Unlike me, my friends had a much easier time purchasing their new abilities. Anise had started our last world with only 16 of her 53 glut occupied, and her new Ability evolution had pushed her up 20 glut and 0 keywords. Anise was now at 36 out of 53 glut. This granted her the ability to ‘tier up’ her skills via practice, at the cost of even more Achievement. She had briefly debated trying to retain last world’s ‘translate cultural icons into magic’ magic system, but Anise had ultimately decided against it, because the fight for more lives was coming up. With how few people were alive in the Market, Anise thought that there might not even be any form of cultural recognition here - which would make the magic system useless during our most dangerous and important fight of all. Being able to manually enhance her spells would have lower heights of power, but it would be far more useful during the most important fight of all.
She also had a healthy set of spells available to her now. Last world, Anise had constantly spent Achievement to form new spells, each of which cost her some Achievement to make permanent. On the bright side, Anise had come a long way from barely having enough different spells to use in a fight. She now had over a hundred different spells that she could call upon in a pinch. She had everything from force, to fire, to ice, to earth spells ready, and could act as both a powerful single mage or as a support to the group’s fighting. She could shield herself, detect enemies in a variety of ways, attack, or empower the attacks of other people. She did have a few weaknesses - namely, she didn’t have very many ‘utility’ spells right now, and she also struggled a bit with heavy-hitting spells. Still, she was now the picture of a competent mage… or, perhaps more accurately, the picture of a competent super-witch in the making.
Of course, since all of her spell maps required Achievement to create, Anise had also returned to the Market with much lower total Achievement than me. Her spell maps ranged from 400 to 2,000 Achievement in cost. She had also earned somewhat less from the Artificial sun last world, since she had fewer utility spells, and thus fewer ways to contribute to the initial setup for the artificial sun. Even so, she had ended up with a healthy total of 200,000 Achievement after purchasing her ability upgrade, and setting aside some to pay Felix back. After all, before entering our previous world, Feix had lent Anise 10,000 Achievement to give her a jump-start in developing her spell maps. We would need a cash register to let her actually transfer the Achievement back, but Anise was already subtracting it from her total when she reported it to us.
Felix, similarly, had 73 out of his 155 glut occupied before we started this world. To no one’s surprise, he had a very easy time purchasing his new abilities with plenty of room to spare. Unlike Anise, he had gotten just as much Achievement as I had from the Artificial sun, and had actually earned a bit more than I had during our previous world since he had more directly contributed to some other forms of influence Achievement, such as when the city used his flying boots to create knockoff flight abilities. He returned to the Market with nearly 450,000 Achievement. He burned a bit on his two new Ability upgrades. His upgrade to his alteration essence system brought it from 15 to 30 glut, while his upgrade to his binding magic system brought it from 15 to 25 glut. This dropped him to 400,000 Achievement.
Sallia had started our last world with 34/62 Achievement. Like Anise, she had plenty of glut to spare, so she instantly purchased her Ability upgrade, propelling her to advanced grade with her primary ability. This pushed her to 49/62 glut. After that, she spent another 10 glut on the master-grade ability for swordsmanship, putting her at 59/62. The master grade swordsmanship ability gave her a variety of boosts to her physical abilities every time she upgraded her swordsmanship grade, up to master, and also gave her swordsmanship itself a variety of unique and powerful properties, such as the ability to harden her blade, extend the tip of her sword using any type of essence, enhance the speed at which she could swing her blade, and a variety of other miscellaneous abilities. One of the neater implications of Sallia’s already absurd physical abilities, combined with her new swordsmanship ability, was that Sallia was now the first truly bulletproof member of the group. Against most smaller firearms, as long as she had her runes and physical stats from her items built up, Sallia could outright deflect bullets with her blade. Of course, there were still limits to this - Sallia would struggle against faster bullets, and none of us were quite sure where that line was. Still, Sallia was terrifying.
Sallia’s purchases brought her to 250,000 total Achievement - a bit less than me, but there wasn’t much of a difference.
With that, everyone but me had already purchased our initial round of upgrades.
“So, the first thing to do is find a shop for Tier 3 soul fragments, right?” said Felix. “Miria still has a few Abilities and ability evolutions left to buy, and if I’m not mistaken, that should be possible just from getting her to +60 in all of her stats.”
Anise and Sallia nodded. “We’d also like to just push everything up to +60,” said Sallia. “With this much Achievement, it doesn’t make sense not to go crazy on our physical stats. If possible, I’d even like to go a step further, and find a shop that sells Tier 4 or even Tier 5 soul fragments. I’m guessing they won’t be very expensive for us - after all, the last world was a huge windfall. We can splurge on some stats, and more base stats are never a bad thing. It might even be worth finding some generic no-keyword abilities to round out what we can do and patch up a few weaknesses, if we can find anything worthwhile.”
Felix nodded. “I agree. We should probably leave some room for our next round of keyword ability upgrades, though. That way when we return to the market next time, we don’t have to waste time sprinting towards a shop, unlike the last few times we’ve returned to the Market. Otherwise, we might have a hard time finding a shop before our abilities dissipate.” Felix’s mouth curled into a grin. “I’m looking forward to getting a huge round of upgrades, though.” Then, his grin faded, and his mouth tightened into an anxious line. “After all, this is our second to last visit to the Market. Our second to last chance to make big upgrades.”
I felt some of my excitement at our upgrades disappear, and an unsettling note of finality entered my thoughts instead.
Felix was right. Time was running out. We needed to make the most of it.
“So we’re planning to push into the inner parts of the nursery again this time?” asked Sallia.
“Of course,” I said. “I think we’d be much better off with a few more inner-circle upgrades, don’t you think? We haven’t even seen much of what an inner part of the nursery looks like - we only got to investigate one building before we had to run for our lives. There must be dozens of other powerful and useful buildings that exist in the inner parts of a Nursery, and we can probably clear most of an inner area out this time.” Sallia nodded.
After that, we tore through the outer circle of the Market. We didn’t bother with assists for skeletons anymore - the Achievement they could give us was a pittance, and we had better things to do with our time. Still, I got a few kills with my spatial ripples as we roamed the streets in search of a shop selling Tier 3 soul fragments.
Slaughter: Killed a skeletal foot soldier for the first time, fifth time Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount. |
Achievement +20, Achievement +60, Achievement +0.00 |
The 80 Achievement I got from killing skeletons as we roamed around didn’t even register to me, honestly. At this point, it was a rounding error. Even so, it brought me from 275,453 Achievement to 275,533.
After a few hours of searching, we found a more valuable shop. This time, Anise took the lead in clearing out the guardian of the shop, since she wanted to test a few new spells. The monster inhabiting the shop was some kind of mucus-type monster. It looked gross, and I had no idea what it did, because Anise’s first wave of fireballs killed it. Obviously, the creature had been highly vulnerable to fire.
As we strode into the shop, I glanced around, and grinned.
This shop had Tier 3 soul fragments, so all of us could push every stat to +60. After that, it was time to upgrade my other keyword ability, purchase a generic keyword ability or two, and then it was time to either hunt down a shop for higher tier soul fragments, or move inside of the Market to hunt for better ways to use up the rest of my Achievement. We still weren’t strong enough that I was happy with our odds of buying more lives… but we were closing the gap. We would get there. My friends and I were going to make it.
Or so I hoped.