Chapter 145: Calculation

Once the three guards quieted down, I got back into my meditative state and tried to focus. It wasn’t exactly easy to do so, with the anticipation of finally Upgrading my Spells so close on the horizon, but I needed to focus on my current choices before I went to give myself even more.

One Talent and one Time Loop Upgrade. From what I’d heard Poppins and Jannin talking about, it seemed like Persistent Loop was out for the Upgrade. Even if they weren’t impossible to get, trying to pick up enough Enchanted items to make it work just didn’t seem feasible. And my future Spell Choices seemed to disagree with the idea, anyway, according to Index.

So, keeping on the topic of the Upgrade, that left me with two options. Recycled Loop and Inclusive Loop. Out of the two, I was having trouble choosing just one. I completely understood the numerical supremacy of Recycled Loop—that many extra Stats would get out of hand extremely quickly.

One of the main limiting factors on these types of effects—giving additional Stats per Level—was the linear nature of power gained from Stats. For example, for a person at Level 0, still with a 10 in Endurance, increasing their Endurance by a further 10 would make it 20, doubling their Health and the boost they got to their physical toughness. So for them, an additional 10 Endurance was absolutely massive.

However, if someone had a 100 in Endurance, increasing it by 10 more would only bring their it to 110, so a ten percent increase. That was nice, sure, but not nearly as impactful as it would be for the Level 0. So these abilities like Recursive Growth and Recycled Loop were predicated on the fact that, as one got stronger and attained more Stats, getting those additional boosts wouldn’t be nearly as impactful as before. Even the rate at which they grew in the number of Stats they gave you would eventually be outpaced by that natural progression.

But that was where my other Talent, Exponential Reclamation, came in. That turned the power scaling from linear to its namesake—exponential. With just that single change, the entire rule of power scaling getting less and less impactful was thrown out the window. No matter how much Conjuration I had, be it 10 or 100 or 1000, it would always increase my Mana/Minute by at least one percent. So it effectively completely broke the intended impact of something like Recycled Loop.

That was one of the big things that drew me to it. It wasn’t just that the Upgrade had a lot of raw power to it—which it did—but it was also that I had the perfect synergy to exploit those extra Stats. Of course I’d want to take the Upgrade.

But then there was the Inclusive Loop. On a raw power level, I honestly didn’t think it shaped up. It was great, yeah, but Recycled Loop held much more long-term power. However, there was more to this decision than just raw power.

First off, the Upgrade could be used in some really clever ways. It required me to be touching a person when I activated Time Loop, but they didn’t have to be anywhere near me at the time I returned to. If I could find the correct people, I could enact massive, country-spanning plans without needing to take the time to personally catch anyone up to speed. And as Time Loop went back further and further, the area these people could span upon returning got wider and wider since it allowed for longer travel times.

It also helped in smaller situations, allowing Erani and Ainash to keep informed on everything that happened in the future, meaning we wouldn’t need me to be an intermediary in informing them. That was all generally convenient and would certainly help in plenty of situations.

But again, it wasn’t really why I wanted the Upgrade. The power was cool, and it could probably genuinely help save our lives once or twice. But…

Okay, I just felt lonely. Sometimes it felt like the weight of everyone’s lives was on my shoulders. Because sometimes, I was literally the only person alive with the information necessary to save people. And that weight was crushing. If I’d been able to give other people the ability to keep their memories in situations like the initial invasion of Carth, maybe I could’ve convinced people to evacuate the city before the Supreme Hellion attacked. When it was just me, I could barely even save myself. But if I could give, say, a few guards the knowledge necessary to realize they needed to get everyone out of there, then so many lives would’ve been saved.

How could I pass something like that up? It felt like I basically didn’t have a choice to begin with.

“Well…” Index said, “it might be worse than you realize.”

If you’re just going to tell me something like “it doesn’t keep you, specifically, alive, so therefore it isn’t worth anything,” I want you to know it won’t do anything to convince me. Don’t you remember what I said about Spatial Flux?

“No, no, I’m not going to say that. Well, I mean, I believe it, but I mean the goals you’re talking about here. It’s not quite as good at saving people as you seem to think.”

How?

“Well, that ‘touching you’ condition is pretty restrictive. In your hypothetical with the Carth invasion, your death was a surprise. Nobody was touching you when it happened. So you would fully not be able to use the Upgrade in that situation. Or, really, any other where you’re surprised. How many times has a person been touching you when you died?”

Okay, sure. So it won’t work specifically in that circumstance. But if I feel like there’s danger coming, what’s to stop me from grabbing someone’s arm just to make sure? And I get multiple loops now, anyway, so I would only be surprised the first time. In my second and third loops, I’d know I need to get people to remember.

“Yeah, that brings me to my second point. They aren’t going to be told in bright flashing letters anywhere, ‘those visions you just had are from the future, they are real premonitions, they will actually happen if you do nothing to prevent them.’ Yes, it would work with someone who already knows—and believes—you can go back in time. So Erani and Ainash, pretty much. But there’s a solid chance that anyone else will just brush that off as a random hallucination. Or worse, they’ll think they’re being attacked by some sort of illusion magic, and will actively run off or fight if you try to talk to them.”

...Hm. I guess you do make a good point there. It’d only really guaranteed work on someone who’s already in the loop about my Class. Some random guard probably wouldn’t believe that they had a genuine vision of the future, especially when they don’t have anything in their Status to say it was. But, okay, listen. It isn’t really about that. I just want to be able to bring people back with me. For someone other than myself to keep their memories.

“And who’s to say you can’t do that without this Upgrade?”

I blinked. What?

“Did you already forget? Ainash kept her memories when the Bond Ranked up.”

I sighed. Okay, yeah, I guess that’s true, but it’s not consistent. We’ve already proven that you basically can’t control when the Bond Ranks. It happens automatically, and trying to force it will only decrease the likelihood of it happening.

“Hm…what can I say…” Index hummed for a moment, seemingly trying to figure out how to word what it wanted to tell me and get around whatever limitations it had. “You’re not thinking big enough. You’ve got this mental link between you and Ainash, right? That mental link could originally transmit one thing: emotions. That was when she was a Nymph. When she became a Dryad, she became able to transmit emotions as well as thoughts. Now you two can talk with each other through it. And then, she became a Draconiad, and became able to transmit not only thoughts and emotions, but also complex sentiment measurement. A collection of your current opinions and feelings about each other, as well memories of each other. Now, you cannot currently see those memories. Only the intermediary of the Bond can. But hypothetically, you might be able to imagine a world where…”

She’ll be able to transmit entire memories through the Bond? I thought for a moment, shocked. So I guess I could come back in time and instantly give her all of my memories from the future. And then she could give those to Erani, meaning all three of us are instantly caught up, every time.

“Yes. In a hypothetical scenario where that pattern continues. Hypothetically.” I could tell Index was really working hard to avoid whatever censors disallowed it to tell me things like this. This was absolutely a possibility, the way that it worded things,

So in that, uh, purely hypothetical scenario, Inclusive Bond would be completely redundant. Um, hypothetically, how long would it take for us to get to that point? Would it require a specific Tribute to be given so she evolves again? Or would it need to be a certain Bond Rank? Or does she just need to reach a specific Level, or something?

“Mmmm,” Index sighed. “I don’t think I can tell you that…huh. Okay, so you won’t need to do anything obscure. It won’t be some extremely rare Tribute, or anything like that. You just…agh. You won’t regret it. Obviously there would be some specific differences in utility between the Inclusive and the, uh, other thing. But I do think you’d consider the basic overlap to be large enough for it to effectively be a waste of an Upgrade here. You can imagine it as sort of…sharing a pool of memories. They transmit theirs to you before Time Loop, then after, you transmit their own memories back to them, and it’s like nothing happened.”

I nodded, trying to go over this new piece of information. If I could get the same major effects of Inclusive Loop without needing to use an Upgrade on it, that would be huge. And, technically, it wouldn’t even necessarily need to just be between me, Ainash, and Erani. Presumably, anyone who got added to the Bond would be able to share memories, too. And honestly, if a person was trustworthy enough for us to tell them about Time Loop, we’d probably be on good enough terms that they’d have formed a Bond with Ainash anyway. In fact, if I felt like we were close and they hadn’t at least formed a Bond of one or two Ranks with her, then that would probably mean they secretly harbored some negative feelings toward us. So the requirement of having a Bond was almost negligible. Though, admittedly, I didn’t know much about the specifics of the Bond’s inner workings, so it may have not worked specifically like that. Still, either way, we’d most likely be able to figure something out.

The more I considered it, the more I leaned in favor of the Bond method. It would take a bit of extra work to get going, but it would effectively give me that entire Time Loop Upgrade for free. How could I pass that up?

So, Recycled Loop was the choice there. Next, Talents. Cumulative Catastrophe or Future Sight was the main choice I needed to make here—Index recommended the third option, Spatial Flux, but I didn’t think it was really correct in that instance, unlike its actually helpful advice with my Upgrade.

“Rude,” Index said.

After having some time to mull it over, I found myself leaning toward Cumulative Catastrophe over Future Sight. Future sight was cool, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt like that single second didn’t matter as much as I felt like it did. It was just so restrictive, whereas Cumulative Catastrophe would be absolutely phenomenal in fights against powerful opponents. I’d constantly found myself matched up with monsters, Demons, people that were way stronger than I was. And in those circumstances, having this Talent to slowly ramp up my own power to match theirs was completely backbreaking for them.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could make slight changes in my fighting style to make it even better. Sure, things like Crippling Chill could make it so that the damage boost effectively never wore off, and it would eventually bring a fight into my own favor if given a couple minutes to spin its wheels, but there was another synergy I hadn’t really considered before: Noxious Grasp and Expedite.

With Noxious Grasp, if I touched my opponent and then instantly moved away, even if we were only in contact for a fraction of a second, it would deal some damage to them and activate the fester. That was great; in a close-ranged fight, I could punish my opponent for any contact they made with me. However, if I boosted my Dexterity with Expedite, suddenly I was able to move much more quickly. And suddenly, if I touched my opponent, let go, touched them again, let go, over and over again in quick succession, I could get several stacks on Cumulative Catastrophe in a single second.

With that strategy used alongside everything else, especially against an unsuspecting opponent, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was able to take down someone with way more raw power than me, just by dragging the fight out and eventually growing completely unbeatable.

In the future, I could definitely see myself wanting to take some more utility-based Spells and Talents. Things like Future Sight could be used outside of combat, after all, and that was certainly helpful. But right now, I was still looking at the looming threat of the Demons waiting for me to just barely slip up. The moment they got to me, I’d have to fight off the full brunt of their forces once again.

That Xhag’duul Demon had said a lot to me before he died. Most of it was bullshit, but one statement had gotten my attention. After this, it wouldn’t be about Temporus anymore. It’d be about revenge. Now, I had no idea if he’d been telling the truth with that. Maybe the Demons cared a lot that I killed him, maybe they didn’t give a rat’s ass. But whether or not he’d been attempting to deceive me with that, he was telling the truth. He just didn’t know it.

Because this wasn’t about Temporus anymore. It wasn’t about Minute Mage, or reclaiming lost resources, or me staying safe. This was about revenge. It was about me getting revenge on these gods-damned monsters, invading my home, killing my people, taking over my home country. They’d done too much—hurt too many people—for me to just ride this out. It was really, truly about revenge now. And if my life ended before I was able to kill every single Demon left in all the planes of existence, that revenge would have failed. I had to be strong enough to kill them all.

And so I needed to gather that power with every day of my life. Like I’d said before, I was moving from defense to offense here. I had to make myself able to fight back and tear through the pits of the hells, starting now.

You have obtained the Talent Cumulative Catastrophe.

Time Loop has gained the Upgrade Recycled Loop.

You have used 6 Stat Points to increase Conjuration.

Your Conjuration value is now 118.