Duskbound

Velik ended up spending another hour taking care of the remaining scorplings. Rather than fight them in the cavern, he retreated to the tunnels again and ambushed them in small groups as they spread out to look for him. The fights were challenging more in that he hadn't slept in days and was exhausted from killing that champion, but he still got the job done.

It was only once he was finally safe again that he realized he hadn't received a champion seed for killing the giant scorpling. As far as he was concerned, that was confirmation that he was in a dungeon, which meant if he didn't hurry, there was a possibility that the champion would appear again. He didn't really understand how the mechanics of its mana recycling process worked, but the fact that the monsters didn't stay dead was common knowledge.

Which means no matter how many of these monsters I kill, there will always be more. But I bet I could break those damn invisible walls now.

[Dread Lance] truly did solve all the problems he'd been having since coming to the deep wood. He'd leveled up several times and gotten a nice bonus to his physical when he'd upgraded his spear, but the champions were still so tough that even injuring them was a daunting proposition. The skill was not without its drawbacks – namely that it was exhausting to use. Even the two shots he'd unloaded into the brood mother had left him feeling winded like he was coming off a six-hour sprint. The skill also took a minute or so to charge to full power, and trying to hold it there for very long was an exercise in futility. Experience tales with empire

But it did turn his mystic stat into a true powerhouse, stacking it right on top of his physical and releasing all that energy in an explosive burst. He hadn't had the opportunity to test it out yet, but he was reasonably certain that it could catch multiple enemies in the detonation if they were close enough together. Of course, if he wasn't careful, he could also easily injure himself, so it was sure to be a tricky skill to manage.

Retreat or press forward? he wondered to himself after he'd finished hunting down the scorplings. On the one hand, he was tired and sore. He finally had a way free, and a large part of him demanded he take it. On the other hand, he still had plenty of healing potions and his haste potion, and if he left now, he'd have to kill the brood mother again when he came back. He'd already checked the compass and confirmed that his target was still here, or maybe that 'here' was the target if he was right about this place being a dungeon.

If that was the case, then it was the source of the monsters. An undiscovered dungeon hundreds of miles from civilization, just far enough away to never be detected, but close enough to threaten the frontier, was exactly the kind of problem that could account for the monsters constantly filtering out of the wild lands. And that meant, now that he knew where it was, that the smart thing to do was to flee, report the location, and let the experts dismantle it.

But if he did that, he would never get the answers he needed. Chalin was somewhere out here, tied to these monsters somehow, maybe a monster himself. Maybe he was this dungeon, and if so, maybe it was possible to free him somehow. A dungeon cracker team wouldn't bother to try. They'd slaughter the monsters, break the core, loot the place, and pat themselves on the back.

Is it worth risking your life over?

It was a decision he could put off for a few more minutes while he made a different one. Thanks to the skill merger, he had an open slot to fill. [Dread Lance] had been an entirely unexpected acquisition, and it changed what he needed by functioning as a high damage skill. Ideally, he'd like to test it on a group of enemies, but not when the stakes were so high, and especially not in such tight confines where he had to worry about turning a monster into shrapnel.

The question was whether it functioned as a multi-target skill, but Velik wasn't sure that even mattered anymore. He'd wanted a skill for large groups of monsters. Now he'd fought hundreds of groups like that, and he'd found his own natural skills up to the task. His coordination and timing were flawless, and his speed and raw power were more than enough to put down anything even five levels above him as long as it wasn't an elite. And if it was, now he had [Dread Lance] to crack its shell.

In light of that, he had to take a moment to think about what he really needed. More offense never hurt, but a utility skill might make more of a difference. The biggest threats to his life right now were a lack of shelter and water. He couldn't safely rest, and at some point, dehydration would overcome the limits of a 107 physical. It wouldn't be today, but it would happen eventually.

But he wasn't planning on being in the flesh caves that long. So, if he dismissed a survivability skill option, that left him with offense, defense, speed, or expanding to rely more heavily on his slowly growing mystic stat. Offense and speed were fine, sort of. It would be nice to tear apart champions ten levels higher than him with nothing but his spear, but it wasn't necessary.

Maybe something to resist environmental damage, like that burning air that comes out of the walls when I damage them. I can always dodge a bite, but how do you avoid the air around you trying to melt your skin?

[The Black Fang] as a class didn't have much in the way of defensive skills. It was focused on hitting hard and hitting first, not on trading blows, but there were a few options in the general skills list, depending on what he was looking to fortify himself against.

[Mind Fortress] helped to insulate him from any sort of mind control or illusions, but he already had that amulet Torwin had given him. [Thermal Regulation] helped with extreme temperatures, and he found something called [Inert Matter] that he didn't really understand, but which claimed to help resist chemical alterations to his body. [Ivory Bones] was a contender in that it strengthened his whole skeleton, but that wasn't really what he needed.

The problem with any of those was that he didn't really see them merging with his current skills. Nothing in his list played nice with the idea of just taking a blow, be it by tooth or by flame or by… chemical alteration, whatever that meant. If he took one of those four skills, that was likely to be the basis of a new skill to start building on, so he wanted to be sure it was the right one.

Or he could go the other direction and grab something else that was powered by mystic. There were a few utility class skills that used it, but they all felt so situational that he felt like he'd have the same problem. Whatever he took wouldn't have a prayer of merging into any of his current skills.

Either I'm starting a new branch in my build and I'll have to wait until I hit level 40 to pick up something to advance it with, or I need to take something that I can fold into what I've got now which may not be immediately useful. Really, it comes down to whether I should be building for the future or for the problem in front of me, and I already know the answer to that.

[Spear Warden] was his highest ranked skill, which meant if he merged something into it, he was practically guaranteed to get an extremely powerful skill, maybe even something to rival [Apex Hunter]. If he'd been able to rank up [Kinetic Charge] or [Phalanx] a few more times, he could only imagine how strong the skill he'd have gotten instead of [Dread Lance] would have been.

That brought him back to considering [Savage Rhythm] again. He could see it merging with either [Spear Warden] or [Dread Lance], and while it wasn't useful for a quick skirmish, if he was going to keep hunting champion elites, it wasn't a terrible choice. It didn't give him armor penetration, but not every champion was so tough that he couldn't hurt it with a normal attack.

A lot of them are, though, even if it's only because they're always a higher level than me. Maybe this is a skill better left for later, but it would be so useful if I could merge it into [Spear Warden]. Alright, let's go with that. Maybe it'll help cut apart these packs of scorplings I keep running into, too.

Decision made, he added [Savage Rhythm] to his skill list. New knowledge flooded his mind, ways he'd never considered to build off each successive strike until an opponent was completely overwhelmed in an avalanche of blows, or to chain one attack into another against a different enemy. The skill was actually more flexible than he'd given it credit for prior to choosing it, and he was hopeful that he wouldn't regret the choice like he had with [Phalanx].

There was an easy way to find out. With an eager grin stretching his lips, he started hunting for his first group of victims.