Ronan hadn’t learnt his lesson. The nightmare tutorial never let him rest. He should have known better than to expect a peaceful night of sleep. At least I got a hot meal. Not that I really needed it, but the stew was really delicious.
He was standing on the roof of the farmhouse, looking in the direction that Moira had said the coastline was when he had asked her the day before. Silence was something that had been stolen for the past three hours, the world filled with a deep rumbling. The ground shook, the grass in the meadows trembling in the moonlight, as though it knew what approached.
Ronan narrowed his eyes. One or more of the stats must improve sensory capabilities, because his vision was so much better when he had a few thousand points in each of them than at the start of a new iteration. It was still nighttime, but the moon was gibbous and cast a glittery glow over the landscape. In the far distance he could make out a gigantic shadow. Of course, it could have just been the sky, but the distinct lack of stars or otherwise in the area the shadow occupied was a dead giveaway.
Then he heard the rumbling grow louder. There were other noises that he could barely make out if he strained his hearing. Cracks and booms, whooshing, and something that resembled tv static. I can’t really see from here, but if I had to guess, based on the tutorial theme… A bloody tsunami. Definitely.
Moira and Hailey had been woken up by the noise a short while after Ronan, but they hadn’t climbed up to the roof with him to see what was happening. He knew it was only a tutorial, but he planned to tell them to get in the old land rover parked in the garage and drive in the opposite direction of the sea as fast as its engine could carry them. There was no need to watch people die if he could stop them from doing so.
About half an hour later—far more time than he had wanted the pair to spend getting ready and leaving—the old woman and the strange little girl had left their farmhouse behind. Moira had been annoyed that she had to abandon the last vestiges of her life, but she accepted that to stay would have meant death for the both of them. Even if there were no monsters, the tsunami alone would have obliterated the house and killed them. It was going to do that. But Ronan would be fine.
He was on the roof again, of the barn this time, as it had a little more height on the house and gave him a greater vantage point. The rumbling was deafening now and the wave could be seen in full view, even without squinting much. Ronan had a strange moment where he stared at what was ostensibly a devastating natural disaster that was going to leave a large region of the country in tatters, yet posed almost no threat to him. A lone man. Lone chronate, I guess? I’m not really human anymore. I should definitely test out my new abilities in the coming fights.
The first time he’d checked his status after the race change Ronan had gained a fresh appreciation for how overpowered Stupendous Stats was. His new stat, chron, also benefited from its effects. Rather than the measly ten points it had started with—which he suspected would be higher if he’d had the race from level 0, based on the stat shift failure message when he’d finished the race change—it was sitting at a juicy few thousand, the same as the rest of his stats.
The large shadow had been revealed to be some sort of titanic monster, one that made even Karadaxos look bite-sized. If Ronan had to describe it, he would say it was a kaiju. And while that was terrifying—he was near certain he might die in the approaching battle—it was also thrilling. Every time he risked his life he learnt new things and grew more powerful. He read over his new affinities while waiting for the inevitable battle, wondering how he could exploit them.
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Time Affinity (Mythical): You are attuned to the flow of time. Your mana can gain the properties of time, allowing it to behave in strange and erratic ways. You may interfere with the flow of time using your mana, but the cost is often prohibitive. Skills deriving their power from time-based attunements and effects will be more powerful when used by one possessing this affinity. Weapons with time-related enchantments will have more of their power drawn out when used by one possessing this affinity.
Dimensional Affinity (Legendary): You are attuned to the infinite dimensions of reality. Your mana can imitate a dimension as well as interfere with the fabric of reality, allowing you to slip between dimensions and manipulate them in complex ways. Skills deriving their power from dimensional attunements or effects will be more powerful when used by one possessing this affinity. Weapons with dimensional-related enchantments will have more of their power drawn out when used by one possessing this affinity.
He wasn’t sure which of his skills would be affected by them. He certainly didn’t possess any items that could benefit. Unfortunately his Sorceric Bastion of Purity sub-class nullified a lot of the benefits of the two powerful affinities, but he was sure that he could push through it with enough effort. Certainly with time magic. His race was now geared specifically for it, and if that wasn’t enough of a hammer to smash the wall his class put up, Ronan would just have to find another way.
When it came to his new race’s innate time manipulation abilities, he discovered that it was possible to use it without mana. It ran entirely on chron, which was both a stat and a resource simultaneously. There was no user manual that came with the race change, but ever since he had become a juvenile chronate, he had occasionally felt strange fluctuations around him that passed as soon as they were felt.
One happened as he watched the approaching tsunami, and Ronan tried to reach out and grab it… with his mind? He wasn’t sure what he was using, really, but something definitely happened. There was a soft boom and a gust of wind near his head. Not damaging or overly powerful, but it was rather strange for it to have randomly occurred. He glanced at his status. His chron was down by about 0.3 points. How does manipulating time cause the wind to blow harder? Maybe I sped it up in that one area? Also it was really cheap.
He did wonder if that was Resourceful at play. His chron stat was only boosted by Stupendous Stats, but as it was technically a resource, maybe the enhancement was doing some hidden work to increase his total pool without actually making the number bigger? That makes… some sense. Probably. Or it’s just cheap to manipulate a random time eddy without much precision.
He kept doing it over and over again. Every time he felt a fluctuation he reached for it, causing a litany of strange effects. Mostly it was odd wind movements, but once he managed to change the flow of time for one of his fingers. He almost broke it while moving his hand downwards as it was delayed and then suddenly snapped back into the normal timestream. While that worried him in regards to his health if he accidentally slowed time for his heart or another important organ, there was no way to figure out a new ability except to test it.
Another half an hour later Ronan had gained enough proficiency with his time manipulation that he could figure out the spatial location of the time eddies before he reached out to them. He also discovered that the fluctuations were just natural shifts in the flow of time—because apparently it wasn’t uniform even in a local area—and what he was doing when he manipulated them was just exacerbating the effect of the fluctuation, whether that was to speed up or slow time down in a very, very small area.
Basically it was useless at that moment. He doubted it would be the deciding factor for the impending battle, but it was neat that he’d figured it out beyond the basics. Over time Ronan was certain he would gain a greater mastery in time manipulation, but unfortunately he couldn’t practice any longer. The world shook as the towering wave approached. It was larger than any tsunami he’d seen on video or heard of, reaching what looked to be over 500 metres in height. He felt like an ant, and almost retracted his previous statement that he wouldn’t be harmed by the wave.
There were many pockets of dense water mana in the tsunami, as well as moving shadows that had to be monsters. Worse, the shadow that he assumed to be a kaiju was taller than the wave by at least half. He had twenty seconds before it hit him, and he needed to decide whether to avoid the water or face it head-on.
