Irrational hatred fills my body, pointed rage directing me to abandon my spot and kill the woman who’s partially responsible for shaping me into what I am, but I separate myself from the anger and prepare to fight the demons encircling me.
Encircling Sierra.
While I’ve made the decision to violate my core tenet and modify it, that doesn’t mean I’ll just be giving into emotion. I refuse to lose control over myself. While anger can be a useful tool, blind rage is only useful when harnessed to enhance the power of a skill.
For now, I protect my ally. Sierra still has yet to uncloak like Adrian did. If the level of power she’s hiding is proportional to the amount the Warrior and water mage had, she’ll be a force to reckon with when she wakes up.
If she wakes up.
The unconscious body must be the one attracting the demons, because there’s a lot of them closing in our location.
She has some kind of item protecting her, that much is evident. There’s no way that she’s casting a shield while she’s unconscious.
There’s only about fifty feet between me and the nearest demons, but I need to think. I add two of my nine new stat points to Mind (Speed), and time seems to slow down as I process the situation.
These demons look different from what I’ve grown used to fighting. They’re slick with oily, iridescent fluid that shimmers in the dim light of the fires around us, and they’re so many of them that I can’t really identify individual differences.
What to do, what to do? Upgrading Appraise is super appealing—the skill is nearly impossible to advance on its own, and I would love to have a better assessment skill.
Maybe later. My first priority needs to be something that I can attack these demons with. I have two of those in my options, but Paralyzing Bite only takes effect over time. If it turns out that I really need it, I’ll pick it up, but I’m going to take the immediate power first.
Misty Blade advanced from Bronze to Silver!
Misty Blade became Misty Mirage!
Misty Mirage (Rare)
Tier: Silver
Level: 1
Coalesce the air into a blade, imbuing a bladed weapon with magical force. Upon wounding an enemy, your target begins to freeze. Deals 100% extra frost damage. Immediately after you strike a blow, an afterimage of your attack will appear in a space you choose at 50% power.
Not bad.
I smile, drawing a knife with each hand. A quick usage of my new Misty Mirage has cold fog misting over the twin blades.
Before I attack, though, I want to use all my stat points. I can absolutely slaughter a single one of these demons, yes, but without Wraithfire, it’ll be much harder for me to kill this vast a number of them.
I have seven points remaining. I put one into Body (Speed) to advance it to 20, four into Body (Strength), which brings it to 15, and I put the last two into Magic (Power) for a total of 12 in that stat. I want every strike to be as powerful as it can be, but the speed is also useful given the vast number of targets here.
With my stats spent, I take off. I could use Bloodpath to get to the demons faster, but there’s enough of them circling towards Sierra that I don’t want to waste any of my magic power. I need to be careful with this—I can try Devouring them, but there’s enough demons that I think they might attack me while I’m feasting on their dead brethren. Devour isn’t instant enough to do that yet.
As I leave Sierra’s immediate area, however, a number of the demons turn to face me.
Interesting. Until this point, the demons have largely left me alone until I’ve started attacking them, which has been pretty fantastic in terms of being able to get a devastating first strike off. Were they alerted to me because of the dying centipede-demon’s cry?
Or is there something about my broken evolution that’s alerted them to me? Godsmarked is incredibly vague, but the wording makes it sound like anything that understands divinity is able to detect it. While I assume that means holy beings, it could very well be demons that seek to destroy anything that the gods have touched.
Either way, my end goal is the same. They’re not just targeting me, that much is clear. A fair chunk of them are still looking towards Sierra, creeping forward. Just up and running isn’t going to be a viable strategy if I want to keep my unconscious ally alive.
Alright. Time for violence.
I leap forward, meeting the first demon head on, and I stab twin blades into what looks to be its head, Knifefighting boosting the power of my Misty Mirage. Frost creeps over its slick body, the wound steaming with cold, and I attempt a Woundshape. The demon resists it, though, and my skill doesn’t work. At least the blade still does its job.
Knifefighting advanced to level 4!
A moment after I withdraw my weapons, nearly losing the knives thanks to the demon’s coating, mist bursts forward from my body and blades, mirroring the attack I just performed. I’m not sure it carries the Knifefighting boost with it, but it finishes decapitating my target nonetheless.
Misty Mirage advanced to level 2!
Now carries 55% of the power. You can now exert mild influence over the positioning of your afterimage.
That was a fast level-up. I wonder if it’s going to proceed at the same rate.
The first demon is already dying by the time I jump to the next one. These ones are significantly less durable than I thought they’d be, which is somewhat surprising.
Another flash of unearthly green lightning illuminates the night sky, striking the tree, and I hear a thunderous crash as one of the largest branches fall.
I finally make the connection when the demons surrounding me shudder for a brief moment, stopping in their paths as the sheen of demonic fluid covering them takes on a greenish hue for a blink of an eye.
Marie’s hurting the tree, and they rely on the tree to survive. Either they’re not fully formed yet or the tree has some other connection to them, but the health of the tree definitely has some impact on how powerful they are.
It’s a shame that I can’t abandon this area right now. It’s also a little annoying that both the tree and Marie are entities that I’ve designated as enemies, but I think the tree is a higher priority at the moment.
As I eviscerate the second demon, sliding under it and ripping its guts out before my mirage freezes the wound, I see the remnants of the first one sink into the ground, the corpse melting away before my eyes.
Demonic blood carries the dissolved corpse away, and I suddenly realize where the consumption is going.
Again, irritating. I hoped that I’d be able to use the massive amount of corpses here to advance and restore my soul, but it looks like the tree is going to be feeding on them before I can.
When I start to Devour the second demon’s corpse, however, the skill sending magical energy through the dead body, hot pain explodes in my back as another one of its brethren takes a bite out of my back. A moment later, it does it again, tearing a bloody hole in my midsection right around where a human heart would be. Its bite isn’t its only attack, either. Acid eats away at my hardened organs, doing its best to kill me from the inside out.
Devour granted +35 XP!
The notification is accompanied by a reduction in the burning sensation and the increasingly-familiar feeling of flesh sewing itself back together, which I have to be thankful for.
Poison Resistance advanced to level 4!
Though it’s entirely possible that this attack would’ve failed to kill me, it’s a single demon’s bite, and there’s a lot more than a single demon.
And I haven’t even killed the attacker yet. As I turn around to face it, it pounces, sharp claws sending me spinning down towards the ground. Half a second later, another one joins it, pinning me to the dirt. The sudden weight is unexpected and surprisingly forceful. Even with my freshly enhanced Body (Strength) stat, I struggle to lift the claw off my chest.
A second insectile limb strikes at the arm I tried to use to pull said claw away, and this one doesn’t stop at just pinning it. It’s a spike of a limb, and it slices straight through my flesh like a hot knife through butter. The demonic slick provides an extra layer of alien sensation to the attack as it cuts through flesh, muscle, and bone.
My left arm tears off at the elbow.
“Oh, come on,” I mutter. “I just got that fixed.”
Another demon joins the two that are on me, and the first one to pin me down opens its jaw impossibly wide.
One demon, I could handle with my strength. Two is a possibility. Three or more?
I’m out.
I activate Bloodpath, and their limbs come down in a tangled mess, slicing through blood and killing nothing.
While I’m in the bloody form, I manipulate pieces of myself, creating sharp spears to slice through their bodies as I pass through them. Not all of the blood penetrates, their oily coating provided by the tree apparently protecting them to some extent, but enough does that one of them keels over. Not dead, but heavily injured.
I’m not going to make the same mistake of stopping to Devour again. Sure, I could’ve escaped fast enough if I used Bloodpath, but that skill is expensive. Devour isn’t granting me enough of my magic power back to warrant wasting a load on Bloodpath every time I slow to eat a demon.
Instead of reappearing in their midst, I continue drawing on my newest skill to cross the forty feet between the demons and Sierra’s body.
Her shield is deactivated when I get to her. I can’t tell if it’s because the item’s run out of magic or because it only turns on when there’s immediate adversity in her area. As it turns out, I’ve drawn away every last one of the demons that were originally gunning for her. I don’t know whether to be impressed with myself or angry with the still-living passenger that did this to me. Probably both.
The demons start screaming towards the two of us as I kneel next to her sleeping body, and I once again draw on my heightened Mind (Speed) as I start moving.
Sierra is surprisingly heavy, and her waterlogged clothes definitely aren’t helping with that. Did she fall into the river? I didn’t notice earlier.
I need my hands free to deal with the onslaught of demons, so I change tactics. I activate Blood Echo, and a crimson copy of myself steps forward from my body. She lasts for only two seconds, but that’s enough to pick up the prone Sierra. As soon as the copy loses form, I draw on Shape Blood instead, manipulating gallons of blood to keep the Blue Mage afloat. It takes up a chunk of my attention, and the added weight makes the skill cost more magic than it usually does, but I pay the cost nonetheless.
I turn my attention to the demons.
While my aggression caught them off guard the first time, there’s a lot of them coming my way. I wasn’t able to deal with three of them at once, let alone the sixty or seventy rushing towards us. I’m going to have to use Bloodpath a lot to manage this, and I don’t know if I have the reserves to do all that while also evacuating Sierra. I can try to run as well, but some of these demons might very well catch up.
I steel myself to flee, readying up all the power I still have—and then my vision flashes bright green.
The sound follows a moment later, white static amplified a hundred thousand times, and my ears nearly overload from the deafening report.
The next thing I notice is the smell. Ozone.
Thanks to my demonic physiology, it only takes a few seconds for my vision to clear.
I open my eyes to a field of ashen corpses glistening with green sparks. They dissolve away even as I watch, demonic blood absorbing them for the tree’s nutrition. Not a single one of the monsters facing me are alive.
The woman who wrought this descends from the sky above, framed in luminescent green. I take in her form, confirming my suspicions.
Though I’ve only seen her face in a picture, my memory is perfect enough to know the face. She looks like she hasn’t aged a day since the time her photo was taken.
“Marie Jade,” I say.
She looks down at me, her feet not touching the ground. Marie wears an entirely impractical white lab coat over a black-and-green bodysuit, and somehow none of it is even the slightest bit dirtied.
“Amalgam experimental variant,” she replies, her cold gaze piercing straight through me. “And my niece. You are less powerful than my reading suggested. A shame.”
Irrational fury fills me, so I take a step back mentally before I can make a poor decision. If I attack her now… actually, I don’t know how strong she is. I attempt to Appraise her.
Name: Marie Jade
Age: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Race: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Class: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Alright. Now that the demons aren’t threatening me, I’m comfortable in using my other skill upgrade.
Appraise advanced from Bronze to Silver!
You may now Appraise some non-living objects. Appraise grants a significantly more detailed list of information. Appraise now bypasses basic cloaking abilities.
I attempt to use it again.
Instead of the message I would usually see, I receive nothing but silence.
When I look back at Marie, her hands crackle with lightning.
“Not yet advanced enough to avoid basic anti-appraisal mechanics,” she says, clicking her tongue. I don’t know who she’s talking to, but it isn’t me. Her vision is focused on a spot far above my head “Had potential to improve, appears to have forgone the path of advancement. May have to be deemed a failure.”
Relentless flares to life as I prepare to fight her, which gives me pause. That trait activates when the odds are impossible, and has only activated before when I’m against a number of enemies that are all higher level than me. It didn’t even activate against the swarm of demons I was just fighting.
How powerful is she?
I pump my newfound power into Appraise, willing it to work, and I use the skill again.
This time, when I see sparks play out over her fingers, I activate my Bloodpath and surge forward, aiming a knife towards her throat.
The sparks turn into a bolt of electricity, and it springs out from her hands straight into my bloody form. This form usually feels no pain, and it suffers no damage.
When she shocks me, though, it hurts, and it destabilizes my skill so much that I fall back into my humanoid form.
But the moment of distraction means that my Appraise makes it through.
Name: Marie Jade (4)
Age: 0
Race: Human (Simulacrum)
Class: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
[APPRAISE FAILED]
Even at Silver-tier, it barely shows more. The promised additional information is completely hidden behind a wall of failure.
What it shows me, though, is still shocking. I understand the terms well enough, my soul amalgam providing the answers I need.
This isn’t Marie Jade. This is a skill of hers, something like my Blood Echo except thousands of times more advanced.
“Less hopeless than I had imagined,” the simulacrum murmurs, still not looking at me. “Appears to have allied with the two trainees. Trainees have failed. Determine repercussions later.”
While she’s talking or taking notes or whatever it is, I dive towards her again, this time using Shape Blood instead of Bloodpath, which she can clearly disrupt.
I make it two steps before my vision goes white and my body seizes up.
An electric shock pulsates through my body, and I slam into the ground. A rib breaks, piercing two of my lungs, and my spine fractures in three places through the force of it.
When my vision clears, I’m at the bottom of a deep, dark pit. Green sparks trace the sides of it, illuminating the night above.
The hole has to be thirty feet deep. Did a single attack bury me this far?
Neon green sings across my eyes again, and my body once again acts against my will, an electric force pulling me back to the surface.
“Still too weak,” Marie’s copy says, still looking anywhere but me. “Perhaps isolation will prove to be effective.”
I try to step forward, but I can’t move. Every muscle in my body is locked up, a thin line of electricity between the simulacrum and my heart stopping me from taking any action.
She floats over to Sierra casually, laying a hand on her shoulder.
The Blue Mage vanishes.
“Note to self: prioritize retrieval of second trainee. Too many resources spent to allow death,” she mutters.
“Who are you?” I ask, keeping my voice even. “What are you doing?”
“Unimportant,” Marie replies, finally meeting my eyes. “The true question is as follows: are you worthless?”
The electricity around her increases in intensity, and then she disappears with a muted pop.
Are you worthless?
The words hit harder than they should, which must mean that the people who made me—Marie included—forced a response into this.
Just because I know that doesn’t mean that I can stop it.
Are you worthless?
I still can’t move, Marie’s lightning still locking up my muscles. I am internally bleeding, and my broken spine means that even if my muscles are freed, moving will be torture. Mud covers me from head to toe where I was slammed into the earth, and half a hundred minor cuts have opened up on my skin.
Marie’s electricity flashes once more, then stops.
I know what she wants me to do. Marie is a researcher, the same as Sapphire and the rest. She wants to see my growth.
I have no other choice.
Are you worthless?
As Demonic Heritage begins to take effect, allowing me to take a brutally painful step as my muscles return to my control, I turn the words over.
I am not worthless, but my worth is defined by me, not the ones who created me.
I will accomplish what they built me to do, and then I will find them. If they want to create the perfect weapon, they can live and die with the consequences.
I advance.
Above me, the demonic tree roars.
Beneath me, the land begins to dissolve.
Objective updated: Burn it all down
The Flowering Demon has advanced to its next stage. Kill it before it can absorb all of the city.
Reward: Advance any two skills to their next tier
Objective: Marie’s monster
Kill your creators.
Targets killed: [0/32]
Reward: ???
Irrational hatred fills my body, pointed rage directing me to abandon my spot and kill the woman who’s partially responsible for shaping me into what I am, but I separate myself from the anger and prepare to fight the demons encircling me.
Encircling Sierra.
While I’ve made the decision to violate my core tenet and modify it, that doesn’t mean I’ll just be giving into emotion. I refuse to lose control over myself. While anger can be a useful tool, blind rage is only useful when harnessed to enhance the power of a skill.
For now, I protect my ally. Sierra still has yet to uncloak like Adrian did. If the level of power she’s hiding is proportional to the amount the Warrior and water mage had, she’ll be a force to reckon with when she wakes up.
If she wakes up.
The unconscious body must be the one attracting the demons, because there’s a lot of them closing in our location.
She has some kind of item protecting her, that much is evident. There’s no way that she’s casting a shield while she’s unconscious.
There’s only about fifty feet between me and the nearest demons, but I need to think. I add two of my nine new stat points to Mind (Speed), and time seems to slow down as I process the situation.
These demons look different from what I’ve grown used to fighting. They’re slick with oily, iridescent fluid that shimmers in the dim light of the fires around us, and they’re so many of them that I can’t really identify individual differences.
What to do, what to do? Upgrading Appraise is super appealing—the skill is nearly impossible to advance on its own, and I would love to have a better assessment skill.
Maybe later. My first priority needs to be something that I can attack these demons with. I have two of those in my options, but Paralyzing Bite only takes effect over time. If it turns out that I really need it, I’ll pick it up, but I’m going to take the immediate power first.
Misty Blade advanced from Bronze to Silver!
Misty Blade became Misty Mirage!
Misty Mirage (Rare)
Tier: Silver
Level: 1
Coalesce the air into a blade, imbuing a bladed weapon with magical force. Upon wounding an enemy, your target begins to freeze. Deals 100% extra frost damage. Immediately after you strike a blow, an afterimage of your attack will appear in a space you choose at 50% power.
Not bad.
I smile, drawing a knife with each hand. A quick usage of my new Misty Mirage has cold fog misting over the twin blades.
Before I attack, though, I want to use all my stat points. I can absolutely slaughter a single one of these demons, yes, but without Wraithfire, it’ll be much harder for me to kill this vast a number of them.
I have seven points remaining. I put one into Body (Speed) to advance it to 20, four into Body (Strength), which brings it to 15, and I put the last two into Magic (Power) for a total of 12 in that stat. I want every strike to be as powerful as it can be, but the speed is also useful given the vast number of targets here.
With my stats spent, I take off. I could use Bloodpath to get to the demons faster, but there’s enough of them circling towards Sierra that I don’t want to waste any of my magic power. I need to be careful with this—I can try Devouring them, but there’s enough demons that I think they might attack me while I’m feasting on their dead brethren. Devour isn’t instant enough to do that yet.
As I leave Sierra’s immediate area, however, a number of the demons turn to face me.
Interesting. Until this point, the demons have largely left me alone until I’ve started attacking them, which has been pretty fantastic in terms of being able to get a devastating first strike off. Were they alerted to me because of the dying centipede-demon’s cry?
Or is there something about my broken evolution that’s alerted them to me? Godsmarked is incredibly vague, but the wording makes it sound like anything that understands divinity is able to detect it. While I assume that means holy beings, it could very well be demons that seek to destroy anything that the gods have touched.
Either way, my end goal is the same. They’re not just targeting me, that much is clear. A fair chunk of them are still looking towards Sierra, creeping forward. Just up and running isn’t going to be a viable strategy if I want to keep my unconscious ally alive.
Alright. Time for violence.
I leap forward, meeting the first demon head on, and I stab twin blades into what looks to be its head, Knifefighting boosting the power of my Misty Mirage. Frost creeps over its slick body, the wound steaming with cold, and I attempt a Woundshape. The demon resists it, though, and my skill doesn’t work. At least the blade still does its job.
Knifefighting advanced to level 4!
A moment after I withdraw my weapons, nearly losing the knives thanks to the demon’s coating, mist bursts forward from my body and blades, mirroring the attack I just performed. I’m not sure it carries the Knifefighting boost with it, but it finishes decapitating my target nonetheless.
Misty Mirage advanced to level 2!
Now carries 55% of the power. You can now exert mild influence over the positioning of your afterimage.
That was a fast level-up. I wonder if it’s going to proceed at the same rate.
The first demon is already dying by the time I jump to the next one. These ones are significantly less durable than I thought they’d be, which is somewhat surprising.
Another flash of unearthly green lightning illuminates the night sky, striking the tree, and I hear a thunderous crash as one of the largest branches fall.
I finally make the connection when the demons surrounding me shudder for a brief moment, stopping in their paths as the sheen of demonic fluid covering them takes on a greenish hue for a blink of an eye.
Marie’s hurting the tree, and they rely on the tree to survive. Either they’re not fully formed yet or the tree has some other connection to them, but the health of the tree definitely has some impact on how powerful they are.
It’s a shame that I can’t abandon this area right now. It’s also a little annoying that both the tree and Marie are entities that I’ve designated as enemies, but I think the tree is a higher priority at the moment.
As I eviscerate the second demon, sliding under it and ripping its guts out before my mirage freezes the wound, I see the remnants of the first one sink into the ground, the corpse melting away before my eyes.
Demonic blood carries the dissolved corpse away, and I suddenly realize where the consumption is going.
Again, irritating. I hoped that I’d be able to use the massive amount of corpses here to advance and restore my soul, but it looks like the tree is going to be feeding on them before I can.
When I start to Devour the second demon’s corpse, however, the skill sending magical energy through the dead body, hot pain explodes in my back as another one of its brethren takes a bite out of my back. A moment later, it does it again, tearing a bloody hole in my midsection right around where a human heart would be. Its bite isn’t its only attack, either. Acid eats away at my hardened organs, doing its best to kill me from the inside out.
Devour granted +35 XP!
The notification is accompanied by a reduction in the burning sensation and the increasingly-familiar feeling of flesh sewing itself back together, which I have to be thankful for.
Poison Resistance advanced to level 4!
Though it’s entirely possible that this attack would’ve failed to kill me, it’s a single demon’s bite, and there’s a lot more than a single demon.
And I haven’t even killed the attacker yet. As I turn around to face it, it pounces, sharp claws sending me spinning down towards the ground. Half a second later, another one joins it, pinning me to the dirt. The sudden weight is unexpected and surprisingly forceful. Even with my freshly enhanced Body (Strength) stat, I struggle to lift the claw off my chest.
A second insectile limb strikes at the arm I tried to use to pull said claw away, and this one doesn’t stop at just pinning it. It’s a spike of a limb, and it slices straight through my flesh like a hot knife through butter. The demonic slick provides an extra layer of alien sensation to the attack as it cuts through flesh, muscle, and bone.
My left arm tears off at the elbow.
“Oh, come on,” I mutter. “I just got that fixed.”
Another demon joins the two that are on me, and the first one to pin me down opens its jaw impossibly wide.
One demon, I could handle with my strength. Two is a possibility. Three or more?
I’m out.
I activate Bloodpath, and their limbs come down in a tangled mess, slicing through blood and killing nothing.
While I’m in the bloody form, I manipulate pieces of myself, creating sharp spears to slice through their bodies as I pass through them. Not all of the blood penetrates, their oily coating provided by the tree apparently protecting them to some extent, but enough does that one of them keels over. Not dead, but heavily injured.
I’m not going to make the same mistake of stopping to Devour again. Sure, I could’ve escaped fast enough if I used Bloodpath, but that skill is expensive. Devour isn’t granting me enough of my magic power back to warrant wasting a load on Bloodpath every time I slow to eat a demon.
Instead of reappearing in their midst, I continue drawing on my newest skill to cross the forty feet between the demons and Sierra’s body.
Her shield is deactivated when I get to her. I can’t tell if it’s because the item’s run out of magic or because it only turns on when there’s immediate adversity in her area. As it turns out, I’ve drawn away every last one of the demons that were originally gunning for her. I don’t know whether to be impressed with myself or angry with the still-living passenger that did this to me. Probably both.
The demons start screaming towards the two of us as I kneel next to her sleeping body, and I once again draw on my heightened Mind (Speed) as I start moving.
Sierra is surprisingly heavy, and her waterlogged clothes definitely aren’t helping with that. Did she fall into the river? I didn’t notice earlier.
I need my hands free to deal with the onslaught of demons, so I change tactics. I activate Blood Echo, and a crimson copy of myself steps forward from my body. She lasts for only two seconds, but that’s enough to pick up the prone Sierra. As soon as the copy loses form, I draw on Shape Blood instead, manipulating gallons of blood to keep the Blue Mage afloat. It takes up a chunk of my attention, and the added weight makes the skill cost more magic than it usually does, but I pay the cost nonetheless.
I turn my attention to the demons.
While my aggression caught them off guard the first time, there’s a lot of them coming my way. I wasn’t able to deal with three of them at once, let alone the sixty or seventy rushing towards us. I’m going to have to use Bloodpath a lot to manage this, and I don’t know if I have the reserves to do all that while also evacuating Sierra. I can try to run as well, but some of these demons might very well catch up.
I steel myself to flee, readying up all the power I still have—and then my vision flashes bright green.
The sound follows a moment later, white static amplified a hundred thousand times, and my ears nearly overload from the deafening report.
The next thing I notice is the smell. Ozone.
Thanks to my demonic physiology, it only takes a few seconds for my vision to clear.
I open my eyes to a field of ashen corpses glistening with green sparks. They dissolve away even as I watch, demonic blood absorbing them for the tree’s nutrition. Not a single one of the monsters facing me are alive.
The woman who wrought this descends from the sky above, framed in luminescent green. I take in her form, confirming my suspicions.
Though I’ve only seen her face in a picture, my memory is perfect enough to know the face. She looks like she hasn’t aged a day since the time her photo was taken.
“Marie Jade,” I say.
She looks down at me, her feet not touching the ground. Marie wears an entirely impractical white lab coat over a black-and-green bodysuit, and somehow none of it is even the slightest bit dirtied.
“Amalgam experimental variant,” she replies, her cold gaze piercing straight through me. “And my niece. You are less powerful than my reading suggested. A shame.”
Irrational fury fills me, so I take a step back mentally before I can make a poor decision. If I attack her now… actually, I don’t know how strong she is. I attempt to Appraise her.
Name: Marie Jade
Age: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Race: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Class: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Alright. Now that the demons aren’t threatening me, I’m comfortable in using my other skill upgrade.
Appraise advanced from Bronze to Silver!
You may now Appraise some non-living objects. Appraise grants a significantly more detailed list of information. Appraise now bypasses basic cloaking abilities.
I attempt to use it again.
Instead of the message I would usually see, I receive nothing but silence.
When I look back at Marie, her hands crackle with lightning.
“Not yet advanced enough to avoid basic anti-appraisal mechanics,” she says, clicking her tongue. I don’t know who she’s talking to, but it isn’t me. Her vision is focused on a spot far above my head “Had potential to improve, appears to have forgone the path of advancement. May have to be deemed a failure.”
Relentless flares to life as I prepare to fight her, which gives me pause. That trait activates when the odds are impossible, and has only activated before when I’m against a number of enemies that are all higher level than me. It didn’t even activate against the swarm of demons I was just fighting.
How powerful is she?
I pump my newfound power into Appraise, willing it to work, and I use the skill again.
This time, when I see sparks play out over her fingers, I activate my Bloodpath and surge forward, aiming a knife towards her throat.
The sparks turn into a bolt of electricity, and it springs out from her hands straight into my bloody form. This form usually feels no pain, and it suffers no damage.
When she shocks me, though, it hurts, and it destabilizes my skill so much that I fall back into my humanoid form.
But the moment of distraction means that my Appraise makes it through.
Name: Marie Jade (4)
Age: 0
Race: Human (Simulacrum)
Class: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
[APPRAISE FAILED]
Even at Silver-tier, it barely shows more. The promised additional information is completely hidden behind a wall of failure.
What it shows me, though, is still shocking. I understand the terms well enough, my soul amalgam providing the answers I need.
This isn’t Marie Jade. This is a skill of hers, something like my Blood Echo except thousands of times more advanced.
“Less hopeless than I had imagined,” the simulacrum murmurs, still not looking at me. “Appears to have allied with the two trainees. Trainees have failed. Determine repercussions later.”
While she’s talking or taking notes or whatever it is, I dive towards her again, this time using Shape Blood instead of Bloodpath, which she can clearly disrupt.
I make it two steps before my vision goes white and my body seizes up.
An electric shock pulsates through my body, and I slam into the ground. A rib breaks, piercing two of my lungs, and my spine fractures in three places through the force of it.
When my vision clears, I’m at the bottom of a deep, dark pit. Green sparks trace the sides of it, illuminating the night above.
The hole has to be thirty feet deep. Did a single attack bury me this far?
Neon green sings across my eyes again, and my body once again acts against my will, an electric force pulling me back to the surface.
“Still too weak,” Marie’s copy says, still looking anywhere but me. “Perhaps isolation will prove to be effective.”
I try to step forward, but I can’t move. Every muscle in my body is locked up, a thin line of electricity between the simulacrum and my heart stopping me from taking any action.
She floats over to Sierra casually, laying a hand on her shoulder.
The Blue Mage vanishes.
“Note to self: prioritize retrieval of second trainee. Too many resources spent to allow death,” she mutters.
“Who are you?” I ask, keeping my voice even. “What are you doing?”
“Unimportant,” Marie replies, finally meeting my eyes. “The true question is as follows: are you worthless?”
The electricity around her increases in intensity, and then she disappears with a muted pop.
Are you worthless?
The words hit harder than they should, which must mean that the people who made me—Marie included—forced a response into this.
Just because I know that doesn’t mean that I can stop it.
Are you worthless?
I still can’t move, Marie’s lightning still locking up my muscles. I am internally bleeding, and my broken spine means that even if my muscles are freed, moving will be torture. Mud covers me from head to toe where I was slammed into the earth, and half a hundred minor cuts have opened up on my skin.
Marie’s electricity flashes once more, then stops.
I know what she wants me to do. Marie is a researcher, the same as Sapphire and the rest. She wants to see my growth.
I have no other choice.
Are you worthless?
As Demonic Heritage begins to take effect, allowing me to take a brutally painful step as my muscles return to my control, I turn the words over.
I am not worthless, but my worth is defined by me, not the ones who created me.
I will accomplish what they built me to do, and then I will find them. If they want to create the perfect weapon, they can live and die with the consequences.
I advance.
Above me, the demonic tree roars.
Beneath me, the land begins to dissolve.
Objective updated: Burn it all down
The Flowering Demon has advanced to its next stage. Kill it before it can absorb all of the city.
Reward: Advance any two skills to their next tier
Objective: Marie’s monster
Kill your creators.
Targets killed: [0/32]
Reward: ???
