Chapter 473: Stele Ability
Sylas walked down the steps slowly until he eventually reached eye level with the City Stele.
[View City Status]
[Use Stele Ability]
[Enter Nexus]
'Stele Ability?' Sylas had seen Cassarae's City Stele before. Usually, that line was replaced with a prompt to conquer the City. But since he was the owner of the City Stele, technically, it wouldn't make sense for it to be here.
Now he was wondering if a Stele Ability was natural for all cities or if it was a rarity.
Since Bronze Genes were practically common currency to him now, he just directly asked the Madness Key and found out.
'I see...' It turned out that only Cities of the Common Grade and above had a chance to unlock a Stele Ability, and first it would have to become a City. That meant going through several Grades.
The higher Grade the city, the earlier it could awaken an ability, or even multiple of them.
However, there wasn't some great reward waiting for Sylas.
at least not on the surface.
All System Cities came with the same default ability: Bird's Eye View.
n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om.
It allowed a detailed map of a certain region. Since there were three System Cities in this Evergreen Territory, that meant that he was able to see an entire third of the Evergreen Territory unobstructed.
Every city, every demon village, every resource.
It seemed only limited by the Grade of the Stele and System Cities were, by default, a level beyond that of the world they were on. As such, it could only find resources at the Silver Grade and below.
There was also a limit of height and depth. It could find deposits nearer to the surface, but not very deep into the earth.
But this wasn't all.
It could also inform him ahead of time when there were fluctuations within this region that would likely lead to the appearance of a portal. And... it had some control over the portals that already existed.
Of course, he couldn't just open or close them at will. But he could use Orciulius' City's ability to take a peek into the other side, about a kilometer or so.
That kilometer radius was a far cry from how far he could see on this side. But it would become invaluable very soon.
'One step at a time.'
Right now, his focus was a perfect clearance of this Quicktime Event. The enemies that lay beyond that, he would deal with when the time came. Trying to account for everything was what led to his plan failing in the first place.
He slotted away the existence of this Stele Ability into the back of his mind and entered the Nexus.
[Merit Leaderboard]
- [1. Sylas Grimblade - ✩✩✩]
- [2. Lauren Mitchell - *]
- [3. Kael Darkman - ✩✩]
- [4. Astrid Grimblade - ✩]
[First Place > 160 000 coins a day; 5 three-day Flexible Elixir a month] [Second Place > 144000 coins a day; 5 two-day Flexible Elixir a month] [Third Place > 128 000 coins a day; 5 one-day Flexible Elixir a month] [Fourth Place > 80 000 coins a day; 4 three-day Soft Elixir a month] [Fifth Place > 64 000 coins a day; 4 two-day Soft a month] [Sixth Place > 48 000 coins a day; 4 one-day Soft Elixir a month].
[Seventh Place > 24 000 coins a day; 4 three-day Brittle Elixir a month]
[Eighth Place> 16 000 coins a day; 4 two-day Brittle Elixir a month]
[Ninth Place > 8 000 coins a day; 4 one-day Brittle Elixir a month] [Tenth Place > 4 000 coins a day; 4 three-use Brittle Elixir a month]
[Coins: 7 493 222 (F)]
It seems that thanks to his spot on the Merit Leaderboard, he had made quite a bit. The rewards had also continued to increase every month. He gained an additional Elixir for every.
'Lauren Mitchell...' Sylas' gaze flickered.
He still didn't really understand what the Stars represented, but he had a good guess. Those two empty stars should be the two Quasi Bronze beasts he had killed, and the full star should represent what Merit he gained from defeating the Sylphs.
The weight of the two was clearly different; otherwise, Lauren wouldn't be above Kael. But the fact that Lauren was on this list at all... was surely a surprise.
Lauren was none other than the woman that had stolen Cassarae's Luck necklace, and she was a member of Legacy.
And judging by the amount of Coins he had, Lauren should have only recently claimed this Merit. Otherwise, he would have made much less if she had claimed the top spot for a while.
He wasn't sure how the time trickery worked in this case, so he could only guess. Regardless, he now had 14 Flexible Gene Elixirs, good enough to last over a month even if he used them continuously, and more money than he knew what to do with.
Though, he was sure that that latter plight wouldn't last for long.
He had learned even in the Bronze Nexus that things could get very expensive, very fast, especially for things on a city-wide scale, things that he would unfortunately be needing if he was going to face off against a government's army that would not be ready for his.
appearance.
As much as he wanted to spend the money to find things to upgrade his Rune status first, he had to prioritize things.
Though it felt like he had a lot of money, even if he waited a month while making 160 000 Coins a day, he would still be shy of five million.
This was to say that this seven million would be the most money he had for a long while, and he had to take advantage of it.
And the first order of business was to find a movement skill that he could finally use himself. Though he needed things to deal with an army, he couldn't forget about his personal strength
either.
As with all things... He needed to find the perfect balance.
He went into the shop with a focused mind and began to scan through all the items before he found three Movement Skills that caught his attention.
Chapter 474: Three Movement Skills
<Chilled Rise>, <Surfing Frost>, <Cryobane Elevation>.
These three movement methods were all extremely expensive FFF+ skills, except for one, and the learning curve was undoubtedly steep. However, they all caught his attention for various reasons.
<Chilled Rise> worked by supercharging the air with frosty energy. The purpose was to force the hotter air to rise as a result, taking advantage to make his body lighter.
As one might expect, though, such a skill was incredibly difficult to control.
For one, it was the hot energy that rose, not the frosty energy that was coating your body.
That meant one had to take advantage of brief instants of time to piggyback off of the hotter air.
Such a thing sounded difficult even while explaining it so simply. But Sylas could see to a deeper layer.
Not only would this require supreme Aether control, it would also necessitate constantly scanning the environment, looking for regions where the skill would be more effective than not. Only by doing this would it be possible to maximize the skill.
Of course, Sylas also had other ideas as well. He could imagine that at the Legendary Mastery level, or maybe even before then, it wouldn't be necessary to rely on the environment at all.
The technique was designed to take advantage of small changes in temperature to begin with.
In pre-Summoning life, the rise of hot air and the fall of cold air wasn't nearly exaggerated enough to lift the body of a person.
That meant that the sort of buoyancy this technique was taking advantage of was minute.
Essentially, it was meant to take advantage of even small degrees of separation. In that case, why not create the gradient himself?
He could just make one region around him cold, and another even colder, that way he could create the gradients he needed in real-time rather than relying on scanning the environment.
A level beyond even that would probably be controlling the shift in energy itself.
'Cold is just the absence of heat... technically speaking, when I chill a region, I'm stripping heat from it. With a few tweaks to my slow and Freeze Ice-Poison Runes, there's nothing that would stop me from controlling this flow of heat.'
Whether it was Ice or Fire, Sylas believed that both likely took advantage of moving heat and energy. If the science of Earth held up, then there should be no difference at all between the
two when it came to controlling the movement of heat.
It was all the same.
Plus, this skill would allow him to do something that he had wanted to do for a while. Well, something he had wanted to do ever since he saw Nosphaleen's <Glide> skill.
If his mastery of this skill reached a high enough level, there probably wouldn't be anything stopping him from gliding through the air for a moment as well. Of course, that was only if he matched it with his telekinesis.Nôv(el)B\\jnn
As far as he could tell by the description of this technique, it wasn't meant to be used to fly, but more so to lighten the steps of the user, and at the extremes, be used as a sort of a "double
jump."
<Surfing Frost> was probably the least technical of the skills. It was as simple as it got. It created platforms, paths, and curving roads of ice for its user to glide on. At this point, it was obvious why it had a name like <Surfing Frost>.
It might be the simplest of them, but it was a skill that truly intrigued Sylas. That was because, in his estimation, the sheer amount of Aether you would need to use this skill was ridiculous.
You had to supercool the air to create ice thick enough to not crack the moment you stepped on it.
If you were on flat land, that was fine enough. But this technique described curving through the air and out of the way of attacks. That would mean literally creating roads of ice out of thin air.
As one might guess, at lower mastery levels, most would only be able to manage a few thin strips on the ground, or maybe even only directly under their feet.
But Sylas was thinking about the highest mastery levels, and how could he not? After all, his Ice-Poison now had Silver-Grade affinity. It would be a shame if he didn't maximize it.
These skills would probably progress a lot slower than his Madness-related abilities would. But they wouldn't be all that slow either.
Finally, there was <Cryobane Elevation>. It was the most technical of the three skills and had the potential to be the absolute most complex. It also seemed to work much more like a Gene Talent than a skill, which was an interesting differentiation.
[Cryobane Elevation (F-) (Gene Skill)]
It was the first of its kind that Sylas had ever seen and it was impossible for him to not be drawn to it.
A Gene Skill... according to the Madness Key, it was a skill that stood above normal skills, but they were likewise even more difficult to use.
And it was the only Ice-Poison movement skill in the Nexus, while the others were all pure Ice.
There were also a few pure Poison skills, but he simply wasn't interested in them.
They all pretty much did what did, but to an inferior level.
<Cryobane Elevation> did two things. First, it used Poison to supercharge the body into an elevated, berserk-like state. Second, it used Ice to keep the body chilled beneath the point of overheating and collapse.
Of course, this "berserk" state didn't refer to one's mind. It was instead an attack against one's Stat Limit. Essentially, for brief instances, Sylas could increase his Speed and Dexterity
Stat Limits.
This put his body at risk of overheating, but that was where his Ice would come into play. The explanation was simple enough, but in practice its intricacies made Sylas' eyes shine.
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