Allen watched Camila’s bout with Nora with about half of his attention. The other half was focused on going through the massive amount of skill points that he still had to spend. After all, it was better that he get his build figured out before too long. Andy said he would be back in a month, and it had been almost two weeks, but Allen had no faith in the god not just showing up tomorrow.

  He had ninety seven skill points left over after spending a few on his four Neuromancer skills. He still had to max out all of his skills to as close to tier fifteen as possible, but first he needed to replace a few skills. That meant Suppression and Damage Control had to go; Suppression was redundant with Destabilization and Havoc, and Damage Control was fighting an uphill battle against his Chaos aspect.

  Allen needed a speed skill that wasn’t restricted to the first move, and he needed a heavy hitting finisher that worked well with Assassinate. Lurker’s Step was good, but it didn’t add any speed, just stealth and fall damage reduction. So, he opened up the list of available skills and looked for anything that caught his interest.

  Removing Suppression and Damage Control returned two skill points each, which was normal. Dropping a skill always refunded less points than what had been invested into it, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He needed more damage and speed. Of course, nothing in a Dusk aspect job would turn him into a supper speedster: Dusk focused on suppression, not enhancement. Still, Dusk Vault couldn’t be that bad. Allen dropped six points into the skill, watching the various numbers go up as he did so. Finally, he nodded inwardly at the end result.

  “Like the classic Shadow Vault, but weirdly restrictive and strange. The first part is just a flat speed increase, but I can’t use any other active skills while that’s on. The second part is like Shadow Vault but… I have to be sneaky. It’s also relative to my current speed, so I can’t just be standing still, or I won’t go anywhere, I guess. The last part is weird though. It’s noclip but extremely niche. Who knows, it could be good.” Allen nodded to himself, satisfied with the skill.

  It wouldn’t allow him to sprint right up to somebody and kill them, or teleport behind somebody and slice their throat open, but it was still a really good skill. “I hate teleporters so fucking much. At least at this low of a level I don’t have to deal with them. At the six-hundred mark it just seems like every motherfucker has a Blink variant, it’s almost as bad as passive regen. As a non-healer, sacrificing much more powerful paths for self-healing seems good in theory, you die a little slower, but all it really does is make you weak for your level-class… Although maybe I could use some passive regen, given how much I damage myself, the question is how the fuck I’m supposed to get it with Dusk and Chaos magic.” Allen shook his head and moved onto his other new skill, upgrading it to the max as well.

  The next skill he got was Fractured Nova. Allen hoped it would be as simple as the skill card said it was. He had his doubts though. He would have to get Ty to help test it with him at some point; the Defender could probably use the opportunity to test his own skills as well.

  “Oh, I like the sound of this one.” Allen smiled to himself after reading through the huge skill card. Fractured Nova was probably one of the most dangerous skills he had ever seen in the two hundred range, and ‘dangerous’ as in dangerous to himself. “It’s not proportional to how hard I physically hit something, which could be a plus or it could be a minus, it depends. What’s more alarming is that the amount of mana it lets me use is infinite, which is why this is so fucked up. I wonder how many mana potions can I chug before using this skill without insta-killing myself? That’s what I really need to know.”

  Allen had eighty-eight points left for the rest of his skills, which was probably enough to get them all to tier fifteen. First, though, he needed to test Fractured Nova. After a moment’s thought as to how he would do the testing, Allen picked up a roughly head-sized rock from somewhere behind where everybody was sitting. Amelia and Christopher gave him a passive glance while Ty was still watching the bout and grinning like an idiot.

  “Here goes nothing,” Allen thought. He reached out to that spot in the back of his mind where his skills resided and activated Nova. At first it felt like he was just transferring his mana to fuel an item, only much more aggressively than normal. That only lasted for a fraction of a second before the air around the rock started to ripple and distort as if it were covered by Cloak of Chaos. A very primal part of Allen could sense that something very bad was about to happen and he reflexively activated the magic he had flooded the rock with like he would yank his hand away from a hot stove. The rock instantly exploded with a very distinctive warbling crack, shooting debris all around the forest and sending out a small cloud of still-crackling dust.

  “Oh shit!” Ty cried out, ducking behind a stump.

  It had all happened in a split second. The rock got soaked by nearly eight hundred MP, and then it got absolutely dusted. Luckily Allen had been standing with his back turned, so the debris had all hit him instead of his teammates, not that it would have done any damage to them.

  “Um, oops,” Allen managed to say. He coughed on the dust and winced as a few broken ribs made themselves known. The hand he had used to hold the rock also felt like he had just slammed a door shut on it full force. “New skill,” he said, cracking a grin. “I should probably pull back on the reigns a little bit,” he thought. “I guess it’s pretty much instant if there’s nothing to resist the magic. Good to know.”

  Ty whistled. “Giving me flashbacks, man, sheesh.”

  Camila and Nora shared a glance before continuing with their fight; it wasn’t going well for Nora, and she was probably grateful for the interruption. Christopher had that calculating look of his while Allen made eye contact with Amelia. He didn’t need telepathy to tell her he needed some healing, the look of pain in his eyes and the purpleness of his hand were enough.

  Eventually Camila decided she was done playing around. She used the punch skill again, sending a wave of force at Nora. Without Havoc interfering with the skill, the Rogue was sent flying into a tree. She let out a grunt of pain before Camila grabbed her by the ankle and threw her into another tree before she had even hit the ground. The fight was over after that, and Camila moved on to fighting Ty. It wasn’t so much a fight as it was a competition to see how much damage Camila could actually do to Ty, which wasn’t a whole lot, it seemed. Neither of them looked serious though.

  By the time that was over, Allen had finished upgrading all the skills in his two main jobs as far as they would go. He scrolled though all of them, only lingering on the ones that provided more than a simple increase to the numbers.

  “Flat number increase.”

  “Just extra grip if I’m jogging.”

  “Huh,” Allen looked over the skill again. “I never really had the chance to test the thought acceleration, but it has to be better if it’s costing HP to use now. Also has something about intuition.”

  Not much was going to happened to either Killer Instinct or Dead Calm until tier twenty, so Allen glossed over them.

  “Dawn magic resistance.” Allen noted.

  “Bypassing resistance if I attack a passive.”

  “Now it fucks up passive regen, I like that a lot.”

  “I can put it on my needles now, epic.”

  None of the last few sills provided anything more than better numbers. Cloak of Chaos allowed Allen to cover his weapons again, but Mana Shroud had done the same much earlier. It was only catching up. Destabilization added a perpetual lingering effect, making it a lot like Ruptured Maelstrom without the damage. “This is probably the next skill I’ll replace,” Allen told himself, looking at his last skill card. He still had around twenty skill points for his Neuromancer Job, but that could wait.

  Stats:

  Primary:

  Secondary:

  ---

  Shoam and Phantom had already returned by the time the group got back to the hotel room. Allen informed both about their plans for the next day, then he went straight to sleep. He still needed it, no matter how much he disliked it. Vitality and Endurance just weren’t his stats. Thankfully, being sleep deprived meant he slept like a rock and didn’t dream about anything.

  Their meeting with the Hillford Governor was scheduled for dinner in the evening. The beginning of the next day was spent preparing for the event. Most of the group set out to investigate the city underground nearby and around the wealthy district. Jack’s psychic net and wind magic were all they needed for communication within the city, and they all had the totems for backup.

  For Christopher, Allen, and Amelia their morning involved semi-legally acquiring a few magicarriages, and some clothes shopping, but only for the latter two. Allen had already looted many wealthy looking outfits off that Lanthinus noble, all of which fit Christopher nicely. For Amelia and himself, they bought mostly generic servant outfits. The three looked like a proper noble and his attendants by the time they pulled up in front of the Hillford capital building. They weren’t alone though, all the mercenaries had come with them, dressed in armor they had borrowed from the Hillford guard barracks.

  Amelia scratched Phantom behind his head. The spider purred softly in her lap; his eyes closed in bliss. Unfortunately for the little guy, their travel time was over.

  [“Phantom, time to go. Recon.”] He sent to the spider, only grinning when Phantom jumped up in Amelia’s lap and stared back at him.

  [“Allen speak! Why you no tell?”]

  [“Surprise,”] he said back, still grinning.

  Phantom seemed stunned for a moment before making a noise Allen knew was as close to a pout that the spider was capable of. Then with little more than a blur of motion, the spider vanished with neither sound nor gust of wind in his trace. Amelia also looked confused and maybe a little unhappy happy at Phantom leaving her lap, but she quickly hid her reaction when her eyes met Allen’s

  “Okay, like I said before,” Allen began, addressing the two others with him. “The calmer and more blasé you are, the more powerful you’ll seem. Christopher is an ESF middle court member, which is sort of like the equivalent of a viscount in ESF ministry terms. Amelia, we do exactly what he says immediately, and Christopher, you expect us to do everything for you automatically. Don’t even acknowledge our presence unless explicitly making a command.”

  “I know that,” Amelia replied, making a strange face as Allen stepped out of the magicarriage and held the door open for Christopher. “I’ve been a servant before. What I’m more concerned about is how exactly you plan to get any information from—”

  [“Talk though this, it’s safer.”] Allen said, interrupting Amelia. He had used his magic to form a three-way telepathic link between the three of them, which drew both Amelia’s and Christopher’s attention. The mercenaries had already encircled their carriage before Christopher had even exited the carriage, followed by Amelia. They were playing their part much better than Allen had expected given their lack of practice. That was something he would have to look into after the meeting. [“To answer your question, we’re here on the grounds of discussing new federal laws put into place by the ESF ministry. Suggestive language is always a good place to start; make him think you’re trying to warn him about the new law attacking the slave trade to see if your can get him on your side. These kinds of people are all working together under the table, if we can catch one, all we need to do is pull and we have a good chance of finding everybody who went missing from that village.”]

  Amelia was nonplussed for a moment before she schooled her expression and formed up on Christopher’s right flank, Allen taking the left.

  [“We’ll do our best, I suppose,”] Christopher replied with a mental sigh. “Three of you take the carriages to the garage, the rest follow,” the professor added. His authoritative noble voice was spot on, almost disturbingly so.

  “Yes, my lord,” the lead mercenary said, winking before he turned around and arranged his group accordingly.

  Allen had to suppress a grin. “I can’t tell who I know less about, Amelia, or him,” he thought, watching as the professor briskly marched up the steps of the capital building, already eyeing the four guards stationed at the front entrance.

  Hillford wasn’t the wealthiest city, or even wealthy by any metric, and the capital building was more like a town hall than anything else, but it was still a sizable stone building. The sun was just beginning to set behind the tall main tower of the building, the tallest point in the city, right ahead of the church steeple in the background. Allen could feel Amelia’s slight fear and hesitation through the link, and he would have felt the same if he were still really seventeen, but at the moment, he only felt excitement. It wasn’t the excitement of battle though, more like the anticipation of pulling a really funny prank or doing something really stupid just for the fun of it.

  “Man, it really has been almost three years since I’ve gotten to do something like this. We could have just used overwhelming violence, but the Spade’s have a reputation to uphold. This way is also just more fun.” With that final thought, as the front doors opened inward, Allen dropped his eyes to the floor and put on a humble and calm expression. “This had better be entertaining.”