Chapter 124: Traveling

Chapter 124: Traveling

When I woke up in the morning, one of the first things I did was check my Status, looking at Noxious Grasp. Over the night, it’d garnered an extra 667 Spell XP! Up to around 700/1.13k, which meant I was already pretty close to Rank 14. But that new Spell XP requirement of 1.13k was getting pretty steep. Even with Exponential Reclamation, a four-digit requirement for my next Rank was quite a massive amount. Still, if I kept going at my current pace, I’d most likely be able to finish this Rank by the end of today.

I’d used the same method from before to gain as much Spell XP as possible throughout the night, having Erani and Ainash, while they were on watch, wake me up whenever they saw Light Plate disappear from my body so I could put it back on.

Really, they said it helped them out too, since Light Plate allowed them to see in the dark night. Normally, the only source of illumination was the moon, which naturally put them at a distinct disadvantage against the nighttime predators that’d come out when it got dark.

We didn’t get attacked by anything during the night, though, thankfully—I suspected the Demons had probably gone out and slaughtered all of the monsters around their wall during its construction, so I wasn’t too surprised at that. But as we continued to leave the site of the wall, I was sure we’d start seeing some more monsters. Especially once we began entering the territories of the other Dragons.

So, we got up and got moving. Our goal was to get to the Barinruth Empire within the next couple days, and we couldn’t do that while stationary.

It took a few hours before we encountered our first monster. This one wasn’t one of the Drakes that’d become familiar in this mountainous land—and it luckily wasn’t a Dragon, either. Instead, it was a monster that was only really seen deeper into Kingdom’s Edge. A Shadow Panther.

Because of the high stone walls on either side of us—the path we walked having been cut straight into the mountains—we were almost constantly in shade, only ever seeing direct sunlight during noon. And Shadow Panthers seemed to use this fact to their advantage.

They looked how they sounded like they’d look—large, feline creatures with dark fur covering their bodies. Their fur was so dark, in fact, that it allowed them to completely blend in with the shadows the tall stone walls around us created. It seemed like they had some sort of invisibility-adjacent ability to make them almost impossible to perceive while they were cloaked in shade.

I hadn’t heard of them before, but Index filled in the blanks where I couldn’t quite intuit things. They didn’t like hanging around the outskirts of Kingdom’s Edge, near the wasteland, because of the Ghouls that resided there. Since Ghouls sensed with smell instead of sight, it made the Shadow Panthers’ invisibility near-useless against them. So it seemed like they stuck around over here, where the Ghouls rarely wandered out to.

Still, despite their near-invisibility, they weren’t too difficult to fight. It made them hard to spot at first, but once they attacked and made themselves known, I could pretty easily keep track of their movements. The additional Stats I’d been building up with Recursive Growth—specifically, the extra Dexterity—gave me the enhanced senses necessary to be able to spot the small distortions in the air and soft patter of its paws on the stone ground. And Erani’s explosion-based magic didn’t really need her to have a perfect idea of where our enemies were, anyway.

I did decide to use the Shadow Panthers as an opportunity to experiment with Sanguine Bond, though. I’d Ranked it up all the way to 9 already, but I hadn’t used it in true combat yet. So I felt that fighting against some agile opponents would give me good practice with what the Spell would demand me to do.

The thing about Sanguine Bond was that it’d break and prematurely end if I ever let my enemy get more than ten paces away from me. And it was expensive enough that a single failed cast of the Spell could mean big trouble for me. Of course, a successful cast of it was good enough that it was worth the risk, but I’d need to get used to keeping people within that radius.

Now, my build was pretty catered toward doing just that. With Crippling Chill, Ray of Frost, and Gravity Well to slow my enemies down and Expedite to speed me up, as long as I had the Mana for it, I could always ensure I was more mobile than my opponent. And if I had better mobility, I could be the one in control of who was positioned where.

So I started my practice against one of the Shadow Panthers. I let Erani and Ainash know that I wanted to try using the next monster that came to work with the Spell, and to keep from engaging unless it seemed like I was in trouble.

Within an hour, we had a hit. I caught a rippling in the wall next to me—a sign of the Panther’s imperfect camouflage—and readied myself for an attack. The moment it saw that I’d noticed it, it pounced straight at me.

Once it got within a pace or two of my Light Plate, the invisibility from the shadows melted away, and revealed the monster’s looks—pitch black fur and beady eyes, with razor-sharp fangs and claws shining in the newfound light.

I’d activated three Expedites on myself in preparation, so despite the creature’s own blistering speed, I was still able to sidestep and narrowly avoid its swipe. Then, keeping my eyes on it as it landed and turned back around toward me, I hit it with both a Crippling Chill and a Ray of Frost to push its Stats down to a more manageable range, keeping Gravity Well ready to be activated at any time.The original appearance of this chapter can be found at Ñøv€lß1n.

The Panther, after being hit with both of the Spell effects at the same time, seemed to realize it was outmatched, and instantly turned to try and flee. That was the issue with trying to use a wild animal to train my skills against; if it realized I was effectively toying with it, it’d obviously run off. But that was why I had Gravity Well ready to activate.

The moment it attempted to run off, I toggled the Spell on, crushing the Panther under a 60% increase in gravity. Then I charged in and turned the attack back on it. While it swiveled around to face me, I tapped it quickly and cast Sanguine Bond—and Noxious Grasp too, while I was at it.

You have cursed Level 14 Shadow Panther with Sanguine Bond. For the next 10 seconds, or until Level 14 Shadow Panther is further than 10 paces away from you, the following effects are true:

It loses 6.21 Health, 7.76 Stamina, and 9.31 Mana per second.

You gain 1.55 Health, 3.55 Stamina, and 4.65 Mana per second.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ainash seemed like she was able to handle just about as many I tried to throw at her. She barely felt a difference at one stack, same with two, and still felt totally comfortable with three, four, and five. At the levels of six, seven, eight, nine, and ten, we started seeing noticeable improvement in her abilities, but at that point, it didn’t really seem worth it. Really, if it was going to cost me 400 Mana just to increase her speed from “extremely fast” to “even more extremely fast,” I could probably find better uses for the Mana.

The thing about Stats was that, especially when considering their physical effects, they had diminishing returns. Going from 10 to 20 Dexterity would feel like a massive change; even though they only added on to one’s base abilities, getting that addition doubled would still be huge for just about anyone. But going from 50 to 60? From 100 to 110? It wouldn’t feel like too much of a big deal. So for Ainash, who already had such extreme levels of Dexterity, she wouldn’t actually get much from Expedite until my Mana rose to much higher levels.

We did still see improvement for me and Erani, though. I managed to push the limit I was comfortable with up to around five—my Dexterity was equal to 184, at that point—while Erani could only push herself up to three stacks.

“Really?” I laughed as Erani got up from tripping over her feet, still unable to walk with four Expedites on her. “I feel like you’ve been stuck at three for a while now.”

“It’s not my fault,” she grumbled, “it’s the damn Bond.”

I stopped laughing. “Oh? Is the Stat gain from it still bothering you that much?”

“Uh, yeah, pretty much. I’m still just trying to get used to the Ranks it gained overnight. A bit rough to deal with that alongside the extra Dexterity from Expedite.”

“It got a Rank overnight?” I asked. “Nice, it seems like what you were thinking about worked. I also had it deepen doing the same thing.”

“Um, not just one,” Erani said awkwardly.

I furrowed my brows. “How many, then?”

“...Eight?”

I stopped in my tracks, looking at her with wide eyes. “I’m sorry, eight?!”

“Uh, yeah. The Stat boost went from 24 to 40.”

I was speechless. How in the hells did that happen? Was I just terrible at working with the Bond? At this point, her physical Stats were all at 50. That rivaled even mid-Level Melee-Classers! My highest Physical Stat was Endurance, and it was only 46, after the 8 extra I got from my own Bond.

In the end, I just managed a shocked sigh.

“Yeah,” she said, “I wasn’t really expecting it, either. I guess this type of thing just comes naturally?”

“Seems so,” I said. “Do you think it’s possible for you to raise it even more doing the same thing?”

“No, probably not. Most of those came in my first couple hours of watch. The rest didn’t really do anything.”

I nodded. With her having so many more Stats, we’d work so much more effectively as a unit now. Angelic Shield helped, but Erani was always weak in circumstances where we fought up-close. Now, as long as we could get her used to these new Stats, she could probably rival me as a front-lines fighter—especially when dealing with larger groups of opponents.

“Ainash, you were aware of this, right? I asked. Since we’d made it a habit to passively relay our conversations to her, she was normally filled in on whatever was happening, but she seemed to be content just listening unless we directly addressed her.

“Yes!” She exclaimed back. “Mother loves me so much!”

“Yeah,” I laughed, “she sure does.”