Luca DR
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Edge of apocalypse 91
🕑 Added 2023-07-19 12:37:44 +0000 UTC91 – Welcome Party
Albert turned around, fast as lightning. All the battles he had fought, all the skills he had acquired, everything he had experienced allowed him to react to a new threat before he was even aware of it. His right hand shot upwards, intercepting an arrow flying at his head. He clutched it, looked at it and snapped it in half, throwing it to the side while he scanned the foliage nearby.
The huntress who had shot the arrow at him jumped out of the bushes, looking perplexed for a moment, before lunging at him and yelling in a strange language Albert could not understand.
Albert dodged the swipe of her knife effortlessly, sliding to a side and using a grappling technique to throw the huntress off balance, moving unnaturally quick thanks to his Bullet Time skill. She didn’t land sprawled to the ground like he expected her to, however, instead using her momentum to complete a roll forward and jump back to her feet.
She rebuilt her stance, holding the knife at the level of her mouth while her other hand went to her back to fetch another arrow. All the while, she stared at Albert with her deep, black eyes crowned by her fiery hair. Her skin, tan and smooth, was visibly tense at the corners of her mouth, and from her upper lips poked out two sharp and long teeth, like fangs.
“Hey, hey.” Albert said, trying to make a gesture to signal that he was not armed. Not that it mattered in a world with magic, he thought.
She hissed at him, spitting words he could not understand. Their tone, however, was unmistakable hatred. The huntress lowered her stance, getting ready to lunge at him. Her other hand had fetched an arrow and as she shot forward, the arrow sailed from her bow in one fluid motion. It was beautiful to see from the vantage point of stretched Bullet Time.
Albert dodged the arrow, and making use of the many combat skills he knew from his training and many videos watched at the Lair, he redirected the huntress’ momentum away from his body. He caught her this time, right before she could fall to the ground, putting her arm in a joint lock.
“Hey. Stop! What are you—”
She yanked at the arm, uncaring that her elbow moved in a way it was not supposed to, and freed herself. She grabbed the knife that had fallen to the ground and put some space between her and Albert, to which he could not respond quickly enough. In order to talk to her, in fact, he had to drop the use of Bullet Time for long enough that she managed to escape.
He sighed. A thought formed but had to be dropped.
She dashed so quickly to appear real time even though he was moving five time faster than her, and he had to drop everything he was thinking only to be able to summon some technique to disable her. He did not want to hurt her, not yet, not if he could avoid it. Fortunately he knew many techniques to make opponents submit, he only needed to put them into practice.
Bullet Time-100 helped in that regard, making what would have been an impossible move much more doable. Because, it turned out, there was a huge gap between knowing a move and being able to pull it off against a resisting opponent. A thing that was obvious in retrospect but that at the same time only becomes crystal clear after the first real fight.
[Fighting does not come naturally to you, but the theoretical foundation is there. You only need to practice.]
New Skill!
[Body] Mixed Style Fighting 1
· Techniques feel more natural when you fight.
Now, with the help of the skill, overpowering her was a matter of seconds. Albert had her throat, and in their tossing and turning he had ended up on the ground with her and managed to joint-lock her into immobility.
“Now. Let’s talk civilized.”
She snarled at him. The only thing he could think of was using his new psionic skills to somewhat make her stop. But he was not very confident using them without having tested them first, and so he decided to not use Suggestion but Mind Read to see if he could pick up the language that way.
It was a bad idea. His ‘safe’ choice turned out to be the wrong one, because reading a mind for the first time managed to distract him for long enough that the huntress broke free of his hold. He was still recovering from the myriad of images and flashes of information that had assaulted his mind when she somehow regained hold of her knife, and plunged it into Albert’s chest.
His personal shield shattered. The knife continued on, piercing flesh and sending a shockwave of pain through Albert’s mind. Even with Pain Tolerance 6, the pain was enough to make his vision go white for a moment.
Taken over by a wave of anger, fear and pain, Albert mustered his full strength for the first time in the fight and literally threw the huntress away from him. She landed against the trunk of a tree, bouncing away and crumpling on the ground. She got back to her feet quickly, but in that time Albert managed to heal himself back to full health.
She hissed at him again. Magic gathered around her. With Bullet Time in cooldown, the fight suddenly got a whole lot more serious. He could either kill her with one of his offensive skills, or use one of his new psionic ones. He did not want to kill her, if he could.
Psionic Suggestion was the best choice to end the fight without anyone getting hurt.
The huntress lunged again, knife at the ready.
“That’s enough. Stop.” Albert commanded.
The woman became immediately still. Completely still. Her body collapsed on itself, carried by the momentum of the lunge while its limbs were made of wood. She fell, her eyes rolling to the back of her head, a trickle of blood coming out of her nose and mouth.
Albert cocked his head, gingerly walking towards the woman.
“Hey?” He asked tentatively, his voice no longer carrying the anger and power it did during the fight. “Hello?”
He poked her with his foot. She didn’t respond. In fact, her heart was no longer beating, and her lungs no longer working. Albert rose up from the crouching position he assumed to examine her. Barely a few seconds had passed.
“Oh, shit. The command. You can move now.”
The huntress jerked. For a moment Albert thought he had managed to save her.
He was, for the second time in a single fight, wrong. It had been his command to kill her, yes, but not in the way he initially thought. The psionic skill was smart enough to understand he did not want her whole bodily functions to stop when he said ‘stop’.
What killed the huntress was the overbearing, oppressive strength of the psionic energy involved with the command. Checking his mana, Albert realized that too much of it had gone into the skill. He had no idea how much the skill was supposed to use, but having used north of 80FU in a single use was probably beyond safety standards.
A quick check of his affinity status answered his questions.
· [A+] Psionic: every psionic spell will be much more powerful than normal. Control, however, comes from the mind, and more powerful spells will get harder to control in a precise manner.
Now it all made sense. He had used the skill successfully, with no backlash, as intended. But what he lacked was control, and the skill scrambled the poor woman’s brain instead of simply making her stop attacking.
Albert knelt down, heaving a sigh.
“…fuck.”
He slowly walked up to the corpse, and with a heavy heart uttered the word: “Usurp.”
[Usurp successful!]
[Learned: Timoan language.]
[Learned: [Space] True Shot.]
[Learned: [Body] Dash.]
[Learned: [Nature] Forest Mimetics.]
[Increased Body affinity.]
The last skill also unlocked a new affinity.
· [B] Nature: nature listens to you, and you listen to it. All magic is more powerful, and you have increased stats the more nature is around you to lend you strength.
***
Albert sat with his back to a tree. Usurping a body, he had learned back when he Usurped PsyOps’ brain and later on with the voidlings, meant the total disappearance of all evidence related to the crime of killing.
Thoughts gathered. Bad thoughts, they were. For a long time, Albert simply sat.
He didn’t want to turn into a killer without morals. The world might end up making him one, but he would do all he could do resist. Not because of some higher standard, but because he knew himself. It was the same reason why he didn’t gamble: he wasn’t sure he could stay away from it if he played even one game.
The thrill. The potential gain. Too much stuff to fixate on.
Even a rational mind that knew the odds could fall into the trap.
And that was just gambling. Imagine how it would be with killing: knowing that each kill makes him stronger, faster, better. Gives him new skills. Increases his affinities.
Intoxicating.
At least the system was not as morbid as to award him extra mana for killing people. Monsters, yes. Dragons, yes. Not people. Otherwise, in the long run, it would become impossible to resist the temptation. Remaining a moral person would be all but impossible, especially with the stakes being the survival of his homeworld.
