Chapter 49: Home Sweet Home

Chapter 49: Home Sweet Home

Isaac’s face sported a wide grin as he headed home, weaving through the forest at speeds that would trigger traffic cams if he’d done so in a city. Moving like this, no holds barred, was exhilarating. Not quite as much as, say, fighting a monster of the right strength, but still fun.

Fat drops of water splattered into his face as the rain poured from the sky and lighting crackled overhead, soaking him to the bone despite his raincoat, but that didn’t matter. Anything that couldn’t get wet was safely stored in a waterproof bag, so there were no issues on that front, and dashing through the woods in this kind of weather was somehow even more fun. And as for that other thing he wanted to do, well, this weather was actually kind of perfect.

Isaac reached his ‘house’ after maybe a quarter of an hour of running, the isolated clearing he’d bought with the money from Vegas came into view. It had been incredibly isolated, making it rather unattractive since it was so hard to get to. But Isaac hadn’t had a car when the [System] had appeared and with what he knew now, he was aware of the fact that he’d never really need one. Even the superhuman physical abilities he had now were enough to make the direct route through the forest faster than going around via the roads as he’d have to with a motor vehicle, after all. Also, the fact that it was so isolated meant he had his privacy.

He cleared the chain link fence he’d had put in with a single jump and then, he was home.

Just like he’d told Amy earlier today, a large chunk of the ground was covered in rock from defeated Golems that had been fused together by Karl. He’d set it up during one of the few breaks from working with the police he’d had to take due to some archaic labor laws that had failed to take into account superhumans with no need for sleep.

Then, with a little help, he’d brought two dismantled shipping containers here from the road five minutes away and set them up here. One was set up as his temporary ‘house’, the second was there mostly for storage purposes.

When he entered his ‘house’, he stripped off his jacket and placed his phone onto the table in the center of the room. A large closet absolutely stuffed with clothing sat against the far wall, with his bed sitting beside it. Ordinarily, this was where one would change out of the wet clothes and try to get dry as quickly as possible, but he’d transcended the point where the common cold posed any kind of threat to him.

He also switched out of his truly soaked jeans, replacing them with a more tightly fitting pair of shorts that would not get in the way. Given how isolated his property was, there was really no reason he couldn’t just run around in his birthday suit, but that just felt weird, so he didn’t.

With those preparations out of the way, he headed over to the other shipping container to grab some supplies. There was the slag he’d gotten from Stagmer when he’d first brought up the idea of getting an Aspect of the Forge Golem, some iron and steel bits, chunks of coal from a garden supply store. He also took some of his emergency long-reaching weapons he’d prepared in case he didn’t have access to the Zweihänder for some reason. They were basically just two meter long metal fence posts transformed into rudimentary blades using the [Blades] [Skill], but they should do the trick for now.

Back outside, Isaac placed the summoning materials into the Tier 4 circle he’d carved into the rock using a chisel and judicious application of [Piercing Strike]. In fact, he’d carved all circles up to that Tier into the ground so he could summon easily without having to repeatedly create new ones. He’d purposefully left out the Tier 5 circle, though. While summoning wasn't illegal, it was frowned upon and Tier 5 was still largely decried as a city killer. Having hard to erase proof of the fact that he summoned those monsters on the regular would have been a capital B bad idea.

As Isaac sat there in the rain, waiting for his mana to recharge so he could actually fight the monster, he thought about how easy it now was to gain resources just by summoning and what pitfalls there were he needed to warn people about. Sure, summoning monsters and killing them for their components was an easy way to get metal and the like, at least on the surface, but sadly, it wasn’t quite that easy.

A lot of the weaker monsters were made from really low quality materials, if they were useful at all. That meant that getting useful things required going after things like The Crusher and that was not going to be easy or painless. Bringing one down required someone like Isaac with a decently high Level and appropriately levelled [Skills]. Creating a person with that skillset required a not insignificant amount of time and effort to be invested, which was, in turn, yet another major source for monsters that could potentially escape and wreak havoc.

What was perfectly possible was to get the really basic building blocks of the world from weak monsters, water, decent quality soil and the like, something that had come into practice in the Third World recently. A certain someone had written up a lot of good advice for that, including a strongly worded warning about how Water Elementals should not be drunk directly because they were made from pure water and that was decidedly bad for humans. Well, only if you drank it, but still something people needed to be aware of.

After posting the little essay on the internet, Isaac had also made donations to several charities and asked them to spread the word. Given the state of the infrastructure in the places that really needed this information, Isaac wasn’t getting any direct feedback, but things seemed to be getting better.

Also, it seemed that things would be as calm as in the other timeline, with very few extraordinarily powerful monsters getting summoned. Given the option of fixing their basic needs using summoning, a lot of people seemed to be content with that.The debut release of this chapter happened at Ñòv€l-B1n.

There were several instances where people had marathon-summoned to topple the local warlord, which often ended up working, but the vast majority of summoners were being surprisingly reasonable and cautious. Not that ousting a despot wasn’t reasonable, it was merely that doing so via summoning required a not insignificant degree of risk taking.

Isaac wished he were in a position to help more there, but he simply didn’t know anything that would be useful. The media had simply not covered those things nearly as thoroughly as it had the messes in the west, leaving him sorely lacking in the information department where the third world was concerned.

He did know about several notable incidents, but they were only the biggest ones, and still fell into the category of ‘if people properly research these monsters, they’ll know better than to summon them’. And really, that was his solution to this situation. Just arrange to summon each of those monsters before they could play a part in those incidents and make sure the world was aware of the dangers.

And then, his mana ticked up to full and Isaac rose in a single smooth motion, fencepost spear in his right hand as the Forge Golem erupted from the summoning circle. Just like everyone had thought, it was a tall, humanoid form made from red hot metal, a white hot circle of material around where the mouth would be on a regular human.

Steam hissed it as the rainwater splattered off the monster, vaporizing instantly, dark splotches instantly forming as the material cooled. It began to march forward, shedding metallic flakes as the hardened outer shell broke off. Now, Isaac could just kept backing off, letting the monster die from the environment alone, but that would be boring as hell and net him precisely jack shit in terms of rewards, so he didn’t.

He did back up a little to get it clear of the summoning circles though, semi-liquid metal splattering across those would be a bitch to clean up.

Users weapon is covered with energy, increasing its ability to penetrate armor. This effect lasts for a single strike. Should the weapon in question be stuck within an opponent, the effect will last for .5 sec, allowing for removal of weapon or further cutting.

In addition, it may now be used in ways beyond the original description, lingering on weapons after use, refining them, and being able to be combined with other Skills.

After countless battles where this Skill was used to pierce the very core of an enemy and slay them in a single, swift, strike it has evolved into an even deadlier form. It may now stab through space itself, any thrusting attack empowered with it launching a beam of all-piercing energy at quadruple the mana cost. In addition, using this Skill will give the user insight into the location of his opponents’ vital organs.

Cost: 10 mana per strike for regular use, 40 mana per ranged attack

The stronger the [Skill] was, the harder it was to disrupt. Simply applying it meant that weapon was more there, more real, piercing through magical effects like, say, the space-time twisting powers of a Space Elemental. And while ‘stab through space itself’ was almost certainly just a particularly fanciful way to phrase ‘stab at a distance’, it was still an incredibly powerful upgrade. The first threshold might upgrade a given [Skill] with a new power, but the second one actually gave an upgrade based on how you had used a [Skill], creating a powerful new effect.

The other two [Skills] might have only hit Level X, but that was still a nice upgrade.

Phantom Step (epic, Level X)

A single step is the beginning of a journey of a thousand miles. And if this Skill’s Level is high enough, then a single step can be a journey of a thousand miles.

You are a phantom in the dark, an unseen shadow that streaks past in the night.

With this Skill, the user can make a single step take them far greater distances than it would normally ever be able to. As a stealth Skill, it is vastly more efficient when used unobserved.

This Skill may now also be used simultaneously with either [Spectral Shift] or [Stealth].

Cost: 15 mana to initiate, 2 mana per three meters of unobserved travel, 4 mana per meter of observed travel, with a maximum range of 10 m +2 m per Skill Level

[Phantom Step] had gotten a little cheaper, which was always nice to have, but the real win was the ability to use his invisibility or walk through wall [Skills] in conjunction with the teleport, letting him jump directly through walls or rapidly move using the teleport [Skill] while staying invisible.

Gaze of the Hunter (epic, Level X)

There are many possible upgrades to the basic Inspect Skill. Some allow for improved examination of details, others are far better at piercing information protection Skills.

This one is different. It loses any ability to gaze past defenses for raw details unless the defenses are very weak, but gains an incredible power at getting rough information on the user’s foes.

Barring an incredible Level disparity, the user will be able to sense whether someone’s Stats are higher, lower or comparable to the User’s, how many Aspects they have and what their overall affinities are.

But by using the information gained via this Skill, an Undying Wraith will be able to deduce anything Inspect could grant, and more.

In addition, this [Skill] allows the user to see mana and sense the purpose of Skills being used in front of him.

And then there was this gem. [Hunter’s Gaze] let him see anything an opponent, be they monster or human, tried to use before the actual effect occurred, giving him an incredibly valuable split second warning for almost all [Skills] while the ability to see mana was all-round incredibly useful. The combination of those two effects would also make navigating the spatial anomalies wielded by the Space Elemental a hell of a lot easier.

But first, he’d try and finish getting that Aspect before the rain let up.