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Chapter 57. Gaining A New Advantage
🕑 Added 2025-04-11 14:28:02 +0000 UTCHe flew through the air. The beam of death shot forward below him. The heat radiating from it was enough to melt his skin from his bones. Even worse was the beast lifting its head slowly so it could torch him where he flew. Rafe was scared. He saw everything in slow motion.
Death was not a big deal in the end. It was just a shame he was going to be wasting Devila's sacrifice. He felt resentful, Rafael did. His skin started bubbling as he fell and as the beam rose to meet him.
In a desperate bid of a last minute survival attempt, Rafe held his sword with both hands and let his sword intent skill engulf his whole body.
It felt easier than before, controlling his aura skill. Making it more solid to improve its ability to function as a veil. It felt so much easier. Rafe had known the way aura skills and the veil functioned were similar, but he hadn't known just how similar. Just then, he thought he could feel the essence his body was releasing start to congeal in a nascent veil of some sort.
And when he thought about it, how did a beast that was restricted to a level ten have a veil that much stronger than his? Sure, it was perhaps rated higher than a legendary beast, but still. The only explanation for why its veil was too strong for even Devila to pierce had to be its aura skill, right? And maybe there was some way to control veils manually at higher levels?
That was all well and good, but there was still a battle to survive. Later, Rafael promised himself. He'd think about it later.
He swung his sword with all his might. He felt his soul strain as he poured every ounce of its strength into his aura. The beam split in two where it met him. The monster kept spewing it out. For a few moments, Rafe hung where he was, the beam of blue death splitting where it met the sharp end of his sword. Then it started to push him back.
The mana reaction was so violent Rafe had been unable to see the beast's soul since the beam had first appeared. He did not know how much mana the beast had legt.
He was in pain, soul deep pain, but that was not a problem. When was he ever going to get the chance to train his soul like this anyway. He felt like some of his stats wanted to tear themselves out, to tear his soul to shreds but he did not stop pushing.
He did not know how he looked by the end. He fell down almost a full kilometer away from the beast. He did not need to open his eyes to see the beast survey him with a little surprise. He had let his racial ability fully off its leash now. He couldn't control it anyway. His head must have been pounding, but he couldn't feel it over the rest of his ruined body. Even with the aura, he couldn't keep out all the heat, and his flesh was effectively crisped.
The monster started to lower itself down onto its haunches to rest, and that was when the pile of bones that was Rafael Kingsley Wilde got to his feet and started running.
He didn't know how he looked. He didn't want to know how he looked. Even with his aura deployed, he had felt the burn of being right at the centre of the mana beam. It was akin to protecting yourself in the middle of a heavy fire using a blanket. Sure, you wouldn't get burned immediately, but you would burn. And Rafe doubted there was any red meat on his bones. Looking now would have him going into shock. He was only able to very slowly run using the aura movement he'd practiced on the second floor.
His eyes were closed. In fact, Rafe didn't know if they hadn't been boiled useless too.
With his racial ability he saw the beast struggle to get to its feet. It had exhausted itself with that last move it seemed. It didn't have any mana.
It had a lot of stamina though. And with how Rafe was barely able to shuffle along using his aura, it would reach him before he reached the safe zone.
Of course there was the possibility this wasn't the safe zone and that he was just wasting his time rushing there but Rafe would not give up. If the beast thought just chasing him down would be enough then it was severely mistaken.
He paid a bit of attention as the beast lifted its head toward the sky and roared its fury. The light of the night, a large moon and hundreds of stars lit up the darkness of the flat peak they were playing on.
Rafe could not but keep running. He wouldn't be able to dodge if the light rained again, but he was not afraid of that. The beast did not have any mana. How the hell was it going to power an area of effect spells again?
There were times when mana was not the only source of power though. Rafe had forgotten that for a moment. He'd forgotten, and so he took his attention off the beast to focus on the darkness ahead. That was perhaps why he was shocked when he started to get hit.
This time even his clothes were damaged, and more of his fried flesh melted off his bones, and he was flying through the air, and his feet were sheared off.
He was not dead though. And one of his hands was still functioning even as the end approached. The beast's concept ability was close to some kind of domain. He had mistaken it for an area of effect spell.
Rafe should have remembered his earlier thoughts about the beast having a higher truth during those moments. He did not.
Twin roars is what tipped him off. He turned his attention back one last time only to see a second head pop out of the beast's shoulder and pull itself out and lengthen until another bear-like beast stood next to the first one.
There was a third one already charging toward Rafe like it had all of the stamina in the world.
He was so close yet he could only drag himself so slowly. Ever so slowly into the approaching darkness. He was only a metre away when the bears, five now, roared again.
When he turned his attention back, he saw the wolf closest to him disappear.
And then a beam of death was shooting toward him from the sky, and it was bigger and was shaped like a familiar beast, and Rafe's panic grew. And he pulled himself forward with ever more desperation.
The beast landed with a crash that had Rafe flying, though not forward like he'd wanted. It started to swipe at Rafe, airborne as he was.
Rafe was floundering among the debris in the air. He saw the beast's attack coming. He had only one arm, but he flopped like a wing. He didn't make it. Or at least half of him didn't.
He saw his body torn in half almost as if in slow motion. The darkness cut off his view before he could register what the twisty thing with the fats and blood was. His racial ability could not pierce the darkness. He hadn't blacked out, he confirmed after a while. He wasn't in shock. Yet. He wasn't in shock yet.
It seemed Devila's assumption had been correct. Entering the dark section signified entering the next safe room. It signified surviving against a calamity beast.
“I did it, Devila,” Rafe said as the darkness started to take him.
Before the pain woke him, Rafe dreamt of Andragoth and her ominous words in the first room of the third floor. It had been a warning on her part, but he couldn't help but believe he and Devila had had something special. She had died, but was there a chance to see her again before he ventured into the multiverse? He did not know.
But then the pain came, and he remembered feeling it after the second floor when he'd had to have his whole body reconstructed multiple times. At least then he'd had his senses stolen for most of the process, but this time he felt his bones grow back, and his skin and his eyes which he hadn't known had been destroyed. His abdomen and his muscles.
After the process was over he stayed there sweating blood and panting and utterly unable to so much as move.
‘Ding’ Your class Warrior has reached level 7. Stat points obtained. Spec points obtained.
Your pseudo-class skill Mimic has reached level 7. Stat point obtained. Spec point obtained.
Your race Human has reached level 7. Free Stat point obtained.
He had not killed anything in that last fight, but it seemed he had received a lot of experience. It had been enough for another level in less than a day, and for so many of his skills to level as well. And that was hardly the end of the notifications.
You have failed a Side Quest.
Objective: Defeat the keeper of eternity.
Punishment: none.
You have completed a Side Quest.
Objective: Ally with an enemy team.
You have completed a floor objective.
Objective: A team oriented competition. (Final team rank #1)
You have completed multiple room objectives.
You have completed multiple hidden objectives.
Assessing level performance. Distributing rewards.
Rewards: 1000 quest points, 10,000 credits, 5 health potions, 3 stamina potions, identify skill scroll, reconstruction of all material possessions destroyed or lost to the floor, floating whip footwork technique book.
Apparently those were enough rewards for a floor with challenges this steep. The credits were more than he'd ever received before, no doubt, and so too the quest points. Even the potions had him thinking this was no ordinary reward. The identify skill scroll was a big positive in any case. He had wanted, no, needed an equivalent with which to gauge humans and beasts and everything in between.
He wasn't sure how valuable the skill was, but he knew he needed it. There was also the issue of gaining a bit of experience in order to ensure Sam's plans went off without a hitch. Everything had been going okay so far as he could remember.
He had gotten the enchantress' eye, unlocked an ability that allowed him to see souls, albeit faintly, and he had practiced using that ability on multiple occasions.
Now was a chance to use it in the way Sam had intended before the actual heist. He opened the skill scroll to learn. He needed to learn just how skills transferred from these kinds of things into the soul where they were written down as scripts and runes.
As he read the scroll, he watched his soul light up as the skill side of the curtain started to knit a new pattern in itself. That was the first time Rafe saw the threads. The threads connecting both sides of his soul. Every skill scaled with a stat, or so he thought from most of their descriptions.
A few scaled with more than one stat though. Like his aura skill which seemed to have threads going through all his stats. That made sense, as aura was basically the manifestation of the strength of his soul.
His class had connections to a few stats as well, but it also had connections to something that seemed to hang in the in-between of his soul curtain. Not quite skills and not quite stats.
His specs, Rafe realised. The class specifications. It made sense in a way. The class was just a very big skill. It was a special skill though, and it needed to prove its dominance. Why not build its own special stats. It shouldn't just settle for the old stats everyone else was benefiting from. It should be special.
Notably absent from his soul realm was the Essence apparatus that had been modified by the system to process experience internally. Even if he had a rudimentary soul sight, it was still a nascent ability and even what he saw was but a simple rendition. The soul was so much more than a mere curtain. He knew this, and yet he somehow did not.
“Focus, Rafe,” he chastised himself.
If he did not focus, he might miss the opportunity he had been waiting for. The opportunity to see the phenomenon of skill absorption. It also didn't hurt that this was the most common time to try and modify a skill, maybe crack it. It was also possible to do during a skill upgrade, but the last skill upgrade he'd had had been more than a little painful. So much more.
This was his best chance. He saw essence come from some dark edge of his curtain like soul to meet the external essence of the skill scroll. The scroll paled and started to fall apart in his hands as it lost the glue holding it together.
Rafe was so focused he jolted when something started to tear at his soul. He searched for the culprit, only to see a skill he recognised as his appraisal lighting up in some kind of reaction.
It was not what was almost tearing his soul apart though. It was another skill, a skill that looked like a dead star. Rafe focused on it.
A vision came to him then. A vision of a bird in a cage. The skill was one that had been bound because he could not use it, if he remembered correctly. The small flame sparrow struggled against its cage.
“Hmm,” Rafe said, a grin starting to appear on his disembodied form. “Now how about that for practice.”
Yeah, identify was a much more important skill to him than he had realised at first. Not only because it synergised well with his racial ability that was all about seeing, but because he had another seeing ability that had helped him gain his soul sight. An ability that he had been unable to use, until now.
And there was also a faint reaction from his Mimic pseudo-class skill, but he ignored that for now. It would be important for his last trick, but that would be then. For now what he needed was to free a metaphorical caged bird.
“Now then,” he envisioned himself rubbing his hands together.
