"Bloody mist," David cursed at it, "you are just adding problem on top of the problem, mini-Erin."
In the Garden-Forest, David was peacefully trying his new Arcane Construct Skill. Wushu and him had formulated a rather intelligent plan to take care of the Froggers, but it required the Arcane Construct's conjuring.
Still, it was doable; the Skill just needed to be cast once.
Arcane Construct reaches level 3. 10.2% Well filling per cast. 9.98 second cast time. 1.2% increased construct size. 58 seconds post-breaking cooldown.
Since the construct was a fairly complex Skill, its Magic Circle was almost as complicated as Arcane Aegis' one. It also had many parameters to take into consideration.
However, even without increasing his Mind further or the skill level, the construct should have been able to hold onto the Slime's mucus. But David had to hurry up scribbling the Magic Circle in the ground, for the mucus was slowly being absorbed into the ground; if it had been a Sourceborn it would have already disappeared.
Drawing reaches level 7. Increase your hands' ability to follow your mind's image by 7%.
He had also decided to remain in a state of Stealth for the procedure's duration; although Wushu was guarding for him, he did not want any surprises. Stealth was showing its effects.
Stealth has reached level 12. Mask your presence to other beings with 12% efficiency.
He was not new to working under stealth, or a semblance of it. He had practiced while in jail and before that in school. He tried hard at disappearing from the teachers' radars; he did it every day. The practice was likely paying off.
Indeed, the closest and only people he had back then, during his years of Secondary Education, were his sister and Willow...
Willow, thinking about her, felt…weird to him. He had to leave everything behind if he wanted to become a Trespasser and unlock the Title that would likely make him hard to catch; would he be able to leave her behind? As he had done when he chose to take a different life instead of going with her to college?
"Why am I thinking about this now?" He said to himself, rolling his eyes. "I swear, drawing always made me think; I hope I'll never start writing then."
"Alright, it's done!" Dave shouted after a few seconds, getting up and out from stealth if speaking to himself hadn't done the trick before.
Wushu got back from his patrol, circling around him and hurrying to act by quickly waving his body in mid-air without moving an inch.
"Just, how do you do that?" David asked, shaking his head.
He placed his hand on the Magic then summoned a glass made of untainted Source.
Right on top of the Magic Circle, that this time was not displaced, a rather large vial was being built second after second; it almost looked like watching a 3d printer in action.
The process terminated after the full ten seconds of cast time had gone by. Then came a wave of energy emanating from the construct that destroyed the Magic Circle.
Dave turned to look at the sky, sore, "Just say you want me to train my drawing skills; at least you won't feel like a troll..."
Arcane Construct reaches level 4. 10.3% Well filling per cast. 9.97 second cast time. 1.3% increased construct size. 57 seconds post-breaking cooldown.
Uselessly speaking at the sky, David understood right away that the construct was bound to his head's location. It hovered a meter from him, at his head's level. He discovered that he could make it do a certain range of movements, but not only was it hard to do, it was also very hard to retain.
The first time he tried to impart a scooping motion to the vial, it turned over, bent down toward the ground, and then shot back again where it was supposed to hover.
Annoyed, David reached the closest he could get to one of the few ground patches that still held the mucus and tried to reproduce the act; then, almost like a spring, the construct shot back to its original position.
"Bloody…" a drop of blood left David's right nostril.
Hitting the slime's mucus, the drop of blood started sizzling before disappearing.
"Maybe I'm not supposed to use this construct this way, Wushu," saying so, David grabbed the construct in hand, and opening his eyes wide, he discovered that holding it, he could do all the movements he wanted with it.
"Woah…"
Wushu signed something in the air.
"I should try throwing it? Yeah, you're right."
Throwing it was not as successful; after reaching roughly a bit more than a meter and a half distance, the construct returned to its starting position, which meant hovering at a one-meter distance from his right temple.
"I guess we'll have to go close and personal with our plan, Wushu," Dave realized.
He summoned his Status.
Status
Name: Deviant (David Anderson) Son
Blessing: Blessing of The Source (Unique) – Resilience + 1 every Level
Title: Trespasser (Unique): Locked
Level: 3
Arcanist, Class level: 4
Class Perks: Source Sight
Attributes
Health: 92%
Stamina: 84%
Well: 28.6%
Alacrity: 5
Constitution: 5
Perception: 4
Strength: 5
Mind: 16
Resilience: 15
Charisma: 4
As always, he had placed his free point into Mind, but maybe he should have placed it into Alacrity. Running a little bit faster might help him with doing what he needed to do.
"Alright, what is done is done," Dave bent down and scooped up a glassful of Poisonous Slime mucus and earth, then letting the construct go, which turned back in position by his head. As he did that, Wushu reached toward the ground and took, or tried to, take the Slime's crystal; it was just a transparent sphere.
Unable to take the crystal, Wushu pointed it to David.
"You want me to take that? Isn't it dangerous?"
Wushu frowned, then zapped it a couple of times.
"Much obliged," David said, picking up the crystal. If there were some other venomous remains, they had likely been pulverized by the lightning.
Then Wushu took flight, and David followed him to the Froggers' cave.
Looking at the construct as he ran, Dave was surprised by the fact that the non-newtonian liquid didn't shift in the slightest. Indeed the glass hovered through the air without a motion that would induce any form of swaying, so whatever was inside of it was secure.
"That is…very, very interesting." Nasty ideas passed through David's mind at that point; still, ideas he could not put into action, not only because he wasn't a maniac but also because he didn't have the means to enact them.
It took them just ten minutes to reach the Frogger's burrow, and looking at it, David's increased Mind Attribute started paying dividends.
"Well, I believe I should keep following Randiallen's advice, that old-Fay is as sly as a fox."
Saying so, David took a look at the burrow's inside, vaguely taking to memory their little pond's location, then he left.
David and Wushu walked atop the burrow, reaching the hillock under which the Froggers had dug to make their burrow, "Alright, Wushu. This should be the rough location. I'm going to start digging here; you should keep watch—what?"
A grinning Wushu danced in the air.
"You want to make it wet so I can dig better, then please," David answered, making curtsy, "do so, kind dragon."
Wushu stopped in mid-air, then he descended, finally dropping on the ground for the first time.
Pinching the grassy clod of earth with his claws. He looked even smaller than he really was like that, he turned toward David, holding out his open palm.
"What?" Dave asked, arching his eyebrows.
"Oh, that Slime's crystal, sure. I was wondering why you asked for it. You want to eat it, don't you?"
Wushu nodded, then opened his small mouth wide and gobbled the crystal as a whole. He shone of a suffused light because of the mist; then, he leveled up.
The Source
Wushu has reached Level 9.
Resilience + 1, Charisma + 1
Wushu has received 3 free Attribute points.
Wushu is placing the points… Constitution + 3.
"Oh, look at that! The prideful dragon has followed his lowly Human companion's advice."
Wushu snorted, then pinched the ground with his two sets of claws, pointed his muzzle to the ground, and started spewing a water-jet. It didn't seem overly strong, but it was strong enough to displace the ground a little and definitely good enough to make it wet.
"Alright, don't stress it, now let me dig when it becomes hard, you'll squirt your water once more— wait… that sounded a lot nastier than I wanted to make it…let's try again. Release your water gun when I tell you to, Squirtle."
Dave started digging with his hands; then the process repeated a couple of dozen times; it took them more than an hour to make a decent-sized hole that reached all the way to the burrows.
David fell back on the, now muddy, ground.
"If I hadn't got this leather suit, my nails would have come right off. I don't remember the last time my arms got this sore…"
Wushu's job was that of patrol, and he had done it right. However, they received no interruptions at all during that time. It seemed that it was indeed Frogger's territory.
"Well, let's get this over with. And let's hope this much gel is enough to poison their water source."
Getting down into the hole they had dug, David removed the last few centimeters of dirt and pebbles, and finally, he could look at the spectacle of the Frogger's burrow below.
A defeated David rose back out of the hole a moment later; he let himself fall on the ground.
Wushu signed a query in the sky.
"We dug in the wrong place. Should have dug a few meters to our right," David confessed.
Wushu snorted, then, seemingly enraged, he signed a long series of acrobatics in the sky.
A.S.U.T. is now level 21. Universal Translation 21%
"Hey! You can't be mad at me! I don't have x-ray vision—what? Oh, yeah—yes, that could work."
Wushu grabbed the construct, and at the same time, Dave descended down the hole.
The moment Wushu passed through the hole with Dave's Arcane vial, Dave could feel whatever was holding the construct in place, pulled at his mind.
His nose started bleeding, the Skill was urging him to release it, but he held up to it. But he couldn't, not yet.
When, finally, Wushu reached right above the water mirror, David released his hold on the construct, which literally fragmented into an uncountable amount of flickering sparks of energy. The mucus escaped the construct without touching Wushu's carefully placed claws, and it ended up splashing in the water.
The dragon shot back up through the air to exit out of the hole. A peeping Dave moved away to let him through.
"Do you think they saw you?" He asked. But—the just come out—Wushu stared at him. Then he simply spat a slow jet of water at his face.
The water came out tainted red.
"Bloody hell, did I bleed that much? No, wait, I am still bleeding…"
David lied back down, then recalled the last time he had lost all that blood from his nose. It wasn't that easy to forget because he would be arrested the next few minutes.
Yet even at that moment, losing blood from his nose, he smiled. He smiled just as he did back then when he taught a lesson to that wanker of Willow's ex-husband, when David found him beating up her and their children, Zoe.
He had never felt more proud of himself than when he left him comatose on the ground…soon later came the regret, both because he could have held back and because he had forever left the wrong impression on the woman he had always loved, and a child that until that moment had thought the world of him.
Dave wondered why he kept thinking about Willow that day; maybe it was because he knew that he would have to renounce her one way or another, renounce his attachments to save himself…yet he had no idea how to do something like that, none.
He didn't really know how long he spent there, maybe an hour or two. Of course, he had long stopped bleeding, he just sat there, hoping for his Quest to fix itself and to get some form of much-needed rest, but then the Source notification made itself apparent.
The Source
Congratulations, Deviant Son! You have beaten your fourth Source Quest.
Your Level reaches 4. You receive 1 Attribute point.
Blessing of the Source, Resilience + 1.
You received (1) Passive Attribute Skill Choice-Token!
You received (2) Minuscule Source Box.
David smiled, "I have fifteen out of the thirty points of Resilience I need, Wushu. And my Well fills by one percent every half an hour." David really didn't want to waste his Attribute point on Resilience, given that he would still receive one point of it per level, but the situation was critical. Currently, his Well stood at around thirty percent, while his Arcane Discharge would still have nine hours and a half of cooldown. After scribbling some math on the ground to calculate the rate at which his Well filled, he knew that he had seventeen hours to go before he was critically full, yet that was so if he didn't use magic at all, which was very unlikely.
Whether he placed a Resilience point or not until he managed to increase it enough to empty his Well naturally instead of having to Discharge it, he would still be in trouble.
Maybe his Passive Attribute would help him more. So, David decided to wait before he placed his Resilience point.
"Source, let's roll that Choice-Token, won't we?"
The Source
Opening Passive Attribute Skill Choice-Token.
Choose an Attribute among the following:
Constitution: Your Constitution represents the duress, resistance, and density of the complex structures that make up your body.
Perception: Your Perception represents the range, scope, and acuity of your senses, both physical and metaphysical.
Strength: Your Strength represents the amount of sheer power that your body can generate and the level of physical abilities it can produce by utilizing the Source.
"I would love to say that it is a no-brainer, but—although I want to take Perception, Constitution may offer me some better ways to resist Source Poisoning." David looked at Wushu.
"What do you say, oh, tiny dragon?"
Wushu arched a brow but then started in a convoluted amount of acrobatics.
"Slow down, it's not…oh, so you say I might develop it naturally…then I guess that leaves us with Perception."
"What about Strength, you say?" David snorted, amused. "I'm a mage, mate. I don't need to raise a finger to work…" saying, so he actually raised his hands which showed his dirty suit gloves, "At least I will not have to raise a finger once I'll become good enough at it."
"Source, let's go with Perception."
The Source
Choose your Perception Passive Ability among the following:
Detailed Info: See much more detailed Information than those the Source normally offers.
Sixth Sense: Develop a preternatural sense for incoming danger targeting you and what you hold dear.
Supernatural Senses: All your natural senses develop much more than natural.
"Yeah, I guess that Detailed Info is the one the others are using to hack my status page. Then I'm going to hire their same hacker. I'll be a Super User too!"
Detailed Info reaches level 1. Increase displayed information by 1%.
Dave chose to try it right away by focusing on Wushu.
Loong (Familiar)
Level: 9
Health: 100%
Elements: Lightning, Water
Detailed Info reaches level 2. Increase displayed information by 2%.
"Oh, this is going to be very, very useful!"
"Well, Wushu, I've got two Minuscule Source Boxes, they must have come out from the dead Froggers down there, I think I'll hold on to them in my invisible Storage, of which—I still have no idea how it works, but, more importantly, I think it's about time we went to look for another Quest. Any idea?"
As Wushu mimicked the acrobatics for "Thinking", Dave spied down the hole to see the effects their plans had left on the Froggers.
What he saw was ugly devastation. The Froggers had slowly died in the weirdest positions. As it seemed, they had drunk the water, and soon later, the poison from the Slime had come into action, killing them slowly. A few of them were still dissolving. Yet, if he had killed all of those, there were quite a few of them, and he hadn't leveled up, then how steep was this leveling curve?
"How did Erin call it?" He asked himself, "Life Source?" David didn't really care.
Wushu was still forming the thinking maneuver, "If you've done loading, Wushu, I'm dying of Source Poisoning here, and of hunger too, so let's find a Quest or at least something to eat, what do you say?"
The dragon couldn't help but ask, what did he mean by "loading?"
"I will not believe that the Fiends have got spaceships but not Personal Computers, hu-uh, no sir. I'll just take that question as the ignorance of a newborn dragon."