Free Web NovelChapter 25: A Big Boost, for Some Big Things
This time, the choice wasn’t about a path of progression. The window offered me five of them — five skills, all tied to my class.
[ Tier 50 — Select a class skill ]
[ Infinite Assault — Lv. 1 ] — each consecutive blow landed on the same target slightly increases the damage dealt to it.
[ Infinite Shadows — Lv. 1 ] — for a brief instant, each attack throws off multiple feints, blurring the body’s true trajectories.
[ Infinite Horizon — Lv. 1 ] — projectiles gain in accuracy the greater the distance.
[ Infinite Arsenal — Lv. 1 ] — allows the user to shape weapons from their base magic element, which can shield or be thrown.
[ Infinite Bulwark — Lv. 1 ] — part of the damage taken is converted into mana loss rather than injury.
The choice was hard, this time. And for good reason: I wasn’t just looking at the skill as it presented itself to me. I was looking at what it would become, later, once it passed through Infinite Evolution’s hands. None of those five lines was fixed. Each was a seed, and it was the tree I was trying to see.
Infinite Assault opened the way to combos that stacked over time. Down the line, it would be precious against the truly durable things — a boss, a demon that wouldn’t fall. The more I hit, the more it hurt. Tempting.
Infinite Shadows would probably end up evolving toward something like illusions, or shadow doubles. Coupled with my speed and the fluidity of the Widow, it would be lethal — an opponent unable to know where I really was.
Infinite Horizon, I ruled out at once. I fought with neither bow nor thrown weapon. A marksman’s skill for a swordsman, no.
Infinite Arsenal struck me as genuinely powerful. Something like those ki-piloted weapons in the xianxia novels I’d devoured. I had no idea what it might evolve into, but the potential was obvious at a glance.
And Infinite Bulwark. Solid, too. And even, thinking it over, formidable in the right hands — converting damage into mana loss was only worth anything if you had mana to spare. Ironically, I pictured it for a moment on Alice: with her reserve, her shield and her Garden on top, every blow taken would only nibble at an ocean. She’d become the final boss of a soulslike, a thing strictly impossible to bring down.
Except endurance, I already had. Apotheosis saw to that, and then some.
So I came back to the only real question: what was I missing most?
The answer was simple. Striking power. From the start, that had been my wall — the speed, I had it; the reading, I had it; but when it came to getting through a carapace, to piercing for real, I hit a ceiling. The Queen had reminded me of it an hour earlier, and so had the broken stub of blade in my hand.
That left Assault and Arsenal. The combo that climbs, or the weapons I shape.
I hesitated a long while. Then I settled on Arsenal. More versatile: against a swarm, against several targets, able to strike and to protect at range — useful, above all, for covering Alice when I couldn’t be in two places at once. And, well, it had to be said.
It looked damn cool, as skills went.
I chose Infinite Arsenal.
And since it had been a while, I took the chance to call up my full status.
[ STATUS ]
Name: Kuro Shiragi | Race: Human | Class: Hero of the Infinite | Level: 50
[ Stats ]
Strength 126 | Vitality 49 | Agility 159 | Mana 150 | Intelligence 50 | Perception 92 | Free points: 18
[ Skills ]
[ Divine Blessing - Lv. 2 ] (passive) | [ Infinite Evolution - Lv. MAX ] (passive) | [ Eye of Infinity - Lv. 4 ] | [ Dance of the Tidal Widow - Lv. 1 ] | [ Dash - Lv. 3 ] | [ Apotheosis ] (Unique Skill) | [ Infinite Arsenal - Lv. 1 ]
I let the numbers scroll past my eyes. A hundred and fifty-nine in agility. A hundred and fifty in mana. Numbers I wouldn’t even have dared write for one of my old heroes, back then, for fear of being told I was rushing it.
And yet.
I thought back to the demon. To Lazaüs, to the ease with which he’d cut through the door and Eric in a single stroke, to Elsa who’d fought him until she left an eye behind. All those levels, all that new power — and I knew, with a cold certainty, that against a thing like that, it still wasn’t enough.
Not yet.
I closed the window and looked around me.
Alice spoke first.
"So?" She gestured at the empty corner of the room I’d been staring at all this time, one eyebrow raised, amused. "What extraordinary thing have you gone and done this time?"
Beside her, Elsa looked curious too — she said nothing, but her single eye had settled on me.
"I hit level fifty." I got to my feet. "And I unlocked a skill tied to my class."
I spoke its name.
"Infinite Arsenal."
Water burst out of nowhere around me. It gathered, hardened, took shape — and in a few seconds a dozen or so weapons hung suspended in the air, motionless, turned outward. Spears, swords, a mace, an axe, things I didn’t even know the name of. A whole arsenal, carved from water, orbiting slowly around me.
Alice and Elsa were left speechless.
Then Alice slowly raised a finger, her eyes moving from the weapons to me.
"And what if..."
A spark ran down her index finger, and a thread of lightning poured into one of my spears.
I froze.
I hadn’t even thought of it. Water and lightning — our combo, ever since the Slime King — but applied to this. I moved the spear with a flick of my hand: the electrified weapon split the air, making it crackle in its wake, ozone rising into the room. And before throwing it, I set it spinning on itself, faster and faster, stacking the rotation on top of the striking speed to multiply the force of the impact. Then I hurled it at the wall.
BOOM.
The wall exploded. A gaping hole, deep, where the electrified, compressed water — thrown at full speed and spinning like a drill — had struck.
I stood there staring at the crater, disbelieving.
Between the speed, the centrifugal force, the compressed water, and Alice’s lightning on top of it, the skill was becoming utterly, absurdly broken.
And then—
Clink. Clink. Clinnnk.
Three pickaxes hit the floor at my feet.
"Get to work," said Elsa simply, already leaning against the wall, arms crossed.
So the time had come to pay the price of glory.
I bent down, resigned, and picked up the handle. It was heavy, badly balanced.
And then my gaze slid over to the wall of crystals.
My new skill was still turning over in my head, fresh. Weapons of water, that I could shape, throw, spin. I thought back to the electrified spear and the crater it had opened in the wall. To the rotation. To the speed.
I set the pickaxe back down.
I reached out my hand, and five spears of water burst up at my sides. I sent them driving into the crystals, and set them spinning on themselves, faster and faster, until they were nothing but five howling spirals biting into the rock and prying its shards loose one by one — all on their own, while I stood there with my arms at my sides.
Alice went still at the sight of the spears boring through the crystals at a mad speed — and, above all, in our place.
"You’re a genius, Kuro. A genius!" She took my hands, bouncing on the spot.
You could really see how much the mining drills had left their mark on our minds, because even I couldn’t hold back my joy — an absurd, immense joy, born of a single thing: finally having found a way out of the intensive mining.
My gaze turned on instinct toward the source of all our woes, the real demon of this world. Elsa. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
She wasn’t protesting. Nothing to say about the fact that I’d found an alternative to the hell of the pickaxe. And it was in that moment that the deliverance truly rang through me, like confirmation that all of this was real — that after this dungeon, we were going to be able to rest, for good.
I tightened my grip on Alice’s hands, and I couldn’t stop myself from pulling her against me. I held her tight, lifted her off the ground, spun her around with me.
"Alice, we did it. We did it!"
"No, Kuro, you’ve got it wrong." She looked me in the eyes. "You did it."
And in that gaze, I lost myself a little more than usual. All the euphoria of the fights strung one after another, of everything we’d just come through, of that escape out of hell — all of it gathered at once in those two red eyes, gorgeous, spellbinding, so close to mine.
I didn’t think. I kissed her.
Her lips were soft, and for a second the whole dungeon ceased to exist — the crystals, the pale fluid, the grinding of the spears, all of it faded. There was nothing left but her against me, her warmth, her breath catching for a second before she kissed me back, more gently than I’d have thought her capable of. One of her hands rose to close in my hair. The rest of the world waited.
Then I set her back down, gently, on her feet.
And for once, it wasn’t her who kept her composure. She looked away, a touch of red at her cheeks, her hand lingering against my chest — as if she were only now realizing what had just happened, she who usually instigated everything.
"Anyway," I said, clearing my throat, fumbling to change the subject, "level fifty’s really a big boost."
"Yeah... yeah," she answered, her eyes darting away. "A big boost. A really big boost."
We stayed there a moment, the two of us, unable to look each other in the face, while my spears went on boring through the rock in a thoroughly out-of-place racket. Me — the one who, an hour earlier, had faced down a higher-ranked queen without flinching — I suddenly had no idea what to do with my hands.
It was ridiculous. We’d crossed an entire dungeon glued to each other, she’d slept against me, stitched me back together a hundred times, slipped into my bed dozens of nights without it ever doing this to me. One kiss, and all of a sudden I was as clumsy as a kid.
Maybe because, this time, I was the one who’d started it.
I glanced over at her. She’d tucked a white strand behind her ear and was staring at the floor with suspicious intensity, but the corner of her lips gave her away completely. She was smiling. That rare smile, no mask, no ulterior motive, the one she showed only to me — and which, for once, reached all the way to her eyes.
So I decided to say nothing more. To leave the silence in peace, the spears to mine in our place, and that smile to last as long as it wanted.
