Chapter 254: Frozen Focus

Sitting upright in the bed we’d rented, I sat and meditated. I had 3 Stat Points and a Spell Upgrade waiting to be assigned, plus the more general improvement of a Soft Cap increase, meaning I could train most of my Spells up one more Rank basically for free.

Once ten minutes had passed sitting idle in the room, I opened up the Upgrade for Ray of Frost.

Choose one Upgrade for Ray of Frost:

Piercing Ray

—

Increases Ray of Frost’s range from 25 paces to 50 paces and causes it to travel through beings, allowing you to hit multiple beings if they are all hit by the same Ray.

Coating Ray

School: +Summoning

—

Ray of Frost now physically covers the damaged portion of the being in a sheet of ice with thickness and break resistance corresponding to the damage dealt. The ice disappears after 10 minutes.

Prolonged Ray

—

Increases the duration of the Frostbite curse from 5 seconds to 25 seconds.

As I read through the options given to me, I idly started practicing all of my Spells that awaited their Rank-ups to the new Soft Cap. I repeatedly cast Ethereal Armor, activated Gravity Well and Crippling Chill on myself, using Regenerate to recover the Health I lost to the curse, and when I ran low on Stamina, used Expedite and its new Stamina regenerating Upgrade to bring myself back up. The physical pain and stress of all these effects wasn’t exactly comfortable, but I was in full control of it, so any time it got bad enough that I might be broken out of my meditation, I just ended them and let myself breathe for a moment.

But my main focus was, of course, on the words presented to my mind. Piercing Ray, Coating Ray, and Prolonged Ray, huh? The Piercing Ray range increase was clearly pretty nice—according to Erani, Firebolt also got a range-expanding Upgrade like that, which was only relatively unpopular because of the total dominance of Explosive Firebolt.

In this case, Ray of Frost would not only receive double range—making it the longest-range Spell in my arsenal—but it would also get the ability to pierce through anything I hit. Theoretically, if I had a hundred enemies all perfectly lined up, I could hit them all with the Spell for the price of one. …Not that something like that would ever happen. But I could certainly imagine hitting two or three with a single Spell every now and then, especially in situations like the one I’d just been in against the Sand Hive. And if I intentionally lined shots up, I was sure I could probably find some very Mana-efficient ways to use the Spell.

Coating Ray was much more vague and complex in the exact way it worked. Currently, Ray of Frost coated whoever it hit in a visual layer of frost that didn’t actually do anything, mainly just representing the Curse portion of its effects. With this Upgrade, it seemed like that visual frost would be turned into a physical layer of literal ice that’d cover up their body and prevent them from moving, if the Spell hit the right spot. Certainly useful, if it worked in the way I hoped it did.

And Prolonged Ray had a simple but dramatic effect. Quintupling the duration of the Spell’s Dexterity debuff was absolutely insane. However, in my current build, the Dexterity debuff wasn’t the main reason I’d cast the Spell. And even when it did matter against a specific enemy, I typically wanted to be hitting them with it over and over in the first place just for the sake of doing damage to them.

I definitely took note of the fact that there were no Upgrade options for the damage portion of the Spell. If there was some way to improve the damage, it’d probably be no contest. But I supposed it wouldn’t be that easy.

Index, any insights on whether one of these three options will provide a way to improve Ray of Frost’s damage? Beyond the normal improvement I get every Rank, of course.

“Actually, all three of these options will give you some sort of way to increase the damage in the future. Now, it’s not in the way you’re thinking, where the future Upgrade options are just something along the lines of increasing the damage dealt by the Spell by 50%, or something; instead it’s mostly conditional damage improvements, or a slight increase to damage in addition to another effect.”

Shit, all three?

“Yes, in some way or another.”

So then, which one is best in that respect?

“Technically, any of the three could be said to have the highest potential damage with their future Upgrades, since most have conditional effects that trigger based on your own actions. So I’d say don’t worry about it and just pick the one that seems best right now.”

I sighed and nodded. That made good enough sense. Hells, with how intense the increase in Spell XP costs rose each Rank, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to get to my second Ray of Frost Upgrade. Noxious Grasp was at 2.91k of the 7.62k XP necessary to reach Rank 20 right now; if every Spell needed to go through that much time and training to get there, it’d take a while.

Even if my Soft Cap was at Rank 20 and I got 1 Spell XP per 2 Mana spent instead of the 1 Spell XP per 100 Mana Spent got for Noxious Grasp, it’d still take an entire hour’s worth of Mana regeneration just to get the requirement done solely from Rank 19 to 20 for a single Spell. Multiply that by seven Spells, plus all the XP I’d need to get for all the Ranks before that, and I was honestly looking at quite a bit of training time.

Of course, certainly doable, especially if I was capable of raising my Soft Cap that high, but…damn. I didn’t want to imagine how long this shit would take without my extra Stats and certainly not without Exponential Reclamation. Poor, poor normal people.

“For someone of your Level,” Index said, “assuming they receive 2 Conjuration per Level and put their 3 Skill Points into Conjuration each Level like you do, receiving no additional boost to their Stats or Mana/Minute, they’d have a…19.3 Mana/Minute, compared to your current value of 123. So, in order to fully Rank seven Spells all the way up to Rank 20, it’d be…around forty years of straight practice with no breaks if they were going past the Soft Cap. If they were doing all of this within the Soft Cap, it’d take a little over two hundred and ninety days.”

Good gods, I thought, chuckling out of sheer appreciation of that figure. It’d take almost an entire year of no-breaks casting just to Rank up their Spells that are in the Soft Cap? I’m so used to it being a pretty much completely instant process that I almost don’t believe you.

“It’s very much a real figure. High-Level Magic-Types will often not even bother bringing some of their Spells to meet the Soft Cap once they get to a certain point. It’s an especially common practice among Wizards, since they’d have so many Spells to train at that point, and their Talents are weaker to compensate for their high number of Spells, so boosting their Stats and Mana/Minute like you do isn’t even close to being an option for them.”

Index, I’m honestly glad to have you around, if not to help give me info on Level-up decisions, then just for the sake of doing all these calculations to satisfy my curiosity that I know I’d be too lazy to do on my own otherwise.

Speaking of Spell Ranks, several of my Spells had Ranked up from passively casting them as I’d been thinking.

Threshold reached. Ethereal Armor XP has reached 623.

Ethereal Armor Rank has increased to 12.

Due to Ethereal Armor Rank reaching 12, it has undergone the following changes:

Mana Cost: From 240 to 246

Dark Plate Downtime: From 34.2 to 32.5

Light Plate Discount: From 48.9% to 51.5%

Threshold reached. Crippling Chill XP has reached 623.

Crippling Chill Rank has increased to 12.

Due to Crippling Chill Rank reaching 12, it has undergone the following changes:

Mana Cost: From 72.1 to 73.9

Health Drain: From 8.56 to 8.99

Stamina Drain: From 6.85 to 7.19

Dexterity Debuff: From 17.1 to 18

Now that those two were Ranked up, I went and focused my practice on Gravity Well and Expedite.

“Go ahead and assign your Skill Points,” Index said. “It’ll help you practice faster.”

Ah, right, I thought, mentally moving to do so. Don’t wanna lose those wasted…what, minutes?

“About fifty-three total seconds of difference in regeneration time.”

Well, we can’t have that.

I put my 3 Stat Points into Conjuration, moving my Mana/Minute from 123 to 129. Man, it felt good to see my Mana/Minute jump up entire whole numbers at a time with every point put into the Stat. Exponential Reclamation was a true beast of a Talent after a certain point, huh?

But I was getting distracted from my main goal: picking a Spell Upgrade.

So, Index, my main questions would be about Coating Ray. What can you tell me about that?

“What do you want to know?”

I guess you could start off with how thick that layer of ice would actually be.

“Well, the unfortunate thing is that the answer to your question is an extremely complex formula involving precisely sixteen different variables, the majority of which I cannot inform you of. So a precise answer is impossible.”

Really? I thought the Upgrade only said the thickness of the ice depended on the damage dealt. Not anything else.

“It mainly depends on the amount of damage dealt, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other factors. Of the ones I am allowed to tell you, there are things like the location and angle you hit the target at, your distance from the target, the local temperature—”

Wait, so I’d need to keep all of that stuff in mind when using the Spell? Like, if it’s too hot out, the Upgrade just wouldn’t work, or something?

“Like I said, the vast majority is decided by the amount of damage dealt. The System just likes to add in some of this stuff for the sake of keeping things just a little bit unpredictable. Kind of like how the amount of XP gained from killing something mostly depends on what you killed and what its Level was, but even if you kill two identical Level 20 Infernals, you still won’t get the exact same amount of XP from both. A few points will be added here and there from countless different things swaying the calculation.”

So I do only need to worry about the damage, then?

“For the most part.”

Then, how thick would the ice be from a shot that deals, say, 60 damage? That’d probably be around my average when shooting accurately.

“Uh, let’s see…something like that would be…around the width of half your pinkie finger?”

Doesn’t seem like much.

“Right, but do keep in mind that it can stack; so hitting them with two Rays of Frost cast one after the other would hit twice, with the first covering them in ice, and the second covering the ice with more ice, effectively making it twice as thick.”

So, four Rays would be a pinkie’s worth of ice, then. I frowned, slightly annoyed that I couldn’t open my eyes and look at my fingers without breaking meditation. And this effect would be buffed by Cumulative Catastrophe, right?

“Yes. Well, technically, the damage is the thing that gets buffed by Catastrophe; this is just based on that damage.”

Hm, alright. And Piercing Ray…would it be at all possible for you to look back through my previous experiences to see how many times I shot a Ray of Frost at something and, if I had the Upgrade, it would’ve hit multiple enemies? Just so I can get a decent idea of how many times that sort of thing will happen without me trying.

“I think I can, but it’ll probably take me a while. The number I get might be a little less impressive than it should be, though; this is the sort of thing that works best when you use it deliberately. Especially with the increased range, even if you don’t pierce enemies that often, just having the ability to shoot them from further away would also translate to a large boost in power.”

Right, right, I get it. Just trying to understand what lining enemies up would even look like. Before you start counting, do you have any personal recommendations?

“No, I don’t think I do. Though, you might want to ask Erani about that while I work.”

Erani? Why?

“Oh, you’ve forgotten. Sorcerers get offered Ray of Frost at Level 10 if they’ve picked Firebolt as their first Spell, remember? So if that’s the case, she’s almost certainly got all of the Upgrades memorized along with whatever you Humans have decided is the best one. At the very least, she may be able to tell you a little of what I’m still forbidden to say.”

Ah, right. She definitely would have opinions about this, wouldn’t she?

“I’m going to focus on these memories. Let me know if you need anything.”

Keeping my eyes closed, I lifted a hand and patted the bed a few times before brushing my fingers against her. Lifting my hand up, I placed it on her…arm? I’d kind of forgotten where I was sitting on the bed, so I didn’t know what I was touching, but I pushed gently a couple times in hopes of waking her up. I was pretty sure now was around the time she was going to wake up naturally, anyway, so hopefully it wasn’t much of a disturbance.

She groaned strangely, and I felt her body shift beneath my hand. She mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear.

“Hey,” I said, “sorry for waking you up. Do you mind helping me with something really quick?”

“Do we really have time?” I heard her ask, voice still groggy. She was still lying down, I was pretty sure. “I thought we had that tourney thing today.”

“It hasn’t started yet. Besides, this shouldn’t take long. Just a quick decision about Ray of Frost.”

“Okay, if you…w-wait, what?”

I felt her shift quickly and disappear from under my hand. Patting the bed once again, I found her foot. Wait, that didn’t make sense. If she had drawn her arm away from me and now I was feeling her foot, then…Oh. Oh, my hand was on her leg the whole time, that made sense. And…Right, that was what she thought I was asking her to do with me.

“S-so, Ray of Frost?” she asked, voice sounding the way it did whenever she was red in the face. Once again, I cursed the fact that I couldn’t open my eyes and see her now.

For a moment, I considered not letting it go, but I shook the thought from my mind. I had work to do, and we were technically on a timetable. “Right, Ray of Frost. So, uh, I used my Talent, and now it’s Upgraded. You got any suggestions for which to pick?”

I heard her take a deep breath. “Okay. Do we have time?”

“Should be a good few minutes before the tourney starts. No imminent danger or anything though, no.”

“Good. So, do you want me to start with Quindrex’s book on the subject, or do you prefer Malcant’s literature?”