After maxing out all his important skills, Allen was left with a rather long list of improvements. His headache hadn’t gotten any better either, so he didn’t spend too much time going over every detail. There would be time to test everything later on.
He pushed the conversations happening around him out of his mind. The sky hadn’t darkened or changed at all since they had entered the dungeon node, but it was still getting late. “Well, from the top I guess,” Allen told himself.
Allen stopped at tier eight for Suppression, not really feeling it was that important at the moment. “I wonder how I can use the pain numbing feature, that seems interesting,” he told himself. “I might still replace this skill though.”
“So… sensory range as well as perception gets boosted now… and I can choose stuff to ignore. That’s a good upgrade, eight-hundred percent too.” Allen read over the skill again, catching something else while he was at it. “Information is filed into my memory as well? I don’t think that was there before. I already have lots to test.”
“No more fall damage and some more numbers, which is always nice… but now this is my only movement skill. I’ll have to see what else this job offers.”
“Killer Instinct and Dead Calm are both familiar. They don’t change much until tier twenty or so, it’s just better predictions for Instinct and bigger numbers for Dead Calm, now fifty minutes to full charge. Nothing to see here.”
“I don’t think this skill had a cost before.” Allen thought. “It’s not much though. And 80% weight reduction for… a lot of mana. That could be useful.”
“And there’s the paralysis effect at tier ten, just like I remember.”
Allen moved on to the additions to his Chaotic Destroyer skills. Unlike many of his skills from his other job in the Assassin tree, he was completely in the dark on how it functioned. “It’s also a Monk job, so I shouldn’t get any weapons skills for anything more than a knife, which fits I guess. Punching stuff sounds cool too.”
“Wow, it instantly charges to the base now and its almost five times as powerful as Break used to be. There’s also a lingering effect, I need to test that.”
“This one is meh. I might not need it anymore, now that Brea— I mean Chaotic Destruction charges instantly. Moving on…”
“I’m still not happy about losing Heavy Accelerate. I didn’t see that coming at all, but this could increase the charging speed of Chaotic Destruction to less than a minute… It just depends on how bad it fucks me up when I use it.”
“I should get a Dusk synergy skill too. This should help with the, um, Chaotic part… and it’s proportional to focus, which I have out the ass right now.” Allen hummed to himself. “I’ll do some testing before I put any more points into it though.”
“These two skills are sort of similar. Just more numbers, except for the mana regeneration part. That looks fun.”
“This one could use some testing; I might get rid of it if it doesn’t work well with Chaos aspect magic.” Allen glanced over his list of skills again and then let out a deep sigh. After going through fifteen skills, he still had thirty-six skill points left to use.
“And then there’s this,” Allen thought, looking at his new Mentalist Job. With two points in it, it had jumped to tier three.
“One might think the Illusionist job is the best for illusions, but they’d be wrong, in my opinion. It just takes a bit of time to get to the actual mind magic.” Allen had some points set aside to put into a few Mentalist skills he knew he’d need, but first he would have to deal with his lack of any movement skills. “It’s probably best if I keep that kind of stuff to my Assassin job and the DPS to the other j—"
“AH! Of course!” Christopher’s sudden exclamation launched everyone out of their thoughts, including Allen. “Teleportation is possible with the Death aspect, theoretically that is.”
“Have you been thinking about that this whole time?” Allen asked, an eyebrow raised.
“Nah, that doesn’t make any sense,” Camila blurted between sips from a wine bottle, “Allen’s just fuckin with you.” She flopped back onto her mat and turned to face the outside of their small camp.
A small breeze blew past everyone while they either rolled their eyes or snorted to themselves, or both in Allen’s case. Christopher cleared his throat and formed a perfect octahedron out of rolling miasma. It appeared to be white at first glance, but it wasn’t bright like the light aspect or flat and rigid like control aspect. In fact, it wasn’t truly white either, it was iridescent, shimmering as it spun lazily above the professor’s palm.
“The arcane aspect is the origin of the other aspects,” Christopher began. “Each of the sixteen aspects are really just the arcane aspect shifted by a certain degree. The greater the shift at higher levels and the greater the synergy with that aspect, the greater its power will become.”
Allen shared a look of puzzlement with Shoam. “That’s basically along the lines of what Amon taught us,” he thought. He could almost hear the elf say the same thing back, even without words.
“The Death aspect is probably the aspect I’m least familiar with, even more so than Dusk,” the professor continued. “Still, I know enough about it to speculate. So, we usually think of death as the act of dying, but because it’s the opposite of life, death is actually the state of being dead.”
“Where is he going with this?” Allen wondered. “Well, Doc says weird stuff like this too, actually.”
“That distinction is important because it means the death aspect involves more than just killing things. I remembered that, at high levels and high synergy, death mages and necromancers can use death magic to achieve astral projection, which is basically as close to dying as you can go before staying dead.”
“What does astral projection have to do with anything?” Amelia asked, looking skeptical.
A glint came to Christopher’s eyes as he grinned enthusiastically. “It stands to reason that a powerful enough necromancer, like the Black Healer, would have enough command over the state of death to surpass the limitations of astral projection. He would then be able to actually kill himself, decompose his body into mana, travel somewhere in second stage detachment as a soul, and then resurrect himself at his destination.”
Allen caught some strange looks as he glanced over everyone in the camp. Most of them just seemed confused, including Ty, Nora, and Camila. Amelia looked upset though, like she couldn’t believe Christopher’s lengthy explanation.
“Huh, well that does sound like something Doc would think of,” Allen said. Shoam laughed a little to his side.
“If his Death attunement is high enough to manage that, then he definitely shouldn’t also have life aspect at all,” Amelia said, looking off to the side.
Christopher hummed in agreement. “Yes, that is true, but as I was thinking of how death aspect transportation could be possible, I realized it would require certain meta magic that is only possible with arcane aspect. Magic that acts on magic itself, so to speak.” His smile returned with an edge of victory and satisfaction. “I figured that since The Black Healer’s arcane job is separate from his life and death jobs, he is able to use his arcane aspect magic as a bridge between opposing aspects. After all, mana shifts towards an aspect have no effect on any arcane aspect jobs or skills.”
Amelia’s eyes widened with realization. “So you’re saying…” she began.
“It looks like its possible to use diametrically opposed magic so long as you have even more powerful arcane magic at your disposal to mediate the two.” Christopher
The professor and the Healer started arguing rather passionately about healing and mana shifting. Apparently, Amelia knew more about magic than she had let on, likely from her studies at the Order of Pain.
Allen would have reacted more to having his mind blown, but his headache had only gotten worse. He decided to drink a healing potion, since the really low-level ones basically worked like Tylenol, and just go to sleep. His body was just as exhausted despite the superhuman strength and endurance it had, thus, he was asleep in mere minutes.
