Ruthless ~ 24!

~ 24 ~

After spending the better part of an hour working to parse and understand the information that had filled his head with the addition of the new skills, Joe was feeling very pleased with the transition. the skills themselves seems to support each other in a way that he had not been expecting.

As he had expected, the ability to create ritual circles was the most basic portion of what he could do. With the alchemical component skill, he could almost completely alter the final effects of a ritual activation, though he would need to experiment with that to get a better understanding of what it meant. It seemed that the summoning or binding portion was designed around gaining the things needed for the alchemical portion of things, and Joe had an inkling that it's could support the enchantment portion of things as well.

It was the magical matrices that truly opened his eyes. anyone could carve a circle and place a pentagram in it without understanding anything about rituals. He knew this for a fact, as that was the diagram for the very first ritual he ever performed, ‘little sisters cleaning service’. It was within the clinical truth of mathematics that true understanding could be formed. Luckily for him, his understanding of mathematics had allowed him to reach the beginner ranks as soon as he gained the skill; almost stepping into the Student ranks, in fact.

So far, he had been Working from a flawed understanding of the ritual diagrams themselves. Using ‘Little Sisters Cleaning Service’ as an example, he now understood that he could have achieved the effect of some of his basic diagrams by implementing a simple sine wave instead of using both the pentagram and circle. this would not only save him time in creation, it would reduce the amount of mana required to power the ritual before his class bonus was ever taken into account.

One of Joe's biggest impediments in the creation of rituals had just been solved. It was going to take a lot of work, but he could now custom design ritual diagrams without the need to search to the ends of the earth to find and adapt a ritual that someone else had left behind. It was a freeing feeling and he was itching to go and create something completely random because he knew that he could.

“I still need to think about other skills, particularly combat skills.” As excited as he was about his new class development, he reigned himself in and tried to refocus on his current goal. “Combat skills… I'm looking at you, Effortless Shaping of shadows. you are supposed to be a legendary skill, but I have so much trouble getting you to work correctly that I can only use you on the slowest and weakest of enemies.”

Joe took a deep breath, knowing that what he was about to do was probably stupid. He took his Legendary Effortless Shaping ability, and placed it in the soul forge with his only Mythical skill, Solidified Shadows. “I can't use this properly right now, and I am going to have to go and learn some new spells anyway…”

Right before he pressed the button to combine them, he paused. Another skill had caught his eye; Dual Casting. now that he was using a two-handed staff to channel his spells, there were very few times that he was using both hands to cast either the same or separate spells. He added that to the mix, took a deep breath, and hit the button.

Time until skills have combined: 18 hours.

Joe was trying to keep his hands from shaking as his most potent active skills vanished into the ether, the knowledge of how to use them pulled directly out of his brain. In terms of attack spells, he now only had acid spray and a dark lightning strike to rely on. he could only hope that he had made a wise decision for his future growth.

Speaking of future growth, he looked at his characteristics scores and decided to take a run at increasing his luck. he started walking toward the testing dungeon, deciding not to go with his team this time, as he was planning on taking the test with the highest mortality rate. As he moved along the packed dirt road, he thought of his current quests and decided that there was nothing pressing for him to follow up on. Most of them were high difficulty, nearly impossible to complete at this time. one of his quest had expired, the daily hunt for Wolfmen had been greyed out, and now had an ‘inactive’ tag that he had never seen before.

He could go over to Ardania and heal up some prisoners or guards, but he decided that could wait for now; but he would make a point of Swinging by the guard Barracks the next time he went into town. now Joe smiled, feeling much more at peace with himself. Something about the massive, sprawling individual list of things that needed to be accomplished being categorized into such broad categories allowed him to look at things with greater clarity. perhaps he had simply been struck with Choice paralysis? he felt his angst and worry draining away, by the time he reached the dungeon, he was feeling positively chipper.

Joe entered the dungeon, selected luck as the trial he wanted to attempt, and waited while it configured itself. Unlikely dexterity trial, this time there was no jumping or leaping across platforms to get into the dungeon space. There was simply a door, which he opened and stepped through. 

Bad Luck! You have died! Calculating… You have lost 3,200 Experience! You will respawn in two hours!

He stood there in his white death room with a look of shock and horror on his face. there had been nothing behind the door. Joe had simply stepped through, and died. this had to be a Monumental joke, the test of luck was literally ‘you either die or not’. There was no skill, there were no chances to do anything different, he just died on the spot.

“Ahh!” Joe screamed into the air. he rubbed the center of his forehead with one hand, and decided to go sit down and wait. After a few minutes of thinking about it, he started to chuckle. He knew that if he told anyone else about this, they would laugh at him. He decided to keep it to himself oh, but use it as a lesson going forward. 

He stopped to consider this trial. was it going to be worth gambling thirty-two hundred experience four five points of luck? His experience gains had slowed significantly now that he was not engaging in active combat as much, so the loss definitely hurt. pulling up his stat sheet, he decided that yes, it was worth the risk. He had been planning to do more fighting, more often, either way. This would be a good motivator, and would save him five days’ worth of characteristic point training each time the gamble succeeded.

While he had another few quiet moments, Joe's eyes lit up as he remembered that he had eight unused skill points from recent leveling up. He plotted out the skills that would be getting a sudden boost in efficiency… then paused. He remembered that when he had gained the Rituarchitect class, he had been informed that he could not put any more skill points into his ritual Magic skill. But now that he had sub skills… would he be able to place the skill points in those? He was excited to give it a try, and as soon as he stepped back into the temple and made sure no one was around, he opened his skill sheet and placed a single point into Magical Matrices.

Skill increase: Magical Matrices (Apprentice 0). Your understanding of the higher mathematics behind spell theory would make you the Envy of any convention you attended! unfortunately, it would not stop the other attendees from arguing with you over the nuances. Bonus: basic calculus formulas are as simple for you to solve as standard addition and subtraction!

“Nice!” Joe was excited to test that out, he had never gotten a bonus quite like this before, and was looking forward to seeing how it worked. Next came the real test, he placed a skill point into Ritual Circles, and it increased to Expert two! His ritual magic category did not increase, oddly enough, but still Joe pumped his fist into the air and whooped. “We are back in business, baby!”

He had six more points to spend, but decided to hold off for now. Most of the skills we're low enough that he should have no issue training them up, but his ritual circles were still far enough from the next tier that he did not want to devote his points there right at this moment. still, the information that he had just gained gave him an idea that he wanted to test out. staying within the building, he walked down to the Grand Ritual Hall and started sketching out his thoughts.

“If I can take two of the ritual circles and combine them into a single, smaller one… will it still count as a beginner Circle, or will it be a novice Circle again?” He selected a simple ritual diagram that he had been working on recently, his attempt at creating long distance communication. “If I take this circle out… I can replace both the inner and the first of the outer rings with a combination of ‘y equals cosecant x’, ‘y equals secant x’, and ‘y equals cotangent x’.”

When he was done, he no longer had a circle in front of him. He had what looked like a fancy, triple repeating and connecting, curvy ‘X’ that had the top left and bottom right legs connected with an ‘S’. Joe had linked them, so it was kind of a circle. Did that still count? as far as he could tell, it should. he had a thought, and had to voice it aloud, “You know, this almost looks like a radio antenna fractal. Funny!”

Joe poured mana into the small ritual, and was pleased when it lit up and a notification appeared.

You have activated Ritual of Communication (Basic)! Range of communication: 50-mile radius centered on the ritual. this ritual is toggleable, by pausing it, the amount of active time remaining will not decrease. When this is activated, it will automatically activate the linked ritual of communication. caution: this ritual is not linked with another. Active time remaining: 11:59. 

If he had not understood that he needed to enchant the ritual circles to work together, he may have tried to Simply activate two of them at the same time and hope for the best. still, he did not yet know how to do that. It seems that he would be taking the offer from Terra's Master after all. the other good part was that the activation did not require a double ring worth of Mana Like a beginner ring would have. For the first time in his life, he was exceptionally grateful to higher mathematics.

He left the Grand Ritual Hall, and walked outside to let his team know where he was going to be for the next few days. He sniffed at the air. What was that? His eyes narrowed when he realized that he was smelling smoke. That was not campfire smoke; it was the greasy, meaty smell of a building on fire. He sped up, running toward the sound of raised voices and shouted orders.