Chương 77: Fusion Magic - 1

WARHOL spent the last month and a half doing non-stop training. He fought the Horror, upgraded himself, rested when mandatory, occasionally helped our Frank and Josh, and mutated some more. All in all, a great time. During this period, his stats exploded. He had fought the Horror six additional times, each time mutating himself and earning boosts which eclipsed anything he had thought possible before the arrival of the Horror.

He so loved gazing at his stats; he looked at it now: [Name: Warhol Chaucer] [Level: 4700] [Martial Prowess: 12, 800] [Magical Prowess: 4, 096, 000] [Stamina: 192, 000] [Mastery Dynamics: 5525] [Unallocated Skill Points: 21, 050] Yeah, so his stats were ungodly, and in a way more literal than he would have ever imagined! Though, such power came at a cost: in his artifact sub-menu, his [Human] percentage now read at fifty-percent. A scary number. And yet...

Just doubling his stats with each mutation made him stronger than any Boon Point allocation could make him. So, seeing them as largely worthless, at least until he found a real cause for them, Warhol held onto all of his Boon Points. During the last six weeks, his battles against the Horror took on bigger dimensions.

He had graduated from fighting minor tentacles to the bigger medium tentacles; the battles, now, were affairs involving the outputs of entire armies of Swarm Goblins and spells the size of which could take out whole moons. Or perhaps planets — scale was hard to understand while fighting the Horror. The net result of his battles was massive level ups. He had no use at the moment for Boon Points, so Leveling Up meant little to him. Yet, when he got hundreds of levels ups from a single tentacle, it still felt good.

It was his stats that gave him a problem, now. Namely, his Martial Prowess. It nearly was thirteen thousand! A state line that his son would never, ever reach, unless he was brought on to fight the Horror to and somehow claimed a kill... not that he wanted to babysit him during the process and not like Lance had a skill capable of killing a tentacle, but still; which such strength, he couldn't even grip a brick without turning it to dust. Well, he was exaggerating a little bit.

But he had destroyed many belongings accidentally and moved with an unnatural swiftness which took him, even now, by surprise. His Stamina being nearly two-hundred thousand was fine to him as it meant he always had more energy than he knew what to do with, which usually meant him going out to help Frank or Josh or zooming around space strafing the Horror.

Until such a time when he learned how to control his Martial Prowess better, he put a [Slow] and [Wither] incantation on his muscles, at least if he was out and out on the town. Otherwise, he would've been an accidental menace! The mutations he had selected over the course of the last six encounters had been part of a mutation 'suite' called 'The Draconic Armor Skin System.' It made him look like a dragonkin had taken a human form; his final mutation had even given him slight horns!

He knew it was juvenile to think so, but he looked badass. What this 'draconic armor skin system' did for him was coat him in ultra-dense scales capable of being reinforced with mana to even denser scales. The description told him the 'skin system' was capable of enduring even a direct hit from an 'Eldritch God,' whatever the heck that was... He even took a few hits, on purpose, from a tertiary tentacle to test it out. The result?

He didn't feel a thing — that giant limb whacked him, and he was as unconcerned as a tree with a woodpecker pecking away. By the time Lance had finished his final exams, Warhol was planning his most ambitious excursion yet — destroying a Major Tentacle. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. During his last outing, he had scanned a major Tentacle, a limb the size of... well, again, the sheer SCALE of the horror made size estimates difficult.

He thought that a major tentacle was about the size, give or take, as a star. So, millions of times the size of a planet. Destroying one by himself would be the ultimate test. If he could, it meant he would be ready to finish the beast off by the time it came to his world. He still had months before the Horror arrived at his home, so as a developmental milestone, doing this now, would be huge to his precious time. The only problem was that with Major Tentacles also came many, many medium and tertiary tentacles.

With so many tentacles, also came a metric ton, to put it lightly, of Swarm Monsters, goblins, but also shades, slimes, and more besides. As insane as it sounded, with so many monsters coming at him, and despite his unfathomable mana reserve that was in the hundreds-of-trillions, keeping up with what seemed a hostile universe throwing everything it had against him, was hard. Very, very hard. There were the tentacles and swarm monsters but that wasn't where his troubles ended.

Further compounding his obstacles were 'blockages.' He didn't know what these blockages were made from, but it was exotic matter he had not seen anywhere else in his lifetime. What the blockages did was, well, prevent him from moving deeper into the Horror unless he splattered the blockage with a seemingly random spray of magical variants. As he made his way deeper yet into the Horror, he saw these blockages become stranger yet to bypass.

Some of them even needed him to splatter them with magic in a specific order, in a specific timeframe, which reminded him an awful lot like the runic puzzles from the Deepest Complex.

"It never is enough..." And it wasn't, either. Just when he felt like he was making headway, he was set back. It was frustrating. Demeaning, somehow. Today, however, would be different. Today, he would taste sweet victory and proclaim himself 'more' than this hell beast! Before he opened a portal back to the deepest part of the Horror, he had yet penetrated, Warhol teleported back to the windswept plains outside of Tomm. He looked over the city with a wistful detachment.

His son would be there soon, living it up, basking in the summer activities, pretending to work hard at his internship, and having, no doubts, lots of passionate 'relations' with his obvious girlfriend. Probably '-friends,' if he were being frank. No way a catch like his son would limit himself to just one girl. He smiled. That was what he was fighting for — happiness. Which meant, he had to focus on the 'now' to protect that happiness.

He drifted down to the field and began the purpose for him being here — experimentation. Being a smart man, Warhol figured at a certain point that the reason the Horror Blockages were being so finicky was because there was something about their relation to magic, he did not understand. That, or there was something about magic itself he did not understand. Whatever was the case, he wasn't going to let his ignorance get the better of him.

So, he consulted his mental palace library, and when those books held nothing, he browsed all the magic bookstores in all the world's great nations, and talked with researchers far and wide on what the 'issue' could be; finally, he settled on an unlikely lead but one that was the best he had, so he went with it — fusion magic. It was only ever hypothesized, not seen in action. That didn't inspire confidence with him.

Theory was well and good, but magical theory wasn't like theory in the humanities, theory meant for theory's sake, knowledge which somehow represented the world; neither was magical theory like scientific theory, something which would be explained by way of practical experiments. Magical theory was a guess on the nature of a thing imminently at your fingertips, assuming you had the right Boons and magical composition. And because many people had the 'proper composition' for the proving of 'fusion magic,' i. e.

, multiple kinds of magics at their disposal, and yet no one had ever proven fusion magic, it meant it either did not exist, or it did not unlock as of yet because of some unexplained reason. Ergo, he did not like his odds. Not knowing what he should do, Warhol fumbled for a bit. He figured if he should be the one to prove 'fusion magic's' existence, then he should just go down the line. A fusion of two or more magics meant, theoretically, exactly that, a certain number of magics combined together.

He incanted [Fireball] and [Water Ball] in each of his hands respectively. He did not put much mana into each ball. He figured if he had to dump an immense amount of mana into each incantation, then it would probably be worthless to him as a practical measure, but he would adjust where needed. Slowly, he brought the two elemental 'balls' together. He expected the fire and water would cancel each other out in a glorious hissing blaze of steam and spittle. He guessed he would see!

As the two orbs came together, he watched with rapt attention, like it was the birth of his son. His heart pounded. He wondered if he was about to witness something never before confirmed by scholarly eyes. The fizzling started, bubbles formed as the two orbs' edges met the extreme temperature difference, and though the immense steam made it hard to concentrate, Warhol continued forcing the two orbs together; as he pushed them together, he willed them to fuse as though he were some primeval god.

A bright light formed in front of him as the two spheres came together; an energy explosion ripped from the center of the orbs, one strong enough to nearly wind him. Warhol gasped in amazement as he saw how what laid in his hand wasn't one of the elemental orbs now dominant — such as the fire orb dehydrating the water orb, or the water orb quenching the fire orb — but something else altogether.