Chapter 18: Decisions, Decisions

  With his new spells, Sam had a decision to make. The system said not to worry about being locked in to the nature of his class and that it was more a reflection of the direction he wanted to grow. Now that he knew he had access to spells and a bow he wanted to make the decision between specializing in long range or melee combat. There was also the matter of whether he wanted to focus on learning magic, cultivation, or martial combat. At the moment there was something about the bow that drew him in. He wasn’t particularly good at it, there was no prodigious talent there. Oddly enough that was the very reason that made him want to pursue that path. However much he grew and honed his skills with regards to the bow would be a true reflection of his efforts since he knew he didn’t have any innate talent for the practice. He decided that to solely focus on one avenue to power would go against his wishes to see everything out there in the wider world, so he would choose not to neglect either magic or cultivation. He did however decide to focus on ranged combat for now. He was already fairly confident as a close quarters fighter, but he really wanted to see just how far effort could take him in trying something new.

  Having made that determination to himself, Samson resolved to commit to the decision for as long as he could. There was something new he wanted to try with the magic of the bow. So far he had used mana to power the enchantment but he had access to another source of power that could be used in somewhat similar ways. Qi. When he tried sending qi into the enchantment, there was some success but the moment he started actually trying to move the qi through, it dispersed. Qi and mana were similar but they were not the same, the properties were too unique to each type of energy. If Sam had to describe them, he would say that qi felt more alive and volatile while mana gave a sense of greater stability. It was like the difference between a raging river, carving its way through a landscape and a serene lake quietly sustaining a local ecosystem. He had an idea of how to get the enchantment to work using qi but he wasn’t yet confident enough in his ability to control both qi and mana for his idea to take fruition at the moment.

  Instead he moved on to something else that would solidify his somewhat childish decision to focus on the bow. He reached for the saber he got from fighting that first hobgoblin and initiated the process of getting the spell matrix from it. He knew this was a bit of an unreasonable thing to do both because it would make him lose his only melee weapon at the moment and because he had no idea about how he would go about removing spell matrices from his soul and there was limited surface area for him to imprint spells onto it. After all he assumed that whatever spells he encountered right now were nowhere near the pinnacle of what magic could achieve and so keeping the surface area of his soul free to imprint more matrices for the future would be important. Still that stubborn streak of his personality reared its ugly head and he continued with the process anyway regardless of the reasons he thought he shouldn’t do it.

  [The spell [Dark Drain] has been imprinted] [The equipment was destroyed in the process]

  As the familiar glow from the process receded, the equipment was gone accompanied by new knowledge entering his mind regarding the effects of the spell. It turned out that the debuff effect that he experienced wasn’t originally supposed to just slow his usage of mana. The spell functioned somewhat like a poison that made healing more difficult and slowly drained away the health of the target that was inflicted with the effects by attacking the soul directly. He wasn’t sure about the specifics but it would seem that the health pool represented by the status screen was directly linked to the soul and that instability or degradation in the soul led to the resource pool draining away. It wasn’t just health too, evidently mana and stamina could be similarly affected by targeting the soul which was why his mana became sluggish when hit with the original effects of the blade. The conclusion he reached about why he wasn’t affected properly by the effect was because of the improvements to his soul that he received when he gained his titles. For that he was incredibly thankful because at the moment he did not have access to any skill or magic that could have prevented the original effect from killing him. There was also the option that the original skill didn’t have quite the same ability to drain health and merely hindered regeneration. After all, Ephemeral Arrow had quite the difference in effects compared to the enchantment from which it originated. It seemed like the kind of damage that touched the soul directly and bypassed conventional defenses. He wanted to test the spell out but he didn’t really feel like shooting a tree with what basically amounted to a damage over time curse so instead he walked down the road until he could see another group of goblins. This time they were actually goblins and not the beefier hobgoblins.

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  He had an idea as he drew his bow back. Instead of using the enchantment to materialize an arrow he used the spell matrix and chose to make the arrow wholly insubstantial once he shot it. This would normally mean that it would fly straight through anything it encountered, from what he could tell from the instinctual knowledge anyway. But he wasn’t done, he then applied the Dark Drain spell to the ephemeral arrow, engulfing the phantasmal construct in darkness similarly to how the saber had been when the hobgoblin started using the skill. He knew the spell touched the soul of his target but he wasn’t sure if he had to physically pierce them first which was why he made the arrow without substance. He let the arrow fly and missed spectacularly. He was about seventy meters away from the goblins and he wasn’t good enough to shoot with any kind of accuracy at that distance. Luckily because the arrow had no substance to it, it made no sound and wasn’t immediately noticed by all the goblins. It looked like a magic wielding goblin at the back of the pack noticed something but it looked curiously behind itself in the direction that the arrow continued its flight. He tried again and missed two more times, now the goblins had fully noticed since one of the arrows landed near the foot of one holding a spear near the front of their formation. They started screaming as a pack and raising their weapons in the air preparing to charge him. Sam was able to shoot one more arrow and this time it hit a goblin in the back holding a bow. At which point something he wasn’t entirely expecting happened. Said goblin started screaming, not in the earlier war cry that it had unleashed alongside its brethren but one of pain. Physically the creature had no injuries but the magic of Dark Drain was successfully delivered. Using his soulsight Sam could see a very different picture than what the physical world showed. He could see the magic corroding the goblin’s soul, slowly going deeper and spreading farther. He felt quite sorry for the thing as he hadn’t intended for it to die an excruciating death like that. The other goblins lost momentum in their charge as they turned to investigate the pained howls of their companion. Sam did the only thing he could think of at the moment. He made yet another insubstantial arrow and this time he cast Soothing Light on it pushing the matrix to maximize the removal of pain and he aimed at the goblin that was now writing on the ground. He took a few steps closer with his skill so that he didn’t miss and let the arrow fly. He saw the warm glow of Soothing Light make contact with the goblin from the arrow and with his soulsight he could see the magic cover every inch of the goblin’s soul as the corrosion from Dark Drain continued. Thankfully it worked and the pained expression of the creature calmed down and was soon replaced with one of confusion. It stood up feeling itself and could not find anything wrong. The pack then turned their eyes back to him as he put his bow in his inventory and started the process of boxing down their numbers.

  The rest of the battle finished without much fanfare. The main point of interest was the fact that the goblin that he hit with the spell simply dissolved into motes of dust and light when the corrosion hit a certain point. The goblins normally did disappear once they were defeated but this happened far quicker than the amount of time that it normally took. The spell was incredibly effective but he didn’t like how much it looked like it hurt the thing before he could hit it with his other spell. In the future he would have to see if he could cast both spells on an arrow at the same time to see if he could infect a target with the effects of Dark Drain while preventing the pain from the very beginning using Soothing Light. There were still many questions left after that battle. For example, Sam wondered if applying multiple instances of Dark Drain on the same target was possible and if doing so would increase the rate of the health drain effect. Still he was probably going to focus on figuring out the pain problem first before he tested anything else out. He had wanted an efficient way to deal damage using spells, not a way to slowly torture something to death. Based on the sounds that the affected goblin had made, he could only imagine how excruciating it must be to feel your very soul corrode into oblivion. While it made him sympathize with that specific goblin it also made him shudder at how his first encounter with a hobgoblin might have turned out had he not already had his titles make improvements to his soul. That was still his going theory anyway, but the idea that the original skill was far weaker still held some weight in his mind.

  He continued forward down the brick road, that he no longer saw as innocently as when he first saw it; it definitely wasn’t full of wonder and whimsy that much was certain. He wasn’t using Inexorable Stride because he wanted to have the time to practice with his bow more before running into another group of the little gremlins and also he wanted to see what progress he could make with Dark Drain. He quite liked the potential shown by the spell, the idea of shooting phantasmal arrows at enemies and not actually physically hurting them seemed pretty cool to Sam. As he walked, he focused internally on the spell matrix to try and see whether he could garner any other ways to change its effect so that it didn’t hurt as much while still doing the health drain.