19 – Gonna Fly Now

19 – Gonna Fly Now

Another year had passed before Hisashi had even realised it. He had been obsessive about continuing to improve Illusory Aura, but now also had Blut to focus on in his training. He needs to get it to the point where his able to run it subconsciously during battle rather than having to focus on the skill. He went through backlash numerous times, but as a hollow he was able to recover from minor backlash within minutes and even if it was more major backlash resting for a few hours would generally take care of the internal damage it caused.

All the hard work had paid off though as he was now able to fight multiple hollow at the same time all while running Blut Arterie or Blut Vene without losing control. It had been ingrained into his body to where it was as natural as breathing.

Illusory Aura was also becoming like a second nature to him as he constantly practiced it by imitating his former self or blending in to all sorts of environments. One he like to use was blending in with water. It was very hard to completely change all the ripples the body caused in the water and are ever shifting in unpredictable ways. If he made just a few mistakes it quickly becomes very obvious there was something in the water. Completely hiding in the rain was a complicated one too.

His increasing dexterity and improving Illusory Aura in combination with Blut Arterie was coming together in a deadly illusory dual swordsmanship where it was becoming harder and harder to tell what was a real strike and what was a feint. Real started feeling fake and fake started feeling real. It was starting to form a combination of skills that couldn't be countered by someone with a similarly powerful physique and spirit power, the synergy between the skills and his swordsmanship that he was slowly refining to work completely with the skills as if it had always meant to be one allowing him to punch above his weight.

He hadn't quite mastered the ability to rapidly switch between Blut Arterie and Blut Vene though which he felt was necessary to once again raise his combat effectiveness another step. It was hard to do because the flow of the two was very different and unlike running the skills through muscle memory this wasn't possible for the rapid switch which was still very likely to cause a backlash.

Unfortunately, he hadn't gotten any further missions to grant him other new abilities. Though this was probably for the best as he hadn't mastered the skills he did have yet and spreading himself even thinner between grinding levels, spirit power and training his skills by adding another skill would just slow down the other things he was already working on.

Reina had actually managed finishing the OS less than half a year in, she founded a small company and release it. At first growth was excruciatingly slow to the point where she personally had to go out and promote it and show people how to use it. One big benefit was our father was actually convinced and as an influential person in his company he actually managed to convince them to switch over after being shown how much more efficient their workflow could be.

This made the company her first major business client and gave her a leg up. Then after a while she got lucky. A small computer hobbyist magazine with a relatively small, but dedicated fanbase that happened to have quite a few notable programmers among their readership invited her for an interview because this anomalous OS intrigued them.

During this interview she happened to mention that the original version was programmed by her brother over 10 years, but that he died shortly before finishing it and how she spent the last 10 years trying to finish it. The magazine didn't really go into it much further as they were more interested in the tech side of the OS rather than the backstory behind it.

However, this was picked up by major outlets because it made for a powerful story. A young girl loses her brother then decides to pick up his mantle to revolutionise the computing world. It was an emotional story that could also serve as an inspiration for young girls. The story practically wrote itself and it didn't take long for it to spread from news outlet to news outlet gaining her an unexpected wave of free advertisement as suddenly she went from being unknown to an icon for young girls. She could be seen on the cover for newspapers, but also girls and technology magazines even talkshows discussed her for the novelty.

All this talking about her and in turn her work lead to a massive spike. She got so busy she ended up having to drop out despite being in her third year of college. However, the income that came along with the booming company more than made up for not completing her degree. Even if both of her parents completely disagreed with her decision. She was already fast on her way to being a billionaire(in Yen lol) in just months though.

There were a lot of growing pains, but she managed to hire some reliable people to form the barebones for an actual tech company in the following months.

[+1 Year]

[+273750 XP from Hollow]

[+22800 XP from Animal Spirits]

[+2250 XP from Pluses/Humans]

[Constitution: 15]

[Intelligence: 15 -> 20]

[Spirit Power: 7297 -> 17242]

[Available Stat Points: 0]

=Passive Skills:=

[Spiritual Energy Absorption]

[High-Speed Regeneration]

[Acidic Touch]

=Active Skills:=

[Soul-Body Separation]

[Spirit Power Concealment]

[Illusory Aura]

[Blut]

He had been pumping a lot of points into everything except constitution. First of all why tank hits when using speed and illusions he can completely avoid them and on top of that Blut Vene actually is a massive multiplier to his constitution even without having having to add points to it. Dexterity was still king though since it was the most useful to both his stealth attacks and his newly forming swordsmanship.

His Spirit Power was also finally reaching significant heights where he could use his skills a lot without concern. [Illusory Aura], [Blut] and [Spirit Power Concealment] didn't consume that much individually, but when running all three at the same time they do add up. [Illusory Aura] during his swordsmanship averaged around 80 Spirit Power per minute while [Spirit Power Concealment] took only about 10 per minute.

[Blut] thought all depended on how much he was forcing into his veins and arteries, during his practice sessions he was using around 100 Spirit Power a minute to maintain [Blut Arterie]. If he wanted to either tank a massive blow or add a burst of speed or strength it could quickly go into thousands per minute to sustain [Blut]. At the beginning of the year he could only last about half an hour when running all three skills at the same time. Good enough to handle your regular hollow even if they can gang up on him, but definitely not enough if he runs into higher ranked enemies.