It wasn't all bad news with regards to the heavily medicated roast aptanoth however as the [accelerated healing] trait finally rose by a level making his recovery for the inevitable next time he was injured even quicker. Alex was under no delusions of invulnerability since even if he stockpiled every defensive trait in the world he would only be elevated to "next to impossible to injure" rather than "impossible to injure". This sounds like a small difference in wording that shouldn't matter but it truly did. Still Alex didn't plan on taking that route anyways since that would be extremely boring for him if he was never actually in danger as he hunted.
What most people on earth had forgotten by being at the top of the food chain was that the fear of injury and death were the oldest and best motivators that have ever existed. In the short few months Alex has been a monster he realized this and swore to never put himself in a position where he forgets this knowledge. This last time flirting with death had lit a fire in Alex to improve and grow stronger. The first step to this was to figure out exactly what he needed to work on to accomplish this.
'I just need a bit more fire energy to get my pyrosis trait to T7 but that can be done over time. It's clear from my brawl with nergigante that my claws need to be upgrade a bit since I had trouble slicing into it's hide and only inflicted shallow cuts on it as a result. If i had to guess I'd say my claws should fall somewhere between in T4 to T5 while this nergigante is at the peak of T6. While I'm sure my defensive setup isn't weak it needs a bit of a boost.' Alex pondered seriously.
Alex really broke down each and every facet of his abilities before roughly figuring out the direction he wanted to take to grow his power. First was the need to raise his defensive traits by a few levels in order to give him some wiggle room in combat. Once that was done Alex planned on ranking up his toxirosys since it was clearly not very effective against nergigante. He wasn't very surprised by this since the trait was only T1 to begin with while nergigante was peak T6.
Alongside that Alex planed to rank up his hydrosis to T4 at minimum since that was one of the requirements for the next growth spurt. According to his guess the nest growth spurt should let him reach a size just below that of nergigante's. Alex knew that getting bigger also made him a bigger target but unfortunately in this world size contributes heavily to power and as a result was a sacrifice he needed to take. The full requirements to grow again was to have a high rank elemental trait , creating a form of fighting unique to himself and finally raising his physical body strength to high rank.
The final requirement was something Alex had already fulfilled however the first two still needed to be fulfilled. Alex wasn't that surprised by the ever increasing difficulty of the requirements to his growth since it was a pattern he noticed much earlier. It also made sense as for most monsters growing up beyond your birth state to a higher tier was a very hard process and Alex's system just made it easier for him. Alex could tell that the reason for the second requirement was to close the gap between him and the other monsters who had their own fighting styles with them basically from birth.
The final thing Alex planned for his training was to increase his attacking power via his claws and when it grew back , tail. While Alex could also add his horns into this he was understandably reluctant to put his head within his enemies reach willingly. Alex knew that his head and throat were his most vulnerably parts so the idea of using either as a weapon in close combat was extremely unappealing. If it really came down to it Alex knew he could always use his teeth as well but he seriously only wanted to do that when he knew that he could get away with it safely.
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