Chapter 71 – A Success Well Earned

AG. Second Chapter of Two. This is Thursday's usual file. There will be no chapter tomorrow and I'm not sure about friday as I have to plan the next arc

Tom understood that what he was attempting was both desperate and crazy. He knew that the feint was controlled, that it was just a way to get Tom within the range of its magic. All things being equal, it was not an opening. But, if his calculations were right, then this was an opportunity - admittedly a risky one, but he had taken more desperate gambles in the past when he wasn’t under a GOD’s shield. Given that today he had that protection, this was well worth the attempt.

His predictions were proven accurate almost immediately, as flames burning hotter than any campfire washed around him. His untempered skin was helpless against it, blisters forming almost instantly. Tongues of super-heated air burned deep into his nostrils, destroying any hope of him having a sense of smell until April restored him. All the water was sucked from his mouth, and it was too hot to breathe. The radiant heat burnt through his eyelids like they were paper. The world was heat and pain, and his senses were suppressed, but he could visualise what the wador would be doing from the data he had gathered over the minutes since the fight had started.

He could clearly imagine the scene. The wador would have danced forward two metres and then cast its inferno spell. It was an ability that it was either unfamiliar with or one that required constant channelling, but Tom guessed the reason didn’t matter. The key point was that it would be stuck on the spot, unable to move until the fire spell ran its course, and only then would it focus back on the battlefield. Only then would it discover Tom’s gamble, and by then it would be too late.

Blind to the world, unable to see hear or sense anything through the flames, he measured his steps. The moment he was within range, he funnelled energy into Spark to create something that was closer to a lightning bolt than the humble tier-zero spell was supposed to allow. He unleashed a force of nature fuelled exclusively with precognition mana so it would target its enemy without Tom having to direct it - which was useful, because any aiming would have just been guesswork.

All of his sensing nerves were gone, and he felt the magic vanish rather than seeing or feeling the flames being extinguished.

His face stung, and he ignored all the body’s warning signals to force his eyes open. Everything was a white blur. His eyes might have been partially functioning, but were not at a level where they could help in the fight. Functionally, he was blind.

The spear that he was thrusting with all of his skill and power struck a target. There was a momentary resistance, which gave way after mere milliseconds. He recognised the feel of penetrating flesh and striking bone. A thrill of achievement went through him. He had stabbed it, despite their rank difference. Now Tom knew that it was up to him to maintain his momentum. His eyes were gone, and it was well beyond his current ability to heal them mid-battle, but he was not completely helpless. Static electricity under his control settled over the enemy. It was not a full substitute for vision, it was barely a partial one, but it met his immediate needs, and the silhouette he could perceive told him that he had missed the creature’s heart.

He tore the weapon out and struck again and again. This time, the blows were on target. Even with Power Strike, his strength was insufficient for the weapon to punch through far enough. Its vitality had to be in the forties. Tom wasn’t sure about its rank, but he was thinking she had set him up against something closer to rank six to eight rather than four. 

He stabbed again. The weapon was penetrating more than a hand length, and he felt the bone that had been denying him shatter.

One more, he thought. That would kill it, and then he could heal himself.

Danger Sense blared a warning. Impending Doom was upon him. Certain death. He threw himself away as the stun relinquished its control and the wador exploded into action. Its claws tore into his stomach in an all-too-familiar feeling, and then fire engulfed his body as it used its magic as well. The impact of all three actions simultaneously pushing him in the same direction sent him flying away, completely out of control. He counted two full seconds as he was thrown metres through the air.

He crashed hard to the ground on his back, the impact blowing the air out of his lungs. It hurt, and some bones broke.

Clinically, he broke it down. A two-second fall meant he had gone five metres in the air. He was lucky to be alive. With all the fire the wador had expelled, his static electricity sensing field was inconsistent, but it didn’t take a genius to know that it was coming for him. He pulled up his charred spear in the vague hope that it would impale itself.

Then he saw it coming through the residual of its fire attack. Its intentions were clear. It was approaching him to close its jaws around his skull and then…

No, Tom roared in his head. He would not succumb to fear, he would fight through the pain to the bitter end. His weapon was almost up and in a position to impale it. He had a brief moment of hope, and then realised he was too slow, and it was too fast. The injuries and the lack of leverage he had because he was sprawled on the ground robbed him of the ability to move quickly enough.

No, not this time. He yelled in his head. I would not die because of this thing again.

His body was almost dead. It wasn’t like he had the strength to continue the battle. If it was truly smart, as it had claimed, it would have leapt away and finished him from range with another couple of fireballs. Not that, with him in this state, such active participation would be required. All it had to do was stay away, but it wanted to end things with its mouth, and that gave Tom a chance.

He remembered all the hours practicing Instant Strike. If he targeted such a blow into the gaping wound he had already created, then even ninety percent strength might be sufficient.

Every part of him focused on the feeling of the skill that had been close to forming in the training arena. A single thrust, carried out in an instant. He remembered the lack of resistance in that space April had created. That, and the way it didn’t require body movement. Him being pinned and lacking leverage didn’t matter. The skill, after all, was just a flex of the soul.

Tom imagined himself carrying out the perfect strike from a place where he wasn’t helplessly lying in the ground. Instead, he was in that arena she had built for him, feet placed firmly on a hard surface and able to drive the power of his legs through the tip of his weapon. His exhausted, terribly damaged body didn’t react at all, but he envisaged the perfect attack, and his soul flexed with him.

There was a ding.

There was no other feedback to indicate whether the attack had worked, and the wador certainly showed no reaction.

It kept coming and bit down, aiming for his head.

Danger Sense, his other senses being almost non-existent, guided him. At the last moment, he lunged sideways, and it bit his shoulder instead of his head. It expressed its displeasure at Tom evading it by using its claws. There was a mad scramble of movement as it used its multiple legs to shred him. Both of the bottom ones tore into his legs, and then the upper right one mauled his shoulder while the other three supported its weight.

Tom didn’t need a diagnosis spell to know the damage was horrific.

It reared back, clearly intending to go for the head again, and then, inexplicably, it collapsed. Its stillness told him it was dead, but, to his pain addled mind it didn’t make sense. How did something like that just die? Then, mentally, he ignored the issue. If it was alive and playing dead, then it would kill him later, but if it had truly passed, then he could save himself.

Immediate efficient healing was what he needed. There was only one thing that could save him. The four component spell forms that fed into Touch Heal appeared in front of him. Without waiting or agonising over the process, he merged them into the spell he had used so extensively in his previous lives. Then he flooded it with the dozen points of precognition affinity mana that he had left. It trembled and deformed on the edges as the mana entered it, just like all the other spells he had been creating had done. This attempt, unfortunately, had less dedicated fate to guide the process, as he had only regenerated three points in the half an hour April had given him. She had her reasons to push him to do this now, but he hoped that measly amount would be sufficient to get him a great outcome.

Satisfied with the appearance of the spell form, he released it. There was another ding as time slowed dramatically. For a moment, excitement went through him when he thought he had earned Healing Tranquillity back, but the feel of the time slowing down was wrong. Instead, it was a souped-up version of the time dilation skill that went along with Heal Organs.

Instantly, it communicated all the damage that had been done to him, and, with the time still slowed, he could assess the next steps.

With a thought, his magic sealed the femoral artery in his leg. Time jerked forward, and he triggered the diagnosis component again. It reset, and once more he had breathing room so to speak. 

The femoral artery was a die-straight-away kind of wound, but the rest couldn’t be ignored either, so he catalogued all of them. There were fourth level burns on his right side and his face; third level ones over most of the rest of his body. Then what was the equivalent of nine significant stab wounds where the enemy had bitten down on him. There were numerous scratches and cuts on his legs, some of them over two inches long and an inch deep. He had been disembowelled with a cut large enough on his stomach for his intestines to have escaped his body’s confines. Thankfully, a lack of movement meant that hadn’t occurred yet; then, finally, there were the seven different poisons from his meal.

Tom was sure April had models of how he would perform, and if he were to create injuries that would promote a successful merge into Touch Heal, this would have been what he would have done. All of his systems were damaged, including bones in the shoulder that had been cut through. Every part of the Touch Heal spell was going to be required to fix him.

As he lay there, he triggered his new spell over and over again, marvelling at the slowed-down time which it started with. It wasn’t as good as Healing Tranquillity, but it was much better than nothing. As he was restoring himself, he took shortcuts. Rather than healing any of the damage fully, he only triaged the worst of the bleeding initially. When it came to his burns, he superficially fixed them to stop sepsis from setting in, but took no effort to prevent scarring. The poisons, due to their nature, had to be dealt with in full, including two he had to physically push out of his body, because he had nothing that could destroy them internally.

Everything he did was triage, and, ten minutes after he started, April was finally able to bring him back to the café and heal him properly. The horrific scarring that had been about to form vanished along with the continuous pain.

He bowed his head to her:

“Thank you.” The gratitude was for more than one thing, and, from the up-curl of the corner of her lips despite her stern visage, she understood exactly what he was saying.

“That was smart,” she told him. “Only healing enough to prove you weren’t in mortal danger was clever.”

“I’m learning, and it’s what I’ll be doing from now on.” He admitted and then looked up at her hopefully. “And?”

She handed him the clipboard, and he read it immediately.

Skill: Instant Strike – Tier 1

Instantly strike an opponent passing within a thirty-degree cone of the reach of a spear thrust.

The attack will be ninety percent as strong as your base attack with a plain tier-zero weapon. Modifiers from the spear you are currently using are not applied even if the description indicates they are compatible with skills.

After the strike, your body’s effective attributes will be instantly reduced by 80%, a reduction which will recover linearly over 2.4 seconds.

Tom stared up at her in disbelief. This was not what he had wanted to see, and she knew that. Since it was a trained spell, there were no extra bonuses. He had gotten exactly what he had purchased, but he also understood why she had shared it. Now that his brain was not addled by his dying body, he recognised what had happened.

His Instant Strike into the gaping wound had been what had killed it. His new skill had shown its deadliness by punching through the monster’s exposed heart and killing it instantly, or at least close to instantly. He smiled up at April. “I figured that was what I got. What about Touch Heal?”

She didn’t respond verbally, but the wording on the clipboard was replaced with a wall of text. It was the spell he expected, with all the add-ons from previous stages of the process. The first thing he noted was that Touch Heal, just like Spark, was a persistent spell. He was going to keep it forever, no matter how many times he used it as a base to merge into other new spells.

That, all by itself, was a huge bonus. Smiling, he read further:

Spell: Touch Heal – Tier 0 – Level 10

You can heal yourself and others if you make physical contact with them.

Then he studied the sideways evolutions listed below. As expected, the functionality gained at lower levels had mostly come through unchanged. He suspected a few minor benefits had been lost, at least in the description, but the bulk of his earned extra capability had flowed through.

He started from the top.

Sideways Evolution 1: Boosted Diagnostics. For the diagnosis stage of the use of Touch Heal, time is dilated at a rate of 64:1. Once you begin healing, the time flow will return to normal.

It was nice to have had the bonus of slowed time quantified. Sixty-four times would buy him a lot of efficiency. In the time it took someone to say a simple sentence, Tom could spend a couple of minutes planning exactly how to fix the injuries, and, from the experience he already had with it, the ability was stronger than it claimed. Not only could he enter and re-enter the diagnostic state at any time - it was also flexible enough to allow him to line up a series of actions when he was in there. Only once he triggered that list of instructions did the time dilation stop.

Overall, it was about half as strong as Healing Tranquillity, but that was still very good. His eyes drifted to the next sideways evolution, and one that was probably the most individually powerful of them.

Sideways Evolution 2: Superior body. Resilience and the speed of injury recovery is increased with the following specific additional benefits.

·        Robust Organs – Efficiency of all organs increased by 50%. Some individual organs also have a more targeted boost.

o   Liver is an additional 250% more efficient.

o   The heart can now continue beating through catastrophic injury.

o   Skin is 20% tougher.

o   Stomach gains an extra 100% boost to digestion.

·        Stronger Bones. All bones require 60% more pressure to break.

·        Enhanced Blood – Oxygen carrying capacity of blood is doubled and you will bleed 50% less.

·        Internal Sanctity – Mana cost to destroy or move substances (foreign or natural) in the body is reduced by 25%.

There was nothing surprising in what was listed. Most of those benefits had been present in the lower spells, with the exception of the efficiency of all organs being increased by fifty percent.

That one was new.

Theoretically, it could be build-breaking, but he wasn’t going to be that lucky, and he suspected the description had overstated the value. For example, he doubted it would make him fifty percent more intelligent, which one reading of that benefit would suggest. Likewise, he was not about to become fifty percent harder to cut, which would have happened if his skin’s performance was truly improved to that degree. Instead, Tom suspected, it represented a general improvement to normal operations. Skin might resist piercing attacks slightly more and heal faster, but its primary function was to keep out bacteria, viruses and fungus, and that was what would be boosted by fifty percent.

That was an advantage, but not that much of an advantage. As for the brain, it was possible his nerves might now fire fifty percent quicker, which would give him a bonus for how fast he thought, but would do nothing to increase his intelligence. Like with the skin, it was a nice improvement, but not an earth-shattering great one. 

His focus continued down to the next cluster of additions. 

Sideways Evolution 3: Internal Barrier, Constructed internal barriers can block foreign substances a full tier higher than what proficiency and energy invested in the spell would usually allow.

Sideways Evolution 4: Active Resistance Boost. For 16 mana, this spell can be applied to increase resistance to all purgeable foreign substances and energies by 32% for half an hour. 

He ignored those two as they were abilities that he was already aware of, and, in the case of the second trait, intended to take advantage of once he had more mana available.

Which left him with the last bonus.

Sideways Evolution 5: Improved Efficiency. Touch Heal is 50% more potent when used on self.

Given he was primarily getting Touch Heal to fix himself up, this was arguably the biggest bonus out of all five.

April had been watching the micro expressions flitting across his face the entire time. Her grin had grown steadily broader:

“And that, my friend, is a damn fine pay-off for a year and a half of work.”

Tom couldn’t help but agree. The outcome was so much better than he imagined it to be when he was in the ritual circle and discovered that he wouldn’t be able to use experience for over ten years. Back then, he had almost despaired, but now he saw the benefit of what DEUS had set up. Between these types of bonuses and the titles he could presumably earn while gaining them, he was going to be a powerhouse.

“Officially, it’s tier-zero; but what do you think it’s really an equivalent too?”

“Tier-zero,” she answered, laughing. “Well, obviously not. That last evolution puts it up a tier just by itself, and Superior Body is at least another tier on top of that. Somewhere between three and four would be my estimate.”

“I wish it had been classified on that basis.”

She looked at him quizzically. “To arbitrage your hypothesised title tiers for creating spells?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“I can see the appeal,” she agreed. “But I think that’s short-term thinking. By the time you’re fifteen, I doubt this being tier-zero instead of three or four will matter. It’s very unlikely to push you over a threshold, and, for all other purposes, this spell being tier-zero is infinitely better. It’ll mean a faster spell leveling, not to mention the benefit of future evolutions. Which, since it’s tier-zero, are far more likely.”

“I know,” Tom agreed, waving her arguments aside. He knew that he just wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. Once more, he read the list of abilities he had managed to tack onto what had already been an amazing spell. It was impressive, especially given all those passive bonuses. He glanced up and symbolically put the clipboard on the table with the pages he had been reading facing down, so they wouldn’t distract him. “Thank you for sharing that with me. Now, I hate to be that person, but I don’t have time to wait around and chat.”

He expected her to insist on a celebration, but she didn’t. “I assume you want to go straight into training Lunge.”

Tom shook his head. “Not today. I think, for this session, I would like to practice fighting. One versus one battles only.”

“I see. You want to train for the divine championship trial. Is that it?”

“Yes; do you know how it works? I mean, how I get selected?”

“If you reach the level they need, you’ll be told.”

“I guess proving myself against rank four is what’s needed for now.”

She shrugged. “I can’t see how it could hurt.”

Suddenly, Tom found himself standing in a familiar meadow, waiting for his challenges to arrive. 

What followed was a series of educational fights against monsters that were either significantly faster than him or much bigger. Surprisingly, the battles against the behemoths were actually the hardest for him to get a clean victory in. The challenges might all have been difficult, and he suffered many wounds, some of them grievous, but he didn’t die even once.

When his allocated time in the trial was at an end, he stood next to April, equal parts happy and sad. While the fights had gone well, he hadn’t received a notification.

“Do you think I’m general combat rank four?”

“I don’t know.” April told him. “Perhaps, there’s a particular opponent niche you can’t beat yet. Before Instant Strike, we knew there were speedsters that were beyond you, and there might be a similar category of monsters out there. Next week, I’ll push you against a wider variety of opponents and we’ll find the weakness. Once we know where the gap is, we’ll find the ability you need to close it.” She patted him on the shoulder. “We’ll get you there, Tom. I promise.”

“I have achieved everything I put on my list. This was supposed to be enough.”

“Maybe it is.”

He glared at her suspiciously. “Are you trying to pacify me?”

She laughed. “No, just because I know they exist doesn’t mean I know how people are informed. There might be a delay; you might need to sleep. There might be dozens of other minor conditions you have to satisfy before you get the message. All I can say is that you’re close. Hang in there. We’ll get you in soon.”

“Thank you, April, for always believing in me.”

She said nothing, and then the trial faded away, and he was outside in the real world.

Trumpets went off.

Then, without him controlling the process he was metaphorically pushed sideways as though he was stepping into his old system room. Reality shifted once more, and he found himself in a bare room with metal walls and no monitor screens or couch like those that existed in his pseudo system room. From years of coming here, he recognised what was happening.

He spun around to confirm there were no surprises elsewhere in the room. There weren’t. It was completely empty. Worried about what might be happening in the real world, he tried to leave.

Nothing happened.

He tried again and realised he was stuck. His heartbeat faster as an edge of panic entered his thoughts. “What’s happening?” he demanded.

Bolded text appeared on the wall he was facing.

Congratulations, you are now a Contender for the Divine Champion’s Trial.

Note. This room is a competitor’s room, and, when it is in use, the rules of the Pseudo-System Room apply without the time dilation penalty.

Additional functions of the room will be unlocked when you upgrade yourself from Contender to Participant.

Tom’s eyes widened as the implications of that message finally sunk in. He had done it. He had got an invitation, and while he was in the room, his avatar acted perfectly, so there was no risk of his reincarnator status being discovered.

Directly under the first message was a timer.

Contender Challenge Starts in.

23 days, 14 hours, 32 minutes and 12 seconds.

It was ticking down.

There was nothing else written anywhere, and, no matter what he said or tried, the room refused to respond further. With a shrug, he tried to return to the real world. There was no resistance this time. A few minutes had passed, and his body, along with the other two, was on their way to dinner.

Tom slid into his normal act, while internally he was dancing in excitement.

He had done it. He would complete the contender challenge and reap the rewards.