Episode 6: The Grind Begins

Arson raised his hands and a flood of energy swirled out from his palms. He couldn’t manage to properly form the orbs before he sent them toward the living armor.

The effect was lackluster but managed to spin the armor off its zombie-like feet after the two collisions occurred. Arson felt the sudden urge to attempt to spartan-kick the armor off the top of the trash heap like the girl in the vision had, but then decided to charge two more orbs instead.

“Yeah, right,” said Arson and he fired two complete orbs at the creature as it rose. The second batch of orbs had a much more intense explosion that made Arson want to jump with excitement.

“Come on, you rusted spark plug, let’s go!” The armor was blown through the air and landed on its neck, unaffected by the fall, but the chest plate he’d managed to hit sported a couple new orb-sized dents.

The creature rose to its feet once more and ran at Arson again. He charged another two orbs and on pure instinct alone mashed them together.

They refused to merge at first, only to drain more mana from Arson as an even larger orb formed—nearly as big as a basketball.

“Eat sparks!”

Arson was ashamed that he had missed his first kill. He shut his eyes and thrust both hands forward. He felt the orb leave his hands, and even heard a ghostly wail of sorts.

He didn’t witness the orb drain all the mana from the creature as it died, detonating the life force within its body, nor the explosive colors that twisted through the air as mana and experience entered his body through his closed eyes and into his head.

He heard an odd noise and opened his eyes a moment later to see nothing but armor pieces scattered around the top of the heap.

He looked around and didn’t notice any immediate threats, but that would most likely change soon.

A prompt for the fight popped up and Arson almost chose, experience over stats, but then remembered that for whatever reason, Touch of the SunStorm Sovereign couldn’t be gained after level 1.0, or whatever that meant. So he once again decided stats.

Then Arson’s first robot came and he took aim and fired. The robot dodged the first orb but the second hit the thing in its face, which caused an explosion that Arson was all too happy to finally witness.

“What did I say? Come up here and you’ll get the sparks!”

All volume control was gone for Arson, he clicked stats at the end of each fight. More came, and more stats were gained with each opponent defeated.

Arson began to see mana flow through the air toward him when he defeated certain opponents, actually, everything but the robots. He even managed to shoot a flying sword as it flew by that made him feel like he was going to burst.

So he fired more shots until the feeling abated.

Fewer enemies got a chance to climb the mountain as Arson patrolled the perimeter of the heap he was on. He began to allow only one at a time to climb as the ones he stopped from the ascent entirely mixed back into the crowd and took his stat points with them.

The single opponents that made it to the top had different names that popped up after they were defeated in an odd log that scrolled in the bottom left of Arson’s vision.

“You have defeated a level 3.5 living armor, energy converted to stats, Enigma’s Armor of descent rewards 3.5 stat points, conversion rate 100%”

Arson was afraid to guess what any of the text meant, but he had a few ideas as to what he thought happened when he chose stats over experience after each fight.

Something told Arson that if he chose experience over stats, his conversion rate would probably fall far short of 100%, but for now stats gave him a large return.

Things continued like this and Arson began to wonder after four hours of straight combat when he was going to run out of mana. Only for the thought to summon a bar in his vision that showed a white energy fluctuate with every orb he shot, in the upper left of his vision.

“Well that helps, but what about health and stamina?” Arson questioned. Two more bars popped up at his question. One a dark crimson, which didn’t move, and the other a vibrant white gold, that fluctuated as much as his mana bar. He tied it to his stamina.

He didn’t understand why his stamina bar moved as much as his more used mana, and this alarmed him as did his slightly growing health bar.

The longer he fought, the longer the crimson bar grew. He couldn’t help but think of how an abundance of life force could also be dangerous and decided to take more risks. Why he correlated having too much life-force with the need to risk his own wellbeing, he assumed was due to being pumped full of raw energy.

“Bring it, rust bucket!” Arson realized he was quickly able to destroy groups of the foes if he closed his eyes and focused on each individual cast of orbs. He was far from rapid fire, but the stream of orbs was enough to bombard groups below him.

He only opened his eyes to aim in intervals between every three or five shots. After a while, the amount of remnants and nearby fights kept most away from Arson’s heap. So he meditated while he waited and listened.

When he entered his Soul Realm, what manifested visually was far different. Orbs like the frozen orbs of lightning flew in random directions all around the sun. The sun’s tendrils would latch on to a random element frozen by the particle ring, and the orb would disappear.

Arson noticed each time a random element was snatched from the air around the sun, another orb of frozen lightning would be created by another of the sun’s tendrils and the frozen particle ring.

Arson was at a loss as to what he was seeing, but had a sense that some sort of energy conversion occurred with each action the sun took. Then the conversion rate of 100% from enemy experience to stat points flashed through Arson’s mind and he snapped out of his Soul Realm.

He immediately opened his status overlay and went to his stat page. Even as he watched, the number increased, steadily and without pause.

“Am I going to really need this many stats?” Arson already had over 100, and the number was still on the rise. Arson merely shrugged and decided to put a point into armor. The prompt that popped up let Arson know immediately, he was going to need every stat he could get his hands on.

“To put this point in armor, you will need to unlock it first. Would you like to unlock Armor for 1000 stat points? Yes or No?” Arson scowled, and jammed the No button mentally.

“Well ain’t that a socket spraying sparks.” He rose to his feet once more and cracked his neck before he rushed down the heap to find a new hill to become king of.

“Eat sparks!”