practice makes pain

Asher and Ken were now on the third day of practice, Ken was looking at a screen looking in on Ken in a room that was hard to describe, the walls had originally been whitewashed but as time went on more and more layers of protective enchantments had been applied, shinto charms shared space with Norse protective runes and Latin barrier spells scrolled in long dry blood, crosses and other symbols of faith hung from strands of copper and silver twined around cold iron and star steel rebar creating the feel of a great cage, built into the wall was a layer of adamantite to repel magic and around that a demensional barrier spell isolating the room outside the normal flow of time and space aside from the heavily reinforced door and the wiring required to run the cameras. in the center of the room was a simple wooden training dummy that had been enchanted to detect and measure damage that it was dealt and tell the observer the highest level of vitality that the strike would be able to deal lethal, crippling, severe, moderate, and low damage to. stacked against the wall behind Asher were a dozen more dummies with a sign hanging off the rebar reading "dummies cost $500, you break it you buy it, you are being recorded".

This was the testing chamber, normally Ken would simply let his disciples test new skills on him but due to the strange side effects of luck this was deemed unwise, if Asher scored a perfect hit to the jugular he could die even from low damage.

Asher held both hands in front of him and summoned his first skill, "homing bolt" while this skill did not directly rely on luck it was considered a massively powerful skill for two reasons, first that it did not rely on any particular Stat to scale up its damage, and secondly that it fired several projectiles that would all home in on the target. unfortunately the usefulness of the skill had fallen off in the last few years, it was mostly obtained by having too many different skills and stats available for you to pick up at the end of the week, the system could simply assign you one of its skills that scale off either all stats or no stats because of the lack of focus, the decreasing usefulness of the skill came from the general increase in stats of most people on the globe, it is much harder to roll a skill repeatedly then a Stat, combined with the fact that the lack of scaling meant that as the average vitality Stat was increased the amount of damage dealt by the spell at low levels seemed to get lower and lower.

the big reason Asher had picked up this skill was that aside from needing only skill points to be spent on it to increase its damage rather then Stat scaling was that he figured the homing mechanism would make it easier to let his luck influence the bolts to hit critical areas.

low level homing bolt would summon 3 or 6 small glowing spears and hurl them at an opponent, ashers version summoned 30 blazing white projectiles floating in a circle 8 inches in diameter above his hand.

"ready?" queried asher.

"hit it" replied Ken

Asher unleashed the energy bolts, each one firing off with machine gun speed as it reached the top of the circular orbit, each bolt hitting the target squarely in the neck.

"hmmm, low damage at 90, medium at 70, high at 50" Ken rattled off "those are for the whole lot of them if they hit in the exact same place, each individual one is 70, 50, 30."

Asher shook his head, those numbers were alright but he would have a problem if anybody with high defense or high enough agility to make them not hit vital points came around.

Asher looked up at the window "that's pretty good for my spammable basic attack, let's try some special moves."