Chapter 119: Choosing

I was a bit taken aback at first by the lack of Trailblazer telling me what my next Spell names would be, but then I remembered that I had something new to replace that.

“Index,” I said, “What can you tell me about these choices?”

“Well, I can tell you quite a lot of things,” was what I got in reply. “Y’know, you’ve been misusing me quite a bit.”

“What, are you angry at me for it?”

“No, I just feel like you don’t know how I’m intended to be used. It’s all reconnaissance and telling you what I see. I’m supposed to be what I’m named after. An index of information! You’re supposed to ask me specific questions, and I’ll answer when I can.”

“Okay, but why not just tell me everything you’re allowed to say?”

“Because it’ll take forever! Y’know, you’ve gotten by fine doing stuff like that until now, when I was just telling you stuff about the people you were fighting. But Spell Choices? This is what I was made for! That means I’ve got a lot, lot more stuff in the ol’ books.”

“Wait, do you physically have books that you tell me this stuff from?”

“No, dummy! It’s an expression.”

“...Sure. Well, okay. I’ll ask you some specific questions, then. But if I’m still undecided afterward, I’m just gonna ask you to start listing off everything you know until I’m satisfied.”

I couldn’t see Index, but I still felt like I could feel it rolling its eyes at me. “Fine. Ask away.”

“Alright. So, with Defy Gravity, it’s a percent reduction. Last time I saw one of those, it was with Ethereal Armor, which Ranked up in a specific way. Does Defy Gravity work the same? Or does it Rank up using some other methods?”

“Pretty much the same. Though it actually decreases by 10%, not 5.”

“Hm,” I nodded. “So if I get it to the Soft Cap, that’ll be…”

I started doing the math in my head, but Index cut me off. “It’d end up as a 65% reduction of gravity on yourself, yes.”

“Alright,” I nodded. I could see where Index was coming from. It was nice to just have free answers to all of my questions. “What about Wild Might? What, exactly, does it…do?”

“I mean, you can read the description. It’s right in front of you.”

“Well, yeah, but I mean, what does it do outside of that? From what I can tell, it seems like it’ll set your Stats to a decent level, boost your Health and Stamina regeneration, and then, after fifteen minutes, revert you to normal with a bunch of your Stamina missing. That’s all oddly specific. Does it do something else that it doesn’t mention?”

“Oh, yeah. It alters your physical appearance quite a bit.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Claws, sharpened teeth, stuff like that.”

I blinked. “Claws and sharpened teeth?! Does it turn you into a monster, or something?”

“No, no, you still look vaguely Human.”

“Vaguely?”

“Yeah, for the most part. Just, y’know, a bit wilder.”

“...Mhmm.”

Yeah, I wasn’t too sure about that one. Index was being quite cryptic with its clues, and really I just wasn’t too big of a fan of its effects. As-is, it’d be an overall increase in Stats, but because of the way the Spell worked, it’d only get less effective as I got more powerful. Right now, setting my Strength to 70 would be an increase of 48, but after a few Levels? Sure, the Spell would also Rank up to compensate for that, but with Recursive Growth, that relative gap would only shrink as I Leveled..

As for the idea of casting it on others, it’d obviously not work well on Ainash, and ironically, it wouldn’t be a good fit for Erani, either. She had so much of a boost from the Bond that it’d be even less effective on her than it’d be on me.

The extra Health and Stamina regeneration was nice, but then, that got counteracted by the fact that it took all the regeneration back once the Spell ended, which would probably leave me with a flat 0 in Stamina, paralyzing me until I got some of it back. Not exactly ideal.

It seemed like the Spell was best used on Unclassed people. I could envision someone else wielding the Spell, casting thousands of Mana worth on random peasants to create an unstoppable army of what had effectively become mid-Level Classers. But in my circumstances, something like that wasn’t too possible.

“What about Sanguine Bond?” I asked. “That one’s got a bunch of different numbers in its description, I could imagine it Ranking up in a few different ways. What does it do when Ranking?”

“Uh, let’s see here… Ah, yes. It gets the standard additional 2.5% Mana Cost, and then a 5% boost in the Health, Stamina and Mana drain, as well as the Health, Stamina and Mana regeneration.”

“Alright. So no boosts to the range or duration.” That Spell was interesting—it wasn’t common to see a Spell that both cost Mana and regenerated Mana. Really, why would there be a Spell that, say, cost 30 Mana and regenerated 10? Why not just cost 20 and cut out the middleman?

But in Sanguine Bond’s case, I understood it. The Mana regeneration was effectively a reward for keeping the Siphon going for the whole duration, that way you could re-earn a bit of the Mana you spent on it.

One very interesting thing with that, though, was that it was technically possible for the total Mana earned to eventually outpace the Mana Cost of the Spell itself. Sure, currently you could only effectively reduce the cost from 190 to 160, but as Index said, the Mana regeneration increased by 5% per Rank, while the cost only increased 2.5%. So, after getting it to my current Soft Cap—

“Mana’d be 238 and regeneration would be 4.65,” Index said, apparently reading my thoughts.

Right. So after getting it to the Soft Cap, the previously 30 Mana discount would become around a 47 Mana discount. And that really started getting interesting when looking at things in the context of Light Plate.

Light Plate would reduce the cost of the Spell, but it wouldn’t reduce the amount of Mana regenerated. So, after taking Light Plate into account…

I paused deliberately, at this point knowing Index would do the math for me.

“Yeah, yeah,” it said. “Light Plate accounted for, original cost would be 108 and Rank 9 cost would be 135.”

Right. So when you subtracted the regenerated Mana from those new costs, suddenly the Spell would effectively cost a total of 78 at Rank 0, and 88 at Rank 9. Only 10 extra Mana in effective cost, and I still got 9 Ranks worth of boosted effectiveness! And it would only get better as both of those Spells Ranked more. It really wasn’t absurd to imagine that I could eventually have a Spell that’d gain me Mana by casting it.

But then, was the Spell actually good, all of that considered?

Obviously, considering its cost, the Spell seriously underperformed in the department of dealing damage—or even draining Stamina. Even considering the refunded Mana, it just didn’t compare to Spells like Noxious Grasp, or even Crippling Chill. And I wasn’t sure that the conditional Mana draining effect would make up for that.

But then, the Spell had another function. In addition to gaining me back Mana, it’d also regenerate Health and Stamina. So, if I considered this to be both a damaging Spell and a healing Spell all rolled into one, it was seriously efficient. I could cast this and put pressure on my opponent to end the battle soon or else have their Stamina quickly drained away, while at the same time regenerating my own Health, making it even harder for them to end the battle in the first place. And the extra Stamina regeneration could also be fed into more Health using Regenerate.

But then, that was assuming I’d always get the maximum effect of the Spell. If I cast this and then let the enemy get away from me, the Siphon would be broken and I’d have wasted all of that Mana. I wouldn’t even get the refund. The worst-case scenario with this thing was pretty awful.

I could see why this Spell came after Expedite, though. It worked well with it. If I cast this and my enemy started getting away from me, I could boost my Dexterity with Expedite to ensure I’d keep up with them. Still, there were many scenarios where you just couldn’t stay within ten paces of an enemy for a full ten seconds. It’d be a risky play in a lot of situations, that was for sure.

And the other Spell being offered to me besides those two was Defy Gravity. That Spell was a weird one, too. Reducing gravity’s effects on me? It was almost the exact counterpart to Gravity Well—the only thing it was missing was the ability to use it on others. Though I could see why I wouldn’t be able to do that—ironically, reducing someone’s weight would probably be a lot more detrimental than increasing it, in terms of completely ruining their coordination in a fight.

But even just considering it could only be activated on myself, I could see quite a few uses for it. As long as I got used to the feeling, reducing my weight could combine nicely with Expedite to pull off tricky moves in combat, like running along walls or leaping up into trees.

Just imagining the possibilities, I almost took the Spell then and there. I mean, it just seemed so cool. But then… it wasn’t very practical, was it? Really, when was the last time I needed to run along a wall? Maybe it could be useful, being able to jump high up and take cover from an attacker, but Classers with high enough physical Stats could do that already, so against a powerful enemy it wouldn’t be likely to buy me much time.

Plus, by the time it got to Rank 9, Index said the reduction would already have gotten to 65%. That seemed like a good thing, at first. It got way more powerful, way more quickly than anything else. Wasn’t that a point in Defy Gravity’s favor? But the Spell’s description was missing something very key to making that true. The phrase “up to.”

“There it is,” Index said. “Right on the money.”

…Was it adding color commentary to my own inner monologue?

“Yeah,” Index admitted.

“Y’know, sometimes I wish you weren’t living inside my head.”

“Just go back to thinking. I wanna see where this ends up.”

I rolled my eyes. Right.

Anyway, the Spell didn’t say I could reduce gravity’s effects by “up to” a certain amount. It just said it’d reduce gravity by that amount, exactly. That meant once it got to, say, 99%, I wouldn’t be able to decide to just reduce gravity by 80%. It’d be all or nothing.

Sure, gravity reduction was nice to a certain point, but once I was jumping hundreds of paces into the air? That was effectively impossible to control. Not to mention landing—I’d have to keep the Spell active the whole time I was in the air or risk falling to my death, and I wasn’t sure I appreciated dedicating that much Mana to a single leap.

“Is there a Spell Upgrade that mitigates that or something?” I asked Index. “Because otherwise, it’s borderline useless.”

“Uhh…Alright, since you guessed the exact Upgrade’s effects, I can tell you. Yes, the Rank 10 Upgrade offers a choice that’ll allow you to modulate the exact amount you reduce gravity by.”

Okay, well that was good to know. Still, I wasn’t sure that I appreciated being forced to use the Spell’s first Upgrade on just making it usable. Comparing it to Sanguine Bond, I’d be getting an already-usable Spell, plus a Rank 10 Upgrade to add on top of that. Considering how useful Noxious Grasp’s had been, I didn’t want to pass that up.

Yeah, I felt like things were decided, at this point. Sanguine Bond was the pick. The healing it offered—and at such a low rate, if I could actually pull off the challenge the Spell presented to me—was just too much to pass up.

So with that, I made my choice.

You have learned the Spell Sanguine Bond.

I also assigned my Stat Points.

You have used 6 Stat Points to increase Conjuration.

Your Conjuration value is now 110.

After the points in Conjuration, my new Mana/Minute was around 70—which meant I’d be getting close to 1.2 Mana per second. And with my new Spell active, that number would jump up to 4.2 Mana. Every single second.

I felt like my build was really coming together. And once I got my hands on some Spell Crystals, it’d get so much better.