Chapter 913: Time to face the past |
[Grand Arbiter]
Class type - Child protection exclusive
Unlock requirements:
[Child] or [Orphan] Only.
Mana sensitivity 100.
Frequent prophetic dreams.
Psychological abuse victim.
Extreme immediate danger caused by an adult.
Unable to consciously defend themselves.
Life*20
Stamina*20
Mana*20
Skills:
Level 1
-(A) Leave No Chance
-(A) Suffer No Pain
-(P) Fear No Evil
-(P) Trust No Lie
Level 10
-(A) Speak No Word
Level 20
-(A) See No Ennemies
Level 30
-(P) Have No Needs
…
Fuck… No wonder she’d never once brought up any memories from before the Orphanage…
What kind of a filthy stinking piece of human waste do you need to be to psychologically abuse a six year old?
Sofia had a disgruntled expression as she remembered her own childhood.
Absolute shitheads.
I’m happy they’re all dead.
Also isn’t mana sensitivity 100 crazy? The requirement was only 5+ for Saint and 10+ for Sprite caller.
Not to mention ‘frequent prophetic dreams’...
I really feel like my old recurring nightmare was like that.
But it’s like the more I try to remember it the blurrier it gets.
How can it possibly be a thing, though? Is that another side-effect of Time being dead?
Orator should be one half born of Time’s death and even he doesn’t seem to have knowledge of the future like that. He said it himself, I ‘performed beyond expectations’...
If a Lord can’t do it, how can a random dream possibly do?
Questions, questions, no answer, and then when there’s an answer, just moooore questions. People who never ask themselves anything must be so happy.
Sofia clicked her tongue, expanding the details of Chino’s class to the maximum and quickly copying it all on a bone slate. There we go. All the spells until level 200. I could check their full description individually but it feels wrong to do that without asking her first…
Oh, I could check Eleonore’s class too.
[Hexer]
Class type - Rare
Unlock requirements:
Placeholder or (Basic) Warrior Class Only.
Mana sensitivity > 10.
Spiritual sensitivity > 50.
Interest in curses or the undead.
Self-taught (1) curse of debuff spell.
Initial stat and stat gain modifiers:
Life*1
Stamina*3
Mana*5
Skills:
Level 1
-(A) Hexblast
-(A) Thaumcrafts
-(P) Curse-touched
-(P) Spellblood
Level 10
-(P) Nightmarish whispers
Level 20
-(P) Bane of buffs
Level 30
-(P) Witch-eye
…
So I could have gotten that if I’d learned a curse first instead of Summon skeleton? Interesting stuff. Not many spells left between what she already had and level 200 but I’ll still write that down for her… So many passives. Strange class. I don’t really get the spiritual sensitivity requirement being the same as the Saint class, though…
Ooooh, [Skeletal pact] at level 180?
Sofia immediately switched to the ‘Spell Encyclopedia’ and looked up ‘Skeletal pact’.
[Skeletal pact]:
Reanimate a twice-dead undead as a subservient Elite skeleton.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Maximum 1 reanimated Elite skeleton at a time.
The Elite skeleton bound by the pact suffers 50% of the damage the caster would in their place, but will suffer a final death should their health hit zero.
So find and kill an undead, then bring it back to undeath and it’s a permanent subordinate until it dies again?
It’s not too bad but you need to find that undead in the first place. I’d sure offload 50% of my damage to Pareth if I could, his low-hit protection would just negate it all.
Might be worth looking into, even if the final death thing is a bit uncomfortable. Definitely won’t use any version of it if I can’t ditch that.
Err.. Enough distractions. What I really came here for…
Sofia navigated back to the main screen, and into ‘System skill blueprints’.
[Stress-Test]:
Scan a mana circuit and send it to DATABASE for simulation, returning failure points, redundancies, deprecated code, and optimizeable nodes.
The relatively simple blueprint for the [Stress-Test] system skill appeared, and Sofia carefully made a bone sculpt of it.
“Perfect. I meant to get that for a while. Whether it makes the skills better or cheaper on blueprint space, I need it! Doesn’t look too hard to learn either.
Although she did not need it right this moment, Sofia also copied the blueprint for [Decode], which she would need to rework [Summon Blood] later.
[Decode]:
Scan a blueprint mana circuit node and locally simulate activation for analysis, then labels its effects and connections.
(Admin permission only: Send to DATABASE to decode an entire blueprint at once.)
Let’s spread those around a bit. Even Eleonore could benefit from those since she’s already making her own spells. The readme thing only said not to share the fourth skill so it means these two are fine, right?
Her new system skills acquired, Sofia returned to Ser’Extra.
Over the next few days, Sofia continued working on her spells, [Stress-Test] was easy to learn and a great help in streamlining her skills, which had a tendency of being quite bloated with redundant parts due to the many messy fusions. Since optimizing the mana circuits by forcefully deleting useless channels didn’t change the spell effects, it even worked on double-locked skills helping reduce the weight of these mainstays that Sofia could no longer get completely rid of even if she wanted to. So far the gains were minimal and spread out, but as Sofia corrected the most glaring issues first, they still added up to a non-negligible amount.
Remaining possible skill slots : 4.5 / 47.5
False Lord Skills (3 of 47.5 Slots)
♢ [Singularity edict] ♢ (1S)
♢ [Paradise Toybox] ♢ (1S)
♢ [Extinguish] ♢ (1S)
Active Skills (14.7 of 47.5 Slots)
[Summon Odalite Blood] - Level 349 (5.2S)
[Graveyard of the Nymphs] - Level 349 (1.1S)
[False immortality] - Level 5 (3.1S)
[Skull Choir] - Level 349 (0.7 + 0.5S)
[Lightsoul curse] - Level 1 (1.8S)
[Avatar of Zeus] (1.6S)
♢ [Abereth of Greed] ♢ (0.7S)
Passive Skills (9.4 of 47.5 Slots)
[Blessing of the Deep] - (3/4) (0S)
♢ [Vakariazrehafin, Hungering hand of Sorrow] ♢ (2.1S)
♢ [Venerable physique of the primeval void] ♢ - Starting step Boundless Space realm (4.2S)
♢ [Runelord] ♢ - Level 5 (1.4S)
[Sixth Melody] (0.9S)
[Spine of the Black Sun] - Level 349 (0.8S)
Classless Skills (5.7 of 47.5 Slots)
♢ [Dreams Of a Demon which Gods Envy - March of the Envoy] ♢ (1.9S)
[Summon Self] - Level 100 (0.5S)
[Crystallized Suffering] ♢ (1.5S)
♢ [Radiant World Mirror] ♢ (1.8S)
Racial Skills (5 of 47.5 Slots)
♢ [Edgewalker] ♢
♢ [Pillar of Creation] ♢
♢ [Mockery of the Divine] ♢
♢ [Convergent Evolution] ♢
♢ [Quantic transposition] ♢
Special Skills (0.4 of 47.5 Slots)
♢ [The Book of Skeletons] ♢ (0.1S)
[Stress-Test] (0.3S)
Wildcast Skills (1.5 of 47.5 Slots)
[Angel’s bolt] ♢ (1.5S)
Biomagical engineering (3.3 of 47.5 Slots)
[All-in Earring] (2.3S)
[Prototype Relocation Eye] (0.5S)
[Silk gold arm (unenchanted)] (0.5S)
The fusions lady Suhen helped with had basically nothing to change, but the others… [DODGE-ME]’s already been reduced by 0.3 skill slots and [Stress-Test] still returns two hundred and ninety errors! I know it was my first manual fusion, but such a messy job!
Four and a half free slots, with [Stress-Test] itself taking 0.3 that can be discarded anytime. Good progress, should be enough to receive my new skills when I level up at least. I just really need to tackle the [Summon Blood] problem after that.
Astelia and Alith’s return happened without much fanfare. Their results were worth celebrating, but they were both tired, and shocked to learn about the Phageid attack, so the entire group ended up simply having a calm dinner-party in Zangdar’s castle, where nobody could bother them.
After that, life had regained its normal course for everyone, heavy summer rainstorms were starting to hit the human continent, dampening the general mood even with regular intervention of Sofia calming the weather with [Sixth Melody].
Eventually Sofia felt that she couldn’t keep putting the hard tasks until later, and on another stormy day, she left Ser’Extra flying to the north above the thick carpet of dark clouds.
Crowie served as her guide, if she was to follow his earlier intel, today was the last day of the school year for Chino in whatever magical academy she studied at.
The academy seemed to be almost on a straight line north compared to Ser’Extra. Built near the base of the human peninsula’s northern mountain range, it stood right on the frontier between the Empire and another human Kingdom Sofia has only ever flown over.
Standing just under the clouds, Sofia observed the academy from above. It was still just one past noon, so students were still around, some running around the campus to avoid the rain, most of them hanging out in the various classrooms.
It doesn’t hold a candle to Brighthall but it’s not too shabby, especially for the human continent. There’s one, two… Five layers of shields around the entire campus? That can’t be cheap to maintain. Everything looks quite new, this place must have not been around for long. Maybe two decades at most.
Doesn’t look like a bad place. But this damn weather…
Let’s just announce myself I guess. Easiest way to get in there anyway.
Sofia casually summoned the choir, five slightly oversized human skulls rotating happily around her.
She flew up, standing in the middle of the thick layer of storm clouds.
This might be a waste of mana but I don’t care.
Grabbing the book at her waist, Sofia reached out for the singular outlier fiery page that was impossible to miss.
Come. Give me some sunlight.
The surrounding air immediately started to heat up as a bundle of fiery bones formed mid-air from Sofia and mana and Bookie’s fog.
You have three minutes, fly to your heart’s contents, get rid of this storm!
Once fully formed, the curled-up Phoenix spread its wings with a delighted cry, its flames growing hotter. The immediate surroundings were instantly cleared of clouds.
Sofia watched in satisfaction her skeleton fly wider and wider circles in the sky around her, erasing the dark clouds with his brilliant flames.
The commotion of course did not go unnoticed, soon all the students were looking up through the windows in absolute awe at the majestic bird with feathers of fire that no one could possibly guess was an undead.
It wasn’t long before the teachers locked onto Sofia as the real source of the disturbance, and a single person flew up to her through the five layers of shields, a grey-bearded old man in simple crimson robes.
The numbers ‘349’ weakly shone above his head. Not bad. Turns out Kuli and Xeros aren’t the only strong people around in the Empire.
The man flew up to Sofia’s level, hands behind his back, looking quite relaxed despite the unexpected situation. Sofia was in civilian clothing, which probably helped. They exchanged courteous nods before the old man presented himself.
“Headmaster Ulfric Merad, at your service, Baroness. To what does our humble establishment owe the honor of this visit?”