While the new attributes settle in and make me feel as if my body is on fire, I peel my attention away fro the feeling to examine the new changes to my status. The new additions of my passive skills, class, and new active skill are quite nice to look at. Some of my skill levels surprise me, and it takes me a moment to realize that I had scrolled past a few level up notifications in the endless rows of Plaints killed. From what I can gather, it looks like , , and leveled one time each during the fight. The additional levels are nice, but I find myself more drawn to my new stat values.
Level: 28
Body (BDY): 50
Mind (MND): 40
Agility (AGI) : 30
Power (PWR): 100
It would seem the leveling spree as well as my class attribute bonus has finally pushed me to a three digit stat value. My PWR stat is finally at 100, and I could not be happier with the milestone. BDY has similarly hit a milestone at 50, but regrettably it required me to give up seven of my free points gained from my leveling spree. It pains me to give up the precious points on something other than PWR, but the current numbers on my screen being settled at all tens makes the childish side of me happy. Luckily, I didn’t have to put any additional points in BDY, as I had received two points in BDY over the course of my time doing physical training with Vince in the last couple of days.
The singular point I got in AGI was more of a surprise than anything, as I guess the attribute raised itself slightly from the long run it took to arrive at the aberrant plains. I’ve never been too interested in AGI, but the conformation of its point value to match the rest of my attributes is very much appreciated.
Putting aside my attribute values, I focus more on my newest skill: < Non-Ionizing Radiation Control>. Honestly, I am completely blown away that a starter class was able to grant me such a skill. Obviously, the non-ionizing energy means that I won’t be able to vaporize someone with a mana-infused gamma ray anytime soon, but the very existence of my skill means that perhaps there is an skill that I could somehow gain later on.
If I could combine my newest skill, plus , plus …
Oh my, I’m actually scaring myself a little bit at the possibilities.
The only downside of my class is that I have gained nothing to control the harmful particles still stewing inside my body, but for the moment, I trust in my mana shell passive to contain them.
Eager to try out my newest skill in order to begin the slow climb up the mountain of controlling all energies, I attempt to get up, only to find that my limbs do not want to listen.
Have my attribute points not settled down yet? No, that can’t be it as I no longer feel the dull pressure of stats branding themselves into my body. Paying a bit more attention to my body, I find that my skin is also itching rather horribly once again.
Hmmm… Oh wait a minute, I think it is because I haven’t adjusted to handle the huge boost in my PWR. Turning the metaphorical dial up in my mind to manage the expulsion of the radiation buildup under my skin, I find that my skin’s itch abates for the most part, but there is a new problem at hand.
My limbs are still irregularly hard to move, and lively flames seem to be licking off of my skin despite me not using at all.
The odd state forces me to begin examining myself, but I am sure that with a bit of creative problem-solving, I should be up and moving normally in no time.
…
Okay, so I might have fucked up.
It would seem that my uneven stat allocation coupled with my [Mana Mutation] has finally caught up with me a bit. Despite the points I threw into BDY to help compensate for the issue of my ever-growing mana pool, my body has been affected beyond a bit of excruciating pain that I could push off with . If I really push it, I could probably manage to move around normally with the heavy assistance of mana infused in my muscles and running near full blast. The issue is that I would run out of mana eventually, and the heat wave created by my constant emission would be a hazard, leaving me in a worse predicament.
The central problem of the matter is that my mana network is currently working overtime trying to contain all of the volatile mana in my body. I think with normal mana, the issue would most likely be manageable by offloading some of the mana buildup, but it would seem that this course of action is not going to work in my situation. The extra energy rolling off of my mana has made the entire situation worse by causing the network to be filled with a chaotic mix of the two that infest my muscles, making them unresponsive to my commands.
This problem was easily resolved beforehand through the filtering technique I learned from Master Lirin, but now it’s not so simple. With the addition of my new PWR stats, and the new mana shell passive- my energy is much harder to expel. Instead of targeting my nervous system and filtering my converted mana into regular mana while expelling my radiation within short intervals, the conversion rate of my mana is so high now that it’s significantly more difficult to keep the intervals as short as I would like.
Add the mana shell to the equation, and now I have two layers of configuration I have to work through to vent out the excess energy while still having to keep the filtration speed near instantaneous.
Long story short- I’m either going to have to adapt to the vastly increased difficulty of filtering my mana, or I am going to have to find a new way of managing the various energies underneath my skin.
Lying on the ground, I continue trying to work a solution in my head for my current predicament, but the sun above me is falling to the horizon, and I am a bit worried about my ability to find a fix before night falls. The last thing I need right now is to have some Plaints respawn and come for revenge. I’m a good bit away from what remains of the aberrant plains, but I have zero trust in The Pillar to not screw me over by allowing a stray monster to find its way over to my still form.
I take my current condition in with a deep breath that is more so a stuttered cough than anything. I’m quite annoyed at my unbalanced stats for having come to bite me in the ass this quickly. A 2-1 stat allocation doesn’t seem that crazy in theory, yet with my condition, the continued split seems like it will not be feasible. I had hoped this sort of problem would come much later; at least after the wave was dealt with. Perhaps it’s for the best though, because if I were to gain a bunch of levels during the wave and then this paralysis happened, I would have seriously been fucked.
What I need right now is to decide whether I am willing to risk spending the entire night trying to find a long-term fix to my problem or not. The odds of me making it back to the barracks before running out of mana are low if I just power through the issue with .
I could ask for help from the others, but given the fact Vince is most likely livid with me for being so late to his hit time, I dismiss the idea immediately. Their availability is also a crutch, and that is not something I can let myself rely on in the hardest difficulty. What happens if I am in a similar situation in the future but they aren’t around? Am I just going to sit there and die because I have need help to fix my own problems? The answer is no. I will figure out a solution right here and now.
Working out a comprise in my mind, I decide that the issue of my lopsided stats is something I will have to embrace entirely. There will never be a permanent solution until I become much more skilled and experienced with mana and the like, so I resign myself to a temporary fix. Similar to my imagined dial that I used to adjust my emission vent every time I adopted some new points in PWR, I will create another technique to handle the ongoing strain of my unstable mana pool.
It’s time to see if I can put my newest skill to good use.
…
POV: EARTH
“Mama, what’s that?” A young girl speaks up while her legs swing back and forth off the edge of the beach-side bench she sits upon.
“What’s what, honey?” The girl’s mother asks from nearby as she waits in line to order from the ice cream truck.
The woman’s eyes are too focused on the menu to notice her daughter pointing toward the ocean.
“That!”
Eventually, curiosity wins out over her interest in the creamy delights displayed on the side of the truck. Glancing over at the child, she finally notices the suspended finger gesturing beyond the beach and out to the large expanse of blueish-green waves where people splash around in celebration of the start of summer. Following her daughter’s attention, the mother looks out to the ocean, fully expecting to see some ship or other mundane object that children always fawn over.
Instead, the mother’s arms drop to her side as her gaze fixes upon the impossibly tall tower that lies in the distance. Like a fold in space itself, the tower cleaves through the horizon and penetrates the clouds, leaving behind a long shadow that settles over the ocean, making the inviting azure water turn into an ominous black void.
Primal instincts take over and the mother rushes over to her daughter, who is still pointing excitedly at the strange construct that just appeared in the middle of the ocean. Plucking her off the bench, the woman doesn’t hear the little girl’s complaints through her own fear as she runs away from the beach and back toward the parking lot where her car lies.
“But mamaaaa, we didn’t get ice cream like you promised!”
…
Raid sirens sound out over the entire base as soldiers dawn their gear and scramble toward the bunker entrances.
“BUNKERS. BUNKERS. BUNKERS. AVENGERS. AVENGERS. AVENGERS.” Repeats over the sound of the wailing noise as the Base Defense Operations Center uses their codeword to call for all of the section leaders and command to meet in the BDOC while all other personnel are to head to bunkers.
Stopping right outside the DFAC, the base commander instead makes his way to the operations center while fiddling with his Kevlar helmet.
“What the hell are they calling us for? I was just about to grab chow goddamnit.” The man grumbles while punching in the door code to get inside the building.
Fully ready to chew someone out for interrupting his time out of the office, the commander barges his way into the base defense partition where rows of laptops, radios, and all kinds of other tech bullshit line the room’s walls while facing toward one big screen on the opposite side of the entrance. Just as he is about to call all of them to attention, the man’s voice dies in his throat as tens of soldiers in camouflaged fatigues run around the room in panic.
Realizing the situation is not a training exercise, the man swiftly grabs a pudgy sergeant from a nearby computer whom he knows is currently on shift.
“Sergeant Martinez, report.” He demands.
The younger soldier, barely an E-5, looks like a deer in headlights as he recognizes the black leaf on the man’s chest, symbolizing him as the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the base. Almost instantly taking on the position of attention, the sergeant fumbles over his words for a moment before reporting in.
“S-sir we have something showing up on all of our radars off the coast. It’s not moving, but it’s huge and we don’t have contact with anyone in the area.”
“Well, where did it come from? One of you were watching the radar this entire time, yes?” The commander asks with an angry undertone as he questions whether the staff had fallen asleep on shift again.
“We-We were watching it sir, I swear! The bogey appeared out of nowhere! It’s like it had been there the entire time, there wasn’t even an alert or anything!” The younger man blabs while pointing at the classified laptop at his side.
“Well, it couldn’t appear out of nowhere if it was as ‘huge’ as you say. Put it up on the main monitor I want to see it.” He demands.
The sergeant quickly complies and casts the strange bogey that seems to have randomly appeared on all of the BDOC’s radars. The room falls silent for a moment as all of the moving bodies stop to look at the rough footage of the mysterious thing residing in the middle of the ocean.
It’s hard to see with the poor quality provided by the military grade scanner, but a panning view of the coast off of the Atlantic Ocean becomes visible.
“Dammit Martinez, fix that black line glitch that’s taking up part of the screen so I can see what the hell you are talking about!”
“Sir…The bogey is the black line.”