New Member

At breakfast on day 10, I get a pleasant surprise, when Belle clears her throat, saying she wants to say something.

Everybody looks to her, and she shifts awkwardly, not enjoying being the centre of attention. It’s a shift from her usual confidence, which I notice immediately.

“Everyone. Gemma. If the offer is still there, I’d like to join your guild please.” Belle says.

Olivia is stifling her laughter, and Belle shoots her a glare. This does nothing to stop the older woman from laughing with a hand over her mouth.

I look around the table. “Everybody okay with Belle becoming an official guild member?” I ask.

“Welcome to the team!” Mia calls out.

“Yay for scary lady!” Lena adds, and Emma elbows her in the ribs. “Ow!” Lena exclaims, giggling.

Skylar, looking at Belle and smiling with a knowing expression, nods her approval.

“Yay!” Elsa says in a small voice, and Mia looks at her, smiling affectionately.

Everybody else nods too, so I send Belle the guild invitation. She looks down at the window, reading it fully, inspecting it for a few seconds, before she hits the accept button.

I ignore the windows for the moment, and instead address Belle. “Welcome to The Centurions.” I tell her.

She smiles at me, seeming genuinely pleased to be here.

Lena starts clapping. Mia joins in, and the rest of us shrug and applaud her too. Belle sits down, somewhat embarrassed at the positive attention.

“Good job dear.” Olivia says, and Belle smiles at her too.

After breakfast, I finally read the two window popups. The 10,000XP is basically useless at this point, but the other two rewards, a class level and a skill evolution point are invaluable.

I’m a bit unsure about the new quest, specifically the ‘Kill the Enforcer’ part. I do tend to want to spare people if I can. I’m not sure I’ll be able to here, and even besides, from what I’ve heard and read in the Observe window, Max is the one person who might deserve it.

Anyway, not the point. I have some quest rewards to examine.

The skill evolution is the rarest reward, and I know exactly where it’s going. I’ve been looking forward to this for ages. I tap the skill evolution option for Mana Bolt and look over the options.

Arc Bolt is the one I’m choosing, I know that almost immediately.

While Arc Wave is a really good crowd control option, I have enough of those for the moment with my cryomancy.

Arcfall is a great damage dealing option, but the fact that it uses my mana means that I’d sacrifice a lot of my damage dealing potential in the meantime. Without more power in the melee department, I don’t think I like that idea.

Arc Bolt is a direct upgrade to Mana Bolt, which is exactly what I want. It has the added bonus of making Arcane Torrent much more powerful too.

Choosing Arc Bolt would triple the damage of both my normal arcane damage dealing spell, as well as triple the destructive power of Arcane Torrent, which is already pretty powerful.

I therefore tap the button for Arc Bolt, and enjoy the feeling of clearly definable progress.

I call Ivy over so she can help me with the next class level. She’s finally accepted the utility of getting her more powerful too, and so together, we invest the class level into the Summoner class.

The choice is obvious. A new artificial spirit could be useful, but I have no plans to transition to a full summoner build. Same with the elemental spirit.

The point of choosing this class to invest in was to increase Ivy’s power, and the stat upgrade gives her an immediate and massive power increase.

It does seem like there’s going to be a pattern of this class increasing the cost of my summoning skills and taking more of my mana regen, but the cost is worth it to make Ivy as powerful as she can be, especially with her incredibly important position as the guild’s healer.

Therefore, the stat upgrade it is.

With 142 extra statpoints, we have a lot to spend, and a lot of easy upgrades we can do.

15 go immediately to getting her intellect up, and we finally hit the 250 point milestone.

Having hit the 250 milestone in intellect, we ponder what the next step for her would be. We figure it definitely couldn’t hurt to increase her strength and agility stats to the next milestone each (100), to make sure she can keep up with everybody else who’s getting faster, and to make sure she can defend herself properly.

With both of those potential weaknesses taken care of, we have 27 statpoints left to spend. We decide to increase her wisdom stat again, as her increased intellect means she now needs even longer to refill her mana bar once it’s emptied.

At the end of it all, Ivy’s stat sheet is looking extremely well rounded.

“Oh yeah, you still have that material bonus slot open.” I remember, as we look through her character sheet.

“We should try to find something I can use for that.” Ivy says, and I nod in agreement.

Then I have a brainwave. I open my inventory and pull out the vibranium ingot. The metal seems to almost hum with magical power in my hand.

“What do you think?” I ask, looking at Ivy.

The healer looks at the powerful metal skeptically. “Wouldn’t that be best used for a weapon or some armour?” She asks.

“Possibly. We can ask Olivia about it first if you like.” I offer. “But none of us here know how to forge weapons or armour. I certainly can’t do it with my craft skill, Vibranium is too powerful. We’d have to wait until after everything with Mathias to find somebody who could work with it.”

“We’re slowly getting more from the higher level enemies we’re fighting, so I highly doubt this will be the last ingot we ever get. And in the service of getting as powerful as possible before we fight Mathias, this could be extremely useful.” I lay out.

“Is there any way we could check what it would do for me?” Ivy asks, still somewhat unsure, taking hold of the ingot as I pass it to her.

As soon as she lays a hand on the metal, a popup opens.

My eyes widen at the popup. Having Ivy be able to enrich Vibranium would be absolutely incredible. Even if we can only use it for her body, it would still massively increase her survivability in combat.

We run to find Olivia to check with her what she thinks, but we’re both pretty excited about the possibility.

We find her getting ready for the day of training with Belle, and chatting with Mia about the possibility of Olivia using armour and weapons.

“-could be useful, but unless I have something that alters its shape and function as I do, it would be a liability. My strength is in my versatility, and weapons and armour that are as versatile as I am, are very rare, very powerful, and not easily found. Maybe one day though.” Olivia finishes explaining.

We wait patiently for them to finish their discussion, as Mia nods. Olivia turns to us as Mia thinks over her answer. “What can I do for you girls?” She asks us.

“We think Ivy should eat this Vibranium ingot.” I tell her.

Olivia raises an eyebrow. “Are you certain? You must have a good reason.” She replies.

I nod, and begin to explain, and after hearing us out, she agrees with my reasoning for Ivy consuming the Vibranium.

As she points out, though the magical metal is extremely powerful and could make for some incredibly strong weapons or armour, if we don’t win the fight against Mathias, it’s unlikely we’d be able to commission anything with it anyway.

With that morbid possibility on the table, and the decision made, Ivy starts to eat the Vibranium ingot.

It’s a strange looking process, and it does take a bit for her to actually eat the thing. Once she manages to take a bite and reinforce her teeth with the metal, she can get through the rest of it much easier.

It takes her about twenty minutes all up, during which the rest of the guild gets ready for training today.

With Ivy’s fairly massive upgrade, I feel confident that we can beat the third segment of the raid today. We’ve moved inside the church, and we’re fighting against three more Balder Knights, plus a Channeler.

The Channeler is a fairly physically weak, mage type enemy that has the amazing ability to be the most annoying enemy we’ve faced in ages.

It can buff up a Balder Knight with its magic, fire spells at us, and it teleports around the inside of the church, including the balconies inside the room, making it extremely annoying to take out.

I agree with Belle and Mia, who have both complained about the enemies being boring and annoying by this point. The Channeler is the only reason we haven’t beaten this segment yet.

The good news is that after this, assuming this Raid is following similar logic and area design to the game its based on, the next segment will be on top of the church, and it’ll be the boss of the area, the Bell Gargoyles.

The not so fun news is that also according to the game, that means we’ll have to head to the Depths next, and then Blighttown, neither of which I’m looking forward to, but I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Like usual, Emma and Lena are sparring with each other again, supervised by Elsa. The two lovers enjoy the routine of experimenting with their magic and trying to push each other to get stronger, even if they can’t really get too much stronger.

And Elsa enjoys supervising them. She says that it’s giving her constant creative inspiration, and her painting of Emma and Lena is coming along nicely.

There’s 7 of us going into the Raid, and we have a really nice team composition overall. Olivia, Belle, Ivy, Mia, Skylar, Paige, and I. With all of us ready, I open the white fog gate to the third segment of the Raid, and we step inside.