Chapter 130

Zea took the news that their plans on using a bloodline skill to strip the inquisitor of his stats wasn’t going to work about as well as Luke did, though with considerably more swearing. After giving her a few minutes to get it out of her system, Luke said, “There’s still the possibility of making something similar. We won’t know until we try. I figured you’d want to get a look at the interface with me.”

“Can I?” she asked.

“I don’t see why not. [Remote Access] has given you pretty much every other settings option I have.”

“That reminds me, I keep meaning to reorganize my skills. The system’s default method is garbage.”

“Can we focus here?” Luke asked. “This whole situation is turning into a repeat of Valtira. I don’t believe for a second that that inquisitor just gave up because we managed to run away. I’d like to be a bit more prepared for the next encounter with them. Myla nearly killed me, and you flat out said it was pure luck that you got your hands on that core that allowed you to go invisible for so long.”

Zea glanced up at him. In her hands, she held a small stylus with a sharp metal tip. She’d been using it to carve lines into a roll of thin leather while they talked. “What do you think I’ve been doing while you get cleaned up?”

“Sorry, I’m just… tense. Frustrated, I guess. I thought we had this one figured out, but of course we were wrong. And System didn’t tell us because we didn’t ask the right questions. Now we’ve got to rush it and try to patch up the plan before the church catches up to us again.”

“Some good news there, at least. I don’t think that inquisitor is working with anyone else from the chruch,” Zea said. “I think that’s why he hired those mercenaries. He’s too far from home and doesn’t have his normal support network. I’m not saying he’s not dangerous, just that we’re not going to have to fight off dozens more inquisitors and templars.”

Luke shrugged. “Does it matter? So he’s got fifty mercs instead of fifty church assholes. Same difference to us.”

“Well, it means we can reasonably expect to not have anyone else above level 30 coming at us, which is a nice bit of info to have. We really only need to plan for the inquisitor himself as a hard opponent, and I’m already working on some crowd dispersal stuff in case the mercs try to jump as a whole group.”

“Okay, that’s a good point,” Luke said. “So I guess I’ll start poking at this skill creation thing while you work on enchanting stuff?”

“Yup. I’ve got a few new ideas thanks to those rank ups in [Mana Sight] and [Mana Manipulation].”

Luke found a spot on the shelf where he could sit with his feet dangling above the stream and said, “Alright, System, let’s do this.”

“Certainly, Luke. If you’ll open your skill shop interface and look to the right, you’ll see a skill forge option.”

“Was this always here? It can’t have been, right? I wouldn’t have just not noticed it all this time.”

“It was not,” System told him. “Upgrading your bloodline to SysAdmin III has unlocked new system options for you.”

“Like what?”

“For example, you can now see full skill lines instead of only the next rank up,” System said.

“Really?” Luke quickly checked [Peripheral Awareness]and saw that instead of just telling him rank 3 would cost 25 AP, it also showed rank 4 at 50 AP and rank 5 at 100 AP, and gave a bit of information about what each rank up would do to improve the skill. That wasn’t particularly useful, as the gist of it was basically that it would keep working as it already did, but better. Though the skill did specifically call out that enemies using some sort of stealth skill would become easier to spot as [Peripheral Awareness] got stronger.

“Oh, that’s cool.” If Luke were that kind of planner, he could figure out how to spend every point of AP for the next 40 levels. Come to think of it, that was kind of what Curt had done, only without the AP requirements being estimates. He’d been pretty accurate as far as his information went, though, so he must have figured out some sort of pattern. Luke had noticed a lot of skills had the same progression of AP costs as they ranked up, but not all of them. Curt has probably done a better job of figuring out the patterns than Luke could ever hope to.

“What all changed with the bloodline purification?”

“Expanded skill descriptions, access to the skill creation menu, increased information from [Analyze], [XP Mask] can now be turned on and off at will, the range on [Remote Access] has increased, you have fewer restrictions to the system’s database, and several new bloodline skills are available. You can view them in the skill shop.”

Luke gave that a quick look, but it wasn’t anything he hadn’t already known about. The skill shop had already told him those bloodline skills existed, things like [Matter Generation] and [Inflict Status], but they were available to take now, as long as he had a whopping 200 AP to spend on each one. If he hadn’t been forced to dump AP to fight at something close to that inquisitor’s level, maybe he’d have considered it. [Inflict Status] certainly sounded like the ultimate trump card. Just give someone the paralysis condition and kill them while they laid there.

That wasn’t the reality of his situation, unfortunately. Unless they wanted to go blow up some more anthills, 200 AP was going to be the better part of a week’s grinding. Luke much preferred the bombing method as a way to exploit the system’s shitty XP policies, but he also wanted to have an effective counter to XP Madness first.

That would be the focus of his efforts. XP Madness was the hard stop to increasing their power. If he could remove that wall, they could just outlevel all their problems. He opened the skill forge and started looking through the options. The first decision he had to make was whether he was looking to build a combat or utility ability. Since being able to prevent XP from coagulating into a new miniature proto-deity inside him didn’t strike him as a combat-oriented skill, he decided to select utility.

The menus were mostly the same as when he was browsing through the regular portion of the skill shop, at least as long as he was filtering down what he wanted. Eventually, he reached a dead end where the system no longer had anything even close to what he was trying to make. From there, a new interface window popped up that him do… something.

“System, what does this mean? I don’t understand what it’s asking for.”

“In broad terms, this is the customization matrix that guides AP into the shape of the skill. It’s a bit more nuanced than that, since AP is an artificial construct. The system assigns it to you as a way for your minds to grasp a portion of the divinity you carry in your soul. Otherwise you would be spending XP directly, and that gets more and more complicated the more of it you have.”

“Oh, I see.” No, he didn’t. This was math class all over again. He was more than happy to leave the math behind the screens to the system to figure out. Getting an amount of AP equal to his level each time he leveled up was easy to grasp, and he preferred it that way.

Except now he was getting past that layer and looking behind the screens, and Luke discovered that his lack of understanding was making it impossible to do what he wanted. Fortunately, he had a sentient being that was inclined to help him.

“Can you show me what this is supposed to look like? Maybe show me what the matrix looks like on other skills so I can compare?”

A second window opened up next to the one he was manipulating, this one listing all his skills. [XP Mask] was selected off the list, and three-dimensional image of something that kind of reminded him of those pictures of molecules they used to show in science class, except instead of four of five balls that were two or three different colors, there were thousands of little shapes in different colors. He spotted cubes, spheres, cylinders, and dozens of other shapes he didn’t have words for, in all sorts of different colors, all connected to each other either by pressing their sides together or meeting at a point.

“What the fuck am I looking at?” he said. There was no way he could build something like that. No human could.

“This is a visual representation of how each point of XP is used to make the matrix that forms one of your skills. [XP Mask] used 20 AP worth of XP, so while this is more complex than most rank 1 or 2 skills, it is nowhere near representative of the most difficult skills to create.”

The screen closed and a new one opened. This time, the whole shape was five times as big, and the shapes were glowing with various degrees of brightness. There were plenty of new colors too, most of which were different shades of the colors he actually had names for. That all would have been fine to look at, even if he couldn’t recreate it, but they were also moving. If there was some pattern to it, Luke couldn’t see it, but it did give him an immediate headache if he focused on it at all.

“This is the matrix for the 200 AP skill, [Matter Generation]. There are skills more complex than this, but I believe this serves as an example of the scaling complexities of creating a new skill.”

“I don’t think I could make a 1 AP skill,” Luke said, looking away from the screen. “Can you help me do this?”

System hesitated. “The system doesn’t make new skills,” he said. “The Pantheon made all of these when they set the God Machine up and used a god as the fuel that powers the system.”

“So, that’s a no?”

“There are no directives preventing me from assisting you,” System said. “I can certainly take parts from other skills and mix them together to your specifications. I believe it would be within my capabilities to merge them into a single new skill.”

“Okay, well… Let’s just see what we can do,” Luke said. “I need it to be able to work on Zea too, so I guess we need [Remote Access]in there?”

“That is not necessary,” System said. “By its very nature, [Remote Access] itself will work in conjunction with any new bloodline skill you develop.”

Luke was so far out of his depth that he didn’t know if he should feel relieved or frustrated. It was probably a bit of both, if he was being honest with himself. System was going to help, but System’s help was generally pretty awful. Even if they pulled this off, it was probably going to be a long, time-consuming process filled with a lot of swearing.

“I guess let’s start with walking through what this process is supposed to do,” Luke said. “The first step is to take all the XP in me, and send it back to the God Machine, right? Then we want to draw a new batch of the same amount of XP out and give it back? And it needs to be put into all the right shapes for my skills and stats? So, really only three steps.”

“That is essentially correct, at a very basic level,” System said.

“Okay, so there’s a mechanism for sending XP to the God Machine and getting it back. It triggers every time I kill something, right?”

“That is also correct.”

“Can we copy that process and turn it into a skill, and then just adjust it to take it from me and give it back to me? That would get me new XP, right?”

A new screen popped up with a bunch of shapes hooked together in a million screwy ways. At least they weren’t moving, this time. “This skill would do this. It would not shape the XP into your skills though.”

“Okay, let’s keep building on it then,” Luke said.

He had a good feeling about this. It was going to work. He just had to figure out how to find all the pieces so System could put them together for him.