CH116

“Why am I so bad at this?” Ben yelled out after hammering his twentieth monster that day. They’d been hunting for demons for the last two days now without luck, and while everyone else would be busy fighting stronger creatures that Thera would draw to them by removing her cloak and resistance band, Ben was put in charge of handling the smaller beasts, making sure to call out for help if things got too bad, and he was hating every minute of it.

Aside from how unpleasant it felt when bones broke under each of his blows, the attacks left everything he killed practically unusable for materials, meaning not only could he not make use of the parts later, but he also couldn’t get any practice for his dismantling with the condition he left them in. Since he’d just finished taking apart everything he’d gotten with his knife training, that meant he would only be able to practice with whatever the others killed.

“It’s not good to be in such a rush,” Wedrow told him as he observed everyone fight from the side. “The zeroth level can sometimes take weeks or months to learn, instead be grateful you got the first one so fast.”

“I get what you’re saying, but the sooner I get it the sooner I can relax and focus on training the skills I really care about, I think it should be pretty clear I’m not a fighter.” He’d already had to have Steph heal him a couple of times today when something got too close or he got careless. It was nothing major, but he wouldn’t be able to survive the things the others had been fighting, especially the current one.

Calling it a dragon would be too generous, but it was some sort of lizard monster. About the size of a lion with six legs and dark green scales, it seemed to be able to use air magic, whipping the winds around its attackers and battering them with dust and debris, trying to push off both them and their attacks, though to no avail.

Against it, Will, Steph, and Thera stood strong. As mages, Steph and Thera stood to the back to avoid being swept up by the gale and fought with a strategy they’d worked out after the first day of fighting, with Steph opening gates between Theras attacks and the beast to reduce its ability to react to the small boulders flying towards it, while Will would run in between spells to attack head-on, and was doing surprisingly good as well.

With his combination of tough skin, enhanced strength, and unarmed master as his blessed skills he was well equipped to fight head to head against the beast, but he had two other things going for him as well. The first was that while Steph was setting up gates for Theras magic, she was also using time magic on Will to speed him up, making him move faster and react quicker. The second was all him though, something he’d apparently learned while he was training. Sometime in the last year, he’d managed to learn an augmentation skill.

Augmentation skills were fairly common among people with warrior or combat builds, but Ben had never actually seen one in person before, and it was another class of skill he’d never be able to get himself. The reason for that was simple, much like magic skills, they were dependent on the affinities a person already possessed, meaning there was no way he could learn any with the low ones he was stuck with.

It would wrap a person’s body or weapons in the mana as a way to inflict extra damage compared to what the attacks would normally be able to achieve, and at a significantly lower mana cost than if one was to compare it against a mage trying to achieve the same result, making it far more suited to warriors that would typically have a lower mana capacity. Of course, given how high all of Will’s attributes were when he got to the world, he could have just learned a magic instead and been able to use it in a complete form, but Ben felt this style suited his friend more.

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