Auto-Battle Is God
A small girl wreathed in blood-red slaughter energy streaked forward in a blur of afterimages and body-slammed straight through a massive monster, punching a hole clean through its torso. She snagged the arm of the humanoid monster hiding behind it, twisted clear of the attack firing from its hand, then drove her foot upward — and from the humanoid monster's shattered body, an arm reduced to little more than a shape went clattering to the ground.
Driven by the red star, the girl's neck wrenched a full hundred and eighty degrees as if breaking, and she opened her mouth wide toward the massive monster that was still flailing its arms despite the giant hole punched through its body. At the same instant, the radiant thrusters mounted on her back roared like engines, spinning faster as if slamming into a higher gear.
Shockwave. Then rupture.
The shockwave erupted first, engulfing the massive monster whole and locking it rigid, before a thunderous blast of sound exploded outward and swept the surroundings clean.
In the brief span it took for the monster — still moving with a girl-sized hole through its torso — to be crushed and shattered under the pillar-like chopstick that burst from her mouth, fresh monsters appeared and either charged or wound up to attack. The girl plunged her right hand into empty air.
A chain came free in her grip, and the storm of that chain — swinging wreathed in red energy — blocked or carved apart every monster and every attack that had drawn near.
As the chain shattered into fragments and dissolved into the air, the storm died with it — and from within that stillness an axe came flying, burying itself in the chest of a monster whose beak had been sheared off by the chain and which still clutched at her.
A black tattoo flashed on her left hand. A seal rose. A dozen-odd consumables registered to her quick slots detonated all at once, refreshing her buffs and forcibly severing the combat state for a heartbeat. The monsters lost their target and froze as one.
In that fleeting gap, her neck — which had twisted with a crack — and her arm, stretched out of joint from swinging the chain, regenerated. Without so much as a pause, the body of the Nascent Soul stage cultivator driven by the red star charged the monsters again, blood-red eyes gleaming as they poured out slaughter energy.
"She really fights ridiculously well. Yeon-a, can you fight like that too?"
"Totally impossible. I could stand my ground with a spear, sure, but all I've got is spear arts. Factor out type-advantage damage and even if I mash normal-attack cancels, she'd just mutual-kill me on a rush and heal off the slaughter energy."
"And if type advantage is in play?"
"Then she dies in one hit and I win, obviously. Fighting her is a different problem."
Yu I-seong's confidence was something else, but I couldn't exactly argue. When she had a spear in her hands, she fought well enough that even I — watching through Auto-Battle — had to give her credit.
It was just that her domain still sat at the limits of a human, not a cultivator, which was why Auto-Battle outclassed her.
"Abaaat!"
My body, moving on Auto-Battle beyond the screen, was carving through monsters with brutal efficiency — and whatever the baby Nascent Soul found so entertaining about the spectacle, it had grabbed a little tower like a light stick and was waving the tiny thing around in its tiny hands.
Every monster in the Abyss was an elite by default. That was baked into the map's design.
The setting was that every creature in the Abyss was a parasite, a kind of digestive fluid. Corpses and monsters swallowed by the Abyss were broken down or overrun by that digestive fluid, and what came out the other end were the Abyss's monsters.
So the more I killed, the fewer of the Abyss's parasites there were — and the more of that digestive fluid disappeared.
Which meant what, exactly?
Random corpse Objects started spawning on the Abyss map.
And the reason smashable objects that spat out random items were so good was simple: items from objects came with level correction by default, so same-level gear dropped out of them.
Abyss objects got the map correction stacked on top of that, which meant their drop rarity hit the same tier as boss-monster loot.
The situation here was actually better than that hidden dungeon from before.
That place had treated elite mobs as bosses, so only manual combat was allowed — which meant I had to rest in between, the hunting took forever, and the level cap blocked any experience from coming in.
Experience was one thing, but the real prize was that Auto-Battle was usable here.
Whether it was the mods strengthening when I hit Nascent Soul, the experience and drop-rate penalties shrinking, or the extra growth buffs from obtaining the records and being reborn as a complete Transcendent — the burden of Auto-Battle had basically vanished.
Boss fights still didn't work, of course!
That said, she really did fight ridiculously well.
The skill usage, the mastery of slaughter energy and spiritual power — it was on another level entirely.
If I was hand-sculpting shapes out of clay, Auto-Battle was a factory press stamping them out — that kind of speed and perfection.
Weapons I swung halfheartedly became, in Auto-Battle's hands, tools tracing elegant trajectories along optimized paths to harvest monster lives.
My defense was so laughably low that when elite monsters stacked area attacks, I could have just tanked them with Mythic gear — but Auto-Battle twisted the body clear of every single one, perfect-parried only the hits that would have left real wounds, and converted them into counters. Watching it felt like sitting through a well-made action movie.
"Seven perfect parries in a row? Damn, that's actually impressive."
"That freak who only plays ironman did seventeen in a row."
"Yeah, because that dog is a freak."
Fair enough. Back on the boards people had been arguing over max consecutive parry counts, and some absolute maniac had posted a short clip of himself perfect-parrying seventeen times on a weapon one hit from breaking, stacking the damage, and one-shotting a raid boss.
Either way, even when I'd played this as a game I'd never managed more than five consecutive parries — and that had taken over a month of specifically gearing for parries just to snag the achievement. Auto-Battle was throwing them out just to kill monsters faster. The difference in feel was enormous.
Auto-Battle really was god!
When Yu Hee reached Nascent Soul, the Status Window that formed her foundation had strengthened to match that explosive growth. Auto-Battle Mode had its penalties reduced, its combat power massively increased, and even the convenience of no longer needing a startup chant — the thing she'd had to shout every time like pressing an on-button — improved.
Naturally, the matching Double Speed Mod hadn't simply gained more speed multipliers either.
Also massively reinforced upon reaching Nascent Soul, the Double Speed Mod went beyond wrecking Yu Hee's sense of time — it outright desynchronized time itself.
Warped time accelerated even the clock inside the brain, accelerated the body's time, and could trigger far more localized speed-ups.
And anywhere that wasn't a Map, it ran a double layer of speed-up.
You had to remember that Double Speed Mod had branched off the emotional emote Rest in the first place — and Rest itself had come with a function that raised recovery speed and ran game time at double speed.
Originally, the affected range had been limited to the player alone.
So what did a double-layered speed-up actually mean? It meant desynchronizing the independent map's time from the player Yu Hee's time.
Time raced only inside the map while other maps ticked along normally — the same way real-world time kept flowing whether the game on the monitor was sped up or frozen. Time simply ran differently.
That was also why Yu Hee never felt her growth slow down, even though the experience required after Nascent Soul had ballooned and training slaughter energy and spiritual power now took several times longer than it had at Golden Core.
Of course, Yu Hee had no way of knowing any of this was happening.
Even as her Auto-Battle body thrashed through monsters in time accelerated dozens of times over, churning out slaughter energy, she could lounge in the Mental World cradled in Yu I-seong's arms, holding the Nascent Soul, and watch Auto-Battle like a show.
Which meant time sense inside Yu Hee's Mental World was accelerated even further.
One hour in the Mental World was ten minutes on the current map, and ten seconds on any other map — a broken fifteen-times multiplier.
Chatter and play for a full twenty-four hours straight in the Mental World amounted to a mere two hundred forty minutes, four hours, on the current map — and four minutes anywhere else.
The problem, of course, was that this was a passive, always-on deployment so seamless that even Yu Hee, who ran it without burning any slaughter energy, had no idea it was active.
A base passive of fifteen-times speed, automatically ramping to a maximum of sixty-times whenever she trained or concentrated — that Double Speed Mod was the real secret behind how Yu Hee had hit Nascent Soul in a blink, bare-handed, with zero sect support.
There was a reason that even as a cultivator, her time sense was so thoroughly wrecked that every time she came back from a map she had to ask friendly NPCs how many days had passed.
"A red light?! Mythic! Did a Mythic drop?!"
"It's red. And it's a Unique."
"That's so confusing! Just because the colors look similar!"
"Kyau?"
Naturally, Yu Hee and Yu I-seong — too busy watching the action movie and betting on drop rarities — had no idea about any of this. Neither did the Humanity Clones grinding items on a millstone to sort them, or the ones playing with the Nascent Soul.