Magical Engineering

Looking at my unspent ranks, it seemed attributes and skill ranks had increased their rate of gain again at level three-hundred. That meant I had a little over fourteen thousand unspent attribute ranks and a little over twenty-five hundred skill ranks. I again questioned how I’d ever spend these attribute ranks, but considering I did have core skills that cost fifty skill ranks per single increase, I assumed something like that would eventually happen there as well.

I promised myself that once we finished this Arena, I was going to focus more on my connection to the System and how all these things really worked. I wanted Earth to enter this much less blindly than I did, and I figured between everyone I had collected so far, I could at least get a decent primer going. Plus, with some added experimentation of my own, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities that I could really figure out how this all worked.

I started with the obvious choice for the final floor and what would give me the most added strength, at least I thought it would. My new core skill, Overclock, seemed like it could be the right thing at the right time, assuming I could handle the drain that would come with it. I settled on putting twenty-five ranks there before moving back to my regular skills and exploring those.

With the new core grade, I could increase several of those now, and I figured I’d have a few new ones that needed to be increased before the floor, too. I scanned my list, looking for two very expected ones, and found box cutting almost immediately. The compass took me a minute until I realized it was technically called a pair of compasses and found it under Paired Compassing. I moved those up to a total of seventy-five ranks, found Malleting, and did the same there. That way, all three of my tools were ready for a fight.

Since I had the spare ranks, I decided to move Close Combat, Pugilism, and Ranged Combat to the max as well. While I didn’t want to do any hand-to-hand fighting if I could avoid it, it was best to be ready for the possibility. Ranged Combat, though I hoped, might work with some of my fireball attacks. I added Climb and Sprint to the list of skills I was maxing, not that I was sure I had done enough physical training for those to matter.

This brought me to my next problem. I had a ton of unspent attribute points, and I doubted I had really moved any of my physical attributes up to where they were bumping into those endcaps anyway. I was going to have to start forcing myself to do a daily exercise regimen if I really wanted to work on those. What I could spend the points on instead of my actions was raising all of my resistances as far as I could get them. I did the same with my interactions, soul, core, and luck attributes, which all had their caps raised with my core fortification again.

I left Treerot with no ranks and kept Wicked Wasp resistance where it was as well, which gave me just enough to hit the current maximum values on the rest. I felt my bond with the tools deepen somehow. The connection between us seemed more tangible now. Likely, it was a side effect of something in both core and soul, possibly projection and strength. As far as what it would actually do, my best guess was a lower loss of power as energy flowed to them. Hopefully, this meant some much stronger spells out of Alpha, at least.

Just as I was about to start on the mana orbs, a chat window popped into my head.