"To think that my newfound skill landed us a scrumptious lunch~!"
"We already located that bird before you even used that skill," Azulus said with her deadpan.
"I guess it gives us a reason to feed you, in a way." Samael smirked.
"Co on, let celebrate my own illusion of contribution!" Kivas cried.
The bird-like Voidlings sizzled over the fire, their featherless forms skewered on makeshift tal rods scavenged from fractured bone-like materials of the trees in this bio.
Their blood had been unusually viscous, nearly gelatinous, and drained with surgical efficiency before cooking. Despite their grotesque nature, the at darkened into a proper char, scentless but warm.
No lingering curses, no residual psychic danger.
They were edible.
"Mhm~!"
"Mmm."
"..."
The three of them sat around the low campfire, the forest of bone-barked trees encircling their encampnt like skeletal sentinels.
Luminescent moss cast faint purples and blues over their resting space, creating a faint kaleidoscope of corrupted tranquility.
Kivas tore into her piece of at with a soft groan. The texture was fibrous, sowhere between boiled leather and stead cartilage, but it was food. It ward her stomach and softened the tension in her shoulders.
"This is disgusting," Kivas muttered with a tired smile, chewing relentlessly. "And I’m still so thankful."
Samael chewed through her own piece, barely reacting to the taste. Her eyes remained half-lidded and bored, as if her mouth was only working out of duty. "I miss those Blood Cakes."
"And who gave us those cakes back then?"
Samael stopped chewing for a solid five seconds before finally uttering words, "Tall-eared girl."
Kivas facepald. "Don’t tell you’ve already forgotten Charishe..."
Azulus gnawed her portion slowly, her posture slouched with exhaustion but her hand never faltered.
"You know what, Kivas? You’ll reach a point," Azulus said, pointing the slightly curved skewer toward Kivas, "where you won’t need to eat like this anymore. Save yourself the displeasure of eating anything inedible while you’re in the middle of your expedition."
Kivas blinked, still chewing. "Yeah? And what is that?"
"When your level is high enough," Azulus nodded as she swallowed. "Your reservoir for Hemo Psyche and Mana Psyche becos sufficient to substitute biological needs. A year or more, even, just off soul-based fuel."
Kivas lowered the at slightly, curious of the implication. "Did you reach that level already?"
Azulus’ lips curved into a rare smug grin. "Almost."
Kivas would rember this rare mont forever, and it kinda ruined her image of Azulus’ stoic and adorable figure—into that of a possible hidden gremlin.
Samael stirred the fire with a flick of her finger, watching a few embers jump without shifting her body.
"There’s a skill," Samael added, "that lets Mana Psyche simulate Hemo Psyche directly. Tricky technique to get, needs an advanced class that branches off from either Priest or Hexblade."
Azulus paused mid-bite. "Seriously?" Her expression stiffened, then softened into a mix of excitent and reluctant interest. "Great. Now I might need to start laying the foundation for the Priest class... Sothing that I haven’t touched for years."
"You’ll love the hymns," Samael deadpanned. "Ti to sculpt yourself out of mud and think of a fake god that you wanted to pray as your god-like figure, and then kill that very god-like figure because that belief manifested into reality."
"Speaking from experience?" Kivas chuckled.
"It was a hard ti."
"I was joking..." Kivas’ expression curled. "Holy shit, that is crazy."
"Heard an even worse occurrence when it cos to levelling Priest class," Azulus leaned forward. "Once there was a man whose belief focused on the skeleton of one’s being being their true body and the flesh and organ being the cage...
"In order to resonate further with this path of self-inflicted idea, that man ’freed’ more than 1,200 skeletons of those he was close with, before a Void Hunter Association put a bounty on his head and put him down for good."
"Ah, that human," Samael chid in as if she personally knew the aforentioned flesh-ripping priest. "I rember that he also got a hidden class because of it."
"Yet you forgot the na of soone you’ve just t a few days ago."
"Ah, so the rumor is true then," Azulus said, eyes widened. It was the words of the Endless Dragon herself who confird it after all. "So many hidden classes are still left uncovered. I wonder if Fathomi just creates a new one every now and then to inflate the pool."
Kivas cocked her head to the side. "Hey, co to think of it, you two never ntion class nas other than the basic one. Is that so kind of taboo thing? Like revealing any detail of the Well of the Soul rule?"
Samael smirked without looking up. "Nope. We just can’t."
"You can’t?"
Samael waved a finger in the air. "Conceptual regulation, to put it simply. Fathomi doesn’t allow disclosure of class nas. Especially hidden classes. You can’t say what you don’t qualify to share. Your soul literally rejects the action of informing it in any way."
Kivas squinted. "So it’s a censorship system?"
Azulus leaned back, resting on one elbow. "There are workarounds. Special inks and rituals. You can encode class data through glyphs or physical imprints. There’s even a hidden class that exists solely to bypass Fathomi’s conceptual locks."
Kivas blinked. "A class that exists just to break the system of class concealnt?"
Samael nodded. "Yes."
Azulus added with a dry chuckle, "It’s one of the most hunted hidden classes for that reason."
Kivas furrowed her brows. "If the existence of this class is known, then how co its owner didn’t just share the qualification of this hidden class to others, instead of just leaving generations of people to hunt for it?"
"Simple," Azulus said. "The person with that class can reveal the na and requirent of other classes, but not the class that allowed it to do so."
"That sucks."
"And that person is also dead," Samael added.
"That sucks even more."
The fire dimd slightly as the wood beneath the empty skewer hissed and collapsed into ash.
Kivas stood, brushing dirt from her legs, her mind racing with thoughts.
Azulus didn’t stir along. Her body leaned heavier into the bone-like bark behind her, head dipped forward.
It seed like Azulus wanted to clear her Nightmares in case that he attributes was lacking for any future encounter, now that a Nihil had been sighted not a long ti ago.
Samael sat cross-legged, still close to the fire, examining the lingering tendrils of Kivas’ last soul experint. Her gaze traced the faint remnants of effort left hanging in the air.
To think that she could just do that, Kivas wondered what was the content of Samae’s current skillset,
If only the rule about not revealing one Well of the Soul didn’t exist, they would had already been nerding about their skills and numbers like best friends. Or in this case, couples.
Right, Samael was Kivas’ love partner now, or owner, or whatever the romantic angle that she could decide at any mont.
"You need an offensive tool," she said plainly.
Kivas turned, slightly confused. "I’ve got plenty—"
"Not tools you carry," Samael cut in. "Sothing from you. A skill. You rely on your Curio arsenal too much. If sothing steals them, curses them, or locks them away—what’s left?"
Kivas frowned, nodding slowly.
She knelt again. Fingers touched dirt. Eyes narrowed.
With breath asured, she began again.
She didn’t pull from both Psyches. She drew from her Hemo Psyche alone. Just the reservoir ant for shaping vitality and soul-anchored force.
She shaped it with intent, tightening it into a single point between her palms.
The pulse ford quickly. A raw Hemo Psyche concentrated, compressed into a needle of will.
Then, invoking her Fate Weaver skill, she let the causality bend. Will form results. Her desire was not rely to damage but to unravel and scatter the target that was hit by it.
That designation should be enough for her current level of Fate Weaver to achieve, as long as it wasn’t done in a major scale.
With a final push of intent, the energy fired.
It streaked from her palm into the treeline, where a large, insectoid Voidling had just crawled into view—drawn by the warmth, or the noise.
"Ah, I hit sothing."
Its carapace shimred greenish-red in the moonlight, and its wings flexed outward.
The bolt struck it dead center in the head.
It did not die, nor was there any physical damage foreseen from Kivas’ position.
It scread.
And then it laughed.
Its movents spasd. It twitched in place. Its claws curled and uncurled. It staggered sideways, struck a tree, fell on its back, then shrieked with delight or agony—it was hard to tell. It spun once. Froth leaked from its mandibles. Then it sat perfectly still and sobbed.
Kivas’ jaw dropped. "What...?"
Samael approached the creature, knelt briefly, and watched its twitching form.
"It’s not dead," Samael said. "Just paralyzed with madness." She turned toward Kivas. "You launched raw Hemo Psyche, twisted by Fate, into its soul. No shaping through elents, no modifier, no intended emotion—just core disruption of one’s psyche."
『Skill Gained: ◈ Madness Bolt Lv1 – You possess the power to launch a bolt filled with madness』
"Well, a notification had just arrived," Kivas said, staring at the glyphs that she could only see. "Can I share the na of this skill?"
Samael imdiately answered before Kivas said anything stupid. "Better not. Having one of your intrinsic skills read like an open book should be the limit. It’s not like I couldn’t deduce what was happening right in front of my eyes."
"So, why did Hemo Psyche do that again? Is this because of my fate thingy?"
"For so reason, the concentrated Hemo Psyche changed its intrinsic characteristic, as if it was bent conceptually, that it disrupts the soul and mind despite you having not a single skill that supports madness-infliction." Samael then bonked the madness-infliced Voidling with the blunt side of her cinquedea, before hitting a certain part that made it unconscious. "But the effects end as soon as severe physical trauma reasserts dominance."
Azulus spoke without lifting her head, her voice faint. "A Fateling is definitely a race with the most limitless potential in terms of chaos."
"That’s fast!"
It seed like Azulus had already finished sweeping her Nightmares away.
Samael then continued, "And it seems like the effect of madness varies depending on the amount of Hemo Psyche used and the target’s Resistance stats...
"If you hit soone with low enough soul resilience, you can keep them incapacitated indefinitely—laughing, screaming, weeping. Whatever their psyche defaults to when cracked."
Kivas blinked, looking at her own hands. "That only took ten HP. But I could feel it—I could have pushed more. A lot more."
"Every increase scales power and risk. You’ll burn through your Hemo Psyche if you’re not careful. But for a skill with no material cost, that’s fine."
Kivas grinned. "Hehehe, such a power in my hand~!"
"Ah, she is drunk with power," Azulus casually comnted.
"She will definitely be one of Fathomi’s great calamities if this attitude keeps up," Samael joined the teasing.
With Kivas’ HP and MP depleted after experinting more of her currently newfound power, they broke camp.
As they continued their journey, Kivas trailed behind as they resud their walk toward the Zarangar Valley.
Her mind burning with new plans, her soul lighter with discovery, and her fingers twitching with the mory of raw, soul-forged madness that she could abuse—if she beca powerful enough.
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