Ascending Endlessly: I Copy Skills

"Jesus, what rank is he?"

I heard chatter amongst a couple of low-ranked hunters as they gazed at the sack sitting next to me.

"Higher than ours, at least. Stop staring,"

There were two reasons they might be looking at me. The first was that I was soaked head to toe in blood, wearing no armor and carrying no weapon. The second was the heavy sack of gloam crystals sitting next to me.

Over the course of two days, I had just killed almost every monster in the D-Rank dungeon outside of Matherstown. The dungeon was different from the labyrinth of Oasis, but its layout was relatively similar. It consisted of three floors, each with a symmetrical layout which was much easier to navigate. 

Although it had a simpler layout, the dungeon possessed a larger variety of monsters, namely three types: wolves, bears, and large lizards. Even I was amazed by the work I'd been able to do, considering my lack of knowledge regarding these monsters and their abilities.

It was all thanks to my mana battery. No, I hadn't gone mad and absorbed it all into my body again. However, I did do some testing with a clear head. I quickly learned my limit. I could only actually contain as much mana as a high-end D-Rank hunter. This was disappointing, but I could make up for it in other ways.

This was where the other thing I'd learned came into play. Similarly to how I could allow the skill cards to draw off my Gate as a supplemental mana source, I could connect the mana flow from a mana battery to a skill card and use myself as a medium to supply a much larger amount of mana. This meant I could maximize the potential of the skill within the card, as well as cast it quickly.

I had only made one mana battery on the trip here, but it was still significant. There was enough mana stored within it to cast D-Rank skills at maximum potential around forty to fifty times. Using this, I'd quickly swept through the dungeon, possessing a clear speed not far from what a B-Rank hunter could accomplish. Of course, few B-Rank hunters would ever be found in a D-Rank dungeon, so I had to just use a rough estimate from my knowledge, but I felt it was a fair evaluation.

What I had yet to explore was the B-Rank skill I'd obtained from Charles Mann. I tried it briefly, but the second I felt it rapidly draining the mana from my battery, I cut it off. Now that I had some money, I had a bit of time to leisurely build up a mana reserve. 

First, of course, I would need a base of operations. After turning in my gloam crystals at the embassy and getting paid out, I found a local inn and walked inside, still caked with dry sinew and blood. The barkeep seemed less than thrilled for me to be there looking and smelling like I did, but I didn't particularly care.

"As you can see, I need to wash up. I'll take a room for a week."

I placed my sack of chips, much smaller now than when it held the gloam crystals, on the counter.

"How much?"

He side eyed me and didn't stop polishing his glass.

"For a week, it'll be a gram."

I pulled out ten 100 milligram chips and placed them on the counter. He pulled a key out from under the bar, a steel plate with the number seven engraved on both sides.

"Upstairs and to the right,"

He nodded as I thanked him. I headed up and found my room. The structures here really were different than in Oasis. There, buildings were mostly made of glass and iron. Here, everything was wood. 

It was a pleasant change. The light drifting in through the windows of the room's wooden walls and floors felt really cozy. I reveled in it for a moment before showering and getting to work.

I'd made quite a bit of money in the dungeon. About three grams of Polarium. It would be enough to live here for a couple of weeks and eat decently, too. Ah, I miss the days of online banking. It was way easier than carrying around a sack of metal. 

Still, it was nice that our currency didn't suffer from any kind of inflation. Since each chip was a combination of steel and Polarium, they were worth precisely their weight. It was a sort of gold standard. Anyway, I'd need to open a bank account.

But that could wait until later. For now, I wanted to create more batteries. I layed all one hundred and twenty cards out on the floor, taking inventory of all of my skills and how many empty cards I had remaining. Considering I didn't know the names or precise ranks of the skills, I could only make up new names and estimate their ranks with context. I counted as such.

One Flame Pillar, D-Rank. I'd purposely destroyed the damaged one to empty out the card.

One Lesser healing, D-Rank. This card could quickly heal lesser surface wounds, but nothing more than that. I'd experimented with it on some enemies and it wasn't particularly strong. It could, however, stop the bleeding on larger wounds. 

Three Laceration cards, D-Rank. This was a skill that transformed mana into a whirlpool of tiny rotating sharp edges. It was used at a close range.

Five Pulse cards, D-Rank. This was a skill that would send a force wave outwards, knocking back enemies within a radius. It wasn't very strong, but using them in succession made it pretty useful.

Three Icicle cards, D-Rank. This skill had a low mana cost, and I could cast it successively from a single card without doing much damage to the spell signature. It would simply create an icicle and fire it from a distance, and was decently forceful.

One Snow card, F-Rank. This card would just lower the temperature to slightly below freezing within a radius. It was really weak. It would also create some light snow by freezing a little of the moisture in the air.

One Lesser Poison card, D-Rank. This would liquify a very small amount of mana and turn it into a poison. The poison wasn't particularly strong, only paralyzing enemies slightly and making them a bit dizzy, but I could see it being useful if I were to apply it to a weapon since it would just be added damage.

One Stun card, C-D-Rank. This may have been a C-Rank skill. It was quite strong. It made a bubble of mana that would shock an enemy's brain when it came into contact with them, leaving them confused and causing them to lose their balance for about a minute. 

One Versatile Barrier card, B-Rank.

Seventeen skills. This was the total number that I'd collected in just a couple of days. It was fucking incredible. Honestly, I didn't see the point in returning to the D-Rank dungeon, or any D-Rank dungeon ever again for that matter.

Of course, the jump in difficulty from D to C-Rank was immense. Between every rank was an impassable gap. Going into the C-Rank dungeon not only meant being attacked by a litany of C-Rank skills, as well as a larger number of monsters, but also meant the possibility of some of those monsters possessing B-Rank skills. In order to defend myself, I would need a shit ton of mana. Fortunately, I had roughly two weeks to make it happen.

As I started to funnel mana into an empty Joker, I was met with something I'd entirely forgotten about over the last two days. My stomach grumbled loudly and pain started to funnel into it.

Oh shit, I hadn't eaten at all, had I?

I went downstairs to buy a meal. I ended up with a burger made of bear meat. It was pretty tasty. Digging into my food without a drink felt odd, but I decided I would try to cut back on the alcohol. I didn't need it anymore. I had a far greater pleasure than liquor could ever give me now.

I didn't spend long eating before finally getting back to my room and working on making batteries. I wanted to try something new. It took me a long time to make these with my miniscule mana output, but what about the cards who possessed their own gates?

If I could activate several at once and siphon them all into a single Spectral Joker, it would make the process far faster, cutting back the time to create a battery significantly.

Still, this was easier said than done. I had limited knowledge on how to stimulate someone else's gate. Still, this was important, not only for efficiency, but to better understand the cards.

So, I hunkered down deep into the night and worked tirelessly. Phew. I needed a skill that could alleviate the need for sleep. A high-level healing skill would do the trick. I was making no progress. Funneling mana into the card would just store it there, not stimulate the gate.

Come to think of it, when Hye-Rin gave me back my Jokers, she said that they didn't react to mana whatsoever. Why was that? It wasn't like they were tied to me through a skill or anything. As I thought more about it, I became slightly startled.

There's no way, right? I looked down at the card in my hand. There were two factors at play. One, they had their own gates. This was strange enough. I'd never heard of an inanimate object possessing a gate.

Two, they responded to my will. All I had to do to activate them was will them to work, and they would fly out from my hip and use a skill.

Were these cards… alive? It seemed entirely possible. Looking at the mess of cards laying on the ground next to me, I started to feel a little bad. I collected and cleaned the off, before placing them neatly on the bed.

"Um… sorry. Thanks for your hard work."

The cards didn't respond, but I felt a little better. If they were living things, I wanted to at least show them some basic respect, as silly as it felt to be speaking to a deck of cards.

Then, I thought of something else. The cards responded to my will. I had been trying to use my mana to stimulate their gates, but what if I just 'asked' them to, the same way I did to cast a skill?

I tried it out. Holding the card in my hand, I recreated the sensation of using them to cast a skill, but shifted the desire to 'activate your gate' instead.

At first, it didn't work, but after a few minutes, I managed to get it to function. 

"Yes! Fuck yes!"

The card was gradually filling itself with mana. 

"Thank you, hell yes!"

I kissed the card out of excitement and did the same with a few more. I didn't want to do them all at once, since I wasn't sure they'd stop once the card was full on their own. I didn't want to create another explosion of mana.

Thinking back on it, the explosion was bizarre, too. A single mana battery couldn't even sustain a B-Rank skill, so how did it create an explosion that even damaged a dungeon? Was there some property to mana that I still didn't understand?

This would require more thought. For now, though, I had the creation of mana batteries to worry about. It took a little over three days, but eventually, the production concluded. I did, in fact, have to manually stop them when they were full, so I was glad that I'd decided to start with only five of them. 

However, this was enough mana to last me quite a while. I still had time, so I decided to do seven more. Things were really amping up.