Dexterity was equal to 184, at that point—while Erani could only push herself up to three stacks.
“Really?” I laughed as Erani got up from tripping over her feet, still unable to walk with four Expedites on her. “I feel like you’ve been stuck at three for a while now.”
“It’s not my fault,” she grumbled, “it’s the damn Bond.”
I stopped laughing. “Oh? Is the Stat gain from it still bothering you that much?”
“Uh, yeah, pretty much. I’m still just trying to get used to the Ranks it gained overnight. A bit rough to deal with that alongside the extra Dexterity from Expedite.”
“It got a Rank overnight?” I asked. “Nice, it seems like what you were thinking about worked. I also had it deepen doing the same thing.”
“Um, not just one,” Erani said awkwardly.
I furrowed my brows. “How many, then?”
“...Eight?”
I stopped in my tracks, looking at her with wide eyes. “I’m sorry, eight?!”
“Uh, yeah. The Stat boost went from 24 to 40.”
I was speechless. How in the hells did that happen? Was I just terrible at working with the Bond? At this point, her physical Stats were all at 50. That rivaled even mid-Level Melee-Classers! My highest Physical Stat was Endurance, and it was only 46, after the 8 extra I got from my own Bond.
In the end, I just managed a shocked sigh.
“Yeah,” she said, “I wasn’t really expecting it, either. I guess this type of thing just comes naturally?”
“Seems so,” I said. “Do you think it’s possible for you to raise it even more doing the same thing?”
“No, probably not. Most of those came in my first couple hours of watch. The rest didn’t really do anything.”
I nodded. With her having so many more Stats, we’d work so much more effectively as a unit now. Angelic Shield helped, but Erani was always weak in circumstances where we fought up-close. Now, as long as we could get her used to these new Stats, she could probably rival me as a front-lines fighter—especially when dealing with larger groups of opponents.
“Ainash, you were aware of this, right? I asked. Since we’d made it a habit to passively relay our conversations to her, she was normally filled in on whatever was happening, but she seemed to be content just listening unless we directly addressed her.
“Yes!” She exclaimed back. “Mother loves me so much!”
“Yeah,” I laughed, “she sure does.”
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