As far as Velik could see, there were two routes forward. One was to consolidate his essence configurations into as few skills as possible in an effort to be efficient with his resources. Ten separate skills were probably costing him five times as much essence as one skill with ten components. Or at least that was his basic theory for how it worked, even if the numbers were off.

Never thought I’d say I wish I was better at math.

The other way was to spend his essence like water, building whatever he needed and eating the proportionately large upkeep costs. It could cripple him in the long run, but the truth of the matter was that he was going up against what were probably the most powerful monsters in existence and he didn’t exactly have a lot of time left to prepare.

Short term power was the better option. If nothing else, Eslaka had just driven that point home for him a few hours ago. Keeping [Flame Ward] instead of swapping it for [Lightning Ward] could have saved his life if she’d decided to attack him, but he’d sacrificed that protection because he’d needed to defeat Tesir’s lightning magic.

He should have kept both, or even better, he should have added [Ice Ward] and [Earth Ward] and every other type of defense he could think of, then slapped them all together into one ultimate magic defense skill. Now that he thought about it, he was sitting on a large stockpile of essence, maybe enough to do exactly that. Having a flexible defense against the magic of a monster that had had thousands of years to hone its skills was probably an excellent idea.

Gods, how did I ever win against the first one? That bat must have been the runt of the litter. I spent my essence specifically building myself up to counter what I knew of Tesir, including what I reaped from another divine beast and what a literal god gifted me, in addition to the wholesale slaughter of dozens of monsters over level 100, and I don’t know if I would have won that one in the end without Eslaka’s interference.

He thought he could have done it, but there was no doubt that the battle would have been long and grueling, possibly coming down to whoever could stay on their feet longer. Even if he had won, there was no denying that immediately going into a second fight would have put him in a terrible position. In a very real way, Eslaka had spared his life.

And what even the fuck was her deal? That was not the same person I met a few days ago.

He wasn’t sure he could kill her now, despite harvesting the essence from two divine beasts. If she showed back up and interfered in his next fight, he needed to make sure he was strong enough to handle her, and that meant spending the essence he already had and going out of his way to harvest more.

Unfortunately, his limited personal system couldn’t just spin up new skills out of nothing. He’d been able to take chunks of the [Elemental Drain]

enchantment his old shirt had contained to craft his two ward skills, but that was far from the comprehensive defensive power he wanted. If anything, it only served to highlight his true disadvantage against the divine beasts: lack of flexibility.

The bat had specialized in dark-themed skills, but he’d obviously had a lot more knowledge than Velik. In the middle of the fight, his essence had shifted around, allowing him to showcase new skills that he’d copied directly from Velik. That was an impressive feat.

Could I copy Tesir’s skills? I experienced them, right? I should have some record of how the essence was structured? Then again… it’s a lot easier to break a house than to build one. It’s not like I was studying the configuration.

Still, that idea was worth exploring. While he watched the lizard monster clumsily stitch more-or-less straight lines through the leather, he set his LPS to building new skills. That included [Frost Ward] and [Earth Ward], and also [Armored] as a way to stack more physical resilience above and beyond what the stat gave him.

Then he slapped them altogether, marveling once again at how much easier it was to work with essence directly than it was to try to coax the system into coughing up the resources needed to merge a skill together. He was half-convinced the whole thing was just a way to block people from actually merging skills together to save on essence.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The four elemental wards and [Armored] linked together, becoming something significantly more complicated that the LPS labeled [Seal of the Relentless]. It wasn’t perfect protection, but it was a strong step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it also took almost half of his thirty thousand essence to build and increased his daily upkeep from eleven-hundred to thirteen-hundred.

With his remaining essence, he turned to some of the potent offensive enchantments his weapon had held. [Sharp] was an obvious candidate, as were [Weakness] and [Blinding]. He discarded [Shape Shifting] and [Mending], those no longer necessary now that he was crafting his spears out of mana. [Bleeding]

was perhaps less useful against opponents with high regeneration, and he thought he could find better uses for his remaining essence.

The skills he elected to keep merged together to create [Blood Toxin], which promised to inflict a whole host of unpleasant effects on his victims. Likely, none of them would be useful for doing more than burning mana at a quicker rate, but that was just fine by Velik. He’d yet to meet a divine beast who couldn’t recover from what should have been fatal damage in seconds, and the faster he could chew through their reserves, the sooner he could make a deathblow stick.

That dropped his reserves down to just under five thousand essence and brought his upkeep up to around fifteen-hundred. One defensive and one offensive. It’ll do for now, but I need to gather more essence and look at merging some of my current skills together. But first things first. Those pants look like they’re about ready.

The lizard man had indeed finished his stitching, but rather than hand them over to the still very naked Velik, he hunched over them and started muttering something. Velik couldn’t tell what it was, other than that it was the same phrase over and over again. But he could see the mana flowing into the pants and had a pretty good guess that he was seeing an enchantment being forged in real time, made in a way no human had probably experienced in however many thousands of years they’d been trapped in the Garden.

When the lizard finished a few minutes later, he set it aside and started on the shirt. Velik moved to claim the pants, but the lizard shook his head and waved him back. Half an hour later, the shirt got the same treatment, then the monster took up both parts and created a new enchantment that linked them together. Finally, he offered them to Velik.

The instant he tried the clothes on, they wriggled and shifted all over his body, changing to fit him perfectly. The lizardman then raised a clawed hand and slowly dragged it across the shirt. The leather split, but within a few seconds it started pulling itself back together. A minute later, it was like it had never been cut at all.

Lizards weren’t really meant for emotive facial expressions, but Velik got the impression that the monster was happy with his work. He patted Velik’s shoulder, then fetched his carving knife and approached the boar, his eyes measuring and weighing the body.

Good trade, Velik thought to himself. He knew that, rationally, the outfit wasn’t going to provide any sort of real protection, but not having his dangly bits on display was weirdly reassuring. The enchantments were an unexpected but welcome bonus, too, well worth the minimal effort he’d spent hunting down the giant boar and slaughtering it.

Leaving the lizard man to his work, Velik climbed into the air and started running. His goal wasn’t to follow Eslaka’s directions precisely, but instead to hunt for essence along the way. It didn’t take long for him to reach the edge of the caldera, and he left a trail of destruction as he descended back down the mountain. Essence poured in, a few hundred at a time, but the monsters were thick enough to offset the fact that they didn’t all mindlessly rush in.

One kill after another, Velik went about the task of growing stronger.

* * *

It works! Eslaka mentally crowed.

She stood in the air, watching smoke billow out of a haldegar den. The massive mole-like monsters weren’t formidable, not even compared to other monsters in the area, but it wasn’t about that. They were test subjects burned to death by her flames.

She’d watched Velik’s extraction of essence from Tesir, and though she’d had to make some guesses about how such an incredibly intricate magic functioned, she’d gotten enough right to know she was heading in the right direction.

It wasn’t much essence, just a few days’ worth from each haldegar, but it was proof of concept. She could refine the magic, test it on new subjects, and keep growing. That hissing bitch Shurga would be in for an extremely unpleasant surprise when Eslaka reached her domain.

Eslaka shifted her essence again, refining the essence eater spell again. This was attempt number eight, and now that she was actually grabbing loose essence from her test subjects, she needed to focus on increasing how much she collected before it dissipated. It was an investment, one she played to recoup over the next day or two.

No more would she cower before Reisha. No more would the others push her down. The Queen of Carnage was released from her gilded cage, and the world would burn in her wake.

Praise the gods for inventing such a brilliant magic, Eslaka thought to herself with a mad grin.