Chapter 288 – Hella Wise

Chapter 288 – Hella Wise



“Finally, I just hope my assumption is correct...” John said and, after weeks of grinding, dropped the 11 needed points into Wisdom, pushing it to 250.



‘First off: nice, actual numbers, and second off: geezus that is quite the jump,’ John thought, looking at his Character Sheet.



So now he had more than enough mana to keep up Spellcarrier without worry. To run the calculation, John had 9,84 mana, for the ease of calculation he just pushed that up to 10. Thanks to Elementalist reducing the cost of his elementals by 20%, they were taking 2% of his mana regeneration each, instead of 2,5%. Their effective cost, therefore, was 10% of his regeneration or 1 mana per second in normal numbers.

Not only was this bonkers cheap (he was semi-certain that Gaia was going to nerf him on that front once the next patch rolled around), but it was still going to get cheaper. The goal to get the summoning skills to be completely free (for which level 20 would be needed) was still his current class objective.

Added to that were the Artificial Spirits, taking another 2% of his mana regeneration. Then he finally got to Possession.

Thanks to Jack having the One of the Hive Attribute, the base Possession cost him no mana or Possession Slot, so that was something. Spellcarrier always costed at least 2 Possession Slots, however: one to create the Spellcarrier condition and another one per kind of spell the Possession target was able to cast.

Each Possession slot cost John 1 mana to keep up, which had been taking quite the toll on his old mana regeneration of around 5,5. With roughly 10 (8,8 after deducting the percentage reductions), this price was way more agreeable. John still wouldn’t use Spellcarrier whenever he could, at least not for the moment.

Fact was that it was fairly rare that using a skill from another position than his own was both required and more effective than just giving the same mana to his elementals. With the exception of Arcane Explosion, none of his spells were particularly great when equipped to Jack, or other objects, in the first place.

Mana Blade had the drawback of having its size and damage scale evenly. When in melee that wasn’t a problem, but if John wanted to use the thing as the sparrow’s talons, then they would deal either next to no damage or be gigantic enough to draw all attention and siphon off a fair chunk of his mana.

Sending Sylph over was the more cost-effective solution in pretty much every situation.

Mana Ray, on the other hand, had such a huge range that whatever John needed to hit through Jack (or any other proxy for that matter) needed to have an even bigger range to make that necessary. That situation hadn’t even happened yet.

Only Arcane Explosion was good, because it turned it from a grenade that had to be thrown into an airstrike. It also did miniscule damage against single targets; to cut even on damage with Mana Ray, Arcane Explosion had to hit three targets.Findd new stories on nov/e(l)bin(.)com

‘So, I really need to get spells that actually make it worthwhile to use Spellcarrier,’ John thought. It was beyond the shadow of a doubt that being able to fire spells from a sheer infinite amount of positions in and of itself was strong. Strong enough, in fact, to compromise his next skill evolutions to fit the needs of it.

Up next was the question of where to allocate his Stat Points from now on. He had patched one hole, an urgent one in fact, for now, but it wasn’t like he could just continue dumping his points into one Stat and never have problems. Better spread it out a bit now that he had met his goal. After some consideration John came to three options.

The digging strategies reduced over time, as the monsters learned that it was a sure-fire way to get crushed underground with no hope of rescue or escape. Instead of trying to dig into John’s fortress, the orcs thus assaulted the second-best target for their digging strategy: The lava trenches.

The orcs would carry a frontal assault with a big force, keeping most of John’s forces bound at the gate, and then have a contingent hack away at the basin that kept the lava in position. To further occupy Gnome during these moments, the orcs actually launched small-scale digging assaults as well.

This multi-front approach lead to John having a lot of relatively easy kills, but at the cost of his lava trench, which was incredibly costly to create, being drained and slowly spilling down the hill, thus creating a bigger area for the orcs to assault next time if John wasn’t willing to invest the mana.

Thus, with their enemies’ new strategy and the Battery Pig’s ramming capabilities in mind, John overhauled the design. For a start, he got rid of the lava trenches. Effective as they may have been in the past, they didn’t fulfil their purpose in this set-up.

Instead, what he got was a crust of spikes that covered the area around and the base of the walls. They wouldn’t keep a Battery Pig from breaking through, the creatures had a complete disregard for their own safety, but they would at least damage it while also keeping orcs from gaining a secure footing from which to climb the walls from.

Even if they tried that, John left little holes around the whole thing for Undine to simply flush them off from. The Warhogs would fall in their attempt and land on some rather uncomfortable ground, making the spikes more effective yet again. The despawning of their corpses also made some rather macabre strategies on the orcs’ side impossible.

Up next was putting a roof on the damn tower. A slated, octagon shaped ceiling that prevented the enemy archers from showering them from a distance. If they wanted to get a shot in that meant anything, the orcs now needed to get closer and aim directly at the gap between roof and railing, which wasn’t the best of targets.

However, the orcs soon adapted to these changes and increased the diversity of their climbing strategies. Undine couldn’t be everywhere at once, so John halved her workload by creating a wide rim around the upper part of the tower, also raising it higher in the process.

That rim, which doubled as a walkway in the tower, had a simple purpose: create a shadow underneath in which Siena could lurk freely. The nightmare elemental didn’t like being delegated to simple guard duty, but with the enemy assault consisting of a literally endless supply of fresh soldiers, she had her claws full enough.

With that change, the orcs then went ahead and got more invested into correctly assaulting the main gate, which John soon changed to be up a small staircase to give Aclysia the height advantage. They tampered with their strategy again, John responded, it was an ever-shifting meta.

Throughout all of that, one crisis popped up after another. Battery Pigs threatened to collapse the now much grander structure whenever they broke through the walls. When John was getting halfway comfortable with his current situation, the orcs dug up one of their old strategies and forced him to respond with the similarly outdated solution, opening him up to other threats in the meantime.

The fighting was fierce, it was continuous, almost four hours of on-edge, raw danger. John had the upper hand; he created for himself a hand that was hard to lose with. Basically he was playing with minor cheat-codes, allowing himself an advantage he shouldn’t have had.

The game’s engine, however, was ready to respond by throwing every last bit of difficulty at him that was possible. Eventually, John came to the conclusion that this was a game that was so rigged on both sides that it was impossible to win if he didn’t exploit whatever opening was given to him.

It was awesome.

If these were what Assault would continue to be, a constant push against waves of enemies that tried to outsmart him, then this was a challenge that thrilled him.

‘Bring it,’ he thought with a wide grin. Everyone else in his party was also having a great time. Aside from Gnome, who was getting stressed by the constant demands put on her as the main construction mage. She didn’t complain at any point, however, as, even though she didn’t directly enjoy it herself, John did.

And the experience would only make them all stronger.