Level 1 Fallen

After Bella made her plans, I teleported Wisteria back to Fallcry, then Diane and I got back in the car to leave once again. It felt odd not having Bella in the car as our lookout, and I had to drive about half as fast as normal to make sure that we didn’t miss any significant landmarks. Neither Diane nor I could compare when it came to long-distance vision.

“How much longer until we reach your lightning ninja dungeon?” I asked curiously, looking at the halfling sitting next to me.

Diane hummed thoughtfully, checking her map. “According to the coordinates that I was given, it should be about three more hours at this speed. We should have plenty of time to do a couple of runs before I have to log out for the night.”

“Is the person that gave you the information going to be there?” I asked, my gaze returning back to the empty sky ahead. I had to use True Sight in order to see through the heavy rain falling like waves and avoid the iron spires.

“No, he hasn’t been to this dungeon in weeks. He only sent me the coordinates because he remembered where it was after seeing my post on the forums. As far as he knows, the dungeon should be unoccupied. Which inevitably means that it will be overflowing.”

I couldn’t help but grimace at that, as overflowing dungeons were always their own brand of annoying. “What are the odds that a group has settled near the dungeon to farm it?”

“Slim to none. Nobody else has messaged me about this particular dungeon, so it would seem like nobody else knows about it. The only other reason would be if someone was farming the dungeon for extremely rare loot and didn’t want the competition.”

Her words made sense, though I was personally wishing that there would have been people maintaining the dungeon and preventing it from getting too out of hand. I was confident that the two of us could handle it, but that didn’t mean that I wanted to give myself any extra work. Theoretically, we only needed to clear this dungeon out once, and that would be enough for Diane to create the lightning ninjas in her own dungeon. Anything beyond that would just be to try to get skills for Diane herself.

Silence fell in the car after that, and we continued to drive through the sky for more than an hour, dodging spires and having lightning crash against the shield over our car. Eventually, it was Diane herself that broke the silence. “Hey, Drake?”

“Hmm?” I responded, keeping my eyes focused ahead. This particular region of Stormforge had more spires than any we had come across, requiring my constant focus to avoid slamming straight into one.

“I was just thinking, wouldn’t it be better if I did the same thing as Bella?” Diane asked, leaning back into her seat. “I mean the whole creating my own skills thing. I was just thinking about that. I’ve been going around, looking for any skills that fit the character I want to portray. But when it comes to making my own skills, I’ve done basically nothing. At most, there were the runes that I used before the big update, but you can’t really count those anymore. And what sort of ninja doesn’t have their own signature move?”

I blinked at that, surprised by the sudden shift in conversation. “Are you thinking about doing your own training after this?” I asked, and Diane seemed to think about it.

“Maybe. For now, I want to try and rely on my Chosen while I’m offline. I’ll give her the parameters for a few interesting techniques, and see if she can make them. Once we’ve gotten through these two dungeons, if she hasn’t been able to make the skills yet, I’ll probably take a few days to try and get them myself.”

I gave a small nod of approval at that. I could understand her reasoning well enough. Even I had created my own skills, such as Confusion or my clone skills. Although they were hardly ‘signature abilities’ of mine, it was true that I had created them by forcibly modifying my existing abilities.

“What sort of skills are you thinking about making?” I couldn’t help asking, thinking that maybe voicing her thoughts would help her settle on something herself.

“Hmm, I’m not entirely sure,” she answered, her eyes looking out the window and past the rain sliding off the barrier. “After watching Wisteria fight, I realized that having one skill to cover multiple different problems might not always be the best bet. In theory, it works well and provides more rapid growth if it can be maintained indefinitely like you do.”

“However, it is different in practice. Skills with so many versatile uses inevitably have a suitably high mana burden. If I use the skill once, it will tank my energy, and I won’t be able to use it again until that energy recovers. I guess you could say that’s the downside to how this game handles cooldowns.”

“Instead, the way Wisteria seemed to approach it is by dividing her skills up into individual uses. If it were you, you’d combine them all into something like Wind Ki Manipulation, but she has Wind Blades, Wind Step, Wind Shield, Wind Bullet, any individual usage that she could require for her wind powers. Then, she also has her clones that we saw her use back in her fight against you, or her petal blades or wolf projection that she used when we were doing the monster hunting mission.”

“I think it might be a bit different,” I mused aloud. “I think the petal blades might be her grandmaster skill. They seem like densely packed wind blades themed after flowers. Going by that reasoning, when she was fighting Bella earlier, she was downcasting all of her abilities to use their individual forms, thus drastically reducing their mana burden.”

Diane paused as that idea struck her, musing over it. “So, the best of both worlds would be to cultivate each individual skill to the master rank, and then fuse them all together into a single grandmaster skill?” she asked, but I could only shrug my shoulders.

“That might be the case, but it might not. I don’t know how long Wisteria’s trained. It’s entirely possible that she trained up the grandmaster skills individually, and then created her own combined petal blade skill to retrain from the ground up. Fallen like us can’t level up, but our skills can improve. So even if Wisteria were the same level as you, her skills would have had a lot longer to develop. The only real limit is how much mana burden she can manage to use at once while training.”

Diane hummed thoughtfully. “That makes sense, too. At the very least, this does all still sound like I need the smaller skills. Honestly, creating them shouldn’t even be that difficult for me, since I have Shadow King. I just need enough enchantment books, and plans for combinations with other skills.”

“For instance, if we get a good lightning skill from the dungeon, I might be able to combine it with Shadow King to create a type of black lightning, and then use that as the basis for future skills. Similarly, I could create ‘shadow’ versions of other elements, and weave those together into my own style…”

Now that she had gotten onto the train of thought, her mind was running away with ideas on the skills that she could create. Most importantly, many of these skills were things that were truly easy for her to achieve. The only problem was that each one had to be trained individually. Although I could provide her with an experience boost, that boost was not so intense that it would trivialise the entire process.

The rest of the trip to the lightning ninja dungeon was rather quiet. Once we began to approach the area, Diane directed me to lower our altitude so that we could more closely scan the surroundings. With a deep breath, she opened a menu and began to describe the dungeon’s entrance. “Okay, Drake, you’re looking for--”

I cut her off, a wry smile touching my lips. “A three-story mansion with two six-story pagodas, one at either end?” I asked, my eyes locking onto something hidden behind the pouring rain.

Diane hesitated, looking at the description of the dungeon. “R-right. I guess that would stand out quite a bit here, wouldn’t it?”

Indeed, the dungeon had been incredibly easy to identify once it had gotten within the range of my True Sight. Tucked within a clearing beneath the towering iron spires, this mansion was patrolled by dozens of yellow-robed ninjas. More could be seen within the pagodas, or walking along the walls, and even dispersing into the surrounding area. “Are you ready to take care of this dungeon?” I asked, finding an isolated area to set the car down.

Diane quickly nodded, stepping out of the car to let me stow it in my inventory. However, the moment I removed the barrier above us, her expression darkened, the heavy rain hammering down on her directly. “Couldn’t you have waited until we got inside to do that?” she muttered, but I shook my head.

“You should know better than anyone about that,” I chuckled. “Having a large patch where the rain refused to fall would appear suspicious to anyone with a well-trained eye, even if we were hidden by layers of stealth.”

Diane let out a little huff, sulking like a wet cat as we turned towards the mansion. “How do you want to do this,” I asked. “Do you want to clear out all of the surrounding monsters first, or leave them alone and head straight inside?”

“Normally, I’d like to take care of all of them,” Diane said, before looking down at her soaked robes. “However, these enemies specialize in electricity, and we are already soaked from head to toe. We need to get inside and dry off before we can comfortably fight them. Besides, we didn’t see any nearby settlements that would be threatened by the presence of these monsters, right?”

I shook my head, having not seen any form of settlement for the last half hour of our trip to this dungeon. So, the two of us fell silent, hiding beneath the cover of my Wraith Zone and passing between the patrols. Once we reached the door of the mansion, I directed Diane to pull it open while I watched the figures standing on either side. I had expected them to react immediately as soon as the door opened, but they continued staring forward, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

So, Diane and I stepped inside, finding ourselves transported into the dungeon. The rain and thunder from outside vanished, and we were now in a quiet courtyard beneath a cloudy sky. Off to either side of the cobblestone path leading further into the mansion were dozens of ninjas practicing basic martial arts maneuvers.

Compared to what I expected to find from an overflowing dungeon, this seemed surprisingly peaceful. Of course, the fighting hadn’t actually started yet, but the monsters within weren’t packed together like canned sardines, nor did they appear to be starving like some of the other overflowing dungeons that we had encountered in the past.

I sent an inquisitive look to Diane, who was currently busy drying herself off with the Clean skill. Only once she had left a dense puddle at her feet did she shudder violently, turning to face me. “Okay… let’s get to work, now.”