Invent (The Completionist Chronicles Book 7), page 7
Bullets flooded against his Exquisite Shell so rapidly that he barely had time to think. He dodged around, back and forth, jumping and rolling; but no matter the action he chose, bullets were constantly clipping him—if not directly smashing into his defenses. Joe hit the ground, blood pouring out of his minced body.
Damage taken: 10,406 (121 penetrating damage x86 hits.)
Exquisite Shell: 0/9,842
Health: 1,300/1,864 (bleeding. -34 health per second!) You’ve got holes in you!
There was only one saving grace, one thing that kept him from getting hit perfectly with each shot and cut off the storm of bullets: with every bullet, Retaliation of Shadows went to work, slapping the absolute abyss out of the bounty hunter. Eighty-six total rounds had pinged off Joe until his shield failed, but the same number of little slaps of enhanced darkness eventually sent Herr Trigger flying, his weapons following him as he tumbled.
Damage dealt: 3,731 dark damage.
“That hurt, you bounty.” Even with the sheer amount of damage he had taken, the man was on his feet a moment later, rolling with the force and checking to see how his team was doing. Coughing blood, his eyes wobbled back over to Joe. “Oh, we are doing poorly. Here’s today’s Trigger Warning: next time, I will be prepared for you… and for him.”
“That’s a female Dwarf,” Joe snorted as he directed his Orbs to slam into the sides of the assassin’s head from either side, pumping a Cone of Cold into the man’s ear on one side and simple, pure, concussive force into the other. “One win for each of us; next kill decides the winner.”
Damage dealt: 541 (158 x2 blunt, 225 cold).
“It’ll be my victory.” Herr Trigger managed one last predatory grin before being sent to respawn with the rest of his team.
Joe dropped to the ground, heaving for air as he pumped healing spells into himself. A slew of messages tried to take over, but he only had eyes for the wildly expanded usefulness of Exquisite Shell. “Double mana means more placed in the spell, and I haven’t found its upper limit for mana usage yet. How had I not even thought about how much damage that blocks now? Have I been so busy that I haven’t even considered my combat spells? What’s wrong with me?”
“Physically? Nothing, except your lack of any identifying hair,” Major Cleave informed him after considering him for a moment. “I do wonder how you survived that series of shots. That skill the strange human used was clearly an Alpha Strike, and it must have had a massive cost to use. Without permanent defenses of a certain level, I’m having trouble remembering another time I’ve seen someone survive one. Skills such as that tend to end lives when they are as single-target and point-blank as that one was.”
“Alpha Strike?” Joe blinked owlishly as he mulled over the title. “I’m learning that I may be further behind than I thought I was, Major. What’s an Alpha Strike?”
“The… torrent of destruction you just survived?” The Major peered into his eyes with concern. “Did you take a brain damage debuff? You must have some form of ability… oh! I have also heard them called an ‘Ultimate’ by your race?”
“An ulty? People have ultimate abilities?” Joe glanced at his skill list, not finding anything that could count toward that. “How do you know what an ulty is? I mean, how do you know if you have one?”
“How do you know?” Major Cleave huffed in surprise and shook her head. “If you don’t know how to rank skills and spells, I suppose you would know them by their massive cooldowns? A day, or twice-a-day usage, is at the lowest level of an Alpha Strike. Once you see week-long, month, year, or even longer… that is when you know you have gained a truly powerful strike. I heard a rumor that you saw two of Major-General Havoc’s known Alpha Strikes. His golem form is one?”
Joe’s eyes went dull as he recalled the horror that his mentor had turned into with the full knowledge that he wouldn’t survive. Somehow the knowledge that that particular skill couldn’t be called on at will gave him a sense of intense relief. “I see… I suppose I have something that might count. I have an ability called Resurrection which can only be used once a day before cooldowns.”
Major Cleave held his gaze for a long moment, before slowly nodding. “Yes, the ability to return someone to life with only a cost to your mana is… fairly ultimate, as you say.”
“Yeah. But… how do you get them?” Joe tapped on the ground in thought, then remembered that his Exquisite Shell was broken. He dumped his entire pool of six thousand, seven hundred and eighty-eight mana into the spell. For a long moment, the spell crackled and sparked like lightning, before settling into a patina that looked like a glitter bomb gone wrong. He was so used to it that he didn’t notice anymore, but the Major rolled her eyes.
“How indeed.” She shook off her attitude and tried to give a proper answer. “While there are people that may be able to teach them, Alpha Strikes are usually gained through a combination of class levels and class quests. At some point, you will either learn or be granted one.”
“Oh.” Joe frowned at his level, which had remained near twenty-one for several weeks at the minimum, and his other classes, which had barely progressed in months. “So there are still reasons to level up. I had kinda stopped worrying about that in favor of grinding skills.”
“Yes, sir,” Major Cleave informed him drolly. “You’re correct. Levels aren’t just numbers that stop carrying meaning as you get stronger. That would kind of defeat the entire purpose of having a quantifiable system of advancement in the first place.”
“Huh. I figured that at some point, it just wouldn’t matter anymore.” Joe smiled and hopped to his feet. “Nothing for it! Let's get awesome!”
“He’s just been using basic abilities this entire time? What kind of imagination does he have that lets them push the limits of skills this successfully?” Major Cleave watched as Joe skipped down the road toward the Shoe, shivering lightly. “This man is a monster.”
CHAPTER TEN
Dark Lightning Strike has reached Apprentice IX.
Lay on Hands has reached Student III.
Retaliation of Shadows has reached Journeyman IV.
Assisted Ritual Orb Usage has reached Beginner III.
Joe’s eyes flew across the information as he entered the tunnels and raised his arms to let the Dwarven guards on duty wave an Elf Alignment Rod—an EAR—over his body. It was an incredibly basic test that listened to his mana frequency to ensure spies weren’t slipping in, but until this city became wealthy enough to have more potent security measures in place, they worked with what they had.
As expected, the check came back clean, and they progressed to the interior of Gramma’s Shoe. Joe blinked at the dazzling lights that had been arranged across the ceiling in a pleasing gradient in five distinct sectors: daylight, orange, green, blue, and violet. Surveying the ground under the lights, Joe could see that the lights roughly correlated to the areas the city planner had zoned out.
The ‘daylight’ area was one of the largest, and was designated to be set up for livestock, farming, and a small park. The violet would be the area which Havoc had claimed for Joe’s magical experimentation, but Joe hadn’t paid much attention to what the other areas would eventually be. For now, his eyes came to rest upon the only real landmark besides his personal workshop and the Artifact alchemy-building: a huge pile of fragments and building material.
It appeared that the Dwarves had been busy. The ground was clear from rubble, and several teams were working to excavate the last few remaining sections of stonework that had been buried even slightly underground. All that remained at this point was cleanish, bare stone—a solid foundation that they would use to build a new and powerful community. Before kicking that off, Joe was fully planning to use the destroyed materials to jumpstart his settlement—his class quest would shoot ahead in the near future.
Hurrying over to the pile, he started setting up a Field Array. No one was guarding the waste material, for fully understandable reasons, but it still felt like an oversight that he should correct. For him, someone else’s trash was literally his own treasure. Banana peels could become walls, dirty diapers were destined to be shingles, and… “Now that I’m thinking about it… maybe I shouldn’t tell people what I’m going to be making their houses from?”
The Field Array came out to be about ten square meters, which meant he would need to shift it around and redo the work a few times, but it should be worth it in the end. He tapped the lines that remained glowing in the air, sending a pulse of mana along them to get an idea of what he was getting into.
Item: Approximately 10 cubic meters of Rare and lesser material. (Rubble; most aspects reduced in aspect value.)
Reduction value: 291 Rare aspects, 2,648 Uncommon aspects, 24,097 Common aspects, 72,291 Damaged aspects, 144,582 Trash aspects.
Total mass: 23,490 pounds of material.
Reduction cost: 112.5 mana per second. Estimated reduction time required: 81 seconds.
“Yikes. That’s heavy. Nine thousand, one hundred and twelve mana if I do it all in one go?” Joe assessed the material and nodded as he realized that a goodly amount of it was stone and other dense material. “That’s about a third more than what I have, so I’ll just have to deal with standing here and slowly converting it. Huh. Must be a lot of air in there, too. If it were tightly packed, I bet this would be way more expensive and dense than that.”
The idea of ‘dense material’ brought his mind back to the cube of material that had dropped out of his codpiece when he had reached this zone. He was waiting to reduce that until he had a proper reduction room; essentially, a large warehouse with a permanent oversized Field Array. Until then… Joe closed his eyes and felt at the Ritual of Reduction that was literally written out in his body.
He only had two aspect jars with him, a Natural Common Aspect Jar and a Natural Unique Aspect Jar. Joe placed them strategically along the Field Array and directed all the other aspects to enter into his Codpiece of Holding. Plenty of Aspects would be lost, but he needed to get to work on this project. Also, while there were no Unique aspects in this batch, he was hoping that the ritual would eventually uncover some. With everything in place, he started gently pushing his mana into the lines.
Over the next few minutes, the pile of rubble slowly shifted and settled as it was converted into aspects. The original eighty-one second timeline came and went, and a frown started to build on Joe’s face. Aspects were streaming into his storage device, the Common aspect jar long since full. His mana regenerated at just over fifty per second, meaning he had regenerated over four thousand at the point the process should have ended.
“Feces… it’s shifting down from above!” Joe hadn’t even thought about how that would impact the reduction. Now he was glad he hadn’t simply pushed for completing it in one burst—the stone may have all toppled onto him, or at the very least, not been stacked in such a nice pile anymore. “How did I not think about that?”
Releasing the array, a flare of the mana lashed out and vaporized a good amount of the stone, reducing it to trash without granting him any aspects. “Ugh… what a waste. Still, I can do this at least another three times without any issues. I should save it for when I get access to my Reductionist class quests.”
Quest complete: Beginner Ritualist. Ritual Lore (Novice IX): 1/1. Resources gained: 1,000/1,000 Common Aspects, 5,000/5,000 Damaged Aspects. Reward: access to Beginner Ritualist II. Record breaker reward: Reward for Beginner Ritualist II increased.
Quest gained: Beginner Ritualist II. Now that you’ve prepared your reagents, quills, and likely went on a shopping spree of epic proportions, it’s time to do some actual work and prepare for combat! Higher-tier materials aren’t going to rip themselves out of monsters for you; you’ve got to do it yourself without dying! Create 25 offensive and 25 defensive rituals for use in combat! Minimum: Beginner rank. Reward: self-protection is its own reward, but you specifically will also gain access to Beginner Ritualist III! Offensive rituals: 0/25. Defensive rituals: 0/25.
“What the abyss…? Wasn’t the reward from the first quest a boost to the next reward? But this one’s reward is just access to the third one?” Joe pored over the rest of the information, then looked at the charged Aspect Jars. He gathered them up, letting the Field Array fade into nothingness.
Natural Common Aspect Jar: 1,820/1,820 Common aspects.
Natural Unique Aspect (Unique) Jar: 1,201/9,558 Unique aspects.
Aspects gathered
Trash: 141,581
Damaged: 74,373
Common: 25,926
Uncommon: 3,390
Rare: 418
Special: 3 (Zombified). 100 (Anima). 111 (Molten)
Unique: 1,719
Artifact: 357
Legendary: 0
Mythical: 0
Looking at the list, Joe could only bite his lips to keep from being frustrated. Weeks of effort, the sacrifice of a half-dozen impressive weapons, as well as the material from another Artifact building had all been devoted to creating a single building that no one could even access yet. “Only reason this place is still standing is that upside-down pyramid… that was a great return on investment. Keep that in mind.”
He scowled at the pyramid and felt his eyelid twitch. “I suppose I can only wonder what an Artifact-ranked Reduction Warehouse would look like. For now. It’s fi~ine.”
“Major-General, if I may-” Joe screamed and vaulted away from Major Cleave, who stood stock-still as he clutched at his heart. “Sir. You need to stop doing that.”
“If I gave you a bell, would you wear it?” Joe muttered too softly for even her enhanced senses to pick it up. He cleared his voice and spoke in a normal voice, “Sorry about that. I was lost in thought. Would have screamed at anyone who came up on me right then. What were you… ah, what’s your suggestion?”
The impressive mustache twitched as Major Cleave struggled to swallow her harsh words. “I was saying that perhaps you might want to consider getting a few buildings in place for housing the people in the area. While we do have the ability to go for a long time without sleep, simply having the option may sway the minds of the people considering staying here long-term in your favor.”
“An excellent idea.” Joe nodded vehemently, totally not agreeing because he was afraid that annoying her too much would bring her axe to bear and turn him from regular Joe into ‘Espresso Joe’ by slicing him up into fine bits and applying heat and pressure in the form of hiding the evidence in the lava pits. “Let’s find Ciril and get a team of mana-rich Dwarves together. Also, please feel free to remind me whenever I’m going off on tangents. I know I have things to do, and I’m always glad to toe the line in the Shoe!”
“Sir…” Major Cleave’s voice was pained. “Before you came here, what sort of things did people throw at you, and how many times a day did it happen? Just for research purposes.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Quest updated: Novice Rituarchitect II. Buildings created: 3/10.
Eyeing the message as he listened to the odd sound of brand-new screws biting into wood all by themselves, Joe licked his lips and whispered, “Soon, my sweet class experience. Soon.”
To be fair, each of the buildings he had raised with the ritual had added fifty experience each to his Reductionist and Rituarchitect classes, but those drops in a bucket only added up over time. He needed nine thousand, eight hundred and fifty to reach level eleven as a Rituarchitect, but under five thousand for his Reductionist class. At five hundred per completed structure, each of which he could soon charge rent on, he’d be over halfway to his next class level.
Title ‘Architect of Artifacts’ increases base stats of Common Apartment Building (50 units) by 10%, increasing Common Apartment Building to 55 units. Durability: 3,300/3,300.
“Look at that.” Ciril stared at the perfect, burnished orange glow that seemed to hang around the building due to the lights directly above. “I swear, every time you’ve made one of those, they look better the longer I look at them.”
Joe chuckled internally, knowing that he’d never reveal that he had a title that improved the buildings after initial construction. It was too much fun to watch the Dwarf trying to figure out if he was going crazy. He looked around the area, noting the other two buildings he had managed to bring up over the last few hours: a barracks and the bathhouse.
As it turned out, the lighting had been coordinated with the planner after he saw the tiles being placed all willy-nilly, and Joe had managed to take a look at the new plan. He had been correct about what was planned under the daylight and purple lights, then been informed that areas under the blue light were for crafters, green was for administration and cleaning, and finally orange for housing the civilian, militia, and military members that were moving in.
“I think we should call this place ‘Eternal Sunset Acres’,” Ciril informed the people around them. “A name like that lends the area a sense of mysticism, and it should draw people looking to relocate.”
“Huh. I was thinking of ‘Empty Shoe Estates’, personally.” Joe shrugged as his suggestion gained him a few disdainful glances. “What? You guys think that’d draw in the wrong crowd? People that want you to get off their lawn or something? ‘Shoe’ does sound like ‘shoo’, I guess. You win this one, Ciril.”
He continued rambling until the staring became withering glares, then promptly looked down at his list and decided that they had done enough for the day. “Now that we have a place to sleep and clean up, let’s take off and meet up tomorrow. I have a few things to attend to.”
