Chapter 70: Round One

The day of the tournament marched towards them, but Will didn’t sit idle. Motivated by the fact that his life was on the line, he channeled all his energy into three things:

#1: Power. Will bribed/coerced a few solo Climbers into giving up their spot in an upcoming Kaiju hunt. It was impressive standing at the knee of such monolithic beasts, but looking back on it, the fights were kind of boring. The mercenaries had developed a nearly flawless method of subduing them, strapping them to the ground with high-power restraining abilities and thick ropes, giving everyone present an opportunity to take an attack on the creature before it was executed.

By doing this, Will was able to cross the boundary into Level 24.

#2: Information. He needed to know his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. This wasn’t some half-hearted attempt to fight in the tournament, test his strength for the fun of it and let the chips fall where they may.

His life and freedom were on the line and there was no excuse.

His first opponent was a chivalrous young man with brown hair and eyes, a little shorter than most with a Paladin Archetype and a deep-seated need to right the wrongs of the world.

Apparently he had a very tragic backstory. The kind one might expect of the hero of a romance novel, who was destined to unite warring kingdoms…according to Loth.

Will didn’t really read romance novels, and merely noted that he wouldn’t expect something he considered ‘cheating’ and mobility was not his strong suit.

#3: Equipment. Will still had an empty finger in his Phantom Hand, and the idea of leaving it clear for a potential future was kind of meaningless if he didn’t win, so he bought a buckler that enhanced blocking and counter-attacks.

He could always overwrite it if he found something truly epic to replace it with.

In the meantime, it was advantageous to have another strength-boosting Relic effect he could swap to aside from the mutated Ring of Accuracy, since Will’s Strength was pretty damn bad.

Buckler of Rebounding

+5 Strength

+4 Kinesthetics

15% reduction in force experienced when blocking

25% increase in the damage of attacks made within .5 seconds of blocking.

Once he sacrificed it to the Phantom Hand, Will checked his Build. It had become…complex.

William Oh

Resourceful Climber Level 24

25+ 10 Strength

72 +10 Kinesthetics

75 +14 Resistance

48 +14 Focus

92 +18 Acuity

Charges: 62/62

Free Points: 0

Item Abilities: Summon Undead retainer, Heal undead, 35% eidolon potency, 45% rogue Archetype potency, 50% Ranger archetype potency, Aetherhawk, Lightning Pulse, Wet footing, Homefield Advantage(Ice), Malleable Space 30% Trespass A/V dampening.

Phantom Hand Slots: (Ring of Accuracy*) (Sickle of Cold Harvest) -(Wand of the Undead Retainer)- (Stormfists) (Buckler of Rebounding)

Primary Abilities: Aspect of the Immortal Serpent*, Phantom Hand**

Secondary Abilities: Sourdough*

Wand of the undead retainer is giving me 17 Focus!? Will thought as he inspected his Build. He had gone from a -3 bonus due to the falconer’s glove penalty, up to +14., which was a more than double-daily swing.

Will sat down and did some math, multiplying his total Acuity, which was 110, by his bonus to Phantom Hand specifically. Since it was an Eidolon and a rogue archetype ability, it combined the bonuses from the ring and his rogue gear (not multiplied), for an 80% boost to its power.

Which meant instead of 1% increase in his slotted Relic’s potency per point of Acuity, he received 1.8%.

Sooo… Will scratched down the problem with one of the pencils that had mysteriously made it’s way into his room. He’d found himself doing a lot more math and writing than he’d thought he would when he started Climbing. Who knew a Party leader had to do math and write letters!?

110X1.8 equals…198.

So, any item that goes into the Phantom hand and is slotted, will provide very nearly triple it’s expected effect. That is wild.

The interesting thing was that the three point Acuity bonus he got from the Wand of the Undead retainer did not benefit from the boosting effect that the other affixes of the wand received.

It should have raised the acuity bonus from +3 up to +8, which would have been enough for it to raise to +9…

Oh, I see.

Acuity scaling does not stack with itself.

It seemed as though the System applied the bonus to Acuity he got from the item and added it to his total when calculating the slotted Relic’s other powers, but in exchange, excluded Acuity bonuses from benefiting from any boosts.

Which made sense as a simple way to prevent breaking The System by stacking Acuity on top of Acuity until it went supercritical.

Could that even happen? With an item that either grants 100 acuity, or 100% bonus to rogue abilities? Actually, what would happen if I put a 25% Rogue Archetype boosting item in the Phantom Hand, and it tripled it to 75%? Wouldn’t it then apply it’s own effect to itself, and raise its own bonus even higher? And higher?…yeah, I don’t think that would work either.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The System and magic as a whole had an energy source, which was Miasma. Anything that required an energy source couldn’t go infinite. If Wills stats were allowed to go infinite based on self-compounding stats like that, something would fizzle out and break long before infinite stats were achieved.

In this case, the thing that fizzled out would probably be Will.

Still a bummer. But not too big of a problem. Just means boosting Acuity manually will be my go-to priority to advance my Build. Same as before.

Looking at his stats made Will consider.

After this is over, I should look into getting an item with a strong Ranger archetype boost of 25% or greater, and swap it out with whichever Relic effect I deem to be the least useful. A boost of 75% to Aspect of the Immortal Serpent and Sourdough would be a fine option to be able to switch to, since it dictates so many of my abilities. Could cut the time required to repair or replace items with Sourdough nearly in half, as well as improving my ability to walk on water, survive hostile environments and heal missing limbs.

Thinking of it, Will itched his stump. In the weeks since he’d acquired the Axolotl Sacrifice, his missing hand had begun to…bud, I suppose?

Currently, it was just a sore, itchy nub of bone that had begun growing out of his truncated wrist, stretching the scar tissue above it. The scar tissue itself was rapidly fading from the pale white of rapidly-healed wound to something more in line with actual skin.

It was only half an inch of growth, but if Will wasn’t embroiled an avalanche of life-or-death bullshit, he would have been ecstatic.

The timeline didn’t really matter as long as he got his gods-damned hand back.

Of course, faster was better.