Orc Shaman (4)

Shin Sua arrived, and the state of her was a spectacle. Blood plastered her face and body, and monster flesh and gore had crusted so thick along her staff that it looked less like a healer's weapon than a warrior's.

"Swinging the staff again?" Jin-soo asked.

"My mana ran dry. I wasn't about to just stand there."

Her answer left him with no small share of guilt. They aren't going to start calling Shin Sua the Holy Madwoman instead of the Holy Saintess, are they? What healer in the world ran out of mana and took to cracking monster skulls with a staff?

Then again, it is efficient, in its own way. Shin Sua's original class had been warrior, so closing with a monster held no fear for her. And because she had consumed every kind of elixir there was, her strength, agility, stamina, and endurance sat far too high to belong to any healer.

With their safety absolutely assured, there was little point in her sitting out the rest of the fight just to watch. Spending whatever stamina she had left to bring down even one more monster was a gain, if only for the experience.

Should I just ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠get her a two-handed mace with a mana-recovery option? If they meant to keep fighting this way, that would be the more efficient path.

"Should I raise Sanctuary first?"

Shin Sua's question cut in while Jin-soo was seriously weighing whether the world was about to see the birth of a healer who carried a two-handed mace.

"Yeah. Go ahead."

Shin Sua spread Sanctuary.

"What should we eat?"

"Nyaaang!"

"Kkaak! Kkaak!"

Leo and Kkami answered in Jin-soo's place.

Why does that sound like meat? They had already devoured a staggering amount of monster meat over the course of the hunt, yet the hunger still blazing in both their eyes told him his reading was not wrong.

"Let's eat meat."

"All right."

The two of them divided the work with practiced ease, got a fire going, and roasted the meat.

"Kruuuugh!"

Watching that utterly unbothered scene, the orc shaman flew into a rage violent enough to raise the veins on his forehead. Unfortunately for him, there was nothing he could do. Jin-soo's party ate their fill, pitched the tent, and dropped into sleep, and all the while Jin-soo's summons and Shin Sua's stone golem went on beating monsters down at a frightening pace.

"Kruk……."

The sight of Jin-soo calmly taking a meal, and then going so far as to sleep, left the orc shaman daunted to his core.

"Kururuk!"

He glared at the tent where the party slept and started forward. Having realized he could not beat Jin-soo, he meant to withdraw first. He could not leave.

A Bone Dragon of enormous bulk closed a foreclaw, talons razor-sharp, around him and seized hold.

"Kuwoooogh!"

The orc shaman burst into a roar of fury and thrashed for all he was worth. No amount of effort tore him free of that foreclaw.

The Curse of Immortality existed to defend against an enemy's attacks. Against even the Bone Dragon's crushing grip and razor talons, the orc shaman did not take so much as a scratch. But that was all it did.

The Curse of Immortality was an absolutely invincible shield, and nothing more. It was not an absolutely invincible spear. His attack power did not rise, and his physical stats did not climb.

"Kuwok! Kuwoogh! Kruruk!"

So however he flailed, an orc shaman whose physical ability fell short could never slip the Bone Dragon's foreclaw.

"Kururuk!"

Thick humiliation and despair welled in his eyes. He was the absolute sovereign of Tower Floor 150, and not even in his dreams had he imagined being reduced to so wretched a state.

"Kuwoooogh!"

He refused to give up. He drove the monsters under his command onward, desperately wishing that the creatures bound to him by a single current of mana would topple the Bone Dragon and hand him his freedom. That wish went unanswered until Jin-soo had slept his fill and opened his eyes.

The life-and-death struggle between Jin-soo and the orc shaman reached its end only after a full week had passed.

"Kururuk."

Eyes half-glazed, the orc shaman folded to the ground with all the strength gone out of him.

That was the end. No more monsters came rushing in, and none respawned.

"This one. Any chance he recovers?"

Jin-soo studied the orc shaman with open doubt. His original plan had been to keep the shaman even after the hunt and haul him from ground to ground. But the creature who had been gushing such enormous mana was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠now little more than a half-corpse, the flame of his life a breath from going out.

Just in case, Jin-soo cast a heal. The shaman's life force only dwindled. It would not rise again.

"The way I see it, no."

"Yeah. Figures."

The orc shaman's mana was a vast lake whose bottom no one could sound, so immense it was impossible to believe any mere monster could possess it. The problem was that this mana was not the reusable kind, able to recover on its own and be spent again. It was single-use. Once consumed, it could never return.

So that's why an Out-of-Spec Monster like the orc shaman can exist out on the field. A White Drake or a Bone Dragon was a calamity simply by existing. Loose on the field, players would die with every step it took, and even if it held still the region would be declared forbidden. The orc shaman was different. Spend the power he had accumulated, and he was finished.

That constraint is why he usually stays put and only moves when specific conditions are met. Before the regression, players with luck as rotten as that man's—anyone who attacked the orc settlement where the shaman lived—would mostly have died. The only reason he survived is probably that the orc shaman never went all out. The braggart in Jin-soo's memory had been a formidable fighter, but not formidable enough to slip the grasp of an orc shaman fighting at full strength.

When he felt threatened, he only buffed the orcs of the settlement and brought them under his control. Even that much would have been nothing short of a disaster for a player party on Tower Floor 150.

Do I have to kill him myself? Jin-soo looked down at the orc shaman, whose breath was hitching toward its last. Left as he was, the flame of his life would likely gutter out before long.

Still. Just in case. Who could say a thing he had taken for single-use might not claw its way back from the brink and turn reusable? Jin-soo waited, calm and patient. Unfortunately, the orc shaman did not rise again.

The dead shaman's body crumbled apart with a dry rustle. In the same instant, a vast tide of system messages crashed across Jin-soo's eyes.

Not there. The skill book he had been hoping for, the Curse of Immortality, was nowhere among them.

Still, there's a Unique-grade Immortal Shaman advancement book. I can hang a little hope on that. Of course, he could not use it now. Regrettably, his class level was still only 2.

First, make him a summon. He had to turn the orc shaman into a summon before the soul dispersed.

Army Summons. Army Summons.

Jin-soo made the orc shaman his summon. With a crack of forming bone, a pair of orc shamans—one black, one white—came into being before him.

Testing will have to wait. The monsters in the area had been scoured away to the last, and long since.

The blessings grew back to back. It's been a while. Until now they had only crept upward in dribs and drabs. How slow had it been? He had spent an entire week killing the monsters the orc shaman kept replenishing, stacking achievement after achievement, and the blessings had grown only once.

The difficulty of growing them has shot up enormously. Even so, the breadth of the stats gained in a single growth was considerable, and that was some comfort. First, let me look at what actually grew.

Jin-soo checked the grown blessings with hungry eyes. The first thing he saw was that every stat had reached 1,422.

The class-skill and common-skill locks went up too. The growth had produced 922 stacks, enough to fix his class skills and common skills—active and passive alike—at level 1,022 each. I'll have to wait a little longer to see whether a new blessing came with it.

The growth of his blessings ended there, with the skill-fixation level rising.

A shame. If he was going to get something, he had wanted the item-level fixation blessing to grow as well, and a new blessing to appear, or an old one to upgrade. The result fell well short of what he had hoped. Is it because this isn't the first, or the second? He had achieved an Impossible Feat, and still the growth felt lower than expected.

Well. Keep walking, and an answer will turn up. When the day came that he had stacked twelve Impossible Feats, or twenty-two, he could probably look forward to the blessings exploding upward. Until then, I'll just move a little harder.

Jin-soo resolved to work more diligently, to keep pace with the blessings' slowing growth. He believed that if small efforts piled up, and piled up again—gather enough dust, as the saying went, and you had a mountain—they would bring a great reward.

Had any other player known what he was thinking, they would have cursed him without hesitation: the man who already has, reaching for still more. In truth, Jin-soo was an irregular whose very existence did not belong at the level of Tower Floor 150. In all the Tower's history, no one had ever overwhelmed the elites of each floor's highest guild by strength alone, nor hunted an Out-of-Spec Monster single-handed. He had done what others could scarcely achieve once in a lifetime—an Impossible Feat—no fewer than eight times, and taken enormous rewards for it. To feel unsatisfied even then meant that if people heaped curses on him by the bucket, he would have nothing to say for himself.

It was not that he failed to see this. Human greed, however, has no end. There is a reason people say that a man with ninety-nine sacks of rice still covets one more. Jin-soo was human. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠He was not satisfied with what he held. He wanted more.

And above all, this place was the Tower. The moment you grow complacent, everything ends. To survive—and to keep surviving until he conquered the Tower—he had to strive without cease, and covet more than he had.

Having confirmed the grown blessings, Jin-soo turned to the spoils.

The Immortal Shaman advancement book stays in the inventory for now. Most of the rest are buff skills. Including the Blessing of Madness skill book, every one of them was a buff. They'll be useful. The catch was the conditions for learning them. All of them were exclusive to the shaman class.

Awkward. Under ordinary circumstances he would class-change into an Immortal Shaman, learn the books, and be done. He had no intention of becoming an Immortal Shaman right now.

A shaman advancement book is too rare on the lower floors to get hold of easily. On the Tower's middle and upper floors, such a book was simple to obtain. On the lower floors, it was like plucking a star out of the sky.

Do I buy one with points? Put bluntly, unless his class level climbed higher, purchasing a shaman advancement book only to learn the basic skills at a mere level 2 and then scrap the class was miserable value. And yet leaving skill books I already have to gather dust is a waste.

While he was turning the problem this way and that, a low hum rose from the communication stone linked directly to Ogawa. It was vibrating.