27. Soul weapon
"So Anya what have you been up to?" asked Ast. Anya looked in his direction and smiled "Care to spar with me bro?". Anya wanted Ast to acknowledge her and also wanted to test out her new skill, she was pretty confident in her newly acquired powers.
Ast told Anya about the new element he had created and asked her to wait for the spar, as it would take him some time to understand how his element worked. So they came to a conclusion that they would train for a week and then go to the town of Aldi to enter the competition.
Ast noticed that he was not able to access the healing properties of light maybe because he has deviated from the original element. He observed that he was able to absorb the light around him to blend in darkness. 'wow if I master this completely then I might be able to even turn invisible in broad daylight' .
Ast next tried manupulating the light coming out of fire, he tried bending, absorbing, reflecting the light and noticed his control over light was not that great with the exception of light absorption. Ast thought about the description that the system showed him. Next Ast attempted to manupulate his shadow and found that it was as if his shadow was an extension of his body.
Ast could move his shadow in all weird ways, change its shape, reduce its size etc etc. Ast tried to move his shadow away from the ground towards his hand and then shaped it in form of a sword. Ast was amazed seeing a shadow sword in his hand. He tried slashing the nearby rocks but the damage was minimal. The shadow sword was not that dense.
Suddenly an idea struck him. He transformed his tatoos into his daggers and covered them with his shadow, it worked but the effectiveness of his daggers didn't increased, it looked cool but nothing different happened.
Ast was sitting quietly over a corner near the fire playing with his shadow and thinking of a way to utilise his abilities best. He knew right now he was just level 1 and slowly with his level his powers would also increase and then his shadow ability might become lethal but he was still a little dejected, thinking he had such a cool looking ability with it did very little damage.
Ast also tried to see if he could also manupulate others shadow but once again he found the answer not to his liking.
Ast took out a storage ring and started looking at various artifacts in hope that maybe he could utilise his ability better with different weapon. Suddenly he noticed a pair of pitch black eerie looking whips. The whips had no handle on which to grab it and at the tip of the whips were finger sized black blade, only visible on careful observation.
What made Ast curious was the fact that these whips were kept inside a golden locked storage space, as if it was very precious. Ast took out the whips and tried to sense any elemental fluctuation and to his surprise there weren't any, before giving up Ast asked the system about the whips.
The system told him that the whips were very high grade soul weapon and the system itself couldn't determine it's origin or its properties. But the system also informed him about the peculiarity of a soul weapon. How a soul weapon becomes a part of its users soul and grow with it and each soul weapon was unique and very very difficult to obtain.
Ast found out the method to fuse a soul weapon with his soul and started the process. After a few hours Ast opened his eyes and noticed that his soul has gotten stronger once again. He also observed the black snake like tattoos all along his arms intertwined near his elbow and reaching his shoulder.
[Congratulations to the host for obtaining a soul weapon, host is advised to give the weapon a name and try calling out its name to summon it].
Ast named the whips 'Viper'. He tried calling it out and in the next second two whips came out of his wrists and wrapped around his hand. Ast tried to aim it on the wall and gave it a jerk. The whip jerked swiftly towards the walls and with a whoosssh sound a deep mark was left on the wall. But what surprised Ast was that the whip was around 2 metres in length but it covered a distance of 7 metres to hit the wall. Ast was flabbergasted. The whips could extend and contract like a very elastic rubber.
'So it is really unique' thought Ast. Now Ast tried to cover the whip with shadow and repeat the action. What he was trying to achieve was to manipulate the movement of his whips mid air using his shadow ability which would make his whips look like as if they had a brain of their own. Ast practiced a few time and he succeeded. Ast was over the moon now he had another ace up his sleeve.
Ast also tried using his shadow to make the whip invisible. Although the whips could still be seen but Ast was sure that given enough time he would be able to master this technique. Ast noticed that that he was slowly transforming into an overpowered assassin.
Next he tried using his skill. He observed as the cave was closed it didn't had many shadows and the source of light inside was fire so he wasn't completely able to utilise shadow jump but his speed incresed manyfolds in the darkness.