Luca DR
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Edge of apocalypse 82
🕑 Added 2023-07-11 16:37:40 +0000 UTCIt went without saying that both Albert and his family had an inkling the Kirkesis Core was mysteriously going to pop out one way or another somewhere on the other side of the portal. There was no way it was all a coincidence, after all.
Preparing to cross took a couple of days. Day one was spent making sure Albert had a veritable arsenal at his disposal, bigger even than the one he had with him when he went to face the Tier 4 event and fought the dragon.
Learning from the dragon fight, he had been given even more explosives, and various types of weapons, ammo, shields, and materials. Almost half of his inventory slots were filled with nothing but possibly useful equipment.
It was strange: it felt like he was preparing to go to war. But since it happened so soon after a fight that was literally the hardest fight he had ever fought, and the one with the highest stakes, he didn’t feel nearly as worried, or anxious. He felt excited to explore a new world, to see where the system would take him.
He thought about watching the firelaser skill video, but decided against it. If the skill was like he thought it was, then a pristine forest was not the right place to test it. Especially when he needed to perform many (probably dangerous) experiments before the skill could be usable.
Albert also spent some time alone in the forest, enjoying his connection with the abundant and pristine nature of the place. He was still not used to this new Elven side of himself, and found the many strange moods, feelings and sensations quite interesting to explore.
He went to say hi to Elle back in the village, and the little girl was super excited when she saw what happened to his ears, although she still claimed that Albert was positively ugly.
***
Lloyd paced around the room. “Albert, what is the description for your skill… what was it? Healing touch?”
“Let’s see… You can perform a quick healing incantation on yourself or on others. The skill will attempt to restore the body to its peak condition. Cost will adjust to the injury being healed.”
“Interesting, interesting... Let's try to use it on me.” He said.
“Why? You're okay, right? You’re not hurt.” Albert asked quickly.
“No, nothing like that.” Lloyd said with a dismissive motion. “But I'm old. Definitely not peak condition. It might work.”
Albert shrugged. It was definitely worth a try. He raised his hand, gathered the healing energies in his palm, making sure to have enough mana but also not to overdo it, and then touched his grandpa.
“Do you feel any different?” Albert asked.
“No.” Lloyd said after a moment. He moved around, felt his joints and knees, touched his arms. “No. Nothing. Did your mana go down?”
“Yes,” Albert said. “But it might just be a failed cast.”
“Well, that’s too bad. I was hoping to get back to some form of youth, one way or another.”
***
Albert decided it was time to split [Mental Fortress] into two. He noticed that the system had changed the way it displayed skills, but sadly the limitation on skills, with their levels capping at level ten, had not been removed. As such, he was to either evolve the skill or split it, as the description said.
Mental Fortress 10
· Increased resistance to mind attacks and altered mental states.
· You can recognize illusions and attempts of mental manipulation, and dispel them.
· You have total control over your pain perception.
· NOTE: The skill has reached MAX LEVEL. Evolve it or split it to keep improving.
A good idea was to split the skill. It had gotten a bit too lopsided towards the pain side of things after his little… self-harming session when he had tried to raise the level of Healing Touch as much as possible.
Splitting a skill was not as easy as it sounded. Albert had to figure out how to reverse engineer it, how to remove certain parts while making sure they didn’t get lost forever, and then had to repackage them into two whole new skills. Or, in this case, one old skill and a new one.
Fortunately, there was a way to make the whole process easier, and much less risky.
“Analysis Mode.”
A few hours later, Albert was able to make a breakthrough. He finally felt confident to proceed, his confidence bolstered by the fact that he could always perfectly recall anything he saw and learned while Analysis Mode was active.
Skill: Mental Fortress has been successfully split into: Mental Fortress V and Pain Tolerance V.
Mental Fortress 5
· Increased resistance to mind attacks and altered mental states.
· You can recognize illusions and attempts of mental manipulation, and dispel them.
· You have total control over your pain perception.
Pain Tolerance 5
· You have partial control over your pain perception.
***
Finally, it was time to go. There was a sense of urgency associated with Albert’s departure, as all parties knew well that he needed to gain more power as quickly as possible. The stone dragon had been defeated with the aid of a nuclear weapon, but there would come a time – and soon – when even weapons of mass destruction were not going to be enough anymore.
Then what? Albert could theoretically use his skills to improve such weapons, making them even more destructive. But it would only be feasible up to a certain point, after which the tradeoff for more power was going to be more consequences after each use. The nuclear weapons would become so big and powerful that they were not going to be a good solution to the problem anymore, destroying ever larger portions of the world, poisoning large areas with radiation and making them uninhabitable.
The situation required Albert to find and pursue all avenues to become stronger. And when a seed he planted for a quest provided him with a free portal leading to the unknown, it was pretty clear he had to cross it, no matter how much he didn’t want to.
To be completely fair, he did want to. Deep down, he craved some more adventure. What he might not have liked was danger, because this was his life and not someone else’s life in a book or something, but the adventure, the discovery, the thrill when he gained new powers…
They were addictive.
“One last check. Then, tomorrow, you will be gone.” Samantha said. There was a hint of sadness in her voice.
Albert stared at the portal. “It’s a bit scary. I think it’s giving me thalassophobia. But with portals.”
Samantha ignored the comment. “If you go through, there is no guarantee you will be able to return anytime soon.” She said for the third time today.
“I need the power up, don’t I? And the system will surely help me, it does state ‘return’, after all.”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t go. I just wanted to spell out the warning, in fact you should notice that I’m literally letting you go on an adventure on your own. I’m being a very good mother, am I not?”
Albert smiled. “Yeah. Thanks mom. Speaking of… Have you decided what you will do in the meantime?”
“I will build a network of operatives here. We can’t rely on just you to do everything. That’s why I have to ask you to do that other thing.”
“The wands for your minions…” He said.
She noticed his sarcasm. “Don’t be so quick to judge. I too used to ride the moral high horse in the beginning. Do you want to know how long I lasted on it?”
“No. I get it. Just use them well. Do you want other wands too?”
“Of course.”
“What other wands do you want?”
“Anything you can make.”
“Do you want them to be reusable?”
“If you can.”
“I'll need to figure out how to make arrays then. Okay, I'll do it.”
***
“Lair, make me a meditation room.” Albert said.
He thought about what his mother said. He thought about what it did to her, watching her own son suffer the kind of pain he suffered when he made the first neuralizer wand. And yet she endured it without batting an eye, even asking for more wands. In the past it would have made him see her as a monster.
It was a couple hours later that Albert was finally ready. In the end, instead of learning how to make arrays to make the wands power themselves, he chose to simply make it so they could be recharged at the Lair after they ran out of uses.
And as he finally went on to create the wands for the unstable skills, he knew that his mother was there, watching him suffer hellish pain for what she wanted, ready to heal him after every wand he made.
He understood just how much pain she herself must have suffered and endured to be able to be what she is now. Cold, detached, in control. He wished he could be like her. He wished he could just let everything go, become what he needed to be to save the world.
Instead, he was a whiny boy who wanted to escape through a portal instead of facing his struggles. To run away, to forget about the apocalypse, to forget about having killed a person, to forget about that time he almost died.
What lay beyond the portal was dangerous, potentially deadly. But it was far away. He would be like in a video game, a whole other person. Pain, struggle and suffering would mold him. And nobody but him was going to see it. By the time he returned, he would be different. Better.
So he told himself to gather enough courage to cross.
The wands were ready. One for mind control, two for fireballs, one for telekinesis, two for shields, two for earth shard, appraisal, and healing. Making the reusable wands for psionic skills was much, much more painful than the one-off ones, and the backlash was resistant to his Mind Fortress skill.
Yet he endured. Perhaps unaware that he was already becoming the exact person he aspired to become, not seeing how being what he wanted to be would not make him happier. But he could not see it then, and probably would not see it after he became that person.
