Chapter 64: The Lazy Grind

Chapter 64: The Lazy Grind

Name: Isaac Thoma

Class: Undying Wraith

Species: Human

Level: 24

XP: 10,316/5,000

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 500/500

Stats

Fortitude

50

Perception

65

Strength

45

Agility

70

Magic Power

50

Magic Regeneration

60

Free Points: 0 Stat, 19 Skill

Central Skills

Form of Horror XIII

The Chosen Weapon XVIII

Skills

Hundred Faces XIV

Stealth XVII

Power Strike XXIII

Piercing Strike XXV

Sundering Strike XXIII

Blades XXIV

Sneak XVII

Sweeping Strike IX

Far Strike XVII

Manifold Strike XVII

Hunter’s Gaze XX

Phantom Step XIII

Unknown Fear X

Bestial Regeneration IX

Undying Focus V

Tools of Terror X

Fleeting Presence I

Crippling Blow I

General Skills

Gralloch IX

Alchemy IX

Aspects

Aspect Skills

Poltergeist (2 stack)

Poltergeist’s Flight

Poltergeist Shift

Isaac just shook his head, irritated with himself. It was far too easy to get sidetracked and start some form of grinding. Again.

Still, he could now safely put his hand into the grill, laying in into the bed of glowing coals, all without taking a lick of damage. He wasn’t stupid enough to assume he was now completely immune to all fire and heat, powerful magical flames would likely still hurt him, but as far as the mundane stuff was concerned, he might as well be invincible.

The steak had finished by now, so Isaac pulled it off the grill with his bare hands and plated it up, then did the same with a couple of balls of aluminum foil he grabbed straight out of the embers. Baked potatoes, made properly, wrapped in aluminum and placed directly in the fire. Delicious.

A single long jump took him to the top of the roof he’d had built over his summoning area, almost as high as the surrounding trees were tall, the sky filling his entire field of view. Only him, his food, and the endless vastness of the universe. A lawn chair appeared in front of him, summoned from the storage room.

But mostly the food. It was divine. Well, the potatoes weren’t, but that was besides the point. Isaac chuckled softly at the unintentional pun. And then, he set down the plate, sank back into the lawn chair, and closed his eyes.

For the first time since returning from the other timeline, he slept properly. Not to get enough rest as to no longer be tired, not because he had to, but simply because he wanted to. It was an indulgent, unproductive waste of time, but the same could be said of basically everything people did for fun, for leisure, anything but work. At least from a certain point of view.

From another, the one he was taking, relaxing was good for him, so it was productive in that sense.

Just taking a nap did feel good, but he woke up after maybe an hour or so regardless. His body was simply no longer built for sleeping a third of to half a day, sadly.

Isaac decided now was a good time to check the news again. The last Event monster had been taken care of, people were pretty confident on that front, so people had stopped dying to it directly, but casualty numbers were still fluctuating wildly. Estimates were being overthrown, like some analyst simply assuming that the people of Africa would jump at the chance to get limited time loot and had assigned five hundred casualties to every known incident of any kind, resulting in vastly inflated numbers. And so on, and so forth.

But even as some overestimates were being proven false, underestimates were also coming to light. A ‘Skalli’ breaking a dungeon core near a major city, unleashing the monsters within as an artificial dungeon break. Why it had even been in there and how it had reached the core without slaughtering all the monsters guarding it was anyone’s guess.

Sure, breaking the core would unleash all surviving monsters upon the surrounding area, but if that had been a deliberate act of terrorism, why on Earth wouldn’t the people responsible just break the core directly, instead of somehow getting the damn wolf in there? Or had the wolf somehow chased a fleeing dungeon master into their own bound dungeon and killed them in the core chamber, then turned its wrath upon the core itself?

Isaac just shook his head in annoyance. If he found out who was responsible for this, they’d better pray they didn’t encounter him in a dark alley. That being said, he suspected he’d have to get in line.

And then there were the additional casualties that were piling up as the Event materials were being misused. The news only referenced a certain video of someone drinking venom to gain fire resistance without having the necessary toughness and/or regenerative ability to survive the experience.

Said video was available online and Isaac had decided to watch it. As one might expect, the sight was harrowing.

Some poor sap had also quite clearly demonstrated what happened when the user of an Ulfhednar cloak didn’t stop despite its use feeling wrong.

The team was all comprised of scientists, whose usual reaction so something going alarmingly wrong was to try to get to the bottom of the situation. This person had decided to ignore the feeling of wrongness that apparently accompanied the transformation if the user wasn’t qualified and ended up turning into a lycanthrope, or as a normal person would put it, a werewolf.

But not the standard ‘transforms into a wolf’ kind of werewolf. No, a two legged beast, three meters tall, arms like tree trunks and fingers tipped with claws like steak knives. And they were probably stuck that way, but there was no way to tell.

They’d been struck with the rage and feral instincts that often accompanied the transformation in stories, gone on a rampage and been gunned down. Well, blown up by multiple rocket propelled grenades. Regular bullets had just bounced off, leading to the deaths of the officers who’d fired them, delaying the monster for all of thirty seconds before it continued to hunt down civilians. The local National Guard equivalent was what had eventually gotten the kill.

Isaac nearly put down the phone but hiding from the world would not make said world any less bad.

The next news segment he came across was somewhat more humorous, though, being greatly reminiscent of that one meme of two people in a Spiderman costume pointing at each other in an accusatory fashion.

But these two weren’t wearing superhero costumes, at least not a proper, modern one, which was probably for the best, given that they likely would have otherwise been sued.

No, this was the ‘uniform’ of someone people considered to be one of the world’s oldest superheroes, hailing from ancient times, the Great Sage, Heaven’s Equal, Sun Wukong, also known as the Monkey King.

One would not have been wrong to simply call these two cosplayers, but that was a vastly oversimplified way to put it.

They were people who were picking [Classes], [Skills], equipment and everything else to emulate the mythical figure and eventually gain the right [Class].

[Monkey King] was an extraordinarily powerful, legendary, fourth Evolution [Class]. It wasn’t entirely clear if the [System] had just given up and generated it because people were trying to get it, or it had always been available, but the point was, it existed.

And what a [Class] it was, generating Jingu Bang, the staff of the Monkey King, as a soulbound weapon and even granting a cloning [Skill], one found in no other [Class] or Aspect, at least not as far as Isaac knew. Oh, and then there were the dozen or so truly insane defensive [Skills] that rendered the user close to unkillable.

Isaac wondered which of the two was the real Monkey King, or if it even was one of them. Well, both of them were fake, obviously, but someone had gotten that [Class] in the other timeline, changed his race to [Mythical Stone Monkey] and chosen the title [Great Sage, Heaven’s Equal]. A very impressive future powerhouse.

Still, that was hardly the only [Class] like this that existed and those two weren’t the only ones who chased the specters of ancient myths and legends, of great historical figures and actual comic-book heroes.

Davy Jones prowled the depths of the ocean on a ship filled with the animated bodies of the dead, occasionally running into a submarine captain whose every [Skill] flowed into making his vessel more and more self-sufficient and increasing its size. Also, he styled himself after Captain Nemo, from the old novel ’20,000 miles under the sea’, his ship was called the Nautilus and one of his [Class] Evolutions had been [Captain of the Nautilus], though near the end, it had evolved into something whose name Isaac didn’t know.

Of course, other people were creating themed builds without having a specific person in mind to emulate. A man styling himself a pirate, going by the name of Captain Thatch, sailed the seas with the Jolly Roger flying high, all the while acting out the overly romanticized version of his ‘profession’. He didn’t give a flying fuck about naval law, taxes or any form of authority, but he also ran around kicking assholes in the teeth, killing monsters and saving people.

No one reached the higher Levels without being at least a little kooky.

Others styled themselves after historical figures or merely happened to follow a similar path and gained an inheritor [Class] as a result. There’d been a serial killer who went after prostitutes in London who’d become [Ripper’s Heir].

All of those [Classes] were pretty damn strong and being deemed to be the inheritor of, say, Gregor Mendel or Louis Pasteur came with one massive heaping dose of prestige, but Isaac was on a pretty damn powerful path as well. His own. One shaped by his own choices and custom made for what he needed it.

Besides, there weren’t any historical or literary paths that fit what he needed, not as far as he knew.

Isaac reached into the pocket space to try and grab another beer, but his hand came back empty. Right, they were all in the tub of ice water ... which was still on the ground.

With a sigh, he dropped through the roof, landing right near one of the summoning circles. Actually, he did need a few more cores, didn’t he? Besides, there was something he wanted to try out ...

The Lesser Space Elemental appeared and was torn to shreds by a fully empowered [Manifold Strike]. With the high Level of all the component [Skills], it was able to tear through the spatial warp as if it were made of tissue paper, something he couldn’t have managed a mere twenty-four hours ago.

He’d have tried that at the university, but he was trying to demonstrate his technique, not brute force. And given how easy that had been ... maybe chopping up another one or two to go shopping with wouldn’t be too bad?

Still, beer first. It wasn’t like he’d be affected by just one in any way. So that was how things went. Get beer, jump onto roof, drink beer, drop down and kill Lesser Space Elemental, then return to the roof with a new drink and read a book or watch the news.

All the way until the first soft rays of dawn began to peek over the horizon. Isaac picked up the phone to call his mother, but swiftly put it back down when he realized it was still 5 in the morning. It was literally the morning after the longest day in the year, sunrise was obviously going to be damn early.

Still, he had the all the cores he needed ... and he could finally get the second stage of extradimensional spaces, the Extradimensional Room. It required the same core, but more mana than he’d had a day ago.

So, why the hell not summon it now, right before he went out to buy stuff? He could certainly pick up furniture as well.

He headed over into his storage container and retrieved a large tarp, then painted a Tier 6 circle onto it. The mere sight filled him with apprehension, he was fully aware of just what could come out of one of these things.

But he was summoning an inanimate area where the laws of spacetime where a little screwy.

Congratulations! You’ve surmounted immense odds and managed to create an Extradimensional Room, a member of the [Rewards] type summons.

Each person can only have one Extradimensional Room, and it may be accessed from anywhere within 10 meters of the original ritual.

Re-using this ritual will move the existing Extradimensional Room to the new site, anchoring it there until it is moved again.

The room itself is 5x5x5 meters in size and is inaccessible to anyone other than the owner while there is no one within. If there are living creatures within, the doorway used to enter it is faintly visible to anyone with powerful magical senses and can, in theory, be broken into with extremely powerful spatial, portal or teleportation magic.

The user may also add in a material sample to create the illusion of the room’s boundaries being made of this material, as well as windows to observe the outside, antennas to access satellite feeds, ... (see full list?).

Isaac grinned and stepped inside, finding himself in a decently sized cube bordered in walls made from black matter and azure lightening. It looked spooky, but he’d be able to change that with just a sliver of any other material, which he could soon get.

Anyway ... time to take another nap before going shopping. It was nice to take it easy like this, even if it wouldn’t last beyond today.