“Why hello there you look rather violent do you want to get out of here with me?”
Lily prided herself on following through by sticking her hand out to the Lycan woman across from her. There was a dead body slumped between them in the blood-slicked stone corridor. It wasn’t fully collapsed like all the others due to the conspicuous icicle sticking through the back and propping it up.
The Rank E ‘Corrosive Death-Lycan’ glared at her. “You stole my kill.”
And with that the elemental-summoner’s expression soured. “I did not! He just got in the way of my icicle while he was busy killing you.” That was a half-truth. She’d been aiming to skewer both of them.
The wolf’s expression soured as well. “He wasn’t killing me—I—had it handled.”
“Yes, of course you did.” Lily stuck her hand out again. “Anyway, do you wanna help me get out of here? I mean do you want to partner up to get out of here?”
The woman stared at her hand like it was—Lily wasn’t honestly sure what. It wasn’t wariness and it wasn’t disgust—more of a simple ‘what is this?’ So she wiggled her fingers a little. “Come on. I’m Rank D and rich. You’ll have better chances and I can help you get away long-term if you’re not too annoying.” She tilted her head. “And I’m a pure Human, so I can imagine you’d find that useful under the current circumstances.”
The woman took her hand in her paw—it was really a hand, all things considered—and shook, finally. “Okay, sure. But like—why?”
What kind of question is that? Lily set off in the direction they’d both clearly been heading as she formulated an answer. A question, in truth. “What do you mean, why? I don’t want to die here and you look passably capable and tolerably sane.” People always complained about how she was bad at working with others. That never made sense! She loved working with people and always did her best effort to team up. For some reason it just had a tendency of not working out, or they’d just refuse her. Like, why though?
“Why are you here?”
Oh. Well that explained it. That was, in fairness, a reasonable thing to ask. Lily wasn’t a guard, yet she was purely Human. Yet she was also trying to escape. The logical conclusion was that she was—well, there wasn’t a logical conclusion was there? This wasn’t an ordinary prison. “My insane uncle kidnapped me, stuck me in a storage closet here, and then ran off.” The truth was as good an answer as she could give this time. She continued while gesticulating at the air wildly. “And then I presume he went and did something to cause all of… this.”
They went down a flight of stairs. Lily got the feeling her new Lycan friend had something to say, but had enough sense to wait until they saw if there would be any trouble waiting at the bottom. There wasn’t.
There was a young guard cowering behind a support beam. But Lily meant there wasn’t a problem. She was going to just leave the Rank F coward behind, but her new pal took a brief detour to go eviscerate him.
Fair enough, Lily thought. The two of them were a whole Rank apart, so the gain would be more worth it for her companion. This wasn’t even factoring in the difference in what kind of progression the system awarded them, or their respective specializations. Also, she was the one actually imprisoned and soon to be enslaved by these people.
“I will not ask about this ‘insane uncle’ right now—“ Lily was thankful for that, though she heard a ‘but’ coming. “—but unless your uncle also planted some sort of disguised Demon as a fake prisoner, I don’t think he’s responsible for the break.”
Lily stumbled to a stop. Her blood ran cold—and not from the ice mana looping through her veins. “What.”
The Lycan woman slowed to a stop too. She started trying to move again, but then realized how deadly serious Lily must have looked. She cleared her throat—a sound fittingly reminiscent of a growl. “Uh, just a few hours ago they brought a new prisoner into the cell next to me. She was unconscious for most of it, but then when she woke up she was able to break out of the suppression shackles and then start freeing us.”
Lily suppressed a groan and forced herself to get moving again. “Alright. And you said she was some sort of Demon?”
Her companion shrugged. “I don’t know? But she was able to do magic even with the shackles, despite clearly being some kind of monster. So she would have to be a higher Demon, right? I mean unless the shackles were faked for some reason, but…”
Hell fucking damn it. Lily scowled. “Of course it wasn’t just me. He went and dragged her into it.”
“Huh?” Lily realized she must have been muttering aloud when the wolf-girl asked about it. “Went and dragged who?”
“No one. Let’s just get out of here. If we’re lucky, she’s gone and we won’t have to deal with it.”
_____
You have leveled up! You are now level 25.
+15 stat points.
+1% core progression.
Zoe was wrist-deep in a woman’s chest when her eyes widened. The triumphant swell of a system notification soon followed.
You have reached level 25 and are eligible for optional class upgrades.
Would you like to view your available upgrade options?
Zoe was close to jumping for joy, but she still had her hand stuck in a woman’s chest. Uh, thanks system, I’ll get around to that in just a minute. The notification disappeared from the front of her consciousness, allowing the gory scene around her to continue unimpeded.The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Surgeon’s Eye has reached level 7!
Surgeon’s Eye has reached level 8!
Zoe didn’t have her hand in a woman’s chest to kill her—that was inefficient, as she could have accomplished an equivalent result thirty seconds ago. No, she was taking the opportunity to power-level her surgeon’s eye skill.
Her theory had been that physically digging around in someone in real-time would help a lot with getting a grip on the information skill. She was right. Her messy endeavor was already paying dividends, though she’d had to expend a lot of blood healing her subject.
Mending Touch has reached level 9!
Rejuvenate has reached level 7!
In fact, she’d now gained three levels in her most potent healing skill for it—along with one in the other one. Let’s see if I can push just a little bit further. Up to this point she’d been fooling around with just the surgeon’s eye skill and her own hands. But what about rending touch? That was another one of her most potent skills, and it was like reverse-healing. That could be useful to observe.
Rending Touch!
What was less useful was how near it came to just killing the unconscious woman. Shit. Zoe was forced to draw a massive amount of the woman’s blood—which was already running quite low. It was enough to sustain her body for an instant. The resulting death was visually anticlimactic.
The system, however, would beg to differ.
Surgeon’s Eye has reached level 9!
…
Rending Touch has reached level 9!
Rending Touch has reached level 10!
Rending Touch has reached Tier II.
+5 Power, +5 Vitality
…
Surgeon’s Eye has reached level 10!
Surgeon’s Eye has reached Tier II.
+5 Perception, +5 Vitality
…
Mending Touch has reached level 10!
Mending Touch has reached Tier II.
+10 Vitality
…
Mending Touch has reached level 11!
Zoe flicked the blood off her claws as she stood up and looked around. Not seeing any immediate danger, she wicked the blood off entirely with a strange draw on her bloodshaper trait. It was something she didn’t grasp all too well yet, but she did figure out how to reliably ‘clean’ herself with its influence. That’s a lot of skill, uh, stuff.
Not that she was complaining. Levels and stats and this new thing about getting skills to Tier II? That was delicious. Not to mention—she still had those class upgrade options she had yet to look at. So that’s exactly what she would do next, as she continued searching for that Lycan Sasha—but first, she checked in on her status.
[ZOE BLACKWELL]
Level 25 | Rank F
Demagogue, Bloody Devotee
Higher Demon of Disdain
-Alignment-
> Infernal
> Disdain
> Blood
-Active Quests-
> Claim Your Right
> Get Out
-Active Titles-
> Outsider
> Usurper
> Humanitizer
> No Love Among Fiends
-Stats and Bindings-
Power 233
Perception 140
Acuity 125
Durability 120
Vitality (Blood) 189
-General Skills-
> Identify 4 (Rank C)
> Hallowed Touch (Tierless)
> Mana Channeling 2 (Rank F)
> Manasight 1 (Rank C)
-Primary Class Skills-
> Acting 3 (Rank D)
> Persuasion 3 (Rank B)
> Mirage 5 (Rank E)
> Lesser Disguise 2 (Rank C)
> Cloak of Scorn 5 (Rank E)
System Display Privileges (Sys-Tier)
-Secondary Class Skills-
> Rejuvenate 7 (Rank F)
> Mending Touch 11 - II (Rank D)
> Rending Touch 10 - II (Rank D)
> Surgeon’s Eye 10 - II (Rank E)
> Blood Whip 10 - II (Rank E)
[JUVENILE BLOOD FIEND CORE]
31% Developed | Rank A
-Traits-
> Natural Weapons (Rank E)
> Arcane Antennae (Rank E)
> Bloodshaper (Rank C)
> Heart of Alchemy (Rank B)
> Personal Inventory (Rank B)
> Magic Resistance (Rank C)
-Effects-
> +60 Power, +60 Durability, +82 Vitality
> Infernal Alignment
> Disdain Alignment
> Blood Alignment
-Available-
> 15 stat points
> Class upgrades (various)
It was a staggering amount of progress for her short time in this new world. That was Zoe’s opinion—and one with which Lilith genuinely agreed. “We are advancing rapidly,” the apparition remarked as she manifested as a tiny doll on Zoe’s shoulder. “It is unexpected. I can’t imagine it will last, though.”
Zoe nodded. Probably not. But slowing down wasn’t that big a deal when you were slowing down from ‘absolutely ludicrous.’ Thinking back on the manner of it all, she decided the whole Demon thing wasn’t so bad at all.
“Told you. We’d have at most a third of the stats. And remember, a sizable portion of our power came from our experience fighting on behalf of Basil.’
When Zoe said that, she didn’t mean it as an invitation for her scheming and invisible companion to get all snarky and self-righteous about it. Also, she didn’t like remembering the experience of being Basil’s puppet. She could acknowledge now that Lilith’s advice at the time was beneficial, sure. But the memory brought back uneasy feelings.
“Yeah yeah, get all touchy-feely with me, why don’t you?” The little plushy flicked her in the ear—a poor choice which resulted in Zoe grabbing the devilish thing and chucking it at the wall.
“Shut up. Let’s look at those upgrade options.” Zoe returned to that very last line of her status. From there, the system conjured a prompt identical to the initial message from when she reached level twenty-five a few minutes prior.
You have leveled up! You are now level 25.
+15 stat points.
+1% core progression.
…
You have reached level 25 and are eligible for optional class upgrades.
Would you like to view your available upgrade options?
Zoe smirked as she rounded a corner and ascended the stairs. There weren’t so many people in this area—just a few crates among the wooden support beams and a few low-ranked guards. Most of those didn’t even try to put up a fight.
Would you like to view your available upgrade options?
There was only one real option here. Yes.