Deacon gots up from his kneeling position in front of the hearth in the far end of the room while holding up his new Status Page in his hand. Making his way across the room and towards his bed that was in between Sam and Esmerelda's beds, he flopped himself on top of it and held it up in front of him to get a look at it.
Skill Upgrade: [Basic One-Handed Weapon Mastery (Uncommon -> Rare)]
Skill Upgrade: [Light Shield Mastery (Initiate -> Common)]
Spell Upgrade: [Flame Armament (Common -> Uncommon)]
Deacon Surtr Hayes
Race: Jötunn Lv 11
Class: Warrior Lv 11
Health: 880/880
Mana: 250/250
Stamina: 850/850
Stats:
Vitality: 88
Strength: 97 (101)
Endurance: 81 (85)
Agility: 57
Intelligence: 20
Wisdom: 25
Willpower: 39
Perception: 19
Free Points: 3
Racial Traits:
General Skills: Identify (Initiate), Meditation (Initiate)
Class Skills: Basic One-Handed Weapon Mastery (Rare), Light Shield Mastery (Common), Academy of Beginnings Sword Style (Uncommon), Blistering Flames (Uncommon)
Spell Masteries: Fire [Spark (Initiate), Ignis (Uncommon), Flame Armament (Uncommon), Flame Mine (Common)], Water [Water Ball (Initiate)], Earth [Gouge Ground (Initiate)]
Affinity: Fire (High) – Innate skill: Undying Flame
Achievements: Finder of the Hidden II [+10 All Stats]
"Hmm," Deacon said to himself as he saw that his skills and spells were finally upgrading past the initiate tier and common tier, and even his Basic One-Handed Mastery skill went to Rare. "Now, how do we get that Basic Prefix out of it?" he muttered to himself before moving on to the other skills that upgraded. "Light Shield Mastery upgraded to Common because I used quite a few of them while Sam and I were running on the battlements."
Speaking of which, Deacon thought to himself as he recalled the journey he and Sam made to find the 2nd to last flag. The number of shields that were just thrown about seemed a lot more suspicious now that I think about it, considering that every couple of hundred meters we traveled, there were always three or four of them scattered about.
"But then again, with the way the System described the area and the skeleton archers, I guess it was all part of the Floor theme," he mumbled to himself as he let the thought fade, eyes dragging back to his Status Page.
Out of all his spells, only Flame Armament had ticked up a tier. A little disappointing, but it wasn't exactly a shock. Ignis had been sitting in his back pocket for most of the climb – good for either a giant fireball or a flickering candle flame, but he hadn't pushed it beyond that. Too easy to lean on what was already strong. If he wanted results, he was going to have to get creative with it from now on.
"Great, now Deke's muttering to himself like a lunatic," Jass cut in from across the room, sprawled out on her bed with her boots still on, her own glowing Status Page held in front of her face with both arms, not unlike Deacon.
Deacon didn't even bother lifting his head, only rolling his eyes as a chorus of chuckles rose from the others. Without a word, he shifted the free points sitting at the bottom of his sheet: two dropped into Perception, one into Wisdom.
While he could have put them into Vitality and Willpower or just Strength to bring them to a satisfying round number, putting them into Perception and Wisdom was far more beneficial to him.
If their linked quest that started from Floor Five was pointing them toward a battlefield setting on Floor Six or Seven, judging by the maps they saw, then being able to actually see the threats coming was going to matter. It was also the same with making sure he wasn't burning through mana like an idiot and ending up bottoming his reserves due to how long battles last.
While he'd had basic battle training just like everyone else did while in the academy, no one was truly in danger while under the watch of the professors, so anyone who bottomed out on mana or got badly hurt was immediately protected by a Manashield bubble and was safely transported to safety.
The battlefield he and his friends were heading towards would be the real deal, and death could come at any point. And while you could say that isn't the same as everything he'd been through, going through a war and a battlefield was something different altogether.
He and everyone in Ravenlight would need to give it their A game and be mindful of absolutely everything and anything because they could be attacked in all and every direction, even from friendlies, because in the fog of war, anything could happen.
"That's not new, Jass," Esmerelda chimed in, still half-absorbed in her own page. "Deke always mutters to himself like a weirdo."
At Esmerelda's response and everyone else's laughter at it, a vein visibly twitched at Deacon's temple.
To the point where he sat up just long enough to grab the nearest pillow and hurled it across the narrow space between his bed and hers.
It smacked Esmerelda square in the face, which unfortunately also smashed her manaphone right into her nose with a satisfying thud and yelp of surprised pain.
"I don't wanna hear that from you, especially," Deacon shot back, indignation clear in his voice as the others laughed harder.
Esmerelda, rubbing her rose with one hand and sending Deacon a glare sharp enough to cut steel, raised her hand without a word and manipulated the wind around her. In response, a small swirl of wind formed at her fingertips, snapping together into a shaky, semi-translucent-looking human hand. Once it was properly formed, it lunged for Deacon's inner thigh and gripped it like a vice for a few seconds before it then vanished away before he could hit it, but due to him already being mid-motion, he instead ended up swinging himself hard.
And just after that, he barely had time to curse before a second spell shimmered into shape: this one a pair of disembodied hands floating right in front of his face, miming a slow, exaggerated squeeze.
"Oh, shit! Okay, I'm sorry!" Deacon barked, scooting back against his headboard and swatting at the air, though the phantom hands dissolved before he even touched them. "No testicular torsion, please, I give!"
Sam, Jass, and Bonehead nearly doubled over from where they sat, wheezing with laughter as they could barely hold onto their Status Pages.
"Oi! Stop laughing," Deacon hissed at them, glaring specifically at Bonehead and Sam, only to hesitate for a moment and focus his glare on only Sam.
However, Bonehead noticed this and immediately stopped laughing and called out indignantly. "Oi! I got balls too, you bastard!"
"What skeleton has balls?" Deacon shot back. "You practically flash me and Sam literally every time we go out to bathhouses, and we never see any; hell, literally after we finished eating and we went to one, you showed it to us again."
"That's cause you never see it after I take my super special potions before heading into the brothel, there I get flesh, skin, nerves, everything, all in the places I need to feel everything," Bonehead huffed, gaining a proud look on his face.
"Wait, what?" Sam asked in disbelief. "You made a potion that can do that?"
"Yessir," Bonehead said proudly, shrugging up his shoulders even higher.
"I've never heard of a potion that can do that before," Jass said with a similarly surprised look on her face as she placed down her Status Page beside her on the bed, and she turned to face Bonehead along with everyone else.
"Well," Bonehead said as he took out his Spatial Satchel and began rifling through it. "I didn't invent it if that's what y'all are thinking. It's just a potion that most undead alchemists learn how to make for skeletons, zombies, ghouls, and the like to give them a sense of feel and help them regain their receptors for a period of time."
"Normally say if a skeleton wanted to be fleshy and 'alive' like you guys for a bit, they would need to submerge themselves in a bathtub-sized amount of the potion to transform themselves," Bonehead explained while air-quoting the word alive.
"For how long do they turn human?" Deacon asked, while compared to Jass, Sam, and Esmerelda, who'd never taken an alchemy class, he, who took alchemy 101 and barely passed it, could understand the sheer amount of complexity and difficulty it must have taken to successfully brew such a potion.
"They don't turn human," Bonehead said as he pulled out both his hands from his Spatial Storage and slowly hovered them up and down in a coaxing manner. "They turn fleshy. Depending on the materials used, the skill of the alchemist, the race of the undead, and around a hundred other factors. And a summation of all of this determines what you'll be."
"I only made a small batch and use that because of rather obvious reasons," Bonehead chuckled to himself, getting eye rolls from everyone else. "I mean like, why else would I even brew it?"
"What happens if a human or non-undead drinks it?" Sam asked him.
"Dunno," Bonehead shrugged. "I've only ever made it for myself, and the undead alchemists who learned it with me never really thought about it… But I don't think it would be a good idea to see what would happen."
"Yeah, just thinking of what could happen sounds way too similar to some of the consequences of screwing up some of, if not all of the rituals I read about in the that grimoire," Deacon muttered to himself, but unfortunately his words hadn't fell on deaf ears as Sam who was closest to him and Bonehead who had more Perception than anyone else in the group.
"What?" Sam suddenly said as his head whipped in Deacon's direction.
"You were reading through the grimoire?" Bonehead asked seconds after Sam. "The one about the ritualist of the humming fuck guy?"
"Whoa," Jass said in disbelief as she then began to look at Deacon with wide eyes, along with everyone else. "Didn't we say that even trying to open it was a bad idea?"
"Whoa, calm down, guys," Deacon said while raising his hands in a placating manner. "I haven't done anything other than read from it. Other than reading a couple of pages and getting incredibly grossed out about some of the rituals I read, I did nothing else."
"Hell, I was even going to talk to you about it later today or tomorrow," Deacon said while gesturing at Bonehead.
"Me?" Bonehead said while pointing to himself as his non-existent eyebrows rose on his skull. "What the hell would I know about rituals? Sam knows better about them than all of us combined."
"Oi, why are you dragging me into this?" Sam said while throwing his pillow at Bonehead. "I only know a bit about magic rituals, not ritualist rituals."
"If I could explain," Deacon said with a sigh as Esmerelda intervened between the pillow fight Sam and Bonehead were starting by catching their pillows mid-air with her wind manipulation.
Once Bonehead and Sam saw that their pillows were now floating in midair, they barely had time to react before Jass sent one crashing into each of their heads, knocking them flat and back onto their beds.
"Thank you," Deacon said while giving both Jass and Esmerelda a thankful look.
"As I was about to say," Deacon said, ignoring the middle fingers both Bonehead and Sam sent his way. "I wanted to discuss how some of the materials in buffing rituals would interact with one another with Bonehead and why some of the ritual diagrams look the way that they do."
"For example, what's the correlation between inserting an obsidian shard into the heart of a beast and muttering a couple of words and getting +5 to Endurance and +4 to Vitality for a month without any debuffs."
Immediately as the last sentence left his mouth, Sam, Bonehead, Jass, and Esmerelda's jaws dropped.