And then I was back, sitting in the back of a carriage driving peacefully through the sandy dunes.
The first thing I did was check my XP.
Currently at 1.87k/3.5k, huh? Not bad.
Not bad at all, Index comnted, considering you started out at basically 0 XP. At your current Level, trying to get half of your XP requirent in a single day should typically cost you your life. Which it did.
A life well spent, I thought back with a sigh. There was honestly sothing so freeing about fighting with Ti Loop as a foregone conclusion. It reminded of my old swordfighting days, where Id spar with partners for hours at the training groundsback when the fights werent life-and-death. There was sothing genuinely fun about fighting that was lost when it got so stressful.
I turned my mind to my Bond with Ainash, sending her a ssage. Hey, I just ca back from Ti Loop. I dont have any mories from your perspectives, but I do think itd be good for you two to get so from my own. Do you mind passing them from to mother?
Okay!
***********
Erani was discreetly touched by her daughter and instantly felt the transfer occurring. Arlan had apparently gone back with Ti Loop and had so valuable mories for her, though she didnt yet know what they were.
She slowly felt her mind being filled with images. It wasnt a single one, but rather a series of short mories only a few seconds long each, and every one was of Arlans perspective watching a certain Spell at work. And that Spell seed to be Firebolt, upgraded with teoric Firebolt. It took a couple seconds for her to rember that this Spell would have been hers, after shed Upgraded it to that option.
It was strange to see a future version of herself, one whod made a decision that the current version of her hadnt made yet. So then, was it a forgone conclusion for her to pick teoric Firebolt? She hadnt been thinking shed take that one, honestly.
Or, no, if it was her in the situation depictedIf they were going into a fight knowing that it would be undone, then she would just choose based on how she anticipated the Upgrade to perform in that fight only, which would change everything, of course. And it seed that, after thinking things over in those circumstances, that version of her had concluded teoric to be the best option for that fight.
Now, all that was left of that version of her were these mories.
Erani blinked, forcing her mind back on track. Thinking about theoretical ti deaths was a bad habit of hers, one that she stopped as soon as she noticed herself doing it. Right now, shed been given so new and valuable information about teorica live demonstration.
In the mories shown to her, Erani saw the Spell doing the work shed heard it could do, but its drawbacks were made very clear, as well. teoric Firebolt was sowhat notorious for being an Upgrade with a massive downside that it didnt tell the user about, causing it to be considered a newbie trap Upgradeone that inexperienced or unprepared Classers often took and regretted taking soon after. Looking at the choice currently being offered to her, Erani gazed at the deceptive description.
teoric Firebolt
Firebolt is delivered from the sky instead of from your hand, and takes the form of a rain of flas that catches anything it hits on fire, dealing its normal damage initially and then 5% of that damage per second for the next 10 seconds to anything it hits. The rain of flas diater is twice Explosive Firebolts explosion diater.
Anyone looking at such a description would be ecstatic to take the Upgrade. Doubling the area of the Spell and adding on a damage over ti effect that could increase the total damage output of the Spell by 50% was absolutely massive. However, secretly hiding in that description was the drawback. The line Firebolt is delivered from the sky instead of from your hand was it. Being delivered from the sky, it turned out, ant that the projectile ca from much further away, aning it would take much longer to hit.
In general, a cast of Firebolt would take around one second to travel thirty paces, aning it was pretty difficult to dodgeespecially once it had an explosive effect. It did make it difficult to cast multiple Firebolts at the sa target, however, since one Firebolts explosion could blast an enemy out of the way of the second Firebolt, causing it to miss, but that was okay as long as you were either willing to be patient with your firing or you could find sothing to pin your target up against so they wouldnt get thrown away.
At one second per thirty paces, a Firebolt would travel its current maximum range of around eighty paces in around three seconds. If Erani had taken the sniping path back at the First Upgrade, which would massively increase the Spells range, then this Upgrade would give her options to increase projectile speed, but that was beside the point. Those were the limitations she was working with. However, teoric Firebolt would make those limitations much worse.
Compared to that three-second arrival ti in the worst case for a typical Firebolt, teoric Firebolt would takeErani counted the seconds in her new moriesalmost fifteen full seconds to fall through the air and onto her enemies. In that particular fight, the drawback had been fine. There were so many enemies that even if the ones she targeted moved out of the way by the ti the Spell hit, others would have moved into that area and would get hit all the sa. Of course, that left Erani with basically no way to protect herself, which she could see causing her issues in the few short segnts of mory where Arlan had caught glimpses of her fleeing from the monsters. However, in a tiline where her continued survival wasnt actually all that important, that was fine.
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But now that her choice concerned the rest of her life, and not a single specific fight? The Spell would not work for her. It still had uses, of courseshed read plenty of passages regarding teorics possibilities as a positioning denial Spell, with its long-lasting fires being able to create impenetrable walls entrapping lee-types, as well as how the Upgrade turned Firebolt from an already phenonal sieging and destruction tool into one of the best a Sorcerer could get at this Level, but for Eranis purposes? It simply wasnt worth the massive drawback.
That just left the other two options, then.
Choose one Upgrade for Firebolt:
Forceful Firebolt
School: Arcane
When Firebolt makes a direct collision with a being, an additional force vector is applied to them with direction and force equal to that of Explosive Firebolts, except it ignores 35% of the natural force prevention that the beings current Health gives them.
Double Firebolt
When you cast Firebolt from one hand, you may have a second Firebolt be shot from your other hand as long as each Firebolt is angled to be shot 40 degrees away from each other.
She looked them over. There was lots to consider, for certain. But she kept reading one section over and over. Double Firebolts shot from your other hand.
Erani looked down at her single hand. Would Double Firebolt even function with her current body? She hadnt ever read anything about that.
She knew that the obviously correct decision would be to simply ask Arlan to talk to his Index thing about it, but she couldnt bring herself to do so. She wanted to verbally acknowledge her predicant as little as possible, if she was honest with herself. Besides, she really didnt like that Index Talent and what it said sotis, so deliberately going to it for advice wasless than ideal.
She also knew that it would probably have been a good idea for her to have taken Double rather than teoric in the previous tiline, that way she would know for sure if it would work. Why hadnt she? Well, this current version of her had no idea. Perhaps it was embarrassnt at the thought of the Spell not working. Perhaps she had decided that the Upgrade was simply not worth taking even if it did work, and figuring out teorics exact timing was better. Perhaps she just didnt want to explain to Arlan why shed taken an Upgrade to find the answer to a question that was easily answerable by Index. Perhaps she had already asked Index about it in the previous tiline, and Arlan just hadnt given her that mory because he figured shed just ask again.
In a normal situation, the decision between Forceful and Double was often a toss-up between different builds. Getting this far deep into the options always led to fractured opinions among scholars, Erani had found, since it was at this point that humanity simply had far less experience with the options provided. Everyone knew that Explosive Firebolt was the best option for Firebolts first Upgrade because pretty much every Sorcerer out there got to that point and could weigh in their opinions. Everything that could be said about the topic had been said, so most everything was known, and the scholars could co to an agreent. At the second Upgrade, however, practical experience beca sparse, and as such, so did understanding.
Forceful was an interesting choice. Its wording was slightly obtuse, but effectively, the Upgrade would double the knockback of Firebolts explosion against whoever it hit at its baseline. But then, if that person had so much Health that it was reducing the effectiveness of the Spells knockback, this Upgrades added knockback would pretend that the persons Health was 35% lower for the purposes of deciding how much force would apply to them. Basically, it pushed people back further on a direct hit, even if they were really strong.
Double was also quite interesting. A good number of aid projectile-based Spells like this one had an Upgrade like this sowhere along the line, though the exact functioning of each varied a bit. In Double Firebolts case, what it did was effectively allow the user to shoot a second Firebolt for free when casting the Spell. That would be a ridiculously powerful effect if it didnt co with a restriction, though, so in this case, Double Firebolt would only allow one to shoot the second Firebolt if the two Firebolts were aid at least forty degrees apart.
It was a asurent that was sowhat difficult to envision off the top of your head, but really, all that needed to be known was that it basically ensured you had to fire each Firebolt at a different target. Even with the explosions giving so leeway, it was almost impossible to hit the sa person with both Firebolts unless they were extrely close to the caster. Also, the Upgrade gave no inherent knowledge of whether a persons hands were actually aid far enough apart for the Upgrades effect to trigger until after the Spell was cast, and at that point, both hands had to already be in position and aid at their respective targets.
Effectively, from what Erani had read, the Upgrade had potential to be extrely powerful, but it ca with an extrely high skill requirent. One needed to have the ntal focus to aim at two separate targets at once, keep their hands appropriately apart, and sohow look in two different places at once to keep track of both enemies they were shooting at. But if they could, it would an an insane increase to their abilities. It was as close to doubling your power with a single Upgrade as you could get.
Except Erani had no idea if it would work for her. Much less if she had what it took to train herself enough to use it. Forceful was clearly the safer option. It worked very well against weak opponents to keep them pinned down, keeping the stun-locking strategy that functioned well at early Levels relevant for just a little bit longer. The force effect of Explosive Firebolt was what kept Magic-Types alive.
Sure, the force still scaled less quickly than peoples Health did, aning the Upgrade would eventually beco useless, but the now was just as important as the futureif not moreso. Keeping herself safe and in command during these fights was important, even if she would just be delaying the inevitable occurrence of Explosive Firebolt becoming unable to significantly push back any opponent at her Level.
But Erani couldnt shake the thought of taking Double Firebolt. It was like the Upgrade was calling to her. She wanted to master the difficult Upgrade, to reach new heights of power. She wanted to spend hours training with it, morizing the degree numbers, learning new fighting styles. She wanted to struggle, and to eventually succeed.
Erani had always felt a very strange connection with the lost versions of herself from other tilines. They werent quite herthey had different mories, different experiences, and, of course, one was alive while the other wasnt. Rather, it was almost like a sistership. Both she and her ti sisters were born of the sa motherpast Eraniand would venture forth into the unknown, making new discoveries with the hopes that they would be passed onto their peers across ti.
In this case, Erani felt that her sister had made a mistake. That one had tried to find an easy way out of thisclung onto hope that maybe teoric Firebolts downside wouldnt be as bad as people said it was, and that she could just take that Upgrade without worrying about the other options. That hadnt been the case. It was ti to ensure Eranis future selves wouldnt regret what she did now. At the very least, she had to try.
Hey, Arlan, she said, hearing her voice carry a tone of stress, do you mind asking Index to help with sothing?
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