After reaching the 35th level of the Shooting Tower, Alex faced a bottleneck with his gun technique. Clearing the levels from 23 to 35 gave Alex another 500 Glory Points.
Glory points are a valuable currency inside Guns of Glory. They could obviously be used to redeem advanced tutorials of the Standard Gun Technique, but there are a host of other things that could be redeemed from the VR station.
Alex felt that Uncommon Rank Gun Technique was his current physical and mental limit and redeeming more advanced tutorials wouldn't be beneficial at the moment. He would have to increase his strength grade first before considering that. Instead, Alex walked towards the Virtual Shop in the Guns of Glory station.
The shop was actually a gigantic building with thousands of people constantly entering and leaving. Alex walked into the store and was immediately supplied with a redeemable list. The sales included tutorials for other kind of gun techniques, guns, origin bullets and monster ability pearls.
As an Ordinary Grade 3 warrior, Alex had three monster ability slots. One had been used to obtain Precision Accuracy. He was still considering the other two.
The choice of monster abilities was a very important and complex one. When the major rank upgrade in strength took place, the monster abilities of that rank would fuse together to transform into a permanent skill that would continue to evolve as the warrior got stronger.
The sequence of monster abilities within a rank would determine the potential of the fused skill and thus synergy between the abilities was very important. Stacking all strongest abilities into the slots would be pointless, for if they are incompatible then the fused skill would have very low growth potential and lose out over time.
This is why, warriors usually choose abiliyies as they pertain to a certain theme or series. Alex had been thinking about his first combined monster skill of the Ordinary Rank and decided to develop a Gunslinger themed ability set. He already had Precision Accuracy as a foundation.
Alex was now looking through the list of redeemable items to see if anything could be useful for him at the moment. He found a lot of ordinary grade gun technique training tutorials for sale.
The Standard Gun technique could be upgraded all the way to the Unusual rank. Why then would anyone want to purchase other gun techniques? The way of the gun was, like all other martial arts, based on one's own proficiencies. The Standard Gun Technique was just a foundation upon which one would build their own martial art by fusing it together with other innovative combat tactics. It was why even ordinary rank gun schools which were not themselves upgradeable were quite popular in sales.
Alex would eventually also consider purchasing the rights to learn these skills, but for now his goal was to master the Gun Technique to the pinnacle. Instead he looked into the Ability pearls for sale.
Guns of Glory had a rather large and complete collection of Ability Pearls. Just within the ordinary rank there were already thousands of them. Alex looked through the list and immediately felt dizzy. At this moment, Alex felt that his first ability supplemented his Accuracy and Trajectory precision rather well. What he found to be increasingly lacking in the higher levels of the Shooting Tower was that his hands weren't able to keep up with his mind. As he improved his strength, his coordination would improve, but his spieit would improve as well creating a perpetual imbalance.
Alex thus filtered the ability pearls to display only those pertaining to body-mind coordination in the ordinary rank. The list rapidly reduced from thousands to just five.
Alex raised an eye. Those were fewer than he thought. As he was looking through the list and frowning, a robotic salesperson walked over and introduced herself.
"Why are there so few choices in ability pearls of this particular category?" Alex asked the robotic salesperson.
"Ability Pearls pertaining to the Mind-Body coordination category are rarely found in the ordinary rank category. Those that are listed are the only known monster species that produce those, and even these are extremely rare to farm because the monsters spawn in very few numbers and the drop rate is very low." The robot replied.
Alex nodded. Most people who wanted to become gunsmiths wouldn't use their ordinary rank skill to be made from the gunslinger series. They would usually focus on their element talent first and then consider the gunslinger series further in their career as a warrior.
Alex didn't have that viability. Firstly, he had no specific attribute affinity. The Crazy Immortal Sutra was an attributeless practice method and secondly he wasn't even certain if he could progress to the Uncommon Rank and was forced to choose the gunslinger's path at the ordinary rank.
Alex looked through the five ability pearls in the list. The five all tackled the problem in different ways.
Reflexive Spontaneity tied the reflex action to the intuitive guess. Thus every shot would be reflexive, and not a conscious action when activated. This was obviously the most perfect form of hand eye coordination, but it was useless for Alex's considerations as it took all agency and ability out of the picture and relied solely on reflexes. Thus he quickly ruled this one out.
Slick Hands went the route of increasing hand and finer movement speed at the cost of loss of reflexive reaction of the arms. While the first ability pearl went the path of total reflex reaction, the second path cut off the reflexive reaction entirely. This too was unsuitable for Alex.
Quick Draw was perfect for Alex in the sense it neither gives up reflexivity, and yet manages to create peak level conscious hand to eye coordination. The draw back is that it needs a build up to be used. The arm can only perform the movement once before it needs to rest for a while, and frequent use will eventually damage the hand. Too many flaws, and thus out of the picture.
Angular Gesture bypassed the problem in a different way. Instead of focusing on the entire hand, it worked only on the ankles and fingers. There were no major tradeoffs like the others, but overall arm movement would be disunited with the hand movements and cause disharmony in the action. The drawbacks of this ability could actually be surmounted with training and Alex potentially considered it.
However, when he saw the final one, his eyes lit up and he gave up thoughts about considering the others.