Leo's Growth (2)
"How are you using a mage's skills?!"
"Just now he even threw a dark-attribute healer's curse!"
"Skills from all kinds of classes—how is that even possible?!"
"Is that thing even human? What the hell is he?!"
The enemies had lost all will to fight, babbling in panic. Jin-soo couldn't have cared less.
Shhk! Shluck!
"Aaaagh!"
"S-spare me!"
"It hurts! It hurts!"
Jin-soo swept Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword through them and put every last one down.
Players out of Moosung. All through the fight he had kept Stat Predation and Skill Predation active, and thanks to that he had been able to devour every skill and stat they held at 200 or below.
Unorthodox, on top of it. Every skill he had swallowed was a signature art of Unorthodox Players from Moosung. Those who walked the heretical path were often so grotesque in temperament that, at a glance, they could be mistaken for the mad. Not all of them. Even so, the tendency ran deep.
The problem is the martial arts. Unorthodox arts were unstable, but they grew fast. The drawback was that rapid growth meant hitting one's ceiling sooner, and an unstable art made that ceiling hard to break. In the Tower, though, the strengths of Unorthodox arts stand out, and the weaknesses die off. Hit a limit, and you simply hunted higher-grade monsters, built the merit to match, raised your level, and stepped past it. Once the arts became skills, much of their instability had been patched over as well.
Still, you can't change what you were born as. Skill-converted Unorthodox arts never fully shed their innate instability, and so cases of mana runaway ending in self-destruction, or of the mind itself breaking, still cropped up often enough. Changing into a class that raised the Endurance and Mental stats, or wearing items with options that supported those two, could improve one's safety…
But by temperament, far too many of them figure willpower is enough and change into warrior or assassin classes. Their gear skewed the same way, favoring raw attack power. Among those of Unorthodox origin, the instability of their arts therefore tended to grow worse, not better. From the start, they'd rather grow fast and unstable than slow and steady. Most of them chased extreme strength rather than raising their stability and walking a middle path.
"Why were you tailing me?"
At Jin-soo's question the Players hemmed and hawed, none of them daring to open their mouths.
Whoosh!
Shhk!
The Blood-Sucking Sword sheared one finger off a Player.
"Aaaagh!"
He burst into a scream of pain.
"Why were you tailing me?"
Jin-soo looked at the man with the missing finger as he asked.
"You son of a bitch cut off my finger!"
The Player still hadn't grasped his situation. Expression blank, Jin-soo swung the Blood-Sucking Sword once more.
Whoosh!
Shhk!
Another finger came off.
"Hngh! It hurts! I'm gonna die from the pain!"
Tears streamed down the face of the Player who had lost two fingers as he screamed.
"Still not in the mood to answer, I see."
Jin-soo raised the Blood-Sucking Sword again.
"It was the branch leader's order!"
In that instant the two-fingered Player blurted it out in a rush.
"The branch leader's order. Which sect?"
"Sahyeolmun."
"Are Sahyeolmun and Changseongmun at war?"
"Th-that's not it. But relations are bad."
"I see."
Before his regression, by the time Jin-soo reached the Tower's 200th floor, Changseongmun and Sahyeolmun had already been at war.
So it hasn't come to open war yet. War simply hadn't broken out. They were still snarling at each other's throats all the same.
"What order did the branch leader give?"
"He told us to confirm whether you'd joined Changseongmun."
"Just confirm? From the way you lot moved, that doesn't seem to be the end of it."
"Th-the truth is, he told us to subdue you and bring you in. Said that since you had ties to Changseongmun, you'd be useful."
"Figured as much."
A Changseongmun affiliate would make a fine bargaining chip. Even if he wasn't one of theirs, they had clearly decided they could wring some use out of him anyway.
"You think he's lying? They came after us over something that petty?"
Shin Sua sounded as if she couldn't believe it.
"I-it's true! I'm absolutely not lying!"
The fingerless Player shouted as if he'd been wronged.
By common sense, hunting someone for a reason that small was absurd. But in the Tower, the unreasonable happens far more often than the reasonable. People drew blades because a passerby had looked at them the wrong way, or because someone wouldn't yield the road. It happened often enough. From the Tower's 200th floor up, that tendency only gets worse.
Even people from the same dimension had gaps born of culture. How much worse, then, between people who had come from entirely different dimensions? And the Tower was a world where power ruled everything—the strong devouring the weak. Among those who think themselves strong, plenty operate with open contempt for everyone else. Sahyeolmun was a gathering of exactly that sort, more than capable of pulling something like this over a reason so trivial.
They'd have looked down on me for being from Earth, too. Had Jin-soo been from Arius or Moosung, they might have shown at least a little caution. But he was from Earth, and the assumption that he was naturally weaker than they were had been hammered into their heads. The thought that they might be the ones getting crushed had never even occurred to them.
"Leo."
Jin-soo called him.
"Nyaang?"
"Eat your fill."
"Nya!"
At Jin-soo's words, Leo's mouth split wide in delight.
"Eek!"
"You cruel bastard! Just kill us!"
"Feeding people to a beast!"
"How can you wear a human face and do something so vile!"
The Players snarled, faces twisted with fear.
"Nyam!"
Leo clamped down on one Player's arm.
"Aaaagh! He's eating me alive! That monster cat is eating me!"
The bitten Player thrashed, face contorted in pain.
"Huh?"
After thrashing for a good while, he tilted his head when the agony he'd expected never came. No matter how hard Leo bit, all he left were tiny tooth marks. So instead of the pain of flesh being torn away, all the man felt was a faint sting.
"Ahem."
"You toying with us? Just kill us already!"
Convinced Jin-soo was playing with them, the Players burned with humiliation.
"M-my stats and skills!"
A moment later, though, the Player had no choice but to be horrified. His stat and skill levels were plunging.
"What's wrong with him?"
"Yeah, what's he yelling about all of a sudden?"
"Huh? Now that you mention it, why are my stats and skill levels like this?"
"Mine too?"
Watching their companion panic, the Players opened their own status windows—and every one of them flinched. Only then did they see that several of their stats and skill levels had dropped hard.
"Nyaang!"
Pap-pap-pap-puck!
Thoroughly delighted, Leo bit and tore at the Players.
As expected, Leo's efficiency with the skills is far beyond mine. Jin-soo had kept Skill Predation and Stat Predation active throughout the fight, and even so, by the time it ended, he still hadn't devoured every skill and stat they held at 200 or below. Leo, though, was swallowing their sub-200 skills and stats at a tremendous pace.
A shame there's a cap at 200 and below. The skills gained through Skill Sharing with Leo had a flaw: their levels didn't display properly. Using Level Fixation would probably raise the efficiency further. It was a situation he had never faced, before the regression or after, and he couldn't decide lightly.
Due to continuous predation, the level restrictions on Skill Predation and Stat Predation are partially lifted.
"Huh?"
A system message rose before Jin-soo's eyes.
A partial lift on the level cap? His eyes sharpened.
"Nyaang?"
Leo seemed to sense something too. He tilted his head, then padded up to a Player whose Stat Predation and Skill Predation were already finished and swung a forepaw again.
Status window. Jin-soo opened his and checked the levels of Skill Predation and Stat Predation.
Nothing's changed? The level field looked exactly as it had before, as if the system window itself were cracked.
"Open your status window for me."
Jin-soo spoke to the Player who had just received a fresh baptism of Leo's forepaw.
"No!"
The Player answered, face full of rage.
Shhk!
Jin-soo swung the Blood-Sucking Sword.
"Aaaagh!"
"You doing it, or not?"
Jin-soo asked again.
"I-I'll do it."
With that, the Player opened his status window.
He doesn't have any stats or skills at 500 or below. Originally, only stats and skills at 200 or below should have been gone. Now the situation had changed.
"Open your status window for me."
Jin-soo spoke to a Player Leo hadn't touched yet.
"Fine."
Having watched what happened to his comrade, the man was obedient. The status window of a Player Leo hadn't laid a paw on was comparatively intact.
Thud!
Jin-soo struck him with the scabbard.
"Agh! Why are you hitting me? I did what you said!"
The Player protested. Jin-soo paid him no mind and kept swinging the scabbard.
Thud! Thwack! Thud!
"Stop! Stop it! Just kill me clean! I did everything you told me! So why are you hitting me!"
The Player raised his voice, indignant at the unfairness of it. Jin-soo had no room to listen. Every nerve was locked on the changes scrolling across the status window the man had opened.
I'm predating stats and skills at 500 and below. At first, only stats and skills at 200 or below could be devoured. Now that ceiling had risen to 500. This isn't me growing.
Leo had grown.
No—can this even be called growth? Jin-soo recalled the system message about a partial release of the level restriction. Were the levels of Stat Predation and Skill Predation that Leo possesses so absurdly high that a restriction was clamped on them? And has continued use partially lifted that cap? It was the only way he could make sense of what was happening.
How is something like that even possible? Whether it was a job advancement book or a skill book, the level at the moment of acquisition was always 1. Leo was the exception. On top of that, he used Stat Predation—a skill you can't even touch until your class level hits 100—the instant he absorbed the Dark Predator job advancement book.
Shadow Footsteps, the skill Jin-soo had received from Leo through sharing, had a broken level as well. Are Leo's skill levels something the system simply can't express? Because a shadow beast's skills and level system differ from a Player's?
Jin-soo's thoughts tangled. The conclusion, though, was simple.
Good thing I didn't touch it carelessly. Seeing Skill Predation and Stat Predation with their levels shattered, he had considered spending a Level Fixation stack. But because it was tied to Leo, he had held back, worried it might do harm. If he's growing on his own, there's no need to interfere going forward.
It wasn't that he begrudged the Level Fixation stack. He was afraid that using it might halt Leo's growth. Skill Predation and Stat Predation aren't my skills. He had only received them through sharing. Their owner was Leo, and Leo alone.
Leo isn't bound by a blessing the way I am. A blessing came with advantages and disadvantages both, and because of that Jin-soo had struggled quite a bit at the start. But not anymore. What he had gained from the blessings far outweighed what he had lost. Leo's situation is different. There was no guarantee that what was good for Jin-soo would be good for Leo. A skill level unconditionally fixed in connection with 2 might well become a shackle around Leo's neck.
I am curious, though. How a summon who wasn't a Player could absorb the Dark Predator job advancement book. How he had possessed high-level Skill Predation and Stat Predation from the very beginning. What it meant that the level restriction had been partially lifted. Well. I'll learn someday.
In truth, it didn't matter if he never did. Leo had been with him until now, and he would stay with him from here on.