Free Web NovelChapter 29: Using Tickets, Raid Time
Aidan slipped back out through the gate the same way he’d come in.
Silent, invisible, a ghost nobody on the skeleton crew ever thought to look for.
He rose off the tundra into the pale sky and only let his breath out once the gate was a black smear far below him.
[Level: 674.]
Sixty-two more levels in the last stretch before he’d called it. Not bad for a day of quiet murder in the cold.
But he could already feel the curve flattening.
Tier-10 monsters had gone from a steady climb to a slow grind. Each one gave less than the last. His level was high enough now that ordinary prey barely moved the needle.
’I’ve outgrown the easy food,’ he thought, watching the tundra scroll by beneath him. ’Tier-10 farming’s done paying rent.’
To climb faster now, he needed bigger game. Epic-rank Terrors. An Epic-rank dimension or Tear, the kind of place that gave real experience.
The problem was that those were rare.
Epic-rank Tears and dimensions surfaced maybe a handful of times a year across the whole planet. And the moment one did, the top guilds and the Association fell on it like wolves.
Complete dibs. Tight security. Sealed behind names far bigger than a nobody in a plain coat.
’So I can’t just wander into one of those.’ Aidan frowned. ’Not without a fight I don’t want yet.’
He turned the problem over the whole flight home and didn’t solve it.
That was fine. He had another way to get stronger, and it didn’t involve anyone noticing him at all.
...
He didn’t stay at the estate.
He collected Solenne, told Tom to hold the fort, and took her out past the property line into deep wilderness, a stretch of untouched hills thick with wild spirit energy.
Somewhere with no eyes, no neighbors, and room to make noise.
"Why out here?" Solenne asked, looking around at the humming green wild.
"Because I’m about to gamble, train, and hand you some power," Aidan said. "All three go better where nobody’s watching."
He sat her down on a flat rock and pulled up his inventory.
Ten Omni-Slot Machine tickets, banked since the warehouse. It was finally time to spend them.
"Let’s see what luck looks like," he muttered, and used the first.
...
The slot machine spun in his mind, colorful and loud, and clanked to a stop.
A ripple of rewards followed over the next nine spins, and the results were, in a word, fine.
A scatter of stat-boosting resources. Refined energy cores, a jar of spirit essence, two condensed pills that tempered the body. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
A handful of items and gear, none of them exceptional. Middling artifacts, a decent storage ring, a mid-tier defensive charm.
And, on the seventh spin, the one thing that made him grin.
[Congratulations. You have acquired a Technique Stone: Silverpierce Lament.]
[Rank: S. Type: Spirit-based attack technique.]
He turned the glowing stone over in his palm, reading the knowledge that bled off it.
Silverpierce Lament. A spirit technique that gathered ambient energy into a single condensed lance and fired it in a screaming line, punching clean through defense with sheer piercing focus.
’An S-rank piercing technique that runs on spirit energy.’ Aidan nodded slowly. ’Not for me. But for her? Perfect.’
He gathered everything up and turned to Solenne.
"Okay. Hold still and open up. This is going to feel weird."
Solenne blinked. "For what?"
"For not dying next time somebody like Barten comes sniffing," Aidan said. "You’ve got an A-rank talent and no teeth to back it. We’re fixing the teeth."
Her talent was Hollow Step, A-rank. A movement-and-evasion talent that let her blur between spaces, hard to pin, hard to hit.
Good for slipping away. Useless for hitting back.
Aidan started feeding her the resources.
He fed them to her one at a time, carefully, monitoring the way her body drank the energy and climbed. The cores first, then the essence, then the pills, refining each surge before the next.
Solenne gasped as the power rolled through her. Her stats climbed, her aura thickening, the frail edge of her presence hardening into something solid.
When it settled, she’d crossed from where she’d been into Tier-8.
SS-rank. A real Hunter now, not a scared girl holding a spear she never raised.
"Whoa," she breathed, flexing a hand that suddenly felt very different. "I, that’s, I’ve never felt this strong."
"You’re going to feel stronger." Aidan pressed the Silverpierce Lament stone into her palm. "Learn this. Master it. It runs on spirit energy, so it pairs with your talent without fighting it."
Solenne closed her fingers around the stone, and the knowledge poured into her.
Her mismatched borrowed eyes went distant, then focused, then sharp with a purpose Aidan hadn’t seen in them before.
She stood, faced an empty stretch of hillside, and raised one hand.
Spirit energy gathered at her fingertips, wobbling, uneven, a first clumsy draft of a lance.
It sputtered and died.
She frowned, reset her feet, and tried again.
"Good," Aidan said, settling back onto his own rock. "Keep at it. Failing’s just the first draft of doing it right."
He left her to it.
While she drilled the technique over and over on the hillside, the air filling with the whine of half-formed spirit lances, Aidan closed his own eyes and turned inward.
He didn’t meditate to get stronger, not the way she was training. His growth came through levels and kills.
But he could refine what he had. Feel out his aspects, sharpen his spellcraft, let the wild spirit energy of this place temper his overbuilt body a little at a time.
He sank into it for a while, the two of them working in comfortable silence, her whine of practice and his quiet inward stillness.
Then, mid-meditation, he opened the Quest and Raid tabs to check something.
...
His status shifted in his mind’s eye.
The daily quest had refreshed, and this one was different from the last.
[Daily Quest: Clear one Terror Raid. | Reward: 1 x Golden Treasure Chest (Epic/Legendary/Divine).]
’Clear a Raid, huh.’ Aidan’s eyes glinted behind their lids.
His gaze slid to the main quest sitting above it, the shared one, still waiting where it had been.
[Main Quest (Shared): Find the Fang of Vorkapar. | Reward: 1000 x Transcendent Points, Mystery Box.]
He’d let it sit. He hadn’t been strong enough to bother.
He was strong enough now.
And the Fang of Vorkapar wasn’t lying around in the open world. To find it, he had to go where it was.
He dropped his attention to the Raid tab below. fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓
[Terror Raids]
[Labyrinth: Vorkapar’s Tomb (4 days left).]
’There it is.’ Aidan felt something cold and interested wake up in his chest. ’The main quest lives inside the raid.’
Four days on the clock. A shared labyrinth, open to the whole pool of Transcendent Players scattered across the world.
Which meant that for the first time since he’d woken up in that bed, he wouldn’t be the only one of his kind in the room.
Other players. Other people forged by the same brutal program, each one climbing toward the same single throne at the top. Each one a potential ally, a potential threat, a potential kill worth things the system still hadn’t fully explained to him.
Aidan opened his eyes.
Across the hillside, Solenne’s latest spirit lance finally held its shape for half a second before scattering, and she let out a small, fierce sound of progress.
He watched her a moment. Then he looked up at the sky, toward a tomb that existed in no place on this planet, waiting behind a five-day door.
’Vorkapar’s Tomb.’ A slow grin spread across his face. ’Let’s go meet the competition.’
