6 Grinding Begins
"Create ID."
"Escape ID."
"Create ID."
"Escape ID."
"Create ID."
"Escape ID."
'Okay, that should do it.' Mentally psyching myself up I prepare to enter what is sure to be the most difficult fight of my life, also the only actual fight in my life.
"ID Create: Zombies."
As the Mana ripples out of me, the world undergoes a horrific transformation. The once green and healthy garden is now just rotting weeds, the orphanage in a state of disarray and an all-consuming scent of rotting meat. All in all, not the kind of place for the family holiday, but if you're the adventurous type, knock yourself out.
'Now where are the walking dead?' In answer to my thought out question, I feel something bite into the back of my neck.
'Is now a bad time to mention my senses don't work as a human anymore? My vision is mostly fine, I can see a couple of colours humans cant. My sense of taste is fucked, any-time I eat anything it's like a kaleidoscope, of hundreds of flavours. It's why I love chocolate so much, it's the only food I've found where I like every flavour in the kaleidoscope, is good. My sense of smell is heightened but only for specific things, I can smell fear. My hearing is interesting I constantly hear eldritch creatures whisper and murmur in their language that is not a language. Maybe I'm just going crazy with that one though. Now, my sense of touch, the reason I started this tirade, I can barely feel anything physically. I mean I can touch something and understand how it feels but I need to focus on it for any detail about what I'm touching. I do not process pain either, it's just an awareness of you are touching something it is bad. However, I can now feel the emotions something possesses towards me as physical inputs, someone who doesn't like me, will cause a prickly sensation to touch, and I assume people that do like me it feels nice to touch.'
While my mind goes off on a mental tangent the undead flesh sack has continued to bite into me. Mustering what strength I possess I forcefully shake it off losing a chunk of meat in the process.
Going into my inventory I quickly find what I'm looking for and summon it to my hands. A large kitchen knife. Yes, I did steal from nuns in an orphanage. No. I do not feel bad.
Readying myself for the combat with this dead creature I lock eyes with it and steady my breath.
It charges at me, as fast as rotting reanimated flesh can, and raises its rotting arm to try and grab me. Since I am actually paying attention this time I can use all 41 points of my DEX to see its path and move to dodge. Now behind it, I can see it move to turn its rotting eyes ahead of its body already looking into mine before it finishes its turn.
Thinking for a second, I decide fuck it, and activate Eyes Of The Spiral, Immediately the undead seems to falter before seeming confused, as it tries to look around I keep moving to maintain eye contact.
Interesting. It seems that due to being a mindless shuffling corpse, the undead cannot resist Eyes of the Spiral and as such are immediately rendered insane. However, since they are mindless their 'insanity' is an inability to identify me as a living creature and thus a target. It also seems that it lasts a short while after losing eye contact, as I do still need to blink.
Preparing my knife and getting ready for the shufflers inevitable counter-attack I rush forward and ram the knife into the creature's stomach. It does not react. Not looking a gift horse in the mouth I keep stabbing and stabbing until it seems to be on its last legs. Then I activate 'Push Your Luck' and deal a final blow to the creature. Its body vanishes leaving only a couple of small gold coins and a bottle containing a red fluid.
Since I do not have Observe I cannot be sure but I'm fairly certain that's a healing potion. Drinking it I can indeed confirm it is a healing potion, and I'm fairly certain the coins are galleons. I'm not sure if getting both a potion and some money is due to my class skill or my very high luck.
Looking over my status after the fight I can see I developed two new skills. Knife fighting which helps improve my ability to fight with small blades, And poison resistance which helps resist harmful substances. In the coming year's I'm going to be spending a lot of time grinding these 2 skills. Mostly so I can fight without a wand, let's be honest 99% of wizards are utterly useless without a wand, and let's not forget the huge murder snake in Hogwarts pipes, I want to be able to drink its venom like shots by the time Ickle-Harry goes to confront it.
.
.
.
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Finishing off another Walker while activating 'Push Your Luck' I quickly pick up the dropped loot. Turns out the common undead in the instance only drop money and healing potions. But, it turns out that Eye of the Spiral is the single biggest cheat in existence for fighting mindless undead, they literally cannot resist it. I've had some fun with it too, turns out Final Fantasy is right healing items do hurt undead, as pouring one of my healing potions into a Zombies throat immediately killed it. Wasn't even a waste either, I have almost 100 healing potions from all the fighting.
I've just had a terrible idea. Y'know how in The Gamer theirs that giant undead boss that forms when enough of the little ones are killed. Well, it's still just a Zombie, right. It Shouldn't be any smarter or anything and even if it is I could always pump more mana into my eyes. I've got it down to costing only 25 mana on average for me to kill a regular zombie, and if I used all 1000 of my mana surely I'd be able to kill the big guy.
Nevermind, my knife just fell apart while I killed the next Zombie. Wait, Healing potions, if I kept it non-hostile with my eyes and then yeeted a bunch of healing potions into its mouth, it would almost certainly die. Even if it doesn't die, I can always use the eldritch tongue to finish it off. Oh shit yeah, forgot you non-existent watchers aren't omniscient. Well, it turns out if I speak in the eldritch tongue, it causes genuine damage to these Zombies, I think its cause they lack a mind and will of their own.
Speaking of The Eldritch Tongue I figured out a couple of fun ways to fuck with people while using it in here. So on its own, the 'language' sounds like a 100 different frequencies of radio static clashing against each other causing dissonance with vague whispers that seem to appear in the dissonance. It's quite fucking creepy. But, as mentioned that's on its own, turns out I can force it and its effects into regular language, however, the harmful effects are largely reduced. For example, if it mixes it with human languages, it has the effect of producing overlapping voices of varying pitches as I speak, so its as though 100's of people are speaking at once. From what I've seen mixing it with languages maintains the beneficial effects for spell casting so that'll be fun to show off. With parseltongue its different, it instead makes the word impossible to understand like it almost sounds like a word but you can't quite make it out. I will be using that a lot to mess with Harry. It maintains its harmful effects and none of the beneficial ones if I mix it into my humming, which is interesting, I could hypothetical murder someone by humming All Star by Smash Mouth over and over again. The most interesting part though is that some vocalisations when spoken with the eldritch tongue result in a small mana drain, I think ill do some experimenting with that.
Anyway, while I've been off on this mental tangent I killed a couple more undead and Lo and Behold a block away a huge ass zombie has appeared. Locking eyes with it I channel mana into them.
Thank Fucking God. It seems to be non-hostile. If that hadn't worked I'd probably be dead by ... ... ... now. Now to get within throwing distance from its mouth.
*Heavy Breathing* So I'm finally by the mouth of this thing don't have a lot of mana left so here we go. Fuck if I ever climb again.
Violently humming 'Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley' I try and climb my way down the now thrashing colossal zombie. Eventually, either the healing potions, the glass or the horrific fate of being Rick Rolled, kills the thing.
Okay now to check out the loot.
What The Fuck. whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck. Deep Breath. Focus. There are 3 Skill books and a cube of some unknown metal. Did that metal just wink at me? No, don't be silly, it doesn't have eyes. Then what's that staring at me. There's nothing there.
Let me just check something, yeah the added effect for 'Push Your Luck' triggered but damn that still quite a lot. I'm not even going to mention the small pile of money.
So let's see what the skill books are. So, there's pyrokinesis, cryokinesis and electrokinesis. Okay, let's start with pyrokinesis.
[ERROR UNABLE TO LEARN SKILL]Pyrokinesis[DUE TO RESTRICTION]
Well, that was unexpected. Didn't realise being mad stopped you from playing with fire. I honestly thought it helped. Lets' try Ice next
[ERROR UNABLE TO LEARN SKILL]Cryokinesis[DUE TO RESTRICTION]
Seriously. What the Fuck. Fingers crossed for lightning I guess.
[NEW SKILL] Electrokinesis(1/100)-Active
Enables the generation and manipulation of electricity. At the cost of mana
Why the FUCK, did that one work. Okay, let's think this through illogically. When I made Mind of Madness evolve into Eldritch Mind of Madness I focused on The Distortion from The Magnus Archives. The Distortion was an aspect of The Spiral, which now that I think about it explains the name of the skill Eyes of The Spiral. This being the case, The Spiral also manifests as fractal patterns, Lichtenburg figures produced by electricity are fractals. Is that really it.
Now to look at the cube. Picking it up and feeling it in my hands it is definitely metal. No clue which one though. I mean I have no interest in crafting so what am I meant to use this for. Guess I could one day cut it up to paint on it make some shit metal playing cards.
Seemingly in response to my thoughts, the metal bends twists and shifts until in my hand is a set of metal playing cards. Cool a shape-changing metal. Picturing a curved dagger I wait for it to change forms.
Come on, any second now. Sigh. Don't tell me it can only change shape once. Throwing the deck of cards towards an approaching Zombie I am honestly shocked to watch it be cut to pieces.
[NEW SKILL]Knife Throwing(1/100)-[Passive]
[SKILL UPDATE] Knife Fighting(9/100) -> Knife Mastery(10/100)-[Passive]
The playing cards are knives interesting. Well, that solves the issue of me having to find knives to grind with. Shit now I'm going to have to pick them up. As I think that weight appears in my hand, looking down I see, the playing cards. Magic Throwing Card Knives even better. Let's do a couple of quick tests.
Holding the deck in my left hand I focus on a card appearing in my right, the ace of spades. Instantly a card appears in my right hand looking at it, it is the ace of spades. Now something else, I visualise all the black cards in my right hand and all the reds in my left. Once again instantly the cards are in the visualised location.
I want to see how they handle clashes, I Focus a lot harder on the image of having all the cards in one hand both focus on both left and right hands. There is an immediate drain on my mana before I am suddenly holding 2 complete decks of cards. So I can produce more cards, good to know. Putting both decks down and moving a bit away, I focus on specifically producing a card. It works, with an even smaller drain on my mana and neither deck seems to have changed. Looking at the card in my hand a King of Hearts I Imagine it becomes a King of diamonds and it does without any drain on my mana.
So I can summon, produce and change the appearance of a deck of throwing cards that are functionally knives. Can I change the appearance of the card to something else, I wonder.
.
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I've Finished testing the cards, as long as I have mana I can freely produce and summon the cards without any need to be near them. I can also freely change the appearance of the cards to any stylised form of a standard playing card or tarot card, regardless of the form it still matches the size of a standard playing card.
Despite all of that I have not gained a new skill, so is it some kind of bound weapon. No Clue, maybe I'll never know.
But what I do know is I am going to grind the hell out of the zombie instance before getting to Hogwarts.
